Climate Change worse than expected

[gigabite]

I think 30 years is near term. I don’t see 30 years of cooling as a mini Ice age. I realize there has been some near term warming since the seventies. That would be thirty years or so.

The problem with the instrument record is that much of it is in developed areas subject to anomalies resulting thermal islands, which are anthropogenic and not exclusively CO2 relate. Then there is the human error in the hand-recorded data. In some cases there are whole seasons and years missing. This is a case where to much data of varying types is being massaged in one direction or the other.

As far as solar irradiance goes it may have been a good measure of the sun’s temperature 106 years ago, but I think everyone could understand a thermometer in space better as a direct relationship between the Sun’s size and distance from the Earth.

The UV and Infrared bands are small but intense. Using solar irradiance as a metric for global warming is confusing to me, akin to going around your elbow to get to your thumb, a doable endeavor, but not efficient.

[x-y-no]

I think 30 years is near term. I don’t see 30 years of cooling as a mini Ice age. I realize there has been some near term warming since the seventies. That would be thirty years or so.

Well in that case your comment that NASA "seems to think that solar irradiance needs to rebound for a new near-term global temperature record" is wrong, since according to the page you linked to "the negative forcing, relative to the mean solar irradiance is equivalent to seven years of CO2 increase at current growth rates."

The problem with the instrument record is that much of it is in developed areas subject to anomalies resulting thermal islands, which are anthropogenic and not exclusively CO2 relate. Then there is the human error in the hand-recorded data. In some cases there are whole seasons and years missing. This is a case where to much data of varying types is being massaged in one direction or the other.

Quite a lot of work is done to compensate for the urban heat island effect and for manual errors by correlating with nearby rural stations.

As far as solar irradiance goes it may have been a good measure of the sun’s temperature 106 years ago, but I think everyone could understand a thermometer in space better as a direct relationship between the Sun’s size and distance from the Earth.

I don't agree with that at all. The temperature recorded by a thermometer in space can be affected by changes in the absorptive and/or radiative properties of the thermometer itself or any structure it's attached to. It's certainly non-trivial, if not impossible, to objectively determine the magnitude of such changes.

The UV and Infrared bands are small but intense. Using solar irradiance as a metric for global warming is confusing to me, akin to going around your elbow to get to your thumb, a doable endeavor, but not efficient.

Not sure what you mean here. Surely the entire spectrum matters when it comes to how much energy is delivered.

[Ed Mahmoud]

Have I posted a link to Princeton's Dr. William Happer's belief that global warming is very bad science?

I may have already, and the name and school should be sufficient to allow someone to find it at Ask.com (official search engine of NASCAR) or similar site.

He'd be in a better position than me to know, being a PhD and having some experience in the field.

Of course, my doubt on the issue doesn't come from my own scientific knowledge, but I suspect very few people here at S2K do form their views on this issue that way.

The polar ice caps could be completely melted in 10 years as someone claimed. I just personally doubt it.

[x-y-no]

Have I posted a link to Princeton's Dr. William Happer's belief that global warming is very bad science?

I may have already, and the name and school should be sufficient to allow someone to find it at Ask.com (official search engine of NASCAR) or similar site.

He'd be in a better position than me to know, being a PhD and having some experience in the field.

Of course, my doubt on the issue doesn't come from my own scientific knowledge, but I suspect very few people here at S2K do form their views on this issue that way.

The polar ice caps could be completely melted in 10 years as someone claimed. I just personally doubt it.

Dr. Happer's field appears to be spin-polarized nuclei and atoms and their application to laser and magnetic resonance technology. It's not clear what if anything he knows about climate science.

[Ed Mahmoud]

When he was at DOE under Bush 41 he managed a number of programs, including their climate research.


He wasn't impressed by the attitudes of the climate change people seeking funding...

Happer explained that his beliefs about climate change come from his experience at the Department of Energy, at which Happer said he supervised all non-weapons energy research, including climate change research. Managing a budget of more than $3 billion, Happer said he felt compelled to make sure it was being spent properly. “I would have [researchers] come in, and they would brief me on their topics,” Happer explained. “They would show up. Shiny faces, presentation ready to go. I would ask them questions, and they would be just delighted when you asked. That was true of almost every group that came in.”

The exceptions were climate change scientists, he said.

“They would give me a briefing. It was a completely different experience. I remember one speaker who asked why I wanted to know, why I asked that question. So I said, you know I always ask questions at these briefings … I often get a much better view of [things] in the interchange with the speaker,” Happer said. “This guy looked at me and said, ‘What answer would you like?’ I knew I was in trouble then. This was a community even in the early 1990s that was being turned political. [The attitude was] ‘Give me all this money, and I’ll get the answer you like.’ ”

[x-y-no]

When he was at DOE under Bush 41 he managed a number of programs, including their climate research.


