Tuesday
Jan032012
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Windy
Jan 3, 2012 Climate: Sceptics It has been very windy here this morning. My parents just telephoned to say they have just had next door's solar panels through their conservatory roof.
So end all who question the AGW consensus...
Reader Comments (181)
dadgervais Jan 4, 2012 at 3:43 PM | Unregistered Commenter
Here we are talking about the photons (light particles) emitted by a body, so they necessarily have uniform velocity - that of light. The energy carried by a photon is related to its light wavelength by the formula
wavelength = ( h . c) / (energy)
where h = Planck's constant, c = speed of light.
As dognonose says, light from a laser has only one wavelength, so all the photons from it have the same energy.
Photons from a hot body (ie anything above absolute zero) have a spread of wavelengths, with a peak at a wavelength depending inversely on the temperature of the body. The distribution of wavelengths radiated by a hot body is explained by statistical mechanics, rather than by Doppler shifts due to the radiating atoms jiggling about.
dogsgotnonose Jan 4, 2012 at 3:32 PM
OK - I'm catching on. "Thermalisation" = "gets hotter" - right?
I think that any comprehensible explanation of the greenhouse effect needs to start off with the assumption that everything is already in thermal equilibrium. So although there is plenty of radiation entering and leaving the overall system, everything stays at constant temperature.
Immediately you avoid (I believe) people getting bogged down discussing whether or not heat is being asked to behave unnaturally.
I apologise for having lead this thread O/T. But in so doing, it will be noticed that agreement on basics is not forthcoming and that no one has popped in to refer us to a standard text explaining GHG theory. After all this time a sceptical viewpoint of this subject is still justified. It is also widespread as can be seen at Tallbloke's talkshop.
Would it be outlandish to suggest that GHG theory in its current form is inexplicable?
Hi Richard,
"I take your point, but unless one simply assumes that there has been no human influence on climate at all (which I am told very few people, even sceptics, believe) then how else do we go about estimating whether we've changed the risk of extreme events?"
Everthing has an effect on the climate doesn't it? Certainly humans do, and not just by emitting CO2, so no problem there. Here's my problem. We have a group of otherwise intelligent people who believe that they can foretell the future. What separates them, at least in their own minds, and indeed in the minds of many people who have no experience of computing, is that they are using highly sophisticated computer models to do their predictions. They, the soothsayers, are innocent enough in that they believe they have put all the information into the computers and written the right code, so what comes out must be true. Other, less worthy people, keep pointing out that the computer models have consistently forecast higher temperatures and that in every case they've been wrong, but that hasn't deterred the faithful at all, they still believe they have enough input data and programmes to manipulate it to advise governments what's going to happen in the future. They love their models (believe me I've had enough experience of groups other than climate scientists who feel the same way).
Now let's do a little thought experiment. You are a cab driver in London in 1912, and some bloke comes along to you and tells you that by 2012 95% of households in the UK will have their own mechanised transport. So you trot off to your cabdriver's computer model and put in these facts to find out how many cabs their would be in 2012. Do you think that the current knowledge in 1912 would have shown that there would actually be MORE cab drivers in 2012 than in 1912? No it most certainly would not, because of the myriad of unknown unknowns that persist in the coupled non-linear chaotic system that is society at large.
It is foolish to believe that you can foretell the future, you are looking at electronic birds entrails, and that's making you believe you can foretell the future because they're not real birds entrails, but they're entrails just the same. However, because they're electronic birds entrails politicians, not the brightest set of individuals on the planet, believe them and are enacting draconian measures to reduce CO2 output. Measures, which in my view, are going to cause untold havoc with our society and threaten the poorest in our society. And they're doing this on the advice of climate scientists because they believe that scientists would never do anything out of self interest, or be deluded about what they were doing. They should, in short, get out more.
Finally let me give you an example of how the policies being implemented on the advice of, and with the encouragement of, your colleagues like Julia Slingo. All of our friends have recently installed solar panels, all the installations are subsidised, and all of them will receive a FIT of 43p/kWh. All of them vote Labour. I am, as I've said before, not particularly less than opportunistic, but I haven't installed them, mainly because I don't think the FIT and sunlit energy will be other than paying your electricity bill ten years in advance, and partly because I want to stick two fingers up at the Greens, so you will have the measure of me. "Shallow" I believe is the word.
