Category Archives: Global Temperatures

“Cheshire Cat Sunspots”-Livingston and Penn

Posted on June 24, 2011 | 1 comment

Future sunspots may behave like the Cheshire Cat:  “the smile is there (magnetic fields) but the body is missing (no dark markings)“.   Dr Bill Livingston and Dr Matt Penn of the National Solar Observatory have been recording the average magnetic field strength of sunspots for the past 13 years.  What they have found is a decline of about 50 gauss per year during Cycle 23 and continuing in Cycle 24.   See their chart below:

Typical sunspot magnetic field strength registers about “2500 to 3500 gauss” based upon their research.  But Cycle 24 spots are running about 2000 gauss and Livingston and Penn are estimating that if the sunspot field strength drops to 1500 gauss: “the spots will largely disappear as the magnetic field is no longer strong enough to overcome forces on the solar surface.”   That could occur in the next ten years, coinciding with Cycle 25.

Traditionally the measurements of sunspots seem to have focused on visible light and magnetic flux.  Livingston and Penn emphasized the sunspot IR and magnetic field strength and that has brought a new perspective which seems to correlate with the other recent discoveries that were announced on 14 June 2011 at the AAS meeting in Las Cruces NM.

Dr Leif Svalgaard used Livingston and Penn data to illustrate the interrelationship of the magnetic field strength and visibility.

The pink line is visibility where 1 means invisibility.  This “visibility/invisibility” is somewhat perverse.  The spot (black) will no longer be seen because its temperature at the Sun’s surface is essentially the same as the surrounding gases. The black line is magnetic field strength.

Sunspots appear dark because they are cooler than the rest of the solar surface.  From posting by Space.com: “The dark, heart of a sunspot, called the umbra, is surrounded by a brighter edge know as the penumbra, which is made of numerous dark and light filaments more than 1,200 miles long.   They are relatively thin at approximately 90miles in width, making it difficult to resolve the detail of how they arise.

A photo of a sunspot taken in May 2010, with Earth shown to scale. The image has been colorized for aesthetic reasons. This image with 0.1 arcsecond resolution from the Swedish 1-m Solar Telescope represents the limit of what is currently possible in terms of spatial resolution.

Now scientists have discovered these columns are rapid downflows and upflows of gas, matching recent theoretical models and computer simulations suggesting these filaments are generated by the movement of hot and cold gases known as convective flow.

The researchers used the Swedish 1-meter Solar Telescope to focus on a sunspot on May 23, 2010. They found dark downflows of more than 2,200 miles per hour (3,600 kph) and bright upflows of more than 6,600 miles per hour (10,800 kph). The models suggest that columns of hot gas rise up from the interior of the sunspot, widen, cool and then sink downward while rapidly flowing outward.

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Posted in AGW, Environment, Global Temperatures, sun and climate

Solar Cycle 24-A Game Changer Revisited

Posted on June 19, 2011 | 5 comments

On the 14th of June at the AAS conference in Las Cruces,  a group of scientist from the National Solar Observatory (NSO) suggested that the familiar sunspot cycle may be shutting down.   They observed that the spots were fading (weaker), that the current Cycle 24 was showing fewer spots and that Cycle 25 was behind the normal schedule in its formation.

Sunspots have been recorded for hundreds of years and they are a very visible proxy for solar activity.  Solar activity is also visible in the numbers and strength of flares and coronal mass ejections (CME).  The solar cycle is nominally about 11 years in duration.  It begins with a relatively quiet sun and then there is a ramping up of sunspots, etc. maximizing  about half way through a cycle.   At this time the Sun’s north and south magnetic poles “flip” and sunspots, etc. begin ramping down to a relatively quiet Sun.

Drs.Frank  Hill  of the NSO explains that he and his team are using “helioseismology to measure sun-wide oscillations of the solar surface”.   Sound waves of extremely low frequency that emanate from deep within the Sun induce up-and-down oscillations in the sun’s outer gas layer. Measurements of these surface motions can be used to make maps of solar surface velocity, called Dopplergrams, from which physical conditions such as temperature, composition and the interior magnetic field can be inferred.  Dr. Hill reported on “a jet-stream-like flow within the sun that they have been monitoring since 1995 using helioseismology.

