Wednesday
Oct122011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Quote of the day
Oct 12, 2011 Climate: solar This is an exciting time for solar physics, and its role in climate. As one leading climate scientist told me last month, it's a subject that is now no longer taboo. And about time, too.
The BBC's Paul Hudson
Reader Comments (73)
That would be the Lord Kelvin who was president of the Royal Society, then? Plus ça change...
I seem to recall that he also declared heavier-than-air flight impossible. He had presumably never seen a bird.
Science has been in denial for way too long. The idea that what goes on outside the earth can affect the earth is ignored as if it were astrology. Therefore solar effects, alignments of planets etc are regarded as superstitions. Strictly speaking, astrology, at its best, is the science of determining the effects of extraterrestrial celestial bodies on the earth. Unfortunately, it descends into pseudoscience and complete bunkum when it gets involved in 'fate' and drawing up horoscopes. But the idea that things beyond the earth can interact with the earth system is not pseudoscience. At the most basic level, the fact that we can see stars means that something that was once going on in them is interacting with something here on earth (your retina, and your mind). Alignments of planets don't 'cause' earthquakes, but they might have a measurable effect on triggering them. Changes in magnetic fields and spectral densities in the sun could very well have effects throughout the system. Newton was chided for formulating his theory of gravitation, which meant that some 'occult' power was at work in the solar system. Galileo foolishly and ignorantly criticized Kepler, whose ideas about gravitation were less developed than Newton's, but who believed that the gravitational effect of the moon caused the tides. Even earlier than Kepler, when the earth was considered by many to be the centre of the cosmos, people had more sense than to think the other bodies in the solar system had no effect. But since we have known for centuries that the earth is a bit player in the solar system it's a little surprising that the effects of the other members have been reduced to zero rather than being seen as of increased importance.
The earth is a system, but part of a larger system, the solar system, which is itself part of a larger system, and everything interacts with everything else.
Patagon,
Thanks, but no joy, I guess that I'm just not welcome there.
For those unable to access the GISS Twomey Prize paper, here's what they claim is the physics: ,i>'The basic premise was simple and a wonderful example of Professor Twomey's incisive thought: if pollution contributes additional nuclei upon which water can condense, then the condensed mass of water will consist of a larger concentration of smaller drops. The reflectance of the cloud will increase because the total surface area of the condensed water in cloud is greater when spread over more droplets.'
There is no such physics. Twomey correctly deduced that when thin clouds are polluted and dropelt size falls, you get more diffuse scattering, hence they get brighter on satellite images. however, he was at pains to point out that this process asymptotes.
Unfortunately, as a good classical physicist he use 'spherical albedo' which asymptotes to unit for no absorption. It seems that climate science which is populated by people with poor physics thought this meant hemispherical albedo, over the back hemisphere. So, they extrapolated the idea to thicker clouds which is what the Sagan-Pollack two-stream approximation does.
However, that equation is wrong because according to it, coarsening droplets, lower optical depth should make rain clouds have lower albedo, the opposite of what is claimed. Because this equation is used in satellite algorithms, even those data are wrongly 'binned': I'm working out how bad the error is - it's probably sign.
Hansen is a good aerosol physicist so he should have known about this mistake which has rendered the subject gobbledegook. it needs new management by apolitical, competent scientists/engineers.
Sorry, an error crept in. The aerosol optical physics in the climate models wrongly predicts albedo change when you reduce the droplet size of thicker clouds. The claimed cooling doesn't exist. Instead, it's heating, another AGW. Physically what happens is that restricting large droplets turns off direct backscattering particularly for intermediate thickness clouds..
Stuck-record:
What next?
"It doesn't matter because this time it's different?"
(c) RealClimate.
Oct 12, 2011 at 11:45 PM | woodentop
I used to work in Financial markets and that was the mantra every time a bubble was about to burst.
What's "settled" is not CAGW's bonehead pseudo-science, but the intellectual climate in which the Green Gang's goose is cooked.
SFT
This is probably the most significant experiment in all science.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experiment
This hugely important negative result allowed the seeds of other ideas to take root in science and led to Einstein's Special Theory being accepted in favour of the 'ether'.
What is interesting is that many scientists still clung onto the centuries old 'ether' as a real physical entity not realising decades after the Michelson–Morley experiment that it was simply a human construct.
If you mention 'ether' to physicists these days they look at you as though you have taken too much of the gaseous fumes.
I think we are at the place where climate science can go one way of the other - will it follow the data or will it stand behind dogma?
Who is brave enough to challenge and overturn AGW?
spartacusisfree
Many thanks for the detail, your paper will be eagerly awaited.
SFT
As a comparison to the Michelson–Morley experiment everytime humans use their instruments to measure troposheric temperatures or oceanic heat we do not find any AGW signature.
Climate science is at the same point as was physics was 100 years ago, both subjects have/had beautiful theories. Actual experiments undermined not only their validity but showed them to be internally inconsistent - they fundamentally failed from within. Dogma could have prevailed in physics - it did not.
Can climate scientists accept the consequences of their own failures?
