James Hansen being the guy that said there was no evidence of global warming in 1999, 11 years after his organization began studying the possibility of AGW that he personally professed belief in prior.

 

Political hack with a pre-existing environmentalist agenda running climate research?  What could go wrong...

 

Then again, he might just be that stupid.  He is after all the moron that thinks Venus is hot because the CO2 traps all that infrared from the Sun it never gets in the first place...

 

Edit:  Hey, there we go!

 

Sorry, no.  He wasn't smart.  He completely overlooked that whole air movement thingy.  Or that water blocks damn near everything in the first place.  He also completely overlooked that half the solar energy we receive in the first place is infrared.  CO2 isn't a one way mirror.

 

One more time.  CO2 is an insignificant little blip in the greenhouse effect.  It doesn't even have the advantage of water, which forms a precipitate and rains back down, returning some of the heat it transported up.

Wow.  Hansen.  Well, that changes everything.

Venus has an albedo of .9.  That's a 90% reduction.  It gets about a third heat from the Sun than Earth does, despite it's relative proximity.  It glows like a star because damn near all of it reflects back out.  So yes, some light does reach the surface.  Some dogs are born with three legs.  The photos also showed volcanic rock covered in soot for a surface.

 

Yes, CO2 really does block infrared from the Sun.  One of the primary reasons I knew the theory was bunk early on.  Half of the energy output is infrared.  When our lump of rock converts a percentage of the rest into infrared and bounces it around in the atmosphere, any increases in how long it bounces around are eclipsed by greater decrease in how far the stuff from outside bounces around before getting out.  There is both more infrared coming in than leaving the surface, and the mechanics of air movement when heated to dictate this fact.

 

 

As it falls, it absorbs heat from the air and brings it back to the surface.  It is very, very cold when it forms, in comparison to the temperature it achieves by the time it hits ground.

 

50%.  Visible light is 40%, UV is 10%.  More infrared makes it to ground than visible light.  The ratios are 53/44/3% at the surface.  The heat you feel on your skin is mostly from the infrared.  People have a high albedo, white people feel almost no heat from the visible spectrum.

 

Your lack of knowledge in basic properties of the elements is staggering.  How do you read enough to know the properties of rain formation without knowing that a drop of water, as it falls through increasingly warmer air, will unavoidably absorb some of that heat on the way down?

 

I honestly don't understand how anyone can be wrong all the time.

 

You can test this easily with artificial lighting.  Put several thousand candles worth of LED lighting in a room and see how hot your skin feels.  The more efficient the light source, the less waste there is in infrared.  Under LED lighting, you'll go blind before you feel anywhere near as hot as in direct sunlight.

 

 

They also block the infrared from the Sun, knocking out over half the energy being transmitted to ground.  The drops do indeed release heat as they're formed.  They do not however continue doing so as they fall through warmer air.  Heat transfers from hot to cold, not from cold to hot.  The odd warm rain when you get dumped on while the surface air is still hot makes this quite obvious.  Temperature drops rapidly with elevation.  No matter how much energy a rain drop might be releasing when it forms, that was energy it already moved up through the atmosphere.  On the way back down it's moving energy lower in the atmosphere.

 

 

As stated, Stomata are largely unstudied in this area.  They're assuming a CO2 driver where they increased the overall viability of plants.  Higher moisture, fertility and temperature may also have an affect.  Local CO2 levels also vary by a good 40 points over the year in places, so trying to claim a global average by counting stomata, which would be a summer phenomenon, is highly unreliable.  There are numerous potential holes in the method.

 

I'd wait a while for people to test that out more.  The stomata lining up with modern air sampling may just be coincidence.  Plants may only change so fast, and perhaps they would continue increasing the counts well beyond their predicted outcome but just haven't been able to outpace the CO2 increases.

You are talking about clouds that reflect sunlight I suppose.

You should realize that clouds can exist because of heat? There has to be heat and warmth before a cloud can even exist.

So who cares that a cloud blocks energy, it's already warm and on top of that, the clouds help us keep warm.

 http://www.windows2universe.org/earth/Atmosphere/earth_atmosph_radiation_budget.html

"Most of the solar radiation that reaches the Earth or its lower atmosphere, where albedo from  clouds and features on the ground come into play, is thus in the form of visible light."

So just forget about the IR ok...

 

Anyway I'm getting really really really tired of discussing this stuff. It's so fucking obvious, there's not even a need to doubt anything. The only thing you can discuss really, is the rate of warming and the details of how and when, but imo that's so nitpicky ... when the shit hits the fan, who will care about how and when? It's the end result that counts, the in-between is meaningless.

You can view the endresult and the required conditions from the paleo-records (with some uncertainty of course).

The end-result can also be inferred from atmospheric/climate models (with some uncertainty of course).

You don't need much else... the rest is just boring details.

