The Science of PR and non-Science of Climate Change Denial

It is not evolution, dork boy, but the growth will happen. And most, if not all folks here do not need a primer from a layman.

SloTard, the ever so stupid political opinion injecting retarded bastard mentality basher, on the loose again.

This is where you show everyone your ZERO credibilty standard. It worked.

After over 4 billion years to accrete and settle in as an orbiting planet, and you want to give it a gentle push outward, and think things wont get all f***ed up by the perturbation required.

It may become desirable, but we will be long dead or long gone by then, and no desire is actually going to give us the capacity to move our planet out near or even past Mars' orbit.

And that would only gain us a little more time.

The sun will not only grow, but it will also get hotter.

There is no hope even for an "Expanded Orbit Earth" to exist.

So, what is your special hand of god solution, idiot?

Oh... that's right... you do not have enough grasp of physics to understand what is required, much less have any idea about the mechanism to produce the change.

The evolving condition of a star isn't Darwinian evolution but the concept of progressive change is common to both.

Since you clearly are "a person who is not qualified in a given profession and/or does not have specific knowledge of a certain subject", your objection to my pontifications is mere bile.

And you are?

Sorry, punk, but you not being employed is NOT a profession, and unless you are CURRENTLY taking a living from something, you are NOT a professional in that arena.

So whatever claim you are about to make, it is false, and you have been obsolete for decades.

I think you need to polish your reading skills. It's carbohydrates that are being produced by photosynthesis, not CO2. And the line was produced by Jasen Betts, whose name you have managed to lose from the contributor string.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Cite!

Dig up a forest and you'll not find much. You get some charcoal (which is fairly inert) produced by forest fires, but mostly it stays in the carbon cycle, being returned to the air by decay (or fire)

to get bulk sequestration you need to trap the biomass in an anerobic space, like swamp, peat bog or a tundra.

--
umop apisdn

Nor do I claim to be. I worked for about forty years as an electronic engineer, qualified by no more than aptitude and experience - my Ph.D. is in physical chemistry, not electronics.

Electronic engineering is like that. The semi-conductor business keeps on introducing new and better integrated circuits, and what was industry standard a few years ago becomes obsolete. One has to keep on discovering new skills.

I'm better than most at keeping up with the new stuff. You seem to have trouble with simple skills - like reading - and your opinion on anything more demanding isn't really to be relied on.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

e

ce,

Since James Arthur isn't exactly well-informed, you might have mentioned th at a lot of CO2 sequestration goes through calcium carbonate formation in m ollusc shells, which end up as carbonate rock, only releasing the CO2 when the carbonate rocks are subducted, and the CO2 comes back up to the surface via volcanoes.

Global warming and ocean acidification may slow that route of carbon captur e.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

+1

And regarding the number of researchers, studies, etc questioning global warming, factor in that the overwhelming source of funding is from govts that are focusing that money on only one side of the issue. If you want to do research that proves global warming, you'll get funding. If you choose the other side, you won't get govt funding. You will get ridicule, possibly lose chances for promotion and similar. And if you take funding from private sources, then they accuse you of being a sell out, shill for hire, etc. What then are all the pro global warming scientists who take money from govts that have declared their positions on global warming?

I'm sure the same was said about the reality of the sun revolving around the earth...... Why, you can see it with your own eyes!

de-emis

b-green

temps

for

s

ted the silliness

ich is

bon

ata

th

ate

e

s,

,

?s

s

?s

:

?s

+1

A good example of what's going on. And apparently the fact that the global warming folks are overwhelmingly supported by govt that have already made their firm positions on global warming know, doesn't bother anyone. Positions that will have already made billions and will make trillions for all kinds of private companies that are providing financial support to politicians and who knows what beyond that. Yet if some researcher on the other side happened to take some funding from say an oil, company, why OMG! Let's see all their emails and put them through an "investigation". The above is something that all legitimate scientists should agree is wrong.

In John Larkin's rather less than well-informed opinion.

Because you will probably deserve it. There's a lot of evidence that global warming is real, and the papers that have put up alternative explanations have been easy to falsify.

See if you can get funding for research to prove 2+2 = 3.

Only from particular private sources, like Exxon-Mobil and its front organisations. And those organisations don't fund research, but rather conferences where denialist propagandists present opinion papers that wouldn't get through peer-review.

The one's who get their papers published in peer-reviewed journals? Sane.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

The problem is not what you can see, but how you understand what you see.

The notion that the Earth revolves around the Sun had been proposed as early as the 3rd century BC by Aristarchus of Samos, but it took a while to accumulate the experimental observations that validated the theory - and falsified all the others.

We've got a better system for publicising and testing hypotheses these days - peer-reviewed scintific journals. Try to find out what they say about global warming - as opposed to what gets shoved in your face by denialist web-sites.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Both negative feedbacks were in the models, but at lower levels than the latest research reveals. James Arthur doesn't know what he's talking about.

It shouldn't.The case had become very persuasive around 1990, and the 100,000 year ice-core data that started coming in around then made the case pretty much unassailable.

