Atmospheric CO2 has gone up 20% since 1960

[Wangler]

Sorry, but not being able to get published is a pretty good smell test for a scientific assertion. The process is fairly lax and some pretty marginal ideas get through. An idea that cannot is normally a non-starter.

Do we know that he even submitted the work to Science, or another journal?

 

[Wangler]

Good counterpoints, Doc.

But, when you mention:

These changes will not show directly in temperature

in regards to the glaciers, while the temperature isn't changing, surely the emissivity does change?

If you have 10% of earth covered by snow and ice, the emissivity is different than if 9% is covered by snow and ice.

 

[lomiller]

If CO2 causes radiative forcing, shouldn't any given warming period have turned Earth into a boiling cauldron, devoid of live?

No, not ever close, that just isn't how feedback loops work. An amplified positive feedback loop can run away, but since we have no gain that isn’t likely to happen from CO2. Instead, what happens is the loop converges on a limiting value.

The value it converges on is entirely determined by the forcing and the characteristics of the feedback loop itself. For a positive feedback look the result is to *magnify* the result of *any* forcing. (A negative feedback look would attenuate the result of any forcing)

If you had a feedback loop that resolved to 3 deg/W and

If you had an increase in solar activity that would result it a 1 deg change without the feedback, with the feedback you would get 3 deg or warming

If that solar activity revered that negative forcing would also be amplified to cause 3 deg of *cooling*

Unless you hit a non-linearity (tipping point) an increase or decrease in forcing followed by a decrease to the original value would always result in the output returning to the original value. If you hit a tipping point all bets are off, however.

 

[lomiller]

Do we know that he even submitted the work to Science, or another journal?

If he has and it gets published then we can deal with it then no?

I don’t know about you but I simply don’t have the time to go over every bit of crackpot science that someone promises is really important and could overturn all the established science even though it never has and likely never will be published. Indeed it’s relativity easy to spin out this type of crap far faster then it could possibly be debunked. This is exactly the tactic used by nearly every piece of woo that crosses this forum.

 

[Hindmost]

It’s like déjà poo all over again.

 

[MervinFerd]

Anybody ever notice how these denialist threads eventually extend toward infinity, asymptotically approaching complete frustration?

 

[macdoc]

Meanwhile the physics of energy retention continues.....silly monkeys - foul their only nest then try and deny doing it.....must be cosmic.....

 

[mhaze]

Sorry, but not being able to get published is a pretty good smell test for a scientific assertion. The process is fairly lax and some pretty marginal ideas get through. An idea that cannot is normally a non-starter.

Yawn. McIntyre has published articles on climate science.

The laughable thing here, though is that you - unwittingly - and Macdoc - ignorantly - ad hom some equation work by McIntyre.

Those equations and the level of that analysis is College 100 Pre Calculus. You are literally saying that some basic math cannot be considered unless it was "published". I do agree that if you cannot comprehend that level of discourse, you should make up some reason why you must remain blind to it.

 

[DogB]

...Instead, what happens is the loop converges on a limiting value.

The value it converges on is entirely determined by the forcing and the characteristics of the feedback loop itself. For a positive feedback look the result is to *magnify* the result of *any* forcing. (A negative feedback look would attenuate the result of any forcing)

You mind if we go into this a little. I want to be sure of what you’re saying.

If you had a feedback loop that resolved to 3 deg/W and

Do you mean 3deg of warming?

If you had an increase in solar activity that would result it a 1 deg change without the feedback, with the feedback you would get 3 deg or warming

So the feedback component is causing 2deg?

If that solar activity revered that negative forcing would also be amplified to cause 3 deg of *cooling*

Unless you hit a non-linearity (tipping point) an increase or decrease in forcing followed by a decrease to the original value would always result in the output returning to the original value. If you hit a tipping point all bets are off, however.

This is what I don’t get. CO2 (for instance) is never a negative forcing. If, in the above example, the CO2 is causing 2 of the 3 deg of warming then even if the solar contribution reverses the CO2 is still causing 2 deg of warming. The temp might drop that 1 deg which will cause some of the released CO2 to reincorporate thus lowering the temp more but I fail to see how you can get back to the initial state. That implies that all of the extra CO2 is reincorporated but that behaviour must occur at a higher temp than the base level.

I can’t see how you wouldn’t end up with a new baseline which is fractionally warmer than before. Unless of course there’s a corresponding negative feedback mechanism which forces the temperature back down to the old base level.

Does that make sense?

 

[BenBurch]

Yawn. McIntyre has published articles on climate science.
...

Cites?

 

[macdoc]

DogB - lowering C02 IS a negative forcing and is a feedback leading to a glacial age.

