Eventually we’ll get to the good news

View 799 Monday, November 18, 2013

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

 

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

 

What we have now is all we will ever have.

Conservationist motto

 

If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan.

Barrack Obama, famously.

The general media has been desperate to find some good news, but there hasn’t been much, and now the story is out that the typhoon in Asia and the late tornadoes in Illinois are indications of climate change due to man-made CO2. It’s global warming manifesting itself.

That seems clear enough to many pundits but it’s not clear to me, particularly because we don’t seem to have had any global warming in the past decade, and I don’t know any mechanism for generating monster typhoons and late season tornadoes in cyclone alley and points north and east. It may be informative to look at speculations about what will come in 2013 made back at the early days of the tornado season: http://www.climatecentral.org/news/an-in-depth–look-at-tornadoes-climate-change-15745 .

Whatever one concludes about the increase of CO2 – which is certainly happening – we need to remember one thing: CO2 is not a very effective greenhouse gas compared to water vapor. As Freeman Dyson has reminded us for years, CO2 isn’t going to have much of a warming effect except in cold, dry places. Now one theory of CO2 and climate is that the CO2 warms things up enough to increase the water vapor which increases the greenhouse effect, but so far that is more speculation than theory: to the best of my knowledge there aren’t any interesting and tested models incorporating that effect.

Climate science is a very complex matter, but there are some clear facts that need to be kept in mind.

One is that CO2 is definitely increasing. We know how to measure it, and we have a good place to measure it from: the top of Mauna Loa at an altitude where atmosphere gasses are well mixed, and there are prevailing winds bringing continuous new samples. Exactly how long it has been since CO2 levels reached what they are isn’t settled because we don’t have such good measurements for past times, but it appears to be about 50 million years ago, at a time when the earth was considerably warmer, the seas were much higher, and the earth for some reason was beginning to cool and the CO2 and sea levels beginning to drop.

Second, while we can come to some agreement as to what temperatures are now, they aren’t all that good. They are getting better but it’s damned hard to come up with a good measure accurate to a tenth of a degree for the right now temperature in your house, or your neighborhood, or your city, or your county, or your nation, or your continent. What do you measure?

The best, I would submit, would be the globe temperature outside exposed to the sky and elements: that would be the temperature inside a standard copper globe painted black inside and out. This measures the combined radiant and conductive temperature, and what most of us would say reflects whether it’s warm or cold. But of course that isn’t what is usually measured even in your living room. Now we want the average temperature in your house, and it gets more complicated. Do we use a globe in each room? Do we skip any rooms? Do we give equal weight to the temperature in the kitchen, the bed rooms (which are not of equal size), the bath room, the TV room? What about the screened in back porch which we spend a lot of time on in summer and fall but not winter?

And as you make the area larger the complexities increase. Global temperature? Land or water? All right, both. Equal weights? By area? Surface or at depths? Wait, we don’t have the atmosphere. While we are at it, getting the temperature in your back yard – do we take that in the sun or the shade? Don’t forget that if we take it at night exposed to the stars, it can get quite cold: the Romans used to make ice cream in the Sahara by exposing a straw lined pit to the stars at night, and covering it with highly polished metal shields in the day time; the straw and the shields kept it from warming up in there, and exposure to the stars exposed it to a radiant environment not far above absolute zero. So I hang my globe thermometer at two meters height where it is exposed to the sky: how many steradians are exposed to sky and how many to fences or buildings? That will make a big difference on a clear starry night, far bigger than the 0.1 degree accuracy we need to discern global warming.

And we haven’t yet got an 0.1 degree accurate temperature for my back yard, much less my neighborhood or city or region or continent, and we’re still talking about land temperatures.

My point is that the assumption that we know the average temperature of the earth to a tenth of a degree is at least disputable, and the belief that the different temperatures we do have taken in the various places we get them from all make use of the same instruments in the same conditions is absolutely and verifiably false.