Yesterday my wife had occasion to around to the house of one of our friends to collect some stuff for the local homeless, and they'd had had solar panels installed. They, good people both, asked why we hadn't done so and my wife promptly answered, "For ethical reasons", she's an absolute doll! Both of our friends looked aghast, and asked what ethical reasons could there be for not installing solar panels.
My wife then explained to them that poor people cannot install them, if they had the money, they probably wouldn't have enough roof space, but they haven't got the money. However, they will be paying 10%, and rising, more in their electricity bills to pay the subsidies and FITs to the rich bastards (I don't believe Mrs. Geronimo would know that word, but something similar) who find the odd £15k in their suit pockets and wonder what to do with it.
In short, without very much effort, the policies advocated by the climate science community are transferring wealth from the poor to the rich. And even I don't like that.
@ Richard Betts
Why the insistence on a numerical figure to quantify the 'confidence'? To me this suggest further attempts to mislead as the "90%" is 'seen' to be 'almost 100%' thus implying your assertions are 'beyond dispute'.
A "90% confidence" has as much credibility as a "50% chance of rain".........
Do they bounce off or do they wizz straight through? ;)
Jan 4, 2012 at 1:34 PM | Martin A
wave particle / duality Martin. The IR has to decide what it is as it approaches the already extremely energetic molecule/atom. ;) If it gets it wrong it will miss everything and go straight through. :))
"it is estimated with 90% confidence that European heatwaves such as that seen in 2003 are now be twice as likely due to anthropogenic climate change."
HOW the hell can you estimate that. 90%; 10% unless you have precisely measured an effect you have no right to say that; You may choose to look back over the weather records and say "this was unprecedented and might suggest a human influence" but actually you can't. There is absolutely no indication anywhere in the weather records that the current warming is unusual. I suggest you go back and check Lamb's work with anecdotal data as well as his weather data. Long warm spells in europe have never been unusual and 2003 wasn't unusual. Yes it was rare in a human's life span but that is completely irrelevent. Your models like economic models are usless except for playing games with. A modern physicist said recently that models cannot and should not be used to predict the future because the future is part of a 'chaotic' system and will always do the unpredictable thing. This is just so tiresome. And I believe you might be a physicist, as well.
Stephen Richards
Stott et al
See also Pielke Snr et al
Here we are talking about the photons (light particles) emitted by a body, so they necessarily have uniform velocity
Jan 4, 2012 at 6:36 PM | Unregistered Commenter Martin A
Sorry Martin A, but the "particles" I was referring to were particles of matter, which have temperature, and which emit the photons, not the photonic "particles" themselves which, of course, are packets of pure energy which all travel at the same universal constant velocity. The individual particles of matter (solid or gas) do not have uniform temperature or motion (except in the abstract average) and even the equilibrium state is hypothetical in the real world; an ideal which is forever approached (until the next disturbance) but never reached.
e.g. the "surface" of the sun and "temperature" of the sun are two examples of such abstraction for the surface of a hot gas does not exist, and the temperature varies from spot to spot (no pun intended) etc.
dadgervais
Well, not exactly right. Let's do your experiment a little differently. You put your coffee into a glass jar, a thermos bottle, and a double walled glass vessel with a vacuum between the two. What? You say, isn't that a thermos? Answer is no. This is a Dewar Flask aka a thermos. Notice anything? Well, it is shiny. It is silvered inside the vessel where the vacuum resides. It is NOT just "effect of conduction/convection" but reflection/refraction as well. Your coffee will get cold quickly in the simple glass jar, very slowly in the Dewar Flash and relatively quickly in it vacuum only vessel.
Now moving onto this wonderful debate over "back radiation", "back scatter" or whatever mysterious process is used to move heat from cold to hot, it is only possible with reflection as in the Dewar Flask -- which depends on that silver to improve the "insulation" of the vacuum because there would still be radiation of the energy through the vacuum without it.
Thus for the proponents of this wonderful theory to be correct, they also have to show that there is a REFLECTION/REFRACTION of the energy in the CO2 laden skies above us.