The stream, which is coincident with the sunspots, has an east-west zonal flow inside the Sun at about 4000 miles beneath the Sun’s surface.   The following figure presented at the Conference is illustrative of what Hill and his team have discovered.

The annotated chart’s  yellow and red bands trace the solar jet streams.  The black contours denote sunspot activity.   Cycle 24 (the current cycle) streams can be seen beginning about 1998-1999 at about 60° lattitude north and south.  These streams begin converging toward the equator.  At about 22°, sunspot activity begins.  Ultimately the streams will reach the equator at a time of solar maximum.  See Cycle 24 and the Butterfly Diagram for more on this.

The stream that began at the 60° latitude splits with part of it going toward the poles and the other part toward the equator.

Note that Cycle 23 stream heading for the equator was more active when it reached approximately 22°  than is Cycle 24 and that the angle of approach to the equator was steeper than that currently occurring in Cycle 24.   Dr Hill reports that it took  3 years for Cycle 24 to cover a ten-degree range that only took 2 years for Cycle 23.   Thus Cycle 24 is “slower” than Cycle 23.

The determination of this magnetic jet stream was first made by the   instrumentation on the SOHO satellite launched  December 2, 1995 using  a Michelson Doppler Imager.  It was replaced by a Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) in Feb 2010 on a Solar Dynamics Observation satellite.  The HMI is said to be many time more sensitive and it will report almost continuously.    The unit uses a 16 million-pixel camera  configured to show blue images where the Sun’s  oscillations are moving the surface toward the HMI camera and red when it moves away.  The satellite is in orbit about 22,000 miles above the Earth’s surface at about the point where the Sun’s and the Earth’s gravitational pull are equal.

Richard Altrock, manager of the Air Force’s coronal research program has observed that the remnants of the magnetic jet stream go poleward as far as 85° where they die.

Returning to the figure it can be noted that Cycle 24 magnetic jet stream was forming in the 1998-2000 timeframe.   Noted on the figure is “Cycle 25??? 2019? 2030?”. Dr Hill points out that the magnetic jet stream for Cycle 25 should have been forming already but there is no sign of it yet.  The press release for regarding this situation suggests that: Cycle 25 will be greatly reduced or may not happen at all.

Latter, I will post on the work by Matt Penn and William Livingston that shows a weakening trend in the strength of the sunspots.

So what do we make of this?  Because of the satellite programs underway in the US and Europe primarily, we are probably doubling our knowledge of the Sun every few year.  But we still don’t know much about the Sun.  Reading the postings on this topic leads me to believe that the solar experts are not of one mind on the idea that this means the climate is about to get much cooler.
My bias is to say that we are going to see years of global cooling.  I say that based upon the reconstructed history of the Maunder and other minimums.  The only good thing I believe that can come from a period of cooling is to put a stake in the heart of the corrupt science that is the AGW theory.  I am not sure we can say with any certainty that more CO2 in the atmosphere and perhaps more naturally caused global warming is a bad thing. Who is to say that 2 or 3 more degrees would be bad.  Only the models in their ignorance are sure of this.  But extended cold could cause a lot of starvation.  Lets hope this does not happen.

So,  stayed tuned.

cbdakota

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Posted in AGW, Climate Models, Global Temperatures, sun and climate

SOLAR CYCLE 24 and the SUNSPOT BUTTERFLY DIAGRAM

Posted on May 25, 2011 | 4 comments

I posted Solar Cycle 24- A Game Changer? which discussed the weak cycle 24 and what it might mean in terms of a cooler global climate.  As the posting was getting quite long, I elected to leave out the Butterfly Diagram for later posting.  So, now is later.