You may think that we should be researching the proposition that 2 + 2 = 3, but few think it a sueful way to spend research money.

Exxon-Mobil doesn't fund denialists directly, but through front organisations

If it wasn't wrong, why would they hide it?

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

1+1+1+1...goes to infinity for crying out loud, that's the point. If there's no increasing loss with temperature--negative feedback--then there's a net increase year on year and the place burns up.

Oh for Pete's sake, if there's a net accumulation year after year, IT GETS HOTTER. If there were a net annual loss, IT WOULD BE GETTING COLDER.

Since you presumably believe the former, there has to be negative feedback or the Earth would've fried ages ago.

So many obvious, basic errors, failure to understand the simplest principles. Boring.

Cheers, James Arthur

a

ack,

e's

t

Climate change is about heat flux, not heat accumulation. This is pretty ba sic physics, and you failure to appreciate it is evidence of a rather serio us cognitive deficit.

The comes in as solar radiation, from a rather warm black body, and is re-r adiated in all direction by the earth - which falls short of being a black body, since the effective radiating altitude for CO2 absorbtion/radiation f requencies is a lot higher and cooler than water-vapour radiating frequenci es.

Global warming is all about changes in the the height of these effective ra diating altitudes.

There's no significant heat accumulation - while the earth as a whole does become a bit warmer, the Hinshelwood-Lindemann approximation is good enoug h for most purposes.

The relevant negative feedback is that the power radiated by a body at a gi ven temperature increases as the fourth power of it's temperature. Anthropp ogenic global warming is all about where the effective radiating altitudes are in the atmosphere - adding CO2 to the atmosphere makes them higher - at the CO2 absorbtion frequencies - which has the additional effect - a posit ive feedback - of increasing the H2O vapour levels in the atmosphere, which lifts the effective radiating altitude for the H2O absorbtion frequencies.

Yes. You are sad case.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

That is only true when the forward open loop system gain is >= 1.

But it is not true in the case of the climate system where the open loop gain starting from radiative equilibrium conditions is about 1/4.

Hint: Av = G/(1-GH) where G is the open loop gain and H is the feedback

Provided that GH < 1 it doesn't diverge.

You are too used to ideal opamps where G ~ 10^6.

1+1+1 goes to infinity and so does 1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 + ...

But that is totally irrelevant here.

Absent any radiation losses the Earth's temperature would only rise until it was at the same temperature as the solar photosphere at most. Thermodynamics has certain universal laws that are always obeyed.

Radiation losses scaling as T^4 put quite a good break on potential runaways provided that you don't boil the oceans at the equator (after that point all bets are off and you get Venus Mk II - the hell planet).

And it is getting hotter year on year but only by a very small amount so that the deniers for hire pretend it isn't happening. Spring is now about two weeks earlier than when I was a child and tender perennials grown as annuals in the UK have now survived two consecutive "winters".

The Earth sits in radiative equilibrium balance with the sun at ~6000K subtending an angle of about 0.01 radian and 4pi - 10^-4 of space at 4K. There is actually a small amount of positive feedback in the system so that minor changes in insolation map to more change in temperature than you would expect from the first order calculation (mainly by moving the permanent snow line, glaciers and ice cover at the poles).

Provided that the positive feedback component r is less than unity the infinite sum does not diverge and the infinite series sums to a/(1-r).

The problems are all yours. The thing that protects us from total runaway is that the greenhouse effect scales with log(pCO2) to a fairly good approximation which means that doubling CO2 concentration adds a modest delta T to the global temperature estimated to be about 3K.

--
Regards, 
Martin Brown

You're introducing unnecessary abstractions. If there's a net 3W/m^2 accumulation each year, it runs away.

Adding a 10 joules a year and leaking 9 would deposit a joule a year, ad infinitum. That is essentially the AGW claim, also.

Granted that we won't exceed sun temp., so there is a limit. We're rather far from that though, aren't we?

Right, a loss that increases with temperature. Another, not previously accounted for, is forests sinking more CO2.

Here I would've planted weeks ago, but instead had 12oF.

Not terribly long ago the northern US was under a mile of ice, the Laurentide Ice Sheet. I too assume it's warmer now than then.

Long before that it was much warmer, life thrived, and laid down fossil carbon deposits we're discovering today.

That's the way of things.

It's great you can solve such a complicated energy balance with certainty by inspection, when the most sophisticated models consistently get it wrong.

It's entirely possible the earth gets a little warmer, clouds get a little denser, and that's it. Or trees grow a bit better & faster. Etc. What we do know as a factual matter is that current models don't include those feedbacks, which could easily overwhelm their alarmist results.

Once upon a time ALL that fossil carbon and more was circulating in the atmosphere, and CO2 concentrations were much higher. Life evolved and thrived.

I fully appreciate the greenhouse arguments. I also fully appreciate that the alleged excess boils down to less than the measurements' uncertainty. Having recently had trouble determining such energy balances, using precision instruments on a piece of equipment *on my bench,* I further appreciate how more difficult and uncertain accurate balances are for an entire planet. My situation had several interactive factors with positive feedbacks; Earth is a lot worse.

