I am unable to find an explanation or get a response elsewhere. I have a “Greenhouse Effect 101” question.
How can the Earth’s surface molecules absorb the short-wave insolation whilst the atmospheric gas molecules can’t?
A reference would be excellent.
Thanks, Mark
Other than an unrevealing term ‘100%’ I can’t seen to find any quantities on the link you provided. Surely you understand how science works, right? Let me help – the statement you’ve made and the website you link to is best described as ‘nonsense’. Noise. But that’s what you are here for.
Ray Ladburysays
Mark Conley,
Basically, the answer to your question has to do with the energies that can be absorbed by gasses and solids. One of the main triumphs of early quantum mechanics was to explain these different absorption spectra. Consider a single atom–basically the only energy tranistions such a monoatomic molecule can make are electrical–so it can absorb light with energies of a vew electron-volts (eV).
Now think about a diatomic molecule–we’ve introduced the possibility that it can rotate now. These rotational energies are also quantized, but with much lower energies.
For a triatomic molecule, we’ve introduced the possibility of vibration of the individual atoms about their equilibrium positions. These energies are in the energy range of infrared light, so these are the greenhouse gasses–CO2, H2O, CH4…
In a solid, the vibrations get a lot more complicated, and energy levels get so close together, they interact and blend, producing energy bands. This means that solids can absorb a broad range of energies, especially those in the visible range. Does that help? I’m afraid I don’t know of a good text that explains all this particularly well.
But in essence, you can think about the (fairly large) proportion of sunlight that is visible light: obviously, some materials pass it easily (air), with some attenuation (water) or hardly at all (rock). Different molecules absorb light of different frequencies in ways that are connected to their internal structure–rather as the note sounded by, say, a harp string will depend upon the length and mass of that string. The details are complicated, and I don’t pretend to understand them in much depth. But one clue is furnished by this fact:
“In liquids and solids the rotational lines are broad and overlap so that no rotational structure is distinguishable.”
In other words, gases, unlike other phases of matter, tend to absorb radiation in very narrow slices of the frequency spectrum. That means that lots of radiation tends to get through. Not so with most solids.
— it’s hard to know how to answer your question without knowing how much math to include, but fortunately I don’t have enough to matter. Any answer without the math is poetry trying to give the flavor of the answer.
Gas molecules aren’t tightly connected to each other, so the atoms making up each molecule are pretty much shaped by their relationship just to each other, and the atoms can wiggle or spin or stretch a bit but in very specific limits of the way it’s put together. H2O and CH4 are greenhouse gases, when they’re gases. Picture them: http://kightleys.photoshelter.com/image/I00007FDx4vgiO1Q
Molecules in a solid aren’t cleanly separated, they don’t mix, they’re anchored where they sit. So the relation between the atoms gets stretched and tugged in every possible way because solids aren’t perfectly smooth.
The energy from sunlight arrives as chunks of specific sizes (wavelength) called photons.
A photon can transfer its energy to a molecule by interacting only with some part that is ‘in tune’ with it, and on a solid surface there will always be lots of stretches between atoms that happen to be in tune with any photon coming along in the sunlight. Most of the photons get soaked up, their energy going into whatever bond they were in tune with — which since the atoms in the solid are so tied together by other bonds, just spreads out into all the surrounding atoms/molecules, which spread it further — and it ends up as heat.
A gas is different. Each bond between the atoms of a molecule has its own tuning possibilities, and only those.
So a gas will absorb some wavelengths — those it happens to have some part in tune with. And then that energy goes into all possible ways that molecule can wiggle a bit more, spin a bit more, move a bit faster — and it interacts with all the surrounding air molecules in all those ways, heating them up by banging into them.
The ‘greenhouse gases’ aren’t intercepting most of the sun’s energy, which goes straight through. When sunlight hits a solid, it mostly turns into heat in the solid.
Now the solid is radiating — at the temperature it averaged out to. It’s not warm enough to radiate visible light, it’s radiating lower energy photons, infrared.
The ‘greenhouse gases’ intercept infrared (and bang around warming up the air they’re in).
—-
I was too rushed to give you a well thought out explanation; that’s off the cuff and seriously gradeschool. I await correction from those who do better.
“The figure (above, right) shows three different vibrational modes of a carbon dioxide (CO2) molecule. The first mode, (a), is symmetric; it is comparable to the vibrational mode of diatomic molecules. The center of mass, and of charge, of the system is not displaced during vibration. However, such is not the case for the other two modes, (b) and (c). In the latter two cases, the “center of charge” moves as the molecule vibrates, creating a “dipole moment”. As explained for the the case of water above, electrons are not shared equally between the atoms in the CO2 molecule, so the molecule is not electrically neutral in all places. As the molecule oscillates, the center of charge moves; from side to side in case (b), and up and down in case (c). A passing electromagnetic “disturbance” (wave, or IR photon) can “excite” such a molecule, causing it to vibrate and transferring energy from the photon to the molecule. This is the mechanism by which greenhouse gases absorb energy from infrared photons.”
