Cosmic rays don’t die so easily
Last week, a Norwegian official-looking - and in my view - climatesceptic website praised Eigil Friis-Christensen from the Danish space center (featuring in the Great Global Warming Swindle) and hailed him for having given the best speech ever in the annual Birkeland seminar organized by Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters (NASL). There were rumours of controversy behind the scene before the seminar, as the NASL is regarded as a prestigious body in Norway.
Furthermore, Svensmark and Friis-Christensen have written a response (title 'Reply to Lockwood and Fröhlich – The persistent role of the Sun in climate forcing'; DNSC Scientific Report Series 3/2007) to a recent paper by Lockwood and Frohlich (LF2007). In this response, they state ’… [LF2007] argue that this historical link between the Sun and climate came to an end about 20 years ago'. Another quote from their response is ‘Here we rebut their argument comprehensively’. So the cosmic ray theory isn’t quite dead after all?
There are several earlier posts here on RC that provide a background to the story about the galactic cosmic rays (GCR) and our climate (here, here, here, here). There is still no long-term trend in the GCR, not even in the Svensmark and Friis-Christensen’s response (see also figure below). This seems to be acknowledged now.
The LF2007 paper and the response focus on just the last 2-3 decades for which there were direct measurements of the total solar irradiance (TSI= solar energy summed over all wavelength), but if they had read my paper on this issue in GRL 2005, they would have seen that there has not been any trend in solar activity or GCR since 1952 (also seen in the figure below).
In addition, there is no evidence of any long-term trend in the low cloud cover (IPCC AR4), and the GCR-hypothesis has a problem with explaining the trend in the diurnal cycle, enhanced warming in the Arctic and a cooling in the stratosphere. The only explanation we can offer is an enhanced greenhouse effect.
It may be of interest for historians that the story about the GCR has been a long-winded epic (total cloud cover, low clouds, adjustment of ISCCP cloud data, etc.), and now new characters are thrown onto the stage: radiosonde measurements (HadAT2) representing the tropospheric temperatures and data from a ‘simple’ ocean data assimilation (SODA).
SF2007 argue that: ‘When the response of the climate system to the solar cycle is apparent in the troposphere and ocean, but not in the global surface temperature, one can only wonder about the quality of the surface temperature record’. This is a rhetorical question, and not a very scientific one. For starters, one cannot exclude the possibility that near-surface processes dominate at lower altitudes thus degrading any correlation. But, in the mind of Svensmark and Friis-Christensen, it is perhaps the GCR that is the most dominant driver.
Svensmark and Friis-Christensen do not disclose the geographical coverage of the ocean temperature they use to correlate with GCR, but the strong annual cycle and inter-annual variations are typical characteristics of local observations rather than global fluctuations. Note, the global surface temperature includes the world oceans (~70%) of the surface.
Another interesting aspect is the improved correlation with altitude. This is not what one would expect to see if the GCR mechanism played a key role, as changes in cloudiness would affect the planetary albedo, and hence the solar energy absorbed by the surface. The troposphere would then respond to the surface changes.
A more likely explanation could be that changes in UV associated with the solar cycle affects the stratosphere (a little disputed hypothesis), and that the signal then propagates down into the troposphere. Thus, we cannot rule out that solar activity influences our climate in ways that do not involve GCR and clouds.
The physical link between any ultra-small particles and much larger the cloud condensation nuclei is still lacking, even after the experiment performed in Copenhagen. Thus, the hypothesis is still speculative. The GHG-effect, on the other hand, is well-established.
According to the official looking Norwegian climatesceptic website, Friis-Christensen states that his work has been controversial, but mainly because of political and not scientific reasons. The fact that he and Svensmark now offer a response to LF2007 seems to contradict his own belief.
Svensmark and Friis-Christensen object to LF2007 by stating ‘Lockwood and Frohlich erase the solar cycle from various data sets by using running means of 9 to 13 years’. It is interesting to note that Svensmark and Friis-Christensen now acknowledge the fact that filtering time series can produce misleading impression after the dubious curve-fitting magic in the famous Friis-Christensen & Lassen (1991) science paper.
Svensmark and Friis-Christensen further argue ‘In any case, the most recent global temperature trend is close to zero’. This is not true, as the IPCC AR4 highlights. I think the the statements in their response ‘use of a long running mean creates the illusion that the temperatures are still rising rapidly early in the 21st Century’ and ‘global surface temperatures have been roughly flat since 1998’ are dishonest (see figure above ).
Svensmark and Friis-Christensen should know of the chaotic nature of our climate system and the fact that it takes more than a few years to determine whether there is a trend or a pause in the trend. The most convincing explanation is that there are also many factors (such as aerosols) playing a role, adding to inter-annual and inter-decadal variations.
It is worrying that the director of the Danish space center makes such misleading claims and then receives honours in Norway by NASL. The controversy running up to the event was therefore understandable, even though Friis-Christensen was supposed to talk about geomagnetism rather than climate.
To answer the question I posed in the beginning of this post, I think that the chapter on the connection between GCR and clouds is not yet closed, but all the evidence goes against the notion that GCR are the cause of the present global warming.
4 October 2007 at 3:43 AM
This is quite worrying scientifically and somewhat opportunist on their part and brings to mind the fact that climate science and earth science are fast becomming the most politicised sciences of all time which seems to be influencing some scientists.
Let us hope that the integrity of science is not itself compromised by some that claim to practise it.
4 October 2007 at 4:08 AM
The problem with this analysis is that it doesn’t look at the period prior to
1950 and as such is pretty irrelevant.
You need to look at the period before and after you claim AGW.
If you don’t accept this, then you invalidate your claim to AGW. The period
post 1945 had increasing CO2, and decreasing temperatures. The claim being that
something else causes the cooling.
Apply the same logic to the above, and the research fails for the same reason.
4 October 2007 at 4:41 AM
My first post to RC, sorry it’s OT!
That infamous piece of denialist merde du jour:
The ‘Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide’
ARTHUR B. ROBINSON , SALLIE L. BALIUNAS , WILLIE SOON , AND ZACHARY W. ROBINSON
is no longer available from www.oism.org, it has been updated, lost two authors and gained a new one! It’s also dropped the reference to the George C. Marshall Institute! [smell that oil]
The new, but unimproved version is
‘Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide’
ARTHUR B. ROBINSON, NOAH E. ROBINSON, AND WILLIE SOON
The website http://www.oism.org/pproject/ still proclaims ‘Click here to see this peer reviewed research paper.’
I haven’t checked thoroughly, but it’s still stating lies like:
‘In all seven glacial and interglacial cycles, the reported changes in CO2 and CH4 lagged the temperature changes and could not, therefore, have caused them (66).’
Reference
66. Soon, W. (2007) Physical Geography, in press.
Clearly this one is going to need some examination and debunking!
4 October 2007 at 6:16 AM
First 3 comments and what do we have?
1. A claim that climate science is becoming politicized. Is that a joke? It’s been political for a long time; you’d think everyone knew that. Indeed how could it avoid being political?
2. “it doesn’t look at the period prior to
1950 and as such is pretty irrelevant.” Did he read it? - It was a rebuttal of the L&F contention that the last 20 years cannot be explained by natural variations. It seems generally accepted now that prior to the last 20 years the theory fits ok. Or does it? Kevin Trenberth makes 1970 the cut-off point from natural effects. L&F say 1985. At any rate few people seems now to argue AGW prior to the 50’s.
3. lies like.. “in all seven glacial and interglacial cycles, the reported changes in CO2 and CH4 lagged the temperature changes and could not, therefore, have caused them”. This is actually something that everyone agrees on. Whether it is misleading or not is the issue but it is by no means a lie.
Try and keep up guys! Is this a scientific site or a fan club?
4 October 2007 at 6:36 AM
Excuse me? Friis-Christensen still is propagating his GCR hypothesis? Against common sense? This is outragous.
I did an intensive check of the Lassen-Frijs hypothesis in my blog and what came up was that the scientists placed their claim on a short time series of data and even made some very grave mistakes in the data reduction. These were already debunked:
Paul Damen and Peter Laut, Pattern of Strange Errors Plagues Solar Activity and Terrestrial Climate Data, EOS, 2004, pp370
Laut,P. (2003), Solar activity and terrestrial climate: An analysis of some purported correlations, J.Atmos. Solar-Terr.Phys.,65, 801–812.
It is also quite interessting to note hat one of the main proponents of the GCR hypothesis Kund Lassen released new and corrected old data and actually debunked the GCR hypothesis himself since these data showed that the conclusion “GCR may influence climate was very permature” and could not be proven over longer time scales.
See: P. Thejll, K. Lassen, Solar forcing of the Northern hemisphere land air temperature: New data. Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics 62, 1207-1213 (2000).
[edit - no personal comments please]
4 October 2007 at 7:01 AM
SacredAmobea 3. Doesnt all this lag issue get covered in Hansens recent Trace Gases paper, where they examine at length the CO2 lag issue?
Their conclusion is that:
*…we can only say with certainty that the temperature and gas
changes are nearly synchronous.*
http://www.planetwork.net/climate/Hansen2007.pdf End of s2 (a).
although they do earlier acknowledge that:
*…The GHGs, because they change almost simultaneously with the climate, are a major ‘cause’ of glacial-to-interglacial climate change, as shown below, even if, as seems likely, they slightly lag the climate change and thus are not the initial instigator of change.*
So its a near-run thing. Basically it looks like the butterfly flutters, and the GHGs come out to play, and pretty well similtaneously the climate change gets underway.
I think we are way past the butterfly flutter this time round, already.
But attempting to return to the topic (as Gavin would hope I do!
)
This insisting that we accurately identify the cause is worthy of our attention only because we think that if we can identify the mechanism we can maybe find the magic bullet to put it down, and we have saved the world.
