Junk Science Award For The Evening

Over the deade the authors examined (2000 to 2010), the average level of the gas (CO2) in the atmosphere went up by 22 parts-per-million. And the time series shows a steadily rising trend in its impact, layered on top of the seasonal changes. By the end of that period, the gas was retaining an extra 0.2 Watts for every square meter of the Earth’s surface compared to the start.

Still, it seems worth noting that the continued increase in greenhouse energy retention measured during this time coincides with a period where the Earth’s surface temperatures did not change dramatically. All that energy must have been going somewhere.

Newsflash: the greenhouse effect really exists | Ars Technica

The authors started in the 2000 La Nina, and ended at the 2010 El Nino – when troposphere temperatures were half a degree warmer. Then they noticed that there was slightly more downwelling longwave radiation, which they blamed on increased absorption from the increase in CO2.

ScreenHunter_7435 Feb. 26 00.15

The increase in DLWR was due to the warmer troposphere during the El Nino. Warmer air emits more longwave radiation. The higher concentration of CO2 will also emit more DLWR radiation, but that is not due to increased absorption. I don’t know how scientists can get any more clueless than that.

About Tony Heller

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13 Responses to Junk Science Award For The Evening

  1. BillyNz says:

    I think co2 levels were increased due to the heavy breathing of Pachauri. That would show perfect correlation.

  2. Jim M. says:

    The researchers isolated the signature of CO2 by using counterfactual spectra. Once this was done, the increase in spectral forcing was observed to be isolated to the spectral regions that correlate to CO2 absorption bands.

    In other words, they fully ruled out temperature or water vapour as being a contributor to the increase in spectral forcing within the CO2 bands. Had they not done so, I can’t imagine their paper would have even been considered for publication.

    Did you read the paper?

  3. AndyG55 says:

    Notice that the so-called “forcing” does not match the RSS/UAH temperatures values in any way shape or form..

    Natural variation FAR, FAR out-weighs ANY pseudo-warming effect of CO2.

  4. Tel says:

    Hmmmm,

    The spectrum it sees looks very much like the one we’d calculated it should see, with a few exceptions caused by heating of the instrument itself. But the precise details vary based on the factors noted above, like the weather and seasons. Using a decade-long time series, the authors are able to get all these other factors to effectively cancel out; what emerges shows “the unmistakable spectral fingerprint of CO2.”

    So they never really detected it, but after adjustments they were allowed to keep their jobs.

  5. rah says:

    Oh, don’t worry, it’s just “confirmation bias”. sarc

  6. Eliza says:

    Another WUWT Furffy posting me thinks

  7. jhubermn says:

    Steve, your article certainly does qualify as junk science for the evening. Did you read the paper by Feldman et al.? The authors were able to pick out those wavelength bands specific to CO2. The graph of their measurements of downward, CO2-specific radiation correlates precisely with steadily rising CO2 (with annual variations due to photosynthesis and respiration in the northern hemisphere) over the measurement interval (2000 to 2010). The graph looks _nothing_ like the graph of tropospheric temperatures shown in your article. And I might add that, because CO2 is a well-mixed atmospheric gas, the measurements made by the authors at their two widely-separated American study locations would be expected to be very similar to measurements made anywhere else in the world.

    • gator69 says:

      The exact values discussed in the paper are from model calculations against the measurements, rather than direct observations at each of the two sites.

      More modeled mayhem. I have seen enough of their failed models and fraudulent adjustments to know that the models cannot be trusted.

      Going on 19 years with no warming, even Phil Jones admitted this would be enough to invalidate the models. Fantasize on your own dime.

    • Gail Combs says:

      The authors are TOO LATE their finding have already been trashed.

      I went to a guest lecture for physics grad students this fall that used observational data to show why CO2 will not be responsible for anymore warming beyond a microscopic amount.

      I do not have to even look at the study to easily tear it apart.

