The mysterious js290 (or should that be "bs1000"). You can't even articulate what you're implying well enough to give us a clue what you're talking about. Thinks minor changes in the sun's output will have outsized effects on the temperature of the Earth, something that has not been evident so far. Thinks since CO2 is only 0.04% of the Earth's atmosphere it couldn't possibly have an effect even though the science behind that effect has been known for over 100 years. Like I said before if you really think you're so smart you should be publishing your results and gathering the accolades you deserve.
It feels to me like you're projecting. You appear to have a pretty strong faith that you know better than climate scientists who have been studying the climate for a long time. But so far all you've done is make some vague claims about coupled systems with no solid evidence to back them up. Let's hear some hard evidence from you. What specifically is the coupling you are talking about? How does it apply in this situation? Give me some hard evidence then we might have something to talk about.
I know what a coupled system is. It's a system where the various components interact and affect each other. There is some gravitational coupling between the Earth and the sun but I've never seen any evidence that the Earth affects the energy output of the sun in any significant way. TSI is the dominant effect of the sun on temperatures on the Earth and we've been measuring that quite accurately for well over 50 years. You can argue all you want about a nonlinear coupled system but until you show the evidence that supports that position it's just hand waving sciency sounding BS. If you really think you're on to something then you should write it up in detail and collect the accolades for finding something that scientists have missed all these years.
CO2 makes up about 0.041% of the atmosphere. So what? Just because the number is small doesn't mean it's not significant. As I explained to Bartles elsewhere in this post if you walk into a room where the concentration of hydrogen cyanide in the air is 0.027% you will be dead in a matter of minutes.
Apropos of nothing there are about 2.53 x 10^25 molecules in a cubic meter of air at the surface which means a cubic meter of air contains around 1.037 x 10^22 molecules of CO2.
Show me some evidence that anything from the sun besides TSI has a significant effect on climate. You can't assume something that is not in evidence. We have not reduced the climate to CO2 alone, it is just the dominant factor currently. Again, you need to provide scientific evidence if you want to show it's something else. If you could provide such evidence I'd be happy to listen to it. So far everything you have said is just vague handwavey stuff without any solid evidence to back it up.
And as Lazeyj points out it's not really a coupled system because nothing that happens on Earth has any effect on the sun so it's a one way relationship.
Since you can't predict the variability of the sun ahead of time what do you think they can do to include it? When the variability is so small (> 1%) you can use an average value and get a pretty close answer. The total effect of the sun's variability on temperatures is about 0.1 degrees C between the highest activity and the lowest activity. So if climate models are using an average for TSI they will be off by at most 0.05 degrees C during certain parts of the cycle. Since the sun cycles between those two extremes on an approximately 11 year cycle the overall effect is essentially zero over longer periods which is what climate predictions are based on (minimum of 30 years).
Huh? Some people studying the sun have some models for it but I'm guessing you're talking about climate models. Since the sun doesn't vary that much it's not necessary to try and put that in climate models. The effects of varying the sun have been tested in climate models but since the variation of the suns output is less than 1% during the 11 year cycle it doesn't have a significant effect in the long run. Even if the sun went into a prolonged Maunder minimum type situation it would only delay the effects of anthropogenic global warming by 5 or 10 years and only as long as the MM period lasted.
The Earth's climate has changed far more radically and far quicker to more extreme states many times in the past...
Please point out when that has been true, other than when a giant meteor impacts the Earth. I doubt you can find such an instance in the last billion years.
If it were the sun getting warmer, then we'd expect the days and summers to be getting warmer. But that's not what we're seeing, it's the nights and winters that are getting warmer while the days and summer barely change. That pretty much rules out the sun.
Next.
That's actually an important point. If it was the sun causing the warming we would expect the times and places where it has the most effect to be warming but as the AC said it's actually the nights and winters (and also the stratosphere) that are warming more. And that does pretty much rule out the sun.
If there is only one variable that affects the Earth's climate, it would be the output of the Sun. If there was a second variable, it would be the kinematics of the Earth about the Sun. Neither one should be considered constant, and the former is certainly not easily modeled. Alas, there's much more than just two variables that affects the climate.
The goal should not be to predict or control climate, but to adapt to it as Nature does.
