Arctic ice

So you made it up. Thought so.

 

First thing I do when climate comes up is google. Put the guys name in, and then Koch, and hit enter.

I've been doing that for a long, long time.

 

No it doesn't. It just moves the average height and temperature of the final IR emission to space to a new equilibrium point.

No it doesn't. We know it varies with sunspot cycles, and that the Little Ice Age corresponded to the lowest level of sunspot activity in several thousand years, and the 20th century warming corresponded to the highest level in several thousand years.

Nope. The balance is maintained by a slight shift in average final emission temperature and height.

To the extent that it ever reaches the surface from the altitude where water condenses out and CO2 becomes important. Which it doesn't, except at high latitudes in winter.

You are merely assuming what you purport to be proving.

And increasing the temperature, which restores the energy flux equilibrium without any measurable effect at the surface.

Radiosondes take their readings in the upper troposphere and stratosphere where there is little or no water vapor. So they "extracted" CO2's effect on radiative energy transfer by deleting the effect of water vapor closer to the earth's surface. This kind of deceitful scientific malpractice is standard operating procedure for anti-fossil-fuel scaremongers.

And as there is so much more water vapor than CO2 in the lower troposphere -- i.e., near the earth's surface -- additional CO2 has no measurable effect on radiative energy transfer there.

If there is not much water vapor in the air.

It is definitely saturated in the lower troposphere, except where it is so cold that there is little water vapor in the air: high mountain peaks, and in winter at high latitudes.

Wrong again. We would see it because the average final emission altitude is far above the level where water vapor has effectively all condensed out.

But from a different average altitude, which restores the equilibrium.

He is merely assuming what he claims to be proving.

Assuming what he claims to be proving.

Thus assuming what they claim to be proving.

"Can be attributed to" is not the same as, "is caused by."

So at high latitude and in winter. Thought so. In 90% of Canada, the temperature is well below freezing, and the air thus very dry, for most of the year.

But mostly when the temperature was well below zero....

But not the contribution of water vapor.

Because the satellite can't see the effect of water vapor either, as it is blocked by the upper atmosphere.

Which ignores water vapor.

Because the effect of water vapor is ignored.

What a disingenuous, deceitful and anti-scientific load of propaganda.

And it clearly shows that the water vapor window is ~8-13 microns, not 7.5-20 microns as shown on the graph, so CO2's absorption bands at 14 and 16 microns have little effect when there is significant water vapor in the air.

 

So, you get a hit for every time anyone on the Net falsely accuses the guy of being associated with or funded by the Kochs.

Somehow, I kinda figured it'd be something like that...

 

"Koch Family Foundations have spent $145,555,197 directly financing 90 groups that have attacked climate change science and policy solutions, from 1997-2018."
https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/global-warming/climate-deniers/koch-industries/

https://www.amazon.com/Kochland-His...ild=1&keywords=kochland&qid=1605463495&sr=8-1

https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Money-H...36J1AT0D31J&psc=1&refRID=PDEV150CT36J1AT0D31J

https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Ch...36J1AT0D31J&psc=1&refRID=PDEV150CT36J1AT0D31J

 

In my thought experiment the atmosphere of the earth was perturbed by adding a significant amount of carbon dioxide uniformly. I didn't say how much CO2 would be added but a 10% increase
would be significant. I said that the Earth's radiation balance would be changed in such a way that there would be less infrared radiation emitted to space - that would be entirely associated with
carbon dioxide molecules radiating out to space at a lower temperature and higher altitude. I was assuming a constant level of solar irradiance for this thought experiment so solar cycle variations
are irrelevant and they would nearly irrelevant without that assumption if we allowed this experiment to go on for about 30 years I said that this would cause the Earth 's surface and atmosphere
to gain energy. I also said that increase "back radiation" or downward flux would increase and warm the earth's surface. That was all correct

Here is an explanation by Clive Best, a physicist who started a blog that covers his views about global warming. His background is described below and then his views on climate..
The important points from his explanation, "As CO2 concentrations increase, CO2 emissions occur at a higher level that are colder, less energy is radiated to space, the Earth warms up to compensate
for the decreased CO2 emissions, and the enhanced anthropic GH effect due to
CO2 emissions is equal to the reduction of IR emissions to space in CO2 bands
from the upper troposphere."