While admirable when we are a long way back from the edge, to the slightly informed and hence potentially very worried layman this has the appearance of a house-fire…
Our house is burning. We want to call the brigade and chuck water on the blaze so we have a home to live in (albeit slightly smoke damaged). But the fire chiefs say:
No! We have to wait until the arsonist is identified, captured, tried and found guilty before we will start to put out the fire.
Sheesh! Lets start damping it down now, and worry about how or why its happening later from the luxury of our porch overlooking the great inland sea of central Australia (at 80m of sea level rise).
http://cegis.usgs.gov/sea_level_rise.html
http://cegis.usgs.gov/video/sealevel_world.avi
So regarding the Norwegians, while debunking and refuting may be satisfying, would we not be better discussing how best to get the refined truth before the powers-that-be? That way at least we are building the arguement in the right direction. I dont think the anti-AGW group have any steam left in their shovels to undermine the vast structure of reality that is pouring in upon us. So lets concentrate on building on the good science and the good communications, rather than wasting too much time destroying the bad.
4 October 2007 at 7:34 AM
Climate science and earth science are definitely far less politicized than any of the social sciences, speaking as someone who made a transition from the social to the natural sciences. Academics often cry “politics” when they feel that their findings are not recognized or are being disputed by established scientific authorities. The persistence of climate scientists in coming to a consensus which supports the effects of greenhouse gases actually demonstrates that political and financial pressure cannot always prevail over sound science.
4 October 2007 at 7:34 AM
The Soon, W. 2007 paper in Physical Geography:
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/Soon07-CO2-TempCORR-Preprint.pdf
4 October 2007 at 7:37 AM
Rasmus, thanks for a thorough and lucid post debunking this tripe. I have been pointing out for years that the main problems with this model are 1)GCR fluxes aren’t changing, 2)the model doesn’t reproduce all of the observed trends, and 3)there really is no physical mechanism for the proposed effects.
Actually, the first of these issues affects me directly. If we were seeing significant systematic changes in the GCR fluxes, then the rates for single-event upsets (bit flips) in microcircuits flown on orbit would deviate systematically from the predicted rates. They do not, and we have been using essentially the same model for the predictions since the early 1980s.
The second point is quite important, and Rasmus makes it quite well. The anthropogenic ghg mechanism is the only one that explains all of the trends we are seeing. Nick (#2 above) claims that the above analysis is irrelevant because it looks only at the post-1950 period. I disagree. Most of the CO2 has actually been spewed into the atmosphere during this period (remember, energy consumption increases exponentially). Moreover, the comfounding effects of aerosols were only removed with clean air legislation after the ’70s. The temporal signature of the trends we are seeing is itself pretty strong support of anthropogenic causation.
Finally, the lack of a physical mechanism is perhaps the most damning of the criticisms. These guys wave their hands so much around this question, it’s amazing they stay on the ground!
The only reason this one is not quite dead is because Svensmark et al. refuse to recognize a persistent vegetative state and pull the plug.
4 October 2007 at 7:40 AM
Rasmus - It is Svensmark (not LF2007) who makes the argument: “When the response of the climate system to the solar cycle is apparent in the troposphere and ocean, but not in the global surface temperature, one can only wonder about the quality of the surface temperature record.”
[Response: Fixed. Thanks. -gavin]
4 October 2007 at 7:45 AM
Re:2
Do some reading about the role of aerosol cooling in that post-1945 period. I’m not sure whether you’re questioning the lack of pre-1950 cosmic ray counts.
At any rate, I’m seeing a lot of rehashed old arguments in online debating. CO2 lagging temperature in historical records, water vapor driving temperature, disputes among scientists means we know nothing, etc. etc. These are all red herring arguments, and used in much the same manner creationists argue their case - sow “reasonable doubt” as if this were a court case…
4 October 2007 at 7:51 AM
Re: Nick@2
The ‘problem’ is one for those who propose a solar mechanism. They are the ones who are ignoring a perfectly adequate physical mechanism (GHGs) for the observed warming and suggesting an alternative explanation. If instrumental records for whatever measure of solar activity they are proposing as the dominant forcing don’t exist prior to ~1950 then they need to get cracking on isolating a decent proxy - if their hypothesis is correct then locating such a beast will strengthen their case.
Meanwhile the rest of us can mutter ‘entia non sunt multiplicanda’ under our breaths and stick with C02 + CH4 + particulates = C20th trends.
Regards
Luke
4 October 2007 at 8:10 AM
There is no scale on the RHS of the graph - pls add it in for clarity - thanks.
4 October 2007 at 8:56 AM
Why DNSC? wasn’t it good enough to publish as a reply?
BTW: http://www.spacecenter.dk/publications/scientific-report-series/Scient_No._3.pdf
4 October 2007 at 10:48 AM
Am I missing something or is this rebuttal fatally flawed?
Look at their Figure 2. Figure 2A shows a poor correlation between tropospheric temperature and cosmic rays.
They mash the tropospheric temperature data by removing the effects of El Nino’s (how?), NAO (how?, volcanic aerosols (how?) a linear trend (they call all this “removal of confusions”!) to give something that matches CRF and tropospheric temperature beautifully in figure 2b.
However the mashed data that correlates with the CRF indicates that since 1957 or so, the Earth’s temperature has decreased by around 0.2 oC. In other words, the contribution from CRF since 1957 has resulted in around a 0.2 oC of cooling.
And they rationalise this by suggesting that the land surface temperature data must be wrong (they say “When the response of the climate system to the solar cycle is apparent in the troposphere and ocean, but not in the global surface temperature, one can only wonder about the quality of the surface temperature record”.)
In other words their own analysis indicates that the CRF has made no contribution to warming since the late 50’s (which Dr. Benestad has already pointed out to us in his excellent intro.), and they rationalise this by suggesting that the temperature anomaly data that we’re all familiar with must be wrong..
Can someone tell me if I’m going mad, or are these guys really trying to sell this odd notion?
4 October 2007 at 12:25 PM
Do some reading about the role of aerosol cooling in that post-1945 period. I’m not sure whether you’re questioning the lack of pre-1950 cosmic ray counts.
At any rate, I’m seeing a lot of rehashed old arguments in online debating. CO2 lagging temperature in historical records, water vapor driving temperature, disputes among scientists means we know nothing, etc. etc. These are all red herring arguments, and used in much the same manner creationists argue their case - sow “reasonable doubt” as if this were a court case…
—————–
I’m quite aware. Let me spell it out.
The article says for one factor, for recent times, there is no link between solar and climate.
OK. We then apply the same standard to CO2. It is one factor.
For C02 in a one factor model, there is no link between CO2 and climate, 1945-200. For part of the time the link was negative, then it was positive. Overall no statistical evidence.
Even Gavin will claim that you have to include more factors such as polution to get a match with CO2 and
climate.
However, the argument here is that solar and climate aren’t linked, and we’ve use a one factor model to prove it. Not only that, but there is cherry picking of the range in which the comparison is made.
Accept that, and the skeptic will pick 1945-1980 as the test of C02.
[edit]
[Response: You misunderstand the point being made. To do a full attribution you need to have all relevant factors included, I think we agree. But to demonstrate that the sign of the trend that would be induced is contrary to the actual trend is sufficient to rule out any one factor from being causal. This is true for solar over the last fifty years and indeed for CO2 over the 1940-1975 period. Pointing out that solar is not dominant now does not imply anything for the past, and pointing out that other things were involved in the 1940-1975 period (to the extent that that internal climate variability can be taken into account), does not imply the CO2 is not dominant now. The ’skeptic’ is confused if he thinks that mainstream climate science is based on a single factor model, it isn’t, and so demonstrations that it is not, do not make very persuasive arguments. - gavin]
4 October 2007 at 12:27 PM
The ‘problem’ is one for those who propose a solar mechanism. They are the ones who are ignoring a perfectly adequate physical mechanism (GHGs) for the observed warming and suggesting an alternative explanation. If instrumental records for whatever measure of solar activity they are proposing as the dominant forcing don’t exist prior to ~1950 then they need to get cracking on isolating a decent proxy - if their hypothesis is correct then locating such a beast will strengthen their case.
————————
Sorry, but you are making the science mistake.
Just because you have one variable that fits after a few fudges, doesn’t mean that there are other variables that also fit.
C02 produces a very small change that is then amplified.
There are plenty of other plausible effects that produce small changes and solar is one of them.
There is no evidence that the amplification is restricted to the small warming produced by C02.
[Response: Who said it was? Feedbacks to solar warming or CO2 warming are very similar. - gavin]
4 October 2007 at 12:28 PM
The second point is quite important, and Rasmus makes it quite well. The anthropogenic ghg mechanism is the only one that explains all of the trends we are seeing. Nick (#2 above) claims that the above analysis is irrelevant because it looks only at the post-1950 period. I disagree. Most of the CO2 has actually been spewed into the atmosphere during this period
———————-
Again, not statistically valid.
You’ve made an assumption into a fact.
You need the before and after in order to show something has changed.
Nick
4 October 2007 at 12:32 PM
>3 and sorry for digressing
– it’s ba-a-a-a-ck … as a review. Note the books reviewed in the same issue. Peculiar. http://www.jpands.org/jpands1203.htm
4 October 2007 at 12:52 PM
#16: Thanks Hank, I nearly choked when I read the concluding sentence:
We are living in an increasingly lush environment of plants and animals as a result of this CO2 increase. Our children will therefore enjoy an Earth with far more plant and animal life than that with which we now are blessed.
Is this for real?
4 October 2007 at 12:57 PM
Nick, (Re: 18), Either you are being deliberately obtuse or you have a very strange understanding of climate science. The period from 1945 to ~1980 is pretty well understood as having been due to the combined forcings of CO2 and aerosols. Once the aerosols go away (due to clean air legislation and the fall of the Eastern Bloc), you have greenhouse warming.
