Arctic ice

Not measurably.

Not measurably.

But unlike in your gedanken above, the actual increased CO2 has not been confined to the lower troposphere!

Both of these effects occur in the upper troposphere and stratosphere where there is no water vapor, not in the lower troposphere.

 

There is no way of knowing the source of the heat discrepancy as there are too many confounding variables: ocean circulation, ice balances, thermal inertia, the solar cycle, etc.

And even not-so-low ones. Right.

Wrong, as explained in my earlier post. The emission temperature increases slightly, the emission height decreases slightly, and surface temperature is unaffected.

 

The enhanced greenhouse effect has been measured. The increased downward radiation at the earth's surface and the decreased outgoing long wave radiation emitted to space (all
corresponding to CO2's radiation spectrum) have been measured at different times when the CO2 levels were different.

See Skeptical Science "How we know more CO2 is causing warming?"

https://skepticalscience.com//empirical-evidence-for-co2-enhanced-greenhouse-effect-intermediate.htm

The curve below is from the American Chemical Society showing the radiation spectrum measured from space of the Sahara at midday and at a Temperature of 320 degrees K.
The Earth's surface is that of a blackbody radiating at 320 degrees K. The portion of the curve at 320 degrees K shows radiation leaving the earth unimpeded by the atmosphere.
The CO2 dip in the curve centered at 15 micrometers represents CO2 emitting at 218 degrees K. Ozone and methane can be seen radiating at temperatures corresponding to
their emission height, just like CO2. Increasing CO2 in the atmosphere will increase the average height that CO2 radiates out to space and will decrease its avg. radiation temperature.
This occurs because the temperature decreases with altitude in accordance with the lapse rate. The additional CO2 makes the atmosphere opaque at levels below this emission height.
If the amount of radiation emitted to space by CO2 decreases, then the Sahara's temperature will rise above 320 K. The area under the curve remains constant (not all of the curve is shown)
because it is equal to the solar radiation absorbed by the earth, which isn't affected by greenhouse gases. So the CO2 "bite" of the curve increases with increased atm. CO2 and the
Earth's surface temp rises. The energy flux is a function of the 4th power of temperature.

 

As already pointed out, that's just a review article -- a restatement of previous claims. Nothing to see here, folks.

 

It used to be impossible.

 

You are prob arguing with a professional.

There is also no way you can win. Don't get me wrong, the science was settled over 2 decades ago, and the trends were clear 3 decades ago.

He's not doing science, he's doing propaganda. All he has to do is create the appearance of controversy to inhibit the normal process of consensus building among the public. This is not a new trick, it's just an improved version of the sick propaganda cigarette companies used to use.

I make the meta-points. They are propagandists, not scientists. That science as a whole, threw their support behind AGW nearly 20 years ago, that you can see the change nearly everywhere now. Hurricanes are doing more damage, and will get worse. The fires out West are a nightmare, and likely to get worse. That the world's ice is melting. It's not a short list.

The good news is Biden has promised to work the problem. How far he can go is an open question, but something most have forgotten is that there are already laws he can use.

So we will see.

Evil has an end. The kids coming up are resisting the brainwashing Republicans do. So this may have to be a generational thing. I shudder to think of the enormity of what we are leaving them to do. But we are one very corrupt country, and we will have to pay that price when the world leaves us behind.

 

Then it is a good thing?

 

And does not measurably affect the earth's surface temperature.

Skepticalscience is an anti-fossil-fuel hate propaganda site, and that article is typical of its disingenuous and deceitful nonscience. The decrease in outgoing longwave is irrelevant because it only affects the upper atmosphere, not the surface, and the increased downward IR at the surface is an EFFECT of higher air temperature, not the CAUSE, as the article actually admits:

"A compilation of surface measurements of downward longwave radiation from 1973 to 2008 find an increasing trend of more longwave radiation returning to earth, attributed to increases in air temperature, humidity and atmospheric carbon dioxide (Wang 2009)."

"Attributing" an effect to CO2 does not make it an effect of CO2.

