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scaddenp at 11:29 AM on 26 August 2010Greenhouse effect has been falsified
Hmm. So we have expensive experimental setups for quantifying greenhouse response of various gases to high degree of precision being invalidated by backyard experiement with cheap thermometers. I dont think so. I think this is a common experiment but the setup is difficult so you get "prove" or "disprove" greenhouse gas theory from physical processes that dont actually have anything to do with it. I prefer this setup for eliminating other possible effects. -
muoncounter at 11:25 AM on 26 August 2010Warming causes CO2 rise
#6:"It has been given some value solely because it happens to match somewhat with global temperatures" What? Given some value? There are multiple agencies responsible for these measurements; they all seem to agree. And please, do not say "Conspiracy!" "magnitude of the nett increase of CO2 being about half of the estimated total emissions from fossil fuels, is very small against both the emissions and the sinks that occur naturally," Well, no. You can take the world annual CO2 emissions from all fossil fuels (EIA.gov is a good place for such statistics) and match it to the annual increase in atmospheric CO2 pretty well. All you need do is convert Gtons CO2 at the surface to ppmV distributed in the atmosphere; there are several places that give that conversion. Then calculate that 39 Gtons CO2 (2009) is about 4ppmV during a year when CO2 went up by 2 ppmV; that means that half of anthropogenic (yes, that bad word) CO2 is absorbed by all sinks and the other half is still out there. I posted a graphic a couple of weeks ago demonstrating this on some prior thread; I'll have to go looking for it. -
dsleaton at 10:50 AM on 26 August 2010Greenhouse effect has been falsified
I suggest a new way of trying to start a learning dialogue with Will. Assume he is right in the findings of his backyard experiment. What, then, happens to our scientific understanding and the engineering that has been developed from that science? What do we have to unlearn about the universe due to Will's discoveries? Will, you seem very invested, psychologically, in your experiments. I wonder if you are capable of accepting constructive criticism. If not, then you are incapable of actual dialogue, and it would be worthless for anyone here to continue to engage with you. A number of posters have challenged your understanding of physics, and they have presented research that has been done with much greater rigor and care than has yours, yet you reject their findings out of hand. And then you expect them to accept your findings without question. -
HumanityRules at 10:40 AM on 26 August 2010Arctic sea ice... take 2
10.Gordon What I'm saying is that for the past two seasons the PIOMAS model has under-estimated the extent. In 2008 it estimated extent would be lower than 2007. This year it has a fairly low estimate of extent which looks like again being an under-estimate. There are some actual measurements of ice thickness. Here's one that's fairly easy to follow (http://epic.awi.de/Publications/Haa2010b.pdf). It's conclusion is that in 2009 there was very little difference in ice thickness compared to 2007. This is the first line from their conclusion "We conclude that older sea ice in much of the Arctic Ocean was of similar or even slightly larger thickness in April 2009 relative to conditions in 2007, but within the expected range of interannual variability." You might argue that this covers only a small fraction of the arctic but unfortunately this is probably as good as it gets. If ice thickness is roughly the same, maybe slightly higher and if the extent and concentration are both greater than 2007 then where does the recent dramatic fall seen by POIMAS come from? The PIOMAS authors in a 2008 paper highlight the fact that the 2007 conditions are weighing heavily on their 2008 predictions, my guess is it is still doing so. I think that this is an over-estimation of the influence that 2007 ice conditions is having on model outputs moving forward. I do think in general the past decade or two have shown a decline in arctic sea ice. It's worth concidering though how long this obsession with trend has been going on. The arctic ice and weather conditions have long been known to have high levels of natural variability. Comment on the arctic seems to blind itself from this variability to focus wholy on the recent downward trend, which is extrapolated forward indefinately as you seem to do. I think it's worth considering the recent conditions in relation to those long term natural variations. -
ProfMandia at 10:35 AM on 26 August 2010Arctic sea ice... take 2
See the article about John Cook at The Guardian. BTW, do not ask people there to donate to John's site because your comment will be removed. I wonder how I know this....? :) -
Berényi Péter at 09:23 AM on 26 August 2010Greenhouse effect has been falsified
#34 Will at 06:50 AM on 26 August, 2010 Even in direct sunlight the top canopy of leaves on any plants will be much cooler than bare earth That's true. Not because they reflect much light, but because of evaporation of water through pores on the back of leaves called stomata.
