But it could calm it down
Every day some place in the world has “wild weather” and in recent times human industry gets the blame: “It’s all caused by man-made global warming” (generally shortened to “global warming”, or GW, by alarmists).
Floods or droughts – blame GW; bushfires or snowstorms – blame GW; frosts or heatwaves – blame GW; hail storms or dust storms – blame GW; cyclones or tornadoes – blame GW.
Puny CO2
If all of this were true, carbon dioxide (CO2) would surely be the most powerful and disruptive gas on the planet – a veritable WMD (weapon of mass destruction).
But CO2 is one of the most stable, predictable, nonreactive and puny of all climate factors. It warms a little, but each new parcel of CO2 added to the atmosphere adds progressively less warming. For decades, adding more has had no practical effect on the temperature.
This graph shows that the apparent effect of man’s production of carbon dioxide has declined dramatically since 1941, and it is now insignificant.
(• source; • discussion.)
Weather is ruled by solar heating, winds, clouds, pressure zones, temperature distribution, moisture content, lunar phases, sun spots, solar cycles, local topography and the massive oceans. A meteorologist never checks today’s CO2 level before he prepares a weather forecast for the next few days. Sailors and farmers watch the clouds, the wind and the moon, and have barometers, thermometers and hygrometers – none think about CO2 levels.
Rising CO2 in the atmosphere has only one proven effect – it encourages the growth of green plants. Forests, desert plants, crops and grasses are all growing better. None of this can cause wild weather.
We are told that rising CO2 will cause runaway global warming. This has never occurred even with much higher levels of CO2 than today. The evidence shows that temperature cycles come and go — sometimes in phase with today’s gently rising CO2, sometimes totally out of phase.
Wild weather is usually caused by extreme differences in air pressures and temperatures, which produce strong winds as the atmosphere tries to equalise things. Variable moisture content can then add storm energy to the brew.
Water vapour is the important “greenhouse gas” in the atmosphere. Rising CO2 has almost zero effect on equatorial temperatures, because there is usually so much moisture in equatorial atmospheres that it completely overpowers any impact that CO2 may have. The predicted “equatorial hot spot” supposedly caused by rising CO2 has not been found.
Hobgoblins not required
But in the very dry atmosphere of the poles, rising CO2 may still have a tiny warming effect which thus reduces the temperature gradient between the equator and poles. This actually LOWERS the potential for wild weather.
Evidence to support this view comes from the depths of the Little Ice Age, when storms and wild weather were more common. Global cooling may produce more storms than global warming.
See: The storminess of the Little Ice Age.
Carbon dioxide could possibly calm the climate but cannot cause wild weather (except in alarmist computer models).
There has been no measurable “global warming” for 16 years so CO2 cannot be causing England’s floods, the US snow or the Australian drought. We have seen them all before.
The weather is chaotic and cannot be predicted. Natural variability guarantees everyone a share of wild or weird weather at some time.
We don’t have to invent hobgoblins to explain it.
Viv Forbes,
Rosewood Qld Australia
forbes@carbon-sense.com
More reading:
Global warming did not cause UK storms says Met Office.
Thank Agenda 21, Red Tape and Green sustainability for Somerset floods in UK.
UK Weather is not as weird as claimed.
Views: 212
Superb. Just excellent.
Yeah, he’s good, isn’t he?
I think CO2 is the key that Einstein was missing for a unifying theory – it explains all things however contradictory & unifies them under the term global warming … I mean climate change … I mean climate disruption.
Ah, the magic CO2 – is there anything it can’t do?
Good one, Magoo. That’s about the size of it. Nothing’s free from its influence! Reminds me: I should check birth records.
I think one effect of CO2 seems to be apparent, in that it turns a large part of the population into gullible cretins
CO2 cannot raise Earth’s temperature, let alone cause wild weather.
