It would be, if we had any choice in the matter, which we don't.
Of course we do. That's the whole point.
Only if we can cause nontrivial climate improvement to occur, which has yet to be shown.
We certainly can cause nontrivial climate improvement to occur, by slowing our emissions. Economic studies indicate that this likely can be done at a cost less than the climate damages averted. Note: this doesn't mean halting emissions, just reducing them. For instance, Nordhaus's optimal abatement scenario has emissions increase until 2100, when they begin to decline, leading to a reduction in warming by about 0.5 C by 2100 and 2 C by 2200 relative to a baseline scenario.
Cite?
Google Copenhagen Consensus, or read Nordhaus's new book for a broad overview of the economics.
The reports I have seen say that current or proposed measures have huge economic impact and miniscule effect on climate.
Cite? Virtually all the major climate economists (Nordhaus, Tol, Yohe, etc.) agree that a certain amount of abatement is worthwhile to insure against the more extreme outcomes. Like I said, even the Copenhagen Consensus, which is commonly cited as an argument against currently proposed measures, recommends almost as much abatement as, say, Nordhaus — just that it be coupled with adaptation and R&D measures.
Play logic games if you want, the fact of the matter is that the environmental movement is political, not scientific.
This is a gross overgeneralization.
They use, or misuse, science to bolster their cause as they see fit,
Some misuse science, and some do not.
Why bet the planet if there is no way to prove a geoengineering scheme will work?
There is a way to prove it: you can try it. If further modeling studies bear the idea out, and anyone deems it worthwhile, the next stage is real-world experiments. One advantage of this kind of geoengineering scheme is that it's relatively easy to control the strength of the effect, and dial it back if it doesn't work. The excess water vapor precipitates out very quickly. The corollary, however, is that if you don't keep doing it (e.g., you run out of money), and allow too many greenhouse gases to build up in the meantime, then you're in for a lot of warming once you stop. Of course, testing would be expensive, but the negative consequences of a test probably are not devastating since the effects can be quickly undone. It's not necessary to "bet the planet".
Besides, the simplest and most direct method of dealing with greenhouse gas emissions is to reduce them, not introduce a new and untested variable into an extremely complicated system.
This is true. Geoengineering schemes probably work as far as temperature is concerned, but there may be unpredictable side effects. Even building a large-scale test is probably not worthwhile. The only time you'd probably try this is if we detect something really bad coming, like crossing the threshold for a Greenland ice sheet collapse.
If you're worried about the next glacial period, then you should want us to save our fossil carbon for later when we really need it, instead of burning it all now when we don't.
"Global warming" seems to only affect large cities ignoring the small towns in between.
That's manifestly false. The warming is virtually unchanged if you toss all the urban areas and look at rural areas. Even if you ignore land warming altogether and just look at sea surface temperatures, the global warming signal is still there.
Let's say we can cool to world, what happens to the poor bastards in the north who have seen no temperature variance in over 50 years
The same north that's warming faster than any other latitude band on the planet?
Nevertheless, the point remains valid, even if you've got the locations confused. Different regions change temperatures at different rates, so these geoengineering schemes are imperfect. Whether they're "good enough" is a different question, and depends on how bad the damages may get.
Maybe the scientists should do some reading before wasting time and probably tax money on a hair brianed ideas.
Hey genius, the scientists involved know more than you do about the problem, as is evidenced by the wrong statements you've made here.
If more water in the air causes cooling, then when the planet warms, won't that naturally cause more evaporation and hence more water in the air at once?
It's not just more water in the air causes cooling. More water in the air can cause warming. It depends on how the water gets there and where it's located. Normally, a warming planet means more evaporated water vapor, which itself has a net warming effect. The water spraying described here has a net cooling effect because it's shot high into the cold atmosphere, where it can radiate more of its latent heat. Also, if you coordinate where you spray it, you may form low-lying clouds which provide shade and extra cooling.
It absorbs infrared radiation, just like CO2 does.
So water may reflect light back down to Earth but it eventually goes away due to condensation, but Co2 never condenses
Water vapor doesn't stay in the atmosphere as long as CO2 does, but that doesn't mean that it's not a greenhouse gas. And since water vapor is continuously evaporating, there is always water vapor in the air, even though any particular molecule of it may not stay there long.
