Ephemera

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http://www.haapala.com/sepp/twtwfiles/2010/TWTW 2010-11-20.pdf

By Ken Haapala, Executive Vice President Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)

THE NUMBER OF THE WEEK is 4.7 GWe to 8.5 GWe, or the nominal electrical generating capacity of wind installed in China in 2008 as compared to that installed in the US. So much for the claim that China is leading in wind - at least in installed capacity. (For wind generation, installed capacity is not a particularly meaningful measure because nature, not human operators, controls the amount of electricity generated at a specific time. Thus, wind is unreliable and requires expensive and inefficient back-up.)

Summarizing the actual electricity capacity being installed in China as compared to the US:

Nuclear power plants under construction: China 24, US 1
Hydroelectricity capacity added in 2008: China 20.1 GWe, US ZERO.
Coal fired electricity capacity added in 2008: China 658 GWe, US 0.7 GWe.
Wind generated electricity capacity added in 2008: China 4.7 GWe, US 8.5 GWe.

Contrary to what politicians and alternative energy promoters claim, China is not in a race with the US to build alternative sources of electricity. It is in a race to build all the affordable, reliable electricity-generating capacity it can from traditional sources for the benefit of its citizens, their children, and grandchildren.

The sources for the above are the Department of Energy and the World Nuclear Association

 

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Nov 21, 2010


Anatomy of a Climate Fraud
By Dr. Vincent Gray, NZ Climate Truth Newsletter

Environmentalists believe that humans are destroying the earth (or as they prefer to call it, “the planet"), and they routinely manipulate news items that can be distorted to support their views. “Resources” are being “depleted”, oil is about to run out, everything is about to become extinct, all chemicals are “toxic” and all human activities must be prevented because they “damage the environment”

The “greenhouse effect” was a golden opportunity to blame every climate event on humans and prevent many classes of industrial activity.

The “greenhouse effect” is a real physical phenomenon, although it has nothing to do with what happens in a greenhouse. A greenhouse inhibits convection and confines the air warmed by contact with the ground that has been heated by the sun’s radiation.

The “greenhouse effect” results from absorption of part of the infra red radiation from the earth by several trace gases in the atmosphere, causing an increase in the surface temperature of the earth,

In order to show that there are increases in this effect caused by humans which are damaging the climate several propositions had to be proved.

� Greenhouse gases are increasing because of human activity

� The temperature of the earth is increasing

� This rise is damaging the climate

� Future changes can be predicted to be disastrous

Let us take these problems one at a time.

Are Greenhouse Gases increasing?

The British scientist John Tyndall in the 1860s, who first established the existence of the greenhouse effect, showed that the most important greenhouse gas is water vapour, so this should be the main emphasis of any investigation into possible damage from increase of greenhouse gases. Unfortunately the concentration of water vapour in the atmosphere varies over several orders of magnitude, being dependent on temperature, time and place. No accurate average value has ever been reliably measured and there is no acceptable evidence of any changes that have been taking place. Even if these were established it might be difficult to blame them on humans.

So, somehow, water vapour had to be ignored. This is done by leaving it out of lists of greenhouse gases, discussing it as little as possible and leaving it out of the main components of their model by calling it a “feedback”. assuming that its average value is exclusively dependent on average temperature.

So then, emphasis was placed on the next trace gas, carbon dioxide. This is a much more suitable candidate, because its concentration in the atmosphere can be blamed on combustion of fossil fuels by humans.

But then another snag arises. Its concentration in the atmosphere has been shown to be highly variable from some 40,000 measurements that have been reported in learned scientific journals, going back to 1850. Some of these measurements were made by Nobel Prize winners, all were respected scientists of the day, and the papers were peer reviewed in the days when this meant something.

In order to show carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is increasing it is necessary to make continuous measurements distributed everywhere in the atmosphere on a representative basis. This is plainly impossible.

But do they despair? No. The first thing to do is to suppress all knowledge of any measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere between 1850 and 1950. Then they publicized the measurements near the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii as the only authentic measurements and followed this up by taking measurements that had been made in a negligibly small sample of ice cores as representative of concentrations before the industrial era, Subsequently they permitted the use of measurements made over the sea in several places to be added, but they have prevented or suppressed all measurements over any land surface, or in any other than an approved direction which are regarded as “noise” (unwelcome data). These restricted results showed a fairly steady increase, but this was not large enough, so they more than doubled it for their models.

THE TEMPERATURE OF THE EARTH

Temperature on the earth’s surface is highly variable. It is impossible to show if there is a general increase unless you can measure the average surface temperature. This would surely involve the placing of measuring instruments randomly all over the earth's surface, Including the 71% that is ocean, and all the forests, pastures, deserts and icecaps. Such an enterprise is impossible with current technology, so it is not possible to find if the average temperature of the earth is increasing.

But, again, a way of faking it was evolved. The originator, Jim Hansen of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies in New York features on his website a discussion headed “The Elusive Surface Temperature” which shows that there is no satisfactory way of defining or measuring the surface temperature of the earth. Yet he proposed to make use of temperature measurements that were routinely made at weather stations around the world as part of weather forecasting services, to derive what is called a “mean global temperature anomaly”.

Weather stations are not situated in representative places on the earth’s surface. They are predominantly near towns. Their number and location varies daily, so there is no fair statistical comparison over any time period. Although many (but not all) thermometers are housed in a standard screen, their positioning is far from standard and it changes over time. Many are close to buildings, sources of heat, concrete, tarmac, vegetation and other changing circumstances. There is no way of allowing either for the lack of representativity or the changes in circumstances.

Then, no weather station actually measures the average local temperature. They typically measure the maximum and the minimum over a 24 hour period which depends on the time of observation. This makes sense for weather forecasting since the temperature regimes by day and night are so different that an average between the two is meaningless.

Recent studies have shown that most weather stations, even today, cannot assess local temperature to better than a degree or two Celsius. Weather forecasters know that their figures are only rough. They never use decimals of a degree.

The “mean annual global temperature anomaly” involves multiple averaging, by week, month and year, plus a subtraction from the average for a reference petiod. This process must involve very large accumulated inaccuracies so that a claim of an increase in the “anomaly” of several decimals of a degree over 100 years is meaningless.

Then there is the overall warming effect of urban and land use change. The 1990 paper in “Nature” which was routinely used to claim the urban effects are negligible was shown by Keenan in 2000 to be fraudulent when he tried to find the Chinese data upon which it was partly based. Phil Jones recently admitted that the data did show an urban effect (and then promptly denied it) but the effect is still ignored in the teeth of the evidence in its favour

IF THERE IS WARMING, IT IS NATURAL?

There is overwhelming anecdotal evidence of warm periods In history which may have exceeded temperatures today, Efforts to discount these by manipulating unreliable “proxies” such as thickness of tree rings have been unsuccessful. There is even evidence from tree rings that the current era is not unusual leading to the need to “hide the decline”.

Besides being affected by urban and land use effects, the unreliable “mean global temperature anomaly” is affected also by currently known changes in the sun and in the ocean oscillations, particularly the North Atlantic Decadal Oscillation and the Southern Oscillation Index. Our knowledge of both of these effects is currently limited. Sunspots are an extremely crude measure of the Sun's activity, and the ocean oscillations also have crude definitions.

FORECASTING THE FUTURE

The problem of forecasting future climate is also impossible to solve. Genuine honest scientists working in meteorology have struggled for several hundred years to try and provide a model of the climate which could help future forecasting. They have collected every measurable climate variable; wind, rain, temperature, atmospheric pressure, relative humidity, sunshine hours and cloud cover, and they have launched weather balloons to study the atmosphere. One measurement they have not found useful is the concentration of carbon dioxide, although that also has been measured in many places. Yet everybody, including the IPCC, knows that forecasts beyond a week or so are unreliable.

Yet in order to confirm the influence of increased greenhouse gases forecasting is essential, otherwise any theory is worthless.

It is insufficiently understood that the IPCC admits that computer based models of the climate are currently incapable of forecasting any aspect of future climate. This fact is freely admitted. Models never make “predictions”, but always “projections”, which are the results obtained by accepting the plausibility of the model assumptions. No “projection” from any climate model has ever successfully predicted any future climate behaviour

Since this is so, all the IPCC conclusions are based on the unproven opinions of those persons who are paid to produce the models. This conflict of opinion is so severe that any model maker who has a poor opinion of the results of his model would probably lose his job and career. This unreliable process is concealed by a system of levels of “likelihood” combined with fabricated figures of the statistical reliability of the “estimates”.

The forecasts made by meteorologists can be checked. If they are consistently wrong the model has to be modified. The “projections” made by the IPCC are usually so far ahead (100 years) that they cannot be checked until the experts have enjoyed their generous pensions. There is no way of telling whether one model is better than another. When more recent “projections” fail there is always the excuse that it is due to “natural variability”.

ARE THE MODELS PLAUSIBLE?

The assumptions made by the IPCC computer models of the climate are all in complete conflict with what is known about the climate. They assume that the earth is in energy equilibrium. This means that the earth is flat, the sun shines all day and all night with one quarter of its maximum intensity, clouds are constant, and the temperature of the earth is constant. Such a model is essential if you want to calculate the possible effect of greenhouse gas increases as this can only be done if everything else is unchanging. In addition the concentration of greenhouse gases has to be constant at any point in time

All these assumptions are ridiculous. No part of the earth is ever in energy equilibrium and it is never “balanced” as a whole. It warms by day and cools by night, when there is no sun. The seasons, wind, cloud changes volcanism and ocean circulation come on top and inevitably confuse any possible change that might result from the greenhouse effect.

“ANTHROPOGENIC” INFLUENCES ON THE CLIMATE

All organisms influence the climate to a greater or lesser degree and humans are no exception. We try to maintain our body temperature by clothing and dwellings. Our buildings and our heating systems raise urban temperatures. We influence the land to encourage crops. There are wind breaks and fences and terraces and dams, and, again, climate is modified. None of these “anthropogenic” effects are allowed for by the IPCC.

NATURAL VARIABILITY

Climate has always changed in an irregular manner over many time periods and its causes are at present imperfectly understood. Some changes (for example ice ages) take millions of years to develop. Others (such as the effects of a large volcanic eruption) influence only a year or so. The idea that natural changes can only be “variable” and not cause “climate change” is therefore incorrect. Also it is impossible to claim with any certainty that a particular change is “unprecedented” over such a short period as a few centuries.

The very existence of natural climate influences means that climate models that are not able to predict their influence cannot hope to detect any change caused by the greenhouse effect.

CONCLUSION

Any routine scientific study would have abandoned the attempt to justify the current emphasis on the greenhouse effect because of the impossibility of carrying out any of the necessary observations to confirm its importance. It could only have been established as a potential threat by multiple fraud from each of the considerations listed above.

http://icecap.us/images/uploads/NZCLIMATE_TRUTH_NEWSLETTER_NO_257.pdf

 

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For the purposes of this book there are two main conclusions to be drawn from the emails. Firstly that senior climatologists have sought to undermine the peer review process and bully journals into supressing dissenting views. This means that the scientific literature is no longer a representation of the state of human knowledge about the climate. It is a representation of what a small cabal of scientists feel is worthy of discussion. Secondly, the IPCC reports represent the outcome of a process in which a relatively small group of scientists produce a biased review of a literature they themselves have colluded to distort through gatekeeping and intimidation. The emails establish a pattern of behaviour that is completely at odds with what the public has been told regarding the integrity of climate science and the rigour of the IPCC report-writing process. It is clear that the public can no longer trust what they have been told. What is less clear is what we, as ordinary citizens, can do in the face of the powerful, relentless forces of corrupted science, to set things right. Awareness, however, is the essential first step.

-Andrew W. Montford
The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science
London, England (UK) 2010.