Only life forms and a few types of rocks can actively absorb C02 enough to drop the atmospheric C02 in any sort of human scale time frame and that then will feed on itslef - the earth gets cooler, the oceans absorb more C02

This might help explain how we could harness that and why forests are so critical

Forest a Desert, Cool the World

By Mason Inman
ScienceNOW Daily News
14 September 2009

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2009/914/2

snip

Ornstein says that if most of the Sahara and Australian outback were planted with fast-growing trees like eucalyptus, the forests could draw down about 8 billion tons of carbon a year--nearly as much as people emit from burning fossil fuels and forests today

•••
DogB

. That implies that all of the extra CO2 is reincorporated

It will be but the baseline is incredibly long - 100k years - that's why in our terms - carbon is forever.

 

[Dancing David]

There are set points in the earth's history that are considerably higher than recent set points, it would be very difficult for us and our society as it exists to live in one where the temperature is at a much higher average than now. (I forget the difference it is rather significant)

The cycle does not always return to our recent average. It can stay considerably warmer for geological scales.

 

[G O R T]

So temps go up a bit which releases CO2 which makes temps go up faster which releases even larger amounts of CO2...

Not a very good model!

What problem exactly do you have with that model?

This idea is common now and is the basis for explaining "Global Warming".
Hansen et al. 2005 (GisTemp/NASA) gets rather long winded about how CO2 is the main factor both now (anthropogenic) and during earlier glacial cycles.

But does it make sense?

If temperature and CO2 reinforce each other in the upward direction, they would not go down easily nor quickly. But they do!

Variations in insolation due to Milankovitch cycles are really quite small. A positive swing in insolation could well cause them (temps and CO2) to mutally increase, but a removal of that extra insolation could never cause them to plummet. Temperature and CO2 effects would have become self supporting. CO2 holds in the heat, and the higher temps prevent CO2 from going back into the oceans.

Something forces temperatures back down at a high rate. Viewed over a long timescale, temperatures rapidly oscillate above and below the mean temperature change. Drops in CO2 can also be rapid but the amplitude invariably seem to lag the temperature drops. This is always ignored, but needs an explanation. Vague allusions to other greenhouse gasses are not enough and indeed make no sense.

In addition, the Stefan-Boltzmann law applies directly only to Black Bodies. The Earth with its greenhouse gasses is NOT a Black Body.

 

[Wangler]

In addition, the Stefan-Boltzmann law applies directly only to Black Bodies. The Earth with its greenhouse gasses is NOT a Black Body.

Err, the law does apply, and it's not just for black bodies.

That's why the previous poster wrote the power form of the law with the emissivity included.

 

[bobdroege7]

In addition, the Stefan-Boltzmann law applies directly only to Black Bodies. The Earth with its greenhouse gasses is NOT a Black Body.

Big deal, the equation still provides a general idea of the amount and frequency of the radiation emitted by the earth.

The balance of the incoming and outgoing radiations still determine whether the earth is cooling or warming. Whether the forcing is cooling or warming.

Planck and all the quantum mechanics still rule the day.

 

[lomiller]

If temperature and CO2 reinforce each other in the upward direction, they would not go down easily nor quickly. But they do!

Read my previous post on feedback loops, your understanding of how such reinforcement behaves is fundamentally wrong. You are committing a classic argument from ignorance, just because you don’t understand the science and math involved does not mean it’s incorrect or that it isn’t well understood by others.

As mentioned above feedback amplifies temperature movements in *both* directions. When something causes temperature to drop, CO2 is absorbed causing more cooling, which causes a further temperature drop.

 

[mhaze]

... ETA- The emissivity would slow the decent of temperature over an interval if the change in emissivity brought about by increased solar activity (*or human activity), so that a large change in emissivity would result in the slope UP in temperature having a little bit steeper magnitude than the slope back DOWN (this appears to be the case in the graphs I have seen).

I agree. Your approach is reasonable. Given the stated limits of the theory and variables used for the analysis, the conclusions follow.

You may find this of interest - more later but I've just ran out of available time!

"Greenhouse effect in semi-transparent planetary atmospheres" 2007, Ferenc M. Miskolszi

Abstract—In this work the theoretical relationship between the clear-sky outgoing infrared radiation and the surface upward radiative flux is explored by using a realistic finite semi-transparent atmospheric model. We show that the fundamental relationship between the optical depth and source function contains real boundary condition parameters. We also show that the radiative equilibrium is controlled by a special atmospheric transfer function and requires the continuity of the temperature at the ground surface. The long standing misinterpretation of the classic semi-infinite Eddington solution has been resolved. Compared to the semi-infinite model the finite semi-transparent model predicts much smaller ground surface temperature and a larger surface air temperature. The new equation proves that the classic solution significantly overestimates the sensitivity of greenhouse forcing to optical depth perturbations. In Earth-type atmospheres sustained planetary greenhouse effect with a stable ground surface temperature can only exist at a particular planetary average flux optical depth of 1.841 . Simulation results show that the Earth maintains a controlled greenhouse effect with a global average optical depth kept close to this critical value. The broadband radiative transfer in the clear Martian atmosphere follows different principle resulting in different analytical relationships among the fluxes. Applying the virial theorem to the radiative balance equation we present a coherent picture of the planetary greenhouse effect.