With respect to GCR forcing, the sign isn’t even right, even after you “massage” (hell, they didn’t massage it, they mugged it!) the data 6 ways to Sunday. In contrast, not only does anthropogenic ghg get the sign right, it reproduces the qualitative features we see in the current warming epoch.
You keep appealing to statistics, but I have yet to see you use a single statistical test to back up your assertions. If you think we will be intimidated simply by the use of the word statistics, I think you walked into the wrong bar.
4 October 2007 at 1:06 PM
‘It is worrying that the director of the Danish space center makes such misleading claims and then receives honours in Norway by NASL.’
It is worrying Rasmus, but it is also very fortunate there are people like you with a skeptical eye. I don’t understand how people from this website can point to the IPCC and NOAA and say that these organizations are somehow immune to science miscarraiges like those at NASL.
4 October 2007 at 1:38 PM
I commented on this issue on my own site yesterday so I will be brief here. Doesn’t this just mean that we don’t know enough? All of the cries of politicizing science aside, we need climate science to evolve to the point that most other sciences have achieved. We need more effort by our governments and universities in this area. There are cries for billions of dollars in expenditures for climate change but no one is crying for millions of dollars just to truly understand all of the causality. I speak more about this several times on my site and most recently on the GCR issue http://globalwarming-factorfiction.com/2007/10/03/the-persistent-role-of-the-sun-in-climate-forcing/
4 October 2007 at 2:01 PM
Interesting comments by Chris, in #15, although I am not sure I entirely follow the analysis. Can Chris/someone just expand on it a bit for the rest of us? I want to be sure I understand this more clearly.
On another tack, could one usefully apply a ‘reductio ad absurdum’ here, i.e. take the GCR argument entirely at face value, assume that it does indeed explain everything they say it does, and then see what physically based results - and hence maybe laws of physics - we have to throw out as a consequence? Might be an interesting exercise, or at least a useful test of Ockham’s razor.
4 October 2007 at 2:08 PM
Michael, I don’t think that anyone has said NOAA or the IPCC are immune to being misled or in error. But we are not just talking NOAA or the IPCC. We also have the National Academy of Sciences, nearly every professional society of scientists, DOD, NASA… It is very hard to find responsible experts who think we aren’t affecting climate. Even most of the “skeptics” admit we are having some effect. It is the consensus that is important. When you’ve got so many disparate groups in agreement, the chances that you are seriously in error are quite small.
4 October 2007 at 2:27 PM
In fairness of NASL they also quite clearly say that the reward has nothing at all to do with his global warming theory…
Re15:
Yes it seams as if they explain a cooling with the rays ad to that the axis of rays and temps are at different levels in the two diagrams. Don’t know where the dip around 92 comes from, El Nino? And where did the linear trend come from?! And it isn’t small either… and a linear trend give or take 0.4K… and so on… not surprised that they didn’t try to publish this!
4 October 2007 at 2:42 PM
Re Nick (#23)
There are several serious problems with The Svensmark and Friis-Christensen “rebuttal”, but their Figure 2 seems to trash their own argument (unless I’m completely misreading this which is possible!). Figure 2 seems to support the argument that the Cosmic Ray Flux (CRF) leaves a signal in the temperature record (possible but not very convincing, I think), but doesn’t support the idea that the marked late 20th century warming can have had any significant contribution from the sun (or at least from the CRF that they bang on about). In fact Figure 2 indicates exactly the opposite…that the contribution from the CRF is at best negligible, and is strictly (following S and F-C’s analysis to the letter) a cooling one.
Look at Figure 2a of S and F-C. Part A shows some raw tropospheric temperature data overlaid with the CRF data. There’s no particular correspondence, we all agree (including S and F-C).
O.K. so there are other contributions to the tropospheric temperature. Let’s try to eliminate these and dissect out the contribution from the CRF. S and C-F do this in Figure 2b.
How do they do this? They remove all sorts of contributions to the tropospheric temperature (they don’t say how). They remove the contributions from El Nino’s and the North Atlantic Oscillation and from volcanic aerosols. Fair enough.
They remove an unspecified “linear trend” of 0.14 +/- 0.4 K per decade (isn’t that the global warming? caused by…ummmm…the greenhouse effect????)
And are left with a wonderful correlation. The curves match beautifully (the CRF and the mashed and denuded tropspheric temperature march side by side in Figure 2b).
However the contribution from the CRF now matches a residual tropospheric temperature evolution since 1958 (?) whose overall trend is a cooling one (by about 0.2 oC between 1958ish and now)..
Have I got this wrong? I think that S and F-C have produced an analysis of the contribution of the CRF to mid-late 20th century temperature evolution that is a mild cooling one. Much as everyone else that studies this stuff properly, concludes. One could argue that their analysis shows a signature from the CRF in the temperature record once other contributions are removed. But in doing this dissection they arrive at a match of the CRF to a mid to late 20th century temperature trend that is a mild cooling one…….
4 October 2007 at 4:04 PM
Ray,
I’m not asking if we’re affecting the climate. When I breath I affect the climate or I suffocate. I am asking what the future looks like. Over the last couple of decades if you were to ask individual scientists from NOAA, IPCC, DoD, NAS, NASA what the future looks like, most would say its going to be warmer, but you would get a wide range of answers on how much warmer. I take issue with people saying the science is settled.
Also, the IPCC is just as capable of error (both at the scientist level and at the scientist community level) for all the obvious reasons: personal views, politics, industry pressure, peer pressure, etc. These organizations should be viewed with a skeptical eye and hammered from every side with counter-theories. I don’t see this or encouragement of this at RC.
4 October 2007 at 4:31 PM
Michael, here: http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Comments/wg1-commentFrameset.html
4 October 2007 at 4:49 PM
Michael, You are misunderstanding the situation. If it were ONLY the IPCC or ONLY NOAA, your position might have merit. It is the aggregate of scientific opinion–by individuals and groups with disparate preferences and instances–that is reliable. What is more, while estimates from individuals might vary, mean estimates are pretty reliable, and have been converging with time. That is not a sign of unsettled science. Nor is the fact that there simply is no credible alternative theory. You can challenge evolution as easily as you can challenge anthropogenic causation of climate change–as indicated by the fact that denialists have to resort to the same tactics as fundies from the Discovery Institute (publish in non-peer-reviewed journals, etc., publish in the press…).
There simply are no credible counter theories. You seem to persist in the belief that there are two sides to every argument. In settled science, this is not true. There are either many sides (e.g. competint theories) or one.
4 October 2007 at 4:53 PM
Re 28 Michael: “I’m not asking if we’re affecting the climate. When I breath I affect the climate or I suffocate.”
I do hope that you are not implying that respiration is contributing to the increase in atmospheric CO2.
“These organizations should be viewed with a skeptical eye and hammered from every side with counter-theories. I don’t see this or encouragement of this at RC.”
And what would these counter-theories be, besides the ones that have been shown over and over to be not worth the paper they are printed on? I’m starting to question your sincerity here, Michael.
4 October 2007 at 5:32 PM
Jim, we have some pretty dismal projections, which call for big decisions to be made. I do not know how many counter-theories are out there, or what thier worth is. I don’t know how open Working Group 1 is to exploring counter-theories. The more a theory stands up to counter-theories, the more useful it is to science. There had better be counter-theories out there, if not something is seriously wrong with modern science.
I see a lot of value in RC, it is the closest thing out there to a level playing field, but the obsession with snuffing deniers is bordering on madness.
4 October 2007 at 5:45 PM
Michael, click the link, here: http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Comments/wg1-commentFrameset.html
4 October 2007 at 5:54 PM
Re Michael # 32.
You say “I do not know how many counter-theories are out there, or what thier worth is. I don’t know how open Working Group 1 is to exploring counter-theories. The more a theory stands up to counter-theories, the more useful it is to science. There had better be counter-theories out there, if not something is seriously wrong with modern science.”
But what counter-theories?? That’s the question. If there are counter theories they will be explored obviously. So where are these counter theories? Well we’re discussing one here aren’t we?
You say that “the obsession with snuffing deniers is bordering on madness”. But what “snuffing deniers” are you talking about? On this part of the RC board we are discussing the “counter-theory” of Svensmark and Friis-Christensen that global warming is dominated by solar effects, in particular the contribution of the cosmic ray flux to cloud formation via seeding of particulates.
It turns out Svensmark and Friis-Christensen’s own analysis indicates that their counter-theory is deficient. It apparently doesn’t make any contribution to the most marked warming on record.
So what other counter theory would you like to bring to our attention? And why should there be counter-theories anyway if the science is settled. I don’t think there is any question that atmospheric CO2 is a greenhouse gas, that increasing its concentration results in warming, and that this has dominated at least mid to late and contemporary global warming. We don’t need a “counter theory” to something that is rather obviously the case.
Clearly it would be wonderful if we knew exactly how much warming we have in store. So far we know that enhanced CO2 has a relationship with the earth’s temperature response equivalent to between around 1.7 to 4.5 oC at 95% confidence limits. Why not just accept what we know and encourage endeavours to improve our knowledge and predictions.
And if anyone comes up with viable “counter-theories” these will obviously be explored and tested.
4 October 2007 at 6:04 PM
Re 32 Michael : “I do not know how many counter-theories are out there, or what thier worth is. I don’t know how open Working Group 1 is to exploring counter-theories. The more a theory stands up to counter-theories, the more useful it is to science. There had better be counter-theories out there, if not something is seriously wrong with modern science.”
OK, let’s back up a step. Just so we’re all clear, please define “counter-theories.” Theories that counter what, exactly? Theories about what is happening, how it’s happening and why? Theories about what will happen? Theories about what we should do about it?
“the obsession with snuffing deniers is bordering on madness.”
