Wednesday, February 06, 2013

Successful Predictions of Climate Science

Via Steve Easterbrook at John Baez's great blog, Azimuth: a talk by Ray Pierrehumbert at the recent AGU conference in San Francisco:


Steve has a list of these predictions here.

John's blog is definitely worth checking out -- he's as close to a modern polymath as I've found.  (He helped me by agreeing to read a recent article of mine in the draft phase, providing very helpful comments.)  Lately he has turned some of his large attention to climate change.

He's one of the very first bloggers ever -- I first discovered his This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics back in the 1990s, via gopher.

(If you don't know what gopher is, you need to study your Internet history, son.)

15 comments:

gallopingcamel said...

These earnest presentations of the Arrhenius theory of CO2 driven warming are simply...........wrong! Universities around the world are teaching nonsense in "Climate 101".

The real GHE (Greenhouse Effect) is not 33K but 134K. The Arrhenius theory can explain at most 3K of the GHE. The 1.2K per doubling is a risible fantasy.

There is a theory than fits the observed data with great precision and it says that the main variable that determined planetary surface temperatures are TSI (Total Solar Irradiance) and pressure. All the other variables are far less important.

David Appell said...

Sure.

gallopingcamel said...

David,
You should be skeptical, but can you explain how CO2 can cause more than 3 K of GHE (Greenhouse Effect)?
http://diggingintheclay.wordpress.com/2013/02/16/unified-theory-of-climate-revisited/

Please take it as a compliment that I omitted you from the list of echo chamber operators,

gallopingcamel said...

David,
You should be skeptical but can you prove that CO2 is capable of contributing more than 3 K to the GHE (Greenhouse Effect)?
http://diggingintheclay.wordpress.com/2013/02/16/unified-theory-of-climate-revisited/

Please consider it a compliment when I did not include you in my list of echo chamber operators.

David Appell said...

Oh, yes: Nikolov & Zeller.

Has that passed peer review yet?

Has it ever come close to predicting anything, such as the simple temperature of the lunar survface? Last time I heard it had not, while standard radiative theory predicts it exactly:
http://davidappell.blogspot.com/2012/04/norfolk-constabulary-made-wrong-charges.html

The magnitude of the greenhouse effect for Earth is calculated here (Figure 2):

Lacis, A.A et al, 2010: "Atmospheric CO2: Principal control knob governing Earth's temperature," Science, 330, 356-359.
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/la09300d.html

The value is 35 C, with which the canonical simple result agrees very closely.

gallopingcamel said...

David,
Thanks for that Lacis et al. link. The paper is based on a fallacy that I demolished in the link (above). To save you the trouble of reading my post here is a summary:

On Earth, CO2 cannot deliver more than 15 Watts per square meter of forcing even when there is no "Competition" from other gases and vapors. Clouds have the effect of reducing the proportion of surface radiation leaving a planet.

On a planet with 100% cloud cover (e.g. Venus) the radiative properties of the gases below the cloud tops are irrelevant as the clouds alone define emissivity.

Just for the intellectual exercise I calculated the radiation emitted by the surface of Venus and got the same figure as Lacis et al. (!6,100 Watts/square meter). Then I calculated the maximum forcing that CO2 could produce. It came out at 923 Watts/m2 or 6% of the total. Even if there were no clouds that would warm Venus by less than 4 Kelvin. Some "Runaway Greenhouse Effect"! Hansen wants us to believe in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairies.

It is sad that scientists can so easily be corrupted. Dangle a few billion dollars and you will find plenty of "Scientists" who will say whatever you want to hear!

David Appell said...

Sure, Peter.

Let me know when your work passes peer review and gets published somewhere, OK? It's not worth wasting time ferreting out the errors on this kind of crackpot science, because there's no end to it and the crackpots are never convinced anyway.

David Appell said...

Just one small example of your errors, Peter, is applying Denning's method to the Moon.

Denning assumes a large-scale (planetary wide) temperature equilibrium, which is not true for the Moon since it has no atmosphere.

Instead, radiative equilibrium holds at each point where the Sun shines.

As I showed here (which you did not seem to read)
http://davidappell.blogspot.com/2012/04/norfolk-constabulary-made-wrong-charges.html

applying that condition predicts the Moon's surface temperature AT EVERY POINT.

Hence, it also correctly predicts the equatorial average: 212 K.

Meanwhile neither you or N&Z can correctly predict this average, let alone the lunar temperature at any point.

gallopingcamel said...

David,
The key statement you made in that link above is:
"....and that the planet's temperature is uniform over its entire surface."

Which is exactly why Scott Denning and his supporters get the wrong answer. In my post I point that out:
"The Moon’s observed temperature would have come out as they predicted if the Moon was a thermal “Super Conductor”, thus ensuring a uniform surface temperature. Given that this is an unrealistic assumption what needs to be done?
Simply said, use the right equation."

In your link you actually quote the right equation:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-oM03UiN0fXE/T3s6Mup56EI/AAAAAAAAAz0/tah5IiIA0FY/s1600/Tgb.jpg

It seems you "get it" after all.

Fortunately, there is a way to test whose equations are right. The Diviner LRE says the Moon's average temperature is 154 K rather than the 255 K that is incorrectly assumed by so many "Consensus" scientists.

gallopingcamel said...

My guess is that N&K will get published in peer reviewed journals. At least their calculations correspond closely with observations for a wide range of planets and moons.

Plenty of nonsense is published in peer reviewed papers (e.g. MBH98, Lacis et al, 2010 and hundreds more). There is nothing wrong with that as all scientific hypotheses will eventually be overturned as our understanding improves.

David Appell said...

You have applied Scott Denning's calculation where it does not apply.

Then you blame him for it.

But the misapplication is yours, not his.

David Appell said...

Peter: Your method, or N&Z's, does not come close to predicting the average lunar surface temperature.

Yet mine does. It predicts the average, and it predicts the exact curve for all longitudes.

Yet for some reason you cling to an N&Z-like theory. Why?

David Appell said...

Guesses about when/if N&Z will get published aren't good enough.

Have you written them to ask?

Crackpots like you certainly don't get a say about whether Lacis et al belongs in Science magazine. Your blog posts are riddled with elementary errors that would make an undergraduate blush.

gallopingcamel said...

David,
You said: "Crackpots like you certainly don't get a say about whether Lacis et al belongs in Science magazine. Your blog posts are riddled with elementary errors that would make an undergraduate blush."

1. Name calling is a sure sign that you lost the argument.

2. I put enough detail in my post at DITC to enable people like you to point out the schoolboy howlers. Instead of doing that you indulge in rhetoric.

One more time. All that talk about doublings is nonsense because the effect that GHGs have on a planet's emissivity is limited. In the case of Earth, CO2 on its own can't deliver more than 15 W/sq meter of "forcing" even under ideal conditions where it has no competition from other gases or clouds.

The effect is diminished proportionally when there is cloud cover. On Venus with its 100% cloud cover the "forcing" caused by CO2 is zero even though the atmosphere is 97% CO2.

You should be asking where the GHE really comes from. The Arrhenius theory can't come close to explaining even 33 K of warming let alone the real warming that is ~134 K. N&K's equations match observations far better than those of the folks who cling to Arrhenius.

If there is anyone who has truly earned the "Crackpot" label, it is James Hansen.

David Appell said...

Peter, you clearly fit the definition of a crackpot:

The Crackpot Index
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html