The Work of Ferenc Miskolczi (Part 1)
Posted by jennifer, May 2nd, 2009 - under Opinion.
Tags: Climate & Climate Change
OUR understanding of the natural world does not progress through the straight forward accumulation of facts because most scientists tend to gravitate to the established popular consensus also known as the established paradigm. Thomas Kuhn describes the development of scientific paradigms as comprising three stages: prescience, normal science and revolutionary science when there is a crisis in the current consensus. When it comes to the science of climate change, we are probably already in the revolution state. In particular there is growing concern that some of the physics underpinning the IPCC climate models may be flawed. The work of Ferenc Miskolczi is a case in point.
Some years ago this Hungarian physicist, then working for NASA, discovered a flaw in an equation used in the current climate models discovered a flaw in how those constructing the IPCC climate models deal with the issue of the atmosphere’s boundary conditions. In order to progress this research Dr Miskolczi eventually resigned from NASA claiming his supervisors at NASA tried to suppress discussion and publication of his findings which have since been published in IDŐJÁRÁS, The Quarterly Journal of the Hungarian Meteorological Service.
In essence Dr Miskolczi showed that the solution to a differential equation for the greenhouse effect developed in 1922 by Arthur Milne, and central to the current paradigm, wrongly assumed an infinitely thick atmosphere. In re-solving this equation a new term and also a new law of physics have been proposed setting an upper limit to the greenhouse effect. Dr Miskolczi’s theory indicates that any warming from elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide will eventually be offset by a change in atmospheric moisture content.
The idea that water vapour is a negative rather than positive feedback is consistent with the findings of other climate scientists undertaking independent research that is also challenging the current paradigm, for example the work of Dr Roy Spencer.
The importance of the hydrological cycle including water vapour and cloud cover, and how their impacts on the global energy budget should be modelled, have been issues for other climate scientists critical of the current paradigm including Roy Spencer from the University of Alabama, Huntsville, and Henrik Svensmark from the Danish National Space Centre.
Meanwhile another Hungarian Physicist, Miklos Zagoni, has provided the following summary of the new controversial theory:
THE findings of Dr Miskolczi can be set into two groups.
First, really for the first time in the greenhouse literature, he published a global average infrared optical depth (the exact measure of the greenhouse effect) for the Earth’s atmosphere. This calculation was a distillation of all his efforts. He published his empirical estimate for tau, , as 1.87 (a dimensionless quantity, describing the optical thickness of the atmosphere – a technical term meaning the climatologically appropriately weighted global average number of times that a statistically typical longwave photon, emitted by the earth’s warm surface, is absorbed and re-emitted on its way through the atmosphere while escaping into outer space).
The second group of Miskolczi’s findings was two new correlations of measurements. Analyzing all of the fluxes in the atmosphere in all possible relations, he noticed that, in global average, the upward emitted atmospheric infrared radiation is nearly equal to half of the surface upward longwave radiation. And, within the clear atmosphere, he also noticed that the downward radiant emittance is about the same as the atmospheric absorbed radiant flux density upwards from the land-sea surface.
These newly discovered relations surely have their theoretical explanation. But here I do not want to entangle myself in theory, explanations and interpretations of how these relations come about. I just want to stay with the simple facts.
As it happens, these new relations supply a profound new understanding of the old, well-known set of energy balance conditions. Substituting them into the old equations, Miskolczi recognized that a new overall global energetic constraint applies to the atmosphere. This was a principled understanding of why the normalized clear-sky greenhouse factor of the Earth takes the remarkably neat value of g = 1/3 precisely. The Miskolczi relations provided an explanation of how this value represents a critical natural balance. The Earth’s greenhouse effect works dynamically to maintain the value g = 1/3 precisely. Miskolczi recognized that his relations occur in nature on any planet that has an ample ocean of water and a solar heating anywhere near that of the Earth. And, looking to the greenhouse literature, for example to the 2006 Cambridge University Press book Frontiers of Climate Modeling by Kiehl and Ramanathan, we can see that according to those authors, the earth’s clear sky normalized greenhouse factor as a strictly empirical fact is 0.334, or 1/3.
That is to say, the Earth’s atmosphere dynamically keeps its greenhouse effect right at its critical value, regardless of our continuing CO2 emissions, regardless of any change in atmospheric CO2 concentration in the past ten thousand years. Miskolczi’s dynamic constraint keeps the greenhouse effect “climatically saturated”: emitting CO2 into the air cannot increase the normalized greenhouse factor g because any impact of human addition of CO2 is dynamically countered by about 1% decrease of the main greenhouse gas, water vapor (moisture) in the atmosphere. This effect is shown in Miskolczi’s recent presentation based on the NOAA 61 year global atmospheric database.