And the conditions are: high CO2 content, high temperatures, dead zones in the oceans, forests at the poles. Something like that. To me that's a big clue what we're headed for.

The reason for this situations isn't relevant... long periods of volcanism, an asteroid impact with volcanism, widespread coal fires, or us humans... the earth doesn't care where it comes from, the earth doesn't care about the little fuzzy rabbits that are playing in the fresh green grass, it only responds to a dramatic change in the atmosphere without feeling or remorse and changes everything.

 

We measure sunlight.  We do this out in space before it hits our atmosphere, we do it at the ground.  It's a piece of cake, consumer tech could do it.  Everything you're saying about sunlight is all wrong.  Over half of the energy that reaches the surface is infrared, and infrared creates nearly all of the heat you'd feel if you're a pasty white guy sunbathing naked.

 

Infrared is absorbed quite efficiently by the human body, if it weren't we'd die.  Our bodies generate infrared in order to power cell activity.  If it just bounced off our skin, we'd cook.  If it just passed through, human popsicle anyone?  We absorb light based on our melanoma content, and even the darkest African isn't actually black.  We are no where near 100% absorption on the visible spectrum.

 

The... idiocy... with Mauna Loa, Antarctica, etcetera.

 

Antarctica is on the southern pole, and never gets above freezing.  There are no trees, no plants of any kind.  There is no CO2 production occurring there.  Mauna Loa is equatorial in location, and surrounded by water.  They use these points because they are consistent.  They do not vary greatly from season to season.

 

CO2 does not just vary in cities, it varies in the surroundings as well.  The CO2 level varies greatly depending on solar output.  Look at the time series.  Localized variations well in excess of 15ppm is a yearly thing in the northern hemisphere, where land mass is more of a percentage of the surface.  In the northern springtime, it's highest, there is no great degree of change out in the middle of the oceans near the equator, or on or around Antarctica.  It's the oceans that produce that vast majority of our fresh air.  It's the oceans that clean out the CO2, not just storing, but converting it through photosynthesis with all the plants and algae that live in it

 

This is why they use them, they give stable readings and they're surrounded by the primary regulator.  The ice cores are also in line with air flask readings.  It is a grievous sin in science to simply decide one source is right when there are obvious potential reasons it would be wrong.  They did not say where they took the samples from.  If they took them from small equatorial islands out in the middle of the ocean, they should be pretty accurate.  If they did not, they'd be terrible gauges of average yearly CO2.

 

http://climate.nasa.gov/key_indicators#co2

 

Look at the time scale on CO2, it's all over the place.  It's like that magic tree from Yamal that shows massive warming none of the other trees show.  With a temperature change comes shifts in overall climate activity.  They could have done their study in an area that switched from getting a coastal air draft during the spring, when the leaves form, to one that was receiving overland air instead.

 

The logical hole in this is even bigger when it comes to climate sensitivity.

 

Before man started adding all of it, the only major natural drivers are known inputs.  We know whether the world was obscenely active in terms of volcanoes during the medieval warm period.  We also know that the oceans do not expel CO2 as the surface temperature warms, that they lag by a very long time.  We know this because we can't account for all the CO2 we've added to the air, more of it than we expected is just gone because of the oceans.  Despite warming, they are still absorbing more than they had as it increases.  If CO2 causes the warming trend, it has to come from somewhere.  Those spikes were not products of high volcanic activity, nor were they from century plus long warming trends that warmed the oceans enough to release CO2.

 

Your second post is even worse...

 

Stop taking wrong information from obviously wrong people.  Anyone that says most of the energy output of the Sun is in the visible spectrum is a fucking retard.  Period.  Anyone that says most of the energy that reaches ground is visible light is a fucking retard.  Period.  These are not scientists, these are not even people capable of simple, brain dead observations of their surroundings.  Apparently you seem to be unable to do this as well.  As such, I'll give you direction.

 

Get two pieces of chromed metal, paint one of them black.  Leave them in the summer sun for a few hours and then go pick them up with your bare hands.  When you burn your sorry ass on the one that still has a chrome surface instead of the one you painted black, come back.

 

That you've decided to discount long term methods of determining that all those supposedly warm periods in the distant past had high levels of CO2, but are still blaming the supposed extinctions on CO2...  I'd be laughing, but mostly it's just depressing.  If our geological records are going to be shown to be horribly inaccurate, you shouldn't be using them for your doom and gloom prophecy.

 

You don't even blindly worship at the altar of science, you just have a need for everything to be our fault.  It's called masochism.  Go find some ball buster to make you his or her bitch, you'll be a happier person.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Solar_Spectrum.png

Check the spectrum and the absorption bands of CO2 and H2O (the red spectrum). Also notice how little infrared energy already reaches the surface in those bands.

So I guess you're right that infrared reaches the surface... but what's important is the infrared that's in those absorption bands. Hardly any of that reaches the surface.