If this vapor laden air rose high enough, it would cool by adiabatic expansion releasing the latent heat eventually by phase transition, producing rain and (relatively) hot dry air which leaves the cloud and radiates this heat into space. Cooling itself this way it sinks again, ready to take up some more moisture.
GHGs are very important ingredients in this process, for due to Kirchhoff's law of thermal radiation in local thermodynamic equilibrium (which holds up tu 50 km in the atmosphere) emissivity of stuff is the same as its absorptivity. That is, if a gas does not absorb thermal radiation (like nitrogen) it can't get rid of heat by radiation either.
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johnd at 09:17 AM on 26 August 2010Warming causes CO2 rise
3 to 5 above, whilst the Mauna Loa CO2 indicates a consistent nett change both seasonally and long term for what occurs in both hemispheres, it provides no understanding of any of the processes that determine those nett variations. It has been given some value solely because it happens to match somewhat with global temperatures, but even there it didn't do so well with the cooling period from about 1960 diverging from the constant upward trend. The magnitude of the nett increase of CO2 being about half of the estimated total emissions from fossil fuels, is very small against both the emissions and the sinks that occur naturally, so a very small error in the estimations and modeling of those natural processes could lead to the wrong conclusions being drawn. The study I referred to earlier that measured how the CO2 varied not only in different regions, but seasonally shows that natural processes are able to reduce CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere by a factor about 10 times the rate that fossil fuels add CO2 to it, therefore the capacity is there within the natural system when the conditions are right. Whilst we might be able to make estimations and construct models that approximate what the nett results appear to be, that is far from being able to lay claim that each and every one of those processes is understood sufficiently to be sure that the values shown in the chart below and measured in hundreds are accurate to small single digit figures.
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Berényi Péter at 08:43 AM on 26 August 2010Greenhouse effect has been falsified
#30 KR at 05:50 AM on 26 August, 2010 your half/double N2 comment really represents a red herring with respect to a conversation on the greenhouse effect. Not really. For example World Book at NASA - Venus has the following "explanation": "Most astronomers believe that Venus's high surface temperature can be explained by what is known as the greenhouse effect". Surface temperature on Venus is about 458°C and if an astronomer believes it is so high because of the greenhouse effect, he is not an astronomer at all, but a crackpot. It is a shame National Aeronautics and Space Administration of the US disseminates such nonsense. At the 1 atm level temperature of Venus is only 71°C, that is, 387°C cooler than at the surface. If you'd put the Earth at the same orbit, its average surface temperature would go as high as 66°C. The difference is only 5°C, that could be called the additional greenhouse effect due to an atmosphere almost entirely made of CO2 and covered by clouds of sulfuric acid droplets above haze of the same stuff. You get it for doubling the amount of CO2 almost 11 times relative to Earth. The rest is pressure (92 bar at the surface), this is what makes Venus so hot, not the "greenhouse effect". -
David Horton at 08:09 AM on 26 August 2010Medieval Warm Period: rhetoric vs science
Toby #34 - excellent summary. I think you are giving the deniers too much credit though. They seem to believe that greenland had no ice on it 500 years ago and this is why it was called Greenland and there were Vikings all over it growing crops and then the LIA came and wiped them out. So we don't need to worry about current warming. There is no sense, in any denier comment I have ever seen, that the Viking colonies were restricted to little coastal enclaves for a small number of people and that the rest of Greenland, then as now, was covered with the immensely thick and immensely old ice sheet. -
Phil at 07:41 AM on 26 August 2010Greenhouse effect has been falsified
Just to expand a bit more on my previous post. Molecules absorb EM radiation (sometimes loosely called "light" by lazy people like me - gulp!) by three mechanisms 1. Changes to Rotational Quantum states - in the microwave and low infra-red EM region. Molecules need a permanent dipole moment to absorb radiation. (N2 for example cannot, neither can CO2) 2. Changes to Vibration (of the nuclei against each other) - in the infra-red region. The vibration needs to change the dipole moment to absorb radiation (The one vibration in N2 cannot, 3 of the 4 vibrations in CO2 can) 3. Changes to Electron orbits - in visible and UV EM region. Again a change in dipole moment is required for absorption. This will depend on the lower and upper orbit, some N2 transitions will be allowed, and these occur in the UV region -