“What are the chances of Climate Science Defense Fund helping Dr. Tim Ball defend against the suits initiated by Dr. Mann and Dr. Andrew Weaver? Dr. Ball is a genuine climate scientist but I suspect his “denier” credentials will rule out any assistance. So lets be truthful, the fund is intended for assisting AGW proponents only.
“It appears that the major part of the fund will be spent assisting public funded scientists to stymie freedom of information requests.”
(my apologies – a long while back I heard Austin had been persuaded to reconsider but it turned out he did no such thing. Probably his cronies (Happer et al.) weaned him back.
thanks RAY, KEVIN, and HANK, this is my 9th attempt at posting this!
i have copied and pasted and am now doing my best with posts and references,
all the best,
Mark
mark conleysays
those reCAPTCHA’s are extremely difficult to read, as frustrating as using O’s 0’s I’s and 1’s in passwords etc
Keep clicking the little circling-arrows icon to get a fresh Captcha; one of them will be readable.
(As to readability, my theory is that the poor AI tasked with displaying that stuff often can’t read it, and the OCR software couldn’t read it, and likely nobody human prescreens it for us (grin). And I could be imagining the AI.)
Susan Andersonsays
Mark Conley,
suggest in future you save your material elsewhere (a text box works well and is easy, Wordpad on PC is around but you have to find it on later machines, Textedit on Mac, i think) when you post.
You need only get one of the captcha words correct, and if there are symbols you shouldn’t try to type them, also forget about case. Needn’t make it any harder on yourself than necessary.
==
Sorry about duplicating the link, typos as usual. My various rebuttals about Tim Ball and the rest of it are in moderation, which may take a while. That link is great, with specific court wording, may come in handy.
==
On another topic, Neven has a copy of a lovely video from NASA on how northern ocean currents are being altered in this article: http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2012/01/new-temperature-record-for-the-arctic-in-2011.html
jyyhsays
#306-7 is the correct answer, but it might help to say the molecules are too tightly packed in solids until someone brings up mercury.
Instead of thinking energy as frequencies one might say IR needs more wiggle room so it collides with gases. This works with X-rays that need so little wiggle room that they pass through solids. But then there are auroras. The excuse here would be they give out light so they must have another origin than the Greenhouse Effect.
#309–Mr. Austin really should try to keep up; the probability of assistance in the suit brought by Dr. Weaver is precisely zero, since as I wrote in November of 2010, Dr. Ball retracted his libelous statements, apologized to Dr. Weaver, and paid an undisclosed sum.
Apparently he decided his statements were indefensible in court.
315: Your remarks are unhelpful. Hank did a great job in 306-7. Why are they unhelpful? “IR needs more wiggle room so it collides with gases” is simply incoherent. It matters a great deal that IR excites specific (vibrational) modes of gases and that diatomic molecules like O2 and N2 do not possess these modes. Consequently IR would pass unhindered through an atmosphere consisting of only O2 and N2. It is this fact that makes CO2, an atmospheric “trace gas”, play a crucial role in setting atmospheric temperature. If CO2 were not a trace gas our puny releases of ~30GT (gigatons) per year would be irrelevant. For example, If instead of CO2 we released 30GT of N2 per year there would be no news, no denialists, no RC. If that were the case, after a thousand years we would have increased the concentration of atmospheric N2 by one part in 100,000. No such luck; we are increasing the concentration of CO2 at a rate of about .005 parts per year (and the rate is increasing).
#319–“If CO2 were not a trace gas our puny releases of ~30GT (gigatons) per year would be irrelevant. . .”
Yep. Thank you.
Dalesays
The Wall Street Journal walked this out in today’s paper. I follow you guys everyday and would like a short critique about the article. Some of them like Lidzen and Kininmonth have been mentioned from time to time but I’m not familiar with most.
Has anyone seen the op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today by “16 distinguished scientists”? What about their claims? Same old? I notice Richard Lindzen is among the signers.
Ray Ladburysays
Mark Conley,
I found a reference in my library that does very nearly exactly what you want. Unfortunately, it is written at the level of a graduate text.
It starts by treating atoms, then molecules, and then interacting molecules in a liquid or solid. It looks like a great book, but you’d need abut 4-6 semesters of quantum theory to comprehend it. I’ll keep looking
Ray Ladburysays
Dale, Yup, they got the whole chorus. Frankly, I wouldn’t train a puppy on the Wall Street Urinal any more.
I see nothing new in the piece. No evidence. No facts. Just name dropping and baseless assertions–about what you’d expect from the denialati.
#325–Hadn’t realized Burt Rutan was part of that crowd. . . oh well.
siddsays
About once a year or five, I happen to read extracts from WSJ editorial pages. Then I take a shower. This particular lump of excrement goes roughly like this:
Para 1: It’s not bad. Nothing major needs be done.