And finally, putting together his new findings, one can have an ultimate theoretical equation for tau, (the global average infrared optical depth) value and the numerical solution is 1.86756093941252 … .
Now recall: in 2004, by his computer calculations on the TIGR radiosonde empirical measurements, Miskolczi found an observed estimate of 1.87. In 2007, theoretically he derived 1.8676… . And in 2009, on the NOAA 61 year global average database, he found another empirical estimate = 1.86875. According to this database, the atmosphere’s moisture content during 61 years from 1948 to 2008 in global average decreased by about 1%. This amount was the climate process’s automatic dynamic response and was enough to counter the impact of any CO2 and methane increase.
Let us be clear that these results recognise that the surface climate temperature can rise or fall. Of course it can, as it is driven by changing external radiative sources. It is driven mostly by the sun, but also in smaller measure by other natural or human energy sources such as geothermal energy from the interior of the earth or industrial heat generation.
But, remarkably and surprisingly, these results say that the ratio of the surface temperature to the sum of the incoming energies is fixed at a critical value; the ratio cannot be altered by adding a greenhouse gas such as CO2. The climate temperature is fully sensitive to real changes in the external drivers that increase the energy input. But it is not at all sensitive to addition of greenhouse gases such as CO2 to the atmosphere.
************
Notes and Links
Greenhouse effect in semi-transparent planetary atmospheres, by Ferenc M. Miskolczi.
IDŐJÁRÁS, Quarterly Journal of the Hungarian Meteorological Service. Vol. 111, No. 1, January–March 2007, pp. 1–40. http://met.hu/doc/idojaras/vol111001_01.pdf
Dear Nick Stokes,
Please excuse my impatience to hear your reply!
You write: “Let’s take 15μ as a typical blocked frequency. That doesn’t mean that such radiation is absent in the atmosphere – on the contrary, emissivity is very high. The reason that there is little transport at 15μ is that at any point in the atmosphere, below TOA, 15μ radiation comes almost equally from above and below. I think your choice of a bottom 100m layer might be based on a belief that 15μ radiation changes over that interval, and it doesn’t.”
Yes I agree that at any point below the upper optical boundary layer of the troposphere, the 15μ radiation comes almost equally from above and below. This includes the lower optical boundary layer of the troposphere (let’s say the lowest 100 meters). There is most often very vigorous convective and turbulent mixing in the lower optical boundary layer. Because of that, in that lowest 100 meters, the temperature is near enough uniform with no more than a small vertical gradient. To me this means that we do not see a separate radiative transport of heat in the lower optical boundary layer nor in the bulk of the troposphere. The radiation there is black body internal to the ponderable matter medium, intense as stated by Planck’s law for those wavelengths, but so nearly equal in all directions that all heat transport there is fully described by the conductive-evaporative-condensative-convective term with its inseparable internal radiation. I agree with you that radiation at the non-winodw wavelengths is intense and not steeply varying within those layers, and in particular that it changes only extremely slightly and gradually, hardly at all because of the vigorous convective and turbulent mixing, in the lowest 100 meters. Sometimes we think of the diffusion of heat in the non-window wavelengths there. Fourier’s heat transport law comes to mind. In a word, we are in an effectively opaque medium. (It is different for window wavelength radiation.)
You write: “Convection and LH transport heat, but mainly at lower altitudes. The K&T figures of about 100 W/m2 combined from the surface are justified, and the transport diminishes as you go up. Convection can look spectacular, but on average the heat transported is small compared with radiation, which is happening everywhere all the time. LH transport upwards is basically set by the rate of rainfall downwards, so again is small at high altitudes.”
I agree that radiation in the non-window wavebands is happening there intensely all the time. But I see its directional near-uniformity as meaning that actual heat transport is simply diffusive, by conduction-evaporation-condensation-convection, and not by free radiation, to use the language of Mihalas and Mihalas 1984, see below. Less heat is necessary to warm the more rarefied middle and upper troposphere.
You write: “The source of the heat radiated from TOA at 15μ (and similar blocked wavelengths) has to be IR, and it has to be at frequencies which are transparent enough to travel substantial distances, but absorbed enough to keep the radiating air warm. What happens in your top 3km is this gradual shift of energy from marginal to “blocked” wavelengths, as the blocked wavelengths finally lose their local isotropy and effectively radiate to space.”
In the upper optical boundary layer (let’s say about 3km), there is less and less component intensity downwards because the air there is thinner and cooler, and there is practically no downwards radiation from space. This is where the convected heat is gradually converted into non-window radiation to space, the upwards emission from the atmosphere.