Mark Shepard on Restoration Agriculture - "Ecology... Nature is only model we have that has survived climate change with sheer, total, utter neglect..." @RestorationAgD http://bit.ly/1ohVqpE
Did you know that without any greenhouse gases in the atmosphere the average surface temperature would be about 0 degrees F? Instead, even before we started adding CO2 there were enough greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to make the average surface temperature about 58 degrees F. Ignoring long term slowly changing things like Milankovitch cycles that's probably the 2nd biggest factor in the temperature on the Earth after the sun. And the sun's not changing enough to have the effects we're seeing.
It's one degree of temperature rise globally but because of Arctic amplification the temperatures around this lake have probably risen several degrees already.
Do you seriously think the amount of energy generated by human sources has any significant effect on anything?
Yes, if we have CO2 output and no energy output (from human sources) we would still heat just about as much. The energy comes from the sun and the CO2 (and other greenhouse gases) slows down it's exit from the Earth system.
The sun has been monitored pretty well for about 400 years. Recently it's been monitored rigorously since the 1950s and continuously from satellites since 1979. In all that time it's never shown enough variation to account for the current warming. You may want it to be the sun but the evidence shows that it isn't.
Sure thing AC. And yet surface temperatures keep increasing, sea level keeps rising, ice keeps melting just like the climate scientists predicted. You'd think in the nearly 200 years of climate science (Fourier discovered the greenhouse effect in 1824) if there was something seriously wrong with it that other scientists would have been able to point it out by now. Climate science has been under intense scrutiny for over 30 years now and no one has been able to shoot it down yet. Instead we have conspiracy theories that tens of thousands of scientists from around the world are lying about it. If they're good enough to hold that big a conspiracy together for so long in the face of the scrutiny you might as well give up. I have yet to see anyone prove they destroyed any data that mattered, hid formulas (the source code of several of the big climate models including the NASA/GISS Model E are available for anyone to see), or faked stuff. In science you have to be able to support your findings and those claiming oppression have failed to provide supporting evidence that they are right.
Just because that's how you would do it doesn't mean that scientists in general are doing it that way. Scientists in the harder sciences like physics and chemistry and yes, climate science are pretty much required to conform with reality or other scientists will take them to task for their misinformation.
The temperature of a gas is a measure of the average kinetic energy of the molecules in the gas. Kinetic theory of gases. This is old school stuff that I shouldn't need to cite for you. The rate of collisions is a function of the density of the gas. So we know that the CO2 in the atmosphere is colliding with other molecules. In fact the collisions are far more common than the CO2 molecule emitting a photon.
I found this response in a post at Real Climate that explains what is going on with greenhouse gases and other gases in the atmosphere fairly well. It is response #9 by Paul Schopf:
It is first necessary to understand that molecules are made up of atoms (with mass) are held together by bonds, much like two balls linked by springs, and therefore have ways of vibrating at specific frequencies.
The bonds between two atoms in a molecule are particularly strong, and can only vibrate at very high frequencies (emphasize frequencies over energies) well above the frequency of infrared or the solar radiation spectrum.
However, molecules with 3 or more atoms can vibrate by changing the angles between the three atoms, and they can vibrate at additional (lower) frequencies. Molecules like CO2 and H2O have vibrational frequencies within the infrared range. In these vibrations, the strong bonds between Carbon and Oxygen may still have very high vibrational frequencies, but the two Oxygen atoms can vibrate toward or away from each other at this lower frequency.
Molecules with more than 3 atoms can vibrate in even more ways (which means more and more frequencies). Examples are CH4, CFCs, etc.
When upward radiation close to the right frequency hits a CO2 molecule, it can excite the vibrational mode at that frequency. The outward radiation is reduced by the amount of energy that goes into the vibration. We see the reduced amount of outward radiation in the spectra observed by downward looking satellites.
[The observant student then might ask why the energy that goes into the vibration does not just get sent back out to space by emitting a photon – after all, if the same molecule gets hit over and over with photons won’t the vibrational energy increase and increase? There are two answers: the simple part is that yes, the energy can be re-emitted, but the direction of the emitted photons does not have to have the same upward angle. In fact, the extra energy will as likely go down as up. On average, only half of the incoming energy continues on an upward path, half heads back toward Earth to participate in the answer to question 3.