Para 2: Waa! How dare APS ignore us cranks ?!
Para 3: We claim that the number of us cranks is growing.
Para 4: No warming for 10 years, Trenberth said “travesty,” feedbacks don’t amplify.
Para 5: Misinterpret 22 yr old model, claim that increasing numbers of extreme weather events are no cause for alarm.
Para 6: CO2 is good for plants. Crop yeilds rose due to CO2.
Para 7: The number of cranks is secretly growing. Climate cabal suppressing free speech.
Para 8: Lysenko!
Para 9: Lysenko, gulag, death !!!
Para 10: We’re still mad about the APS attitude toward us cranks! They must be in it for the money and the cocaine and the strippers.
Para 11: Huge bureaucracies, rising taxes. Lysenko!
Para 12: We cranks can’t understand the science. Therefore nothing needs be done.
Para 13: Misinterpret Nordhaus. Our free markets are glorious. And more CO2 might be good !
Para 14: More research needed. Climate always changes. Nothing needs be done.
Para 15: We don’t really hate the environment. APS are alarmists. We’re still mad at them.
Para 16: We are unashamed enuf to list our names, together with affiliations.
A friend of mine told me that “a scientist who had come back from Russia” told her that fires are burning deep under the ground in Russian coal mines. She claimed that these fires give off more CO2 than all of China.
I said I had never heard of that. I also asked how fires would burn deep in the ground without oxygen.
This person is often telling me denialist talking points, but I had never heard this one before.
Does anyone have a clue what she might be talking about?
I know they had all the forest fires, and perhaps some peat was on fire, but were coal mines deep in the ground on fire?
Here is a link about a cavern in Darvaz, (Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan depending on who you believe) that had gas in it so they set it on fire to keep gas from going into the air. It has been burning for decades.
I know that Gavin et al at Real Climate have more interesting things to do than to respond to something like the WSJ op-ed. However, this one was addressed “to the candidates”. Although you can argue that it’s only throwing red meat to the base by WSJ and that there is no journalistic integrity whatever there, it might at least be interesting to see if they would publish a rebuttal. Just a thought.
[Response: Anyone who thinks that the WSJ Op-ed page has any journalistic integrity simply hasn’t been paying attention. This goes way back before the Murdoch takeover. As a statement of science this letter is laughable, but as a study in denialist rhetoric it is worth looking at carefully. – gavin]
flxiblesays
Snapple – Underground coal fires aren’t so unusual – there’s at least one in Pennsylvania, and one in Germany, and one in Canada, and in Australia one has burned for thousands of years, enough oxygen is always available. None of them makes human generated CO2 negligible regardless of denialation.
Cugelsays
Dave Erickson : I don’t think this is one for RealClimate, more one for Climate Progress? There’s really no science in it, apart perhaps from the old “no warming recently” theme which they must know is in its final days.
John Pollacksays
Snapple @ 328-29 Long-lived coal fires have also occurred at coal mines in Pennsylvania, and probably other places I don’t know about. However, they can only produce as much CO2 as there is oxygen to burn, and the supply is pretty limited underground with no mechanical ventilation. Contrast that to one coal-fired power plant fed a continuous diet of finely ground coal and sufficient air for (nearly) complete combustion, and it’s not hard to see that underground mines fires aren’t a big source of CO2. The big problems are after the coal is mined!
David B. Bensonsays
Snapple @328 — Coal seam fires, sometimes called coal field fires occur in many locations around the globe. Australia, China, Indonesia, India and the United States come immediately to mind. These are smoldering fires, somewhat similar to the still glowing coals in the ashes of a camp fire the next morning. Such fires can burn for many centuries as witnessed by a lightning(?) started fire in Australia. Coal seam fires are almost impossible to extinguish; the Chinese celebrated a great success in stopping one which had been bunring for well over a century in a coal mine, thought to have been accidently started by coal miners preparing their dinner,
I suppose that dried peat can smolder in much the same manner, but I’ve seen no papers on that. In any case, China now consumes in excess of 2 gigatonnes of coal per annum and I doubt that peat fires in Russia are that extensive, although that is only opinion on my part.
An estimate, from China, suggest that all the world’s coal seam fires contribute about 1–2% of the excess CO2 added to the atmosphere each year. That estimaete did not include peat fires.
john byattsays
#331, I actually felt sorry for them, how embarrassing to sign your name to that load of drivel, and the old tasteless,odorless and weightless, according to our parliament opposition leader, irrelevance in 2012 is quite sad really.Dads army of denial.
Snapple @328
The famous coalmine fire (famous enough to have its own wiki page)is surely at Centralia, USA where they had to move the town because they couldn’t put it out. As for emissions from such fires exceeding China’s emissions, that’s just bar room hyperbolising.
#328-330–Snapple, coal seam fires are a real phenomenon, but hardly unique to Russia; there are estimated to be 200 burning in the US, the most famous of which, the Centralia fire, has been burning since 1962.