So let's refine the statement: solar energy from the CO2-bands contributes a negligible amount to the current heat balance near the surface.

 

Lucky you, it's getting pretty cold here in the Netherlands. I want the summer back!

Australia is a myth used to frighten children. A land where it's summer when it's really winter and vice versa.

So... am I right if I say that the earth absorbs all the possible radiation that hits it (as long as it's not reflected), heats up a little, and emits all of it again as far-infrared ?

http://homepages.ius.edu/kforinas/ClassRefs/GlobalWarming_files/greenhouseeffect.htm

In figure 7.5 they put the solar spectrum next to the spectrum from the earth's surface. Ingoing is radiation with wavelengths < 2 micrometer, outgoing is radiation with wavelengths >2 micrometers.

 

I'll read it in more detail later on... and I'll write a more elaborate response for the rest.

 

Ok.. so basically all the high-fequency energy (both visible light and short-wavelength-infrared) gets absorbed and all of it is emitted back at high-wavelength-infrared radiation. Well... that's a wavelength band where the sun has little to offer.

Ok now the rest.

 

A seasonal variation of about 15ppm is not very significant in terms of global warming. We're discussing the result of a 100 ppm increase and it's hardly noticeable in the world. The increase needs to be a lot bigger to make a real difference. So who cares about a 15 ppm variation... the global warming discussion is really about what will happen if we get an increase of 1,000 or 2,000 ppm.

Uhm... yeah. And that life will perish if the oceanic temperatures become over 40 degrees celcius. The only oceanic life left will be around the polar regions.

I'm not saying it's wrong... I'm just saying the ice cores are no good to determine short-period trends in CO2. They are just not the type of medium for that. I think they do have a good time resolution for temperature, after all temperature is determined from the ice crystals and those cannot migrate. From this alone you know that T and CO2 from the ice cores have quite a different time resolution. And once time resolution is lost then no matter how many corrective filters you throw at it, you can never geit back.

So all I'm saying is, that I don't think you can determine a time lag between T and CO2, even if they come from the same ice core. Not even when both are radiometrically dated (because even that cannot compensate for diffusion).

So I think it's ok if the CO2 measurements from the ice cores are used on long term modeling, where modeling results have a resolution of 1,000 years or even more.

If you want to analyze more rapid changes, then you're better off with other sources of data.

And you can use both to verify the results from models...

What do you mean... that CO2 graph shows variations of 200 ppm to 280 ppm on a scale of about 100,000 years and only tiny variations of about 20 ppm on smaller scales of 5,000 years. Doesn't that tell you anything? The shape of this graph is pretty convincing to me in terms of extensive smoothing in time. It really only shows very long term variations, you cannot tell anything from it on a short scale.

I wonder if they didn't just plot actual measurements for the last 100 years ... how could they measure from CO2 in the ice ... those bubbles haven't even formed yet, they only form in the solid ice at depths of over 50 m.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period Whatever it was, it was a small effect, comparable to what we experience nowadays.

http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/gases-solubility-water-d_1148.html The solubility of CO2 changes slightly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcium_carbonate#With_varying_CO2_pressure The solubility of calciumcarbonate is a different story... it depends on temperature but also on acidity (and hence on partial CO2 pressure). I'm not sure what that means... does it mean that more CO2 can enter the ocean if calciumcarbonate is driven out? Or less? Or does it not matter, it's all a form of carbon after all.

That's just a matter of equilibrium - if you increase the concentration in the air, then the concentration in the water has to rise proportionally. The water will keep absorbing CO2 until the concentration in the water is in equilibrium with the concentration in the air. After that, it won't absorb anymore unless it has somewhere to put everything (sedimentation), but that's a process that hasn't changed recently.

Which spikes... it's all smoothed out. I think it's really hard to tell from those ice core data... they have such poor CO2 time-resolution, it's like looking through fuzzy glasses and trying to make out details. It's better than nothing, but still... it's not great either. To be honest I don't know what to make of it, you can make all kinds of conclusions based on this ... like the face of Mars Which turned out to be a rock  ^^.

I suppose you mean the "sudden" increases in CO2. Those have a time resolution of ... what ... 10,000 years or so? What kind of conclusion can you make about that? Also, we are talking about ice ages here... half the globe was covered in ice. We are in a different situation now, there are few ice caps.

And instead of looking at it in terms of peaks, on can also look at it in terms of troughs.

I'll have to think about this kinda stuff, I don't know what to make of it.

Is an ice age an unstable situation, governed by activity of the sun or the length of summer/winters on the northern hemisphere? If that's the case, T might cause a change in CO2. After all, ice caps will upset the carbon cycle.

But we have no ice caps now... there's no major disruption to the carbon cycle other than "us". There's no natural process that we know of that could be driving a 100 ppm change over the last 150 years.

Do you know of one?