But HOW could that be done?
For reflection/refraction to occur, you need two materials with different indices of refraction and an interface (such as the surface of water and air) on which refraction occurs. However, I will give them the point that it is not only on the surface interface, for it is possible for light to be refracted inside a volume -- all most all fiber optic cables in use today are gradient-index. And what they are proposing is that somehow the air has a gradient-index of refraction caused by the CO2 we so carelessly spill into our air.
Thus they would have to show not only is CO2 capable of refracting light - but that there is a gradient of CO2 in the air. That is there is more and more -- or less and less -- the higher you go in the atmosphere. And given that there are localized variations in the CO2 content over the world, then this phenomenon should be easily seen.
Given that there is far more pronounced variability in the temperature of the air from place to place that would cause localized refraction of light (I am thinking of mirages) I am at a loss to explain how you tell a mirage caused by thermal heating of the air and that caused by CO2.
Hopefully, their explanations will be interesting. I am looking forward to reading them.
Don Pablo de la Sierra: I recently had a wonderful discussion with an Australian Climate Scientist who is apparently researching the idea that back radiation is from a Fabry-Perot Etalon in the sky, with the stored energy being a standing wave. In effect he is inventing a dichroic mirror with ordered CO2!
At least in Swift's Gulliver's Travels, you had something a bit more credible, storing moonbeams in pickled cucumbers.
What has happened is that Climate Science teaches fake physics and arrogance in equal quantities so they feel able to bend science to meet the needs of their religion
Jan 4, 2012 at 1:37 PM: Richard Betts
Richard, I'm sorry if I implied you were an alarmist when you said "I don't think we can see an effect on disasters yet". I should have just said that your statement was "alarming" to me, which would equally be my response to similar imagined statements like "We do not propose to raise the standard rate of income tax", "Rationing energy is not on the agenda", "We have absolutely no intention of nuking Iran", etc etc, whose meanings become rather different (and alarming) if the word "yet" is added.
While I'm replying I'd like to add a comment on your assertion that you should have said "it is estimated with 90% confidence that European heatwaves such as that seen in 2003 are now be [sic] twice as likely due to anthropogenic climate change". Twice as likely as what? Twice as likely as natural causes? Twice as likely? Surely not. Maybe you meant twice as likely as you previously estimated. Perhaps, but what was your previous estimate? Sorry if I'm confused; I'm usually OK with what words mean.
Jan 5, 2012 at 7:27 AM | mydogsgotnonose
Actually the physics I was taught at Bristol University in the late 1980s as part of a straight physics degree was entirely consistent with what I was later taught in my meteorology PhD at Reading (it included lectures from the MSc course).
If "climate science" physics is fake then so is the rest of physics.
Don't remember the arrogance lectures. Must have missed them :-)
Martin A
"there is plenty of long wavelength IR that comes from the sun. It radiates many orders of magnitude more power in the long wavelength range than the earth does.
But, because the sun's v. hot, its radiation peaks at a much shorter wavelength, so the long wavelength IR from the sun contains negligible power relative to the shorter wavelengths from the sun."
But not negligible compared to the earth. If the sun's output is 'many orders of magnitude' greater, then the long wavelength component is significant to us, and it simply occurred to me that it would outweigh whatever properties you ascribe to CO2. If you took the GHG's away, would we not be just as warm?
Don Pablo
WRT thermos flasks, I have a conundrum for you. A friend has a heated mirror in his shower room, to avoid condensation. When you stand close to it (or look in it, even) you can feel the radiated heat, which I wasn't really expecting. I'm guessing it's the glass, as the silvering is on the back, but I wasn't expecting it to be so noticeable. Any thoughts?
40 years’ industrial research where you have to get it right meant I gave up on academia in the early 1990s. Scientists became technicians and modellers. As a pioneer of renewables and CCS, I had assumed climate science got it right but it failed.
The problem is adherence to Arrhenius’ ‘back radiation' and 100% IR thermalisation. No other discipline enshrines a breach of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics at its core. In 1993, Will Happer, the US' IR spectroscopist, refused to publicise false IR physics for Gore and went to Princeton.