That is also extremely deceitful. Yes, CO2 absorbs at 14 and 16 microns, but that part of the spectrum is already effectively saturated by water vapor anyway. In fact, the whole curve except for the portion between 8 and 13 microns is effectively saturated by water vapor, and there is so much water vapor in the air, even above the Sahara, that the other greenhouse gases are effectively irrelevant. Labeling the 14-16 micron dip as "the CO2 dip" is a gross misrepresentation of the facts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Water_infrared_absorption_coefficient_large.gif

No. The ozone absorption between 9 and 10 microns is real, as it corresponds to a part of the IR spectrum where water vapor is transparent, but the absorption region labeled "CH4" is in water vapor's saturation zone under 8 microns, just as the region labelled "CO2" is in water vapor's saturation zone above 13 microns.

But have little effect on surface temperature.

In the troposphere. In the stratosphere, temperature begins to rise with altitude because ozone absorbs ultraviolet sunlight.

Right. So a change in the emission height and temperature has little effect on surface temperature unless the emission height gets close to the surface, as on high mountains in winter at high latitudes.

By some microscopic fraction of 1 K. The main effect is far above the surface where IR makes its final escape into space. This is a very common deceitful practice by anti-fossil-fuel hate propagandists: correctly pointing out that some physical process means additional CO2 will increase the earth's surface temperature (but "forgetting" to mention the fact that the increase will likely be immeasurably small) and then claiming that much larger natural increases in temperature must therefore have been caused by CO2.

See? They did it again. "The earth's surface temp rises" -- but maybe only by ~0.001 K.

Right. Which means the effect of CO2 is confined to the upper troposphere and stratosphere, where a small change to temperature and emission height is enough to rebalance the energy flux. No significant effect of CO2 ever propagates back to the earth's surface except at the tops of high mountains, and in winter at high latitudes.

See the water IR absorption spectrum referenced above, which shows that water vapor saturates absorption everywhere from 5 to over 100 microns, except the area from ~8-13 microns where only ozone (9-10 microns) has any noticeable effect.

 

I am arguing with people who obviously have some knowledge of climate science. I don't think that their understanding of the science is entirely correct. I believe
that they are honest. I am speaking primarily of Jack Hays and bringiton . I believe that other "skeptics" are sincere and generally less well informed. That said, I have never been able to change
a single "skeptics" mind as far as I know. I may give up on this venture very soon.

I believe that there are propagandists among some of the "skeptic" blogs that specialize in climate articles. Most of the right-wing blogs just give their readers what they want to hear.

I am careful about attributing hurricanes and wild fires entirely to climate change. Attribution is much more difficult than what the average person thinks. I am not convinced of
a moderate to strong link between Western fires in 2020 and climate change. I believe that there is some connection between the recent increase in category 4 &5 hurricanes
with climate change but the evidence isn't strong.

I have confidence in mainstream climate scientists. There is no obvious reason for them to deceive the public. They are highly intelligent and curious individuals. It isn't
reasonable to think that they don't care about their profession. The main reason why a person chooses a profession like physics, geology, or climate science is out of
a desire to make sense out of the natural world. There have always been climate scientists that are out of the mainstream and try to debunk the mainstream view. So
far they have not been successful in their arguments and they are becoming fewer in number. Also, climate scientists frequently express skepticism and doubt about
aspects of their own research and acknowledge shortcomings in what is known.

 

Sure there is. Scientists are like everyone else. They want recognition by their fellow researchers and by the general public. They want their work to be seen as important. And if you get to it they want research grants. There are plenty of reasons for climate scientists to misrepresent their position. And they might be completely well meaning about their deception. They could honestly believe they are trying to get changes made in order to "save the planet".

 

Ignore that oil billionaire behind the curtain...

 

Do you know when the Antarctic is supposed to melt and the arctic freeze? I heard that is the next ice age because there will be too much ice on land being land in more prevalent in the northern hemisphere. I've had trouble finding info on it because all the global warming hype gets front seat.

 

How is that relevant?

 

In a few hundred million years, maybe. It would take a lot of continental drift.

The imbalance of land between the northern and southern hemispheres is a major driver of longish-term climate variation such as the ice ages.

Yeah, it's unfortunate that Google shoves anti-fossil-fuel hysteria at users so hard.

 

The decrease in outgoing long wave radiation decreases the total energy of the Earth's surface + atmosphere system but the amount of solar radiation remains constant and the Earth surface/atmosphere
system gradually gains energy because of this imbalance. This doesn't prove that the Earth's surface temperature will rise. That will happen as a result of increased downward radiation from an increase
in greenhouse gases. As the Earth's surface begins to slowly warm from an increase in GHGs, more radiation will be emitted by the earth's surface, decreasing the altitude where saturation ends.

