J
JasonSB
Guest
Yes, of course. Unfortunately I suspect that you will choose not to “believe” it, no matter what I say.
Link? Looks like it’s still rising to me.
- Status
M
Monte_RCMS
Guest
Whenever someone uses hoakey graphs, then my suspicions are immediately aroused.
The carbon dioxide graph should start at zero. it does not.
The temperature anomaly graph only covers one short period of history, a very short period. Show the temperature anomaly graph for a couple of hundred years and it might have some credibility … maybe.
If you have a temperature graph that starts in January at zero and stops in August at 100, and then demand your conclusion that by December the temperature would be 200, that conclusion would be based on utterly faulty graphology. Not science.
By cherry picking the graphic scales, what you are doing is basically using propaganda, not science.
Tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
The carbon dioxide graph should start at zero. it does not.
The temperature anomaly graph only covers one short period of history, a very short period. Show the temperature anomaly graph for a couple of hundred years and it might have some credibility … maybe.
If you have a temperature graph that starts in January at zero and stops in August at 100, and then demand your conclusion that by December the temperature would be 200, that conclusion would be based on utterly faulty graphology. Not science.
By cherry picking the graphic scales, what you are doing is basically using propaganda, not science.
Tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
C
Calliso
Guest
I could be wrong but I am guessing the co2 part of the graph doesn;t start at 0 because co2 levels aren;t at 0. I am not sure what specific graph you are looking at but I am guessing it starts at about 290 or so on the co2 part of the graph right?
M
Monte_RCMS
Guest
And they have special names for the estrogen, so as not to upset liberals too much.Didja know one of the biggest pollutants in our water is Estrogen - Progesterone’s?
lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/feb/08021805.html
Maybe we can get some Progressive - Liberal - ecologists Catholics to give up Birth Control or at least don’t pee in any place that goes into our water tables??
:tiphat:HatTip To my Friend Monte
I’ll post it here.
M
Monte_RCMS
Guest
Nice graphs.First you accepted the graph as **" evidence of AGW’ ** …Now you claim that the graph was manipulated / adjusted.
Let’s say we agree.
Then Logically, ALL proven manipulated /adjusted graphs should be thrown out - correct?
Since the CRU used nothing but proven subjectively - preducdical ] manipulated / adjustments that because of purposely dumping the raw data - So that any valididy can be confirmed as truthful - The throw out of Medieavl Warming and Little Ice Age to get their graph. If included, the graph changes like this bottom graph http://americanelephant.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/mwp-hockey-warming_graph.gif?w=419&h=307 ]…
Logically, we can throw out any graphs made by CRU or Mr. Hansen…Mr. Mann…Mr. Briffa…et al
ABSOLUTELY!!! You are now catching onErgo ALL of the AGW hypothesis.
Actually, no. The Graph does NOT show that. Many other Glaciers are stable and many are growing, using not a model but observational evidence, Hard Science, to support this claim…
Are they receding OR shifting? Something, NOT addressed by IPCC.
Can you tell by a picture…used by IPCC IF receding or shifting? No.
If receding… can a cause - effect be established to support the claims this is because of AGW? - NOT as yet Example, the Mt. Kilimanjaro EVIDENCED, at one time by IPCC - Mr. Gore et al… as proof of AGW…Proven NOT to be because of AGW.
The greatest threat to the hypothesis of AGW - is not the denalists - it’s observational HARD ] Science, NOT one claim of the hypothesis of AGW has withstood the light of observational science. . -kimmie
Does this mean the temperatures are not warming OR cooling? ABSOLUTELY NOT. IT means the hypothesis of AGW is based on flawed (name removed by moderator)ut going in - flawed output coming out.
I’ll try to add one on arctic ice extent.