“Global coal fire emission are estimated to include 40 tons of mercury going into the atmosphere annually, and three percent of the world’s annual CO2 emissions.”
@321-323 &@327.
I note the two US Academic Advisors to the GWPF are among the 16 who signed the WSJ message. Having been in close proximity (too close probably) of GWPF pronouncements recently, this WSJ message does seem to be of the same ilk – brave words, zero substance.
Note how they convert Kevin Trenberth’s “…lack of (measured) warming at the moment…” into “…well over 10 years…” Also they ignore C4 grasses that evolved when CO2 was lower than today, plants that are not a small part of the carbon cycle. So not bad. Two substantive comments in the same article, both dodgy.
A first installment of my take on the truly incredible GWPF has bee posted up at:- http://www.desmogblog.com/what-does-gwpf-really-stand
Then I can safely guess you are not a hard core space cadet. They harder they come, the harder they fall. They are notoriously anti-science when it comes to global warming, climate change and the cost and realism of their space ideas. The part about carbon dioxide being a safe, colorless, odorless gas is particularly amusing considering Schmitt’s and Rutan’s experience with closed and cramped space capsules and cockpits flying in a vacuum.
Gavin et al, I understand your reticence to dignify drivel like the WSJ piece with a response. However, two considerations this year: 1) In Republican presidential politics, it has become a requirement to dismiss climate science as a hoax; 2) policy action on carbon emissions mitigation has come to a halt in the US because of the acceptability of above dismissal. I find this accusation by elected officials to be tantamount to a charge of scientific fraud against the research community that is taken seriously by the body politic. I think it would be interesting to take up this accusation, which is being abetted by the authors of the WSJ piece. I don’t think elected officials really understand how serious the charge of scientific fraud is. How do you, as a serious research scientist respond to such a charge? That response would be really interesting to see in the WSJ, or the NYT or the Wash Post. The purpose would be to show the general public how truly ludicrous the WSJ op-ed and its ilk really are.
just looking at last year model update IPCC AR4 20C3M + SRES A1B
worked out that SRES A1B, most likely special report emissions scenario A1B, what exactly does 20C3M translate to? tks
dhogazasays
I don’t think elected officials really understand how serious the charge of scientific fraud is.
They (or at least those who are in the Majority in the House) don’t care.
How do you, as a serious research scientist respond to such a charge?
I’m not a serious research scientist, just a serious software engineer, but the answer is: you’ can’t, in any meaningful way. If you support mainstream science, you’re a “liberal” and that’s that. That’s the beauty of what has happened politically the last few years, it’s not science, but ideology that matters.
That response would be really interesting to see in the WSJ
M. J. Wood, K. M. Douglas, R. M. Sutton. Dead and Alive: Beliefs in Contradictory Conspiracy Theories.Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2012; DOI:10.1177/1948550611434786
#348–a flash of humor from Science Daily: “Since Osama bin Laden is not Schrodinger’s cat, he cannot be simultaneously alive and dead.” (Wait, have we measured that?)
But Mr. Monckton has expressed views implying that it is both warming and not-warming simultaneously on the same timescales, and that’s just the most obvious example of internal contradiction from Team Denialati. It does bring to mind the phrase “six impossible things before breakfast.”
Fortunately, this does, over time, tend to invoke the Voltaire effect: “I prayed that my enemies be ridiculous, and my prayers were answered.”
Oh and while I’m on a roll, from CRU:
“Hemispheric and large-scale land surface air temperature variations: An extensive revision and an update to 2010”
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/pip/2011JD017139.shtml
I am unable to find an explanation or get a response elsewhere. I have a “Greenhouse Effect 101” question.
How can the Earth’s surface molecules absorb the short-wave insolation whilst the atmospheric gas molecules can’t?
A reference would be excellent.
Thanks, Mark
Other than an unrevealing term ‘100%’ I can’t seen to find any quantities on the link you provided. Surely you understand how science works, right? Let me help – the statement you’ve made and the website you link to is best described as ‘nonsense’. Noise. But that’s what you are here for.
Mark Conley,
Basically, the answer to your question has to do with the energies that can be absorbed by gasses and solids. One of the main triumphs of early quantum mechanics was to explain these different absorption spectra. Consider a single atom–basically the only energy tranistions such a monoatomic molecule can make are electrical–so it can absorb light with energies of a vew electron-volts (eV).
Now think about a diatomic molecule–we’ve introduced the possibility that it can rotate now. These rotational energies are also quantized, but with much lower energies.
For a triatomic molecule, we’ve introduced the possibility of vibration of the individual atoms about their equilibrium positions. These energies are in the energy range of infrared light, so these are the greenhouse gasses–CO2, H2O, CH4…
In a solid, the vibrations get a lot more complicated, and energy levels get so close together, they interact and blend, producing energy bands. This means that solids can absorb a broad range of energies, especially those in the visible range. Does that help? I’m afraid I don’t know of a good text that explains all this particularly well.