Will at 07:36 AM on 26 August 2010Greenhouse effect has been falsified
KR You are wrong, I have conducted these experiments on multiple surfaces. The CO2 bottle contains almost pure CO2. Enough to extinguish a burning match, see here: spinonthat.com/CO2.html At the end of the last video at the bottom of the page I demonstrate how much CO2 with a burning match. Still I am impressed at how you can convince yourself of almost anything based on pure guess work. Well done to you! -
Phil at 07:22 AM on 26 August 2010Greenhouse effect has been falsified
Will #36 Read it again; the first sentence refers to molecular vibrations, and visible radiation, the second to electronic absorbtion and UV (i.e non-visble) radiation. No contradiction -
Will at 07:19 AM on 26 August 2010Greenhouse effect has been falsified
Tom I should have said "caused by" vibrating matter are you happy now? The point I am making is that Ned is wrong about glass being opaque to thermal radiation because if it were, why would we need double glazing with reflective coatings? -
Greenhouse effect has been falsified
Will - in your experiment you lack the black cardboard representing the Earth. Therefore you don't have the visible light changing to IR and attempting to leave back through the air or CO2, hence your experiment isn't set up correctly, and hence your results aren't going to show anything. I'm also not certain you're going to have sufficient CO2 in your quite small sample from soda water fizz; I would try it with an empty soda bottle full of air, and another where you fill it with CO2, either from a tank or using a piece of dry ice (vented until the ice sublimates, to keep pressure the same). Otherwise the effect may be too small to show up on simple (and rather inaccurate) thermometers like the liquid crystal ones you show. -
batsvensson at 07:13 AM on 26 August 2010Can't We At Least Agree That There Is No Consensus?
chris at 01:34 AM on 25 August, 2010 There is a difference in saying: 1) Given what we know then this or that can happen. 2) Given what we know then this or that will happen. When we talk about predictions its important to know which case we are talking about, in particular if we want to connect a scientific consensus to the prediction. -
muoncounter at 07:07 AM on 26 August 2010Greenhouse effect has been falsified
#34: "Above all plants do not warm environments, they cool them" And here in plain English is why: Plants give off water through tiny pores in their leaves, a process called evapotranspiration that cools the plant, just as perspiration cools our bodies. On a hot day, a tree can release tens of gallons of water into the air, acting as a natural air conditioner for its surroundings. And that's why plants cool their surrroundings, which has nothing to do with UHI. But here is why this may be a new problem: "There is no longer any doubt that carbon dioxide decreases evaporative cooling by plants and that this decreased cooling adds to global warming," says Cao. "This effect would cause significant warming even if carbon dioxide were not a greenhouse gas." Its a double-whammy. CO2 traps heat requiring plants to do more evaporative cooling, but CO2 acts to decrease a plant's ability to cool itself. -
Will at 07:03 AM on 26 August 2010Greenhouse effect has been falsified
Tom Why don't you try it for yourself. The point is not to take my word for it. Its a simple test and yes children have done it and achieved the same results as I do. -
Gordon1368 at 07:02 AM on 26 August 2010Arctic sea ice... take 2
HumanityRules, you may be right, however, the graph shows a drastic acceleration in the decrease in ice volume, are you saying it is drastically wrong? If it is even 10% or 20% wrong, the decline is alarming. Furthermore, are you saying the declining trend it shows is wrong? Even if the apparent acceleration in decline in ice volume is exaggerated, that is small consolation, as the straight line itself is quite steep. Even if, as you say, the model is sometimes wrong, it is still very useful to see the problem we are facing. Unless it is always wrong? Is that what you are saying, that it is useless? -
Tom Dayton at 07:00 AM on 26 August 2010Greenhouse effect has been falsified
Will, you are incorrect. Thermal radiation is not vibrating matter, because "radiation" is not vibrating matter, it is instead electromagnetic energy. Use the internet to search for definitions of "thermal radiation." An example is a definition by the University of California San Diego Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences. -