I seem to remember from my industrial gas engineering days that CO2 is heavier than air (that's why we'd put powered vents near the bottom of enclosures that air breathers might go into).
Yes, but it takes a century or two to start coming down, and much of it will remain in the atmosphere for thousands of years until natural sinks can scrub it.
Can we please all just move on to the next 'the-sky-is-falling' media-hyped scenario like the scarcity of fresh water? It's probably a scarier situation but many of the invested AGW people haven't caught on yet.
Those who study climate change impacts are well aware of scarce water supplies, which climate change is expected to exacerbate in some regions.
Not just "one of the biggest", it's far and away the biggest.
As noted in TFA, the cooling from latent heat transport and subsequent radiation is projected to outweigh the greenhouse warming. It's possible that the opposite is true, but establishing this would require much more sophisticated modeling and experimentation than simplistically observing that water vapor is a greenhouse gas.
That reminds me of a guy I ran across who wanted to destroy hurricanes before they hit land by nuking them. Someone gently pointed out that the likely result would be a RADIOACTIVE hurricane. Not an improvement.
In other words you need to change either the temprature or pressure of the atmosphere as a whole for it to hold more water vapuor. You can't pump significant amounts into the atmosphere without it falling out as rain/dew elsewhere over the next few days.
That means you have to continually keep spraying water to keep the scheme going, but it doesn't mean that the scheme doesn't work.
As for dissipating heat into space, water vapour rarely gets higher than a jet liner since the temp/pressure thing makes it form clouds and it falls down again.
The point is not to inject water into space, just that if you shoot it into higher and therefore cooler air, more of the latent heat will be radiated than if it evaporates at the warmer surface. Some of that radiation escapes to space.
Although I support pure research I find it sad that someone let this guy have time on a supercomputer to play with his idea.
Why? The model supports the validity of his idea. Whether it's practical to continuously spray that much water is another matter. It would be easier to do aerosol geoengineering, but that may have more side effects.
But the light must make it down first to be absorbed and emitted as infrared.
This is known.
I have to put the idea out there that the models say that cloud feedback is positive because if the model came back negative the researcher would no longer have any money.
Can you come up with an idea that doesn't resort to lame conspiracy theories?
Note that even if cloud feedback is negative, the overall feedback is still positive. Global warming isn't going to go away if cloud feedbacks turn out to be negative. Note also that models do have other negative feedbacks, some quite large, such as the lapse rate feedback. (Opposite to clouds, a few models predict a positive lapse rate feedback.) There is no conspiracy to remove negative feedback from models.
Not all models have positive cloud feedbacks. One or two of them have negative feedbacks, and several of the others are near zero. Most of them are positive because that's what is suggested by actual observations of the factors which control cloud formation.
Why is it when we talked about a nuclear war it was a Nuclear Winter? Sorry, at this point that is only conjecture, too.
It's not really conjecture. As you note, large amounts of dust and smoke are known to cool the climate.
Every time there has been a major volcanic explosion in history, global effects, it was followed by sudden and sometimes extreme cooling. Mt. Tambora in Indonesia exploded in 1815 and 1816 became "the year without a summer."
Duh. Climatologists know this.
Real data, not models, shows that this dust in the atmosphere and the resulting clouds (clouds form on dust) cool the planet.
The same models which predict a positive cloud feedback also predict cooling from volcanoes. Volcanoes do not prove that the cloud feedback is negative. Volcanic emissions do have a negative forcing on climate due to their effect on cloud formation (aerosol indirect effect). But that doesn't mean that the feedback on clouds due to warming temperatures is negative. Temperature has a different effect on cloud formation than do volcanic particulate and SO2 emissions.
Real data, which is used to calibrate the models' parameterization of cloud formation, suggests that a warmer climate leads to a positive cloud feedback. It's uncertain, and it's possible to conclude that the net feedback is negative, but the balance of evidence implies a positive feedback.
Actually, the main competitor to the geoengineering approach described in TFA is stratospheric injection of aerosol precursors, i.e., artificial volcanoes. It has drawbacks.
What scares me is that genuine concern over global warming could spur popular support for one of these crackpot schemes.