And we haven’t even got started yet, and it’s time to have lunch with my wife. We’ll continue this later.

What I hope we can conclude is that while we have a very accurate measure of world CO2 atmospheric levels, we are nowhere near that in coming up with a single measure of global temperature. It is clear that we don’t use the same measures year after year, either. Sometimes they change. Sometimes entire regions don’t report and interpolations have to be used. All of this establishes trends, but to claim accuracies to 0.1 degree C with high confidence is absurd; and even conceding a capability to compare a number representing the average temperature of the globe for 365 days to a comparable number from a year ago, we certainly have no way to compare that to temperatures in the 1800’s when sea temperatures like as not came from putting a mercury thermometer into a bucket of water hauled up onto the deck, and most regions of the earth didn’t report any temperature at all on a daily or even weekly basis.

What we do know is that while the CO2 level has risen dramatically in the past 100 years, the temperatures have not. They have certainly fallen and risen dramatically and undisputedly in the past twelve hundred years. Earth’s climate was considerably warmer then than now, and we have evidence from all over the world. Well, to be exactly accurate, most of that comes from the northern hemisphere, but I know of no theory that allows a really dramatic long term temperature difference between hemispheres so I assume that the whole earth was warmer when there were dairy farms in Greenland, Vines in Nova Scotia then known as Vinland, grapes grown in Scotland and the Border lands, longer crop seasons in continental Europe and China, etc. It’s pretty well undisputed that the climate was all better in Viking times, and stayed that way until just after 1300 when it got to be colder and wetter all over from Greenland to China. By 1500 the climate was colder and wetter everywhere, and there were signs that things had been better in the New World and were now getting worse. In any event the cooling continued to about 1800, after which there was a halt to cooling and a gradual warming. Benjamin Franklin, seeing the dense clouds from erupting volcanoes in Iceland while travelling to Europe, speculated that the volcanic clouds were shading out the sun and causing the climate to be colder, and predicted more glaciers.

Somewhere before 1850 rivers began freezing less solidly in winter, and the spring ice breakups happened earlier and earlier, as recorded in Farmer’s Almanac as well as private diaries. By 1890 the warming trend was obvious, and Arrhenius began his calculation on the effect of increased CO2 from the Industrial Revolution on climate. It was not then considered obvious that warmer weather and longer growing seasons were a bad thing.

 

thermal radiation to space

Jerry:

Your comment about Roman ice cream reminded me of an incident from 1962.

I was stationed in Thailand at the ARPA R&D Field Unit. Our job was to do in-theater research that didn’t require combat involvement (that was done by a sister unit in Saigon). One problem was tracking insurgents who waded through paddy fields after dark. It was suggested to us, by a researcher in the US, that this wading should stir up the water, leaving a warmer trail of water from near the bottom, which would contrast with the cooler water on top, where it lost heat quickly at night. So we simply inserted thermometers at several depths in a pond and measured how quickly the temperature dropped after nightfall. It turned out that the temperature dropped very quickly through the whole column of water. The idea that there would be a layer of cooler water on top of a layer of warmer water was simply wrong. Radiation to space was a very real thing, even in tropical Thailand.

Joseph P. Martino

Which is why clouds are important in any model of climate: cloudy areas do not get exposed to space at night.  Of course they don’t get the blazing Sun in daytimes.  And in cold dry places CO2 will definitely have an effect.  In damp areas the water vapor will have absorbed all the re-radiated energy leaving none for the CO2 to affect.

 

 

More on this theme later this week.  Meanwhile:

 

Hello Jerry,

I know you like opera, so I thought I would pass this one on to you, just in case it hasn’t already ‘passed through’

http://videos.komando.com/watch/4333/viral-videos-9-year-old-opera-singer-stuns-all?utm_medium=nl&utm_source=tvkim&utm_content=2013-11-09-article-screen-shot-f

Enjoy.

Bob Ludwick=

All I can say is WOW! Brava!

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.