Will at 06:59 AM on 26 August 2010Greenhouse effect has been falsified
Phil "This is because, as has been explained to you above incoming solar radiation does not match the vibrational frequencies of the IR active vibrations - in visible light is too high a frequency for any molecular vibrations. Electron transitions do occur due to UV light, but the atmosphere is largely transparent to visible light. You have contradicted yourself here. -
Tom Dayton at 06:55 AM on 26 August 2010Greenhouse effect has been falsified
Will, your experiment that you describe on your web site is not novel. Students have been doing similar experiments for years. Maybe there is a flaw in your experimental design, or the effect you created was too small to be detectable by your temperature measuring apparatus. I've got relevant links on this comment. -
Will at 06:50 AM on 26 August 2010Greenhouse effect has been falsified
Ned "Will, glass is transparent to near-infrared wavelengths. It's opaque to thermal infrared wavelengths. See figure 2-3 here for an example." Lets just look at this statement for a minute. Thermal radiation is heat. Vibrating matter. Gas molecules are vibrating matter. They cannot pass through solid glass. You are confusing matter with energy. It is the energy which passes through the glass not the vibrating molecules which cause heat. In the vacuum of space full spectrum EMR produces no thermal radiation, heat. It is you who is confused or rather attempting to confuse. As for your comment about healthy green plants absorbing 90% of visible wavelengths, this is yet another stab in the dark generalisation. Some leaves are highly glossy/reflective and others are completely mat. It depends on the plant. Above all plants do not warm environments, they cool them, as per the urban heat island effect. Even in direct sunlight the top canopy of leaves on any plants will be much cooler than bare earth, and that is my point. So the point is, according to the bottom-up warming "greenhouse effect" hypothesis, an empty greenhouse should be considerably warmer than a full one, as attested to by the urban heat island effect, but this is not the case. With regards to false analogies, try implementing cap and trade without using the words "greenhouse gas emissions". -
Rob Painting at 06:23 AM on 26 August 2010Greenhouse effect has been falsified
Hey Will, still no answer to post #3 & 4. At least the hypotheses put forward by climate scientists match real world observations and measurements. Which is kind of the whole point isn't it?. -
Phil at 06:20 AM on 26 August 2010Greenhouse effect has been falsified
Will, The article on your web site that you've linked to includes serious factual errors. Diffusion of light by the atmosphere does not cause "the molecules also absorb some of that energy from the photon", and does not cause the molecules to vibrate. This is because, as has been explained to you above incoming solar radiation does not match the vibrational frequencies of the IR active vibrations - in visible light is too high a frequency for any molecular vibrations. Electron transitions do occur due to UV light, but the atmosphere is largely transparent to visible light. O2 and N2 are completely inactive to IR radiation, except for the tiny amount of isotopic variation which, as your own graphs show, are 1x10-30 less powerful than CO2 and are the wrong frequency for both incoming solar and outgoing earthlight. You should also be aware that the energy in photons is related to their frequency, not as you seem to assume, their intensity. Or do you really not believe Albert ? You are wrong to say all substances absorb IR radiation: use the search engine of your choice to look for "Dipole Moment" and "Vibration" and take your pick -
muoncounter at 06:12 AM on 26 August 2010Medieval Warm Period: rhetoric vs science
#31: "According to Moberg the MVP anomaly is a "blip" of around 0.2 Kelvin. " No. The data graphed above is straight out of Moberg, which clearly shows the MWP was 0.4 deg above the earlier (0-600 AD) baseline. Why state something that is so blatantly false? -
Ned at 06:10 AM on 26 August 2010Hansen etal hit a Climate Home Run -- in 1981
Thanks, muoncounter... :-) -
Ned at 06:06 AM on 26 August 2010Greenhouse effect has been falsified
Will writes: Please don't "Science of Doom" me. I'm not sure what you mean by that. Science of Doom offers admirably lucid, accurate, and detailed explanations of the physical basis for the greenhouse effect. They also manage to do so in a polite and respectful environment. It's hard to imagine a more appropriate resource for this particular thread. -
muoncounter at 06:05 AM on 26 August 2010Hansen etal hit a Climate Home Run -- in 1981
#18:"GISS-data are so much higher" #19:"GISSTEMP is virtually identical to that from HADCRUT, NCDC, and the RSS" See Ned's excellent summary of these virtually identical temperatures. -