You write: “But KL is actually a law about material properties, emissivity and absorptivity, and not about thermal circumstances. You can look up gas absorptivities; you won’t find separate emissivities (generally), because they are just taken to be the same. Essentially, KL applies whenever the concepts of emissivity and absorptivity are meaningful.”
Mihalas and Mihalas (1984, pages 328-329) are cautious about this: They write “Although (72.14) is certainly satisfactory in the diffusion limit (see Para. 80) where the assumptions stated above hold, it cannot be guaranteed true, and may lead to significant errors, when free transport of radiation occurs, because the radiation field the acquires a nonlocal and/or nonequilibrium character that tends to drive the state of the material away from LTE. We shall analyze the meaning of LTE further in Para. 84; in the meantime we regard it as a computational expedient that sometimes must be used, even when of doubtful validity, to render a problem tractable (e.g., in most radiation hydrodynamics applications).”
As I read this, for non-window radiation, we are in the diffusion limit in the lower optical boundary layer and in the bulk of the troposphere, where there is no free transport of non-window radiation. But not so in the upper optical boundary layer, because there there is free transport of non-window radiation, which is going from that layer to space, with no reply from space. (Of course it is different for window radiation.)
Yours sincerely,
Christopher
Dear Nick Stokes,
You write at May 6th, 2009 at 5:56 pm to cohenite: “S_U is in principle measurable, but in practice noone has tried to survey the earth’s surface with a low altitude IR device, so it is computed from ground temp and S-B.”
I think they are right to compute it from ground temp and S-B, because there is no other way. I think that the conductive-evaporative-condensative-convective transport of heat from the land-sea surface to the lowest troposphere has to taken from the S_U. This means that S_U is in principle not directly measurable by a purely radiometric device. Perhaps one might work out a calorimetric way to measure it indirectly. In this sense I regard it as a theoretical quantity, a kind of proxy for the ground temp.
Yours sincerely,
Christopher
Dear Nick Stokes,
On second thoughts I see that my just previous post is perhaps inaccurate. The conductive-evaporative-condensative-convective heat transport would affect the emissivity of the land-sea surface, I think, so that the radiation would be measured at less than S_U calculated by the surface temp and S_B with unit normalized emissivity. What do you think?
Yours sincerely,
Christopher
Hello Christopher,
“On second thoughts I see that my just previous post is perhaps inaccurate.”
You can measure surface emission with a radiometer.
Thank you Jan. “You can measure surface emission with a radiometer.” How much does the non-radiative (i.e. conductive-evaporative-condensative-convective) heat transfer at the interface affect the normalized emissivity? Why?
Comment from: Christopher Game May 7th, 2009 at 1:25 am
Thank you Jan. “You can measure surface emission with a radiometer.” How much does the non-radiative (i.e. conductive-evaporative-condensative-convective) heat transfer at the interface affect the normalized emissivity? Why?
There is no reason why it should have any effect, outside of its effect on the surface temperature.
To the extent that it cools the surface , it will reduce the radiative flux, which depends on temperature.
I just have to ask this question once in awhile, in hopes that I someday get an answer:
At high noon in the tropics (or even in summer at mid-latitudes), the solar insolation on a clear day is well over 1,100 w/m^2. Using the BB calcs., this is consistent with a surface temperature of about 100 C. It doesn’t get anywhere near this hot, even in the deserts, due to convection and evaporative losses. Now, the conventional hypothesis says that, in addition to this 1100 watts directly from el sol, we also have some amount of “backradiation” from the atmosphere (the “greenhouse effect”). Query: How come it doesn’t get much hotter than 30-40 C?
Comment from: jae May 7th, 2009 at 4:56 am
I just have to ask this question once in awhile, in hopes that I someday get an answer:
At high noon in the tropics (or even in summer at mid-latitudes), the solar insolation on a clear day is well over 1,100 w/m^2. Using the BB calcs., this is consistent with a surface temperature of about 100 C. It doesn’t get anywhere near this hot, even in the deserts, due to convection and evaporative losses. Now, the conventional hypothesis says that, in addition to this 1100 watts directly from el sol, we also have some amount of “backradiation” from the atmosphere (the “greenhouse effect”). Query: How come it doesn’t get much hotter than 30-40 C?
What do you mean by BB calcs? How do you arrive at 100C?
Jae,
OK, I get it. You get 100C if you assume that the solar radiation at noon has heated the surface to a temperature at which it would emit the 1100W/M^2.
This is the peak radiation impinging on the surface from the sun during the day.
This is only correct of the effective heat capacity per M2 of the surface is zero or the heat conductivity is zero.