Cycle 24 is the plot just beginning now, 2010 and 2011.  The leftmost “butterfly” is Cycle 11.  (click on the chart to enlarge)

This figure is sometimes known as the Maunder Butterfly Chart as Maunder seems to be the first person to recognize the unique pattern formed by plotting the position of the sunspots on the face of the sun versus time.  When a new solar cycle begins, the sunspots become numerous.  In the beginning they appear away from the equator at about 35 degrees south and 35 degrees north.   With time the spots begin to converge at the equator.  When the “minimum” occurs, the spots  are basically upon the equator.

The butterfly chart for Cycle 24 is perhaps  showing sunspot formations that are relatively fewer than in recent Cycles 22 and 23.  Cycle 24 seems to resemble cycles that occurred many years ago.  If you occasionally check the progress of the spots toward the equator, you might be able to make a good guess on the length of Cycle 24.   Will it be much less than the average of 11 years?  The experts probably have a better feel than we amateurs,  but I am pretty sure that they would not bet the farm on their feel.

There is an interesting paper “First Solar Butterfly Diagram from Schwabe’s Observations 1825 1867” by Rainer Arlt and Anastasia Abdolvand, This paper uses the spots recorded by Schwabe during the named period to assemble butterfly diagrams for Cycles 7, 8 , 9  and 10.  These are the butterfly diagrams that immediately precede those in my first chart.  Cycle 8 was a weak cycle according to the authors.

cbdakota

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Posted in AGW, Climate Models, Global Temperatures, sun and climate

Joanne Nova’s Guide to the Skeptic’s World.

Posted on May 13, 2011 | 1 comment

Many in our country believe in the theory of man-made global warming.  They are busy with their own lives and problems and don’t have time to get informed to make their own judgment.   Others have just left school, high school or college, where the “educators”—many ill informed—have been preaching the theory to them.   Moreover, they often believe this because the media really only prints articles which are supportive of that theory

Yet the tide is turning against those who want us to believe that we must act quickly to prevent a global catastrophe.   How is it possible then, that in the face of the media barrage, and the educators, more people are becoming skeptical of what they are being told?

One reason, besides our citizen’s inherent common sense, is the internet’s unpaid (most of them anyway) cadre of skeptics that are providing factual discussions on the theory.  This information allows them to look at both sides of the issue.    One of the very best is Joanne Nova—A brilliant and prolific writer.

Nova has a posting “New Here? The “ten second” guide to the world of skeptics.”  I guess she put quotation marks around ten seconds, cause it will take you longer than that to read through the posting .  But I can’t think of anything that will get you up to speed regarding  most of the issues around the theory of man-made global warming faster or more comprehensively.

She tells you who is outspending Big Oil and by how much.

She illustrates why the banking community is so gung ho about the theory.

She points out how unscientific  the “scientific” underpinnings of the theory are.

She discusses climate history.

Etc.

Her posting is full of links that support her position.  If you don’t read them on the first time through the posting,  do it  at the time of your  second or third reading .

After that, you will be better able to navigate the murky waters of the man-made global warming theory and dig deeper into the science of this issue.  I bet you will come down on the side of the skeptics as your knowledge matures.

cbdakota

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Posted in AGW, Alternative Energy, Energy Development, Environment, Global Temperatures, IPCC, United Nations

SOLAR CYCLE 24–A Game Changer?

Posted on May 10, 2011 | 3 comments

The current solar cycle 24 might be a game changer in the global climate debate.   It is showing early signs of reaching the solar Maximum in two short years.  Solar Maximums on average occur some 5 to 6 years in to a typical 11-year cycle.

The Sun has a cycle of about 11 years from minimum to maximum and back to minimum magnetic activity.  This cycle can be observed by the numbers of sunspots formed on the surface of the Sun.  During a cycle, the sunspot numbers increase, flares are common and coronal mass ejections occur until the Sun’s polarity “flips”.   This usually is the point at which the so-called solar maximum is reached. The activity on the Sun begins to decrease.  The cycle eventually reaches a point where very few sunspots are observed.  This is the completion of a cycle.

The chart below shows the magnetic fields of several previous solar cycles and the current cycle 24.  The North polar field is nearing the zero on its way to swapping sides with the south polar field.  Note, also, that the magnitude of cycle 24’s field is not as large as the previous cycles.