Greenhouse effect has been falsified
Just an overall note on topics, Berényi - your half/double N2 comment really represents a red herring with respect to a conversation on the greenhouse effect. It's not helpful, and doesn't advance the discussion in any way. -
Greenhouse effect has been falsified
Berényi - So, you are just talking about the lapse rate here? Your comments seemed to involve nitrogen as a greenhouse gas, which I found quite confusing. Certainly, if you remove half the atmosphere, the dynamics and equilibrium of the Earth would be different - much as it would be if you removed all of it. I was under the impression, however, that we were discussing greenhouse gasses and the greenhouse effect, with only a few % of the atmosphere in question. Not wholesale planetary engineering or hypothetical worlds... -
Ned at 05:25 AM on 26 August 2010Greenhouse effect has been falsified
Will writes: As for Photosynthetic efficiency which is just one part of the effect I'm referring to, 2% is a stab in the dark. While it is claimed that crops such as wheat may achieve low efficiency of between 1-4%, sugar cain can achieve 7%, but photosynthesis is just one process plants use energy for. Oxygen production is another. Photosynthesis is how plants produce oxygen. It's the same process! A moment ago you were claiming that "40-50% of the incoming sunlight hitting the leaves is locked in by photosynthesis and the rest is reflected as short-wave". Healthy green plants absorb 90% or more of visible wavelengths of light, quite a bit less in the near-infrared. Only a small part of that, less than 10%, is converted by photosynthesis. The remainder warms the plant, and indirectly warms its environment. This is all irrelevant, though, since the analogy to a glass greenhouse is not intended as (nor appropriate as) a description of the physical mechanism by which CO2 warms the earth system.Moderator Response: Indeed. Will, in the post at the top of this page, see the section titled "The Term 'Greenhouse.'" -
Ned at 05:16 AM on 26 August 2010Greenhouse effect has been falsified
Will, glass is transparent to near-infrared wavelengths. It's opaque to thermal infrared wavelengths. See figure 2-3 here for an example. Lots of people get confused about this distinction, but if you're going to write about the earth's radiation budget you absolutely have to understand it. -
Tom Dayton at 05:13 AM on 26 August 2010Greenhouse effect has been falsified
You're right, Will, I should not have pointed you to Wikipedia for the definition of thermosphere. So let's use NASA. Or you could just search the internet for "thermosphere" and look at hundreds of definitions of it as a layer of the atmosphere. -
Berényi Péter at 05:12 AM on 26 August 2010Greenhouse effect has been falsified
#22 KR at 04:18 AM on 26 August, 2010 If's just the lapse rate you could swap nitrogen for argon or krypton (distinctly NOT greenhouse gases) with no effect No, you could not. These are monatomic gases (unlike nitrogen), therefore their adiabatic index is not the same (5/3 vs. 7/5). Dry adiabatic lapse rate would be higher. -
Ned at 05:12 AM on 26 August 2010Hansen etal hit a Climate Home Run -- in 1981
fydijkstra, what are you talking about? Over the past 30 years, the global (land/ocean) surface temperature increase in GISSTEMP is virtually identical to that from HADCRUT, NCDC, and the RSS satellite record -- they're all +0.16C/decade. The only major global temperature index that's noticeably lower is UAH, at +0.14. -
Will at 05:11 AM on 26 August 2010Greenhouse effect has been falsified
KR Glass is not opaque to IR either. See here: "The Diurnal Bulge and the Fallacies of the Greenhouse Effect."Moderator Response: To save us the trouble of editing your links, be sure not to include an extra space and line-break inside the quotation marks with the link URL. For example, use
<img width="450" src="http://image_url/">
rather than
<img width="450" src="http://image_url/
"> -
Will at 05:08 AM on 26 August 2010Greenhouse effect has been falsified
Ned I think I said EXPERIMENTAL verification! Please don't "Science of Doom" me. As for Photosynthetic efficiency which is just one part of the effect I'm referring to, 2% is a stab in the dark. While it is claimed that crops such as wheat may achieve low efficiency of between 1-4%, sugar cain can achieve 7%, but photosynthesis is just one process plants use energy for. Oxygen production is another. The point is that very little of the energy is converted to IR compared to say concrete slabs or Earth. At my site you find direct reproducible experimental evidence that pure CO2 causes less warming than ordinary air. Tom Dayton Wikipedia, please ? ! Go to the two links I have given above. The DIurnal Bulge has been deliberately hidden in plain view by renaming it as the Thermosphere. On the dark side of the Earth there is no Thermosphere. Therefore the Thermosphere is not a layer, it is a giant bulge on the sunny side. -