 

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http://noir.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a3rRK06J5eQE&pos=9


Cape Wind Power-Contract Granted in Loss for Kennedys
By Christopher Martin

Nov. 22 (Bloomberg) -- Cape Wind may become the first U.S. offshore wind farm after Massachusetts regulators approved a contract permitting it to sell electricity, overcoming critics including the Kennedy family and Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

The Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities posted the decision on its website today. The state’s governor, Deval Patrick, supported the project as a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase renewable energy production.

The contract with utility National Grid Plc is the first power purchase agreement approved for an offshore wind project in the U.S. It may pave the way for an additional 6,300 megawatts in various stages of development, said Charlie Hodges, an offshore wind analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance in London. The U.S. generates more power from wind than any country, all of which is based on land.

“This is a significant win for Cape Wind and may help build momentum for other offshore wind projects,” Hodges said before the announcement.

Massachusetts agreed to let National Grid, a London-based company that delivers power to about 3.3 million customers in the U.S. Northeast, buy half of Cape Wind’s output for 18.7 cents per kilowatt-hour. That price will increase 3.5 percent annually for the 15 years of the contract.

Expensive Electricity
That rate is more than three times the average wholesale power price in the region of $55.02 a megawatt-hour, or 5.5 cents per kilowatt-hour, over the past year.

The developer, closely held Cape Wind Associates LLC, wants to install as many as 130 Siemens AG offshore turbines about 5 miles off mainland Cape Cod, in an area known as Horseshoe Shoal. The project would spread over 25 square miles and would generate as much as 468 megawatts of power.

At that size, the project would cost about $2.43 billion, excluding transmission lines that would be needed to deliver the electricity to Nantucket and Cape Cod, Hodges said.

The timing of the approval will also make it harder for Cape Wind to tap a federal treasury grant program for 30 percent of the systems cost, which may deter some investors, Hodges said. Power projects that want the grant must begin construction this year unless congress extends it.

“The difficult part is finding anyone to finance it,” Hodges said.

Kennedy Opposition
The late Senator Edward Kennedy fought the project for almost a decade up to his death last year. Cape Wind backers have said he was concerned the turbines would spoil view from the family’s seaside estate on Cape Cod. Environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has called the project a “boondoggle” that will cost taxpayers billions of dollars and threaten the local fishing industry.

Wal-Mart objected to being charged transmission fees that the state says are needed to spread the costs of the project, even though the world’s biggest retailer won’t be buying any of Cape Wind’s output. Wal-Mart has already invested in wind turbines and solar panels at its stores in Massachusetts, and buys additional power from other suppliers.

The Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound in Hyannis, a group of homeowners whose ocean views would be affected, estimates Cape Wind amounts to a premium on electricity of more than $4 billion over 15 years, said President Audra Parker.

When completed, the wind farm may generate enough power for more than 200,000 average U.S. homes, the Interior Department said when it approved a lease for the Cape Wind site in April. It will also cut carbon-dioxide pollution from traditional coal- fired power plants by 700,000 tons a year, the equivalent of removing 175,000 cars from the road annually.

 

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http://media.npr.org/assets/img/2010/11/12/temperature_aerosols_1850-2000_enl.jpg?t=1289594220
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http://www.npr.org/2010/11/12/131276631/with-lava-volcano-spews-chemicals-to-cool-earth

 

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http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/2010/11/scientists-and-journalists-lessons-learned-2/

I have a science background (Clinical Biochemistry) and, up to a year ago, believed the world was warming because we were still coming out of an ice-age. Now, I actually believe we are more than likely entering a period of coolness. Why the big change? I actually read lots and lots of blogs and papers, from all sides, and looked at what was happening with the IPCC with their WWF references, the ‘homogenized’ temperature datasets, the solar influence, the cooling satellite figures, the cooling ocean figures (ARGO network) etc. etc. It looks like none of the above-mentioned journalists have done anything like this. Why has the number of thermometers drastically dropped? And only in cold and high places? Why has no-one seriously looked at how GISS gets their temperatures for the Artic? Extrapolation of around 1500 kms is how. Why are so many weather stations in seriously comprised situations? Why did GISS try and hide the terribly wrong (high) satellite temperatures in the Great Lakes earlier this year. 600F is surely laughable, and it took a blog to force them to admit that they were actually posting these temperatures. What about all the long-term documented temperatures that have suddenly been lowered to make the current values seem higher? What about the blatent lies regarding the monsoon in Pakistan this year? An actual reviewer for IPCC (200&) has now stated that the rains were only 5% above average and were definitely not unprecedented.

If the above journalists ever get around their own ideology they will find there is not much holding up the theory of AGW

Ignorance, of course, can be cured. Is it warming here at the end Holocene? Depends upon your perspective, and that depends upon what you know versus what you believe. One powerful, but lately ailing belief structure involves attribution to CO2 for the strong warming of the late 20th century. Read the carefully worded research that confirms this, the scientific consensus provided by the IPCC and this will ring true in a modern educated mind. But a more sentient mind will remember the Oil for Food scandal recently brought to us by the same parent organization of the IPCC, the UN. So a more sentient mind would likely do a little more reading, maybe even investigate the other side, something scientists are actually trained to do. And that is where the things start to get dicey. Adjustment after adjustment applied to the raw data that seems to have disappeared, and along with it such things as the warmest decade in the 20th century (the 1930’s), reliance upon a few pinon or Yamal conifers that support your view of things past, but become uncooperative after 1960. Just whack off the disobedient data and add on something else. That’s not science, that’s scientology. Then you find that something like 75% of the reporting weather stations have ceased to be used since 1990, and they were predominantly in high latitude, high altitude and rural settings. And suddenly you realize that anthropogenic forcing of climate is real, very real indeed. The less sentient simply failed to keep their eye on the pea.

So what should we expect now at a half-precessional cycle old extreme interglacial? Well, 5 of the last 6 interglacials have each lasted about half a precessional cycle. Multiple proxies point to the ends of the last 4 such interglacials as being quite the wild climate ride, with decadal to centennial fluctuations of several degrees C and sea level spikes such as at the end of the last one, the Eemian (or MIS-5), shooting from +6 to +20 meters (depending upon whose research you believe), and as high as +21.3 meters at the end of the Holsteinian (MIS-11). Writing in Quaternary International (207 [2009] 137–144) Boettger et al state in the abstract “The pronounced climate and environment instability during the interglacial/glacial transition could be consistent with the assumption that it is about a natural phenomenon, characteristic for transitional stages.” This is not a cherry-picked quotation as many paleoclimatologists, geologists and other scientists are beginning to decipher that the ends of the most recent interglacials themselves are also a proxy for what could very well be happening, even as we go into the negative cycles for both the AMDO and PDO with a quiet sun.

Dig just a smidgen deeper and you will soon come to learn of a long running debate in the science of paleoclimate which considers just how long the Holocene, the interglacial in which all of civilization has occurred, will last. A little deeper still, and you will soon learn that not a single ice age termination was preceded by rise in CO2, but that CO2 followed the temperature excursion. It gets much dicier when you look at the high resolution records from the Greenland ice cores and come to see that the Dansgaard-Oeschger oscillations not only follow this same temp/CO2 order, but that CO2 seems to act to slow the relaxation of the D-O temperature spikes back to the cold glacial state. Something worth pondering at the likely end Holocene. Sort of the antithesis to the AGW prognostications. Could it possibly be, that in the latest stages of this interglacial, we started emitting a CO2 security blanket at more or less precisely the right time to ameliorate the eventual (imminent?) drop back to the next cold glacial state?

All of which leaves us to reflect on the propriety of being a “science” reporter when not a single one that I remember seeing even deigned to dig into the hacked FOI2009.zip file and find the HARRY_READ_ME.txt file, much less daylight what I just did for you without even the need to go there.

_____________________________________

It always resorts to ad hominem attacks. Long ago, it revealed itself as a political junkie by its perjorative language on other topics. It isn't the least bit interested in science. Instead, it is driven to this field by an all-consuming envy, jealousy and blind hatred. It sees an opportunity to advance its political agenda.

Its repeated and intentional use of insulting language, attempted bullying, arrogance and attack are intended to mask its ignorance of the topic and impress the gullible. It is almost (but not quite) able to pass as knowledgeable through use of scripted responses. It fools some of the people some of the time but doesn't yet understand that its ignorance is transparent to anyone who has done any reading in the field.

It will ultimately fail because it assumes you are an idiot. Truth will out; it always does.

==================================

frank ryan (Credo):

You have more patience than I ever will. You have patiently granted ___ every possible courtesy and ___ has responded with nothing except ad hominem attack, insult and insufferable rudeness.

You are right; intelligent readers can discern the difference between someone with an agenda and someone who refuses to be bullied or intimidated.

=================================

QUOTE:
...It's impossible to say from this single dive how much this ecosystem is hurting. After all, many of these animals have evolved to live in or near natural seeps of oil and gas...

-Richard Harris
______________

But that's not enough to stop Richard Harris from idle speculation and innuendo, is it?

After all, SOMETHING has to be said to justify Harris' junket and the mass hysteria whipped up by the professional gossips and busybodies.

===================================

The U.S.S.R. figured it out, the People's Republic of China figured it out, Poland figured it out, Bulgaria figured it out, Czechoslovakia (Slovakia & the Czech Republic) figured it out, Albania figured it out, Vietnam figured it out, the German Democratic Republic ( formerly known as "East Germany" ) figured it out, Kazhakstan figured it out, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania always had it figured out, Hungary figured it out, and Romania figured it out. Hell, even the Cubans are finally figuring it out.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129757511

Reform On The Range: Cubans Heed The Call To Farm
by Nick Miroff

Quote:
September 21, 2010 Cuba has miles and miles of fertile, lush countryside where nothing is growing or grazing. After five decades of state-controlled agriculture, the country struggles to feed itself, forcing the government to import some 70 percent of the island's food...

 

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The Atmospheric Greenhouse Effect, and its Effect on AGW
by Leonard Weinstein, ScD.

Background and the Issue


The material in this first section tries to define the issue clearly rather than get into specific numbers and results. The comments may include discussion of specific results, but interpretation of available data is given in later sections. Before I describe the atmospheric greenhouse effect, I need to make three points:

The first is that the effect is not like a greenhouse for growing plants. That type of greenhouse actually is convection limited (trapped gas) volume, where the interior gas is heated, but can’t convectively carry the heat away. Heat conduction in a gas is far less effective that convection to transport energy, and radiation is limited in the amount of heat transfer for these cases. It is the same effect you get in an enclosed car in sunlight, where the interior gets very hot. Open the windows and the car cools quickly due to the ability for convection to the atmosphere.

The second point is that the atmospheric greenhouse gases act as radiation insulators but the atmosphere can freely convectively transport thermal energy. This radiation insulation effect is often described as causing additional heating from back radiation. While there is absorption and re radiation of thermal energy, including back radiation, that description is misleading and in fact wrong in its implication. A later section shows the result, which requires an addition effect to result in the heating.

The third point is that the concept of average planet temperature is quite flawed. Since temperature varies a lot day to night, at different latitudes, and different seasons, the fact that the black body radiation is highly non-linear (fourth power effect), and that local regions vary so much, just doing a linear average of temperatures is generally inaccurate in characterizing what is going on. However, it is the metric used, and will be assumed here to be adequate for the comparisons, although I have serious doubts on that assumption.

Earth’s atmospheric greenhouse gases
There are several gases (and particles) in Earth’s atmosphere that are relatively transparent to incoming sunlight but optically absorbing of most of the thermally radiating outgoing energy. The principal one is water vapor, which absorbs about half of the thermal energy from the surface. In addition, water droplets in clouds absorb about half of the remainder, and also absorb some of the incoming sunlight. Dust particles and aerosols also absorb some incoming and some outgoing energy. The next main gas is CO2, which has been described as absorbing 8% to 20% of the outgoing energy (by different authors). Methane and other gases absorb the rest that is not directly transmitted. In addition, about 8% of the surface and atmospheric absorbed radiation is directly radiated to space through optical “windows” in the GHG (spectral regions which are not absorbed).