Chart Source:   http//wso.stanford.edu

Cycle 24 has been a maverick.  Initially the solar cycle gurus said it would perform about the same as the previous two cycles—22 and 23.  However it did not seem to want to begin and when it did, it has under preformed expectations so significantly that the performance forecast has had to be lowered many times.   Cycle 24 has more in common with cycles of years ago that also exhibited reduced solar activity.  These cycles coincided with global cooling.

Galileo began counting sunspots in 1610.  Daily counting began  1749.   From 1645 to 1715, there were very few sunspots.  This period is known as the Maunder Minimum.   Few sunspots were visible during the period from 1790 until 1830. This period is known as the Dalton Minimum. Corresponding to the period of time that included the Maunder and the Dalton Minimums, the Earths climate was comparatively cool.  The climatic period, know as the “Little Ice Age” lasted from 1450 until 1820.  The chart below shows correlation between sunspots and the Minimums.

  (The chart shows non-systematically collected  sunspot numbers in red. Systematically collected observation spots are in blue.)
Chart courtesy of Robert A Rohde for Global Warming Art

Here is the current plot of sunspot count for cycle 24.   Also note how low the forecast of peak sunspot activity is compared to the previous cycle. Click Chart for clarity.

The “predicted values”  would indicate that the cycle 24 maximum will occur in 2013.   After a big jump in March,  the April count is heading down and so far the May sunspot count is rather low.

So, solar activity for cycle 24 is quite low compared to recent cycles.    But can we be sure that cycle 24 wont become very active?  No we can’t.  Can we be sure that if cycle 24 is short (less than 11 years) the climate will cool off?  No we can’t.    What we can say is that low solar activity appears to correlate with a cooler climate.

Why would a less active Sun result in lower global temperature?  The amount of radiation from the Sun to Earth does not vary much year to year.  No one knows for certain if the variation is enough to raise or lower global temperatures.  The Sun’s magnetic field weakens when the Sun is less active. Some theorize that this lets in cosmic rays and that these rays form low altitude clouds.  Low altitude clouds do lower the Earth’s temperature.  My philosophy is:  Even though the exact mechanism linking the Sun and global change has not been definitely established,  it is kind of like gravity–it is obvious.  If cycle 24 continues on its current track, we may see more confirmation that low activity correlates with cooler weather.  We will have to wait for several years to know.  Stay tuned.

cbdakota

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Posted in AGW, Environment, Global Temperatures, IPCC, Radiation, sun and climate

Obama Wants Supreme Court To Throw Out Case Against Utilities

Posted on April 17, 2011 | Leave a comment

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on a lawsuit brought by several environmental groups as well as several States.  This group is asking the Court to force power plants in 20 states to reduce their CO2 emissions.  The Obama Administration is siding with the power companies asking that the EPA throw out the lawsuit.  Obama on the side of the Utility companies you ask with a stunned look on your face.  Well, they are but not because they don’t want to cut CO2 emissions.  They are arguing that the Supremes should not set the regulations, but rather that should be left to the EPA which has not yet written them.  They say that the Court should not meddle in the powers given to the Executive Branch of which, as you know, the EPA is a member.

Laurence Tribe, lib lawyer extraordinaire, is supporting the Administration in their quest to get the Supremes to drop the case.  In his letter to the Boston Globe he says:

“Congress, through the Clean Air Act and other measures, has empowered the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases, and that agency has begun to do so, prodded by a Supreme Court ruling in favor of Massachusetts when the state sued the EPA to compel it to take up the problem. The courts should reject the political and administrative roles that would be thrust upon them by litigants dissatisfied with Congress’s decision to entrust the EPA with this challenging mission — or by those dissatisfied with the efforts of the president and the State Department to engage in the international diplomacy required to cope with an obviously international problem.” (underlines are my emphasis)

Give me a break.  The  previous Congress thought it necessary that it write legislation to manage CO2 but could not get a bill to pass. And that was with a Democrat majority in both houses and the Presidency!!!   How does that translate into “…Congress’s decision to entrust the EPA”????  Today, neither the House nor Senate could muster a bill with 50% voting for regulation of CO2.

