What Do We Think About Climate Change

Jimbo, you don't need to find more stuff on youtube. You just need to address the basic physics issue posed. We aren't going anywhere until you do!

BillyDoc

 

still waiting on an answer from the paleoclimate people
but I think its pretty obvious from the details of the data reconstruction that the time intervals on there graph are way to long to adequately show the relationship between sun, co2, and temp
which is were Im going with this hole thing
the graph ( post 2201 ) showing the plots on it makes that pretty clear
but Im waiting confirmation on that from the folks who made the graph
thing is
there skeptics so they may not want to answer a question that shoots a hole in there data
point being
the ice core data clearly shows a 120,000 year oscillation in temp and co2
any graph with out the necessary resolution to show deviations with in those time frames with not be of any use in determining an accurate relationship between the two

 

http://www.abc.net.au/foreign/default.htm "what lies beneath" has some interesting stuff on core sampling in Antarctica which may add weight to your postulation, Either from here or another program it appears that there is a correlation between warming and CO2 - but which causes which - and I argue that the CO2 would follow the evidence of warming as it would be less cold in the form of snow deposits and hold some of the evidence of the causal gasses / "pollutants" and being more permeable, allow absorbtion os same whilst settling etc.... and the higher levels of "responsible gasses etc" may be the cause of warming influences... core samples are ~500metres and the new Chineese ecpedition is hoping to go down to 1000 metres..... for core sampling and analusis...

 

Billy,

I don't really understand why you would not want to hear the explanation from an actual scientist (whose lecture happens to be posted on YouTube) but would rather hear it from me, but I guess that's how you choose to draw a line in the sand in defense of this position which you obviously have at least a great emotional investment.

The basic physics are what the AGW camp gets wrong. Heating (by ANY cause, including ANY greenhouse gas, water vapor included) causes more ocean surface evaporation. Evaporation adds water vapor to the atmosphere (of course) but also leads to cloud formation. Clouds both block some sunlight (thereby reducing incoming solar radiation) but also increase greenhouse warming. Clouds are actually responsible for both reflecting sunlight back into space, but also a large fraction of the greenhouse effect. The big question is of course which of these two opposing properties in the end dominates the equation. The AGW camp, quite predictably, asserts that the greenhouse portion dominates. But if that were true, then we should see an increase in suspended water vapor without an increase in precipitation. But in fact, what we actually observe is increased cloud formation AND precipitation, meaning that there is a net cooling effect which is precipitating the water vapor out of the air mass. Thus water vapor concentrations do not change. Precipitation becomes a heat transport mechanism which keeps all in check.


Boston,

You have become so full of **** that it's become difficult to even read your posts anymore. Dr Spencer's work is not only peer reviewed and accepted, but this latest paper detailing the mechanism I described above was put before the very authors his paper was refuting, and yet they accepted his paper and admitted that they had got it wrong only a couple of years earlier. Of course if you had watched either of the Roy Spencer lectures, you would know this.

Boston, you are a pathetic excuse for an educated man who has reduced himself to little more than a close-minded ideologue. I hope you presently know all you will ever need to know, as you've clearly lost the required humility needed for further learning.

Jimbo

 

I thought Utube was full of crap, like a guy blowing up a chevy engine with water in the sump . Or the guy doing a bike wheely.


So is this where you guys get all your info 0n the world climate then?

I popped in to this thread now and again but will probably do so less now.

 

The reason, Jimbo, is that I have not been convinced that Spencer is an actual scientist, as opposed to a propagandist from he oil industry, of which there are way too many. I don't want to waste my time. And you are absolutely right about my "emotional investment." It really looks to me like the end is in sight for this planet, and that affects me strongly. I really, really, would rather not see us all die miserably, and unnecessarily.

Bravo Jimbo! That is an excellent description of the problem! This is the approach I like, talking about actual phenomena and then looking at the evidence to see what is supported and what is not. Bravo!

Now let's get down to the details.