Geoengineering is not a crackpot scheme. There are various options on the table that would almost certainly work as far as halting global warming. Whether their side effects are worth the benefits is a matter of cost-benefit analysis. In my opinion the answer is likely "no" unless something really bad happens climate-wise, in which case it may be a choice between bad and worse.
I sincerely doubt that any climatologist worth his salt would back any action other than reduction in the gas emissions believed to contribute to climate change.
There are some very prominent scientists who support or at least are investigating climate geoengineering. One of the seminal geoengineering papers was written by a Nobel laureate in atmospheric chemistry (Crutzen), although he's not strictly a climatologist. Ken Caldeira in TFA is a rather well known and respected climate scientist. However, geoengineering proponents are often given a hard time at conferences; there are many people who think the whole idea is immoral. I personally think it has legitimate uses, but only as a last-resort safety valve if things get worse than we expect.
We already have evaporation that produces water vapor in the air, so how can we cool the planet more that it already would have if we had done nothing?
The idea is that you shoot the water high up so it loses heat when it's above from the surface. Since higher altitudes are cooler, you get more heat loss than if it had evaporated at the surface.
Water vapor from increased warming almost certainly means more heat. It's possible that cloud feedback effect may subtract from the water vapor greenhouse effect, but clouds won't outweigh the greenhouse effect. In fact, most models predict at least a slightly positive cloud feedback effect, i.e., even more warming due to heat trapping from low-lying clouds, outweighing the albedo cooling.
It's true that water vapor and clouds are uncertain in models. The question is not whether they're uncertain, but whether the uncertainties are large enough to make this effect spurious. If anyone wanted to implement this scheme, the first thing they'd do is check it in a variety of models using a range of assumptions for the relevant feedback parameters, and see if the result is robust across a plausible range of assumptions. This is just a preliminary analysis. The next thing they'd do if they were serious is experimental trials to quantify the local cooling effect. Only after a lot more testing would this ever be deemed worth implementing.
It sounds like you're making a fallacious leap from "models have uncertainties" to "therefore we don't know anything reliable about the climate".
You don't actually know what the net effect is until you calculate it. Caldeira calculated it, in a state-of-the-art climate model, and found that the net effect of the latent heat release coupled with cloud albedo outweighed the heat trapping effect. It's possible this model is wrong, but proving it would require a much more nuanced calculation than "clouds trap heat".
Agreed. But how fast is too fast, and how does that compare to the rate at which the climate is now changing? I don't know; do you?
According to what I recall from the research summarized in the IPCC Working Group 2 report, farmers in temperate regions can adapt if the warming is less than about 3 C over the next century. 3 C is about the middle-of-the-road estimate for business-as-usual emissions scenarios. In equatorial regions they can only adapt to 1-2 C warming over a similar time scale before there are net damages.
Either way, I'll need to adapt, but that's what life's all about, isn't it?
Yes, but there is something to be said for prevention as well as adaptation.
Aside from Global Warming, and by association those that work with it, being ridiculous; please note that the greatest contributor to the greenhouse effect is water vapor. This is ignored frequently, since it isn't a gas coupled with the popularity of the phrase "greenhouse gases."
This is not ignored by the scientists in TFA, as you would know if you RTFA.
This guy simply has his facts wrong.
No. The climatic effects of water vapor are more complicated than you think, and you have to actually sit down and calculate to tell which effect dominates.
Yes. I did my PhD on adsorption, so I frequently mistype it. But thanks for lecturing me on what adsorption is.
Temperature certainly varies with location, and different locations correlate to higher and lower mean temperatures than others, but that still does not imply that distribution does matter.
Distribution does matter, but mostly the distribution that matters is the vertical distribution, not the horizontal. In particular, the amount of absorption you get in the real atmosphere differs from what you get in the lab because of the nonzero atmospheric lapse rate and convection. Indeed, GCMs have been criticized because their radiative transfer codes assume a constant lapse rate, when in reality the lapse rate responds to warming and thus alters the radiative properties of the atmosphere. (It's computationally infeasible to recompute the transfer line-by-line in every time step, so they work out the spectrum in advance and assume it's constant.)
You better re-route power through the transporter system before the plasma injectors fry, the trilithium crystals crack and you have an enormous anti-matter mess on your hands. Quickly, or Chief Engineer LaForge will be irate.