NOW, Tribe thinks the Supreme’s activities on this topic are a “dangerous perversion of the judicial process and would likely retard efforts to grapple with climate change…..”  It was A-ok to do it in the Massachusetts versus the EPA when it resulted in the Supremes making that horrible decision in Mass.’s favor. Do I smell hypocrisy?

I believe there are two reasons Obama, supported by Tribe, don’t want the Supremes involved any more:

  • Fear that the Supremes will somehow try to make up for their previous error by narrowing the EPA’s power to regulate
  • Hundreds of lawsuits await the EPA if they follow through with their intended path of focusing on the “big polluters–hence Utilities and automobiles” and ignoring everything else.  Folks say that the EPA can’t be selective—- picking and choosing whom they are going to regulate— but rather like with other “pollutants” they must regulate all sources. All the hospitals, the high schools, the office building down the street, your house, etc.  The EPA  doesn’t want anyone to tell them what to regulate.  A decision by the Supremes to set emission limits on these utilities would open the gate for the lawsuits.
UPDATE 19 APRIL 2011  Seems the Supremes are likely to side with Obama. See this posting.
cbdakota

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Posted in AGW, cap and trade, Energy Development, Environment, Global Temperatures

10 Major Failures of the Model Based Virtual World View of Climate.

Posted on March 31, 2011 | Leave a comment

Joseph D’Aleo has developed a list of the “Ten Major Failures of So-Called Consensus Science”.  To develop this list, he analyzed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) based science.   Then he focuses on “how actual data compares to the consensus science, model based virtual world view of climate”

His ten issues are:

1. Warming is said to be unprecedented and accelerating. It is neither.

2. Global warming is not GLOBAL

3. Winters would grow increasingly warm

4. The entire Northern Hemisphere would experience less snow and snowcover

5. The arctic oscillation (AO) would become increasingly positive, aiding in the warming

6. Global warming would lead to a permanent or semi-permanent El Nino

7. Atmosphere will warm faster than surface (because that is where the heat trapping gases are).

8. Record highs and heat waves are increasing

9. Sea levels are rising at an increasing, alarming rate

10. Droughts and floods will worsen.

There are many other issues, he notes, but his concentration is on the “major findings, assessments or model predictions from the IPCC and other national climate centers and NGOs….”

The listing of the ten above are rather sketchy, but he provides convincing evidence of his convictions which you can access by clicking on the “See the analysis part 1 and part 2” at the bottom of  his posting which is accessible by clicking here.

cbdakota

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Posted in AGW, Climate Models, Environment, Global Temperatures, IPCC

BBC SCIENCE PROPAGANDA

Posted on January 30, 2011 | Leave a comment

Propelled by the Climategate email scandal, cooling global temperatures, total failure of the Copenhagen climate conference, many false and otherwise erroneous reports in the IPCC 4th report on Climate Change, etc. the public is becoming aware of the bill of goods that has been feed to them in recent years by the mainstream media, Al Gore, and politicians of all stripes who want to tax and regulate you. Polls show waning  support for draconian taxes and regulation  in order to cut fossil fuel CO2 emissions.

This past week, the BBC aired a program they produced titled “Science Under Attack”.   The objective of the program was to bolster the man-made global warming theory (AGW).

So how good was the BBC’s “Science Under Attack”?

A desperate and sleazy program according to Christopher Booker as told in his posting “How BBC warmists abuse the science”:

The formula the BBC uses in its forlorn attempts to counterattack has been familiar ever since its 2008 series Climate Wars. First, a presenter with some scientific credentials comes on, apparently to look impartially at the evidence. Supporters of the cause are allowed to put their case without challenge. Hours of film of climate-change “deniers” are cherrypicked for soundbites that can be shown, out of context, to make them look ridiculous. The presenter can then conclude that the “deniers” are a tiny handful of eccentrics standing out against an overwhelming scientific “consensus”.