Atmospheric greenhouse effect
Once a sufficient amount of atmospheric long wavelength IR absorbing gases (called atmospheric greenhouse gases by convention) are present, they reduce the direct radiation transmission to space enough so that convection and relayed radiation becomes the dominant modes to transport energy from the surface (and from absorbed incoming energy) to a high altitude where it is radiated to space. The only way the energy can be radiated to space from the high altitude is from the absorbing and radiating gases. Once this situation is encountered, adding more absorbing and radiating gases (but not enough to significantly increase the total mass of the atmosphere) do not change the fact that convection is still the dominant heat transport mechanism. In fact, this reduces the radiation conduction, so that convection carries even more of the total energy. However, adding more absorbing gas does raise the altitude of outgoing radiation somewhat (not because of the tiny added mass, but because the height where the radiating gas concentration is suitable to radiate to space is increased). It is this increase in altitude of the outgoing radiation that results in the slight temperature increase.

Once the dominant mode of heat transport is convection (buoyancy, winds, and turbulent mixing), the atmosphere will form and maintain (on the average) an adiabatic lapse rate. This lapse rate is a temperature gradient due to the cooling effect of rising gas in a dropping pressure (due to gravity). Evaporation from the surface and condensing water vapor in the atmosphere change the level of the lapse rate from the dry air value, and this is called the wet adiabatic lapse rate. The outgoing radiation has to equal the incoming absorbed radiation unless the temperature is changing, but here we consider the case where the temperature has leveled off for simplicity (as it has on Earth for the last decade or so). In that case, the match of radiation out to space, from a particular effective altitude, to absorbed input radiation, determines the effective temperature of the gas at that altitude. This temperature is then added to the lapse rate times the effective altitude of outgoing radiation, and this gives the ground effective temperature. The combination of moving the location of the effective level of the atmosphere, where the radiation to space occurs, to a higher altitude, and adding the effect of the lapse rate times increased altitude is the source of higher low altitude and surface temperatures.

Feedback effects and sensitivity
The issue is actually more complex than indicated above due to what are called feedback effects in the sensitivity (sensitivity is defined as the change in average temperature caused by doubling the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, including feedbacks, and is thought to be approximately constant for CO2). The increase in CO2 comes mainly from burning of fossil fuels, manufacture of cement, and land use practices. The argument goes this way:

The doubling of the CO2 concentration would cause a temperature rise of about 1.2 C if that were the only change. However, the small temperature rise causes increased water vapor content, since vapor pressure increases with temperature. In addition, the higher temperature in the oceans would cause more CO2 to be released into the atmosphere, since solubility of CO2 decreases at higher temperature. An additional effect would come from more melting of sea ice at the high latitudes from the warmer temperature, which decreases the average albedo of Earth, and thus increase absorbed solar energy. All of these effects drive the temperature even higher, until the rapid nonlinear increase in black body radiation with increasing temperature stops further increase. However, there are other effects that also occur. The main ones are:

1.Clouds may increases, increasing albedo and decrease rather than increase sensitivity.

2.Aerosols, also produced by the burning of fossil and other fuels, reduce incoming solar energy.

The main issue of the anthropogenic global warming debate is what is the net effect of all feedbacks. If they were strongly positive, the sensitivity would be much larger. If negative, the sensitivity would be smaller. Many scientists posit a net sensitivity of 2 to 6 C, while some skeptics think it is 0.2 to 1 C. The entire debate hinges on the actual value.

Possible other causes of temperature change
In addition to atmospheric greenhouse gas changes and feedback effects, there are numerous other possible causes for short term and longer-term temperature changes. Some of the main ones in order of increasing time scale are:

1.Large volcanic eruptions (typically negative effect lasts one or at most a few years)

2.Solar activity (spots, spectral variation, and insolation)

3.Cause of cloud forcing from cosmic radiation variation

4.Long period ocean current variation (PDO, ENSO, AMO, etc.)

5.Planetary tilt and orbit variation

6.Land movement, which also changes land at high latitudes and ocean circulation


The Logical Flaws in the CO2 Positive Feedback Argument

The increase in the atmospheric CO2 concentration in the last 150 years can reasonably be blamed on human activity such as the burning of massive quantities of fossil fuels. CO2 is an optically absorbing (and emitting) gas in part of the wavelength range of thermal emission from the Earth.

The presence of atmospheric gases that absorb in the thermal wavelengths has the effect to raise the location of outgoing radiation to space that matches the absorbed solar input radiation. This effect, in conjunction with the formation and maintenance of the atmospheric adiabatic lapse rate, causes the surface and lower atmosphere temperature to be higher than for the case with no absorbing gases. This effect is called the atmospheric greenhouse effect (AGE).

The effect of increasing the quantity of any absorbing gas in the AGE is to raise the location of outgoing radiation, and this in conjunction with the lapse rate increases the surface temperature. Calculations based on the absorption spectra of all the absorbing gases indicate that water vapor is by far the main greenhouse gas, and clouds have the next highest effect. CO2 is third (although aerosols have a large and less known effect).

Calculation were made assuming that the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere was doubled from recent levels, and also assumed that all other contributors to AGE were not changed, to see what effect this would have on the temperature. The calculations indicated that about 1.2 C increase would occur for each doubling of CO2. In fact, other factors might occur if the doubling of CO2 occurred. The vapor pressure of water would increase at the slightly higher temperature, so potentially more water vapor would amplify the effect. This could cause more clouds, which could decrease or increase the effect depending on details. Also more CO2 could be driven out of the ocean due to the higher temperature, increasing the effect. Finely, ice could melt over large enough areas, so solar absorption could increase. The net effect of all these contributions is a temperature increase that may be higher (or possibly lower) that due to CO2 alone. The net increase from this doubling of CO2 is called the sensitivity of temperature to CO2 doubling.

There are three main factors I will examine here as relating to the CO2 sensitivity. They are the water vapor feedback effect, the CO2 from seawater feedback, and the melting ice feedback. The cloud effect and aerosols are not well enough defined, and are not considered here, but note that both are probably significant negative feedback causes.

Before discussing the three, I want to point out that since the adiabatic lapse rate is maintained even though there is some net radiation flux through the atmosphere, that whatever happens in the lower several km of atmosphere does not matter by itself. Only the change in effective location of outgoing radiation determines the surface temperature. Thus the only effective greenhouse gas concentrations that matter are the ones located at the altitude of outgoing radiation. The only net effect of adding absorbing gases is to move this effective location up a bit.

The first example is the so-called water vapor positive feedback effect. For this effect to be active, the absolute concentration of water vapor must increase along with the CO2 increase at higher altitudes. It has been clearly shown that this water vapor concentration does increase near the surface, but contrary to expectations, it not only did not increase, it slightly decreased in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere in recent times. The limited data accuracy and short time for data do make this not the final word. However, this reduction at altitude rather than increase refutes any present positive water vapor feedback claim until contradicted by new data.

The second so called positive feedback is the addition of more CO2 to the atmosphere from seawater due to warming. However, there is also a claim the increasing CO2 dissolving in seawater is acidifying it. That is, the seawater is a sink, not source. You can’t have it both ways. It presently is a sink and will remain so for the future of excess CO2 production. This makes it a negative feedback.

The third so called positive feedback is exposure of more absorbing area to sunlight due to sea and land ice area decreasing from the warming. It is true that the Arctic sea ice and some lower elevation Greenland ice has reduced during summers, although black carbon seems to be at least partly to blame, and also the ice seems to be partially recovering from the recent melt. Also many smaller land glaciers have been reducing since the end of the LIA. However, the Antarctic land and sea ice has been generally increasing over most of this time. The total global ice coverage has only reduced by a very small amount over the last 50 years, and the exact amounts were not known accurately prior to that to determine the level. Since the high latitude ice is exposed to a low Sun angle at most, the ice area effect is not a significant factor in feedback for periods short as we are considering.

We have thus shown that the three main positive feedback terms are not doing what is required, and we know clouds and aerosols tend to reduce heating, so the effective sensitivity is very likely less than 1.2 C per doubling.

Long Term CO2 and Water Vapor Effects on Heating

It has been pointed out and emphasized that it is necessary for the sensitivity to have significant positive feedback in order to explain the temperature CO2 correlation that has been observed over Geological time scales. The three main sources of possible positive feedback are water vapor feedback, ocean degassing of additional CO2 with rising temperature, and ice melting, decreasing the effective albedo of Earth.

Since many of the periods in the last 600 My were essentially glacier and polar ice free, the change in ice is not a viable feedback for these periods. Since the CO2 level that actually was present is supposed to have been determined, the source, and possible ocean feedback on CO2 level can’t be isolated, so any ocean contribution has to be considered as part of the source, not a separate feedback. The only remaining positive feedback is increased water vapor that increased at higher altitudes. We know that at the present, even though CO2 has increased about 40% from 150 years ago, and the temperature has increased about 0.8 C over that time, that the upper atmosphere water vapor did not increase (although there are accuracy of data questions). This does not support the supposition of positive water vapor feedback.

However, a more direct question occurs. If a small temperature increase from any source occurs (changing solar heating, biomaterial changing albedo, very long term ocean current variation due to land mass movement, etc.), why would this not also cause a positive water vapor driven feedback. What is so special about CO2? One argument given is that CO2 has a much longer persistence in the atmosphere and thus is not directly coupled to temperature variation. This may be a factor for a period of a few years or even a few decades, but we are talking about Geological periods of Millions of years. It is pure nonsense to talk about the CO2 persistence effect at those time scales.

http://climateclash.com/2010/11/25/...nhouse-effect-and-its-effect-on-agw/#comments

 

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See the spreadsheet:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/27/people-living-in-glass-planets/#comment-538665

Spreadsheet:
https://files.me.com/williseschenbach/odjw4f

Eschenbach

 

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Keith Briffa's Yamal tree ( the most important tree in the world ):

http://joannenova.com.au/globalwarming/skeptics-handbook-ii/web-pics/rcs_chronologies1-ii-web.gif


http://joannenova.com.au/globalwarming/skeptics-handbook-ii/web-pics/synthesis-report-summary-tar-hockey-stick-web.gif




​

http://joannenova.com.au/2009/12/fraudulent-hockey-sticks-and-hidden-data/

 

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http://judithcurry.com/2010/12/03/testimony-follow-up/#comment-18182

I think the radiative/convective emphasis has a big effect on how easily people are convinced, but that it has no effect on policy. Both approaches predict that (ignoring feedbacks) each doubling of CO2 will give about 1 C of surface warming. (So the 40% increase in CO2 so far will contribute about 0.5 C warming.)

The two big questions are sensitivity and impact. Are there large positive feedbacks that multiply the CO2-only warming by big numbers, and if so, why haven’t they done so as a result of CO2 increase to date? And even if the temperature does rise by 2 C, 4 C, 10 C, whatever, is that necessarily a bad thing? Given the larger temperature variations we see at the local scale, would it even be significant? Wouldn’t it be easier and better to adapt?