Honest skepticism is of course healthy and necessary, but judging from my encounters with out and out “deniers”, it seems like an awful lot of them are well past the border of madness. That wouldn’t be a problem, except that there are very clearly some people deliberately propagating the disinformation that is feeding that madness. It’s really that disinformation that is being challenged and snuffed. As Hank likes to ask, in an equally healthy skeptical spirit, “where are you getting your information?”
4 October 2007 at 7:31 PM
Michael, I there a counter-theory to evolution? to gravity? how about atomic theory? They all did at one point in their history. However, when a scientific field becomes sufficiently mature and the evidence becomes overwhelming, then there are simply no credible alternative scientific theories. Climate science is over 150 years old. Why wouldn’t it be mature? And it’s not as if there are any controversies over basic issues–the consensus of anthropogenic causation has been strengthening for >20 years. The fact that you don’t like the implications of the science cannot be a basis for rejecting a successful theory
4 October 2007 at 8:22 PM
Michael, you start chipping away at Golden Calves and you’re in for a heap of trouble. I think Confucius said that… or somebody [;-). Nothing riles a scientist more than questioning his religion. I said that. (with apologizes to Bob Dylan)
Question: Anybody, what is the physical/astrophysical process that theoretically enhances global warming by decreasing cosmic radiation?
[Response: Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCR) are supposed to create particles which become cloud condensation nuclei (CCN). Thus, more GCR the more clouds and vice versa. Less clouds reflect less of the sunlight, and more is absorbed at the surface. Hence, the hypothesis claim that:: less GCR -> less CCN -> less low-level clouds -> more sunlight absorbed by the surface -> higher temperature. -rasmus]
4 October 2007 at 8:29 PM
Is DNSC peer reviewed?
[Response: No, I don’t think so. -rasmus]
4 October 2007 at 8:31 PM
Re: #20 “I nearly choked when I read the concluding sentence:” Nice pun. BTW maybe he’s talking about phytoplankton and jellyfish? There’s bound to be more of those, right?
4 October 2007 at 8:43 PM
Oh yeah, there are lots of counter theories to atomic theory. You can read all about them on www.crank.net. Every idiot who learned algebra thinks that he can throw down reams of scribble proving something or other. Eli was at a meeting last night at a fairly important scientific conference where some clown screwed up a trivial heat of formation problem and said that he had proved that conservation of energy and the uncertainty principle were not compatible. He made several other mistakes.
5 October 2007 at 3:00 AM
RE: #37
This is according to my read of “The Chilling Stars”:
Increased cosmic radiation of the right type leads to increased cloud condensation nuclei, leading to increased low cloud cover, causing overall cooling. Conversely, fewer cosmic rays of the right type lead to sunnier skies and warmer temperatures.
Interestingly, this theory would explain how Antarctica doesn’t follow global warming trends. Antarctica has such a high albedo that clouds cause overall warming.
[Response: The Antarctic connection is bogus (the Arctic has the same features for instance). My take on their book is here - gavin]
5 October 2007 at 4:39 AM
Hank Roberts Says:
– it’s ba-a-a-a-ck … as a review. Note the books reviewed in the same issue. Peculiar.
http://www.jpands.org/jpands1203.htm
I can’t decide whether you’re talking about the Soon & Baliunas junk or the abortion-breast cancer junk.
5 October 2007 at 4:53 AM
There does not need to be a trend in solar activity since 1952 to explain the recent warming, if there had been a prior increase in solar activity, and the thermal inertia of the oceans had not yet responded. The mid-century cooling presumably due to other causes (possibly aerosols and lead particulates), would only postpone the response to this plateau of high solar activity, until the recent warming.
Feedbacks to solar activity and CO2 forcing are very similar in models given their similar treatments, but are perhaps not so similar in reality.
[Response: If this is true, then we would expect the GCMs to have under-estimated the effect from the increase in CO” as such a long lag would mean that more than we expect still lies in the pipe-line. Furthermore, this would suggest a higher climate sensitivity, and we have no reason to think that the magnitude of the response would be particularly sensitive to whether it is an increased greenhouse effect or changes in the total solar irradiance (TSI). However, I think that the lag time scale is more likely less than 10 years.. -rasmus]
5 October 2007 at 4:54 AM
I don’t see many comments here that address the content of the paper. I can only agree with Gavin’s comment that the cosmic ray theory isn’t dead. In fact it correlates pretty well to fluctuations, when other forcings are accounted for, and interestingly enough, when a small, mysterious, linear upward trend is removed.
[Response: You cannot possibly know it these fluctuations are due to GCR or other solar factors, as the GCR correlates with the sunspots, 10.7 cm flux and the solar UV. It’s still a mystery why you would see stronger correlation in the troposphere than near the surface. I do not yet believe the figure showing the ocean temperatures (it looks suspiciously like one location is being cherry picked, as more ‘convetional’ sea surface temperatures do not provide such good match). -rasmus]
Earlier papers which claimed that the solar forcing was overwhelmed by CO2 had such long smoothing as to carry over temp trends long after they had dissipated, or so the new paper claims, and so were flawed.
I guess that in wishing to be the first to denounce the paper, many here neglected to read it.
5 October 2007 at 5:52 AM
Rasmus, your 2005 GRL paper seems to refer to global average surface temperature. I think any correlation with solar cycle length and average temperature is in the Northern Hemisphere, as reported by Armagh Observatory, for example:
http://www.arm.ac.uk/press/200years-on-the-Net.html
This 2002 GRL paper finds evidence agianst an indirect solar link between cosmic rays and low clouds, but evidence for a direct link via UV:
http://folk.uio.no/jegill/papers/2002GL015646.pdf
5 October 2007 at 7:15 AM
#4 JamesG:
“3. lies like.. “in all seven glacial and interglacial cycles, the reported changes in CO2 and CH4 lagged the temperature changes and could not, therefore, have caused them”. This is actually something that everyone agrees on. Whether it is misleading or not is the issue but it is by no means a lie.”
“The” changes in CO2 and CH4 and “the” temperature changes were not isolated events in time as such language implies. Most of the changes overlapped each other so saying one change could not cause the other (at all is implied) is a lie.
JamesG: “Try and keep up guys!”
JamesG would make a good start by taking his own advice.
5 October 2007 at 7:26 AM
Rod B., OK, where’s the religion. I see evidence, Rod, not faith. Do you have any evidence to put up against the mountain of evidence in favor of climate change (or evolution, for that matter)? In the absence of any such evidence, I would suggest that your scientific views might be better characterized as faith based.
Actually, judging scientific evidence is in many ways easier when there are competing alternatives theories. One can then compare the values of the likelihood functions based on the available evidence. When you are down to a single credible theory, all you can say is that the evidence support the theory or not–the degree of support is difficult to quantify without resorting to Bayesian arguments.
5 October 2007 at 8:01 AM
Re:42
I’m sure you’ve seen this attempt to paint AGW research and conclusions as religious. The argument works both ways.
The “skeptics” share argument tactics with creationists. Take one piece of research which on its surface seems to contradict the whole and use it to damn the whole. Throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Tactic 2 involves papers like the subject of this post. If all else fails, fake it. Like planting human fossils amid dinosaur fossils then claiming coexistence.
The key is to keep ignoring rebuttals, and referring to the same specious arguments. Of course, the skeptics side will claim the same of science, but science does have a mechanism for self-correction and arguments.
5 October 2007 at 8:26 AM
Re 43 and 44. OK, now let me try to get your arguments straight. Yorick, you seem to be saying that the rather alarming warming we’re seeing in the past 25 years or so correlates “pretty well” with some putative change in cosmic rays (which we know isn’t happening by several measures) once we neglect some “mysterious” upward trend, and despite the fact that there is no mechanism beyond hand waving and mumbling about clouds. That about got it?
And Martin, you seem to be saying that we need to posit some increasing solar term prior to 1952 for which we have zero evidence–and also no mechanism–and that this stayed hidden until ~1980. Right?
Guys, rather than doing all these mental cartwheels and torturing this poor theory well past death, wouldn’t it be easier to look at the possibility that a mechanism we know is occurring and can explain not just the quantitative but also the qualitative features of the current warming epoch?
5 October 2007 at 8:34 AM
Svensmark’s and Friis-Christensen’s (S & F-C)”rebuttal” is surely an excellent example that properly done science tends to lead to well-supported conclusions where the systems studied (solar contributions to mid-late 20th century and contemporary warming) are amenable to the methodologies at hand.
The thing that stands out is that S and F-J come to the same conclusion that Dr. Benestad and Lockwood and Frolich (and many others) have estabilished. That solar contributions to the most recent very large warming has a negligible solar contribution. That’s very clear from S & F-C’s figure 2 where they isolate the solar component (they use the Cosmic ray Flux; CRF) to tropospheric temperature, and demonstrate that this fits to a solar contribution that is a mild cooling one (around 0.2 oC) since 1960.
That’s what pretty much all the other research in this area has established; i.e. that the sun has been a minor plaer with respect to mid-late 20th century warming.
It seems to me that S and F-J’s “rebuttal” concerns a misunderstanding or “straw-man”. They say in the first paragraph “These authors [i.e. Lockwood and Frolich] accept that “there is considerable evidence for solar influence on Earth’s pre-industrial climate and the Sun may well have been a factor in post-industrial climate change in the first half of the last century”. But they argue that this historical link between the Sun and climate came to an end about 20 years ago. Here we rebut their argument comprehensively”.
However Lockwood and Frolich (L & F) say no such thing. L & F analyze the various measured solar parameters and show that each of these is in the wrong direction for warming for the last 20 years or so. But they certainly don’t say that “the historical link between the Sun and climate came to an end about 20 years ago”, nor imply any such thing. We all know that the link between the Sun and the climate is an ever-present. It’s just that it’s contribution at any particular time varies. The Sun may dominate the evolution of the climate or it may be insignificant compared to other factors. We know that the latter pertains for the warming of the last 35 years or so.