Until 1997 when it was proved that CO2 lagged T, high feedback CO2-GW was justifiable but after then the discipline had to find the real cause of delta TSI amplification at the end of ice ages and calibrate CO2 climate sensitivity against post-industrial warming,. That’s why we had the hockey-stick scam and fiddled temperatures.
Real CO2 climate sensitivity may be slightly negative at present [self absorption at IR band saturation], reduced emissivity/absorptivity facing the Earth. Nahle is using partial molar Cp data for CO2 in air to establish this quantitatively. This science has been known for 50 years but was apparently never checked by climate science.
The second problem is ‘33 K GHG warming’. It cannot be more than 15 K [the IPCC assumes no change in albedo with no atmosphere but with no clouds or ice it falls from 0.3 to 0.07]. The real value has been computed to be ~9 K showing the balance between GHG warming, mostly water vapour, and negative feedback by clouds which probably also takes care of most effects from increased CO2. The rest is lapse rate warming.
The third issue is 'cloud albedo effect cooling', 44% of net AGW in AR4. The optical physics underpinning it is wrong and this extends to algorithms used to translate albedo data to optical depths. This is active research in the US. ~40% of low level clouds behave very differently because they have a bimodal droplet size distribution. Yet read any climate science paper and they claim high albedo always comes from small droplets.
This appears to originate here: http://geo.arc.nasa.gov/sgg/singh/winners4.html . This switched Twomey's partially correct physics by 'enhanced surface reflection'. There is no such physics yet the models claim it hides high feedback CO2-AGW. This was just before AR4; the only ‘evidence’ for 'high feedback' has no experiment verification.
In reality, switching off droplet coarsening, the 2nd AIE, is a powerful form of GW/AGW accounting for much if not most warming claimed to be from GHGs. You see this in present cooling of the N. Atlantic [ http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/figure-101.png ], something that cannot happen with high CO2-AGW.
This explanation [via biofeedback] accounts for the end of ice ages. Only yesterday, the sun lurched downwards following its awakening on October 3rd. No climate model can predict climate: CO2 dogma physics is wrong and they ignore major natural processes.
dadgervais Jan 4, 2012 at 2:40 PM
The school physics master told us that, for small temperature differences, convection cooling dominated radiation cooling. He was wrong.
(Unless he meant microscopic temperature differences.)
He (or we) should have asked "in that case, why do Thermos flask makers bother to silver the insides of the double walls?" (Don Pablo de la Sierra has pointed out the need for a thermos to suppress radiative transfer)
When I needed to specify "heatsinks" (actually, cooling radiators) for germanium transistors years ago and read up on heat sink design, I found that (if I correctly recall), the radiation heat loss was roughly equal to the convection heat loss. So, even though the transistors were only a few tens of degrees warmer than their surroundings, it still made sense to paint the heat sinks black to maximise the heat loss through radiation and to position them so that they were radiating to the external world and not merely exchanging IR radiation with each other.
I don't think this says anything much about greenhouse effects except that radiation transfer should not automatically be ruled out as a significant effect.
The SAS use a type of vacuum flask invented in the 1920s. The gap is filled with a fibrous material and the vacuum, ~0.2 Bar, is sufficient that the mean free path of the gas molecules exceeds the inter fibre dimension. Thus there can be no intermolecular collisions, no gas thermal conduction. it keeps drinks hot for 3-4 days.
High tech thermal insulation of the same type is used in ceramic hobs, under the elements. It's made from compressed nanoparticles.
James P Jan 5, 2012 at 9:50 AM
Yes and no. The total long wave IR power radiated by the sun must be 1000.....000's of times greater than the total long wave IR radiated by the earth. But nearly all of that radiated long wave IR power goes off into space and only a tiny proportion of it impacts the earth.
The proportion of long wavelength IR from the sun impacting the earth is around 1% of the total radiation from the sun impacting the earth or its atmosphere (the other 99% being shorter wavelength IR, visible or UV wavelengths). [according to the figures given in A First Course in Atmospheric Radiation by G W Petty.
The earth, complete with its atmosphere, emits essentially nothing but long wave IR to outer space. (we can ignore lighting flashes and man-made illumination).