The second answer comes from equipartion of energy. Temperature is a measure of the kinetic energy of the molecules. This kinetic energy is made up of not only the vibrational energy, but also the rotational energy and the classical kinetic energy of moving molecules.
When one molecule with high vibrational energy bumps into another molecule (even one without a vibrational mode) some of that vibration can go into kicking the other molecule into faster motion or higher rotation. So energy gets lost from the vibrational mode and transferred into the general temperature of the surrounding gas. The CO2 molecule has a unique way to absorb energy at a particular frequency, but that energy gets transferred very quickly to its neighboring molecules, most of which have no way to emit radiation at that frequency.]
Do you really think reducing CO2 output will be enough?
Well considering it isn't mathematically possible for CO2 to be the cause of the temperature increase, reducing it won't make any difference at all. For CO2 to be responsible for even a 1c temperature increase would require that 1 molecule of CO2 out of 2500 molecules of air (400ppm), that only absorbs about 8% of the reflected infrared energy, is somehow generating 2500c of heat needed to raise the temperature of those 2500 molecules by 1c.
Not this nonsense again! You ignore the fact that the CO2 rather quickly transfers the energy it traps, mostly by collisions with other molecules in the atmosphere. You also ignore the fact that water vapor causes around twice as much of the greenhouse effect as CO2.
Actually global sea level doesn't act like a bathtub. There are all sorts of effects that cause variations in sea level, currents, gravity among others.
It's not a binary question. There are multiple tipping points involved in global warming/climate change. Just because we may have passed one doesn't mean we can't make things even worse if we ignore the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
just so I can delete it and join the crowd. Seriously I'm glad I never signed up but I'm sure they still have a lot of data on me anyway.
The mysterious js290 (or should that be "bs1000"). You can't even articulate what you're implying well enough to give us a clue what you're talking about. Thinks minor changes in the sun's output will have outsized effects on the temperature of the Earth, something that has not been evident so far. Thinks since CO2 is only 0.04% of the Earth's atmosphere it couldn't possibly have an effect even though the science behind that effect has been known for over 100 years. Like I said before if you really think you're so smart you should be publishing your results and gathering the accolades you deserve.
It feels to me like you're projecting. You appear to have a pretty strong faith that you know better than climate scientists who have been studying the climate for a long time. But so far all you've done is make some vague claims about coupled systems with no solid evidence to back them up. Let's hear some hard evidence from you. What specifically is the coupling you are talking about? How does it apply in this situation? Give me some hard evidence then we might have something to talk about.
I know what a coupled system is. It's a system where the various components interact and affect each other. There is some gravitational coupling between the Earth and the sun but I've never seen any evidence that the Earth affects the energy output of the sun in any significant way. TSI is the dominant effect of the sun on temperatures on the Earth and we've been measuring that quite accurately for well over 50 years. You can argue all you want about a nonlinear coupled system but until you show the evidence that supports that position it's just hand waving sciency sounding BS. If you really think you're on to something then you should write it up in detail and collect the accolades for finding something that scientists have missed all these years.
CO2 makes up about 0.041% of the atmosphere. So what? Just because the number is small doesn't mean it's not significant. As I explained to Bartles elsewhere in this post if you walk into a room where the concentration of hydrogen cyanide in the air is 0.027% you will be dead in a matter of minutes.
Apropos of nothing there are about 2.53 x 10^25 molecules in a cubic meter of air at the surface which means a cubic meter of air contains around 1.037 x 10^22 molecules of CO2.
Show me some evidence that anything from the sun besides TSI has a significant effect on climate. You can't assume something that is not in evidence. We have not reduced the climate to CO2 alone, it is just the dominant factor currently. Again, you need to provide scientific evidence if you want to show it's something else. If you could provide such evidence I'd be happy to listen to it. So far everything you have said is just vague handwavey stuff without any solid evidence to back it up.
And as Lazeyj points out it's not really a coupled system because nothing that happens on Earth has any effect on the sun so it's a one way relationship.