You say: "what we actually observe is increased cloud formation AND precipitation, meaning that there is a net cooling effect which is precipitating the water vapor out of the air mass." I think you are correct in stating that we observe an increase in cloud formation and precipitation. That would follow from a warming situation. But let's look a little closer at this evaporation and precipitation cycle.

Water has an unusual property when undergoing phase changes from liquid to gas. It absorbs energy to become a gas, and releases energy to re-condense back to a liquid. The first is called the "Heat of vaporization," and the second is the "Heat of condensation." Go here for more on this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_enthalpy_change_of_vaporization The salient feature of these heats of vaporization and condensation is that they are always exactly equal. They must be, because if there was any differential at all we could engineer some way to exploit it and tap off free energy! Which would be against the "Law of conservation of energy" which these idiot politicians passed years ago.

When water evaporates it absorbs some 539 calories per gram. When it condenses it gives up some 539 calories per gram. So, water evaporating from the oceans and then condensing into water droplets in clouds results in no net energy change to the system as a whole.

So, where is the "net cooling effect" you mention coming from? I can certainly see that an increase in cloud formation will increase the albedo (reflection) and reduce the effect of incoming heat. But then, that would cause a subsequent reduction in cloud formation and a reversal of this process, again leaving no real net difference without a net increase in heat.

I also note that you start your discussion by noting that "Heating (by ANY cause, including ANY greenhouse gas, water vapor included) causes more ocean surface evaporation." which I certainly agree with. But then you seem to be saying that evidence indicates that there IS an increase in cloud formation while at the same time saying that some precipitation phenomenon causes cooling, which should reduce cloud formation. Where did I go wrong here? Aren't you actually supporting the GW theory by stating that there has been an increase in cloud formation?

BillyDoc

 

Frosty,

You Tube is simply a website that allows you to post video content. All sorts of content is available there now, as it has been from the very beginning of YouTube. You can see stupid animal tricks, street fights, car and airplane crashes, children reciting poetry, people playing musical instruments and many, many scientific lectures. It's just a medium, like any other.

Would you discredit information found in a book because there are a lot of crappy books in print?

Please explain to me how you propose to watch a given lecture presented by a scientist or professor without attending that lecture in person OTHER than a medium such as YouTube.

Jimbo

 

Billy,

Dude, you've been listening to that idiot Boston for too long! Spencer is not an oil company scientist, he's a (former) NASA scientist and now a university scientist/lecturer. His work is per reviewed and accepted, in the most recent case, by the very peers his work refutes.

You can't keep tarring all the people whose views you don't like with this "Oil Money" crap, using it as an EXCUSE to ignore their scientific arguments! This tactic has become transparent in intention. Show some moxy and answer the scientific questions he presents rather than finding a trumped-up excuse for not listening to a detractor from your precious orthodoxy!

IF you have any BALLS, (which at this point I seriously doubt), have the courage to actually listen to Spencer's lecture an then try to find REAL SCIENTIFIC FLAW in his assertions, rather than taking Boston's usual COWARDLY approach of character assassination.

The 'Skeptics' on this thread have studiously taken apart the BOGUS, UNFOUNDED, MASSAGED DATA and etc ad nauseum, of the AGW camp, while you 'warmers' have CONSISTENTLY taken the scoundrel's approach of retreating to the cowardice of character assassination!

Shame on you all! Grow some nuts and play ball on the field!

Jimbo

 

Jimbo, did you notice any actual argument in my last message to you? Some stuff about "Heat of vaporization" and "Heat of condensation" maybe? A little problem for you, and Spencer, in the fact that they are equal and do NOT result in a net heat loss?

BillyDoc

 

Billy,

I know it sounds paradoxical that there could be a net cooling from ocean evaporation, but this is exactly what is observed in the real world. The explanation is not all that difficult to grasp. Clouds both heat and cool. The cooling effect trumps the heating effect. Dr Lindzen's work supports this idea also, though he readily admits his work builds on the works of other before him. The 'Iris Effect' is real and has now been observed and quantified.

Get over you anxiety about AGW, because

1) AGW is a fiction and

2) At no time in the past has a warmer earth been a less biologically hospitable earth; and

3) at no time in the past has a cooler earth been a more hospitable place.