Stop being sarcastic and read something about radiative transfer physics.
Right, except that the Earth is not "an open system" thermally, except with respect to radiation.
That's the whole point: the Earth is not closed with respect to radiation.
Distribution could in no possible way make the difference between "problem" and "no problem" as the GP claimed.
I agree with that, and I said that myself. I'm just pointing out that the radiative properties of CO2 do depend on distribution, because they depend on temperature, which depends on distribution. The following statement is false: "Every carbon dioxide molecule, therefore, has the same non-emission behavior in the infrared band regardless of its location and regardless of what other substances are in its vicinity."
Way to be off-topic.
The fact remains that you're making physically incorrect statements. If you want to correct someone, do it right. I already made the same overall observation before your post, but I didn't make the mistake of claiming that the overall absorptive effect of CO2 is the same in the atmosphere as it is in the lab. It's not: you can't measure CO2 in the lab and use that number to compute the strength of the atmospheric greenhouse effect. It's much more complicated than that, which is why radiative transfer codes were written.
Believe it or not, climate model physics includes thermodynamic heat transfer.
The point is that some of the heat in the water vapor gets radiated to space, when the vapor is lofted to higher and cooler altitudes. Also that it can induce sunlight-reflecting cloud formation.
Distribution does matter, because the adsorption spectrum of CO2 depends on its temperature, and its temperature depends on location. Radiative transfer codes have to take the atmospheric lapse rate into account in order to correctly calculate the total greenhouse effect. But the overall point remains true: the greenhouse effect doesn't go away just because the gas is in an open system.
No, I'm describing case 3. Climate models predict a positive warming feedback from water vapor resulting from global warming. This is not the same as runaway warming. They (or at least one of them) also predict cooling from water vapor which is injected in this way. So this is a counterexample to your case 3: water vapor injection produces cooling, but does not imply that the net water vapor feedback in a warming climate is a stabilizing negative feedback.
Slashdot Mirror
It would be, if we had any choice in the matter, which we don't.
Of course we do. That's the whole point.
Only if we can cause nontrivial climate improvement to occur, which has yet to be shown.
We certainly can cause nontrivial climate improvement to occur, by slowing our emissions. Economic studies indicate that this likely can be done at a cost less than the climate damages averted. Note: this doesn't mean halting emissions, just reducing them. For instance, Nordhaus's optimal abatement scenario has emissions increase until 2100, when they begin to decline, leading to a reduction in warming by about 0.5 C by 2100 and 2 C by 2200 relative to a baseline scenario.
Cite?
Google Copenhagen Consensus, or read Nordhaus's new book for a broad overview of the economics.
The reports I have seen say that current or proposed measures have huge economic impact and miniscule effect on climate.
Cite? Virtually all the major climate economists (Nordhaus, Tol, Yohe, etc.) agree that a certain amount of abatement is worthwhile to insure against the more extreme outcomes. Like I said, even the Copenhagen Consensus, which is commonly cited as an argument against currently proposed measures, recommends almost as much abatement as, say, Nordhaus — just that it be coupled with adaptation and R&D measures.
Play logic games if you want, the fact of the matter is that the environmental movement is political, not scientific.
This is a gross overgeneralization.
They use, or misuse, science to bolster their cause as they see fit,
Some misuse science, and some do not.
Why bet the planet if there is no way to prove a geoengineering scheme will work?
There is a way to prove it: you can try it. If further modeling studies bear the idea out, and anyone deems it worthwhile, the next stage is real-world experiments. One advantage of this kind of geoengineering scheme is that it's relatively easy to control the strength of the effect, and dial it back if it doesn't work. The excess water vapor precipitates out very quickly. The corollary, however, is that if you don't keep doing it (e.g., you run out of money), and allow too many greenhouse gases to build up in the meantime, then you're in for a lot of warming once you stop. Of course, testing would be expensive, but the negative consequences of a test probably are not devastating since the effects can be quickly undone. It's not necessary to "bet the planet".
Besides, the simplest and most direct method of dealing with greenhouse gas emissions is to reduce them, not introduce a new and untested variable into an extremely complicated system.