K
kimmielittle
Guest
The VERY Honest IPCC seems to get ripped on crediblity:
nytimes.com/2010/08/31/world/31nations.html?_r=2
foxnews.com/scitech/2010/08/30/independent-audit-slams-un-climate-panel/
nytimes.com/2010/08/31/world/31nations.html?_r=2
K
kimmielittle
Guest
OR because Gavin Schmidt of RealClimate and IPCC, Kiehl and Trenberth diagram (1997)et al DOUBLE the effects of CO2 .
climatechangedispatch.com/climate-reports/7055-nasa-charged-in-new-climate-fakery-greenhouse-gas-data-bogus
What happens without the X 2 multiplication factor?
J
JasonSB
Guest
OK, here’s what I don’t understand: you say you don’t believe RealClimate et al because they have “credibility problems”. Then you link to websites like the above that have blatant errors. For some reason, your “skeptical” radar is disengaged and you blindly accept what they have to say without even thinking about what they’re saying – even when what they’re saying is obviously wrong! (Hint: Where does Judith Curry work? If he can’t even get basic stuff like that right, how can you trust everything else? The IPCC includes an erroneous claim about Himalayan glaciers in a 1,000-page report and you use it as an excuse to reject the whole thing, even when the error wasn’t even in the bit that talks about the science underpinning AGW. Double standards?)
It’s also clear from your question about “X 2” that you don’t understand even what Gavin Schmidt called a “pretty simple” model. Yet you unquestioningly accept claims about it that are patently wrong written by someone who is confused by high-school level geometry and who actually thinks that nobody realised that planets have thermal mass until he came along(!). (Here’s a question: how do you think scientists use borehole temperatures to reconstruct past temperatures if they don’t realise that the ground absorbs heat???)
I really don’t understand why there is such an enormous gap between the scepticism you apply to one side and the scepticism you apply to the other.
Anyway, if I can explain how the “X 2” factor comes about to your satisfaction, will you accept the greenhouse effect is real?
Well, I’m willing to put the effort in to explaining it. Hopefully you are willing to put the effort in to understanding.
Before I start, though – it is simply bizarre to criticise a “pretty simple” model designed to aid understanding of the greenhouse effect for ignoring the effect of rotation. It is patently absurd to even suggest that a model clearly described as “a stripped down mathematical model that is complex enough to include some interesting physics, but simple enough so that you can just write down the answer” with the caveat “Note that this is just going to be a qualitative description and can’t be used to quantitatively estimate the real world values” as something that is actually used by NASA to calculate expected temperatures.
J
JasonSB
Guest
OK, now on to the “X 2” in Gavin’s post, realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/04/learning-from-a-simple-model/
The model assumes a single layer of greenhouse gases above the surface that allow visible radiation in from the sun but traps a certain proportion of the outgoing longwave radiation from the earth.
Now your own link says that the “radiation is isotropic, meaning the intensity is equal in all directions”. This is true. When a greenhouse gas molecule intercepts a photon, it doesn’t “know” which direction it should re-emit it, so it re-emits it in a random direction. Half of those directions are towards the surface, and half are in the direction of space. (Actually, very slightly less than half are reflected back to towards the surface, because the surface is round, not flat, but that’s immaterial – i.e. the difference is too small to matter – so we’ll ignore it from now on.)
If a photon is emitted at an angle rather than straight up or straight down, does it matter? No – either it will go far enough that it either intercepts the surface or escapes into space, or it will hit another greenhouse gas molecule and be re-radiated in a different direction which, again, will either eventually hit the surface, escape into space, or hit another molecule that re-radiates it in a different direction, and so on.
Eventually all photons end up either hitting the surface or escaping into space, and the proportion of photons that go each way is 50:50.
Therefore we can simply say that the amount of radiation going back to the surface is R, say, and the amount of radiation escaping into space is also R. They must be the same because the CO2 molecules re-radiate the photons in any direction with equal probability and half of those directions are back towards the surface.