Since neither of these is zero, the temperature rise will have to be considerably less. The fact that the heat capacity of desert sand, and the penetration depth of the radiation and heat is low, relative to the ocean makes its surface get warmer than the ocean, and increases the range of diurnal temperature variation.
If you dig into the desert sand during the day, the lower you go, up to a point, the cooler it gets.
You will get to a point in depth where temperature is very even over a diurnal cycle.
You have no means of reasonably estimating the peak surface temperature unless you know the heat conductivity and heat capacity, and look at the variation of radiation over a diurnal cycle. Of course you will also need to add in the clear air greenhouse effect, and convection as well. For the desert, the water vapor will not contribute much to the greenhouse effect.
I hope I have answered your question. Once I understood what you meant by BB calc, the answer was quite easy and elementary. It is puzzling to me that you have asked this question many times, and not received an answer.
Christopher
On radiation transport, imbalance etc:
Do you know about Modtran? There’s a Web interface here. You can set an imaginary radiometer to any height, looking up or down, under various climatic conditions, and it returns IR values. You can see the spectrum.
I ran it for the USST-76, no clouds or rain, at heights corresponding to pressures 1030, 500 and 100 mbar. Here are the IR fluxes. I’ve padded with dots, hoping that html will preserve the spacing:
Ht………P…….Up.IR…..Down.IR….Nett IR
0km….1030…..361,,,,..258…….103
6.5km…500…..289…….83…….206
16km….100…..261…….14…….247
What does it mean? Remember that total heat up at all levels including convection/LH (I’ll call it CLH) must balance SW going down, which is about 235 W/m2 at ground, rising slightly with altitude. So on this calc, CLH is about 132 at ground, dropping to say 35 at 500mb, and almost 0 at 100mb.
Up IR diminishes somewhat with height. The reason is that, as you look down, for blocked wavelengths, instead of warm ground you see IR coming from the colder nearby air.
But down IR diminishes much more, and so nett IR transport rises. The reason is just that there’s less radiating air above. It’s also colder. At highly blocking (emitting) frequencies, this doesn’t matter so much at say 500 mb, but there is a large region of intermediate wavelengths where the halving of the atmospheric mass makes a big difference.
On things that affect surface emissivity, it is often taken to be 1. I believe in the IR range, it is indeed usually more than 0.9, so there isn’t a lot of scope for other transport to have a big effect. That said, I can’t see why, say, evaporation should affect emissivity.
Nick said,
On things that affect surface emissivity, it is often taken to be 1. I believe in the IR range, it is indeed usually more than 0.9, so there isn’t a lot of scope for other transport to have a big effect. That said, I can’t see why, say, evaporation should affect emissivity.
As I mentioned earlier, if the surface is ocean or other bodies of water, evaporation will reduce the surface temperature and reduce the radiation slightly .
One thing you didn’t discuss was the time of day at which this is taking place. I suspect that it is actually and average, from the figures you have given.
Eric,
“time of day”? Is this referring to the Modtran calc? Yes, it used USST-76 data, so it is an average.
On evap, yes, it may cool the surface, but that doesn’t necessarily change the emissivity.
eric adler:
“I hope I have answered your question. Once I understood what you meant by BB calc, the answer was quite easy and elementary. It is puzzling to me that you have asked this question many times, and not received an answer.”
Thanks, but I don’t think I have an answer, yet. If you place a real double-walled glass greenhouse at the surface under the conditions I have described, you will get close to 100 C. Thus heat capacity is not an issue here. The only reason it is actually less than that (only 30-45 C) must be ascribed to convection. If you construct the greenhouse with a material which is transparent to long-wave IR, you will still get about the same temperature. So, where is the effect of this “backradiation” that we keep hearing about? If there is an effect of backradiation, shouldn’t I have surface temperatures higher than only 30-45 C. In fact, shouldn’t I have even higher temperatures in humid areas than in the deserts, given all the GHGs in the humid areas? It is actually the opposite. If I place the IR-transparent greenhouse in Guam, it still will not get as hot as the one in Phoenix, despite the fact that there is more than three times the quantity of “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere in Guam. Why?
Nick “Do you know about Modtran? There’s a Web interface here. You can set an imaginary radiometer to any height, looking up or down, under various climatic conditions, and it returns IR values. You can see the spectrum.”
No Nick radiometers measure total radiation possibly limited to a band what you see on MODTRAN is is a fake interferometer.
“I can’t see why, say, evaporation should affect emissivity.”
The water lines that you see on MODTRAN below ~500/cm tend to broaden with higher concentration h20 that affects both absorptivity and emissivity of the atmosphere.
Dear Nick,
Thank you for this.