The article by Evans and others, which I have a copy of, describes how the greenhouse flux from individual gases was extracted by subtracting out the background thermal emission. The background emission of the atmosphere was simulated using the radiative transfer code, FASCOD3. The simulations incorporated the temperature, relative humidity and pressure profiles from radiosonde measurements obtained at Minawaki, Quebec.

It is interesting to note that only 15% to 30% of the upgoing thermal radiation from the Earth's surface is transmitted out to space. Carbon dioxide and water vapor have overlapping
absorption band between 14um and 16um. The absorption band of carbon dioxide is close enough to the peak of the blackbody curve to have a significant effect. According to this diagram
and what I have read, the band between 14um and 16um is not saturated with water vapor's absorption. If that were true, we wouldn't see carbon dioxide's 220 degree K. emission
spectrum as viewed from space. The emission from the Earth's surface that is trapped by CO2 at a much higher temperature, is released to space at a much cooler temperature.

This is the abstract from the Evans + others 2006 paper:

The earth's climate system is warmed by 35 C due to the emission of downward infrared radiation by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (surface radiative forcing) or by the absorption of upward infrared radiation (radiative trapping). Increases in this emission/absorption are the driving force behind global warming. Climate models predict that the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere has altered the radiative energy balance at the earth's surface by several percent by increasing the greenhouse radiation from the atmosphere. With measurements at high spectral resolution, this increase can be quantitatively attributed to each of several anthropogenic gases. Radiance spectra of the greenhouse radiation from the atmosphere have been measured at ground level from several Canadian sites using FTIR spectroscopy at high resolution. The forcing radiative fluxes from CFC11, CFC12, CCl4, HNO3, O3, N2O, CH4, CO and CO2 have been quantitatively determined over a range of seasons. The contributions from stratospheric ozone and tropospheric ozone are separated by our measurement techniques. A comparison between our measurements of surface forcing emission and measurements of radiative trapping absorption from the IMG satellite instrument shows reasonable agreement. The experimental fluxes are simulated well by the FASCOD3 radiation code. This code has been used to calculate the model predicted increase in surface radiative forcing since 1850 to be 2.55 W/m2. In comparison, an ensemble summary of our measurements indicates that an energy flux imbalance of 3.5 W/m2 has been created by anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases since 1850. This experimental data should effectively end the argument by skeptics that no experimental evidence exists for the connection between greenhouse gas increases in the atmosphere and global warming.

Extended Abstract (256K)






The shaded blue region below represents water vapor's absorption

 

Because over 90% of what I've deal with for over 20 years was generated in a Koch propaganda machine, spread by a Koch fake website, and promulgated on forums like this by fools and Koch employees.

 

I have read posts from other "skeptics" of climate change make the argument that climate scientists deceive in order to get research grants. That is very common and it originated with a comment
by Richard Lindzen, a climate contrarian scientist. I don't buy it because the science is so compelling without any attempt at deception and the uncertainty over climate projections is real
There is much uncertainty over what the future will be like in the year 2100 and much of that is due to the uncertainty in future carbon emissions. There is less uncertainty with predicting the
future from models, but that is still very significant. With so much uncertainty over the future and so much that is not understood about the climate, climate scientists should have no difficulty
in getting research grants. So, I find that argument to be very poor. Maybe I'm naive, but I think that scientists are generally very honest and I know of no large conspiracy in the history of
science. Even a conspiracy on a small scale is rare.
.
What climate "skeptics" seem to be missing is that there could be something of a concerted effort on the part of climate contrarians to deceive the public into
thinking that climate change is a hoax or nonsense. The motive could be political, many individuals hate the government and have libertarian views.
I think that a political motivation may be greater today than the fossil fuel lobby's
efforts to downplay cliamte change.

 

Thank you for taking the high road. Most anti-fossil-fuel scaremongers clearly have no interest in understanding climate.

I'm the first to admit I don't understand everything about climate science. But I understand more than the typical anti-fossil-fuel scaremonger.

Thank you. It's so refreshing not to have the constant ridiculous accusations of oil company funding.

True. A lot of what politically motivated climate skeptics say is woefully, even comically ill-informed, and amounts to, "God promised there would never be another Flood."