So that’s why Gavin has “lambda x A” radiation going in both directions from the greenhouse gas layer, which is equal to my R. He could have called them “half-lambda x A” if he wanted to and avoided the factor 2 that appears in the upcoming calculations, but he wanted to define a lambda that would have a useful physical meaning (emissivity).
Now let’s look at the three equations he derives from the diagram. (We’re assuming radiative balance, i.e., after the system has reached equilibrium.)
Surface: S + lambda x A = G
This means that the radiation that is absorbed by the surface coming from the sun (S) plus the radiation that is absorbed by the surface coming from the greenhouse gas layer above (lambda x A) must be the same as the radiation leaving the surface (G), since we’re at equilibrium.
Atmosphere: lambda x G = 2 x lambda x A
This means that the total energy absorbed by the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (lambda x G) must be equal to the total energy re-emitted by the atmosphere (half of which eventually goes up, half of which eventually goes down).
Planet: S = lambda x A + (1 - lambda) x G
This means that the energy being absorbed by the planet as a whole (S) must be the same as the energy being released by the planet into space (lambda x A = the half of the radiation emitted by the atmosphere that managed to escape into space and (1 - lambda) x G is the proportion of the radiation from the ground, G, that managed to slip straight through the atmosphere without being absorbed.)
Now we can do some basic algebra. First, take the second equation and rewrite it in terms of A:
lambda x G = 2 x lambda x A
therefore
lambda x A = lambda x G / 2
Now substitute that into the third equation:
S = lambda x A + (1 - lambda) x G
= lambda x G / 2 + (1 - lambda) x G
= lambda x G / 2 + G - lambda x G
= (1 - lambda/2) x G
Re-arrange for G:
G = S / (1 - lambda/2)
G is also equal to sigma x Ts^4 from the Stefan-Boltzmann equation, so now we can calculate the expected surface temperature Ts if we know S and lambda, both of which can be directly measured.
Now this is not the model used to estimate the actual temperature of any body – you have to make it more complex by taking into account conduction of heat from the surface on the side of the sun through the rest of the body as well as how quickly it is rotating, and you also need to use many “layers” rather than just a single layer for the greenhouse gases, and incorporate convection and clouds. It is not meant to be used for that. It’s exactly what Gavin said it was: a simple model to help explain the basics of the greenhouse effect. To claim that
The model assumes a single layer of greenhouse gases above the surface that allow visible radiation in from the sun but traps a certain proportion of the outgoing longwave radiation from the earth.
Now your own link says that the “radiation is isotropic, meaning the intensity is equal in all directions”. This is true. When a greenhouse gas molecule intercepts a photon, it doesn’t “know” which direction it should re-emit it, so it re-emits it in a random direction. Half of those directions are towards the surface, and half are in the direction of space. (Actually, very slightly less than half are reflected back to towards the surface, because the surface is round, not flat, but that’s immaterial – i.e. the difference is too small to matter – so we’ll ignore it from now on.)
If a photon is emitted at an angle rather than straight up or straight down, does it matter? No – either it will go far enough that it either intercepts the surface or escapes into space, or it will hit another greenhouse gas molecule and be re-radiated in a different direction which, again, will either eventually hit the surface, escape into space, or hit another molecule that re-radiates it in a different direction, and so on.
Eventually all photons end up either hitting the surface or escaping into space, and the proportion of photons that go each way is 50:50.
Therefore we can simply say that the amount of radiation going back to the surface is R, say, and the amount of radiation escaping into space is also R. They must be the same because the CO2 molecules re-radiate the photons in any direction with equal probability and half of those directions are back towards the surface.
So that’s why Gavin has “lambda x A” radiation going in both directions from the greenhouse gas layer, which is equal to my R. He could have called them “half-lambda x A” if he wanted to and avoided the factor 2 that appears in the upcoming calculations, but he wanted to define a lambda that would have a useful physical meaning (emissivity).
Now let’s look at the three equations he derives from the diagram. (We’re assuming radiative balance, i.e., after the system has reached equilibrium.)