I'm not averse to the likelihood we're warming the planet. The planet has been warming a long time, and most of us wouldn't be here if it hadn't. That we NEVER hear the potential benefits means the people promoting the disaster aren't disinterested, they're zealots pressing for a political result.

Above you mentioned you're getting spring two weeks earlier. Sloman will babble about warmth not increasing crop yields, citing stoma, and oblivious to a longer growing season. It's laughable.

It's the loons iterating models barely valid one year fifty years, then making smug pronouncements in their own interest that are annoying.

Cheers, James Arthur

: a p

Not remotely. The AGW case is that the number of joules running through the system - the heat absorbed from solar radiation every second - is fairly c lose to constant, but that it's reradiated from higher in the atmosphere wh en there are more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Because the temperature of the layer of the atmosphere that's actually doin g the re-radiating has to remain pretty much the same, the atmospheric laye rs below it all have to become a bit warmer in order to sustain the thermal gradient.

Since we live at the bottom of the atmosphere, we see our environment getti ng warmer. This does permanently tie up a few joules, but that's an epiphen omena.

r

As Martin Brown proceeded to explain. James Arthur has a habit of snipping that kind of explanation, making it even more obvious that he doesn't bothe r reading them.

Quite why James Arthur thinks that forest CO2 absorbtion wasn't accounted f or escapes me.

talks about finding more carbon-capture than expected in tropical rain fore st.

The tropical forests aren't actually "sinking" more CO2. They exist by usin g photosynthesis to turn CO2 into carbohydrates, and that carbohydrate - pa rticularly in tropical rain forest - eventually rots back to CO2 after the trees and shrubs have died. What the NASA study showed was that more CO2 me ant more carbohydrate per tree, so that there's more CO2 in transit through the tropical forests than earlier researchers had thought.

Boreal forests that create peat bogs do actually sink CO2. The peat bogs tu rn into brown coal deposits over geological time, and eventually black coal .

o

It's been warmer than that for about 10,000 years. Now its getting even war mer.

The plants that we rely on for food today aren't the ones that thrived back then.

.

They don't. Produce an example of a model that gets it wrong - or got it wr ong when it mattered. This web-page lists a few, but sets their failure in context.

e

Not likely. Cloud cover is fixed at close to 50% by conservation of matter - clouds appear in rising cooling air, and vanish in falling warming air. Since air is conserved, only half of it contains clouds. Lindzen thought up a complicated way of getting around this, but it turns out not to happen i n the real world.

Actually they do, but in a fairly crude way. The results aren't alarmist, b ut rather as close to realistic as we can get. It's perfectly reasonable to be unhappy about the likely consequences of persistent anthropogenic globa l warming, and somewhat irrational to deride these legitimate anxieties on the basis of a very imperfect grasp of the physics involved.

A lot more CO2 gets sequestered as carbonate rocks than ever gets buried as fossil carbon. Back when atmospheric CO2 levels were much higher the sun w asn't radiating as much, and we needed about 3000ppm CO2 in the atmosphere to avoid an ice age.

Life certainly thrived back then, but it's less certain that our agricultur e would have done well. Nobody's going to thank us for engineering a world where weeds do splendidly and our crops fail.

Clearly you don't, otherwise you would be arguing in watts rather than joul es.

he

You imagine this to be the case. If you did - in fact - fully appreciate th e technical case, you wouldn't have been talking about joules.

Earth is certainly more complicated than your bench-top, but cleverer peopl e than you have been working on it a lot longer. The sort of budget that pu ts monitoring satellites in orbit to check out the mass of carbohydrate tie d up in the tropical forests would seem to be beyond your resources.

But you are averse to any kind of political action that would slow down the process.

if

There is an argument that the alternation between ice-ages and inter-glacia ls created an environment where the cultural transmission of skills and ada ptions was particularly valuable. The planet has been warming and cooling o n a roughly 100,000 year cycle for the past few million years, but your cho ice of words suggests that you aren't conscious of this.

What's going on at the moment is a remarkably rapid warming - the hockey-st ick curve - and the last time the planet saw anything like as quick, some 5

5.8 million years ago

quite a few new species appeared, which is to say the populations of at lea st some of the pre-existing species crashed.

The potential benefits will be nice. The potential disasters will kill peop le - a human population crash is definitely a possibility - and prudent obs ervers do pay more attention to them

What's less laughable is pest species spreading further from the equator, b ecause the hard frosts that killed them off aren't happening as often.

Our agriculture has been selecting crop plants that do well in the current environment for the past five or six thousand years. We are now changing th at environment. Our crop plants won't be as well adapted to the new environ ment and some weed or other will be better adapted. James Arthur's optimism is anything but laughable - it is feckless ignorance.

s, then making smug pronouncements in their own interest that are annoying.

Not nearly as annoying as self-appointed experts pontificating about models they don't remotely understand because they don't like the political impli cations of what the science is telling us.

Right-wingers are peculiarly prone to ignoring rational advice when it does n't suit their principles.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney