Someone asked Bill Kininmonth:
If AGW is a fiction, is it not a useful fiction?
He answered with a resounding NO!
“Firstly, the AGW debate (now proselytisation) is diverting attention from those real issues that you mention and causing public and private investment in a range of actions that will have no present or future benefit. How often does it need to be said that CO2 is a colourless, odourless gas whose only detrimental characteristic is to form a very weak acid (carbonic acid) when dissolved in water. On the other hand, CO2 is an essential component of photosynthesis – increased CO2 in the atmosphere is an effective fertiliser of the biosphere as shown by horticulturalists artificially increasing the CO2 content within glasshouses. CO2 is NOT a pollutant.
There is every reason to believe that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere will have no significant impact on the climate system. The greatest impact of atmospheric CO2 on the earth’s radiation budget was the first 20 ppmv. After this concentration the source of IR radiation to space from the active CO2 radiation bands was in the stratosphere, where temperature does not change as the emanation goes to higher and higher altitudes with increasing concentration.
There is every reason to believe that earth is near an upper temperature limit given its present distribution of land and ocean and the strength of solar irradiance. The earth’s surface is heated by way of solar radiation and back IR radiation emanating from clouds, greenhouse gases and aerosols; it is cooled by conduction, evaporation and IR emission. Solar radiation and conduction are essentially constant and the earth’s surface temperature will vary according to increasing back IR radiation (radiation forcing from CO2 and water vapour) being offset by surface IR emission and latent heat of evaporation. At a global average surface temperature of 15C the rate of increase of surface IR emission with temperature is about 5 W/m2 per degree C and the rate of increase of latent energy from evaporation is of similar magnitude. This means that back IR radiation from doubling of CO2 concentration must be at least 10 W/m2 to sustain a 1C temperature rise and more than 30 W/m2 to sustain a 3C temperature rise. Using the most accurate line-by-line radiation calculations the increase in back IR radiation due to doubling of CO2, increasing atmospheric temperature by 3C and holding relative humidity constant (the full positive feedback effect at 3C) only produces an increase in back IR radiation of 18 W/m2, well short of the 30 W/m2 necessary to sustain a 3C increase in equilibrium surface temperature. The rapidly increasing surface IR emission and latent heat loss with temperature are a barrier to significant surface temperature increase unless there is a change in the solar radiation input (either directly or through a change to cloudiness and albedo).
Secondly, the emphasis on CO2 emission reduction (so-called ‘clean coal’) is encouraging research in the wrong areas. Oil, gas, coal and uranium are all non-renewable sources of energy. Global demand is already causing price increases but the real concern will be as supplies become seriously depleted and more difficult to extract. The latter may not be in this century but will surely come. Investment in geosequestration and other forms of ‘clean coal’ are increasing the amount of resource needed to produce each unit of energy by up to 30 percent (according to one IPCC report). That is, we are contemplating using the non-renewable resource 30 percent faster (and bringing the effective lifetime forward by 30 percent) in order to achieve the chimera of CO2 emission reduction. Very poor policy if we are considering the needs of future generations!
AGW is a fiction and a very dangerous fiction.
William Kininmonth
Australasian Climate Research
and author of Climate Change: A Natural Hazard
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Excellent post!
Another here from Nir Shaviv:
http://www.sciencebits.com/IceCoreTruth
WTF!
Firstly, William doesn’t even mention (or understand I’d hazard a guess) positive feed-backs. That has been discussed many times here so no point going there again, I guess.
It’s the second point I gotta laugh at.
If you increase the price of something, you reduce the demand. Therefore, you will begin to use your non-renewable resource slower. Not faster. Slower.
Also, the percentage increase in the cost of a product does not equate to the same percentage change in the rate of it’s usage. It’s a little more complicated than that.
Nexus, he is suggesting from my interpretation that the new methods are not as efficient in their use of resources per unit of output and hence we will use up our resource more quickly.( I do not know if this assumption of innefficieny is correct?)
“Investment in geosequestration and other forms of ‘clean coal’ are increasing the amount of resource needed to produce each unit of energy by up to 30 percent (according to one IPCC report). That is, we are contemplating using the non-renewable resource 30 percent faster (and bringing the effective lifetime forward by 30 percent) in order to achieve the chimera of CO2 emission reduction.”
You are right to point out that there will be a substitution effect away from coal to alternatitives as they become price competitive.
regards Toby
IF AGW is a fiction then it can’t be useful.
No government endorsed fiction ( or propaganda ) does anything except undermine confidence in institutions we expect to be rigorous – indeed it’s this rigour that gives rise to the public confidence ; even if the theories eventually change due to new evidence etc.
I read somewhere once that the propaganda utilised expertly by Britain against Germany during WWI was believed to contribute to the reluctance of the British and American public to accept the reality of the extermination camps in eastern Europe in WWII.
People thought the stories of the Holocaust were just more of the same.
So the argument I’ve heard before – even if AGW turns out to be false, at least we’ve raised consciousness about renewable energy/the evils of industrialisation blah blah blah – is 180 degrees wrong.