The scientist picked to front the progamme was Sir Paul Nurse, a Nobel Prize-winning geneticist, now President of the Royal Society (which has been promoting warmist orthodoxy even longer than the BBC). The cue to justify the programme’s title was all the criticism which greeted those Climategate emails leaked from Sir Paul’s old university, East Anglia, showing how scientists had been manipulating their data to support the claim that temperatures have recently risen to unprecedented levels.

One of the two “deniers” chosen to be stitched up, in classic BBC fashion, was the Telegraph’s James Delingpole. He has spoken for his own experience on our website. Still worse, however, was the treatment of Professor Fred Singer, the distinguished 86-year-old atmospheric physicist who set up the satellite system for the US National Weather Bureau. We saw Nurse cosying up to Singer in a coffee house, then a brief clip of the professor explaining how a particular stalagmite study had shown temperature fluctuations correlating much more neatly with solar activity than with levels of CO2. This snippet enabled Nurse to imply that Singer’s scepticism is based on one tiny local example, whereas real scientists look at the overall big picture. No mention of the 800-page report edited by Singer in which dozens of expert scientists challenge the CO2 orthodoxy from every angle.

For those that attend to the Climate Change Sanity postings routinely  (see) will instantly spot how poor the programming was and how little about the subject, Sir Paul Nurse knows when your read the following Booker comments:

The most telling moment, however, came in an interview between Nurse and a computer-modelling scientist from Nasa, presented as a general climate expert although he is only a specialist in ice studies. Asked to quantify the relative contributions of CO2 to the atmosphere by human and natural causes, his seemingly devastating reply was that 7 gigatons (billion tons) are emitted each year by human activity while only 1 gigaton comes from natural sources such as the oceans. This was so much the message they wanted that Nurse invited him to confirm that human emissions are seven times greater than those from all natural sources.

This was mind-boggling. It is generally agreed that the 7 billion tonnes of CO2 due to human activity represent just over 3 per cent of the total emitted. That given off by natural sources, such as the oceans, is vastly greater than this, more than 96 per cent of the total. One may argue about the “carbon cycle” and how much CO2 the oceans and plants reabsorb. But, as baldly stated, the point was simply a grotesque misrepresentation, serving, like many of the programme’s other assertions, only to give viewers a wholly misleading impression.

You can read James Delingpoles discussion of the Nurse “gotcha interview” here.

For 10 years Peter Sissons was the BBC evening news anchor.   In his recently published memoirs, he says:

“The BBC became a propaganda machine for climate change zealots, and I was treated as a lunatic for daring to dissent”.

The BBC and the Warmists desperation in producing a program like this is palpable and it argues strongly that the BBC has lost its integrity.

cbdakota

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Posted in AGW, cap and trade, Climate Models, ClimateGate, Environment, Global Temperatures, IPCC, sun and climate, United Nations

COLLEGE STUDENTS LACK SCIENTIFIC LITERACY?-Part2

Posted on January 20, 2011 | 2 comments

In the previous posting, College Students Lack Scientific Literacy?, we took a quick look at the role of photosynthesis in the Carbon Cycle.  This posting  will examine the part that burning of fossil fuels play in the carbon cycle and how fossil fuel CO2 affects global warming.

There are those who believe that catastrophic heating of the Earth will result if fossil fuels use is not curbed or perhaps stopped all together.  They think that the extra increment of CO2 from fossil will cause the climate to reach a “tipping point” after which there may be no turning back.

So what is the argument about between skeptics and believers?

Broadly speaking the believers have looked for a cause of a temperature increase of something less than 1C  during the last century.   They say that the measured volume of Carbon Dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere has gone up coincident with the temperature increase and that since CO2 is a known greenhouse gas, it must be the cause.   And they add that CO2 from industrial and transportation sources, a product of fossil fuel combustion,  is the reason for the atmospheric CO2 increase from the past “steady-state” measurements.

