Friday
Sep262014
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Carbon Brief does energy budgets
Sep 26, 2014 Climate: sensitivity One criticism of the energy budget model approach that lies behind these kind of studies is that it doesn't take into account the role of the oceans in taking up excess heat. Other estimates of climate sensitivity using climate models support the higher end of the IPCC's likely range.
Carbon Brief is struggling again.
Reader Comments (76)
" ... Climate change discussions around the (communal) lunch table, compost toilets and solar roofs, naked saunas with your colleagues. It was, to say the least, a bit of an eye opener. After about a month of freaking out I got into it, largely because of the cool people that I met (often in saunas) who encouraged me to learn ... "
Oh, Barry (wipes tears of mirth from eyes) that is hilarious.
Especially the bit about the "naked saunas with your colleagues." I can only assume that many of them were nubile young things of whatever gender he prefers.
I must say, the prospect of sharing a sauna in the nude with most of my former colleagues would have had me - and probably them - running for the hills!
I had a short (lived) comment on CB about the possibility of CO2 levels being an effect rather than a cause, but it was too much for their moderator. How on earth do they expect to debate anything?
Solar radiation penetrates 10s of meters into the ocean , whereas IR radiation is all absorbed within a few meters of the surface. The greenhouse effect is caused by a slight reduction in out-going IR radiation from the top of the atmosphere while solar radiation remains essentially constant.This induces a slight annual increase in atmospheric IR absorbed by the ocean surface then balanced by a small surface warming. However short term diurnal, seasonal and merdional changes in radiative balance are far greater than this slow 'net' change in net sea surface temperatures. The proposal tnow being made to explain the pause that since 1998 the missing heat has now magically dissapeared into the deep ocean without affecting ocean surface temperatures is preposterous.
turnedoutnice
"I knew Millikan, and his sidekick Harry Secombe......."
Magic! Brought a real good laugh out of me, for which I truly thank you! Not been a good day.
Whilst I am aware global warming moves in mysterious ways its wonders to perform, as the moves develop I become more aware of Spike as a prophetic as well as comic genius.
Once you realise we are living in a 1950's Goon's sketch it all starts to make sense.
it is also interesting to note that on the ATTP thread, the dedicated chimp and shit-thrower Steve Bloom is now throwing shit at Dr Betts...
http://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2014/09/25/lewis-and-curry/#comments
anything said by Steve Bloom should be translated instantly to the exact opposite. I imagine he lives in a plush suite in New York, with thousands of servants, telling everyone else how to live, without actually being able to explain why.
(Sigh). And there I was, thinking a Carbon Brief was some sort of sexy black undergarment.
jamesp: do not fret, no comment of mine has even made it to the page. Am I moderated? Am I blocked? Am I bothered?
With the level of debate they seem to want, the answer to the last has to be, "No." Their loss (not that I think I am making great points, but more that they should sink so low as to keep their tiny minds so tightly shut, yet insist that they are being scientific). Surely, it would have made them look more magnanimous had they let my comment through for all to view, then shot it down with sound argument? Are they so frit that they allow no dissent, at all?
@Clive Best: IR is absorbed in the first few microns of water. But because 'back radiation'; is an Emittance, not a real flux, there is no IR absorbed from the atmosphere. The heating is exclusively from SW penetration; up to ~150 ft at the UV end.
As for IR emission, it's all the other way round but emissivity maximises at ~25 deg C. This is because of the exponential kinetics of evaporation. By ~31 deg C, all the oceanic heat loss is from evaporation.
@turnedoutnice
I agree that evaporation dominates heat loss for the tropics and that radiative cooling is irrelevant. Thunderstorms over the intertropical convergence zone power the Hadley cell convection. This bypasses the greenhouse effect completely and moves heat up to the tropopause to radiate directly to space independent of CO2.
You are also right that IR is absorbed in the skin layer of the oceans. So it is more like some of the radiated heat from the surface is reflected back over temporate oceans. In polar regions radiative cooling dominates.
I am always amused by the canard that ocean surfaces cannot absorb IR.
The initial absorption takes place in the top 1mm.
Some energy is reradiated, conducted to the atmosphere or provides latent heat for evaporation..
The rest is transferred to the bulk volume of the ocean by conduction and turbulence.
SandyS:
I also did the Millikan experiment at school at much the same time and recall getting some results consistent with quark charges. It always struck me as odd, because it seemed unlikely that a measurement error would throw up 2/3e rather than say 0.85e. Must have been the oil - or some cosmic ray induced meson formation! Or perhaps I was on the brink of discovering cold fusion?
FAO diogenes
Steve Bloom was based in California and heavily involved in the Sierra Club as I recall. Used to be slapped down repeatedly by Steve McIntyre back in the day when Climate Audit was a little more rowdy.
