Climate II

[Schneibster]

Your saying this is the hottest decade in history. How would this decade compare when the British had a wine industry competing with the French, or when the Greenlanders were growing Barley. They were farming in Greenland for over 400 years using medieval technology. They've been claiming global warming for barely 2 decades. 400 years is climate, two decades is weather.

By your own definition, claiming this is the hottest decade in history is a lie.

It's not two decades, it's fifteen.

You're lying again.

[Schneibster]

Choff, the facts in history mean nothing to the Troll.

Errr, what facts in history?

He's chosen an agenda and whether he understand it's implications or not, he's going to push it.

The implications are that science is right, and you're a climate crank.

He may even be clueless enough to imagine he's making his short life worthwhile by doing it, he's not very bright.

Welcome to the ignore list. You can watch your betters discuss climate. Enjoy.

[Schneibster]

So let's get some details out of the way.

First, "global warming" has several meanings. The first and foremost is shown by the difference in the average surface temperatures of the Earth and the Moon. Both are at the same distance from the Sun; therefore both get the same amount of energy per unit area. So why is Earth 33°C warmer? Answer: global warming.

Does everyone here understand this, and understand why it proves there's global warming? We don't have anybody here who's going to start denying the Law of Conservation of Mass/Energy, like you were denying General Relativity a little while back, do we?

OK, so moving right along, now we see the second definition of "global warming." This one isn't about temperature; it's about heat content. Remember, temperature isn't conserved; heat is. So I have a question: where's the heat going? Because we know it's going in. And we know it's not coming out; that's why the satellites measure a lower temperature from space than we do on the surface. I hope no one thinks the satellites dangle thermometers out on strings a hundred miles long at eleven thousand miles an hour. What they do is they measure the amount of heat coming up. If there's less heat coming up, they measure a lower temperature; however, of course, the temperature of something, somewhere in the system, has to be going up. It's energy conservation. You can't absorb heat and not have anything in your system get hotter. It's against the First Law of Thermodynamics, which is the same as the Law of Conservation of Mass/Energy.

That one (satellites measure a lower temperature so surface measurements are questionable) is a very common myth among climate cranks. It springs from not knowing how satellites measure the temperature of the atmosphere, when they're not in it. It also springs from the dual meaning of "warming:" 1) Increasing temperature 2) Increasing heat. Heat and temperature are not the same. This is a common misunderstanding among people who do not know physics. It's also a commonly used fallacy by climate cranks.

And one more thing to keep in mind: The third kind of "global warming," which is the kind you all are used to talking about, i.e. increasing average temperatures over the entire Earth system concentrated especially in the atmosphere and ocean. Now we have a better definition of it: instead of 33°C warmer than the Moon, Earth will be 37°C warmer than the Moon. On average. Everyone understands that this is a correct definition of "global warming," right?

Now, there's lots more things to keep in mind, really. For example, there are two definitions of "heat:" 1) radiant heat, i.e. infrared radiation, and 2) kinetic heat, i.e. vibration of molecules. These two can interconvert; for example, a molecule can absorb a photon of infrared, and start vibrating, or a vibrating molecule can emit a photon of infrared and stop vibrating. This is not a process in which there can be a partial result; the photon a) is or b) is not absorbed/emitted; the vibration is quantized by the degrees of freedom allowed in a CO2 molecule for vibration, of which there are enough for exactly three modes. These three modes are the "spectrum" of CO2. CO2 only emits and absorbs photons of those frequencies, as a molecule. The individual atoms absorb and emit much higher frequency photons of visible light, and do so much more quickly; and in fact, neither carbon nor oxygen has a significant amount of blockage in this region of the EM spectrum, as we can see from the fact you can see stars at night. In fact, most atmospheric gases are transparent to visible light. The Sun could be anything from a K to an F or even an A, and its spectrum would peak in the visible zone; if it were an A we'd need to be about twice as far away and have a much thicker ozone layer, but it would be possible. If it were a K we'd need to be closer in, and we wouldn't have to worry about ozone; we probably wouldn't need much if any in the atmosphere.