Can you partition the IR into the part that goes straight to space, through the window, and the non-window part that is absorbed before its next adventure?
Obviously one needs some definition of ‘window’ for such an exercise. This might be not too easy to make. In reality, every wavelength will, I suppose, have some non-zero absorption, even if very small. This absorption will manifest a variation in the width of the window wave bands as the pressure and water vapour content varies with consequent line width variation, I suppose. No simple thing to define the window, although it is a central concept according to G.C. Simpson 1927 and 1928 http://www.aos.princeton.edu/WWWPUBLIC/gkv/history/climate.html.
On the zero order approximation that there is no downwards window component at the surface, and on the assumption that Aa=Ed, using your numbers would lead to a zero order approximation for St of
361 – 258 = 155 W m^-2. Presumably this is too high an estimate for St because the zero order approximation is wrong. How do you get past this?
Another way to tackle the problem might be to try to calculate the convection directly. I think that would be verging on the unfeasible?
It worries me slightly that the land-sea surface doesn’t look black in the visible, but it is considered to be black in the IR. I mentioned that I don’t have IR eyes. It also worries me slightly that the non-equilibrium situation might somehow upset the Kirchhoff equality, since Mihalas and Mihalas 1984 say they like to have no free radiative transfer for it to be reliable, but we are postulating at least some free radiative transfer through the window. I don’t feel sure that evaporation should affect emissivity, but I can’t feel too sure that it doesn’t. Well, Kirchhoff warns that his law does not work if there is fluorescence. It seems to me that there is always fluorescence to some slight degree, just the life time of the excited state of the absorbing species being non-zero. Perhaps there is some lifetime for the current problem such that anything that happens within it is considered to happen instantaneously. Perhaps these worries are negligible.
Yours sincerely,
Christopher
Well JAE the answer has to be Enthalpy; ET and the latent heat transfer of more water in the low atmosphere means that water is a -ve feedback hence Guam is not hotter than Phoenix. This real example should kill the notion of back-radiation effect but of course it won’t.
And here is Nick muddying the waters with his clear-sky stats :-); Steve Short has an interesting take on the variation in the various radiation parameters between clear-sky and all-sky conditions;
http://landshape.org/enm/the-value-of-tau/#disqus_thread
Steve concludes that Tau does vary in proportion with the cloud cover; with no clouds Tau is 1.87; with 100% of cloud cover Tau is 3.58. Does that mean that greenhouse is increasing with increased water as assumed in the enhanced greenhouse notion; not according to Steve; even though S_T reduces with increased cloud cover the increase in ET [the water relevant emission lines derived from the increase in evopotranspiration caused by the increase in [low] clouds] compensates so that the OLR remains constant. Steve argues this is consistent with Lindzen’s IRIS concept and ratifies the theory that low cloud is temperature negative in proportion to increase and vice-versa with high cloud. Of course Michael Hammer put forward a some-what similar idea recently;
http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2009/03/radical-new-hypothesis-on-the-effect-of-greenhouse-gases/#comment-87115
Again the key is water not CO2 and regardless as to the completness of M’s theory he is right to that extent; I believe this is the main difference between the pro-AGW and sceptic positions; the AGW position is that water is increasing and is a +ve feedback; the sceptic position is that low water is a -ve feedback while high water is a +ve feedback; if low water is increasing the question remains where does the water come from to supply the increase in high water which the pro-AGW camp is claiming is happening?
Dear Eric Adler,
Thank you for this.
You write: “As I mentioned earlier, if the surface is ocean or other bodies of water, evaporation will reduce the surface temperature and reduce the radiation slightly .”
Can you calculate how much effect the evaporation will have, say for example, on the surface of the sea, which I think is about 70% of the whole surface. Presumably the latent heat of the evaporation is then eventually convected upwards to an altitude where the temperature is lower, but the obstruction to radiative emission to space is also less because the water vapour is less because of precipitation. Can you work out the magnitude of this effect? And compare it with the slight reduction of surface radiation?
Yours sincerely,
Christopher Game
Comment from: JAE May 7th, 2009 at 9:39 am
eric adler:
“I hope I have answered your question. Once I understood what you meant by BB calc, the answer was quite easy and elementary. It is puzzling to me that you have asked this question many times, and not received an answer.”
Jae wrote,
Thanks, but I don’t think I have an answer, yet. If you place a real double-walled glass greenhouse at the surface under the conditions I have described, you will get close to 100 C.
Thus heat capacity is not an issue here. The only reason it is actually less than that (only 30-45 C) must be ascribed to convection.