So S & F-C set out to “rebut” a notion of their own construction. They make a great effort to show that there is a residual solar “signature” in the tropospheric temperature. We might be able to agree with this once they’ve shown us exactly how they’ve manipulated the data to “dissect out” the solar (CRF) component.
But at the end of the day there’s nothing really controversial in S and F-C’s “rebuttal” (apart from some silly statements). Their analysis shows that solar contributions have not been significant to warming since at least 1958, and that the solar cycle might be apparent in the fluctuations in the record once the dominant contributions to tropospheric temperature have been accounted for.
5 October 2007 at 9:31 AM
If you want opinions of persons in other disaplines, you need to explain more of your letter groups. DNSC? CO2 = carbon dioxide, RC board? NOAA = National Oceanic AA? DoD = Department of Defense, CRF,NASL, GHG = greenhouse gas and vapors, CH4 = methane, NAO, AGW
Are we counting solar cosmic rays along with galactic cosmic rays, or have we redefined GCR? I suppose reduced solar wind would allow more GCRs to reach Earth’s surface and Earth’s stratosphere. Neil
[Response: Solar cosmic rays are not strong enough, so everything here is discussing true GCR. (DNSC = Danish National Space Center, NAO = North Atlantic Oscillation, RC=us, CRF=Cosmic Ray Flux, AGW = Anthropogenic global warming). - gavin]
5 October 2007 at 9:51 AM
This seems to become som kind of nordic battle. The finnish aerosol reseachers are now measuring sub-3 nm clusters, showing that neutral clusters outnumber the ion iduced ones. This means basically that the effect of cosmic rays on CCN number concentration is small
5 October 2007 at 10:04 AM
The most convincing explanation is that there are also many factors (such as aerosols) playing a role, adding to inter-annual and inter-decadal variations.
Even some of the moderators on this site remain unconvinced about the role of aerosols (despite the insistence of a few notable posters that aerosols can explain mid 20th century cooling). The effect of aerosols are, as Mike Mann has written, “regionally specific”, i.e. the effects should be measurable at the locations of the source of the aerosols. In the post-war period these locations covered …but all the evidence goes against the notion that GCR are the cause of the present global warming
All ? Really ? Fig 4e in the Lockwood & Frohlich paper shows a consistent decline in the CR flux throughout the 20th century. Consistent, that is, apart from a period in the late 1940s and early 1950s when CRs rose quite sharply. Interesting! Isn’t it Tamino who maintains that the only cooling which occurred took place between 1944-51. If you’re reading this, Tamino, L&F might just have found the reason why.
Any argument that solar parameters peaked in the 1950s or 1980s or whatever is irrelevant. The point is the amount of the Sun’s energy received by the earth was higher in the late 20th century than it was in the early 20th century (which was higher than in the 19th century). To argue that some ‘discrete’ peak in solar activity was reached in 1958 and that the sun’s warming influence, therefore, ceased at that point is a bit like claiming that turning the gas flame lower under a pot of water will stop the water from continuing to warm.
5 October 2007 at 10:26 AM
Chris O’Neill
“Most of the changes overlapped each other so saying one change could not cause the other (at all is implied) is a lie.”
What kind of revisionist nonsense is this? Every climate scientist now agrees that CO2 wasn’t the trigger, but was an amplifier. A position that has been affirmed on this blog several times. Accusing someone of lying when they are just restating a truth that you don’t like to accept is a very nasty trait.
5 October 2007 at 10:40 AM
Re Yorick #44. You suggest that others are commenting on Svensmark’s and Friis-Christensen’s (S&F-C) “rebuttal” without having read it, but your comments suggest that you haven’t digested it properly.
Because S&F-C’s analysis (see their figure 2) indicates that solar contributions (specifically the cosmic ray flux or CRF) hasn’t made a significant contribution to warming at least since 1958 (if anything the solar contribution in their analysis is a slight cooling one).
Now presumably many things can make a contribution to the climate system and why not the CRF? If you dissect away all the other contributions you might well be able to isolate the CRF’s contribution. We don’t know whether S&F-C’s analysis has done this properly since they don’t say how they did it. However we can take their conclusion at face value that the CRF hasn’t contributed a bean to warming since at least 1958. I don’t have a problem with the possibility of a CRF contribution to the Earth’s energy budget..it just seems to be a rather tiny one, as S&F-C themselves show (not, btw, that S&F-C’s correlation of CRF with residual, denuded, tropospheric temperature necesarily has anything to do with the CRF, since the CRF is a very close match to the other variable elements like sunspot numbers, total solar irradiance, etc., and everything that S&F-C claim to see may have nothing to do with the CRF itself).
But what is this “small, mysterious, linear upward trend” that you speak of whose “removal” yields such a good correlation with the residual, denuded tropospheric temperature trend? It’s surely the global warming, isn’t it? The result of the massive enhancement of the atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. It’s neither “small” nor “mysterious”!
You seem to be claiming that “earlier papers” that show that solar contributions were overwhelmed by CO2 were flawed. However S&F-C’s own analysis indicates that the solar contribution to mid-late 20th century warming is “overwhelmed” by CO2….unless one tries to maintain the dubious notion that the warming the world has experienced since the early 70’s is somehow “mysterious”!
5 October 2007 at 10:51 AM
Sorry to go off-topic, but I see no active thread on this topic - the following open-access review papers makes for interesting reading:
Robinson, A.B., N.E. Robinson, and W. Soon (2007) Environmental effects of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide. Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons 12: 79-90 http://www.jpands.org/jpands1203.htm
“A review of the literature concerning consequences of increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide leads to the conclusion that increases during the 20th and early 21st centuries have produced no deleterious effects upon Earth’s weather and climate…”
I guess the authors felt the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons would provide a more receptive audience than would the readers of mainstream science journals?
5 October 2007 at 11:09 AM
Chuckle. I suspect the “Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons” is going to start rising fast in the Google page rank for questions about climate change, if the frequency at which hot links to them continues. They published the Archibald thing discussed in the topic “My model, used for deception” — I wouldn’t link to them, why encourage them? They’re way, way extreme politically.
5 October 2007 at 12:11 PM
John Finn, so please, tell me. By what mechanism do you take a tiny change in GCR flux (which is only 5 particles per square cm per second to begin with) and turn it a rapid global temperature rise? And no mumbling about cloud nucleation sites. There’s no evidence that there is any shortage of cloud nucleation sites in any case.
Second, if there is an increase in GCR flux, they pray, why don’t we see in from satellite measurements, neutron fluxes, etc.? How do you reproduce the increase in night-time temperatures, etc. with a GCR mechanism? I don’t see how this can do the job even if you had a mechanism and a real effect. This just is not credible.
5 October 2007 at 12:12 PM
If solar played a significant part, there’d be a “wow” in the temp record to match the fluctuations due to sun spots.
5 October 2007 at 12:59 PM
Many thanks indeed to Chris (e.g. #23 and later entries) for the additional explanations and details.
Re. John Finn (#53), I am trying to understand the theory/hypothesis in more detail. If we accept GCR activity and global mean temperature records are in general negatively correlated, and were further to accept that this indeed indicates a direct and persistent relationship between GCR and temperatures during the last two or more centuries, a relationship which has (according to the theory) dominated global climate over this period, could you clarify for us the physical mechanism that underlies the relationship, as you understand it? For example, do you attribute the cooling c. 1945-53, as from higher GCR, to increased cloud cover or to something else? If to cloud, at what altitudes and latitudes, and on what basis? If not to cloud, to what else? And is rainfall also affected?
Going further, can you tell us the observational data conforming to the hypothesis, for example regarding height and distribution of cloud (if that is the effect causing the warming/cooling), and also precipitation?
Many thanks,
Nick
5 October 2007 at 1:25 PM
Re John Finn # 53
1. You need to make up your mind about the Earth’s temporal temperature response to solar forcings! Lockwood’s and Frolich’s Be data in Figure 4d (not 4e) shows a bump on a decreasing trend around 1945-1961. Fine, let’s say that the Be proxy for Cosmic Ray Flux (CRF) is tightly coupled the Earth’s temperature response (that little bit of cooling between 1945 and 1950).
Why then does this become uncoupled from the temperature response after 1985 (CRF goes up and temperatures continue to go up)? I suspect that the answer is that there isn’t any correlation between the CRF and temperature at all, but that occasionally two sets of non-correlated data are bound to show some similarities. After all Svensmark and Friis-Christensen see no correlation between the CRF and tropospheric temperature (see their figure 2a).
So I don’t think you can get away with the inconsistency that the solar contribution tightly couples temporally to temperature (that’s what Svensmark and Friis-Christensen assert continuously too - see their Figures 1 and 2b)…….but yet at the same time propose a massive lag in the Earth’s temperature response..
2. Your gas flame and pot of water analogy doesn’t work either. Surely the correct scenario is to consider again the gas flame warming a pot of water. The water settles to an equilibrium temperature resulting from the balance of heat input and heat loss. Now turn down the gas. Does the pot of water continue to warm. I think we can all agree that it actually cools towards a new equilibrium temperature. Is the system (earth’s temperature response to solar variation) at or near equilibrium? You need to come to some consistent conclusion about this. Svensmark and F-C think that the relationship is very tight (see their figures 1 and 2b). Do you agree with them??
5 October 2007 at 1:30 PM
Re # 28 Michael: “These organizations should be viewed with a skeptical eye and hammered from every side with counter-theories.”
I’m not quite sure what you mean by counter-theories, but more valuable, is critical review of the conclusions put forth in their publications - and, in fact, that is precisely what happens through the peer review process (the process used to develop and revise the IPCC reports strikes me as very transparent), and there is plenty of critical commentary on RC ( by the moderators and readers). But, when RC contributors make critical commentary on what you (apparently) consider to be counter-theories, you dismiss this as an “obsession with snuffing deniers.” You can’t have it both ways, I’m afraid.