fydijkstra at 05:07 AM on 26 August 2010Hansen etal hit a Climate Home Run -- in 1981
Interesting! But is it a good idea to check Hansen's predictions with his own GISS-data? The fact that GISS-data are so much higher than the other datasets makes me suspicious. What if you do the same analysis with HadCRUT or satellite data? -
Greenhouse effect has been falsified
Berényi - "...if you removed half the nitrogen from the atmosphere, the Earth would freeze over completely...". Really? Are you talking about the lapse rate? If's just the lapse rate you could swap nitrogen for argon or krypton (distinctly NOT greenhouse gases) with no effect. I would love to see your reasoning (and math) for this non-GHG effect, as I don't see how that would occur. -
Greenhouse effect has been falsified
Will - An important point in the atmospheric greenhouse effect (which as Ned notes is not the same thing as a glass greenhouse in operation) is that GHG's aren't opaque to IR. They absorb thermal IR from the ground as per Berényi's post, and emit it again spherically distributed. This causes half of what they absorb to go back to the ground, which shows up clearly in the notches of the first chart of Figure 1. -
Berényi Péter at 04:08 AM on 26 August 2010Greenhouse effect has been falsified
#15 KR at 01:40 AM on 26 August, 2010 Nitrogen doesn't absorb/emit in the IR, and in fact most of it's absorption is in the UV True. It has no "greenhouse effect" whatsoever. Still, if you removed half the nitrogen from the atmosphere, the Earth would freeze over completely down to the very bottom of oceans. And if you raised its quantity twofold, global temperatures would go up by 40°C, cooking all of us for good. That much about the alleged 33°C warming from GHGs. -
Tom Dayton at 03:59 AM on 26 August 2010Greenhouse effect has been falsified
Will, please look up the definition of thermosphere. It is a layer of the atmosphere. The atmosphere is a poor conductor only relative to other substances (e.g., solid metal). That is irrelevant to this topic. What is relevant is the atmosphere's absolute conductivity. In a greenhouse or anywhere else, sunlight hitting leaves heats the leaves. Go find a plant that is exposed to sun. Put your hand on a leaf that is exposed to sun and compare its temperature to that of a leaf that is in the shade. You are correct that some of the sunlight hitting the leaf is consumed by photosynthesis, and that some is reflected, but some is absorbed as heat. -
Ned at 03:55 AM on 26 August 2010Greenhouse effect has been falsified
And, of course, Figure 1 in the very post at the top of this thread is direct evidence of the CO2 greenhouse effect. -
Ned at 03:50 AM on 26 August 2010Greenhouse effect has been falsified
Will, the troposphere is mostly heated from below, not from above, as KR notes above. The use of a glass greenhouse to illustrate the greenhouse effect is only appropriate at a coarse "end result" level, not as an actual model of how the CO2-induced GHE actually works. But in any case, the sunlight entering a (glass) greenhouse warms all dark surfaces within the space (floor, plant leaves, whatever). It doesn't significantly provide any direct warming of the air molecules inside the greenhouse. The air is warmed by contact with the various surfaces that are absorbing sunlight. Photosynthetic efficiency for most plants is less than 2%, and less than 10% in virtually all cases. Most of the sunlight absorbed by plant leaves just raises their temperature (directly) and that of the air around them (indirectly). Finally, there's experimental verification of the CO2 greenhouse effect -- see here or here (and continue on to parts two and three as well). -
Will at 03:30 AM on 26 August 2010Greenhouse effect has been falsified
Ned: The Thermosphere is not a sphere it is a bulge. The Diurnal Atmospheric Bulge and the Thermosphere are one and the same. The Diurnal Atmospheric Bulge (Thermosphere) is caused entirely by incoming EMR. I never said there was a connection between the "greenhouse effect" and the Thermosphere. I said there is no "greenhouse effect". I have proven this with experimental verification on my website at the following link: "The Diurnal Atmospheric Bulge, giant 1200º bulge of rapidly heated and expanding gases circling the Globe 24/7." KR: The atmosphere (air) is a excellent insulator and therefore a poor conductor. It exhibits various temperature gradient inversions. Partly because it is such a good insulator and partly because it is heated from the top-down by incoming EMR. All mysteries explained. Which way up is the temperature gradient in a greenhouse? Like I said before, a greenhouse still functions perfectly well with a full canopy of leaves shielding the ground completely from direct sunlight. 40-50% of the incoming sunlight hitting the leaves is locked in by photosynthesis and the rest is reflected as short-wave. No direct sunlight reaches the ground yet the greenhouse still warms that same as an empty one would. Where is the "greenhouse effect" bottom-up warming in this scenario? When your theory generates more questions than it answers, this is a clue that you are traveling away from the truth. When your theory is still awaiting experimental verification after 200 years . . . . . ? -