He wasn't impressed by the attitudes of the climate change people seeking funding...

Happer explained that his beliefs about climate change come from his experience at the Department of Energy, at which Happer said he supervised all non-weapons energy research, including climate change research. Managing a budget of more than $3 billion, Happer said he felt compelled to make sure it was being spent properly. “I would have [researchers] come in, and they would brief me on their topics,” Happer explained. “They would show up. Shiny faces, presentation ready to go. I would ask them questions, and they would be just delighted when you asked. That was true of almost every group that came in.”

The exceptions were climate change scientists, he said.

“They would give me a briefing. It was a completely different experience. I remember one speaker who asked why I wanted to know, why I asked that question. So I said, you know I always ask questions at these briefings … I often get a much better view of [things] in the interchange with the speaker,” Happer said. “This guy looked at me and said, ‘What answer would you like?’ I knew I was in trouble then. This was a community even in the early 1990s that was being turned political. [The attitude was] ‘Give me all this money, and I’ll get the answer you like.’ ”

I'm kind of confused. DOE must get thousands, if not tens of thousands, of grant applications a year. So he'd make people travel to DC, racking up travel and lodging costs, so they could give him an in-person presentation of their proposal in a field he doesn't know? And this was supposed to save money?

That's like nothing I've ever heard of.

I'm also not terribly clear about what role the Energy Department plays in climate research funding. I thought it was almost all funded by NASA, NOAA and NSF.

[gigabite]

I understand what you mean about absorptive radiation. I am just not convinced that it is a valid point. Bunkering against radiation is part of the science of nuclear electric generation. The standards are ridged, but the compounds are basic calcium carbonate and just plain carbon.

Factoring out a known amount of radiation from a machine of a known mass can’t be more than a few buttons worth of factors. It has got to be easier than reducing the heat sink of hundreds of urban environments for population, industrial intensity, and carbon output for hundreds of years and compensating for missing data.

A lot to the primary heating of Earth comes from UV and Infrared radiation. The irradiance metric blurs that signature in a clump of other bandwidths. The process of measuring and meaning the whole spectrum hides the variance of primary heaters which complicates the understanding of the size of the Sun/distance from Earth relationship to the ground temperature of earth as measured by thermometer.

Nobody turns of the tele and gets the current radiation count. Your talking apples and oranges here. Temperature and solar irradiance are not the same.

I’m sure that the pricing had more to do with selecting the metric than efficiency of the metric. That is to say cost go up as difficulty increases. In other words it is more profitable for a NASA contractor to invent a complicated process and peripheral equipment than it is to just pull a digital thermometer off the shelf.

It just does not make sense to guess at the temperature of the Sun with an accepted but heretofore unproven ancient formula when it is easer to measure it. I mean really is the fate of all life on Earth less important than the genetic history of Mars if any?

[x-y-no]

I understand what you mean about absorptive radiation. I am just not convinced that it is a valid point. Bunkering against radiation is part of the science of nuclear electric generation. The standards are ridged, but the compounds are basic calcium carbonate and just plain carbon.

OK, two questions:

What thermometer exists in space that has such shielding?

Even if such exists, wouldn't one still have the same problem with the calcium carbonate and/or carbon shielding gradually changing character as it is subjected to cosmic radiation?

Factoring out a known amount of radiation from a machine of a known mass can’t be more than a few buttons worth of factors. It has got to be easier than reducing the heat sink of hundreds of urban environments for population, industrial intensity, and carbon output for hundreds of years and compensating for missing data.

How, precisely would that be done? It seems to me you'd need a whole other instrument up there to measure the absorptive/radiative properties of the thermometer and attached structure in order to calculate the correction. Isn't it a lot simpler to (as we do) directly measure the radiation received from the sun across the entire spectrum?

A lot to the primary heating of Earth comes from UV and Infrared radiation. The irradiance metric blurs that signature in a clump of other bandwidths. The process of measuring and meaning the whole spectrum hides the variance of primary heaters which complicates the understanding of the size of the Sun/distance from Earth relationship to the ground temperature of earth as measured by thermometer.

NASA’s Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment measures the whole spectrum both in aggregate (Total Irradiance Monitor) and by frequency (Spectral Irradiance Monitor). It seems to me this is far superior to a secondary measure like the temperature of a structure in space.