LiT, Bloom thinks he knows the literature on the Amazon better than Betts. It is a joke.
Turnedoutnice, Clive Best
For your entertainment .
@entropic I do not dissagree but why then would absorbed solar radiation be any different to IR radiation ? Furthermore you do not consider other feedbacks to AGW like increased atmospheric conduction by waves and ocean spray.
How else could it be possible that the earth's climate maintained liquid oceans for the last 4 billion years?
PS. are you not actually an alias for @scienceofdoom ? A great site when it sticks to science !
;-)
Clive Best, if I was SoD, I wouldn't be amused by that comparison.
Michael Hart: +10! Our sage of the staff room is considerably more arrogant and pompous than SoD; I suppose so many years being the
cleverestone with the most knowledge on the subject in the classroom could make one like that.Is this radiation from the sea surface a theoretical radiation, or has it actually been measured? If so, how?
Having recently paddled in clear, shallow open sea water, there was a noticeable difference in temperature between the water over dark surfaces than over the clean, white sand, so there is certainly evidence that not all the heat is absorbed in the first few mm.
@Entropic Man: sorry, that's the usual trotting out of spectrophotometric curves of Emittance (aka Exitance). People MUST understand that all these devices work by having a metal shield to prevent the Emittance in the reverse direction from being received by the detector thus isolating the signal i the 'View Angle'. This is Radiative Physics 101; no professional scientist or engineer** makes the mistake of confusing it fro a real energy flux.
Defined as being completely objective as well as having had proper training in standard physics.
@Clive Best, re the Faint Sun Paradox: the real reason is something else, to be revealed soon.....:o)
This type of wilful misunderstanding of climate sensitivity is at least partly due to Nic's continuous stressing of the median (the meaningless range middle) value rather than the mode (most probable) value. All sorts of numbskulls come out and declare that 4.5 degrees is just as likely as 1.5 because - well hey - uncertainty goes both ways. Yet in reality the distributions are highly skewed towards the 1.1K (zero-feedback) and without feedback there is no compelling case for action even using these flawed climate models. I can only presume this cleaving to the median comes from his finance background where sparse data and/or zero underlying theory are commonplace. But here we intrinsically know and expect that increasing values must be decreasingly likely.
Not that evidence makes any difference to these climate clods as they have gone too far to admit their abject ignorance now. And if that claim by Myles Allen that a 25% reduction in sensitivity just delays the putative warming by 10 years then all it shows (yet again) is that it is far too easy for the utterly innumerate to get into academia. Of course without the CO2 scare who'd ever have heard of him or any of the other climate-obsessives?
@RadicalRodent DramaGreens like other cults rather than respond with reasoned argument angrily smear anyone challenging them .. Having a simple mis-characterisation of "the enemy" helps them do this .."oh they are all mad right wingers in the pay of big oil"
.. it never occurs to them that many of us are real greens who have worked with them, and are actually further along the thought path having come out of the other end of the tunnel, while they are still stuck in fantasyland
"PhD in Climate Communication" ranks up there with "PhD in Reiki", or "PhD in Angelology".
"Carbon Brief" seems very brief indeed on science, fact or reason, and quite long on dissembling, deception and manipulation.
The Academy is ill-serving those whom it claims to exist to better in astonishing ways.
I notice that the Bish has lately been very tolerant of the usual suspects trying to hijack threads with theories about turnedoutnice stuff. It's boring, repetitive and clogs discussion with irrelevant posts.
But, of course, it is up to the boss.
Before the communists hijacked the green movement, CAT used to be a very good place for Alternative Technology, not having a grid connection they actually lived it so the pros and cons were clear to see.
The last time I visited it was all too obvious they were succumbing to the temptation to go for the big green money available to those who preach the cagw mantra. You can't expect the sort of "greens" who come with that to slum it, of course, so they now have a grid connection, ostensibly required for the safety systems for their new funicular.
Their power distribution system had a clear front so that you could see in the old "off grid" days what proportion of the site's electricity needs were coming from wind, hydro etc, and this survived into the "on grid" era - I wonder if it still does, because when I was last there it was possible to see that the renewables were doing nothing, the whole site was running on grid power. IIRC the big wind turbine was broken and looked derelict.
Sadly, NW, I have not had the opportunity to return, much as I have wanted to, but I do not doubt your observations; no matter how altruistic your dreams, reality will eventually impinge – and ruin them.
Some problem with the energy budget approach?? But the whole premise of AGW is that more energy is entering than leaving the earth system.
And if heat is going into the deep oceans where we can't yet measure it, this will of course mean less energy leaving the earth system.
IOW, it is precisely what thea positive energy budget would reveal surely.
Am I missing something?