This is true. Geoengineering schemes probably work as far as temperature is concerned, but there may be unpredictable side effects. Even building a large-scale test is probably not worthwhile. The only time you'd probably try this is if we detect something really bad coming, like crossing the threshold for a Greenland ice sheet collapse.
If you're worried about the next glacial period, then you should want us to save our fossil carbon for later when we really need it, instead of burning it all now when we don't.
"Global warming" seems to only affect large cities ignoring the small towns in between.
That's manifestly false. The warming is virtually unchanged if you toss all the urban areas and look at rural areas. Even if you ignore land warming altogether and just look at sea surface temperatures, the global warming signal is still there.
Let's say we can cool to world, what happens to the poor bastards in the north who have seen no temperature variance in over 50 years
The same north that's warming faster than any other latitude band on the planet?
Nevertheless, the point remains valid, even if you've got the locations confused. Different regions change temperatures at different rates, so these geoengineering schemes are imperfect. Whether they're "good enough" is a different question, and depends on how bad the damages may get.
Maybe the scientists should do some reading before wasting time and probably tax money on a hair brianed ideas.
Hey genius, the scientists involved know more than you do about the problem, as is evidenced by the wrong statements you've made here.
If more water in the air causes cooling, then when the planet warms, won't that naturally cause more evaporation and hence more water in the air at once?
It's not just more water in the air causes cooling. More water in the air can cause warming. It depends on how the water gets there and where it's located. Normally, a warming planet means more evaporated water vapor, which itself has a net warming effect. The water spraying described here has a net cooling effect because it's shot high into the cold atmosphere, where it can radiate more of its latent heat. Also, if you coordinate where you spray it, you may form low-lying clouds which provide shade and extra cooling.
How is water a greenhouse gas?
It absorbs infrared radiation, just like CO2 does.
So water may reflect light back down to Earth but it eventually goes away due to condensation, but Co2 never condenses
Water vapor doesn't stay in the atmosphere as long as CO2 does, but that doesn't mean that it's not a greenhouse gas. And since water vapor is continuously evaporating, there is always water vapor in the air, even though any particular molecule of it may not stay there long.
I seem to remember from my industrial gas engineering days that CO2 is heavier than air (that's why we'd put powered vents near the bottom of enclosures that air breathers might go into).
Yes, but it takes a century or two to start coming down, and much of it will remain in the atmosphere for thousands of years until natural sinks can scrub it.
Can we please all just move on to the next 'the-sky-is-falling' media-hyped scenario like the scarcity of fresh water? It's probably a scarier situation but many of the invested AGW people haven't caught on yet.
Those who study climate change impacts are well aware of scarce water supplies, which climate change is expected to exacerbate in some regions.
Not just "one of the biggest", it's far and away the biggest.
As noted in TFA, the cooling from latent heat transport and subsequent radiation is projected to outweigh the greenhouse warming. It's possible that the opposite is true, but establishing this would require much more sophisticated modeling and experimentation than simplistically observing that water vapor is a greenhouse gas.
That reminds me of a guy I ran across who wanted to destroy hurricanes before they hit land by nuking them. Someone gently pointed out that the likely result would be a RADIOACTIVE hurricane. Not an improvement.
In other words you need to change either the temprature or pressure of the atmosphere as a whole for it to hold more water vapuor. You can't pump significant amounts into the atmosphere without it falling out as rain/dew elsewhere over the next few days.
That means you have to continually keep spraying water to keep the scheme going, but it doesn't mean that the scheme doesn't work.
As for dissipating heat into space, water vapour rarely gets higher than a jet liner since the temp/pressure thing makes it form clouds and it falls down again.
The point is not to inject water into space, just that if you shoot it into higher and therefore cooler air, more of the latent heat will be radiated than if it evaporates at the warmer surface. Some of that radiation escapes to space.
Although I support pure research I find it sad that someone let this guy have time on a supercomputer to play with his idea.
Why? The model supports the validity of his idea. Whether it's practical to continuously spray that much water is another matter. It would be easier to do aerosol geoengineering, but that may have more side effects.
But the light must make it down first to be absorbed and emitted as infrared.
This is known.
I have to put the idea out there that the models say that cloud feedback is positive because if the model came back negative the researcher would no longer have any money.
Can you come up with an idea that doesn't resort to lame conspiracy theories?