The ‘basic physics’ question is a distraction, but a tactically important one. Partly it is a rhetorical trick – scientific confidence in the basic physics is used to give the impression of confidence in sensitivity and impact. Sceptics who only doubt the latter are often portrayed or treated as if they doubted the basics – as if once you accept the basics, global climate catastrophe inevitably follows. Partly it is an issue of the authoritarian versus the educational models of scientific public outreach. By not giving the proper explanation, the general public are unable to check arguments for themselves and so are forced to rely on the scientists’ authority. This means that scientists can more easily mix in speculative or uncertain conclusions with the more solid ones, and not get called on it. And of course not providing explanations wastes a lot of sceptic’s time, which cuts down on the opposition they can mount.

http://judithcurry.com/2010/12/04/education-versus-indoctrination/#comment-18560

We have drifted steadily towards the intellectual trap of Scientific Authority. The lesson we learned from Aristotle’s downfall, from the ipse dixit, is in danger of being lost. It has already taken over the public sphere, and I see it increasingly infecting actual scientific discourse. Why do most scientists outside of climatology support AGW? Most of them haven’t looked into it. They don’t know the details of adiabats and cloud microphysics. So how do they know?

They have just looked at the reputations and authority of the protagonists, and taken ‘the consensus’ as being ‘Science’, and what a scientist should be supporting as a matter of principle. I’ve had scientists who are quite vocal about the dangers of global warming, and I’ve just asked them “why are the tops of mountains so cold, given that hot air rises?” and they don’t know. How can they possibly venture an opinion – how dare they back it with their reputation as scientists – if they don’t understand even the basics of meteorology?
-Nullius in Verba

http://judithcurry.com/2010/12/04/education-versus-indoctrination/#comment-18642

One problem with communication of climate science is the nonsequiteur claim. “Climate change exists therefore we must stop using fossil fuels.” when in fact the debate is about MAGNITUDES and COSTS and BENEFITS. The refusal to address these three words or even to admit they exist has swelled the ranks of sceptics. It is entirely possible that the harm from trying to prevent 2 deg warming is much more than the impacts from that much warming. Assessment of this possibility is prevented by hysterical talk about any warming equalling catastrophe and the denigration of those who find errors in the analysis of surface station or tree ring data.
-Craig Loehle

 

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http://www.appinsys.com/globalwarming/WaterVapor.htm

The following figures show the average annual sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies for 1973-2007 for the two regions with strongest trends in specific humidity in the figure above. The area with strongest negative trend is shown in the red line below (5N-5Sx160-180E) and the area with the strongest positive trend is shown in the blue line (0-10Nx80-100W). There has been no net warming in the area with positive specific humidity trend, while there has been slight warming in the area with the negative specific humidity trend.

http://www.appinsys.com/globalwarming/WaterVapor_files/image014.gif​

 

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http://noir.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601085&sid=a5IQzsBmOT7Q


Energy Credits Prove Inflated With Green Claims Seen as Hot Air
By Ben Elgin

Dec. 7 (Bloomberg) -- Along the steel-gray Quinebaug River in eastern Connecticut, Duncan Broatch is tinkering with machinery that will keep one of his two hydroelectric plants cranking out clean energy. The U.S. needs Broatch’s Summit Hydropower Inc. and other green power providers to make a dent in the 35 percent of the country’s global-warming pollution that comes from burning fossil fuels to make electricity.

Broatch was hoping to build more hydro plants. He planned to get the money partly from selling renewable energy credits, widely used tools championed by businesses, conservationists and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

RECs allow renewable-energy developers to sell something beyond their electricity: the right to claim that power’s environmental benefits. Corporations buy the RECs, and some then say that the credits reduce their environmental footprint; green power producers gain enough revenue to expand -- at least in theory, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.

Trouble is, some of the RECs Broatch sells fetch $1 to $2 apiece, he says, which is a fraction of the $40 or more he receives for the corresponding electricity and nowhere near what he needs to build more hydro plants.

“I get a check in the mail; it’s barely worth the paper it’s written on,” says Broatch, 55, who has spent the past 27 years revamping hydropower plants along Connecticut’s rivers.

Twenty other renewable-energy developers interviewed by Bloomberg News say their RECs aren’t adding green energy to the power grid either.

‘Spreadsheet Mumbo Jumbo’
“Nobody is going to make a decision to build more renewable energy based on selling voluntary credits,” says Mark Isaacson, vice president of Miller Hydro Group in Lisbon Falls, Maine.

“RECs have not worked out like we thought they would,” Isaacson says. “It has been a big disappointment.”

Companies buying RECs like those Broatch sells are a lot happier. Cisco Systems Inc., Dell Inc., Intel Corp., Whole Foods Market Inc. and more than 57,000 other firms, towns and agencies are using RECs to burnish their environmental halos. Some brag they’ve trimmed or even eliminated their carbon footprints altogether -- thanks in part to RECs.

“It’s spreadsheet mumbo jumbo,” says Kim Sheehan, a University of Oregon advertising professor and a founder of Greenwashing Index, which rates environmental claims. “Companies show their emissions are reduced, but overall emissions to the environment aren’t changed.”

Becoming Carbon Neutral
Intel, the world’s biggest maker of computer chips, heralds itself as the largest U.S. purchaser of green energy. The company says it cut global-warming emissions by more than 45 percent, or 1.9 million metric tons, from the end of fiscal 2007 in December through fiscal 2009 with the help of RECs.

Take RECs out of the equation and Santa Clara, California- based Intel reduced carbon emissions by a more modest 13 percent, according to its filings with London-based Carbon Disclosure Project, which tracks corporate emissions.

Cisco, the top maker of networking gear, announced in its 2009 corporate responsibility report that it had cut its global- warming emissions by 40 percent from the end of fiscal 2007 in July through fiscal 2009, surpassing its goal of a 25 percent reduction by 2012 three years ahead of time.

Without factoring in RECs, emissions climbed 3 percent during those years, according to data in the San Jose, California, company’s report.

‘PR Credit’
Computer maker Dell says it became carbon neutral in 2008 with the help of RECs; not counting them, emissions per volume of sales increased 4 percent since 2008 at the Round Rock, Texas, company. Spokeswoman Michelle Mosmeyer says the rise is because of Dell’s 2009 acquisition of Perot Systems Corp. and that the company will continue to focus on cutting energy use.

“It isn’t reasonable to say that purchasing a REC is equivalent to not polluting,” says Joseph Romm, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington and author of the Climate Progress blog, which covers climate-change science and politics.

“Some companies are just trying to get a certain amount of PR credit while not transforming their company.”

At least one large REC buyer is scaling back because it’s concerned the claims may not be credible. Nike Inc., the world’s largest sporting goods supplier, was the 24th-biggest corporate purchaser of RECs in 2008, the EPA says. Nike trimmed purchases by 68 percent in 2009.

“There is a lot of scrutiny about RECs and whether they’re helping to launch projects,” says Sarah Severn, director of corporate responsibility at Beaverton, Oregon-based Nike. “It might not be something we’d want to be associated with.” (Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News, says it purchased 155,000 RECs for 2010.)

Green-Power Quotas
The idea of splitting renewable energy into two products -- electricity and environmental benefits -- emerged in the 1990s. Environmentalists hoped the credits would help reverse a dire trend.

Nonpolluting sources of electricity have been shrinking as a percentage of the U.S. power supply. In 2008, 11 percent of non-nuclear power came from renewable supplies, down from 15 percent in 1990 and 20 percent in 1960, the Department of Energy says. Sixty-nine percent of U.S. electricity is made by burning fossil fuels, mostly coal and natural gas.

RECs have proven successful in programs in the District of Columbia and 29 states with green-power quotas.

Utilities that can’t generate enough renewable electrons can make up the difference by buying credits. States set rules about how much green energy is required, where it must be made and the types of generators that can sell RECs. In New Jersey, a mandate that some power be from the sun drove the value of solar RECs to $640 to $660 apiece in November, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, more than 10 times the electricity’s value.

No Binding Regulations
World Resources Institute, a Washington-based environmental advocate, teamed up with Alcoa Inc., DuPont Co. and seven other big companies in 2003 to promote voluntary RECs. As in state markets, this type of REC represents the environmental benefits associated with 1 megawatt-hour -- enough to power about 700 houses for 60 minutes.

Unlike state programs, there are no binding regulations. About 62 percent of the voluntary market chooses to be certified by the Center for Resource Solutions, a San Francisco-based organization that ensures credits aren’t sold more than once and that the corresponding electricity was actually produced. Voluntary purchases of RECs soared 253 percent from 2005 through 2009, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado.

Midddlemen
“Developers are trying to pull together every possible source of revenue to get these projects to work,” says Alex Perera, a co-director of business engagement at World Resources Institute.

Perera says it’s impossible to gauge how much green power REC-related efforts have generated. He declined to comment on whether the program is sparking new projects, saying that voluntary RECs have provided some financial support.

If there are winners in the REC world besides companies that claim environmental virtue, they’re the middlemen who buy and sell the credits. These intermediaries often wind up with more money than green-power developers, according to 35 contracts obtained through public*record requests.

Sterling Planet
Sterling Planet Inc. in Norcross, Georgia, has built a profitable business dealing in RECs. The privately held company estimated revenue of $25 million in 2010, with $2 million in net profit, according to a projection submitted to the Connecticut Department of Public Utility Control in March.

Sterling Planet orchestrated a REC transaction 6 miles (10 kilometers) from Broatch’s plant along the banks of the Quinebaug. Here, the Shetucket River travels a valley where maples, ashes and sycamores are mostly bare limbed on a November day. Near Occum, the river enters a dam and runs through turbines, shooting out about 10 feet (3 meters) below.

Inside a red-brick building, the power is corralled and sent to Norwich, a city of 38,000. Power from this and two other hydro projects accounts for 5 percent of Norwich’s electricity.

The Occum plant and two similar operations owned by Norwich generate about 12,000 RECs per year. The Connecticut Municipal Electric Energy Cooperative sold these credits to Sterling Planet. Sterling paid $1.25 apiece in 2009 and $1.20 in 2010, according to contracts obtained by Bloomberg. Sterling sold 6,139 credits -- 2,352 from Occum -- for $12.90 apiece in 2009, a more than 10-fold markup.

‘Needed Revenue’
Bette Trevillion, Sterling Planet’s director of marketing and communications, says it’s misleading to focus on what the company pays one source. The hydro credits are blended and sold along with other, more expensive ones, and prices vary based on the type of renewable energy, the age of the power plant and other factors, Trevillion says.

“Our contracts with renewable generators bring them needed revenue,” she says. “Sterling Planet’s existing REC contracts with suppliers will ultimately have delivered tens of millions of dollars to them when they are fulfilled.”

The REC money hasn’t led to any hydro projects being built or expanded in Norwich, says Jeff Brining, energy services manager at Norwich Public Utilities.

Instead, REC sales provide about 10 percent of the budget for a fund that pays for small, renewable-energy pilot projects in the Norwich area. For 2011, the fund is buying solar panels for a local middle school. The amount of power the panels will generate is less than 1 percent of what the hydro plants put out.

200,000 Cars
“You cannot really claim that because you buy voluntary RECs, more renewable energy is or will be produced,” says Anja Kollmuss, a scientist at the Somerville, Massachusetts, office of the Stockholm Environment Institute, which researches sustainable development.

Even so, the federal government is promoting RECs. The EPA provides a handy online Green Power Equivalency Calculator that helps companies convert RECs into environmental boasting rights. Intel cited the EPA’s calculations in a January 2010 press release that said the chipmaker’s market-leading purchase of 1.4 million credits had the same impact as taking almost 200,000 cars off the road or not powering 134,000 homes for a year.

Government agencies themselves are buying RECs to reduce carbon emissions and meet a 2005 law that required them to get 5 percent of their electricity from renewable sources in 2010. NASA, the Air Force and the departments of Agriculture and the Interior purchased RECs supplied by the Rocky Reach hydroelectric project near Wenatchee in central Washington.

Not Significant
At the plant, the waters of the Columbia River power turbines that have been making electricity since 1961. Chelan County, home to 72,000 people, fixed up the plant in 2006 to produce 2 percent more power. On Dec. 18, 2008, the county sold 66,000 RECs to Sterling Planet for $1 each, contracts show.