Surface: S + lambda x A = G
This means that the radiation that is absorbed by the surface coming from the sun (S) plus the radiation that is absorbed by the surface coming from the greenhouse gas layer above (lambda x A) must be the same as the radiation leaving the surface (G), since we’re at equilibrium.
Atmosphere: lambda x G = 2 x lambda x A
This means that the total energy absorbed by the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (lambda x G) must be equal to the total energy re-emitted by the atmosphere (half of which eventually goes up, half of which eventually goes down).
Planet: S = lambda x A + (1 - lambda) x G
This means that the energy being absorbed by the planet as a whole (S) must be the same as the energy being released by the planet into space (lambda x A = the half of the radiation emitted by the atmosphere that managed to escape into space and (1 - lambda) x G is the proportion of the radiation from the ground, G, that managed to slip straight through the atmosphere without being absorbed.)
Now we can do some basic algebra. First, take the second equation and rewrite it in terms of A:
lambda x G = 2 x lambda x A
therefore
lambda x A = lambda x G / 2
Now substitute that into the third equation:
S = lambda x A + (1 - lambda) x G
= lambda x G / 2 + (1 - lambda) x G
= lambda x G / 2 + G - lambda x G
= (1 - lambda/2) x G
Re-arrange for G:
G = S / (1 - lambda/2)
G is also equal to sigma x Ts^4 from the Stefan-Boltzmann equation, so now we can calculate the expected surface temperature Ts if we know S and lambda, both of which can be directly measured.
Now this is not the model used to estimate the actual temperature of any body – you have to make it more complex by taking into account conduction of heat from the surface on the side of the sun through the rest of the body as well as how quickly it is rotating, and you also need to use many “layers” rather than just a single layer for the greenhouse gases, and incorporate convection and clouds. It is not meant to be used for that. It’s exactly what Gavin said it was: a simple model to help explain the basics of the greenhouse effect. To claim that
means the author of that website is either doesn’t understand what Gavin wrote (in which case you shouldn’t pay him much attention) or he’s deliberately misleading people about what Gaven wrote (in which case you shouldn’t pay him much attention). I’ve shown you every step of the working above, and as you can see, it doesn’t even multiply the “Stefan-Boltzmann blackbody numbers” by “an additional factor of two”! That sentence doesn’t even make sense! What is multiplied by two is lambda, the emissivity, and the factor of two comes in precisely because the CO2 molecules re-radiate in all different directions with equal probability which he himself mentioned on the very same page!
J
JasonSB
Guest
(Here’s another simple model that includes pictures that might help understanding. It’s similar except he uses “H” for lambda.A (which makes it look a bit simpler) but he also uses “S” for the total solar irradiance, which makes it a bit more complicated again: eesc.columbia.edu/courses/ees/climate/lectures/gh_kushnir.html)
If you ever wonder why I accept AGW, it’s because of episodes like this. Every time, without fail, when outlandish claims that seem to turn the scientific consensus on its head are examined in detail, they all fall apart due to really basic errors. Conversely, not only is the theory of AGW supported by reams of observational evidence, it’s all consistent no matter where they come from.
As Pat Michaels, the #1 AGW sceptic scientist said in the Peter Sinclair video I linked to before, “Make an argument that you can get killed on and you will kill us all” because you destroy any credibility you have. You’ll note that “skeptics” like Roger Pielke Sr and Roy Spencer have been trying to educate anti-AGW’ers recently to avoid the most outlandish claims because it makes the anti-AGW “movement” look bad:
wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/23/quantifying-the-greenhouse-effect/
Spencer:
drroyspencer.com/2010/07/yes-virginia-cooler-objects-can-make-warmer-objects-even-warmer-still/
drroyspencer.com/2010/08/comments-on-miskolczi%E2%80%99s-2010-controversial-greenhouse-theory/
drroyspencer.com/2010/08/help-back-radiation-has-invaded-my-backyard/
Heh – I just read down a bit further on the link you provided and came across this gem:
But secondly, if he really wants to know, why doesn’t he just download the source code and data from the GISS website? (giss.nasa.gov/tools/modelE/) Or perhaps pick up a climate science text book?