Since you can't predict the variability of the sun ahead of time what do you think they can do to include it? When the variability is so small (> 1%) you can use an average value and get a pretty close answer. The total effect of the sun's variability on temperatures is about 0.1 degrees C between the highest activity and the lowest activity. So if climate models are using an average for TSI they will be off by at most 0.05 degrees C during certain parts of the cycle. Since the sun cycles between those two extremes on an approximately 11 year cycle the overall effect is essentially zero over longer periods which is what climate predictions are based on (minimum of 30 years).
Huh? Some people studying the sun have some models for it but I'm guessing you're talking about climate models. Since the sun doesn't vary that much it's not necessary to try and put that in climate models. The effects of varying the sun have been tested in climate models but since the variation of the suns output is less than 1% during the 11 year cycle it doesn't have a significant effect in the long run. Even if the sun went into a prolonged Maunder minimum type situation it would only delay the effects of anthropogenic global warming by 5 or 10 years and only as long as the MM period lasted.
The Earth's climate has changed far more radically and far quicker to more extreme states many times in the past ...
Please point out when that has been true, other than when a giant meteor impacts the Earth. I doubt you can find such an instance in the last billion years.
If it were the sun getting warmer, then we'd expect the days and summers to be getting warmer. But that's not what we're seeing, it's the nights and winters that are getting warmer while the days and summer barely change. That pretty much rules out the sun.
Next.
That's actually an important point. If it was the sun causing the warming we would expect the times and places where it has the most effect to be warming but as the AC said it's actually the nights and winters (and also the stratosphere) that are warming more. And that does pretty much rule out the sun.
If there is only one variable that affects the Earth's climate, it would be the output of the Sun. If there was a second variable, it would be the kinematics of the Earth about the Sun. Neither one should be considered constant, and the former is certainly not easily modeled. Alas, there's much more than just two variables that affects the climate.
The goal should not be to predict or control climate, but to adapt to it as Nature does.
Mark Shepard on Restoration Agriculture - "Ecology... Nature is only model we have that has survived climate change with sheer, total, utter neglect..." @RestorationAgD http://bit.ly/1ohVqpE
Did you know that without any greenhouse gases in the atmosphere the average surface temperature would be about 0 degrees F? Instead, even before we started adding CO2 there were enough greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to make the average surface temperature about 58 degrees F. Ignoring long term slowly changing things like Milankovitch cycles that's probably the 2nd biggest factor in the temperature on the Earth after the sun. And the sun's not changing enough to have the effects we're seeing.
It's one degree of temperature rise globally but because of Arctic amplification the temperatures around this lake have probably risen several degrees already.
No, if you walked into a room where the concentration of hydrogen cyanide gas was 280 ppm you would die in a matter of minutes. Cyanide#Toxicity
Do you seriously think the amount of energy generated by human sources has any significant effect on anything?
Yes, if we have CO2 output and no energy output (from human sources) we would still heat just about as much. The energy comes from the sun and the CO2 (and other greenhouse gases) slows down it's exit from the Earth system.
The sun has been monitored pretty well for about 400 years. Recently it's been monitored rigorously since the 1950s and continuously from satellites since 1979. In all that time it's never shown enough variation to account for the current warming. You may want it to be the sun but the evidence shows that it isn't.
Climate model projections compare well with observations. Here's the latest comparisons:
Climate model projections compared to observations
Sure thing AC. And yet surface temperatures keep increasing, sea level keeps rising, ice keeps melting just like the climate scientists predicted. You'd think in the nearly 200 years of climate science (Fourier discovered the greenhouse effect in 1824) if there was something seriously wrong with it that other scientists would have been able to point it out by now. Climate science has been under intense scrutiny for over 30 years now and no one has been able to shoot it down yet. Instead we have conspiracy theories that tens of thousands of scientists from around the world are lying about it. If they're good enough to hold that big a conspiracy together for so long in the face of the scrutiny you might as well give up. I have yet to see anyone prove they destroyed any data that mattered, hid formulas (the source code of several of the big climate models including the NASA/GISS Model E are available for anyone to see), or faked stuff. In science you have to be able to support your findings and those claiming oppression have failed to provide supporting evidence that they are right.