Now older surface-based measurements need to be corrected in order to mesh with SORCE measurements, but since the sun's radiation fairly predictably correlates with a black-body radiation profile, that's doable.

Nobody turns of the tele and gets the current radiation count. Your talking apples and oranges here. Temperature and solar irradiance are not the same.

You lost me. I don't know what this is in reference to. If anything, this seems to be an argument against your idea of using the temperature of an object in space to estimate the solar energy delivered to Earth.

[Skyhawk]

When he was at DOE under Bush 41 he managed a number of programs, including their climate research.


He wasn't impressed by the attitudes of the climate change people seeking funding...

Happer explained that his beliefs about climate change come from his experience at the Department of Energy, at which Happer said he supervised all non-weapons energy research, including climate change research. Managing a budget of more than $3 billion, Happer said he felt compelled to make sure it was being spent properly. “I would have [researchers] come in, and they would brief me on their topics,” Happer explained. “They would show up. Shiny faces, presentation ready to go. I would ask them questions, and they would be just delighted when you asked. That was true of almost every group that came in.”

The exceptions were climate change scientists, he said.

“They would give me a briefing. It was a completely different experience. I remember one speaker who asked why I wanted to know, why I asked that question. So I said, you know I always ask questions at these briefings … I often get a much better view of [things] in the interchange with the speaker,” Happer said. “This guy looked at me and said, ‘What answer would you like?’ I knew I was in trouble then. This was a community even in the early 1990s that was being turned political. [The attitude was] ‘Give me all this money, and I’ll get the answer you like.’ ”

I'm kind of confused. DOE must get thousands, if not tens of thousands, of grant applications a year. So he'd make people travel to DC, racking up travel and lodging costs, so they could give him an in-person presentation of their proposal in a field he doesn't know? And this was supposed to save money?

That's like nothing I've ever heard of.

I'm also not terribly clear about what role the Energy Department plays in climate research funding. I thought it was almost all funded by NASA, NOAA and NSF.

I see nothing to indicate that this refers to proposals. I would understand it to refer to funded projects, which are reviewed from time to time. Neither does it necessarily indicate that the researcher travelled to Washington. The reviewer(s) could have instead travelled to one of the DOE labs to review the in-house research or review research done at nearby universities. The review could also have been done at common location where both reviewer(s) and researchers were required to travel for the review. I am aware of reviews that have occurred in a hotel meeting room at a hub airport for the convenience of the reviewers. When I say reviewers I mean a team of six or so "experts". I recall one such team reviewing CO2 separation and sequestration research that included an ecologist. This expert was hardly qualified to understand the chemical engineering aspects of the separation process or the reservoir engineering aspects of the geological sequestation. A physicist would certainly more qualified that an ecologist to understand both aspects.

[x-y-no]

I see nothing to indicate that this refers to proposals. I would understand it to refer to funded projects, which are reviewed from time to time. Neither does it necessarily indicate that the researcher travelled to Washington. The reviewer(s) could have instead travelled to one of the DOE labs to review the in-house research or review research done at nearby universities. The review could also have been done at common location where both reviewer(s) and researchers were required to travel for the review. I am aware of reviews that have occurred in a hotel meeting room at a hub airport for the convenience of the reviewers. When I say reviewers I mean a team of six or so "experts". I recall one such team reviewing CO2 separation and sequestration research that included an ecologist. This expert was hardly qualified to understand the chemical engineering aspects of the separation process or the reservoir engineering aspects of the geological sequestation. A physicist would certainly more qualified that an ecologist to understand both aspects.

OK, it's quite possible I misunderstood what he was saying here. Still I maintain we don't have anything like the information we need to evaluate his narrative. For instance, I can well imagine that the ‘What answer would you like?’ that he says one researcher hit him with was actually a request that he clarify what he was looking for, i.e. what it was that he didn't understand. We just don't know. And frankly, I find it more plausible that Dr. Happer simply didn't understand what he was being told than that the many, many researchers in the field are either incompetent or dishonest.

[Skyhawk]

I find Dr. Happer's statements quite believeable. I have on more than one occasion been met with hostility from a presenter when asking a question of a researcher that focussed light on the fact that the research was not well thought out. There's a lot of "research" being done that shouldn't be done. There are plenty of PhDs who don't do PhD quality work. The system is broken in my opinion.

[gigabite]

http://lasp.colorado.edu/cgi-bin/ion-p? ... pectra.ion
x-y-no, thanks for link interesting stuff low precision, limited range. It does show the aphelion perihelion wobble.




TAO temperature 180W 0N 1998-2009