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When I did these simple sanity checks, they supported the IPCC statements and not the people who claimed that there was no problem.
This is not an argument from authority: Any moderately numerate person should be able to follow my reasoning, and I would like to know how this could come up with any other answer.
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And those are key points: simple sanity checks (and to be willing to do them), being at least a moderately numerate person
To compare with that, you have the only attempt of being numerate that Malcolm did so far which is in his post #5592
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Over the long term global temperature depends on energy entering the atmosphere vs energy leaving the atmosphere and the point at which these two reach a balance.
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We agree. I'm still trying to understand how the surface temperature can depend on anything other than solar output and the radius of the Earth's orbit. Obviously it does, since there's a fairly regular 24-hour cycle in surface temperature where I live and the 8000 mile variation in the distance between me and the sun seems to small, compared to the 90 million+ mile total, to have the daily 10
o F. or so effect that I observe.
Suppose some friendly space aliens told us tommorow that, starting 200 years ago, they had surrounded 200 sunlike-stars with spherical shells of various diameter, thickness, and material composition. They selected these stars and the time of construction such that next week Tuesday at 1200 GMT we would see all of these stars wink out at once and then, over time, begin to glow at a frequency determined by the diameter of the shell and the material of its composition. Eventually, the total energy flux
h would depend only on the energy output of the star, and the flux per square meter of shell surface would then depend on
h and the diameter of the shell. Right?
Let's construct hollow stainless steel spheres 2 feet in diameter, with a sight glass that lets us look inside. Let's then suspend thermometers on cotton string (non-condicting) inside the spheres, evacuate them as much as possible and bury them underground at depths (to center) of 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and 64 feet. Cameras mounted outside periodically photograph the thermometers. What will we see? A daily fluctuation that depends on depth, right? An annual mean temperature that depends on latitude and altitude and nothing else (barring geothermal sources or nearby ocean currents), right?
Let's fill these spheres with various gasses to various pressure and rebury them. What will we see? Because we are basically measuring soil temperature the type of gas and the pressure may influence how rapidly the thermometers reflect outside variation, but the total energy input to the thermometer cannot depend on the pressure or type of gas, right?
Let's dig them up and send them into orbit around the sun. Won't the temperature reported depend only on the radius at which they orbit?
Baby steps in the argument. Please expand.
Let's do the autopsy of such a travesty.
1) Notice the "We agree" in the beginning. We'll come back to this later.
2) He begins a speculation where a numeric little argument is made to say that the "daily" variation of the distance from what is local to him to the sun is meaningless to explain the daily -yet regular- variation in local temperature, so little farther, little closer seems not to be the cause. Nothing is said about day-night, because it's too obvious? well, then, why bothering in analysing the distance?
3) We arrive nowhere and all the paragraph is supposed to say "average Earth-Sun distance is what matters". An assertion, not a conclusion.
4) A different line of argumentation starts (the extraterrestrial loop). Notice the vocabulary choice: "glow at a frequency". That's not bad at all by itself but it promises the lack of knowledge on basic principles and methodology if the person is highly verbally skilled -in relative terms-. The paragraph is intended to show that striking different departures of the same experiment arrive to results that can be categorized the same way (steady state), and that is frequently sold as "different departures arrive to the same outcome" which is intended as a self-regulation of some sort when it is instead "the same kind of structure produce the same kind of results" which really means "Physics has laws, duh!". But we don't know yet where is Malcolm going. I only have to say that I've observed that more than a half of these pseudo-sceptical arguments in scientific vestment are playing with this disregard of basic physics while presenting parts of the same basic physics as "deep sensible knowledge" (double entendre of the "sensible" part) on the subject that they have and their opponents lack.
5) Malcolm has brought us nowhere yet as it was a prologue. Here comes the core:
6) A experiment is started with spheres. Those spheres are going to be the same all along the experiments. Some modifications affecting very small areas will change result only in an imperceptible way. It is important that those spheres are the same all along the experiment, otherwise different conclusions can be made.
7) The underground phase of the experiments begins. Besides the candid approach of a sphere buried 64 feet and having "daily fluctuations of temperature", we only can conclude that the spheres will follow the kind of things buried stainless steel spheres follow in these circumstances. By supposing a
ceteris paribus of the earth core, Malcolm soon discover the law of conservation of energy and that vacuum spheres, saber-toothed cat skulls and a Buick Skylark 64 with Jimmy Hoffa's body in it, all of them buried the same deep in the same place sooner or later reach the same temperature and follow what the external source of energy "imposes" to them. The problem is what is the "external source of energy" (remember:
"barring geothermal sources ...").
8) Well, here is when the magic trick is done. Let's recapitulate first what was going on: Basically different systems suffer transient states but they arrive to steady states in their own time. A lot of identical spheres experience the same if placed in similar conditions. First order platitudes.
Now the spheres start their spacial loop and the reasoning comes quickly to an end. The spheres are sent to different locations around the sun and it is asked if the temperature will depend on the distance to the sun. Remember, you are not allowed to make changes in the spheres, all identical. That is, there's just one variable in the problem and all the rest is
ceteris paribus including the spheres. Like the magic trick, our attention has been carefully misguided to a "conclusion". The matter here is that we better place the spheres in the same "circular" orbit and start changing their surface. For instance, we paint one sphere black and another sphere white. Malcolm, does the temperature depends just on the distance to the sun? Do you know for instance what "albedo" is? Why don't we place the spheres in a way they always face the sun from one side, then let's paint one sphere black in its side facing the sun and white the opposite side and another sphere choosing the opposite colours. Malcolm, does the temperature depends just on the distance to the sun? Let's make some spheres transparent, ...
9) We only arrive to the conclusion that the experiment only points the the circumstances of the experiment itself. The humongous
ceteris paribus in this experiment is not what is needed to arrive to a sound conclusion but what is needed to:
a) Hide the inability to analyse dynamic systems.
b) Hide the inability to analyse complex systems.
c) Hide the lack of ability to potentially distinguish between a function, its derivative and its primitive, so only a "stock" variable or a "flow" variable is considered, yet the outcome has to be "a constant value" otherwise the analysis feels iffy.
d) More important, to hide the absence of skills and education to select a proper set of variables to pay attention to.
e) Even more important, to hide the absence of skills and education to change the parameters and make a sensitivity analysis (not sure how you say that in English)
f) And even more important, to hide the inability to design the experiment itself and to accept feedback from others.
I suppose, jimbob, there were circumstances in your analysis when you arrived at a striking different conclusion or a conclusion that violated the principles of the different natural sciences involved, then you checked your calculations and found some mistake you've done and didn't claim "scam!" instead. That happens to every person who has both education and good will. Well, that's not the case with the deniers of the world. Malcolm probably feels that his blunders in this debate are excusable as he is a "humble"
fellow but McIntyre and Dyson remain to be right. It's the attitude of a pawn of a higher cause.
EDIT:
I forgot to comment on 1). Malcolm considered that the astronomical position of the earth and the steady state that is reached "at last" are equivalent to equilibrium in energy transactions in high atmosphere.