That same day, Sterling Planet began a sale of more than 65,000 of the credits to the four government agencies for $3.23 apiece -- a 223 percent markup.

The $1 per megawatt-hour that went to Chelan County paled in comparison to the $59 per megawatt-hour that the plant fetched for electricity. Even though it was a small sum, Rocky Reach didn’t turn down the money.

“RECs aren’t factored into the economics of our decision making,” says Melissa Lyons, power resource analyst at the Chelan County Public Utility District. “It isn’t significant compared to our multi-million-dollar power deals.”

‘Clear Signal’
Companies that buy RECs say the credits fit into their wide-ranging environmental strategies.

“It sends a clear signal to the market that we want cleaner energy,” says Andy Smith, Cisco’s global sustainability manager.

At Intel, Marty Sedler, director of global utilities and infrastructure, says RECs are more valuable than critics make them out to be.

“It’s a positive thing,” he says. “Any RECs you buy absolutely help get more generation built. How much? It’s very hard to determine.”

Intel first bought credits in 2008 and since then has purchased a total of 4 million. Sedler won’t disclose how much Intel paid or which green producers sold the RECs. Sterling Planet handled the transactions.

RECs are just part of Intel’s environmental commitment, Sedler says. The company has spent $35 million since 2001 on cleaner-burning lighting for its chip plants and other eco- improvements. In January 2010, Intel announced it was putting solar panels on eight buildings.

Big Accolades
All the same, Intel is getting big accolades for buying its 1.4 million RECs in 2010. The company says it’s now cutting 1 million tons of carbon emissions from its environmental- footprint calculations. In October, Newsweek magazine named Intel one of the five greenest U.S. businesses. The same month, the EPA awarded Intel a third consecutive Green Power Leadership Award, which recognizes “exceptional achievement” in supporting renewable energy. The EPA gave 10 organizations awards for purchasing green power in 2010.

“We could put in 1 megawatt of solar, but it wouldn’t be a game changer,” Sedler says. For roughly the same price, Intel can say 1.4 million RECs cut about 1 million tons of carbon emissions compared with about 1,000 tons for solar.

The EPA says companies buying RECs are making a difference.

“This added revenue helps developers recover costs, pay off debt and help reduce project risk,” says Allison Dennis, communications manager for the EPA’s Green Power Partnership, which hands out the awards.

Sedler says Intel’s main goal is to spark more companies to follow its lead in promoting renewable energy; making a sizable cut in its own emissions calculations is a fringe benefit.

“The last thing we want to do is try to do something good and end up harming our reputation,” he says.

 

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I go all the way back to the days of remote access terminals, punch tape and Hollerith cards through Fortran, COBOL, Basic, Visicalc and Lotus 1-2-3 to VBA, HTML and Excel. I've seen an enormous amount of garbage/nonsense come out of computers that was blindly accepted as the gospel truth merely because it came out of the "infallible" computer. To use the vernacular, that's a part of "where I'm coming from."

I've also seen a lot of organizations and institutions and how the people who are part of them behave. We ARE herd animals— lone wolves and wild geese either die or the mob kills them. As a result, I frequently question the "sapiens" in H. sapiens.

I've spent time in third world countries ( and discovered that I'm not interested in living that way ) and in the middle of big oceans on small sailboats. It's a very, very big planet.

Mother Nature doesn't give a damn if we live or die.

http://judithcurry.com/2010/11/26/raising-the-level-of-the-game/

http://blogs.chron.com/climateabyss/2010/11/the_tyndall_gas_effect_part_1.html

Numerous writers have been over this territory. Greenhouses work by suppressing convective exchange of heat between the interior and exterior of a greenhouse. In the atmosphere, the "effect formerly known as greenhouse" (or EFKAG, for short) works by absorbing and emitting infrared radiation while being generally transparent to visible radiation...

...But, not to fear, there's nothing in science that's presently known as a "Tyndall gas". So this term can immediately replace the term "greenhouse gas" to refer to gases that are much more opaque to infrared wavelengths than to visible wavelengths.

A replacement for the term "greenhouse gas" is especially useful since only a small fraction of the gases that fill greenhouses are greenhouse gases. This makes "greenhouse gas" a double misnomer. Wow.

http://blogs.chron.com/climateabyss/2010/12/the_tyndall_gas_effect_part_2_seeing_is_believing.html

The Tyndall Gas Effect, Part 2: Seeing is Believing
Having attempted to bury the "greenhouse gas" terminology in favor of Tyndall gases, it's time to consider their effect on the exchange of energy between the Earth and its surroundings.

This is a fundamental topic; the Royal Society's excellent climate change primer leads off with a few carefully-chosen sentences that explain the Tyndall gas effect, although they don't call it that. But I think I can make it even simpler. Furthermore, I think I can do it without raising any of the strange sticking points or false simplifications that appear in comments in the blogosphere or in some articles by scientists who ought to know better.

No "average temperature" nonsense. No lapse rate confusion. No back-radiation mumbo-jumbo.

Okay, here goes. {sound of knuckles cracking} Ow.

Let's start with the following. (For the sake of concreteness, let's let everything refer to yearly averages.)
(1) The Sun heats the Earth (through the Earth's absorption of solar radiation).
(2) The Earth heats the atmosphere (through evaporation, conduction and convection, and net infrared radiation, in various combinations)
(3) Both the Earth and atmosphere lose heat to space (through emission of infrared radiation).

(The Sun is also an important direct heat source for parts of the upper atmosphere. But most of the heat in most of the air was received from the Earth's surface. And most of the infrared radiation lost to space comes from the lower atmosphere, not the upper atmosphere. So I'll ignore the upper atmosphere in what follows.)

Most of the gases in the Earth's atmosphere are transparent to the infrared radiation emitted by the surface of the Earth and by clouds. But Tyndall found experimentally that particular gases absorb infrared radiation. I'm calling such gases Tyndall gases. Later experiments showed that the infrared absorption of each Tyndall gas is confined to particular ranges of wavelengths. Some wavelengths are strongly absorbed, others are weakly absorbed, and others absorbed hardly at all. The specific pattern of wavelengths of absorption are as unique as a fingerprint, and this basic principle is how scientists use the radiation emitted from stars, planets, nebulae, etc. to infer their chemical composition, as well as a host of other applications.

The same molecular characteristics that allow Tyndall gases to absorb infrared radiation at particular wavelengths also allows them to emit infrared radiation at those same wavelengths. For any substance and wavelength, the intensity of the radiation emitted depends on the substance's temperature: the warmer it is, the more radiation it emits.

This fact is exploited by weather satellites to determine the temperature of various layers of the atmosphere. Indeed, the incorporation of data from weather satellites on the radiation emitted by the atmosphere led to the last major advance in medium-range weather forecasting skill a bit more than a decade ago. The forecasting improvement was largest in the Southern Hemisphere because there are so few direct upper air measurements there from weather balloons. So not only is it real, it works.


Left: Visible satellite image
Right: Color scale for infrared brightness temperatures

Infrared satellite image, 14.7 microns, with map overlay

Let's see how it works. To get you oriented, here is a visible satellite image from this morning (December 1, 2010) along with a temperature scale. All the images shown here were downloaded from the Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies' GOES derived product page, specifically the "all band display". The area covered by the image is shown in the map here; all the images we'll look at are for the same area and time.

A "visible satellite image" is simply a depiction of the intensity of visible light received by the satellite sensor as it scans across the Earth; greater intensities are shown in lighter colors. The source of the light is the Sun; the satellite detects light reflected or scattered by the Earth and by clouds. The upper left corner of the image is dark; the image is so early in the morning that sunrise had not reached that part of the United States yet. The satellite image features clouds associated with a storm system along the East Coast of the United States. The south-central United States is free of clouds; if you look closely you can see the coastline along the Gulf of Mexico.

While the visible satellite image detects light originating from a distant source illuminating the Earth, infrared satellite images detect infrared radiation emitted directly by the Earth. You can imagine that the Earth and its atmosphere are glowing with warmth, and the satellite is detecting that glow at different wavelengths. Depending on the wavelength, it might see the glow emitted by the Earth and by clouds, the glow emitted by particular Tyndall gases in the atmosphere, or both.

The intensity of the radiation will be shown in the form of "brightness temperature". For what we'll be looking at, this is roughly the temperature of the object or substance that's emitting the radiation. Remember that the warmer the temperature of a substance, the stronger the radiation it emits. Physics whizzes know how to convert brightness temperatures into actual temperatures; the conversion is almost 1:1.

That image with the map on it is actually an infrared satellite image, at a wavelength (14.7 microns) where carbon dioxide (CO2) is a very efficient absorber and emitter of radiation. We're in the gray part of the temperature scale, indicating brightness temperatures below -55 C. There's no sign of any clouds in the image, meaning that all the infrared radiation emitted by clouds or the Earth's surface at this wavelength has been absorbed by the intervening CO2, and all the radiation we're seeing must have originated from CO2 above the clouds.

None of this would have been a surprise to the satellite instrument designers, who chose this wavelength to measure temperatures in the lower stratosphere. The more effective a Tyndall gas is at absorbing radiation, the higher up the radiation that finally makes it out to space must originate. If they'd picked a wavelength for which CO2 was less effective at absorbing and emitting, the radiation would have come from farther down in the atmosphere.


Left: Infrared satellite image, 14.4 microns
Right: Infrared satellite image, 14.1 microns

Left: Infrared satellite image, 13.6 microns
Right: Infrared satellite image, 13.4 microns

Left: Infrared satellite image, 12.7 microns
Right: Infrared satellite image, 12.0 microns

Oh, wait, they did. In order to extract information about the vertical structure of the atmosphere, they picked several wavelengths, ranging from very effective absorption by CO2 to totally ineffective absorption by CO2. Smart folks, those satellite designers. You can see these in action here. Besides the 14.7 micron wavelength image, I'm showing images for 14.4 microns, 14.1 microns, 13.6 microns, 13.4 microns, 12.7 microns, and 12.0 microns.

As the wavelengths get shorter and shorter, we're seeing radiation emitted from progressively lower down in the atmosphere. The first non-CO2 features that start being visible are the high clouds (a hint of them at 14.4 microns, more clearly at 14.1 microns), then lower clouds, then finally (dimly at 13.4 microns, more clearly at 12.7 microns) land surface and coastal features. Meanwhile, the emissions from CO2 are also coming from lower in the atmosphere, where the CO2 is warmer. Eventually, at 12.0 microns, we're not seeing any emissions from the air; everything is coming from clouds or the Earth's surface and passing right through the atmosphere all the way to the satellite. The clouds generally emit less intense radiation, with lower brightness temperatures, because they really are colder; temperature typically decreases with height in the lowest 10-15 km of the atmosphere.

This day happens to be one in which air temperature in the mid-troposphere is very cold over central North America. In the 14.1 micron image, you can see that the radiation is less intense (brightness temperatures are lower) there. The cold air also shows up lower in the troposphere, in the 13.6 micron image, with a somewhat different spatial pattern. At shorter wavelengths, we're getting some contribution to radiation from the low clouds and ground, so it's harder to infer the atmospheric temperature pattern.

I need to point out here the differing roles of concentration and temperature. The concentration of CO2, in combination with its effectiveness at absorbing radiation at a particular wavelength, determines the altitude range where the atmospheric radiation comes from. The temperature of the CO2 determines the intensity of the radiation. So, away from clouds, we can see the atmospheric temperature patterns in the clear-air infrared radiation.

Just in case you want to compare measured temperature patterns to those seen in the satellite images, I've archived upper air maps from the NCAR RAL web site corresponding to the 14.4 micron image here, the 14.1 micron image here, and the 13.6 micron image here.