" I have a Bsc in Physics and a PhD in High Energy Physics and have worked as a research fellow at CERN for 3 years, Rutherford Lab for 2 years and the JET Nuclear Fusion experiment for 5 years.
I became interested in understanding the physics behind climate change after getting fed up with being told that the debate is over. Science is never a closed book and has a habit of turning round and biting those who think so. This explains why the blog now focuses on climate science.
I am basically a scientific skeptic but with a deep interest in other opinions and cultures."

http://clivebest.com/blog/?p=1169

"IR scatters repeatably upward through layers of the atmosphere until at between 5-9 km the air is so thin that the the atmosphere becomes transparent allowing CO2 emissions here to radiate out into space. At these levels there is little water vapour and CO2 dominates the energy loss. As CO2 concentrations increase so this level shifts to higher levels in the atmosphere since a critical density must be reached for the radiation to escape. These levels are colder (until we reach the troposphere) and IR loss is proportional to T**4 (Stefan Boltzman’s law). This means that slightly LESS energy is radiated to space than before and since the total energy must balance, the Earth warms up to radiate more heat to compensate. Don’t forget that there are windows in the IR spectrum with no absorption other than water vapour allows extra energy loss through evaporation and IR emission from clouds. Clouds also increase albedo. The vertical concentration of H2O and clouds are both temperature dependent. The temperature profile of the atmosphere is called the (adiabatic) lapse rate and is approximately -7 degrees per km falling to -4 degrees per km in the tropics. This is valid up to the Tropopause after which temperature rises again in the stratosphere. So greenhouse warming depends on falling temperature with height, and the anthropic enhanced greenhouse effect due to CO2 emissions is equal to the reduction of IR emissions to space in CO2 bands from the upper troposphere."


Radiosondes were not used to measure the downward flux in the experiments by Evans and others and the measurements were made near the Earth's surface not in the upper troposphere.

"The downward zenith sky radiation from the clear sky was collected by positioning a gold-plated mirror at the emission port along the optical axis of the instrument."
"The measurements of the downward atmospheric thermal emission were collected using a Magna 550 Fourier transform interferometer spectrometer or a high resolution
Bomem DA8 system."

 

You said to the lower troposphere; but if you now want to change it, OK.

Yes, and it is typical anti-CO2 nonscience because you "forgot" to specify HOW MUCH it would warm the earth's surface. If a 10% increase in CO2 causes a 0.01K increase in the earth's surface temperature, the anti-fossil-fuel narrative falls apart because CO2's effect on climate is just a bit of noise compared to natural variation.

No, the atmosphere immediately below the emission level does, increasing non-CO2 IR emission temperature and reducing its altitude to compensate for the lower temperature and higher altitude of CO2 emissions.

But that effect occurs in the upper troposphere, as explained above, not at the surface.

So you'd think he would understand the physics a bit better.

He means the tropopause: the altitude where ambient temperature stops declining with altitude (the adiabatic lapse rate) and the stratosphere begins. Or maybe he just means the stratosphere. In any case, troposphere is wrong because the troposphere starts at the surface.

Nope. Flat wrong. Only the atmosphere immediately below the emission level warms significantly because it is opaque to those wavelengths. Think of a bed in a cold room with ten blankets on it. If you add another blanket, the upper surface temperature of the 11th blanket will be very slightly lower than the upper surface of the tenth blanket was before, and the tenth blanket will warm up more than any of the blankets below it. The lower you get in the stack of blankets, the less difference the 11th blanket will make to the temperature of a given blanket, and the person sleeping in the bed won't feel any difference at all. With atmospheric CO2, we are now at the point where we have increased the covers from 10 to ~15 blankets. How much warmer would you expect to be in that bed with 15 blankets rather than just 10? Assuming the blankets don't weigh anything, and thus do not compress the ones below, how much warmer would you be with 20 blankets rather than 10, or with 30 or 40 blankets? That is why adding CO2 to the atmosphere makes no measurable difference to the earth's surface temperature. And the reality is actually even more extreme than that because once you get below a certain point in the atmosphere, water vapor takes over from CO2, and the blankets are much thicker than the CO2 blankets higher up in the stack.