Anyway, so I've mentioned spectral classes of stars. Here they are: W O B A F G K M R N Si. There are subtypes 0-9, of decreasing class; thus you go from G9 to K0, or from G0 to F9. Our sun is a G0. This means that its surface temperature is around 5500°K. (Camera buffs should recognize this color temperature; actually the Sun is just a little hot, about a hundred degrees, from G0. Also, remember that the atmosphere scatters blue, which is why the sky is blue; this means that sunlight by itself is slightly redder (cooler) on Earth than on the Moon due to atmospheric scattering by nitrogen and oxygen molecules.) So we know now that the strongest radiation from the Sun is green light. And this is controlled by its surface temperature. What happens to all that light?

Well, most of it is absorbed. Some is reflected, by snow and ice, or clouds. But that which falls on open ocean or other open deep water, or on soil, or on leaves, or on asphalt, or on concrete, or on most things except reflective surfaces, is absorbed. That means the light makes the molecules in the absorbing matter vibrate. That's why the asphalt is hot on a sunny day.

Now, the Earth doesn't have zero temperature; in fact we already know it's 33°C warmer than the Moon. So does it have a spectrum? What's its color temperature, if you will? Answers: bet yer sweet patootie, and it's 15°C or 288°K. So what's that mean? Well, it's in the infrared. Heat, specifically radiant heat, remember? So that heat can move several different ways. First, if it's in the ocean, the water containing the heat can convect; that's what happens when a pot of water boils, but less violent, so you need instruments to see it. Second, wherever it is, it can be conducted, in matter. And it can be conducted from one phase of matter to another; for example from the ocean liquid to the atmospheric gas, or from the land solid to the atmospheric gas, or whatnot. Third, it can be radiated, as infrared. This is the only form that can cross a vacuum; that's why a thermos is a vacuum flask. And that's also why its outside is mirror finished. This means the thermos blocks both radiation and absorption, and also conduction. Only a very small amount of radiation comes in or goes out through the mirror finish; and that's the only way in or out. So it stays hot or cold for a long time, until the very small radiation channel has time to conduct enough heat to cool or warm it to room temperature.

So now we have a picture of the Earth absorbing visible light, and emitting infrared radiant heat. Now, physics buffs, what happens if anything blocks the emission of radiant heat? Well, gee, it works just like a blanket; it traps the heat. Remember, heat can only leave the Earth as radiation; neither convection nor conduction can occur across a vacuum. So, what blocks the emission of radiant heat? Answers include several gases that are transparent in visible. Of these the most common is water. But water doesn't have a long lifetime; days, usually. It generally falls out of the sky after that. You know, remember rain and stuff? So what else is common and has an infrared spectrum? Well, CO2. And methane.

Tomorrow I'll tell you why CO2 and methane pack a warming punch out of proportion to their apparently small concentration.

[JoeStrout]

First, "global warming" has several meanings. The first and foremost is shown by the difference in the average surface temperatures of the Earth and the Moon. Both are at the same distance from the Sun; therefore both get the same amount of energy per unit area. So why is Earth 33°C warmer? Answer: global warming.

I'll jump in here, just for fun.

I don't think this is what anybody means when using the common term "global warming." The Earth's steady-state temperature is higher than the Moon because it has an atmosphere, and this has been true essentially forever. "Global warming" refers to a change in that steady-state in recent years, as caused by changes in the concentration of various greenhouse gases (especially CO2).

So, yeah, our globe is warmer than the neighboring one, but that's not what "global warming" generally means. I think it confuses the issue to redefine it as that (even if you say it's just one of several meanings).

And one more thing to keep in mind: The third kind of "global warming," which is the kind you all are used to talking about, i.e. increasing average temperatures over the entire Earth system concentrated especially in the atmosphere and ocean. Now we have a better definition of it: instead of 33°C warmer than the Moon, Earth will be 37°C warmer than the Moon. On average. Everyone understands that this is a correct definition of "global warming," right?

Yes, I agree that this is the standard meaning of the term (and probably the best to stick to, to avoid confusion).