References and background material:

PHYSICS OF THE PLANETARY GREENHOUSE EFFECT
2008 INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON GLOBAL WARMING New York, New York, March 2-4, 2008 PHYSICS OF THE PLANETARY GREENHOUSE EFFECT Dr. Ferenc M. Miskolczi 3 Holston Lane, Hampton, VA 23664, USA, e-mail: f
http://www.heartland.org/bin/media/newyork08/PowerPoint/Tues...

Ferenc M. Miskolczi Greenhouse effect in semi-transparent planetary atmospheres IDŐJÁRÁS, Quarterly Journal of the Hungarian Meteorological Service, Vol. 111, No. 1, January–March 2007, pp. 1–40 *

Miklós Zágoni, An Introduction into the Greenhouse Theory of Ferenc Miskolczi, http://hps.elte.hu/zagoni/Miskolczi/hartcode_v01.pdf {LINK not working 2008/12/17.

Ferenc M. Miskolczi and Martin G. Mlynczak The greenhouse effect and the spectral decomposition of the clear-sky terrestrial radiation IDŐJÁRÁS, Quarterly Journal of the Hungarian Meteorological Service, Vol. 108, No. 4, October–December 2004, pp. 209–251

Ken Gregory The Saturated Greenhouse Effect June 2008

An introductory review -
http://landshape.org/enm/greenhouse...-planetary-atmospheres-by-miskolczi-a-review/

Discussion
http://heliogenic.blogspot.com/2008/10/miskolczi-climate-model.html

More discussion
http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2009/05/the-work-of-ferenc-miskolczi-part-1/

Critical presumption of optical depth
http://www.climateaudit.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=556

 

[Wangler]

Ferenc M. Miskolczi Greenhouse effect in semi-transparent planetary atmospheres IDŐJÁRÁS, Quarterly Journal of the Hungarian Meteorological Service, Vol. 111, No. 1, January–March 2007, pp. 1–40 *

Mhaze, the "Quarterly Journal of the Hungarian Meteorological Service"?

Are you serious?

What's the IMPACT of that journal? Where does it rate in the cite databases?

This paper's probably not even worth a speed read.

Sheesh.

One man's garbage is a deniers treasure, I guess.

 

[lomiller]

Do you mean 3deg of warming?

No. While some transfer functions are unitless, this one can’t be. The earth heats or cools in response the energy flux at the top of the atmosphere which has a unit of J/s (Which is W) but what we get at the other side is a change in temperature. The transfer function must have the correct units to go from W to T.

So the feedback component is causing 2deg?

That’s probably not a good way of looking at it since you can’t really separate the effects. Open loop gain in a feedback system isn’t really a physical quantity, it only exists in the math. In some manmade systems you can pull out the feedback and see it directly, but that’s not the case here.

Better to think of the transfer function as a whole. The feedback is part of that transfer function. A transfer function of 3deg/W means if edge of atmosphere energy balance is perturbed by 1 W it will eventually cause 3 deg of warming which is sufficient to cancel out that initial disturbance. (BTW the actual number is believed to be ~3 deg per 4.5W but that only includes short term feedback like water vapor, not long term ones like melting glaciers or oceans/land ecosystems releasing CO2.)

This is what I don’t get. CO2 (for instance) is never a negative forcing.

A forcing is anything that creates an imbalance in Ein vs Eout at the top of the earths atmosphere. In this case a reduction in CO2 would increase the long wave IR exiting the earths atmosphere. Ein-Eout would go from being 0 to some negative number, which is a negative forcing.

I can’t see how you wouldn’t end up with a new baseline which is fractionally warmer than before.

As I pointed out above, the transfer function applies equally to warming and cooling. As long as the system is approximately linear that is. For a non-linear system this may not be true, hence the concept of a tipping point.

 

[lomiller]

Big deal, the equation still provides a general idea of the amount and frequency of the radiation emitted by the earth.

The balance of the incoming and outgoing radiations still determine whether the earth is cooling or warming. Whether the forcing is cooling or warming.

Planck and all the quantum mechanics still rule the day.

Yes and No. The surface of the Earth responds approximately as a black body, so it’s still useful for determining the characteristics of the energy that must ultimately escape the top of the atmosphere, but the greenhouse gasses in between create a layer of thermal resistance that must be overcome. This means the earth is ~33 deg warmer then Stephan Boltzman would otherwise predict for a planet with no atmosphere.