The likelihood of public support for a genuine environmental threat will be minimal.
But no need to worry!
We’re told that ” The debate is over” , ” There is no longer any doubt ” , “The concensus is overwhelming” etc etc so poor fools like me are in!
The substitution effect will reduce demand for coal and oil but this will be offset by increased demand from the additional processing. And as the additional processing is likely to be imposed through compulsory emission targets, then the price sensitivity of this will be less than that for substitution effects.
Interestingly, one of the new methods for processing shale oil involves converting the shale underground, essentially converting the rock strata itself into a massive conversion plant through the use of injected heat. And if this heat can be sourced from geothermal or other sources then there will be no additional hydrocarbon demand for this conversion process.
Positive feedback, negative feedback?
Evaporation Is Equal To Precipitation On The Global Scale – Implications To the Conclusion On A Claimed Increase of Atmospheric Water Vapor
Filed under: Climate Change Metrics — Roger Pielke Sr. @ 7:00 am
In early March, there were exchanges of e-mails with respect to the Climate Science conclusion regarding the 2007 IPCC Statement for Policymakers claim on page 7 that
“The average atmospheric water vapour content has increased since at least the 1980s over land and ocean as well as in the upper troposphere. The increase is broadly consistent with the extra water vapour that warmer air can hold.”
Climate Science wrote on February 15, 2007 in the weblog “Several Science Errors (Or, At Best Cherrypicking) In the 2007 IPCC Statement For Policymakers”,
“This conclusion conflicts with the finding in
Smith, T. M., X. Yin, and A. Gruber (2006), Variations in annual global precipitation (1979–2004), based on the Global Precipitation Climatology Project 2.5° analysis, Geophys. Res. Lett., 33, L06705, doi:10.1029/2005GL025393,
where they write for the period 1979–2004 that precipitation tends
“have spatial variations with both positive and negative values, with a global-average near zero.”
The global average precipitation has not changed significantly in the period.
If greater amounts of water vapor were present in the atmosphere, the evaporation/transpiration of water vapor into the atmosphere and thus the precipitation would have to increase when averaged globally and over a long enough time period.”
This Climate Science weblog and a subsequent one on March 10 entitled “Scitizen Column Published Entitled ‘Scientific Errors With the IPCC Statement for Policymakers’”
solicted a range of comments including
On March 10, 2007 Issac Held, a very well respected climate scientist, commented,
” Dear Roger,
Water vapor can certainly increase without an increase in precipitation or evaporation — the residence time of the vapor simply increases. This is precisely what happens in all models, as described in Held and Soden, J. Climate, 2006, and as many others have pointed out before us. Water vapor follows Clausius-Clapeyron in the models, while the evaporation (and therefore precipitation) are determined instead by the changes in radiative energy fluxes, which are relatively small.”
and also
“…….I don’t think that I can explain it any clearer here than we tried to do there. But visualize a bucket with a constant input of water – once it fills and spills over the output will equal the input. Now make the bucket bigger, with the same input and therefore the same output. That’s all there is to it. I am afraid that I do not understand your arguement at all.”
Gavin Schmidt also commented and wrote,
“I would draw readers attention to the fact that all these points were drawn to Roger’s attention when he first made these claims.
http://climatesci.colorado.edu/2007/02/15/science-errors-or-at-best-cherrypicking-in-the-2007-ipcc-statement-for-policymakers/
It is curious therefore that he should choose to repeat them verbatim.”
Climate Science responded to their comments on those weblogs, however, to make sure the issue is clear, I requested that my class this semester at the University of Colorado in Boulder examine the issue (and particular thanks to Laure Montandon and Carl Drews for their insightful contributions!).
As the students documented, the average residence time for water in the atmosphere is 8-9 days. The annual evaporation rate is 45 times the amount of water in the atmosphere at any instant. Thus the atmosphere is a relatively small reservoir for water. Even a small percentage increase in the global evaporation evaporation must result in the same percentage increase in percentage of precipitation increase. This will occur even if the content of water in the atmosphere increases due to a longer residence time.
Thus, while Climate Science agrees with Issac and Gavin that the amount of water in the atmosphere can increase even without an increase in evaporation and precipitation, the claim in the 2007 IPCC SPM is that the atmosphere and the Earth’s surface (thus including the sea surface temperatures; SSTs) have warmed. Higher SSTs are expected to be associated with greater evaporation (the actual sea surface evaporation depends on the surface turbulent moisture fluxes which includes the surface layer vertical gradient of absolute humidity, as well as the net radiation received at the surface).
A larger global averaged evaporation, therefore, must be associated with a larger global average precipitation. Thus the lack of an observed increase in precipitation is in conflict with the claim in the IPCC SPM that ““The average atmospheric water vapour content has increased since at least the 1980s over land and ocean as well as in the upper troposphere.The increase is broadly consistent with the extra water vapour that warmer air can hold.”
For this statement to be correct, not only must the atmosphere hold more water BUT the surface evaporation must also have increased due to the warmer Earth’s surface! That the precipitation has not increased indicates that the evaporation has also not increased. This implies that any warming of the surface where most of the evaporation ocurrs; i.e. the tropical oceans) has been small.