Physics went on to have a glorious future in the 20th century as a consequence of those failures, but will climate science do so in the 21st?
In my viw anyone who thinks that the BBC is changing its view is indulging in wishful thinking,
It will be amongst the last dragged kicking and screaming into a new scientific understanding.
Nice discussion this thread. :)
BTW, did anybody hear that the ether theory is making a comeback??
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/09/060908-dark-matter.html
http://www.calphysics.org/haisch/matthews.html
The argument will not be "won" unless and until the provisions of the Climate Change Act are suspended, or even better, the Act is repealed. I am not holding my breath.
Lawrence Krauss was on Radio 4 today. He's such a brilliant science communicator. Anyway the quasi-crystal issue was brought up. You know, the man who discovered them was pretty much booted off the team he was a member of. People just thought it was impossible, hence he was ridiculed. But he was awarded the Nobel prize for his discovery last week!
It seems ridiculous that the mere possibility that the BBC has realised that the sun plays a part in global climate, has caused so much comment. I would be much more interested if they had discovered that CO2 was not currently warming the planet but I would be ecstatic if they discovered that basically the human race has no clue as to how the whole thing works.
The human race has "previous" here ; we knew the earth was flat, we knew the sun went round the earth and we knew until recently that it was not possible for matter to exceed the speed of light.
We have to realise that whatever the latest theories are, in the great scheme of things we have just scratched the surface of total understanding.
However in certain areas, possible outcomes are limited and where temperatures are concerned there is only up or down. Even in the infinitely miniscule history of humans we have seen that 2 degrees up or down can be handled. However we are in an interglacial and when it ends global temperature is going to be 10 degrees up or 7 - 8 degrees down and our windfarms be seen for the King Canute moment that is all they are.
We need to develop strategies for dealing with huge changes and stop panicking about the odd degree either way.
Oh yes and the current rising levels of CO2 are caused by the warm period we had about 800 years ago, not current human activity.
Green Sand @ Oct 12, 2011 at 9:24 PM
You can often find what you need on the Wayback Machine
Mac: "If you mention 'ether' to physicists these days they look at you as though you have taken too much of the gaseous fumes." And to think that at the end of the nineteenth century no scientist of note denied the reality of the ether. Likewise with phlogiston and caloric in the eighteenth century: substances as mythical as the unicorn and the phoenix. They all believed in things that never existed.
Mind you, there are still some diehards who believe in an ether (or 'aether') because they can't understand how one can have wave propagation in a vacuum. This is probably because they think a vacuum is 'nothing'. But it isn't 'nothing' - it still has properties of dimensions, as well as permittivity and permeability, which can be measured with purely static measurements (electrostatics and magnetostatics). The speed of propagation of electromagnetic radiation is derivable from a simple relationship with permeability and permittivity, i.e. can be deduced from purely static measurements, and all in accordance with Maxwell's equations, classical physics.
"Physics went on to have a glorious future in the 20th century as a consequence of those failures...". I'd have to take issue with that. It had a future, but surely not a glorious one.
Dung "The human race has "previous" here ; we knew the earth was flat, we knew the sun went round the earth and we knew until recently that it was not possible for matter to exceed the speed of light." I agree with the general tenor, but the examples are a bit shaky.
No-one but a very small minority of the educated ever believed the earth was flat. The idea that people thought the earth was flat is actually the myth that needs to be slain.
As for geocentrism, it was generally believed that the sun went around the earth because that was the common sense default position since there were no instruments to be able to tell one way or the other until the seventeenth century. Both the geocentric and heliocentric models were taught in Germany at the university of Wittenberg from the mid-Sixteenth century, decades before the invention of the telescope. Once the telescope became available geocentrism died very quickly, except in Tycho Brahe's hybrid system which, as far as observations of the solar system are concerned, cannot be shown from observations to be wrong. But that one died a death with Newton's formulation of gravity - not from observations, mind you, but from a useful theory of gravitation.
The neutrino results do not yet prove that matter can go faster than light. There are an awful lot of checks to be done before these results can be accepted. I have seen over a dozen explanations as to why they are wrong, many of which suspects should be taken seriously and 'eliminated from their enquiries', so to speak.
If I were William Connolley, I'd immediately rush to Wikipedia to redefine 'taboo':
A taboo is a strong social prohibition (or ban) relating to any area of human activity or social custom that is sacred and forbidden based on moral judgment, religious beliefs and scientific consensus."
In fact, as of this moment (Oct 14 2011, 1:24pm) Wikipedia entry for taboo reads:
"A taboo is a strong social prohibition (or ban) relating to any area of human activity or social custom that is sacred and forbidden based on moral judgment, religious beliefs and scientific consensus."
And I am not even William Conolley!
William Connolley and his band of encyclopedia activists.
Those were the days.
Einstein himself believed there's ether:
"According to the general theory of relativity space without ether is unthinkable; for in such space there not only wonld be no propagation of light, but also no possibility of existence for standards of space and time (measuring-rods and clocks), nor therefore any space-time intervals in the physical sense."
http://www.tu-harburg.de/rzt/rzt/it/Ether.html