You know it's time to question your position when it lines up with the establishment view.

The clickbait business model has a lot to answer for.

Right! And a handful of loudmouth anti-fossil-fuel hatemongers take full advantage of the public's naivete.

But there are non-obvious ones like professional recognition and advancement, grant money, and social status.

Most are. But some in positions of authority, like Michael Mann, strike me as little better than con men.

Many have voiced concern about the political takeover of climate science.

They have been successful in their arguments. The mainstream has just ignored and marginalized them. There is a precedent for this sort of scientific malfeasance in economics: 60 years ago, the American neoclassical school decisively lost the Cambridge Capital Controversy, but simply ignored the fact that their fundamental concepts had been proved incoherent, and have continued to teach the same proved-false garbage to this day, and even require graduate school applicants to pledge their allegiance to it as a condition of acceptance.

Right. The real ones. Not the anti-fossil-fuel scaremongers.

 

Evidence for such outlandish claims?

Of course not.

 

Read, "The Corruption of Economics" by Mason Gaffney, "Debunking Economics" by Steve Keen, or "J is for Junk Economics" by Michael Hudson. Modern mainstream neoclassical economics is the biggest scientific hoax of all time, eclipsing even anti-fossil-fuel hysteria.

I suspect the fundamentalist religious right has more to do with it than politics or libertarianism.

Ask yourself who benefits, and how much, if other people use less fossil fuel.

 

A bunch of like minded people is not a conspiracy.

 

That's what I've been saying. If you are a climate scientist and know that if you publish anything even mildly critical of the idea of climate change, and you know it is going to draw massive mocking and criticism by everyone you know, everyone you worked with, everyone you went to college just how eager will you be to publish your findings? It is easy to imagine the professional damage you could suffer. Just imagine you try to get a prestigious professorship and the first thing they mention about you is "Isn't he that guy who doesn't believe in climate change"?

Simple self preservation does not require a conspiracy of any kind.

 

All of that sounds reasonable, but there many people that openly talk about fraud being committed by climate scientists.

I suspect that all scientists have to publish their findings because that is their job
regardless of the implications. If they try to fudge the results they will likely be caught, and anyone caught doing something unethical would pay a big price. If a group of scientists receives government funding to do a study, and the results don't conform with the climate change narrative, what choice do they have on whether or not to publish the findings? I don't think that anyone can blame them for doing their job. If a scientist professes not to believe in anthropogenic climate change, that could be a problem.

The recent CMIP6 climate models are on the average much more sensitive than the previous CMIP5 models and are projecting greater warming. The results of these models should appear in the 2021
IPCC report. Why would scientists deliberately make their models produce warmer projections than the CMIP5 models, which made somewhat warmer projections than have been observed?
If they make wrong projections their credibility will suffer.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/cmip6-the-next-generation-of-climate-models-explained

Researchers are currently looking into what is driving these high ECS values. In a number of models the increase in ECS appears to be due to their improved representation of clouds and aerosols; for example, how models treat supercooled clouds (below freezing but still liquid) in the Southern oceans can make a big difference in resulting sensitivity.

However, despite making the models more realistic, it is not yet clear whether these improvements are translating into more accurate estimates of ECS. For example, a number of climate scientists have expressed scepticism of the high-end values, arguing that they are inconsistent with evidence from palaeoclimate records and other lines of evidence.

It remains to be seen how the IPCC AR6 will reconcile the high ECS from some models with other sources of evidence, and if they will update the “likely” sensitivity range.

 

That has been my experience.

 

I can't take climate change (global warming) seriously for a huge reason:

Humans already KNOW how to deal with widespread global warming and its larger overall effects like sea rise.

If drought prone areas become larger we irrigate. Irrigation has been used highly effectively for literally thousands of years.

If sea levels rise and threaten to swamp low lying areas we build dikes and other water barriers. The Dutch have been doing that for so long that there is a saying that goes "God made the Earth but the Dutch made Holland". And sure there are storms that sometimes swamp the dikes, sea walls and other barriers. Killing thousands. These things happen. But the Dutch rebuild, regroup and continue to march forward.

In general, most human beings like a warmer environment. That has been lauded as one of the defining appeals in the U.S. of southern California and Florida (among other places).

But even worse case from global warming will not produce the kind of apocalyptic results that people like bartender/model lookalike congressman AOC loves to claim.