The AGW crowd has it backwards again. Whenever the earth has been warm, the biosphere prospers and the opposite was true whenever it was cold.

If we are warming then that will be a good thing. I think we are actually headed for another period like the "Maunder Minimum" where we will get very cold again.

Either way, human activity has nothing more than a trivial effect on global climate.

Jimbo

 

Dude,

I read it all and noted that this same argument has come up over and over. This is just a re-tread of 100 thread pages ago. This has all been addressed. The IRIS and the backwards cause/effect order accounts for all of this. When you see the lecture (if you ever actually watch it) you'll understand. And yet there's nothing revolutionary in the lecture; just good basic physics.

But the AGW crowd should be ashamed at how badly they've got it wrong.

Jimbo

 

Jimbo, when someone tries to tell me that something is happening that clearly violates basic physics like the Heat of Vaporization and Condensation equality, I get a little suspicious. It makes me think that maybe they didn't do their data collection quite right, for whatever reason. To my mind the established physics trumps the so-called observations. And for you to simply assert that "AGW is a fiction" holds no weight at all for me. Show me the logic, and I'll listen!

And the stakes are indeed high on this one. Your statement that "At no time in the past has a warmer earth been a less biologically hospitable earth" runs very contrary to the several mass extinctions that have apparently occurred exactly because of global warming. Those cases where we all suffocate from H2S pollution don't sound like too much fun at all to me. Go back and read my post #2193 on page 147, which has a lengthy excerpt from a Scientific American article on this subject. If I remember correctly, the evidence is now supporting the notion that three of the last five mass extinctions on this planet we call home were from H2S, the other two from impacts. The H2S phenomenon gets an upper hand exactly from global warming, from whatever cause.

Remember also that most, if not all, computer models of global warming use linear variables as the best estimate of the parameters used. This is, of course, a good first approximation. But when you have positive feedback involved, and tripping points like sudden methane releases from ice lattice structures that contain the gas melting, then the phenomena are no longer linear. They are exponential.

Exponential functions are hard to get a feel for. Back a few years (like about 50, I think) I saw a very interesting movie on TV called The Atom: A closer look. You can see it too, if you go here: http://www.archive.org/details/The_Atom . The reason I bring this up is that this movie has a scene in it, explaining nuclear fission, in which a room full of mouse traps with two ping-pong balls on each is used to simulate a neutron hitting a Uranium atom and releasing two more neutrons. These two hit two more, which hit four more and so on in an exponential progression with 2 as the exponent. The result of this exponential progression in the case of real Uranium (235) is, of course, a massive explosion. In the case of the room full of mousetraps and ping pong balls something very much like a slow motion explosion also happens. The announcer just casually tosses a single ball into the room, then there are two flying around, then four . . . and then all hell breaks loose!

If you watch the movie, try to picture the same sort of thing but with tripping points like a sudden methane release, or even just the simple positive feedback of increased atmospheric water vapor causing ever more warming. I personally think that you are right, Jimbo, that the water vapor business is probably self-limiting because of albedo changes. BUT, if this naturally self limiting water vapor process leads to a sudden methane release, or even just the eventual high accumulation of plain old CO2, these gases are not self limiting. Even worse, if these gases accumulate higher than the clouds, then increasing albedo isn't going to help much. Do you really want to write off this threat so casually? If the authors of the Scientific American article I mention above are correct, then this phenomenon has gotten away from all control several times in the past, and stayed that way for hundreds of thousands of years afterward. Given exponential factors, this phenomenon is something that you may very well have to deal with personally. I'm lucky, I'm already an old phart.

BillyDoc

 

Billy Doc,

They also used that movie to tell us that the world would explode if the atom bomb was ever to be used.........

 

Landlubber,

They did? So the movie was made prior to 1945 when two were used --- and they didn't know?

BillyDoc

 

Now, now, keep it nice and lay off the "personal attacks" argue the point not denigration of the person.... as my 3 year old grand-son says "caaaaalm down".... Thanks