It is known that the heat capacity and conductivity of the surface affects the surface temperature. Rock will be cooler than sand because of its heat conduction, and ocean has a much larger transparency to radiation and heat capacity than other surfaces. So there is definitely an influence there. I don’t have figures on how much this is.
http://www2.for.nau.edu/courses/hart/for213/Self%20Study/SM_C4_Q&A.pdf
If you construct the greenhouse with a material which is transparent to long-wave IR, you will still get about the same temperature. So, where is the effect of this “backradiation” that we keep hearing about? If there is an effect of backradiation, shouldn’t I have surface temperatures higher than only 30-45 C.
Transparent to IR and absorbing IR should not make much of a difference. If the material absorbs it heats up and will end up emitting as much as it absorbs. Its temperature should not be too much different than the air.
In fact, shouldn’t I have even higher temperatures in humid areas than in the deserts, given all the GHGs in the humid areas? It is actually the opposite. If I place the IR-transparent greenhouse in Guam, it still will not get as hot as the one in Phoenix, despite the fact that there is more than three times the quantity of “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere in Guam. Why?
This is a very simple question. Guam is surrounded by ocean. The sea having a high heat capacity absorbs radiation without heating up significantly. This keeps the air above the ocean much cooler than the air above the land.
This sets up a sea breeze during the day which cools the air above the island as the hot air rises and is rapidly replaced by ocean air. The lower air temperature compensates for the increased GHG concentration.
I don’t understand the logic of your arguments, since you don’t really have any quantitative data to show, yet you appear to be arguing that there is something wrong with the theory that radiation by greenhouse gases doesn’t make sense. It seems to be based on belief rather than real data.
Real scientists ahve done 150 years of work on this theory. After all the detailed spectroscopy and quantitative work that has been done on it by real scientists, it would seem that if there were something as radically wrong as you claim, on the basis of your instinct, that scientists would have written about it and made it stick.
Miskolczi and G & T have not really done that. Their work is full of mistakes and logical errors.
Your hypothetical data and guesses about what drive it are very unconvincing, since you leave out so many effects that are known to be important.
[...] This is part 2 of ‘The Work of Ference Miskolczi’, Part 1 of this series is here: http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2009/05/the-work-of-ferenc-miskolczi-part-1/ [...]
eric adler:
“Real scientists ahve done 150 years of work on this theory. After all the detailed spectroscopy and quantitative work that has been done on it by real scientists, it would seem that if there were something as radically wrong as you claim, on the basis of your instinct, that scientists would have written about it and made it stick.
Miskolczi and G & T have not really done that. Their work is full of mistakes and logical errors.
Your hypothetical data and guesses about what drive it are very unconvincing, since you leave out so many effects that are known to be important.”
ROFLAMO. Because YOU say so?? WHO are YOU? Lay out your credentials for criticizing, say, G&T, man! If you have any specialties, they must be in some type of “Armwaving.”
Part 2 now posted here: http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2009/05/the-climatically-saturated-greenhouse-effect/
A valuable contribution from Christopher Game.
Christopher,
Yes, it is reasonably possible to partition the upgoing IR in to a window part and the rest – T_A and A_A in M-speak. The partition puts a divide into a continuum of absorbency, and is rather arbitrary. K&T choose a narrow window of 8-12μ, and a flux of 99W/m2 leaving the ground, which is then on average reduced by 62% to allow for cloud. Here there isn’t a cloud reduction. Incidentally, remember the figures I quoted don’t claim to be a global average, but they do show how typical IR streams vary with altitude.
Re St, 361-258 is actually 103 (my last column). and doesn’t represent S_T, since I don’t agree that A_A=E_D, although it may be reasonably close.
You don’t get fluorescence with thermal IR, because there isn’t enough energy to shift electron orbitals. Absorbed energy just changes bond oscillations and rotations, and this energy parsists for only a very short time before ebing exchanged by collision.
eric-the-righteous is the perfect example of your run-of-the-mill AGW Syncophant posing as some type of expert. He commits the logical “consensus/appeal to authority” fallacy every time he/she comments. He also specializes in “leading the witness,” as in. “Real scientists have done 150 years of work on this theory. ” He should (and probably does) know full-well that there has never been a consensus on this idea. Arrhenius was put down severely by his critics, for example. He arrogantly uses the term “real scientists” as if he is entitled to judge thls. eric, I’m not impressed.
cohenite said:
I have no idea what to say at this point but “Ackk!!” What does “TCR can mask the true ECS” mean? Where do you get the idea that there is declining water vapor in the upper atmosphere OR that increasing water vapor at the surface is a negative feedback? And, how can you possibly talk about the 1.64 C TCR being before feedbacks when it was explicitly determined (by a “skeptic”) by fitting to the temperature data (probably to UAH so that he would get the lowest possible value, although I am not sure about this).