That is nonscience. Evaporation is endothermic, not exothermic, and clouds consist of condensed water, not water vapor. The water droplets and ice crystals that make up clouds have completely different IR transmissivity from that of water vapor.

Right. NOT from the SURFACE.

Sorry, but I do not believe you. There is no reason to use a radiosonde for measurements near the earth's surface where it's much cheaper and easier to just use aircraft. Radiosondes go much higher than any but advanced military and intelligence aircraft. That is why they are used.

That does not mention the altitude. It does not mention the ambient air temperature. Therefore it is safe to assume the readings were taken above the altitude where water has all condensed out. I.e., the data were deliberately constructed to remove the effect of water vapor on IR transmission.

 

You claimed 90 PERCENT of climate skeptics you have dealt with were Koch funded, not 90 GROUPS.

So still no evidence for your claims.

 

Thank-you for your very comprehensive rebuttal.

My response to your claim of 0.01 K increase in Earth's surface temp. to a 10% increase in CO2

There is a formula, dF = 5.35 ln (CO2/Co2-initial) W/sq. meter, that is an an approximation to the change in radiative forcing at the top of the atmosphere to a change in CO2 concentration.
If the CO2 concentration increases by 10%, the dF = 0.51 watts//meter of increased radiative forcing, that is significant. It is 3.7 watts/meter for a doubling of CO2. The change in radiative forcing
will be affected by climate feedbacks, and if we assume a climates sensitivity of 3.0 for a doubling of CO2, 0.51X(3.0/3.7) = 0.41 degrees C temperature increase of surface warming after
equilibrium is achieved. That would require at least 50 years.

Your claim:
No, the atmosphere immediately below the emission level does, increasing non-CO2 IR emission temperature and reducing its altitude to compensate for the lower temperature and higher altitude of CO2 emissions.

That claim is something that is difficult for me to grasp. You seem to be saying that the atmosphere below where CO2 emits radiation out to space, around 5.5 km or a little higher, warms instead of the surface,
and that lowers the emission height of other greenhouse gases, making them more efficient radiators out to space. Doesn't the density of the other greenhouse gases determine the emission height. That
wouldn't change. I don't think that would affect the atmospheric window's emission of energy.

Your claim: He means the tropopause: the altitude where ambient temperature stops declining with altitude (the adiabatic lapse rate) and the stratosphere begins. Or maybe he just means the stratosphere. In any case, troposphere is wrong because the troposphere starts at the surface.

I agree. I saw that error before I read your response but after I posted the message. He gets it right later in the paragraph after talking about the lapse rate: "This is valid up to the Tropopause after which temperature rises again in the stratosphere". I thought that he meant tropopause.

When Clive Best talks about the IR loss being proportional to Temp. raised to the 4th power, he is talking about how the CO2 emission physics at the emission height of around 6 km or more can
be approximated as a blackbody. A small decrease in the emission temperature produces a big change in radiation flux.

As more and more carbon dioxide is added to the atmosphere, the warming effect increases less and less, approximately logarithmically. This is not disputed by any climate scientists that I know of.

Your claim: That is nonscience. Evaporation is endothermic, not exothermic, and clouds consist of condensed water, not water vapor. The water droplets and ice crystals that make up clouds have completely different IR transmissivity from that of water vapor.

Clive Best seems to be saying that not all of the change at the top of the atmosphere is due to CO2's reduced emission of energy. Some of the change could be caused by changing albedo,
specifically cloud albedo. He doesn't say whether or not more energy or less energy could be reflected back to space from a change in cloud albedo and his description of the role of cloud
albedo changes is just another complication in trying to determine the change in the earth's total energy budget due to a perturbation in atm. Co2.

I can only say that I believe that the report by Evans and others, "Measurements of the radiative surface forcing of climate" means the surface of the earth. I don't understand the technology
used to make the measurements.