Climate models that are based on the completely false physics that radiation from a colder atmosphere can actually help the Sun in raising the temperature of Earth’s surface are a complete fiction. It cannot do so. Physicists will tell you (if you even bother to ask a specialist in thermodynamics like myself) that such radiation undergoes what they call “pseudo scattering” in which it is immediately re-emitted in a resonating process, without any of its electro-magnetic energy being converted to thermal energy. This provides some of the electro-magnetic energy in the SB calculation for the warmer surface, and thus slows radiative cooling, but it can have no effect on molecules colliding at the interface and transferring thermal energy by conduction and evaporative cooling.
But none of this is what really determines planetary surface temperatures anyway. The base of the Uranus nominal troposphere is hotter than Earth, and yet it receives no direct solar radiation worth mentioning.
Valid physics can be used to confirm beyond a shadow of a doubt that a gravitationally-induced temperature gradient will always evolve spontaneously in a vertical plane in any solid, liquid or gas that is exposed to a gravitational field. This happens at the molecular level where molecules swap kinetic energy and gravitational potential energy when in free flight between collisions. No one has correctly rebutted this, and wires outside cylinders also develop thermal gradients so no perpetual motion can occur.
There is a predetermined thermal profile in Earth’s atmosphere caused by gravity which, without water vapour or greenhouse gases, would intersect the surface in the vicinity of 25C, but then water vapour reduces the gradient (due to inter-molecular radiation, not the release of latent heat) and we end up with a mean of about 15C.
It is natural cycles, probably regulated by planetary orbits, which are the primary determinants of climate. That’s why it’s not carbon dioxide after all.
VP,
I raised some questions for you here and here.
Could you address them please?
Sorry, the “VP” didn’t come up when searching.
Replies include this comment and others on that thread.
Is every thread about Uranus now?
I wouldn’t examine that too deeply.
While we’re on the subject this is quite a nice drop, made from habanera chili’s:
http://www.chilli.co.nz/shop/sauces/rings-around-uranus-habanero-sauce-detail
With enemas like this, who needs friends?
Hehe.
By the way, Ken Coffman needs some people to buy his book
Buffoon: One Man’s Cheerful Interaction with the Harbingers of Global Warming Doom [Kindle Edition]
Ken Coffman (Author)
http://www.amazon.com/Buffoon-Cheerful-Interaction-Harbingers-Warming-ebook/dp/B00IH3YQIE/ref=sr_1_fkmr1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1392565741&sr=8-1-fkmr1&keywords=ken+coffman+buffoon
>”Floods or droughts”
Not necessarily “or” either. I think I’ve been witnessing (in the media anyway) an emergent cyclic droughtflood phenomenon where one immediately following the other in the same vicinity is attributed to the same human cause.
Seems a difficult concept to grasp but according to John Abraham it doesn’t have to hard:
Discussing global warming: why does this have to be so hard? | John Abraham | Environment | theguardian.com:
“1. We don’t know exactly how much climate change will occur. It may range from very little to a lot over the next 100 years or longer. If we are lucky, climate change will be a minor inconvenience. If we are unlucky, it will destabilize societies around the world. It is most likely neither of these extremes will occur, the future will be somewhere in the middle, but frankly we just don’t know.
2. We don’t know how fast it will happen. Will it take a few decades or a few centuries for some of the big changes to occur? We have a pretty good idea but we can’t be certain.
3. We don’t know exactly how climate change will manifest itself. How will drought/flood patterns change? How will hurricanes change? How will sea levels rise? How fast will the oceans acidify? We have educated guesses but we can’t be certain.
4. It isn’t clear how much of what we see is due to us and how much is just natural variability…”
http://tomnelson.blogspot.co.nz/2014/02/discussing-global-warming-why-does-this.html
The floods or droughts thing is interesting. I grew up in southern Africa where, like Australia, floods occur together with droughts in cycles. So floods and droughts are normal climate. The absence of floods and droughts would be classed as ‘climate change’ in these regions.
>”The absence of floods and droughts would be classed as ‘climate change’ in these regions.”
Problematic alarm-wise though.
Re drought and flood normal in Australia. From their classic poem:
‘My Country’
Dorothea Mackellar – 1885-1968, written in 1904
“I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror –
The wide brown land for me!”
And,
“Core of my heart, my country!