We know the particular source levels of the radiation because we know the CO2 concentrations. Well above ground level, CO2 mixing ratios vary from place to place by less than 1%. That makes CO2 the most common well-mixed Tyndall gas, which is why it produces a nice strong signal for temperature measurements.

Water vapor, the most common Tyndall gas overall, is not well-mixed. This makes it not so useful for measuring temperature in the atmosphere by satellite. But since water vapor is important for predicting clouds and precipitation, we do care about its distribution in the atmosphere, so some satellite channels are tuned to wavelengths that are absorbed by water vapor.

By the way, just to clear up a common misconception, clouds are not made of water vapor. Water vapor is the invisible, gaseous form of water. It's what your sweat turns into as it evaporates. Clouds and steam, on the other hand, consist of tiny droplets of liquid water or, if the air is cold enough, tiny particles of ice.


Infrared satellite image, 7.4 microns

Left: Infrared satellite image, 7.0 microns
Right: Infrared satellite image, 6.5 microns

Here are some satellite channels tuned to wavelengths that are absorbed and emitted by water vapor. For these wavelengths, the smaller the wavelength, the more effective the water vapor at infrared absorption and emission. So water vapor is only weakly effective at 7.4 microns, moderately effective at 7.0 microns, and highly effective at 6.5 microns. All three of these images are showing infrared radiation emitted from clouds where clouds are present (and high enough in the atmosphere) and infrared radiation emitted from water vapor where clouds are not present (or are too low).

Just as with CO2, we get more intense atmospheric emissions from the less effective wavelengths, because the emissions can escape to space from lower in the atmosphere where the air is warmer. But there are some patterns in the clear air emissions that we didn't see with CO2. Compare, for example, the 6.5 micron image with the 14.1 micron image. The 14.1 micron image, away from the clouds, just has a boring intensity pattern with the lowest brightness temperatures in the northwest and the highest brightness temperatures in the southeast. The 6.5 micron image instead has a lot more intensity variation within the clear air, with a tongue of higher intensity radiation extending from the southwest to the middle of the image and a band of much lower intensity radiation to its southeast.

These infrared radiation intensity variations are caused by variations in the mixing ratio of water vapor. While CO2 varies by less than 1%, water vapor can vary by a factor of 20 or more. Where there's lots of water vapor in the upper troposphere, the infrared emissions at 6.5 microns detected by satellite originate in the upper troposphere. Where there's almost no water vapor in the upper troposphere, the infrared emissions detected by satellite originate farther down, in the middle troposphere. Because it's warmer farther down in the troposphere, the infrared emissions from there are more intense, with higher brightness temperatures.

Misconception alert! In most of our experiences, more means stronger. But in the case of infrared radiation escaping into space, less is more and more is less. Where there's more water vapor, the emissions that escape to space originate from higher in the atmosphere where the intensity of emitted radiation is weak because the air's so cold. Where there's less water vapor, the more intense emissions from lower in the atmosphere are unblocked and can escape into space.

Now, let's get back to heat transfer and how the Earth and atmosphere lose heat to space. We've looked at several infrared wavelengths, and depending on the wavelength and location, the infrared radiation escaping to space might come from CO2, from water vapor, from clouds, from the Earth's surface, or more generally from a combination of these, including other Tyndall gases besides CO2 and water vapor. Of all these sources, the infrared radiation coming from the Earth's surface is generally the most intense, because on average the Earth's surface is generally warmer than most of the atmosphere.

Now imagine how things would be different if you suddenly disabled the Tyndall gases. The water vapor, CO2, and the other gases would still be present but they would not absorb any infrared radiation. In that case, at all infrared wavelengths, the relatively intense emissions from the Earth's surface formerly blocked by Tyndall gases would escape directly into space. The whole Earth-atmosphere system would suddenly be losing much more energy than before, much more, in fact, than it would be absorbing from the Sun. The inevitable thermodynamic result is that the Earth-atmosphere system would begin cooling off.

If you wanted, you could make some additional assumptions and try to guess how much the Earth would cool. But this leads to a rather complicated set of arbitrary decisions. Do you take into account the fact that the Earth would have more snow cover and therefore reflect more solar radiation into space without absorbing it? Do you take into account possible changes in cloud cover? I'm not going to go there. Instead, I prefer to keep it simple and obvious:

The presence of Tyndall gases keeps the earth-atmosphere system warmer than it would be without them. This is the Tyndall gas effect.

Note 1: The so-called "greenhouse effect" is usually quantified by comparing the present Earth-atmosphere system to an imaginary Earth with no Tyndall gases and no clouds, but with the same distribution of vegetation and snow, and with the spots on the Earth's surface that would have been beneath clouds painted white, or, in the case of oceans, dyed white. The oceans are assumed to remain present, but the sea ice is assumed not to become more extensive even if the average temperature at the Earth's surface drops below freezing. The resulting number is extremely easy to calculate, which perhaps is what makes it so attractive, but it would seem to have very little to do with anything that might actually happen on Earth, even hypothetically.

http://ecomythsmith.blogspot.com/

 

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A debate held at The University of Virginia Law School on 10 October, 2010 between Andrew Dessler, Ph.D. of Texas A&M and Richard Lindzen, Ph.D. of MIT on the topic of anthropogenic global warming:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9Sh1B-rV60&feature=player_embedded

The presentations are lengthy. Dessler goes first, Lindzen begins at ~31 minutes. Rebuttals follow.

 

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http://judithcurry.com/2010/12/14/co2-no-feedback-sensitivity-part-ii/


CO2 no-feedback sensitivity: Part II
by Judith Curry

So how to define this problem to make sense? Or can we? To focus the discussion started on the previous thread, I am highlighting some of the defining or thought provoking statement from the the previous thread:

Mike Jonas states:

So unless you are absolutely specific as to what is a feedback and what isn’t, the no-feedback sensitivity cannot be calculated. Whatever you decide on, the calculation is in any case a highly artificial construct and IMHO unlikely to be meaningful.​

The essence of the challenge is described by Pekka Pirila:

The discussions on no-feedback sensitivity tell more about difficulties in presenting the understanding on the atmospheric behaviour that about the understanding itself. The question is almost semantic: what is the meaning of the expression “no-feedback”, when such changes are considered that are themselves at least partially feedback.

For the real CO2 sensitivity with feedbacks these problems are not present, but then we face naturally the serious gaps in detailed knowledge of atmospheric processes.​

Tomas Milanovic lays it all out:

Judith just look at how bungled this “sensitivity” concept is .

(1) F = ε.σ.T⁴(definition of emissivity)
dF = 4.ε.σ.T³.dT + σ.T⁴. dε => dT = (1/4. ε.σ.T³).(dF – σ.T⁴. dε)

Ta = 1/S . ∫ T.dS (definition of the average temperature at time t over a surface S)

Now if we differentiate under the integral sign even if it is mathematically illegal because the temperature field is not continuous we get :

dTa = 1/S . ∫ dT.dS

Substituting for dT
dTa = 1/S . ∫ [(1/ 4.ε.σ.T³).(dF - σ.T⁴. dε)] . dS

Now this is a sum of 2 terms :

dTa = { 1/S . ∫ [(T/ 4.ε) . dε].dS } + { 1/S . ∫ [dF/4. ε.σ.T³].dS }

The first term is due to the spatial variation of emissivity.
It can of course not be neglected because even if the liquid and solid water has an emissivity reasonably constant and near to 1 , this is not the case for rocks , sable , vegetation etc . It is then necessary to compute the integral which depends on the temperature distribution. E.g same emissivity distribution , different temperature distributions give different values of the integral and different “sensitivities”.

The second term is more problematic. Indeed the causality in the differentiated relation goes from T to F . If we change the temperature by dT , the emitted radiation changes by dF . However what we want to know is what happens with T when the incident radiation changes by dF. This is a dynamical question whose answer can not be given by the Stefan Boltzmann law but by Navier Stokes (for convection) , the heat equation (for conduction) and the thermodynamics for phase changes and bio-chemical energy.

OK as we can’t answer this one , let’s just consider the final state postulated as being an equilibrium. Not enough , we must also postulate that the initial and final “equilibrium” states have EXACTLY the same energy repartition in the conduction , convection , phase and chemical energy modes. In other words the radiation mode must be completely decoupled from other energy transfer modes. Under those (clearly unrealistic) assumptions we will have in the final state dF emitted = dF absorbed.

Now comes the even harder part . The fundamental equation (1) is only valid for a solid or some liquids so the temperatures and fluxes considered are necessarily evaluated at the Earth surface. If we took any other surface (sphere) going through the atmosphere , all of the above would be gibberish.

Unfortunately the only place we know something about the fluxes is the TOA because it is there that we will postulate that radiation in = radiation out.
This is also wrong (just look at the difference between the night half, the day half and the sum of both) but this is the basic assumption of all and any climate models sofar. So what we postulate at some height R where the atmosphere is supposed to “stop” is :
FTOA = g(R,θ,φ) with g some function.
From there via radiative transfer model and assuming known lapse rate, we’ll get to the surface and obtain F = h(R,θ,φ)] with h some other function depending on g (note that h , so F depends also on the choice of R e.g the choice where the atmosphere “stops”). Last step is just to differentiate F because we need dF in the second integral.
dF = ∂h/∂θ.dθ + ∂h/∂φ.dφ

Now substitute dF and compute the second integral . The sum of both gives dTa , e.g the variation of the average surface temperature. We can also define the average surface flux variation :
dFa = 1/S . ∫ dF.dS

It appears obvious that {∫ [(1/ 4.ε.σ.T³).(dF - σ.T⁴. dε)] . dS} / ∫ dF.dS
(e.g dTa/dFa) will depend on the spatial distribution of the temperatures and emissivities on the surface as well as on the particular form of the h function which transforms TOA fluxes in surface fluxes. It will of course also change with time but this dynamical question has been evacuated by considering only initial and final equilibrium states even if there actually never is equilibrium.

A careful reader will have noted and concluded by now that it is impossible to evaluate these 2 integrals because they necessitate the knowledge of the surface temperature field which is precisely the unknown we want to identify.
The parameter dTa/dFa is a nonsense which can only have a limited use for black bodies in radiative equilibriums without other energy transfer modes.
The Earth is neither the former nor the latter.​

 

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by Jim Cripwell
http://judithcurry.com/2010/12/14/co2-no-feedback-sensitivity-part-ii/#comment-21589

30 years ago, the IPCC tried to prove that adding CO2 to the atmosphere would produce a catastrophic rise in global temperatures. They could not use the “scientific method”, because, as has been noted many times, the “scientific method” does not work if you cannot do controlled experiments. So they invented a hypothetical way to try and end run this fundamental difficulty. Politicians, eminent scientists and scientific institutions have believed this IPCC “proof”. One of the elements in this “proof” is how much doubling CO2 will increase global temperatures without feedbacks. This is an essential step in the IPCC process. That is why it was done.

And if it is wrong, then the IPCC “proof” is wrong.

 

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The CO2 saturation curve ( showing CO2′s temperature response ).

The “blue fuzz” represents measured global CO2 increases in our modern times.

http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/co2_temperature_curve_saturation.png?w=510&h=414​

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/13/my-towns-climate-action-plan/

 

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http://judithcurry.com/2010/11/30/physics-of-the-atmospheric-greenhouse-effect/#comment-16901

By "Nullius in Verba"

A great deal of confusion is caused in this debate by the fact that there are two distinct explanations for the greenhouse effect: one based on that developed by Fourier, Tyndall, etc. which works for purely radiative atmospheres (i.e. no convection), and the radiative-convective explanation developed by Manabe and Wetherald around the 1970s, I think. (It may be earlier, but I don’t know of any other references.)