Comment from: jae May 7th, 2009 at 11:34 am
eric-the-righteous is the perfect example of your run-of-the-mill AGW Syncophant posing as some type of expert. He commits the logical “consensus/appeal to authority” fallacy every time he/she comments. He also specializes in “leading the witness,” as in. “Real scientists have done 150 years of work on this theory. ” He should (and probably does) know full-well that there has never been a consensus on this idea. Arrhenius was put down severely by his critics, for example. He arrogantly uses the term “real scientists” as if he is entitled to judge thls. eric, I’m not impressed.
The history of this controversy is that the spectroscopy was not well understood, and the experiment which debunked Arrhenius theory was done incorrectly. The fact is that surveys of scientists who currently do research show that they accept the AGW theory,
Leaving that aside, your arguments about how glass greenhouses and the difference between the temperature of Phoenix and Guam, show that the Greenhouse Gas theory is not important, have no merit, because they leave out important factors. You haven’t really answered my objections to them. They leave out important factors.
In addition, you focus on the daytime temperatures. The greenhouse effect does most of its work at night. Most of the temperature gains since the 1950’s have been a result of night time temperature increases. This shows that heat retention is the source of the temperature increase.
http://www.usgcrp.gov/usgcrp/seminars/971105DD.html
The bottom line that all the AGW/CO2 syncophants have to face at some point (and which is making them ever more vocal and angry) is that there has been no warming for over 12 years, now. And it’s not looking any better, with the Sun in a funk.
There was never ANY empirical evidence for the idea that increased CO2 resulted in increased temperatures, even 12 years ago, discounting the hockey stick which now serves as an example of extremely poor science, at best. Of course, AlGore tried to fool everyone with his dishonest graph of CO2 vs. time plotted separately from the graph of temperature vs. time; but he got caught, big time, when someone put the two graphs together and noted that CO2 LAGS temperature by about 800 years.
The only rationale for an effect by CO2 has been computer models and the flawed physical hypotheses that form the basis for the flawed computer models. Now these have been invalidated by the current cooling, the lack of the requisite “hot spot” in the tropic troposphere, and all the studies that show that water provides a NEGATIVE feedback, not a positive one.
The models did not predict what is happening, and they are essentially invalidated. And the “believers” have no explanation for the current cooling, though they still make ridiculous remarks about how the cooling is the sign of a coming warming, or something like that. I would say that the AGW/CO2 folks are BUSTED!
Jae,
When you can’t defend a scientific point, you retreat into your regular cheerleading rant.
“What does “TCR can mask the true ECS” mean? ”
You have to ask?
“I have no idea what to say at this point but “Ackk!!” What does “TCR can mask the true ECS” mean? Where do you get the idea that there is declining water vapor in the upper atmosphere OR that increasing water vapor at the surface is a negative feedback? And, how can you possibly talk about the 1.64 C TCR being before feedbacks when it was explicitly determined (by a “skeptic”) by fitting to the temperature data (probably to UAH so that he would get the lowest possible value, although I am not sure about this”
What a load of tosh; this is just garbage. Read Keenlyside or Easterling; hell, read the back of little will’s head when you are mutually grooming; you guys may as well use phrenology; it makes more sense than anything else you’ve got.
Dear Nick Stokes,
I comment about your
“Comment from: Nick Stokes May 7th, 2009 at 11:25 am
Christopher,
Yes, it is reasonably possible to partition the upgoing IR in to a window part and the rest – T_A and A_A in M-speak. The partition puts a divide into a continuum of absorbency, and is rather arbitrary. K&T choose a narrow window of 8-12μ, and a flux of 99W/m2 leaving the ground, which is then on average reduced by 62% to allow for cloud. Here there isn’t a cloud reduction. Incidentally, remember the figures I quoted don’t claim to be a global average, but they do show how typical IR streams vary with altitude.”
Yes it seems rather arbitrary to specify a particular wavelength band. But I think we would still like some good way of representing the presence of a window. The window is important in understanding the main outlines of the climate process.
You write: “Re St, 361-258 is actually 103 (my last column). and doesn’t represent S_T, since I don’t agree that A_A=E_D, although it may be reasonably close.”
Oops. Sorry, my mistake, I mixed the columns when I did the sum. I thought it looked a bit odd. Lucky I showed my working to trace my mistake.
The right answer to my sum is 103 W m^-2 as you observe. That is what I would call the zero order approximation to St. This is a bit more like reality, I think.
The question remains then, how to get a good way to represent the window? That is to say, how to calculate St precisely?