 

At the emission altitude. The lower you go from that altitude, the less significant it is. Just think of the blanket analogy.

Why assume such an absurdly exaggerated number when there is no empirical justification for it?

Assuming the increase propagates efficiently all the way down to the surface. Which there is no reason whatever to assume, and ample good reason to doubt.

Exactly, because they are emitting at a higher average temperature. Remember the Stephan-Boltzmann Equation.

Density AND TEMPERATURE.

It affects the average altitude and temperature of the emission.

And contrariwise: a small increase in temperature produces a big increase in emittted radiation. The point is that the downward radiation is blocked by greenhouse gases, the upward can escape into space, so the temperature change does not propagate downward.

Right.

Clouds are not well understood, and are not modeled well in GCMs. It is very likely that the effect of clouds on climate is negative feedback because higher temperature increases evaporation rate, increasing cloud cover and albedo, in turn reducing temperature. We know from paleoclimate data that there appears to be a ceiling on the earth's surface temperature, so some such negative feedback mechanism is almost certainly involved.

It's also complicated by the difference between clouds' daytime effect, which is to reflect more sunlight back out into space, cooling the surface, and their nighttime effect, which is to reflect IR back down to the surface, warming it. The daytime effect is almost certainly far more important because the incident visible EM flux from the sun is orders of magnitude greater than the nighttime IR flux from the ground.

Do you understand the blanket analogy, and why it shows that emissivity and transmissivity measurements of greenhouse gas changes in anything but standard lower troposphere air are guaranteed to be irrelevant to climate?

 

The research continues.
Past Climate More Complex Than Previously Thought, Says Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute
By P Gosselin on 22. November 2020

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Atmospheric CO2 just doesn’t change on a whim and cause global temperature to follow along in response.
Press release from The Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI):

Irregular Appearances of Glacial and Interglacial Climate States
During the last 2.6 million years of Earth’s climate has altered between glacial and interglacial states. As such, there have been times in which the transition between the two climate states appeared with either regular or irregular periodicity. AWI researcher Peter Köhler has now discovered that the irregular appearance of interglacials has been more frequent than previously thought. . . .

Original publication
The study has now been released in Nature Communications:

Köhler, P., van de Wal, R.S.W., Interglacials of the Quaternary defined by northern hemispheric land ice distribution outside of Greenland. Nat Commun 11, 5124 (2020). DOI:10.1038/s41467-020-18897-5

 

Good times for the bears.

Polar bear habitat update for late November
Posted on November 25, 2020 | Comments Offon Polar bear habitat update for late November
Sea ice formation is ahead of usual in some regions and behind in others but overall, sea ice habitat is abundant enough for this time of year for virtually all polar bears across the Arctic to be back out on the sea ice hunting seals.



Overall, there was more sea ice at 24 November 2020 than there was on the same date in 2016, which was the last year that a number of polar bear subpopulations were surveyed, including Western and Southern Hudson Bay, Southern Beaufort, Chukchi Sea (Crockford 2019, 2020), see graph below from NSIDC Masie:


Northern Hemisphere sea ice at 24 November, 2016-2020.

UPDATE 27 November 2020: Problem bear report published today (for week 13, Nov. 16-22) has been added below.

Continue reading

 

The notion that a little warming is somehow bad for polar bears is nonsense: when it warms, they move north, when it cools again, they move south. Polar bear populations are determined by humans, all right, but not by our CO2 emissions. Bear populations were stable before the Inuit got access to firearms. Populations then fell steeply, because the Inuit correctly regard them as dangerous pests. Now they are protected by law, and populations have rebounded.

Bears are just overgrown raccoons, and raccoons are just overgrown rats.

 

The bears are thriving. The embarrassment for polar bear "experts" is that it has been shown they are perfectly able to flourish in a variety of sea ice conditions. The "experts" dislike Susan Crockford so much because she has embarrassed them with evidence.

 

Newly discovered Greenland (mantle) plume drives thermal activities in the Arctic
The research team discovered that the Greenland plume rose from the core-mantle boundary to the mantle transition zone beneath Greenland. The plume also has two branches in the lower mantle that feed into other plumes in the region, supplying heat to active regions in Iceland and Jan Mayen and the geothermal area in Svalbard.