Thus if the global average mass of water vapor has actually increased, it is likely for reasons other than surface and thus tropospheric warming (the residence time of water in the atmosphere could increase, for example, due to aerosol effects on cloud processes which extend their lifetimes, or from the creation of large haze clouds). Alternatively, water vapor content may not have increased at all as the data to quantitatively assess this is quite limited.
The error (or at best incomplete presentation) in the 2007 IPCC SPM with respect to the higher humidities in the atmosphere misleads the policymakers with respect to actual observed changes in the hydrologic cycle. Instead of relying mostly on model results, the IPCC should be presenting observed atmospheric data which supports their claim. The detailed chapters in the IPCC Report will be examined to ascertain if there is substantive evidence to bolster their conclusion.
Nexus must have been behind the door when they were handing out brains.
“If you increase the price of something, you reduce the demand. Therefore, you will begin to use your non-renewable resource slower”
Insert into “something” food
“If you increase the price of food, you reduce the demand. Therefore, you will begin to use your non-renewable resource slower”
As I was saying, Nexus is using his limited resources slower.
Yes Rog, people ate more bananas when the price skyrocketed, didn’t they? Did they eat the same amount even? Oh, hang on, they ate less!!!! Coal is but one source of energy, just as bananas are but one source of food.
Fact is, increase the price of coal, there’ll be more for future generations, as current generations will reduce their rate of use (and increase their rate of use of other energy resources). It’s quite likely that future generations will, over time, develop new technology that reduces the cost of sequestering CO2, making the coal still in the ground viable to extract again.
I know you’re greedy and want everything for yourself now Rog, but please try and think of the future just for once.
Good to see Rog getting into a bit of biffo again. His boat must be becalmed.
Don’t do your nana now Rog.
I thought we’d been through this water vapor feedback business. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/11/busy-week-for-water-vapor/
GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 32, L19809, doi:10.1029/2005GL023624, 2005
Anthropogenic greenhouse forcing and strong water vapor feedback increase temperature in Europe
Rolf Philipona
Physikalisch-Meteorologisches Observatorium Davos, World Radiation Center, Davos Dorf, Switzerland
Europe’s temperature increases considerably faster than the northern hemisphere average. Detailed month-by-month analyses show temperature and humidity changes for individual months that are similar for all Europe, indicating large-scale weather patterns uniformly influencing temperature. However, superimposed to these changes a strong west-east gradient is observed for all months. The gradual temperature and humidity increases from west to east are not related to circulation but must be due to non-uniform water vapour feedback. Surface radiation measurements in central Europe manifest anthropogenic greenhouse forcing and strong water vapor feedback, enhancing the forcing and temperature rise by about a factor of three. Solar radiation decreases and changing cloud amounts show small net radiative effects. However, high correlation of increasing cloud-free longwave downward radiation with temperature (r = 0.99) and absolute humidity (r = 0.89), and high correlation between ERA-40 integrated water vapor and CRU surface temperature changes (r = 0.84), demonstrates greenhouse forcing with strong water vapor feedback.
Might not be global but it is empirical and well measured.
I really don’t understand people like Kininmonth, all his colleagues for years would have been telling about feedback as being the reason for concern over the greenhouse warming, but it’s all gone in one ear and out the other, apparently. The basic facts he states are already well known, it’s bit’s he completely ignores that are the issue.
“the world problematique.”
is this the political force behind the crass dishonesty of AGW..
Luke draws attention to Philipona et al 2005 where I think a key finding is the similarity between his his Figures 2b and 2d showing CRUT2 surface temperature and integrated water vapour increasing as you go east in his grid box.
I have some comments at,
http://www.warwickhughes.com/papers/philipona05.htm
which indicate the Philipona et al conclusions are strengthened by selection of their 1995-2002 period.
which is attributed to increasing CO2 and water vapour (Fig 2d).
I am puzzled why Philipona et al do not look at T data for the lower troposphere where some of these atmospheric processes must be operating.
MSU data shows only 75% of the CRUT2 surface warming for the 1995-2002 period over the Philipona et al grid box 35 to 60 North, 10 West to 20 East.
Returning to the CRUT2 T trends and it it gets worse when you look in detail at annual trends for the six 5 degree zones of longitude across the Philipona et al grid box.
In 1995 the temperature gradient was in fact increasing to the WEST thus puffing up the 1995-2002 difference that provides so much of the eyeball impact in Philipona’s Fig 2b.
Had he chosen the 1994-2002 period, then Fig 2b showing T change would not have looked so convincing.
Also if the 1995 to 2005 period is looked at then not only is the warmest longitude zone near the middle of the grid box but the warming per year is only 64% of that for 1995-2002.
The MSU trend for 1995-2005 has only 38% of the warming in CRUT2.
So it is clear that the conclusions illustrated in Philipona’s eye catching Figure 2b are;
[1] highly dependent on choice of time periods, thus,
[2] are not robust,
[2] would show less warming if the lower troposphere T data had been presented.