      #1. The active wavelengths for water vapor and CO2 mostly overlap. I do not know if you have enough physics to understand, but the wavelength that is absorbed by CO2 can not be the same as the wavelength emitted. There is a shift. SEE: The Pound–Rebka experiment This is part of the confounding. The main CO2 bands are saturated only the ‘wings’ can absorb The critical point of the physics lecture I went to is neither Lorentzian nor Voigt line shapes are correct in the far wings and these are the shapes used in the models. Cross sections depend on far-wing lineshape at band edges and this is what supposedly drives further warming.

      http://www.globalwarmingart.com/images/7/7c/Atmospheric_Transmission.png

      #2. Albedo, a measure of water, clouds and ice increased during the time frame of that study.
      https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2007/10/earth_albedo_bbso.png

      #3. CO2 radiates ABOVE the tropopause. (the black line)
      http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/global_warming/images/stratospheric_cooling.jpg

      This is very important because if there are clouds especially thunderheads no radiation is seen. It is all absorbed by water. Don’t forget that something like 99% of IR is absorbed by water vapor in the troposphere… It doesn’t actually get back to the surface… (There is that line shift again.)

      Experimental data shows no CO2 radiation at the surface and barely any CO2 radiation at 11 KM. CO2 is actually radiating in the stratosphere ~ 47 KM above the surface. This is in agreement with what Dr Robert Brown, a physicist at Duke University said. He explains why CO2 emits in the STRATOSPHERE.

      The question is, “What is the absorption cross-section for a 15 micron photon”. That’s the effective surface area intercepted by each CO_2 molecule. It is large enough that the mean free path of LWIR photons in the pressure-broadened absorption bands of CO_2 in the lower atmosphere is order of a meter. That means that LWIR photons — whatever their “size” — with frequencies in the band go no more than a meter or few before they are absorbed by a CO_2 molecule.

      The lifetime of the excited state(s) is much longer than the mean free time between molecular collisions between the CO_2 molecule and the (usually nitrogen or oxygen or argon) other molecules in the surrounding gas. That means that the radiative energy absorbed by the molecule is almost never resonantly re-emitted, it is transferred to the surrounding gas, warming not just the CO_2 but the oxygen, nitrogen, water vapor, argon as well as the other CO_2 molecules around. Periodically CO_2 is thermally excited in-band by just such a collision and radiates energy away, but it is not like an elastic scattering process such as occurs in specular reflection within clouds. In band/thermal radiative energy gradually diffuses upwards, with the mean free path of the photons increasing the higher one goes, until it starts to equal the remaining depth of the atmosphere and photons emitted “up” have a good chance of escaping, cooling the molecules (on average) that emit them. It takes order of 100s of absorptions and emissions for radiation to diffuse upward to escape, and there is an almost equal probability that radiation will diffuse downward (especially from the lower levels) where we observe it as back-radiation/greenhouse radiative forcing of the surface.
      Because of pressure broadening, molecules close to the ground emit photons “in the wings” at frequencies that less broadened molecules at higher altitudes/lower pressures are nearly transparent to. That means that there is a steady CO_2-mediated “leakage” even from lower altitudes directly to space from the edges of the monotonically decreasing-with-height absorptive bandwidth. It also means that there is a MAJOR change in atmospheric absorptivity/emissivity with simple high and low pressure centers as they move around, as well as a modulation of the size of the emission-wing “hole”.

      And I didn’t even get into the silly “CO2 is uniform” propaganda since I just posted the rebutal to that already this week.

  8. monosodiumg says:

    If 0.2W/m^2 is a big deal for climate change then global energy output should also be a big deal.
    In 2012 primary energy production was 5273Mtoe (http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/keyworld2014.pdf), which works out to 6.132E+10MWh (conversion factor from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonne_of_oil_equivalent)
    The earth’s surface is 510072000 km^2 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth).
    That works out to 0.0137W/m^2 (please check that).
    I can’t find any mention of global climate models including anthropic heat output. Is it possible that including anthropic heat output would significantly affect climate models? If so then some of the warming attributed to GHGs may be actually be due to the heat we dump.
    Is that worth looking into?
    N.B.:
    – The number includes renewables but they account for just a few % .
    – Perhaps quite a lot of that heat is being dumped into the ocean via water cooling of power stations.
    – Some of that energy is buried in our rubbish or locked up in materials,
    – The heat we dump into the atmosphere goes into the lower atmosphere, which may make it more significant for surface temp measurements.

    • monosodiumg says:

      oops… I picked the OECD total instead of the world total for primary energy. The world total is 13371 Mtoe so the forcing works out to 0.0347W/m^2.

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