Re # 57 Hank (and others): Sorry for missing the earlier posts on the Robinson et al article, and for providing a gratuitous hot link. I’m afraid the article first came to my attention only this morning.
Re # 37 Rod B: I don’t think scientists are riled more easily than anyone else when someone questions their religion. But, as Ray pointed out, you seem to be (whether accidentally or intentionally, I won’t speculate) confusing science with religion, a rhetorical trick often used by creationists and intelligent design proponents to attack scientific views about evolution. If you want to take a jab at scientists and their views on scientific matters, surely you can come up with something more plausible, such as Thomas Kuhn’s analysis of scientific revolutions?
5 October 2007 at 1:37 PM
Sorry about trying to be subtle with you guys with my “mysterious” remark.
Ray Ladbury,
The caption to Figure 2.
“The solar cycle and the negative correlation of global mean tropospheric temperatures with galactic cosmic rays are apparent in this ESA-ISAC analysis (ref. [2]). The upper panel shows observations of temperatures (blue) and cosmic rays (red). The lower panel shows the match achieved by removing El Nin~o, the North Atlantic Oscillation, volcanic aerosols, and also a linear trend (0.14 § 0.4 K/Decade).”
I don’t know how he accounts for El Nino and PDO, I ssume that he smooths out 1998, an El Nino year, for one. One thing that is apparent is that Cosmic Rays are not nothing. Pretending that they can be ignored is unhelpful. Presumably the goal is to understand the problem thoroughly and precisely. I guess you can eyeball the graph and confidently assign the difference between prediction from CRF to CO2, I can’t. I guess what you guys mean by properly digesting the paper is to jump to the “correct” conclusions the way you have.
If anybody has a link for me that explains how CO2 warming trendlines have accounted for PDO, I would be interested in seeing it. In this way, I could take more seriously arguments that absent CO2, cooling should have been the result, or that the authors did not properly account for it, anyway.
5 October 2007 at 2:10 PM
Re: #53 (John Finn)
I think you’re referring to figure 4d (not 4e) in Lockwood & Frohlich.
And it doesn’t show “a consistent decline in the CR flux throughout the 20th century.” The authors say, “The cosmic ray records shown by the thick line in figure 4d are the abundance of the cosmogenic 10Be isotope, [10Be], from the Dye-3 Greenland ice core (Beer et al. 1998, 2006); in addition, a composite of cosmic ray observations (by Forbush, Neher and the Climax neutron monitor) have been scaled by regression to the [10Be] data (Rouillard & Lockwood in press) and are shown by the grey line.”
The black line is only a proxy, the grey line is direct measurements, and the direct measurements do not show any secular decrease after 1950, only very slight fluctuations superimposed with cyclic changes (in step with the solar cycle). This is even better illustrated in figure 3d, which shows cosmic ray counts since 1975 with the cyclic signal removed; there’s an overall slight decrease until 1987 followed by an increase. Yet as figure 3f shows, temperature has increased throughout this time span.
5 October 2007 at 2:18 PM
I would not rule GCR in or out as a factor. One of several, if it is.
5 October 2007 at 2:35 PM
Sorry, Yorick, what figure 2 shows is correlation with solar cycle–a lot of things correlate with solar cycle because a lot of things change with solar cycle. Correlation without a physical mechanism isn’t science. A recent post here found a significant positive correlation between warming and the number of Republicans in congress–that doesn’t mean it’s physically real.
5 October 2007 at 2:56 PM
Re #63 Yorick:
Let’s be honest and straightforward about what we can surmise from the data of Svensmark and Friis-Christensen (please be clear if you consider a point of disagreement):
1. taking their data at face value (see figure 2b), the solar contribution to the Earth’s temperature response, as indicated by the CRF, has been negligible for many decades. Since 1960 the solar contribution has been a slight cooling one. Agreed? That’s what Svensmark and Friis-Christensen show in their figure 2b.
2. They show (figure 2b again) that if one removes all sorts of contributions (El Nino’s, linear trends, volcanic aerosols, NAO) that the residual, denuded, tropospheric temperature matches the CRF.
Can we conclude that this means that the CRF leaves an identifiable signature in the tropospheric temperature trend?
There are surely two answers to this:
a. Not really, until Svensmark and Friis-Christensen show us how they dissected out the CRF component.
b. Absolutely not, since the CRF correlates very closely to other solar parameters measurable within the solar cycle. So even if the correlation exists (see a) we can’t say it’s due to the CRF at all. The CRF influence on climate remains an unsupported hypothesis.
3. We can’t say (from the data presented) the Cosmic Rays are “for nothing” or “for something” (see (2))
4. We don’t have the evidence to judge whether the Cosmic Rays can be “ignored” or not (see (2)).
5. Your point about “eyeballing the graph and confidently assigning the difference between predictions from CRF and CO2″ and the link that supports the dominant CO2 contribution also has two answers:
a. Svensmark and Friis-Christensen (see their figure 2b) explicitly demonstrate that the CRF has made zero contribution to the very marked warming of the last 30-35 years.
b. Here’s one of several publications that answers the point that you request (I’ve chosen one you can link directly to):
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2005/2005_Hansen_etal_1.pdf
6. concerning your statement “In this way, I could take more seriously arguments that absent CO2, cooling should have been the result, or that the authors did not properly account for it, anyway.”…
it’s not us that are saying that, absent CO2, cooling should have been the result…it’s Svensmark and Friis-Christensen. Look at their figure 2b. They’ve isolated the CRF from all other influences on the Earth’s temperature response since 1958. They conclude that the match of the CRF with the residual tropospheric temperature (after everything but solar contributions have been reomved) is a slight cooling one…
don’t argue with us…we’re just pointing out what Svensmark and Friis-Christensen are asserting.
5 October 2007 at 2:59 PM
tamino,
The paper speaks to 3f.
Their Fig. 3f (ref. [1]) suggests a remarkable
0.1 K increase between 1998 and 2002, when the curves
terminate. In reality, as shown in the unsmoothed pre-
sentation of monthly data in their own Fig. 1e, global
surface temperatures have been roughly °at since 1998.
The apparent pause in global warming is even plainer and
of longer duration in the tropospheric data, as sampled
in our Fig. 3.
The point of the paper was that 3f was flawed. Why are Svensmark and Friis-Christensen wrong on this point?
BTW, obviously I meant North Atlantic Oscillation, not PDO in comment #63. A preview function wuold be nice.
5 October 2007 at 3:00 PM
Re #65 SteveSadlov
“I would not rule GCR in or out as a factor. One of several, if it is.”
Absolutely. Of course we’d like to know whether it’s contribution is small, medium, large or tiny. According to Svensmark and Friis-Christensen, the most vocal advocates of its influence, the CRF has made a negligible contribution to the Earth’s temperature response since 1958 (in fact it’s a mild cooling one)….
…as they show in their Figure 2b.
5 October 2007 at 3:04 PM
Correlation without a physical mechanism isn’t science.
Ignoring correlations because you don’t understand them and they are inconvenient to your position is not science either. A mechanism has been proposed. It has been experimentally tested and enough was found to warrent further investigation.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/10/061023193345.htm
Talk about deniers!
5 October 2007 at 3:35 PM
Re #70 Yorick:
1. The correlation presented by Svensmark and Friis-Christensen in their figure 2b is:
a. so far unassessable since we have no idea how S and F-C “teased” out the CRF (there’s no methodology whatsoever in their website report).
b. unattributable to the CRF, since all they’ve done is use CRF as a proxy for the solar cycle. The whole putative “correlation” might be due to solar irradiance or sunspot numbers or other solar parameters that correlate strongly with the CRF.
2. A mechanism for the effects of the CRF has indeed been proposed (nucleation of cloud formation). It has been tested under laboratory conditions. The jury is out as to whether this is significant in the real world. The fact remains that we don’t know whether the correlation is real (1a) or has anything at all to do with the CRF (1b).
And we still cannot escape the fact that Svensmark and Friis-Christensen demonstrate in their own analysis that the very marked warming of the last 35 years has (according to Svensmark and Friis-Christensen) had no contribution from solar variation at least as indicated by the CRF (see their figure 2b).
5 October 2007 at 4:03 PM
Re #68 Yorick:
you say “The point of the paper was that 3f was flawed. Why are Svensmark and Friis-Christensen wrong on this point?”
The answer is, of course, yes, S&C-F are wrong on this point. It’s very easy to show how Svensmark and Friss-Christensen are trying to pull the wool over your eyes, if you consider the following points in relation to the actual temperature anomaly data collated by NASA GISS. Click the folowing for this:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2005/2005cal_fig1.gif
Lockwood and Frolich show two different things in their figure 3f and figure 1 e. In figure 3f, the temperature anomaly data are shown as a running mean (as the legend to figure 3 indicates). This is equivalent to the red line in the NASA GISS data I’ve linked you to.
In figure 1e Lockwood and Frolich show the raw temperature data (black dotted line and dots in the NASA GISS data in my link).
Do you see how Svensmark and Friis-Christensen are trying to fool us now?
if you can’t see this then do ask for clarification. The clue is that one cannot take the difference between single years (e.g. 1998 and 2002), and make a conclusion from this. Especially so since the temperature anomaly of 1998 was lifted by around 0.2 oC above the trend as a result of the strongest El Nino of the last century.
Svensmark and Friis-Christensen are being very naughty here. They’re trying to sell a falsehood.
5 October 2007 at 4:52 PM
Re: #68 (Yorick)
The statement from S&F-C:
is evidence that they’re not just mistaken, they’re being disingenuous.