Cheers,
- Joe

[choff]

The Chinese have been doing their own research

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/image ... _china.pdf


Here's just a hand full of tidbits

Hong et al. (2000) had also reported that, at the time of the MWP, "the northern boundary of
the cultivation of citrus tree (Citrus reticulata Blanco) and Boehmeria nivea (a perennial herb),
both subtropical and thermophilous plants, moved gradually into the northern part of China,
where it has been estimated that the annual mean temperature was 0.9-1.0°C higher than at
present." And considering the climatic conditions required to successfully grow these plants,
they further noted that annual mean temperatures in that part of the country during the
Medieval Warm Period must have been about 1.0°C higher than at present, with extreme
January minimum temperatures fully 3.5°C warmer than they are today, citing De'er (1994).
1 http://

Also publishing in the same year, Zhu et al. (2003)11
described their work with a sediment core that had
been extracted from lake Chen Co in the Yamzhog
Yum Co drainage basin of southern Tibet in the delta
of the Kaluxiong River. This core was dated by
comparing sedimentary rates measured by 210Pb and
absolute time horizons measured by 137Cs (Wan 1997,
1999; Benoit and Rozan, 2001), after which several
environmentally-related magnetic properties of
sections of the core were measured and analyzed.
This work revealed what they called a "Middle Ages
Warm-period" (around ca. 1120-1370 AD) that was
followed by what they described as "an intensively
cold stage during ca. 1550-1690 AD, a cold-humid
stage from ca. 1690-1900 AD and a warm-dry stage
since ca. 1900 AD." But they note that the warm
period of the past century was not as warm as the
earlier 250-year warm period of the Middle Ages

In the words of Ge et al., "the
temperature of the 20th century in eastern China is still
within the threshold of the variability of the last 2000
years," which observation clearly indicates that the
Chinese data provide no evidence for the hypothesis that
the eastern part of the country's 20th-century warming -
or even a small part of it - was human-induced


the existence of
this millennial-scale oscillation of climate, with its prior
periods of higher-than-current temperatures, clearly
demonstrates that there is nothing unusual about earth's
present climatic state, except that it is surprisingly cool,
considering how much more CO2 there is in the air
nowadays than there was during the warmer Medieval
and Roman Warm Periods.

Yes, its been warming the last 15 decades, we're thawing out from the Little Ice Age, nothing to do with CO2.
To date, the dire predictions of the last two decades have simply not come true, they constitute fear mongering.

[Schneibster]

First, "global warming" has several meanings. The first and foremost is shown by the difference in the average surface temperatures of the Earth and the Moon. Both are at the same distance from the Sun; therefore both get the same amount of energy per unit area. So why is Earth 33°C warmer? Answer: global warming.

I'll jump in here, just for fun.

I don't think this is what anybody means when using the common term "global warming." The Earth's steady-state temperature is higher than the Moon because it has an atmosphere, and this has been true essentially forever. "Global warming" refers to a change in that steady-state in recent years, as caused by changes in the concentration of various greenhouse gases (especially CO2).

Actually, that's not true. The origin of the term is as it was used in the 1970s when they described the state of the climate on Venus as "runaway global warming" and blamed it on the atmospheric gases in addition to its closeness to the Sun.

So, yeah, our globe is warmer than the neighboring one, but that's not what "global warming" generally means. I think it confuses the issue to redefine it as that (even if you say it's just one of several meanings).

Well, unfortunately I didn't just make it up. Confusing it may be, but it's also true.

I've looked for a source that uses it that way but the ones I had in mind were offline because of the shutdown.

Also, this is the reason the geophysics climate community started calling it "global climate change." "Global warming" isn't specific enough.

[Schneibster]

The Chinese

Propaganda alert. Deflector shields engaged.

[Schneibster]

Now, I've already made this point, but the really important thing to remember is that the heat doesn't come out of the Earth-system at the same frequency it goes in. I think this point really trips a lot of deniers up; they assume the atmosphere is all one transparency at the Earth's temperature and the Sun's temperature. It's not. So the heat goes in as visible light from the Sun, at visible light frequencies, where the atmosphere is transparent; but when it goes out, it does so at infrared frequencies, where the atmosphere often is not transparent. As a result it gets absorbed and turned into kinetic energy in the atmosphere, that is, heat. This is often called the "greenhouse effect," but that's actually not really accurate; however, as an analogy, it is somewhat useful as long as you keep its limitations in mind. In the analogy the Earth's surface is the inside of the greenhouse, the atmosphere is the glass, and so forth.