Land of the Rainbow Gold,
For flood and fire and famine,
She pays us back threefold –
Over the thirsty paddocks,
Watch, after many days,
The filmy veil of greenness
That thickens as we gaze.”
http://www.lancescoular.com/my-country-by-dorothea-mackellar.html
But that was then I suppose.
CO2 cannot cause any warming, full stop. It’s blatantly obvious at the base of the nominal troposphere of Uranus where there’s no CO2, no direct solar radiation and no surface, yet it’s hotter than Earth but nearly 30 times further from the Sun.
CO2 cannot affect surface temperatures because such temperatures do not relate to radiation but instead to the temperature supported by the gravito-thermal effect.
Below is a comment I have just posted on Lucia’s Blackboard in response to a common thought experiment attempting to disprove the existence of the gravito-thermal effect that is obvious in all planetary tropospheres.
The “argument has been put to me several times and is obviously yet another attempt among climatologists to rubbish what is of course a very threatening postulate, because it smashes the greenhouse.
The argument … does not display a correct comprehension of Kinetic Theory, or indeed the manner in which molecules move and collide.
If a perfectly isentropic state were to evolve then all molecules in any given horizontal plane would have equal kinetic energy, and of course equal potential energy, just as after the first two collisions in the 4 molecule thought experiment above.
Now, the direction in which a molecule “takes off” in its next free path motion just after a collision is random – rather like what happens with snooker balls.
So two molecules with equal KE set out in different directions after the collision, but there is no requirement that they must have more KE to go upwards. They don’t travel far anyway. It’s not as if any one molecule goes up a matter of several cm before colliding with another, for example. In fact, they nearly all travel in a direction that is not straight up or down.
At thermodynamic equilibrium (as you can see in the 4 molecule experiment) when any molecule has an upward component in its direction, it loses KE that is exactly the amount of energy represented by the difference in gravitational potential energy between the height of the molecule it last collided with and that of the next molecule. With the thermal gradient in place, the next molecule it strikes will have KE that is less than the one it last struck, and its own KE will have been reduced to exactly the same KE that the next molecule already has.
So, at thermodynamic equilibrium all collisions involve molecules which had identical KE before the collision, and so they exit the collision process still having the same KE which is the mean KE for all molecules in the horizontal plane where the collision occurred.
Now, for a small height difference, H in a “closed system” where g is the acceleration due to gravity, the loss in PE for a small ensemble of mass M moving downwards will thus be the product M.g.H because a force Mg moves the gas a distance H. But there will be a corresponding gain in KE and that will be equal to the energy required to warm the gas by a small temperature difference, T. This energy can be calculated using the specific heat Cp and this calculation yields the product M.Cp.T. Bearing in mind that there was a PE loss and a KE gain, we thus have …
M.Cp.T = – M.g.H
T/H = -g/Cp
But T/H is the temperature gradient, which is thus the quotient -g/Cp. This is the so-called “dry adiabatic lapse rate” and we don’t need to bring pressure or density into the calculation.
Neil King from the Skeptical Science team has been unable to fault the physics in my derivation and proof of the existence of the gravito-thermal effect. I presume no one else from the SkS team can do so, even though about 1 in 6 of them have qualifications in physics, including John Cook.
So I think that just about wraps it up as cogent proof, because no one from Judith Curry, Jo Nova, The Air Vent, WUWT, DrRoySpencer, Australian Climate Madness, Clive Best, Bishop Hill, Stoat-Connelly, Open Mind, The Lukewarmer’s Way or any other climate blog has been able to prove wrong the answer to the trillion dollar question, namely that the Loschmidt gravito-thermal effect is a reality..
Hence the greenhouse conjecture is debunked once and for all.
Are there any last minute challenges?
Doug,
Not “last minute” challenges, no. But I’m still waiting on your reply to my last postings here.
Below is my latest comment (still awaiting moderation) on Lucia’s Blackboard in the thread about my “heat creep” hypothesis. This information will be included in my official complaints to Australian Authorities and the Government Ombudsman here.
So it’s time for you to resign from the Skeptical Science team, Neil King,
You have failed to show any fault in my four molecule proof by mathematical induction of the existence of the gravitationally induced thermal gradient.