Mark, there’s some technical stuff here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absorption_(electromagnetic_radiation)
But in essence, you can think about the (fairly large) proportion of sunlight that is visible light: obviously, some materials pass it easily (air), with some attenuation (water) or hardly at all (rock). Different molecules absorb light of different frequencies in ways that are connected to their internal structure–rather as the note sounded by, say, a harp string will depend upon the length and mass of that string. The details are complicated, and I don’t pretend to understand them in much depth. But one clue is furnished by this fact:
“In liquids and solids the rotational lines are broad and overlap so that no rotational structure is distinguishable.”
(That’s from this site:
http://www.andor.com/learning/applications/ATR_Spectroscopy/)
In other words, gases, unlike other phases of matter, tend to absorb radiation in very narrow slices of the frequency spectrum. That means that lots of radiation tends to get through. Not so with most solids.
There’s also some relevant info here:
http://doc-snow.hubpages.com/hub/Water-Is-A-Dancer
Meeting coming up for the engineers and those who like watching them:
http://www.southeastgreen.com/index.php/florida-environmental-news/5360-white-house-official-environmental-policy-analyst-to-deliver-keynotes-at-carbon-management-technology-conference-in-orlando-in-february
An attempt for Mark Conley:
— it’s hard to know how to answer your question without knowing how much math to include, but fortunately I don’t have enough to matter. Any answer without the math is poetry trying to give the flavor of the answer.
Gas molecules aren’t tightly connected to each other, so the atoms making up each molecule are pretty much shaped by their relationship just to each other, and the atoms can wiggle or spin or stretch a bit but in very specific limits of the way it’s put together. H2O and CH4 are greenhouse gases, when they’re gases. Picture them: http://kightleys.photoshelter.com/image/I00007FDx4vgiO1Q
This might help:
“Chapter 4. Greenhouse Gases
http://forecast.uchicago.edu/archer.ch4.greenhouse_gases.pdf
… Water, H2O, is a molecule that is bent in its lowest energy state (Figure 4-1)”
Molecules in a solid aren’t cleanly separated, they don’t mix, they’re anchored where they sit. So the relation between the atoms gets stretched and tugged in every possible way because solids aren’t perfectly smooth.
The energy from sunlight arrives as chunks of specific sizes (wavelength) called photons.
A photon can transfer its energy to a molecule by interacting only with some part that is ‘in tune’ with it, and on a solid surface there will always be lots of stretches between atoms that happen to be in tune with any photon coming along in the sunlight. Most of the photons get soaked up, their energy going into whatever bond they were in tune with — which since the atoms in the solid are so tied together by other bonds, just spreads out into all the surrounding atoms/molecules, which spread it further — and it ends up as heat.
A gas is different. Each bond between the atoms of a molecule has its own tuning possibilities, and only those.
So a gas will absorb some wavelengths — those it happens to have some part in tune with. And then that energy goes into all possible ways that molecule can wiggle a bit more, spin a bit more, move a bit faster — and it interacts with all the surrounding air molecules in all those ways, heating them up by banging into them.
The ‘greenhouse gases’ aren’t intercepting most of the sun’s energy, which goes straight through. When sunlight hits a solid, it mostly turns into heat in the solid.
Now the solid is radiating — at the temperature it averaged out to. It’s not warm enough to radiate visible light, it’s radiating lower energy photons, infrared.
The ‘greenhouse gases’ intercept infrared (and bang around warming up the air they’re in).
—-
I was too rushed to give you a well thought out explanation; that’s off the cuff and seriously gradeschool. I await correction from those who do better.
Here’s a page that might help, found by pasting your question into Google:
http://www.physics.rutgers.edu/~matilsky/documents/kirchoff.html
but never mind what some guy on a blog says.
Try a science teacher:
http://www.windows2universe.org/earth/climate/greenhouse_effect_gases.html
“The figure (above, right) shows three different vibrational modes of a carbon dioxide (CO2) molecule. The first mode, (a), is symmetric; it is comparable to the vibrational mode of diatomic molecules. The center of mass, and of charge, of the system is not displaced during vibration. However, such is not the case for the other two modes, (b) and (c). In the latter two cases, the “center of charge” moves as the molecule vibrates, creating a “dipole moment”. As explained for the the case of water above, electrons are not shared equally between the atoms in the CO2 molecule, so the molecule is not electrically neutral in all places. As the molecule oscillates, the center of charge moves; from side to side in case (b), and up and down in case (c). A passing electromagnetic “disturbance” (wave, or IR photon) can “excite” such a molecule, causing it to vibrate and transferring energy from the photon to the molecule. This is the mechanism by which greenhouse gases absorb energy from infrared photons.”
#306-7–I was tempted to write “Mmm, tasty!” but will go with “Nice job!” instead.
DotEarth has a new article on the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund.