They make this claim as though it’s obvious just from looking at the graph. I prefer quantitative analysis: linear regression indicates a trend from 1998 to the present day of 1.9 deg.C/century. That’s not zero or negative, even within its 95% confidence limits, so statistically we reject their hypothesis that surface temperature has been “roughly flat”; it’s “flatly” contradicted by the data. And yes, that’s using the more stringest test assuming the random fluctuations are red rather than white noise.
This result is a remarkable testament to the reality of warming, since the chosen time interval starts with one of the strongest el Nino events ever observed! S&F-C know this; they went to all the trouble to remove el Nino in other analyses. But they’re perfectly willing to leave it in place in order to give the impression of “roughly flat” by appealing to the worst-case cherry-picking starting point: 1998.
The truly laughable part is that even choosing the “optimal cherry-picking” start year, they’re still demonstrably wrong.
5 October 2007 at 5:18 PM
Yorick, until you have a physical mechanism, you don’t even have anything worth denying. Without a physical mechanism, you don’t know whether you are looking at causation, or merely at two parameters that are both correlated to a third.
Now, perhaps you would care to suggest how a fraction of a particle per square cm per second–even if it were there, which it isn’t–could cause the warming we’ve seen. And if you are going to suggest that the cause is cloud nucleation sites, perhaps you’d care to show that such a tiny flux would make a significant difference.
5 October 2007 at 5:54 PM
Yorick, On the one hand, you have an explanation of the current warming epoch based on a well established mechanism (greenhouse forcing) driven by a change we know to be occurring (anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions increasing CO2 by 35-40%). It explains the magnitude of the warming very well–particularly when feedbacks (e.g. H2O) and competing effects (e.g. aerosols) are taken into account. It even explains the qualitative aspects–when and where warming are most pronounced pretty well. On the other hand, you have a conjecture (it is not a theory) based on an exotic mechanism that hasn’t been worked out quite and the underlying cause doesn’t even look to be present. Moreover, it can’t explain the qualitative character of the warming–let alone the amount of warming (again, no mechanism to model). Now I ask you, why would anyone of a scientific bent adopt the latter theory over the former?
5 October 2007 at 9:37 PM
“…flat since 1998’ are dishonest (see figure above ).”
Worse than flat, actually. Linear regression of the HADCRUv3 dataset between Jan 2002 and Dec.2006 is trending negative, not by much mind you, but still the heretics Svensmark and Fris-C are pretty much correct on that point.
Regards, BRK
[Response: You have natural variations of course, which makes it nonsensical to talk about trend for a 4-year interval. -rasmus]
5 October 2007 at 9:58 PM
> between Jan 2002 and Dec.2006
Brian:
“… 5 year trends from surface temperature are not very significant and are a bad measure of anything. As everyone should know. But it seems that some people don’t. So in tedious detail……”
http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2007/05/the_significance_of_5_year_tre.php
Cautionary post. If you don’t understand, ask.
5 October 2007 at 10:01 PM
Marie, et al: I appreciate the help. But I think I have a handle on the effect a variable GCR has on the atmosphere. I was asking where/how GCRs originate, especially how/why GCR might vary over periods of decades. Supernovas or novas come to mind (for the variances), but coming from the “galatic average” it’s hard to see how we would experience a noticeable, let alone significant, change over a few years. Though maybe… I don’t know. Why I’m asking.
et al, same song, fourth verse: There is in fact a body of evidence that points to intelligent design; evolution has some serious unexplained holes in its theory. Most of the evidence sides with evolution. Going ballistic when someone says a scientific theory is certifiably less than perfect (evolution, e.g.) is characteristic of religious zeal, not scientific discourse. Even if the fervor is coming from scientists. Also, stating a scientific postulate or theory based on limited evidence is not (necessarily) a religious stance, even if the postulator “believes” it to be true.
5 October 2007 at 10:52 PM
There is data that supports the assertion that a significant portion of the 20th century global warming was due to solar changes. (Note the sun can directly effect global cloud cover via electroscavenging in addition to modulation of GCR.)
Any way, here is a paper that provides data to support the assertion that there is strong correlation of the solar parameter Ak (which is a measure of the solar magnetic field strength and wind speed. The solar mechanism to that is hypothesized to module cloud cover, is more complicated than simply number of sunspots.) and planetary temperature, in the 20th century. There are also papers that show planetary cloud cover inversely tracks the 20th century temperature changes. Such as Enric Palle’s paper that measures the earthshine off of the moon to determine change in planetary albedo.
[Response: I have not been able to find any convincing documentation on any trend in the low cloudiness (including in the IPCC AR4). -rasmus]
Paper by Georgieva, Bianchi, & Kirov “Once again about global warming and solar activity”
http://sait.oat.ts.astro.it/MSAIt760405/PDF/2005MmSAI..76..969G.pdf
From the above paper: “It has been noted that in the last century the correlation between sunspot number and geomagnetic activity has been steadily decreasing from - 0.76 in the period 1868-1890 to 0.35 in the period 1960-1982, … According to Echer et al (2004), the probable cause seems to be related to the double peak structure of geomagnetic activity. The second peak, related to high speed solar wind from coronal holes (my comment: For example coronal hole 254 that produced the Dec 16, 2006 peak in solar wind, during a sun spot minimum, see attached link to Solar Observation Data), seems to have increased relative to the first one, related to sunspots (CMEs) but, as already mentioned, this type of solar activity is not accounted for by sunspot number. In figure 6 long term varations in global temperature are compared to the long-term variations in geomagnetic activity as expressed by the ak-index (Nevanlinna and Kataga 2003). The correlation between the two quantities is 0.85 with p
5 October 2007 at 11:10 PM
Hmmm, Brian, someone with the same name here also was relying on short time span numbers to claim the world is cooling. Any relation?
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070503.wclimate03/CommentStory/ClimateChange#comment890701
6 October 2007 at 2:02 AM
#73 Tamino, its more than just mathematical myopia, the planet has warmed significantly since 1998,
enough to melt millions of cubic meters of glacial and sea ice, enough to turn the fall into summer, with historical maximum temperature records being smashed everywhere. Cake on the contarian icing : Northern Hemisphere temperature anomally standing from January till August: 1998: +.89 C ; 2005 +.99 C; 2007 =1.09 C . Flat warming hey?
6 October 2007 at 2:22 AM
Small correction
I’ve calculated
January to August for 1998 (not yearly average) +0.95 C
January to August for 2005 (not yearly average) +0.96 C
January to August for 2007 Monthly anomaly ave. +1.09 C
2007 will likely exceed +1.09 at year end …..
6 October 2007 at 3:53 AM
I agree with Pete .. ‘Let us hope that the integrity of science is not itself compromised by some that claim to practise it’
best regards to everyone
6 October 2007 at 6:57 AM
Rod B., The GCR flux is indeed generated mainly by supernovae. Since the sources are scattered far and wide in space and time and are by any measure infrequent in any particular time and place, they can be looked on as Poisson processes, and the mean flux doesn’t vary much. We’ve been using essentially the same GCR model to predict upset rates for microelectronics since the 1980s. GCR fluxes do modulate with the Solar Cycle–peaking in Solar Min and dipping at Solar Max.
Now, as to your other comment. It is not a religious attitude to be irritated when someone distorts the truth repeatedly. Evolution has handled every problem thrown at it–including the very difficult one of social insects. To claim that the theory “has problem” is to distort the truth. Likewise the hypothesis of anthropogenic causation of the current warming epoch has stood up to all of the evidence so far. As evidence I cite the fact the in both cases, the deniers keep bringing up the same discredited ideas to attack the theories. There has been no new attack in at least 5 years. Now, unless you are using the term “religion” in a Gandhian sense as a devotion to truth, I would suggest that you retire that tired, old attack about the “religion” of science. It only shows you don’t understand science.
6 October 2007 at 7:05 AM
William Astley, showing a correlation between Ak and climate demonstrates nothing, as Ak varies with solar cycle and many, many other parameters do as well. As climate skeptics love to point out: correlation is not causation. Without a physical model that demonstrates how causation occurs, you are not doing science.
Now I am curious. We have a model that works. It is physically reasonable. It’s mechanism is known and known to be increasing. And the model has been incredibly successful. Why do folks like you insiste on going off into the weeds looking for an effect that may or may not be there, that has no known physical mechanism and that wouldn’t correlate all that well to the evidence in any case.
6 October 2007 at 8:17 AM
Chris O’Neill: “Most of the changes overlapped each other so saying one change could not cause the other (at all is implied) is a lie.”
JamesG: “Every climate scientist now agrees that CO2 wasn’t the trigger,”
Wow, that was quick. “Cause” to “trigger” in one easy switch. Unfortunately, sleight-of-keyboard doesn’t work as well as sleight-of-hand. The relevant words were “the reported changes in CO2 and CH4″, “the temperature changes” and “caused”. The vast majority of the temperature changes occurred after the CO2 and CH4 started to change so the CO2 and CH4 changes could have caused some of the temperature change. So it is a lie to use the word “caused” in statements like “the reported changes in CO2 and CH4″ “could not, therefore, have caused” “the temperature changes”.
Switching words in an attempt to hide a switch of meaning is a very nasty trait.
6 October 2007 at 10:14 AM
Re #78 Rod B
You’ve gone wildly off topic in your generalised anti-science comments, but having brought up the subject could you please point to “the body of evidence that points to intelligent design”, and to the “serious unexplained holes” in the theory of evolution. After all these points either exist or they don’t…so which are they??
Surely in discussion of science subjects we point specifically to the issues, rather than making vague generalisations.
For example, getting back to the specific issue of this thread, and looking at the website report under discussion written by Svensmark and Friis-Christensen, would you say that this report provides any evidence for a contribution of CRF to the Earth’s “climate”? And would you say that the website report of Svensmark and Friis-Christensen supports a solar contribution to the very marked warming since the early 70’s that is large, small, insignificant or negative?