You quite incorrectly misled readers into thinking there were somehow balancing molecular movements, implying that for every downward movement that caused warming, there would be another downward movement that would cause cooling, and vice versa for upward movements. That would be like saying that for every stone you drop which accelerates, there would be another you could drop which would slow down.
Hence, in failing to disprove the existence of the gravito-thermal effect, you also failed to prove the existence of isothermal conditions in the absence of so-called greenhouse gases.
Hence you failed to prove that there is any 33 degrees of warming from an isothermal state supposedly due to greenhouse gases.
Hence you failed to debunk my hypothesis which itself debunks the radiative greenhouse effect conjecture, and which can explain all measured and estimated temperature data in the atmospheres, surfaces, crusts, mantles and cores of all planets and satellite moons in our Solar System.
In contrast, the greenhouse radiative forcing conjecture (supported and actively promulgated by SkS) fails to enable any explanation of temperatures on other planets and also on Earth.
Consequently the right and honest thing for you to do is admit your mistake, explaining to John Cook and all SkS team members that you now believe, based on sound physics, that planetary surface temperatures are not controlled primarily by incident radiation, but by the supporting temperature at the base of their tropospheres, which temperature is pre-determined by the solar intensity and the autonomous thermal gradient in the troposphere that evolves because of the force of gravity acting on molecules in free flight.
This comment will be posted on at least ten climate blogs where most of this critically important discussion of the “trillion dollar question” has been duplicated. I may also use it as part of my formal complaints to Australian authorities and the Government Ombudsman here.
Doug,
Have you run any of these ideas past Lindzen, Spencer etc?
Andy, I was communicating by email yet again with Roy today as it happens. I asked him what he knew about thermodynamics and he boasted that he got an “A” in thermo. Well, thinks me, in first year university perhaps – many years ago when they did not teach the entropy version of the Second Law, and so he makes the first mistake below …
Climate models can’t tell us anything at all, because they are based on false assumptions, namely ..
(I) That the troposphere would be isothermal in the absence of radiating gases.
(2) That radiating gases from a colder atmosphere can boost the incident Solar radiative flux to a combined sum which then supposedly can be used in S-B calculations to determine the temperature of the thin transparent surface layer of the ocean through which the UV, visible and IR Solar radiation all passes, but the low energy IR from the troposphere does not.
As far as I’m concerned (I could be wrong) gravity-induced density increases will raise the temperature of a gas. This means that I would expect a temperature profile that is warmer closer to the centre/surface of a planet than further away.
This makes sense from both a radiative and conductive point of view, and I would have to be convinced that an isothermal situation is physical, because right now I’m not.
But the actual magnitude of that temperature depends on what ‘fixes’ it. For example, say a planet is warmed from within and has reached a “steady state”* of 100K at its surface. Assume for argument’s sake that there is no sigificant stellar radiation reaching its surface.
I would in this case expect the gas temperature to be near 100K at the surface (conduction with surface), diminishing as altitude increases. How fast it diminishes would depend on the gas composition, depth, pressure, etc.
What would be the characteristic emission temperature of the planet? Somewhat less than 100K, because it will be the combined planet + gas temperature as seen from space.
*Note: I say “steady state” in inverted commas because the planet core will slowly cool down over time in this scenario, but we will assume a snapshot in geological time.
It may also be possible that the temperature profile created by conduction near the surface and free radiation at the top of atmosphere will overwhelm any pressure-induced temperature profile.
Just a quick aside, since I have seen some confusion on this point:
1) All matter, including gases, radiates all the time, if its temperature is above 0 K. The amount and peak wavelength of radiation depends on the temperature of the matter. For the atmosphere, this peak is typically low IR. For the sun, it’s mainly high IR through visible to low UV.
2) Greenhouse gases absorb radiation in the IR and visible wavelengths. The absorption does not depend on temperature, rather the absorption wavelengths are molecule-dependent. Note that nitrogen, which makes up the bulk of our atmosphere, absorbs in the UV range in the upper atmosphere, protecting us from harm.