Now the strongest global warming gas is water vapor. And that's obvious from the fact that its spectrum is so wide. In fact it's responsible for most-- 30°C, over 90%-- of the Earth's temperature difference with the Moon. However, that would only bring the Earth to the temperature of the last glaciation- the Würm/Wisconsonian glaciation I mentioned above. The difference that makes today's interglacial temperate climate is almost all CO2 and methane (which is also CH4). And of that, mostly CO2. Let me repeat: without CO2 we would be in a glaciation today. In fact we have had two ice ages due to absence of CO2: the Cryogenian, which happened before animals became numerous and active enough to make CO2, and the Karoo, which was caused by plants invading the land and sucking all the CO2 out of the atmosphere, and was broken by animals invading the land and breathing and deforesting and farting. And even so 70% of the carbon the trees sucked out remains underground as coal today.

The other thing about water vapor is it doesn't remain in the atmosphere long. Days, at most; often only hours. Furthermore, it has two different phases depending on whether it concentrates in microscopic droplets or not: clear air water vapor, and clouds. The second are also opaque to light, and thus absorb heat that might otherwise make it to the land; on the other hand, the water carries the heat to the ground when it rains out, or else the heat gets radiated into the atmosphere. Remember that condensing water vapor also emits heat into the atmosphere, so the amount of heat can be quite substantial when these two are added together. Also, clouds reflect some of the light, but this is a minority effect. That's why hurricanes work.

Now methane and CO2, they're different; they don't rain out. So they stay in the atmosphere a lot longer; hundreds of years for CO2, and thousands for methane. This is why they're much more powerful warming gases, in the long run, than water vapor. They're in the atmosphere millions of times longer, so they affect millions of times more photons. Simple arithmetic. That's the first reason.

I gotta go watch some football so that's all for now. When I come back I'll tell the second reason.

[choff]

A little background on the MWP controversy.

http://www.epw.senate.gov/hearing_state ... ?id=266543


In 1995, I published a short paper in the academic journal Science. In that study, I reviewed how borehole temperature data recorded a warming of about one degree Celsius in North America over the last 100 to 150 years. The week the article appeared, I was contacted by a reporter for National Public Radio. He offered to interview me, but only if I would state that the warming was due to human activity. When I refused to do so, he hung up on me.
I had another interesting experience around the time my paper in Science was published. I received an astonishing email from a major researcher in the area of climate change. He said, "We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period."

The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was a time of unusually warm weather that began around 1000 AD and persisted until a cold period known as the "Little Ice Age" took hold in the 14th century. Warmer climate brought a remarkable flowering of prosperity, knowledge, and art to Europe during the High Middle Ages.

The existence of the MWP had been recognized in the scientific literature for decades. But now it was a major embarrassment to those maintaining that the 20th century warming was truly anomalous. It had to be "gotten rid of."

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/10/22/m ... rm-period/

When you see things like this (from MBH98 co-author Malcolm K. Hughes) on the MCA/MWP:

A case will be made for the abandonment of both of them, on the grounds that they are inappropriate, uninformative, and that they very probably divert attention from more revealing ways of thinking about the Earth’s climate over the past two millennia.

[Schneibster]

A little background on the MWP controversy.

http://www.epw.senate.gov/hearing_state ... ?id=266543


In 1995, I published a short paper in the academic journal Science. In that study, I reviewed how borehole temperature data recorded a warming of about one degree Celsius in North America over the last 100 to 150 years. The week the article appeared, I was contacted by a reporter for National Public Radio. He offered to interview me, but only if I would state that the warming was due to human activity. When I refused to do so, he hung up on me.
I had another interesting experience around the time my paper in Science was published. I received an astonishing email from a major researcher in the area of climate change. He said, "We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period."

The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was a time of unusually warm weather that began around 1000 AD and persisted until a cold period known as the "Little Ice Age" took hold in the 14th century. Warmer climate brought a remarkable flowering of prosperity, knowledge, and art to Europe during the High Middle Ages.