Skeptics, while accepting that the Earth’s temperature has increased in the last century, so has it for the last 10,000 years since the end of the last Ice Age.  And further,  this cold to warm and return to cold has been going on for hundred thousands of years, so the last century’s warming is probably due mostly to natural causes.   Skeptics say that the past history of temperature increases and CO2 variation as charted from the examination of ancient ice cores show the temperature change leads CO2 change both increasing and decreasing.  Stated in another way,  CO2 follows a change in temperature rather than leading the change. By the way, Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” movie did show it the other way but it is widely agreed that was wrong as was so much  else of that science fiction documentary.

The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is very small, and the CO2 increment from fossil fuel burning is about 3% of the total atmospheric CO2 content.  If pressed the believers will agree that the primary greenhouse gas is not CO2, but rather water in the form of vapor and clouds.  From 90 to 95% of the greenhouse gas effect results from water in the atmosphere.

An interesting way to look at the CO2 versus water has been made by Art Horn  in his posting “The Utter Futility of Reducing Carbon Emissions”which can be seen by clicking here.  This  posting looks at the Carbon Cycle and it uses the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as the data source.  This panel is the believer’s bible.   Quoting from his posting:

“…….the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 4th Assessment showed that 3% of the atmospheric CO2 comes from man-made sources. Global gross primary production and respiration, land use changes, plus CO2 from the oceans totals 213 gigatonnes of carbon exchanged each year between the Earth/oceans and the atmosphere. The IPCC figure also shows man-made carbon emissions to be about 7 gigatonnes, bringing the total to 220 gigatonnes per year. So from this, we can see that making energy from fossil fuels is producing about 3% of the carbon dioxide added to the air each year. From that, the total human component of the greenhouse effect is therefore about 3% of the total carbon dioxide component of the greenhouse effect, which is 8%.

That gives us a value of .2% from man-made carbon dioxide. If you think that’s a small number you’re right.”

A little more simple science is necessary to get this picture.

Greenhouse Gas (GHG) effect

To begin with, the simplest view is that GHG is a study of “energy in =  energy out”.  The “energy in” is the radiation from the Sun—sunlight, infrared (IR) and ultraviolet  (UV)—that is absorbed by the Earth.  The Earth then radiates this energy back out into space.  On its way back out into space, some of it is delayed by interaction with trace elements in the atmosphere. This interaction increases the temperature of the atmosphere, and the Earth’s temperature rises. The greenhouse effect is real and it allows life, as we know it, to exist.  If the Earth had no atmosphere,  its temperature would be 255K (-18C).  The average temperature of the entire Earth averaged over seasons is, by measurement, about 288K (15C).  Thus the greenhouse effect results in an increase in temperature of about 33K (33C).

Lets look at GHG in more detail.  The Sun energy in the form of visable light, IR, and UV (shortwaves) pass through the Earth’s atmosphere and are absorbed by the ocean, the land, the trees, concrete, road surfaces, etc.  Not all of the Suns energy  makes it to the Earth’s surface due to clouds and surface reflection, along with atmospheric scatter that represent a blockage.  When the Sun’s input ceases, at night for example, these Earth objects begin to emit electromagnetic radiation.  This radiation is in the infrared range but because the temperatures of the objects are much lower than that of the Sun, the wave lengths are different.  They are much longer.  For our purposes the Earth’s radiation will be called the longwaves.

The interaction of the trace compounds in our atmosphere with the outgoing longwave radiation is dictated by atomic absorption.  Each compound  in the atmosphere has a specific wave length band(s) that it absorbs.  If the compound’s wave lengths correspond to the wave lengths of some of the IR radiated from the Earth’s surface, the IR waves can be absorbed. Those IR waves are converted to heat causing the compound to emit IR of a different wave length. The compound is transparent to other IR wave lengths.

Water, CO2 and Methane will absorb IR wave lengths emitted from the Earth.    Of the emitted IR waves that are absorbed, it is estimated that some 4%to 6% are by CO2.  The CO2 greenhouse effect is limited because the wave lengths that CO2 absorbs only represent a small part of the wave length ranges of the reemitted IR from the Earth. In fact, adding more CO2 to the atmosphere has only limited significance because the amount of CO2 already in the atmosphere is nearly sufficient to absorb those particular Earth originated IR waves.