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/25/a-legal-defense-fund-for-climate-scientists
Amongst the commenters is one Bob Austin:
“What are the chances of Climate Science Defense Fund helping Dr. Tim Ball defend against the suits initiated by Dr. Mann and Dr. Andrew Weaver? Dr. Ball is a genuine climate scientist but I suspect his “denier” credentials will rule out any assistance. So lets be truthful, the fund is intended for assisting AGW proponents only.
“It appears that the major part of the fund will be spent assisting public funded scientists to stymie freedom of information requests.”
(my apologies – a long while back I heard Austin had been persuaded to reconsider but it turned out he did no such thing. Probably his cronies (Happer et al.) weaned him back.
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/25/a-legal-defense-fund-for-climate-scientists
“Tim Ball is no climate expert, and this has been admitted in a court of law.”
(with extensive citations) by David Appell at
http://theclimatescepticsparty.blogspot.com/2011/12/will-tim-ball-be-our-wrecking-ball.html
thanks RAY, KEVIN, and HANK, this is my 9th attempt at posting this!
i have copied and pasted and am now doing my best with posts and references,
all the best,
Mark
those reCAPTCHA’s are extremely difficult to read, as frustrating as using O’s 0’s I’s and 1’s in passwords etc
Keep clicking the little circling-arrows icon to get a fresh Captcha; one of them will be readable.
(As to readability, my theory is that the poor AI tasked with displaying that stuff often can’t read it, and the OCR software couldn’t read it, and likely nobody human prescreens it for us (grin). And I could be imagining the AI.)
Mark Conley,
suggest in future you save your material elsewhere (a text box works well and is easy, Wordpad on PC is around but you have to find it on later machines, Textedit on Mac, i think) when you post.
You need only get one of the captcha words correct, and if there are symbols you shouldn’t try to type them, also forget about case. Needn’t make it any harder on yourself than necessary.
==
Sorry about duplicating the link, typos as usual. My various rebuttals about Tim Ball and the rest of it are in moderation, which may take a while. That link is great, with specific court wording, may come in handy.
==
On another topic, Neven has a copy of a lovely video from NASA on how northern ocean currents are being altered in this article:
http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2012/01/new-temperature-record-for-the-arctic-in-2011.html
#306-7 is the correct answer, but it might help to say the molecules are too tightly packed in solids until someone brings up mercury.
Instead of thinking energy as frequencies one might say IR needs more wiggle room so it collides with gases. This works with X-rays that need so little wiggle room that they pass through solids. But then there are auroras. The excuse here would be they give out light so they must have another origin than the Greenhouse Effect.
But really, #306-7 is what happens.
#309–Mr. Austin really should try to keep up; the probability of assistance in the suit brought by Dr. Weaver is precisely zero, since as I wrote in November of 2010, Dr. Ball retracted his libelous statements, apologized to Dr. Weaver, and paid an undisclosed sum.
Apparently he decided his statements were indefensible in court.
#309, and my as-yet unmoderated response–
Apparently, I’m the one who needs to keep up. I was referring to the 2010 lawsuit involving the Free Press, not this one:
http://wottsupwiththat.com/2011/04/11/help-asked-for-dr-tim-ball-in-legal-battle-with-dr-mann/
For Mark Conley
An animated version here (choose “Photon absorption” sheet):
http://phet.colorado.edu/en/simulation/greenhouse
But maybe it is too simple. Explanations given above are better.
315: Your remarks are unhelpful. Hank did a great job in 306-7. Why are they unhelpful? “IR needs more wiggle room so it collides with gases” is simply incoherent. It matters a great deal that IR excites specific (vibrational) modes of gases and that diatomic molecules like O2 and N2 do not possess these modes. Consequently IR would pass unhindered through an atmosphere consisting of only O2 and N2. It is this fact that makes CO2, an atmospheric “trace gas”, play a crucial role in setting atmospheric temperature. If CO2 were not a trace gas our puny releases of ~30GT (gigatons) per year would be irrelevant. For example, If instead of CO2 we released 30GT of N2 per year there would be no news, no denialists, no RC. If that were the case, after a thousand years we would have increased the concentration of atmospheric N2 by one part in 100,000. No such luck; we are increasing the concentration of CO2 at a rate of about .005 parts per year (and the rate is increasing).
#319–“If CO2 were not a trace gas our puny releases of ~30GT (gigatons) per year would be irrelevant. . .”
Yep. Thank you.
The Wall Street Journal walked this out in today’s paper. I follow you guys everyday and would like a short critique about the article. Some of them like Lidzen and Kininmonth have been mentioned from time to time but I’m not familiar with most.
Sorry, here is the link to what I was writing about.http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204301404577171531838421366.html
Has anyone seen the op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today by “16 distinguished scientists”? What about their claims? Same old? I notice Richard Lindzen is among the signers.
Mark Conley,
I found a reference in my library that does very nearly exactly what you want. Unfortunately, it is written at the level of a graduate text.