3) A greenhouse gas will therefore absorb some radiation in certain bands, but emit continously in the IR. A “non-greenhouse” gas will be transparent to most visible and IR energy but will also emit continously in the IR.
4) Both GHG and non-GHGs will absorb energy via collisions (conduction). This will most likely be the primary source of heat gain or loss, especially low down in the atmosphere where density is greatest.
You need to define what you mean by “absorb.” Are you talking about when a photon just raises an electron by a quantum energy amount or are you talking about when this process is subsequently followed by the far more complex process in which the extra electron energy is then converted to kinetic energy and spread uniformly between the translational, vibrational and rotational degrees of freedom of the “absorbing” molecule? Once it is kinetic energy it can then be transferred by conduction or diffusion to other molecules, such as water which may then evaporate. Is that the type of absorption you are talking about? What then happens if radiation from a cooler atmosphere penetrates 1mm below the surface of warmer water? Does its electromagnetic energy get converted to kinetic energy in the water molecules, perhaps causing them to rise to the surface and evaporate? If so, why would this not be a reduction in entropy? I suggest you read “Radiated Energy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics” in the Principia Scientific International website in their Publications menu. It’s about the only valid paper on their site. Yours truly.
Just remember there’s going to be a genuine $5,000 reward for the first to come up with proof I’m wrong and proof IPCC are right about water vapour – see last paragraph..
In a horizontal plane you can observe diffusion of kinetic energy in your home. Just run a heater on one side of a room, turn it off or even remove it quickly from the room, and you will temporarily have measureably warmer air on one side of the room. Molecules then keep on colliding and as they do, kinetic energy is shared. Statistical mechanics tells us that temperature (that is, mean kinetic energy per molecule) will even out across the room assuming it’s well insulated.
Suppose now that the room has double glazed windows and it’s cooler outside. Which is more effective at insulating the room?
(a) A window with dry air or even argon
(b) A window with moist air – say 4% water vapour or water gas
(c) A window full of carbon dioxide only, like the Venus atmosphere?
The answer is the dry air or argon, as is well known in the construction industry. Why? Because radiating “pollutants” like water gas and carbon dioxide send the energy across the gap (and up through the troposphere) with inter-molecular radiation. Such radiation only ever transfers thermal energy from warmer to cooler regions. Otherwise what happens is as described in “Radiated Energy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics.”
Why then does the thermal gradient reduce in magnitude because of the inter-molecular radiation between carbon dioxide molecules in the Venus atmosphere, or between a few methane molecules in the Uranus troposphere or between water vapour molecules in Earth’s troposphere and Earth’s outer 9Km of its crust?
All these thermal gradients (aka lapse rates) are less steep than they would have been in dry air or (nearly) non-radiating gases. Gravity would have induced a steeper -g/Cp gradient.
The thermal gradient in the Uranus troposphere does not level out (despite no solar radiation or any surface) because to do so would violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It seems most of you don’t understand why, but the reason is that entropy would decrease. If somehow a state were to evolve with more gravitational potential energy per molecule at the top, but no compensating reduction in kinetic energy per molecule (ie temperature) then there would be unbalanced energy potentials at the top, so work could be done and thus entropy would not have been at a maximum. The four molecule experiment demonstrates this and how it happens at the molecular level.
The vortex tube demonstrates it, and kinetic energy is re-distributed such that the inner tube gets far colder than the air that was pumped in. So you can’t blame friction for heating the outer tube. Nor does pressure alter temperature, because pressure is proportional to the product of temperature and density: temperature is an independent variable and only varies when mean kinetic energy per molecule varies.
Finally, none of you can explain how the Venus surface actually rises in temperature from 732K to 737K during its four-month-long day, unless you start by understanding that the thermal gradient is the state of thermodynamic equilibrium. Then you need to understand the mechanism of “heat creep” explained in the second part of the four molecule experiment.
There will be a $5,000 reward for the first to prove me wrong with conditions explained in public advertisements and on all of a dozen or so of my websites. To win the award you will also have to show empirical evidence of the IPCC postulate that the sensitivity to water vapour is of the order of 10 degrees of warming for every 1% increase in the Earth’s troposphere.