Note that even if cloud feedback is negative, the overall feedback is still positive. Global warming isn't going to go away if cloud feedbacks turn out to be negative. Note also that models do have other negative feedbacks, some quite large, such as the lapse rate feedback. (Opposite to clouds, a few models predict a positive lapse rate feedback.) There is no conspiracy to remove negative feedback from models.
Not all models have positive cloud feedbacks. One or two of them have negative feedbacks, and several of the others are near zero. Most of them are positive because that's what is suggested by actual observations of the factors which control cloud formation.
Why is it when we talked about a nuclear war it was a Nuclear Winter? Sorry, at this point that is only conjecture, too.
It's not really conjecture. As you note, large amounts of dust and smoke are known to cool the climate.
Every time there has been a major volcanic explosion in history, global effects, it was followed by sudden and sometimes extreme cooling. Mt. Tambora in Indonesia exploded in 1815 and 1816 became "the year without a summer."
Duh. Climatologists know this.
Real data, not models, shows that this dust in the atmosphere and the resulting clouds (clouds form on dust) cool the planet.
The same models which predict a positive cloud feedback also predict cooling from volcanoes. Volcanoes do not prove that the cloud feedback is negative. Volcanic emissions do have a negative forcing on climate due to their effect on cloud formation (aerosol indirect effect). But that doesn't mean that the feedback on clouds due to warming temperatures is negative. Temperature has a different effect on cloud formation than do volcanic particulate and SO2 emissions.
Real data, which is used to calibrate the models' parameterization of cloud formation, suggests that a warmer climate leads to a positive cloud feedback. It's uncertain, and it's possible to conclude that the net feedback is negative, but the balance of evidence implies a positive feedback.
Actually, the main competitor to the geoengineering approach described in TFA is stratospheric injection of aerosol precursors, i.e., artificial volcanoes. It has drawbacks.
You're right. I always get that reversed. UCAR has a nice summary.
Seriously, people are so fucking gullible.
... he says, while citing "The Great Global Warming Swindle" as evidence, presumably with a straight face.
Oh, the irony.
What scares me is that genuine concern over global warming could spur popular support for one of these crackpot schemes.
Geoengineering is not a crackpot scheme. There are various options on the table that would almost certainly work as far as halting global warming. Whether their side effects are worth the benefits is a matter of cost-benefit analysis. In my opinion the answer is likely "no" unless something really bad happens climate-wise, in which case it may be a choice between bad and worse.
I sincerely doubt that any climatologist worth his salt would back any action other than reduction in the gas emissions believed to contribute to climate change.
There are some very prominent scientists who support or at least are investigating climate geoengineering. One of the seminal geoengineering papers was written by a Nobel laureate in atmospheric chemistry (Crutzen), although he's not strictly a climatologist. Ken Caldeira in TFA is a rather well known and respected climate scientist. However, geoengineering proponents are often given a hard time at conferences; there are many people who think the whole idea is immoral. I personally think it has legitimate uses, but only as a last-resort safety valve if things get worse than we expect.
We already have evaporation that produces water vapor in the air, so how can we cool the planet more that it already would have if we had done nothing?
The idea is that you shoot the water high up so it loses heat when it's above from the surface. Since higher altitudes are cooler, you get more heat loss than if it had evaporated at the surface.
Water vapor from increased warming almost certainly means more heat. It's possible that cloud feedback effect may subtract from the water vapor greenhouse effect, but clouds won't outweigh the greenhouse effect. In fact, most models predict at least a slightly positive cloud feedback effect, i.e., even more warming due to heat trapping from low-lying clouds, outweighing the albedo cooling.
It's true that water vapor and clouds are uncertain in models. The question is not whether they're uncertain, but whether the uncertainties are large enough to make this effect spurious. If anyone wanted to implement this scheme, the first thing they'd do is check it in a variety of models using a range of assumptions for the relevant feedback parameters, and see if the result is robust across a plausible range of assumptions. This is just a preliminary analysis. The next thing they'd do if they were serious is experimental trials to quantify the local cooling effect. Only after a lot more testing would this ever be deemed worth implementing.
It sounds like you're making a fallacious leap from "models have uncertainties" to "therefore we don't know anything reliable about the climate".