Climate scientists do know how the basic greenhouse physics works, and they model it using the Manabe and Wetherald approach. But almost universally, when they try to explain it, they all use the purely radiative approach, which is incorrect, misleading, contrary to observation, and results in a variety of inconsistencies when people try to plug real atmospheric physics into a bad model. It is actually internally consistent, and it would happen like that if convection could somehow be prevented, but it isn’t how the real atmosphere works.

This leads to a tremendous amount of wasted effort and confusion. The G&T paper in particular got led down the garden path by picking up several ‘popular’ explanations of the greenhouse effect and pursuing them ad absurdam. A tremendous amount of debate is expended on questions of the second law of thermodynamics, and whether back radiation from a cold sky can warm the surface. It can, but whether it can or not is actually completely irrelevant to the real greenhouse effect. It doesn’t matter, because back radiation isn’t what causes the surface to be as warm as it is anyway.

The greenhouse effect requires the understanding of two effects: first, the temperature of a heated object in a vacuum, and second, the adiabatic lapse rate in a convective atmosphere.

For the first, you need to know that the hotter the surface of an object is, the faster it radiates heat. This acts as a sort of feedback control, so that if the temperature falls below the equilibrium level it radiates less heat than it absorbs and hence heats up, and if the temperature rises above the equilibrium it radiates more heat than it is absorbing and hence cools down. The average radiative temperature for the Earth is easily calculated to be about -20 C, which is close enough although a proper calculation taking non-uniformities into account would be more complicated.

However, the critical point of the above is the question of what “surface” we are talking about. The surface that radiates heat to space is not the solid surface of the Earth. If you could see in infra-red, the atmosphere would be a fuzzy opaque mist, and the surface you could see would actually be high up in the atmosphere. It is this surface that approaches the equilibrium temperature by radiation to space. Emission occurs from all altitudes from the ground up to about 10 km, but the average is at about 5 km.

The second thing you need to know doesn’t involve radiation or greenhouse gases at all. It is a simply physical property of gases, that if you compress them they get hot, and if you allow them to expand they cool down. As air rises in the atmosphere due to convection the pressure drops and hence so does its temperature. As it descends again it is compressed and its temperature rises. The temperature changes are not due to the flow of heat in to or out of the air; they are due to the conversion of potential energy as air rises and falls in a gravitational field.

This sets up a constant temperature gradient in the atmosphere. The surface is at about 15 C on average, and as you climb the temperature drops at a constant rate until you reach the top of the troposphere where it has dropped to a chilly -54 C. Anyone who flies planes will know this as the standard atmosphere.

Basic properties of gases would mean that dry air would change temperature by about 10 C/km change in altitude. This is modified somewhat by the latent heat of water vapour, which reduces it to about 6 C/km.

And if you multiply 6 C/km by 5 km between the layer at equilibrium temperature and the surface, you get the 3° C greenhouse effect.

It really is that simple, and this really is what the peer-reviewed technical literature actually uses for calculation. (See for example Soden and Held 2000, the discussion just below figure 1.) It’s just that when it comes to explaining what’s going on, this other version with back radiation getting “trapped” gets dragged out again and set up in its place.

If an increase in back radiation tried to exceed this temperature gradient near the surface, convection would simply increase until the constant gradient was achieved again. Back radiation exists, and is very large compared to other heat flows, but it does not control the surface temperature.

Increasing CO2 in the atmosphere makes the fuzzy layer thicker, increases the altitude of the emitting layer, and hence its distance from the ground. The surface temperature is controlled by this height and the gradient, and the gradient (called the adiabatic lapse rate) is affected only by humidity.

I should mention for completeness that there are a couple of complications. One is that if convection stops, as happens on windless nights, and during the polar winters, you can get a temperature inversion and the back radiation can once again become important. The other is that the above calculation uses averages as being representative, and that’s not valid when the physics is non-linear. The heat input varies by latitude and time of day. The water vapour content varies widely. There are clouds. There are great convection cycles in air and ocean that carry heat horizontally. I don’t claim this to be the entire story. But it’s a better place to start from.

Of course, given the number of competing claims and assertions in this area, all this just looks to most participants like another crank version and gets ignored, even by sceptics. I am not hopeful. It would require more ‘official’ climate scientists to stop using their simplistic version and be a bit more careful, and would take a while to percolate into the public consciousness. Probably they don’t because they know what people would say.

 

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http://www.skepticalscience.com/images/Trenberth_energy_budget.gif​

http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2010/12/20/working-out-where-the-energy-goes-part-2-peter-berenyi/

http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?p=2&t=108&&n=178

 

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If ...[one] made the most basic enquiry, ... [he] might also have found out that the entire case for the man-made threat to the climate rests on just the word of 60 scientists who reviewed Chapter Nine of the Fourth Assessment Report. He’d also know that the people he calls deniers, far from being recipients of thousands of regular Exxon cheques, are mostly self-funded, many are retirees, and that Exxon’s paltry $23 million for 1990 – 2007 was outdone by more than 3000 to 1 by the US government alone which paid $79 billion to the Climate Industry during 1989 – 2009.

The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth...






http://joannenova.com.au/2010/12/a-journalist-who-confuses-journalism-with-propaganda/

 

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http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1210/46733.html#ixzz18v3D5N4y


Polar bears not 'endangered'
22 December, 2010

The Obama administration is sticking with a George W. Bush-era decision to deny polar bears endangered species status.

In a court filing Wednesday, the Fish and Wildlife Service defended the previous administration’s decision to give the polar bear the less-protective “threatened” species designation, a move that will frustrate environmentalists who hoped for stronger protections under the Endangered Species Act.

FWS Director Rowan Gould said the 2008 "threatened" listing was made "following careful analysis of the best scientific information, as required by the ESA."

At the time, the service determined the bears weren't danger of extinction, so did not warrant the “endangered” status. The bears were listed as "threatened" because they face serious threats from projected decline in its sea ice habitat due to global warming would result in them likely being in danger of extinction in the foreseeable future.

FWS is "confident it was and is the appropriate status," Gould said.

Listing the polar bear as “endangered” as a result of global warming could open the door to using the Endangered Species Act to regulate greenhouse gases, an outcome the Obama administration has opposed.

U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan sent the controversial listing decision back to the Obama administration in October, asking officials to clarify the language the agency used when it determined that polar bears aren’t “endangered” under federal law.

Environmentalists who challenged the listing in court had hoped that Obama administration officials would seize the opportunity to ditch the Bush administration’s decision and extend stronger protections to the species, but that was seen as a long shot.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1210/46733.html#ixzz18x1ew0Wi

 

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http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/42356


Where has all the heat gone?
Apr 16, 2010

Two leading climate scientists have urged their colleagues to find the growing amount of "missing energy" that seems to be eluding climate sensors.

In a commentary in today's issue of Science, Kevin Trenberth and John Fasullo of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, US, identify a large and growing amount of solar energy that appears to have been absorbed by the Earth – but has yet to turn up in terrestrial measurements.

Since 2001 scientists have used satellites to compare the amount of solar energy being absorbed by the Earth to the amount of infrared energy escaping from our planet. And just as predicted by the theory of manmade climate change, the amount of energy retained by the Earth has increased along with greenhouse-gas concentrations.

Losing energy since 2004
At first this extra energy seems to have boosted temperatures down here on Earth. Then something unexplained happened in about 2004 – and since then terrestrial measurements suggest that the planet is losing energy.

So are the satellites wrong? While Trenberth and Fasullo say that the satellites are not good enough to give accurate measurements of the net energy itself, they claim that the instruments are "sufficiently stable" to track changes in net energy, which are the important quantity.

Trenberth told physicsworld.com that the discrepancy probably lies in the environment's largest heat reservoir. "I would say that the missing heat is mainly in the ocean," he argues.

Much of our understanding of how the oceans absorb energy comes from over 3000 "Argo floats" that gather temperature data at depths of up to 2000 m. However, Trenberth says he thinks that "oceanographers are fairly new at processing this kind of data and are still learning how to do it right". He also points out of that some of the floats deployed in the Atlantic have been problematic.

Lurking deep in the ocean
Despite the challenges involved in analysing the Argo data, Trenberth points to a recent study by Karina von Schuckmann and colleagues at CNRS in Plouzané, France that looks at Argo data gathered in 2003–2008. Unlike most calculations of energy changes in the oceans – which consider temperatures down to 700 m – the CNRS team looked all the way down to 2000 m. At these greater depths they appear to have found a significant chunk of the missing heat.

Trenberth believes that it is crucial to understand when this energy will return to the upper ocean, where it would have a significant effect on climate. Scientists already know the Southern Oscillation involves the absorption of solar energy by the Pacific Ocean during "La Niña" years and its release into the atmosphere during "El Niño" years – leading to significant changes in weather patterns in the Americas.

An El Niño began in 2009 and looks set to continue in 2010. Trenberth believes that it might result in much of the missing energy resurfacing – but adds that current data gathering and analysis techniques mean that it could be a year or two before we know. "One can argue that we should develop a system to do this in closer to real time as part of the new climate services," he said.

 

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http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.c...nosed-by-the-upper-ocean-heat-content-change/



Update On Jim Hansen’s Forecast Of Global Warming As Diagnosed By The Upper Ocean Heat Content Change
May 21, 2010

Jim Hansen responded in 2005 to a comment we made on ocean heat content with respect to a Science Express article he wrote in that year [Pielke and Christy, 2005; our Comment was (no surprise) rejected by Science]...

... A consequence of this absence of heating is that we should soon see a return to the radiative imbalance predicted by Jim Hansen, if he is correct. Indeed, this provides us the best opportunity we have over the next few years to test the robustness of the multi-decadal global models to predict the climate system radiative imbalance (i.e. global warming).

 

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http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/3639/full


Renewables Won't Keep the Lights On
By JOHN CONSTABLE
January/February 2011


In private, the best-informed analysts now agree that Britain's environmental policies have put the country on track to have the world's most expensive electricity. This is mainly because our competitors are almost certain to choose cheaper routes to emissions reductions, such as natural gas, or to shun emissions reductions altogether. The Coalition's own Annual Energy Statement for 2010 concedes that by the year 2020, nearly one third of the average domestic electricity bill will consist of green energy charges imposed by law (£160 out of £512, or 31 per cent). Business will be hit even harder, with environmental charges for the average medium-sized non-domestic user accounting for £404,000 out of £1.224 million, or 33 per cent.

If other economies are more cautious in loading burdens upon their wealth creators, Britain will be a less attractive place in which to deploy capital, with obvious implications: high green charges on domestic bills might be merely questionable when household income is both stable and generous, but they would surely be indefensible in the context of lower wages and unemployment.

Government takes comfort from estimates that energy-saving policies, for example to encourage the use of better fridges, will reduce annual domestic electricity bills by £187 in 2020, and by £128,000 for non-domestic consumers. Such savings are desirable, but they are also extremely uncertain, even improbable. And if, as seems likely, these savings do not materialise, then consumers will be looking at very testing bills made still more trying by environmental policies. They may not like what they see.

Public awareness of these concerns has been inhibited since the costs of environmental legislation tend to be moderate in the short run, with the pain of the full impact only likely to be felt in years beyond the political horizon. However, it is clear that the impact of subsidies is already economically significant even if it is not yet psychologically salient. Britain is obtaining only a fraction of its electricity from renewable sources, just under 7 per cent in 2009-2010. The wholesale price of that quantity of electricity would be approximately £1bn, but the Renewables Obligation, a complex subsidy paid to generators but drawn indirectly from bills, adds a further £1.4bn, more than doubling the cost to the British consumer.

In its first three months, from July to September 2010, the Feed-in Tariff for microgeneration (guaranteed prices to support, among other things, solar photovoltaics [PV] and wind turbines up to a capacity of five megawatt) has produced roughly 0.005 per cent of UK annual demand, at a cost of £2.6m. This generous support has encouraged the construction of an installed capacity of microgenerators totalling 59 MW. To put that in perspective, peak load in Britain on a cold winter's afternoon is nearly 59,000 MW.