Well, why do the believers think that CO2 will cause the very high Earth temperatures they trot out frequently to scare all the rest of us.  They agree that water is the primary greenhouse gas.   They think that the little upward bumps in temperature that are possible if more CO2 is added to the atmosphere will result in more water vapor in the atmosphere.  They know that CO2 can’t do the deed so they have programmed their computers models (GCM) to  gee-up lots of water vapor to do the deed. This amplification of the total greenhouse gases (GHG) is called positive feedback. Using this positive feedback, the GCMs forecast climate out some 100 years or more and conclude that global temperatures will rise dramatically.   The problem is that this positive feedback is difficult to impossible to demonstrate in the real world.  (Basically the world abhors positive feed back.) Meanwhile a negative feedback has been shown to exist in real world, making run-away global temperatures quiet unlikely.

In summary,

Very little of the CO2 in the atmosphere is due to the burning of fossil fuels.

The  GHG effect is primarily due to water as vapor or clouds

CO2 can only absorb  a limited portion of  the Earth’s radiated IR

The Believers proclamations of catastrophic weather conditions are based computer programs. Those computer predictions that were done sufficiently long ago to be meaningful as a predictions,  have been notorious failures.

And the concept of Positive Feedback  increasing water in the atmosphere resulting in large increases in the Earth’s temperature is a fiction of the computer program as it has not yet been proved in real experimental work.

cbdakota

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Posted in AGW, Climate Models, Environment, Global Temperatures, IPCC, United Nations

COLLEGE STUDENTS LACK SCIENTIFIC LITERACY

Posted on January 13, 2011 | 1 comment

Last week was one of lows and highs.  I went back to South Dakota to say my goodbyes to my sister. She passed away some 7 hours after I got to the hospital. The highs were the young people that gathered for the funeral.  Mainly grandchildren and other kin of my sister. The children ranged from grade school to Grad school to graduated and off to work.   After spending time with them, it seems clear that we will be putting our nation into good hands.

Some probably do not share my political philosophy, However, I am hopeful that Winston Churchill’s view of the stages of life will play out when he said,  “If you are young and not a liberal, you have no heart.  If you are growing old and are not a conservative, you have no brain.”

But brains they do have no mater their political philosophy.   And those that have thought about Climate Change have open minds.

After reading the result of a recent Michigan State study, which concluded that College Students lack scientific literacy, I wondered if there are college students or grads, unlike my Sister’s kin, that do not have open minds and need a little background to begin formulating their own opinion about climate change.

Quoting the MSU researchers:

The researchers assessed the fundamental science knowledge of more than 500 students at 13 U.S. colleges in courses ranging from introductory biology to advanced ecology.

Most students did not truly understand the processes that transform carbon. They failed to apply principles such as the conservation of matter, which holds that when something changes chemically or physically, the amount of matter at the end of the process needs to equal the amount at the beginning. (Matter doesn’t magically appear or disappear.)

Students trying to explain weight loss, for example, could not trace matter once it leaves the body; instead they used informal reasoning based on their personal experiences (such as the fat “melted away” or was “burned off”). In reality, the atoms in fat molecules leave the body (mostly through breathing) and enter the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and water.

Most students also incorrectly believe plants obtain their mass from the soil rather than primarily from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. “When you see a tree growing,” Anderson said, “it’s a lot easier to believe that tree is somehow coming out of the soil rather than the scientific reality that it’s coming out of the air.”

The oxygen we breathe is primarily released from plants when photosynthesis takes place breaking the CO2 molecule, recombining it with water to produce a sugar.  The excess oxygen from the photosynthesis reaction is now a waste product and expelled to the atmosphere.

The above Graph is a product of  Onimoto.com

Without atmospheric CO2, there would be no plants.  Without plants there would be no life on this planet.   It offends me when I read media articles that call CO2 a POLLUTANT.

Because the Researcher’s objective for this work is to gain acolytes to the Church of Man Made Global Warming, my next posting will be to show that CO2 is not a big factor in the Greenhouse effect.

To read the MSU press release click here.

cbdakota

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Posted in AGW, Environment, Global Temperatures, IPCC, sun and climate