Just because that's how you would do it doesn't mean that scientists in general are doing it that way. Scientists in the harder sciences like physics and chemistry and yes, climate science are pretty much required to conform with reality or other scientists will take them to task for their misinformation.
Yes.
I suppose this is the time for the obligatory mention of Betteridge's Law of Headlines.
Not an endorsement but I use the Comfort Sleep Mask from Walgreens. It has a Velcro adjustable elastic strap and works well for me.
As an old fart I endorse this. I've been using an eyeshade for several years now and it definitely helps.
The temperature of a gas is a measure of the average kinetic energy of the molecules in the gas. Kinetic theory of gases. This is old school stuff that I shouldn't need to cite for you. The rate of collisions is a function of the density of the gas. So we know that the CO2 in the atmosphere is colliding with other molecules. In fact the collisions are far more common than the CO2 molecule emitting a photon.
I found this response in a post at Real Climate that explains what is going on with greenhouse gases and other gases in the atmosphere fairly well. It is response #9 by Paul Schopf:
It is first necessary to understand that molecules are made up of atoms (with mass) are held together by bonds, much like two balls linked by springs, and therefore have ways of vibrating at specific frequencies.
The bonds between two atoms in a molecule are particularly strong, and can only vibrate at very high frequencies (emphasize frequencies over energies) well above the frequency of infrared or the solar radiation spectrum.
However, molecules with 3 or more atoms can vibrate by changing the angles between the three atoms, and they can vibrate at additional (lower) frequencies. Molecules like CO2 and H2O have vibrational frequencies within the infrared range. In these vibrations, the strong bonds between Carbon and Oxygen may still have very high vibrational frequencies, but the two Oxygen atoms can vibrate toward or away from each other at this lower frequency.
Molecules with more than 3 atoms can vibrate in even more ways (which means more and more frequencies). Examples are CH4, CFCs, etc.
When upward radiation close to the right frequency hits a CO2 molecule, it can excite the vibrational mode at that frequency. The outward radiation is reduced by the amount of energy that goes into the vibration. We see the reduced amount of outward radiation in the spectra observed by downward looking satellites.
[The observant student then might ask why the energy that goes into the vibration does not just get sent back out to space by emitting a photon – after all, if the same molecule gets hit over and over with photons won’t the vibrational energy increase and increase? There are two answers: the simple part is that yes, the energy can be re-emitted, but the direction of the emitted photons does not have to have the same upward angle. In fact, the extra energy will as likely go down as up. On average, only half of the incoming energy continues on an upward path, half heads back toward Earth to participate in the answer to question 3.
The second answer comes from equipartion of energy. Temperature is a measure of the kinetic energy of the molecules. This kinetic energy is made up of not only the vibrational energy, but also the rotational energy and the classical kinetic energy of moving molecules.
When one molecule with high vibrational energy bumps into another molecule (even one without a vibrational mode) some of that vibration can go into kicking the other molecule into faster motion or higher rotation. So energy gets lost from the vibrational mode and transferred into the general temperature of the surrounding gas. The CO2 molecule has a unique way to absorb energy at a particular frequency, but that energy gets transferred very quickly to its neighboring molecules, most of which have no way to emit radiation at that frequency.]
Do you really think reducing CO2 output will be enough?
Well considering it isn't mathematically possible for CO2 to be the cause of the temperature increase, reducing it won't make any difference at all. For CO2 to be responsible for even a 1c temperature increase would require that 1 molecule of CO2 out of 2500 molecules of air (400ppm), that only absorbs about 8% of the reflected infrared energy, is somehow generating 2500c of heat needed to raise the temperature of those 2500 molecules by 1c.
Not this nonsense again! You ignore the fact that the CO2 rather quickly transfers the energy it traps, mostly by collisions with other molecules in the atmosphere. You also ignore the fact that water vapor causes around twice as much of the greenhouse effect as CO2.
Actually global sea level doesn't act like a bathtub. There are all sorts of effects that cause variations in sea level, currents, gravity among others.
And yet California has a bigger economy than all but 5 nations in the world. Doesn't seem like enough people are leaving to having an effect on that.
It's not a binary question. There are multiple tipping points involved in global warming/climate change. Just because we may have passed one doesn't mean we can't make things even worse if we ignore the problem.