Continue reading →

 

Study suggests great earthquakes as cause of Arctic warming
13 hours ago

Charles Rotter
MOSCOW INSTITUTE OF PHYSICS AND TECHNOLOGY Research News A researcher from MIPT has proposed a new explanation for the Arctic’s rapid warming. In his recent paper in Geosciences, he suggests that…

 

The data won't comply with the alarmists' propaganda needs.

“Arctic Not Freezing”
Posted on January 13, 2021 by tonyheller
During October, a well known climate researcher just across the border in Colorado sounded the alarm that the Arctic wasn’t freezing this winter. The press got hysterical. . . .

Arctic sea ice extent is highest for the date in the last five years and just below the 1981-2010 two standard deviation range.



Ocean and Ice Services | Danmarks Meteorologiske Institut

 

Keep your eye on the data.
Greenland Ice Mass Loss Below Average In 2020
Charles Rotter
What is evident is that there has been no acceleration in melt since the start of records in 2002. This runs counter to the alarmist message commonly perpetuated, for instance…

 

Yes.... it sure looks like methane is beginning to be released from the ARctic permafrost.

I am at the two minute mark and I am really impressed with his approach to this topic.

 

Or... could it be true that the ADDITION of H2O to Antarctica is keeping ocean levels relative stable.... and thus masking the very serious threat posed by rising ocean levels?

 

Is the alternative theory on stabilization of the climate that I prefer illogical in your opinion (oritinal)late......?

This video is AWESOME!!!!! I am at the twelve minute mark but....... I believe that investment in turning deserts green will accomplish the most good, in the least amount of time... for the least level of investment?!


http://www.politicalforum.com/index...raham-peace-accord-turn-deserts-green.578489/

 

The Permafrost used to be down around the 45 degrees north line around 20,000 years ago, then over the centuries moved north to its present day around 1,200- 1,500 miles to the north. The ground had been permanently frozen for 10's of thousands of years before glaciation phase ended. This means most of the CH4 outflow has long been done, and since the molecules doesn't last long in the atmosphere, it is irrelevant to the heat budget.

 

Inconvenient truth:

Study Shows Arctic Sea Ice Reached Lowest Point On Modern Record… In The 1940s, Not Today!
By P Gosselin on 24. January 2021

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If Al Gore had been an activist in the 1940s, he would have certainly predicted an ice-free Arctic by 1960, or at least by 1980. And of course, as usual, he would have been wrong.

Al Serial-Exaggerator Gore gets exposed again

Back in the 1930s and 40s, the globe had been warming at a rate that we’ve see over the most recent 30 years. There were newspaper articles back then reporting on a rapidly melting Arctic. But then the globe cooled again and the Arctic sea ice recovered and all was forgotten.

Arctic sea ice low point in 1940s

Now, NTZ guest author Kenneth Richard just tweeted a new study by Van Achter et al, 2020, which found the Arctic in fact may have reached its lowest sea ice volume level in the 1940s, and not only just recently like the climate alarmists like to claim. . . .

 

There is no Arctic ice problem.

Global Ice Story: What they don’t tell you
Guest Blogger
The Arctic includes the Arctic Ocean, Greenland, Iceland, and part of Siberia and northern Alaska. Because of the absence of any land mass in the Arctic Ocean, most of area…

 

Data trumps propaganda.

Greenland : “A New Study Says”
Posted on February 5, 2021 by tonyheller
A new study admits that Greenland’s surface is gaining ice, but says this will change by the year 2055 due to CO2.



The surface of Greenland’s ice sheet could lose more mass than it gains by 2055, a new study says – ArcticToday

The surface mass balance data for the Greenland Ice Sheet from the Danish Meteorological Institute shows that over the past five years, the surface of Greenland has averaged a gain of about 400 billion tons per year, which is slightly above the 1981-2010 mean.



Surface Conditions: Polar Portal

But the press tells us that Greenland melting is the fastest in 12,000 years. . . .