CBDunkerson at 03:12 AM on 26 August 2010Pakistan flood: many more will die unless more aid is delivered quickly
The high human population of the planet does play in to CO2 emissions, but population GROWTH specifically does not... precisely because that growth occurs in the areas which do NOT have high CO2 emissions. Environmental problems in general are different (and off topic) than CO2 emissions specifically. Getting back down to 350 ppm does not require a return to pre-industrial technology. If it did it would never happen. Instead, the obvious path to lower CO2 emissions is power generation from sources other than fossil fuels. -
muoncounter at 03:00 AM on 26 August 2010Warming causes CO2 rise
#2:"seasonal variations of these magnitudes must make it extremely difficult to be sure that the annual global increase of perhaps 2ppm is being accurately isolated. " I disagree. Seasonal amplitude is not the same as year-to-year rate of increase. Look from year to year at successive peaks and troughs and you find consistency in the annual growth rate.
I've done this with several arctic stations where the seasonal amplitude is as high as 15ppm; what was 1-1.5 ppm in the '70s is now 2-2.25 ppm. And that rise matches the growth in CO2 emissions from fossil fuel use quite well.
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Kernos at 02:42 AM on 26 August 2010Pakistan flood: many more will die unless more aid is delivered quickly
CBDunkerson #15: "China and India have long had huge populations... but their CO2 emissions were virtually non-existent until they began to industrialize." Which they are doing now and will be doing more of in the future. And, is it not largely farmers that clear land to grow crops? I think saying human population, global or regional, has nothing to do with global warming and other human environmental impacts is simply specious. "So again... no significant 'negative feedback' on CO2 emissions from natural disasters. At least not any time in the near future. " Is not one of the causes of environmental problems, short term thinking/ Should we not be thinking in the long term, say a millennium from now? "...how well technology has kept up with allowing us to adapt to the climate." I think the goal to not to adapt, but to turn back to pre-industrial levels, or say to 350 ppm, as some suggest. I certainly don't want coastal city dwellers inundating my grandkids as they all run for higher ground. Besides, these human disasters may be the only thing to get the politicians thinking beyond the next election. Or is that just wishful thinking? I do not think the environmental problems can be solved without taking human population(s) into account. -
Greenhouse effect has been falsified
Will - on your note that 79% of the atmosphere is completely missing: I assume you mean N2? Nitrogen doesn't absorb/emit in the IR, and in fact most of it's absorption is in the UV. Hence it's usually not shown on most charts of greenhouse gases - it's irrelevant to the IR spectra. -
Greenhouse effect has been falsified
Will - There's definitely heating from the sun involved in atmospheric expansion. Looking at the energy balances from Trenberth 2009 roughly 78 W/m^2 of sunlight are directly absorbed by the atmosphere. Another 161 get absorbed by the ground/water. However, what's emitted by the top of the atmosphere (as LW radiation) is ~169 W/m^2 - partly re-emission of atmospheric energy, mostly emission from ground/water thermal energy that has percolated up through multiple absorption/emission events. And the temperature profile of the atmosphere shows warming of the troposphere and cooling of the stratosphere - if this was all top-down warming you would see a hot stratosphere and colder troposphere, relatively speaking. The observed temp profile is one of the fingerprints of the greenhouse gas effect. So yes, some top-down heating does occur. But it's mostly bottom-up, as most of the solar irradiation goes through the atmosphere to the ground, only returning as IR. I would say that the diurnal bulging of the atmosphere is due to the atmosphere warming - because days are warmer than nights. But the temp profile clearly shows that it's warming from the bottom (IR), not the top (solar).
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