The implication is that should renewables contribute a large share of national needs in 2020, then environmental costs will become politically visible. If some 30 per cent of UK electricity were renewable in 2020, this would require an ongoing annual subsidy of upwards of £6bn (assuming an average subsidy of 5p per unit).

Furthermore, the subsidy is not the end of the additional costs implied by the policies. The character of most renewables increases overall system operating costs. Wind power, for example, requires sufficient flexible conventional generation to meet demand at times when the wind fleet is all but becalmed, and major grid expansion. Such costs are inherently difficult to estimate, but they are very unlikely to be trivial.

The question is whether these generous levels of tax and spend — and the Renewables Obligation is classed as such by the Treasury and the Office of National Statistics — will produce any compensating benefit. The government's own Impact Assessments are not encouraging. The lifetime cost of the Feed-in Tariff scheme is £8.6bn, while its benefits, including climate change benefits, amount to only £420m (technically, the Net Present Value is negative £8.2bn). Government's figures for the revised Renewables Obligation needed to meet the 2020 targets shows that costs exceed benefits by £33bn. The emissions savings fail the government's own cost-effectiveness tests.

Although such policies should never have been allowed to proceed, they duly became law under Labour and the Coalition has yet to grapple with this toxic inheritance. Indeed, it would seem that the current government has persuaded itself that the transition to a low-carbon economy will redeem the situation.

In a speech to the Confederation of British Industry last October, the Prime Minister David Cameron said of the offshore wind programme: "It's a triple win. It will help secure our energy supplies, protect our planet, and the Carbon Trust says it could create 70,000 jobs." Well-meaning talk of this nature needs to be tempered with cool reason. While the gross effect of public expenditure on renewables may well be positive, the net effect is likely to be negative as the costs of creating jobs in the green sector reduce activity in other areas. An authoritative 2009 study from the Rheinisch-Westfälisches Institute for Economic Research (RWI) in Essen notes: "Initial employment benefits from renewable policies soon turn negative as additional costs are incurred. Trade, and other assumptions...claiming positive employment turn out to be unsupportable." Such wealth destruction is hardly surprising when it is considered that the subsidies per worker in the German solar PV industry exceeded €175,000, far in excess of average wages. The study adds: "It is most likely that whatever jobs are created by renewable energy promotion would vanish as soon as government support is terminated, leaving only Germany's export sector to benefit from the possible continuation of renewables support in other countries such as the US."

Spain's experience is even worse. In a May 2010 document, the country's Ministry for Industry showed that businesses were paying 17 per cent more for electricity than their European competitors, largely as a result of subsidies to renewables, which were €5bn in 2009. It also noted that whereas prices should have fallen due to cheap fuels, they actually rose because of environmental policies.

Moreover, because Spanish energy companies do not recover the full cost of renewable generation from consumers, but accumulate government debt instead, one company alone, Endesa, was owed €8.3bn by the state at the end of September 2010. The total "tariff deficit", as it is called, amounted to around €16.5bn in 2010, and according to the ministry, will increase by a further €2bn in 2011 in spite of efforts to rein in subsidies. Whether Spain has fared any better than Germany in its attempt to create a self-sustaining green or low-carbon economy is also open to doubt. A study by Gabriel Calzada Alvarez of Madrid's Universidad Rey Juan Carlos has estimated that the market distortions needed to create one green job destroyed two jobs in other sectors. Since 2000, each green-sector job has cost €570,000, with wind-industry jobs costing €1m. The details here are debatable, but they are consonant with German experience, and do not bode well for Britain.

Perhaps the most instructive example, and of particular relevance to the Coalition, is the Japanese solar thermal hot water industry. In response to the first oil shock, governmental support created a market that was by the early 1980s installing 2.7m square meters of panels a year. Unfortunately, the resulting companies were weak and the products were either poor or poorly installed, with the result that the industry not only collapsed as the oil price fell but, due to consumer disenchantment, has failed to recover in recent years in spite of higher hydrocarbon prices. Installation rates have flat-lined for the last decade at around 0.25m square metres a year and it is at least arguable that the Japanese solar thermal industry is less vigorous than it would have been had the government never offered a helping hand. The Japanese call this the "solar tragedy".

All told, subsidies and targets are unlikely to be a successful means of driving energy system change, and probably entail government responsibility for the income of a large part of the electricity sector, perhaps in perpetuity, with consequential gross inefficiency and wealth destruction through misallocation of resources.

Despite these dismaying precedents, the Coalition is attempting to drive a green industrial revolution by means of state-guaranteed rates of return for investors in nearly half the electricity sector. The Government's own figures show that this will be expensive, resulting in costs that will seem all the more insupportable if natural gas prices remain low. In addition, current ambitions may have disastrous opportunity costs. To achieve targets, government must commit itself to currently available emerging technologies and thus will forestall or forego as yet unknown inventions and innovations.

No one knows whether there is a green low-carbon economy waiting for us in the more distant future, but we can be confident that the current policies — the EU Renewables Directive, the Renewables Obligation, the Feed-In Tariff and the Green Deal — are most unlikely to deliver such an outcome. Indeed, they are probably counterproductive, since they insulate nascent technologies from competition and thus infantilise them.

But push is coming to shove, and as quotidian pressures make themselves felt, the green subsidies will be slowly reduced, and our short-term electricity needs met by patched-up coal and nuclear stations, and by older gas plants. A new generation of Combined Cycle Gas Turbines is likely, though build rate will not be of satisfactory scale or pace if government fails to restrain the growth of subsidised on- and off-shore wind power, which is damaging the investment case for all unsubsidised technologies.

Concerns over gas availability and price appear to be alleviated by the unexpected growth of global shale gas production, though there are residual anxieties that the UK may become overwhelmingly dependent on one fuel for reliable electricity. As a consequence, there will be pressure for nuclear and for high-efficiency super-critical coal after 2020.

There is a strong argument for steering into this skid, rather than looking away as the Coalition seems inclined to do. Britain could renegotiate a more realistic and equitable commitment under the EU Renewables Directive (one quarter of the EU-wide costs of the scheme fall on us), while the various renewables subsidy mechanisms could be wound down or cancelled retrospectively for those generators whose capital has been recovered. Instead, government could announce a combination of a carbon tax and a realistic set of emissions regulations. The emerging Emissions Performance Standard might be a basis, but will need revision if it is not to discourage any and all conventional generation.

Regulation and judicious tax could be used to specify the character that we wish to obtain of our electricity system, so that the energy sector can quickly find the most cost-effective way of realising that desire insofar as it is practical to do so. However, this would require significant improvements in the transparency of Britain's electricity market, which at present is far from truly liberal. Many of the costs imposed on the consumer are still concealed and there are areas in which relevant information is either difficult to obtain or simply non-existent, inhibiting new market entrants and preventing understanding of problems and system inefficiencies that might be solved by novel technologies. The government's forthcoming Electricity Market Reform could serve as the vehicle for such a radical programme, but it would require all of the PM's charm to overcome the objections of vested interests.

With current errors decisively corrected in this way it is just possible that we might see the beginnings of a self-supporting low-carbon economy that also generated sufficient wealth to fund adaptation to climate change, should that be necessary. By contrast, the present policies can only offer emissions reductions through further deindustrialisation and significant economic contraction, effects that are unlikely to be popular with the electorate whatever the weather

 

[trysail]

http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/04/21/reader-background/#comment-40619

I am a retired experimental particle physicist, doctorate and all and over 300 publications in my field. Most of my working life. since 1967, was spent fitting theoretical models to data and estimating errors.

Like most scientists in my field, and possibly most fields, I trusted in the integrity of other scientists: the methods used, the data condition, the skepticism every scientist has to have before presenting his/her work for peer review. So I trusted when told that climate scientists foresaw an enormous problem because of the unprecedented warming due to excess anthropogenic CO2. The papers were in Science and Nature after all.

What woke my sense of smell is that the “unprecedented heat” announcement was close to the finding of that mummy of a hunter in a high pass in the Alps. I thought ” How could it be unprecedented if the pass was open before?” Then I remembered the Vikings and Greenland, and am also a fan of Father Cadfael who had a vineyard in Wales back in the 1000s ( ).

A colleague of mine in solid state had been reading Crichton, and was converted to the skeptical side. The retired people from my institute ( chemists, biologists, etc) had a lecture once a month on various topics and my friend challenged me to present the topic of warming in a lecture. I took up the challenge, and two months to read up TAR and AR4 as far as the physics is concerned.

Reading the physics justification, chapter 8, in AR4, raised my physicist hackles. I read a bit, got upset and started walking around pulling my hair. Remember, computer models were my trade.

So that is how the scales fell from my eyes and I am a firm skeptic, not of warming, which is self evident coming out of the Little Ice Age, nor too much of the CO2 numbers, though I give some thought to Beck’s compilations that throw doubt that 390ppm is really unprecedented either, but of the model outputs and data manipulation displayed in the IPCC reports. These last are what are used to call “wolf” on catastrophic warming.

Then of course, even if one takes the IPCC model outputs as black box outputs, Nostradamus, I have counted 7 falsifications up to now of the predictions/projections given.

Here I copy some of my criticisms from an older blog:

When the physics elementary particle community comes up with a number, for example, ” there are 3 neutrinos” from the fit to the data, it uses computer programming and modeling intensively. The difference with “there is a 3C rise in 100 years” coming from the GCM models is in the error bars. Errors are strictly propagated in all particle physics modeling both statistical and systematic, and all numbers come out with an error +/- statistical , +/-systematic. No error propagation exists in the IPCC model outputs that I can find in the voluminous reports. This denotes that any numbers given are meaningless, sleight of hand, video game presentations.

What is done instead, to fool the scientific audience:

1) The model is fitted to the temperature data. There are so many parameters that this is not difficult to do ( Von Neumann and his elephant).

2) In order to simulate the chaotic dynamics of climate ( they do acknowledge that climate is chaotic) they change the initial conditions as they feel like and create spaghetti lines around the optimum fit, believing they simulate chaos. The deviations from the fit they treat as errors. BUT the variations are not 1 sigma variations to give chi**2 per degree of freedom, they are just to please the eye of the beholder, because no such chi**2 is reported anywhere.
For example, a 1 sigma variation of the albedo only would throw off the curves by 1C ( try the toy model over at junkscience.com).

3) Then many models, which means different models of similar structure and assumptions are all put together on a spaghetti graph, again claiming the width as representative errors even though the only “valid” argument is “chaotic spread”, including the chaotic brain waves of the modelers. What amazes me is that statisticians are treating these spaghetti projection widths as if they are true errors and discuss the number of angels on the point of the needle, ( in other blogs).

A second blow against the GCMs is what a lot of people with mathematical physics background have been trying to say, but cannot get through. The grid model of the earth cannot simulate the interdependencies of the numerous coupled non linear differential equations that enter the climate problem ( a classical dynamic chaos problem) . By construction the grid with the average values assumed in these huge blocks is assuming that the solutions to these differential equations are well behaved so that the first order terms can be used for most of the variables entering ( the average is the first order term in an expansion of any function). It is more than inevitable that this hypothesis will fail, because the solutions are highly non linear. That is why for weather and climate GCMs can only work for a limited number of time steps. After a while, the divergence of the real solution enters as the higher order terms kick in.

The only useful modeling for the future has to be a model that incorporates these nonlinearities, as Tsonis et al have attempted, non linearly.

The Tsonis link:
http://www.uwm.edu/~aatsonis/2007GL030288.pdf
also in http://www.uwm.edu/~aatsonis/ there are expositions of connection of chaos with climate.