It starts by treating atoms, then molecules, and then interacting molecules in a liquid or solid. It looks like a great book, but you’d need abut 4-6 semesters of quantum theory to comprehend it. I’ll keep looking
Dale, Yup, they got the whole chorus. Frankly, I wouldn’t train a puppy on the Wall Street Urinal any more.
I see nothing new in the piece. No evidence. No facts. Just name dropping and baseless assertions–about what you’d expect from the denialati.
#325–Hadn’t realized Burt Rutan was part of that crowd. . . oh well.
About once a year or five, I happen to read extracts from WSJ editorial pages. Then I take a shower. This particular lump of excrement goes roughly like this:
Para 1: It’s not bad. Nothing major needs be done.
Para 2: Waa! How dare APS ignore us cranks ?!
Para 3: We claim that the number of us cranks is growing.
Para 4: No warming for 10 years, Trenberth said “travesty,” feedbacks don’t amplify.
Para 5: Misinterpret 22 yr old model, claim that increasing numbers of extreme weather events are no cause for alarm.
Para 6: CO2 is good for plants. Crop yeilds rose due to CO2.
Para 7: The number of cranks is secretly growing. Climate cabal suppressing free speech.
Para 8: Lysenko!
Para 9: Lysenko, gulag, death !!!
Para 10: We’re still mad about the APS attitude toward us cranks! They must be in it for the money and the cocaine and the strippers.
Para 11: Huge bureaucracies, rising taxes. Lysenko!
Para 12: We cranks can’t understand the science. Therefore nothing needs be done.
Para 13: Misinterpret Nordhaus. Our free markets are glorious. And more CO2 might be good !
Para 14: More research needed. Climate always changes. Nothing needs be done.
Para 15: We don’t really hate the environment. APS are alarmists. We’re still mad at them.
Para 16: We are unashamed enuf to list our names, together with affiliations.
sidd
A friend of mine told me that “a scientist who had come back from Russia” told her that fires are burning deep under the ground in Russian coal mines. She claimed that these fires give off more CO2 than all of China.
I said I had never heard of that. I also asked how fires would burn deep in the ground without oxygen.
This person is often telling me denialist talking points, but I had never heard this one before.
Does anyone have a clue what she might be talking about?
I know they had all the forest fires, and perhaps some peat was on fire, but were coal mines deep in the ground on fire?
Here is a link about a cavern in Darvaz, (Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan depending on who you believe) that had gas in it so they set it on fire to keep gas from going into the air. It has been burning for decades.
http://englishrussia.com/2008/03/25/darvaz-the-door-to-hell/
http://www.neweurasia.net/photoblog/darvaz-the-gates-of-hell/
Supposedly it is in the Karakum desert.
Here is something in Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derweze
I know that Gavin et al at Real Climate have more interesting things to do than to respond to something like the WSJ op-ed. However, this one was addressed “to the candidates”. Although you can argue that it’s only throwing red meat to the base by WSJ and that there is no journalistic integrity whatever there, it might at least be interesting to see if they would publish a rebuttal. Just a thought.
[Response: Anyone who thinks that the WSJ Op-ed page has any journalistic integrity simply hasn’t been paying attention. This goes way back before the Murdoch takeover. As a statement of science this letter is laughable, but as a study in denialist rhetoric it is worth looking at carefully. – gavin]
Snapple – Underground coal fires aren’t so unusual – there’s at least one in Pennsylvania, and one in Germany, and one in Canada, and in Australia one has burned for thousands of years, enough oxygen is always available. None of them makes human generated CO2 negligible regardless of denialation.
Dave Erickson : I don’t think this is one for RealClimate, more one for Climate Progress? There’s really no science in it, apart perhaps from the old “no warming recently” theme which they must know is in its final days.
Snapple @ 328-29 Long-lived coal fires have also occurred at coal mines in Pennsylvania, and probably other places I don’t know about. However, they can only produce as much CO2 as there is oxygen to burn, and the supply is pretty limited underground with no mechanical ventilation. Contrast that to one coal-fired power plant fed a continuous diet of finely ground coal and sufficient air for (nearly) complete combustion, and it’s not hard to see that underground mines fires aren’t a big source of CO2. The big problems are after the coal is mined!
Snapple @328 — Coal seam fires, sometimes called coal field fires occur in many locations around the globe. Australia, China, Indonesia, India and the United States come immediately to mind. These are smoldering fires, somewhat similar to the still glowing coals in the ashes of a camp fire the next morning. Such fires can burn for many centuries as witnessed by a lightning(?) started fire in Australia. Coal seam fires are almost impossible to extinguish; the Chinese celebrated a great success in stopping one which had been bunring for well over a century in a coal mine, thought to have been accidently started by coal miners preparing their dinner,
I suppose that dried peat can smolder in much the same manner, but I’ve seen no papers on that. In any case, China now consumes in excess of 2 gigatonnes of coal per annum and I doubt that peat fires in Russia are that extensive, although that is only opinion on my part.