Yours sincerely,
Christopher
eric:
[b]In addition, you focus on the daytime temperatures. The greenhouse effect does most of its work at night. Most of the temperature gains since the 1950’s have been a result of night time temperature increases. This shows that heat retention is the source of the temperature increase.”[/b]
Well, as noted above, that is no longer the case. It has been COOLING for many years, eric. Moreover, the deserts have warmer temperatures at night than the tropics at the same elevation and latitude. It seems to me that the GHE in the tropics should result in a greater nightly temperature.
Being an outcast among even most skeptics, I still suggest that the “greenhouse effect” is nothing more than the storage of heat by the atmosphere and water. I’m at about 45 N. latitude, and my swimming pool temperature averages about 15 C over the year. No need for radiation diagrams to explain the average temperatures on Earth.
eric: don’t miss this: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/06/the-global-warming-hypothesis-and-ocean-heat/#more-7646
Christopher asks: The question remains then, how to get a good way to represent the window? That is to say, how to calculate St precisely?
The answer is use HITRAN and one of the many line-by-line codes. Since the question is one of detail, the answer is also. The line-by-line codes have been validated against observation (One could also use MODTRAN, but not the UChicago interface, you would have to get down and dirty)
Dear Eli Rabett,
You post at May 8th, 2009 at 1:19 am.
Please expand on this. Who has done such calculations and what have they found?
I think your post is confirming the proposition that St is a precise way of representing the window model?
Yours sincerely,
Christopher
cohenite:
Well, that’s coherent! I’ve read what Keenlyside says (assuming you refer to the 2008 Nature paper) but don’t see its relevance here. Keenlyside make a prediction that many others are rather skeptical will actually come to pass and may more likely reflect issues with their model initialization. But, at any rate, their prediction is within a climate model that shows that the long term response to rising CO2 will be more warming.
Easterling merely points out what we have been saying for a long time, which is that short-term trends are not expected to be uniformly upward in the face of steadily increasing forcings because of the natural climate variability.
Who is Will, by the way? George Will?
“Who is Will, by the way? George Will?”
William Shakespeare, I’m guessing. Not the author, the pop star from the ’70s.
Folks, please don’t count on the funny-bunny to add light to anything; his specialty is to add doubt and darkness to any discussion that could possibly discredit the AGW/CO2 conspiracy.
No little will, I prefer Shakespeare the poet and playwright; you would be Yorrick and Joel, of course, would be Ophelia.
Nick Stokes comments that the theory proposed by Miskolczi is “crackpot stuff”.
Others defenders of the prevailing AGW paradigm have said the same about the work of Svensmark, which will soon be put to the test at CERN.
But, hey, that’s also what they said about Alfred Wegener’s theory of “continental drift”, until many years after he died and it became the new paradigm of plate tectonics.
Don’t write off Miskolczi as a “crackpot” yet.
His theory may become the new paradigm.
Max
Jae
I still suggest that the “greenhouse effect” is nothing more than the storage of heat by the atmosphere and water.
Interesting to hear you say that. I only discovered recently that Neils Bohr had cast doubt on the IR ‘trapping’ properties of CO2 back in 1913, and four years earlier, R W Wood (the inventor of IR photography) demonstrated experimentally that air trapped under glass became no warmer than air under a sheet of clear rock salt.
Growers and horticulturalists will also point out that plastic poly-tunnel greenhouses get just as hot as glass ones, so it’s hard not to conclude that the GE, like the death of Mark Twain, has been somewhat exaggerated…
Dr. Miskolczi is saying that the Earth’s atmosphere is automatically regulated to
stay at a certain optical depth such that the total of all greenhouse
gases always remains the same and any necessary adjustment is achieved by
a change in the quantity of water vapour.
That suits me perfectly.
One of my propositions is that the temperature of the troposphere is
always being dragged towards the average global sea surface temperatures
because the thermal inertia of the oceans is so huge.
Thus if there were to be more CO2 in the air the water below would seek to
remove the extra energy in the air to return the system to an equilibrium
set by the oceans.
The extra energy in the air cannot get into the oceans because of the
evaporative barrier.
So instead the hydrological cycle speeds up and if necessary the
latitudinal positions of the air circulation systems will shift to effect
that change in speed. The total amount of water vapour changes to maintain
the optical depth necessary to keep the system stable with the air at the
surface remaining in line with sea surface temperatures despite any extra
CO2 or any other GHGs.
That is what happens routinely to modulate the effect of warmer ocean
surfaces but on a far larger scale than would be required to deal with a
little CO2.
Thus if he is right then my climate description provides the real world
mechanism by which the outcome is achieved.
Interesting