The earth's long wave IR emission to outer space has to balance precisely the total extra-terrestrial radiation of all wavelengths it receives. If the two did not balance the earth would either be perpetually warming or perpetually cooling. The temperature of the earth adjusts itself so that the two balance.
Of course, this is a simplification. As commenters point out, you can't really talk about the earth's temperature because it varies from point to point. All the same, the integrated radiation emitted to outer space has to balance the integrated radiation received from outer space.
I'm struggling to understand the greenhouse effect myself in more than simply descriptive (hand waving) terms and until I achieve such an understanding I'm just not competent to comment on it.
The usual explanation is along the lines...
" - the earth receives x watts radiation from the sun
- to radiate x watts, the earth (considered as a perfectly conduicting black body) has to be at temperature T
T is 33 degrees (or whatever) lower than the actual average temperature. Therefore there has to be a greenhouse effect.."
But because of the approximations in treating the earth as a uniform body at uniform temperature this is totally unconvincing to me. (Integrating a set of values raised to the 4th power can give a very different result from raising the integral of the set of values to the fourth power - and calculating black body radiation involves calculating T^4.)
Martin A: The 33 k figure is a gross deception because it includes the warming of the lower atmosphere by gravitational potential energy.
The right answer, within the limitations of the Earthly average concept, is probably ~9 K with the rest, 24 K being lapse rate warming.
This 33 K claim is probably the worst of the climate science 'fraud', or it's monumental scientific incompetence.
More solar panels have taken flight.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-norfolk-16424313
Thank you, Martin. Pinning down the greenhouse effect does seem to be akin to nailing jelly! What I’ve read about global temperatures makes surprisingly little reference to the fact that the earth rotates, so day-time warming can be quite dramatic without any risk of runaway, because night-time always intervenes.
I’m sure things would be very different if Earth days were the same length as the years, as is the case on Mercury, for instance.
Perry
In Norfolk, too, I see! Has FOIA been loosening screws, I wonder? It sounds like terrorism to me.. :-)
mydogsgotnonose
Interesting -- I think my idea of a gradient index of refraction caused by ever lower percentages of CO2 the higher the altitude (because of gravitational effects -- CO2 is more dense than air) would be the way they would go. But a FPE interferometer! OMG! HOW CREATIVE! You said that it was a "wonderful discussion". I am wondering how many pints you each had at the pub?
At least one of those scientific geniuses figured out that reflection/refraction was the only way they could do a system where net heat energy moved from a lower temperature environment to a higher temperature environment. Doing it with Mirrors
James P
If it is heated, then it should radiate, just like a incandescent light bulb would.
Richard Betts
Judging from the above, Richard, you didn't miss a single one.
Don Pablo de la Sierra: the guy was commenting on an Aussie Academic climate fanboy site and was so convinced there is 'back radiation' [because you can measure it with a radiometer, no less], that he refused to admit that my 40 years' experience of building such things as gas temperature measurement electronics made me unqualified to comment. After all, I wasn't like he a 'climate scientist'.
The FBE was, so he said, the only explanation. Quite frankly, the noun for arrogant, poorly trained climate scientists like he is, is a scientific Walter Mitty puffed up by the glow of government approval of scientific fraud.
mydogsgotnonose
Unlike you, I don't have much formal training in thermodynamics, but even I realize that it is hokum.
Arrogant isn't the word I would use. But then again the Bishop asked us to be polite.
I must admit the FBE mechanism still has me laughing.
Don Pablo
"If it is heated, then it should radiate"
Even if silvered? I thought it would be the opposite of a black-body radiator, although you are clearly right, because it does!
James P. The mirror was silvered on the back so the glass, which has high IR emissivity, radiates the energy.
MDGNN
You're right, of course. It's rather a strange sensation though, feeling (considerable) warmth on your face from a mirror. I'm still surprised that a polished glass surface radiates so well.
mydogsgotnonose
Could you please point me to an explanation of "lapse rate warming" so I can read up on it?
Thanks for the link, Perry - presumably the panels are damaged beyond economic repair, and will have to be replaced by the original supplier...
Who's probably gone bust....
The DM has some new pictures of another three wind turbines in West Yorkshire that failed to survive this week's winds:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2083149/Wind-turbines-cope-UK-weather-3-blown-pieces.html