An estimate, from China, suggest that all the world’s coal seam fires contribute about 1–2% of the excess CO2 added to the atmosphere each year. That estimaete did not include peat fires.
#331, I actually felt sorry for them, how embarrassing to sign your name to that load of drivel, and the old tasteless,odorless and weightless, according to our parliament opposition leader, irrelevance in 2012 is quite sad really.Dads army of denial.
Snapple @328
The famous coalmine fire (famous enough to have its own wiki page)is surely at Centralia, USA where they had to move the town because they couldn’t put it out. As for emissions from such fires exceeding China’s emissions, that’s just bar room hyperbolising.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania
#328-330–Snapple, coal seam fires are a real phenomenon, but hardly unique to Russia; there are estimated to be 200 burning in the US, the most famous of which, the Centralia fire, has been burning since 1962.
“Global coal fire emission are estimated to include 40 tons of mercury going into the atmosphere annually, and three percent of the world’s annual CO2 emissions.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_seam_fire
@321-323 &@327.
I note the two US Academic Advisors to the GWPF are among the 16 who signed the WSJ message. Having been in close proximity (too close probably) of GWPF pronouncements recently, this WSJ message does seem to be of the same ilk – brave words, zero substance.
Note how they convert Kevin Trenberth’s “…lack of (measured) warming at the moment…” into “…well over 10 years…” Also they ignore C4 grasses that evolved when CO2 was lower than today, plants that are not a small part of the carbon cycle. So not bad. Two substantive comments in the same article, both dodgy.
A first installment of my take on the truly incredible GWPF has bee posted up at:-
http://www.desmogblog.com/what-does-gwpf-really-stand
Hadn’t realized Burt Rutan was part of that crowd
Then I can safely guess you are not a hard core space cadet. They harder they come, the harder they fall. They are notoriously anti-science when it comes to global warming, climate change and the cost and realism of their space ideas. The part about carbon dioxide being a safe, colorless, odorless gas is particularly amusing considering Schmitt’s and Rutan’s experience with closed and cramped space capsules and cockpits flying in a vacuum.
Big Oil’s lobbying dollars earn 5800%.
http://priceofoil.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/big-oil-5.jpg
Gavin et al, I understand your reticence to dignify drivel like the WSJ piece with a response. However, two considerations this year: 1) In Republican presidential politics, it has become a requirement to dismiss climate science as a hoax; 2) policy action on carbon emissions mitigation has come to a halt in the US because of the acceptability of above dismissal. I find this accusation by elected officials to be tantamount to a charge of scientific fraud against the research community that is taken seriously by the body politic. I think it would be interesting to take up this accusation, which is being abetted by the authors of the WSJ piece. I don’t think elected officials really understand how serious the charge of scientific fraud is. How do you, as a serious research scientist respond to such a charge? That response would be really interesting to see in the WSJ, or the NYT or the Wash Post. The purpose would be to show the general public how truly ludicrous the WSJ op-ed and its ilk really are.
#340–Rodger that.
just looking at last year model update IPCC AR4 20C3M + SRES A1B
worked out that SRES A1B, most likely special report emissions scenario A1B, what exactly does 20C3M translate to? tks
They (or at least those who are in the Majority in the House) don’t care.
I’m not a serious research scientist, just a serious software engineer, but the answer is: you’ can’t, in any meaningful way. If you support mainstream science, you’re a “liberal” and that’s that. That’s the beauty of what has happened politically the last few years, it’s not science, but ideology that matters.
Won’t happen, they have a history.
The Republican Base won’t read either of these.
Here’s an alternative to Google Scholar — a bit slower, but it’s not Google:
http://sciencenet.kit.edu:8080/
found here: http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/feature/Open-Source-Alternatives-to-Google-3923746-2.htm
And it’s also a publishing tool for science data:
http://sciencenet.kit.edu/FAQ
Study explains why it’s useless to argue with climate deniers
http://grist.org/list/study-explains-why-its-useless-to-argue-with-climate-deniers/
Believing the impossible and conspiracy theories
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/120126152134.htm
M. J. Wood, K. M. Douglas, R. M. Sutton. Dead and Alive: Beliefs in Contradictory Conspiracy Theories.Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2012; DOI:10.1177/1948550611434786
Full PDF here: http://m.spp.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/01/18/1948550611434786.full.pdf
# 344 found it using science kit
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/annexessannex-iv.html
#348–a flash of humor from Science Daily: “Since Osama bin Laden is not Schrodinger’s cat, he cannot be simultaneously alive and dead.” (Wait, have we measured that?)
But Mr. Monckton has expressed views implying that it is both warming and not-warming simultaneously on the same timescales, and that’s just the most obvious example of internal contradiction from Team Denialati. It does bring to mind the phrase “six impossible things before breakfast.”
Fortunately, this does, over time, tend to invoke the Voltaire effect: “I prayed that my enemies be ridiculous, and my prayers were answered.”
(Apologies for pervasive misquoting by memory.)