You don't actually know what the net effect is until you calculate it. Caldeira calculated it, in a state-of-the-art climate model, and found that the net effect of the latent heat release coupled with cloud albedo outweighed the heat trapping effect. It's possible this model is wrong, but proving it would require a much more nuanced calculation than "clouds trap heat".
Agreed. But how fast is too fast, and how does that compare to the rate at which the climate is now changing? I don't know; do you?
According to what I recall from the research summarized in the IPCC Working Group 2 report, farmers in temperate regions can adapt if the warming is less than about 3 C over the next century. 3 C is about the middle-of-the-road estimate for business-as-usual emissions scenarios. In equatorial regions they can only adapt to 1-2 C warming over a similar time scale before there are net damages.
Either way, I'll need to adapt, but that's what life's all about, isn't it?
Yes, but there is something to be said for prevention as well as adaptation.
Aside from Global Warming, and by association those that work with it, being ridiculous; please note that the greatest contributor to the greenhouse effect is water vapor. This is ignored frequently, since it isn't a gas coupled with the popularity of the phrase "greenhouse gases."
This is not ignored by the scientists in TFA, as you would know if you RTFA.
This guy simply has his facts wrong.
No. The climatic effects of water vapor are more complicated than you think, and you have to actually sit down and calculate to tell which effect dominates.
"Did you mean: absorption spectrum?"
Yes. I did my PhD on adsorption, so I frequently mistype it. But thanks for lecturing me on what adsorption is.
Temperature certainly varies with location, and different locations correlate to higher and lower mean temperatures than others, but that still does not imply that distribution does matter.
Distribution does matter, but mostly the distribution that matters is the vertical distribution, not the horizontal. In particular, the amount of absorption you get in the real atmosphere differs from what you get in the lab because of the nonzero atmospheric lapse rate and convection. Indeed, GCMs have been criticized because their radiative transfer codes assume a constant lapse rate, when in reality the lapse rate responds to warming and thus alters the radiative properties of the atmosphere. (It's computationally infeasible to recompute the transfer line-by-line in every time step, so they work out the spectrum in advance and assume it's constant.)
Codes? What?
Software routines. Like this one.
You better re-route power through the transporter system before the plasma injectors fry, the trilithium crystals crack and you have an enormous anti-matter mess on your hands. Quickly, or Chief Engineer LaForge will be irate.
Stop being sarcastic and read something about radiative transfer physics.
Right, except that the Earth is not "an open system" thermally, except with respect to radiation.
That's the whole point: the Earth is not closed with respect to radiation.
Distribution could in no possible way make the difference between "problem" and "no problem" as the GP claimed.
I agree with that, and I said that myself. I'm just pointing out that the radiative properties of CO2 do depend on distribution, because they depend on temperature, which depends on distribution. The following statement is false: "Every carbon dioxide molecule, therefore, has the same non-emission behavior in the infrared band regardless of its location and regardless of what other substances are in its vicinity."
Way to be off-topic.
The fact remains that you're making physically incorrect statements. If you want to correct someone, do it right. I already made the same overall observation before your post, but I didn't make the mistake of claiming that the overall absorptive effect of CO2 is the same in the atmosphere as it is in the lab. It's not: you can't measure CO2 in the lab and use that number to compute the strength of the atmospheric greenhouse effect. It's much more complicated than that, which is why radiative transfer codes were written.
Believe it or not, climate model physics includes thermodynamic heat transfer.
The point is that some of the heat in the water vapor gets radiated to space, when the vapor is lofted to higher and cooler altitudes. Also that it can induce sunlight-reflecting cloud formation.
Distribution does matter, because the adsorption spectrum of CO2 depends on its temperature, and its temperature depends on location. Radiative transfer codes have to take the atmospheric lapse rate into account in order to correctly calculate the total greenhouse effect. But the overall point remains true: the greenhouse effect doesn't go away just because the gas is in an open system.
No, I'm describing case 3. Climate models predict a positive warming feedback from water vapor resulting from global warming. This is not the same as runaway warming. They (or at least one of them) also predict cooling from water vapor which is injected in this way. So this is a counterexample to your case 3: water vapor injection produces cooling, but does not imply that the net water vapor feedback in a warming climate is a stabilizing negative feedback.