The existence of the MWP had been recognized in the scientific literature for decades. But now it was a major embarrassment to those maintaining that the 20th century warming was truly anomalous. It had to be "gotten rid of."

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/10/22/m ... rm-period/

When you see things like this (from MBH98 co-author Malcolm K. Hughes) on the MCA/MWP:

A case will be made for the abandonment of both of them, on the grounds that they are inappropriate, uninformative, and that they very probably divert attention from more revealing ways of thinking about the Earth’s climate over the past two millennia.

That's because they only happened in the Northern Hemisphere.

[Schneibster]

Here's the most basic problem you see:

A. We see how much sun there is, from satellites
B. We see how much heat the Earth-system radiates, from satellites
C. A - B > 0
D. Temperature goes up.
E. Every other method shows the temperature going up too; for example, thermometers on the surface.

Energy conservation. Sorry, I don't make the rules, I just point them out. Heat doesn't just go away. It's not "going into the Earth," either; volcanoes duh. During the time when the atmosphere hasn't been heating the last few years, the Southern Ocean has been, long with the Indian Ocean and the South Atlantic and South Pacific. This is called La Niña. Maybe you've heard of it.

[Schneibster]

So the second reason global warming gases behave as they do is because of the spectrum of water. This shouldn't surprise anyone; anything that deals with the most powerful warming gas, water vapor, must be governed by its spectrum.

As it turns out, clear water vapor is not clear at all in the infrared. In fact it has only two major defects in its infrared spectrum. One of them is very close to a peak in the CO2 spectrum, and the other is very close to a peak in the CH4 spectrum. That's why these are strong global warming gases. The comparative spectra are available from NIST databases; these are unfortunately offline due to the Republican't-teatraitor alliance shutting down the government to lynch the black President.

[Schneibster]

Because CO2 molecules absorb certain frequencies with a particular probability, increasing the concentration of CO2, that is the number of CO2 molecules, increases the probability of photons of those frequencies being absorbed. This is a lemma.

Energy from the Sun arrives primarily at the surface of the Earth at the color temperature of the surface of the Sun; minus, of course, the high-frequency scattering by nitrogen and oxygen molecules that makes the sky blue. This is another lemma.

Energy from the Earth arrives coming out from the Earth at satellites at the color temperature of the Earth-system; this does not necessarily mean that the amounts of energy are different, there merely need to be as many watts going out as came in. But, of course, there aren't. And the difference between the satellite temperature and the surface temperature tells how much the intervening atmosphere has absorbed. This is another lemma.

And the simple facts are the energy going in is bigger than the energy coming out. There just isn't anywhere to hide without denying Einstein, and Joule.

Understand this: wherever you live (unless someone in orbit is reading this, which I highly doubt), a hundred miles below you is hell. You know that yellow stuff that comes out of volcanoes? Solid that. Several thousand miles deep. And then it gets worse; solid molten iron, at a temperature so high it would flow like water at the surface, but under so much pressure it reacts almost like a solid crystal.

There isn't anyplace to put heat inside the Earth. It's way, way hotter than space, even with the Sun shining on you.

[Teahive]

Computer models need to be compared to reality before they can be trusted. Ideally you're able to run lots of experiments with different starting conditions and take high quality observational data. It's somewhat worse if you have to rely on random incidents with limited data recording.

But if you're trying to model a global long-term change where you can't run an experiment except for the single existing one, and where data capture is lacking in both quality and quantity, you have a problem.

[Schneibster]

Computer models need to be compared to reality before they can be trusted. Ideally you're able to run lots of experiments with different starting conditions and take high quality observational data. It's somewhat worse if you have to rely on random incidents with limited data recording.

But if you're trying to model a global long-term change where you can't run an experiment except for the single existing one, and where data capture is lacking in both quality and quantity, you have a problem.

There's only one universe and we seem to be doing fine with that. We have galaxies in all the right places. And that's a lot bigger and more complex than the climate on Earth.

Not to mention submarine propellers and aircraft turbines. Curiously neither the Chinese nor the Russians, neither of whom are good at computer models, do a very good job of aircraft turbines. Why do you suppose that is?