We can answer these questions categorically in the context of Svensmark’s and Friis-Christensen’s without beating around the bush and generalising vaguely. Likewise with the evolution generalisations.
Let’s try to be specific!
6 October 2007 at 10:14 AM
It would appear that the GHG theory depends on the simultaneous radiative and thermal equilibrium between a solid (earth) and a gas (CO2). Constraining both equilibria and solving the radiation equation does indeed provide a large spontaneous emission.
The LTE treatment in Goody and Yung explicitly argues that thermal equilibrium is achieved because collisional relaxation is much faster than spontaneous emission. This argument also serves to demonstrate that the gas is not in radiative equilibrium with the solid. If it were, the collisional relaxation would be unnecessary, as both collision and radiation would be driving towards the same relative population of states.
Goody and Yung go on to constrain both equilibria, solve the equation, and assign a Planck source function to emission from the gas.
Given the obvious failure of greenhouse “physics”, it is certainly appropriate to propose additional possibilities.
6 October 2007 at 10:28 AM
Ray, thanks. It still seems difficult that the galactic CR variance would be noticeable to affect atmospheric temperatures (via cloud formation and such) one iota. But I don’t know. Also it would seem that a decreasing GCR, which causes the temperature increase (is that right??), would almost be nonexistent. I can understand novas generating more GCR, but I can’t envision what can cause a decrease??!!? (I know I’m asking contrary to my skeptical leanings, but science is science.)
Speaking of which, the irritation of being challenged does not reflect religiosity as you say. It’s the degree of foaming of the mouth that is the clue. Anytime I merely hint at maybe a few cracks in the science I can expect a slew of immediate vitriolic responses sometimes suggesting I should crawl under the porch and visit my Mother.
Evolution hasn’t fully explained the “explosion” periods, specie to specie evolution, or why 99+% of evolutionary changes are not for the worse, as probability would have it. (Hey! How ’bout an invisible hand of an intelligent designer? Just a thought.)
6 October 2007 at 12:26 PM
Harmon (#87) wrote:
Not really, there are non-Local Thermodynamic Equilibria regions, for example for carbon dioxide as low as 30 km at 15 μm. Still part of the greenhouse effect. If some of the radiation is downwelling after reemission, then you will have a greenhouse effect. Incidentally, life pretty much depends upon the greenhouse effect. Without it the average temperature of the earth would be about 30 degrees Celsius cooler, well below freezing.
Harmon (#87) wrote:
At this point it would appear that you may not be all that familiar with the terms that you are throwing about.
Harmon (#87) wrote:
At this point you would appear to have little understanding of the paper which you are refering to - or for that matter what LTE refers to. In any case, you will have a local thermodynamic equilibria when the rate of collision is about a million times higher (or more) than the rate of emission. This is what establishes an equilibria between the Maxwellian temperature associated with translational energy and the Planckian temperature of radiation.
But now lets zero-in on your central error.
When a molecule loses its energy due to collisional relaxation, where does that energy go? To other molecules - which like the original one also have the opportunity to emit radiation. And with a Maxwellian distribution of translational kinetic energy, some molecules will always have enough energy to emit radiation. Likewise, since reemission is the decay of a quantum state of higher energy to one of lower energy, it is essentially a random process in which the molecule is “unaware” of how long it has been in a given state, and thus it follows a simple exponential law of decay. As long as there is a certain percentage of molecules in a state where they have sufficient energy to emit radiation in a given part of the spectra, a certain percentage of molecules will emit radiation at a given rate.
Harmon (#87) wrote:
Gobbledigook.
Collisional relaxation happens. And as long as it happens at a much higher rate than that of emission, a local thermodynamic equilibria will be established. But the greenhouse effect itself does not require a local thermodynamic equilibria. All it requires is that some reemission take place, and that some of that reemission be downwelling (towards the ground) as well as upwelling.
The direction of reemission is essentially the result of a random process. Thus some of the radiation will be go down, reducing the rate at which energy is lost from the climate system. The climate system must heat up enough to compensate for the reduction in the percentage of radiation which escapes. It will heat up until the energy leaving the climate system equals the amount of energy entering the system. This follows from the conservation of energy.
Harmon (#87) wrote:
Now you are just being inconsistent. Are you arguing that Goody and Yung’s results where molecules lose energy far more often due to collision is what prevents the greenhouse effect and thus that the atmosphere is incapable of the reemission of the thermal radiation which it absorbs (what is suggested in the earliest part of your post), or are you arguing that there is some fatal flaw in Goody and Yung’s approach and thus that the greenhouse effect can’t take place?
Harmon (#87) wrote:
Greenhouse physics?
No - its just physics. Quantum mechanics and radiation transfer theory at this point.
“Additional possibilities” for what?
For whatever has been causing the trend towards higher temperatures in the twentieth century?
Sure, go ahead and look for them. Thats part of what science does - it looks for alternate explanations of the same evidence. But at some point, it arrives at certain theories which, at least as a very good approximation, are considered well established. They constitute a form of knowledge. Newton’s gravitational theory would be a good example. General relativity came along, but one key requirement of the theory is its consistency with Newton’s gravitational theory where Newton’s theory is known to perform quite well. This is what is known as the correspondence principle. Same thing applies between special relativity and classical physics, and between quantum mechanics and classical physics. The basic physics behind the greenhouse effect is - roughly in that category - well established knowledge.
Whether or not greater levels of greenhouse gas is causing the current trends? Well, that’s not basic or fundamental physical principles, but it is pretty well established, too. However, I doubt that any “scientist” who is proposing cosmic rays as the cause of the trend towards higher temperatures is actually denying the physics behind the greenhouse effect. (Well, maybe one or two - but collisional energy can also cause porcelain to break.) As for the problems with the cosmic rays causing the current trend - detailed above.
And as for the reemission of radiation by the atmosphere, well observed.
See comment #555 to post Part II: What Angstrom didn’t know. There are links to images from satellites at various levels in the atmosphere — and there are even movies!
Enjoy.
6 October 2007 at 12:29 PM
Re 87 Harmon: “Given the obvious failure of greenhouse “physics”, it is certainly appropriate to propose additional possibilities.”
Not just propose them, but describe, demonstrate, and provide evidence as to how they can generate the observed effects. Until S & F-C do it’s not even a theory.
I’ll let others more learned than I address your “failure” of greenhouse physics remark.
6 October 2007 at 12:43 PM
Re #78: [There is in fact a body of evidence that points to intelligent design; evolution has some serious unexplained holes in its theory.]
Perhaps that’s a good parallel to the GCR case. Suppose for the sake of argument that evolution or standard AGW theory do have some holes. That doesn’t translate to support for competing conjectures, or fill in their holes. Where’d the intelligent designer come from? How are GCRs supposed to create their effects on climate? All you’re doing is replacing a working but possibly incomplete theory with something you find more emotionally satisfying.
6 October 2007 at 1:19 PM
Jim,
The discrepancy has much to do with the failure to use the factor “epsilon” when applying Stefan’s Law. The right hand side of the equation in Stefan’s Law should include a dimensionless, generally empirical, factor, epsilon, which ranges from 0 to 1, and describes how closely a substance imitates a theoretical blackbody.
For a blackbody, epsilon is equal to 1, and you have the sigma T^4 equation everyone knows and loves.
Real substances always have an epsilon value less than 1. For a mixture of lanthanide oxides, epsilon is pretty close to 1. For a low pressure, low T, sample of He gas (if you even really want to apply the model this far from a blackbody), epsilon is pretty close to 0.
Take two substances with different epsilon values (assuming you’re happy applying Stefan’s Law to CO2 at STP in the first place), earth and CO2.
Now match the excitance, immediately it is seen that if excitances are equal, and epsilon values are not, then temperatures are also not equal. Conversely, you can match the temperatures, something closer to atmosphere at the same T as ground. It falls out immediately that since the epsilon values are different, so is the radiation emitted from each. They are not in radiative equilibrim, when they are in thermal equilibrium, at STP.
If you go to very high T, it is possible to make the Boltzmann distribution match radiative equilibrium with the solid. THis will occur when the temperature is high enough that the two states are very close to each other in population. At STP, the states have very different populations, which is why you see a net absorption.
At low pressure, when not in thermal equilibrium (collisional), the system will move closer to the radiative equilibrium position (more spontaneous emission).
At conditions found in the troposhere, the radiation is simply not in equilibrium, while the collisions are in equilibrium. You should expect a large absorption, which is seen. You should expect negligible emission, which is generally the starting point for training an IR gas phase spectroscopist.
Remember that energy is conserved. If the atmosphere is heated by absorption of IR photons, then it necessarily emits less energy than it absorbed.
If you want to satisfy conditions of both thermal and radiative equilibrium simultaneously at STP, try comparing a solid with another solid, then it works. You need to at least get the epsilon values close to each other.
6 October 2007 at 1:25 PM
> This argument also serves to demonstrate …
There’s your logic problem. Arguments neither serve nor demonstrate.
Can you show your work, Harmon, if you did the math yourself, or point to your source if you’re relying on someone else’s opinion about what’s in the source you refer to?
A quote and a page reference, if you’re referring to this:
http://www.amazon.com/Atmospheric-Radiation-Theoretical-R-Goody/dp/0195102916
6 October 2007 at 1:31 PM
Harmon (87) — Visit the AIP Discovery of Global Warming site, linked in the Science section of the sidebar. In particular, I recommend reading the page entitled Carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas.
6 October 2007 at 1:46 PM
Harmon, There is no assumption of equilibrium. Rather, you have a system (Earth +atmosphere) that starts out in equilibrium, but is perturbed by a change to one of its components. Since the only way it gets rid of energy is via radiation, it must heat up to restore equilibrium. Maybe you should look into the physics before you call it a failure.