Wouldn’t you want a site that you consider “credible” to know this kind of stuff?
If you ever wonder why I accept AGW, it’s because of episodes like this. Every time, without fail, when outlandish claims that seem to turn the scientific consensus on its head are examined in detail, they all fall apart due to really basic errors. Conversely, not only is the theory of AGW supported by reams of observational evidence, it’s all consistent no matter where they come from.
As Pat Michaels, the #1 AGW sceptic scientist said in the Peter Sinclair video I linked to before, “Make an argument that you can get killed on and you will kill us all” because you destroy any credibility you have. You’ll note that “skeptics” like Roger Pielke Sr and Roy Spencer have been trying to educate anti-AGW’ers recently to avoid the most outlandish claims because it makes the anti-AGW “movement” look bad:
wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/23/quantifying-the-greenhouse-effect/
I guess Anthony Watts is in on the conspiracy now, too!
Spencer:
drroyspencer.com/2010/07/yes-virginia-cooler-objects-can-make-warmer-objects-even-warmer-still/
drroyspencer.com/2010/08/comments-on-miskolczi%E2%80%99s-2010-controversial-greenhouse-theory/
drroyspencer.com/2010/08/help-back-radiation-has-invaded-my-backyard/
Heh – I just read down a bit further on the link you provided and came across this gem:
Firstly, I don’t know why he’s talking to Judith Curry as if she somehow represents NASA or Gavin Schmidt – particularly when she’s normally considered by anti-AGW’ers as “on their side” and has had recent, very public run-ins with Gavin et al.
But secondly, if he really wants to know, why doesn’t he just download the source code and data from the GISS website? (giss.nasa.gov/tools/modelE/) Or perhaps pick up a climate science text book?
Wouldn’t you want a site that you consider “credible” to know this kind of stuff?
J
JasonSB
Guest
Did they find anything in the science that casts doubt on AGW?
E
Ender
Guest
I watched your fool-me-once video and have some major problems with it. First, their start date was 1995 and I was talking about the last decade. That may or may not make a difference but I used the last decade because that is what NOAA used in their 2009 annual State of the Climate report when they announced that, when the EN-SO effect was removed, the temperature change trend from 1999-2009 was 0.00 degrees (+/- 0.05). This is quite different than the 0.12 degree trend Phil Jones identified. So, which is correct? Is NOAA right or do you contest their report and reject their finding?
I understand the difference and your explanation may be completely valid, but it is wrong to claim that the loss of sea ice extent demonstrates global warming when in fact - world wide - there has been no such loss.
Oh, Even if one discounts high energy cosmic rays I thought there were more inasmuch as the IPCC included volcanic effects.
Do these effects distinguish enhanced greenhouse warming from the warming caused by ozone and aerosols? My understanding is that there is a very specific heat signature from enhanced greenhouse warming that should appear as a hot spot centered over the tropics at an altitude of about 10km. Has such a signature been found?
Ender
K
kimmielittle
Guest
My disregard stems from Ad Hominem attempts like this - Stems from blatant falsehood made by IPCC - 1/2 truths and obfuscatory comments from AGW’s themselves. THESE were NOT done by the Skeptics - These were CHOSEN ACTS by the IPCC - et al who promote the AGW hypothesis.These CHOSEN ACTS alone - are enough to question the whole AGW Hypothesis - One needs not get into the so called “Science”. Simple Logic alone, says that if the CASE WAS SETTLED - IF IT WERE AN HONEST HYPOTHESIS, there would be no need AT ALL for promoters of AGW to associate with anyone that does so.
Buy it if you want
An inert object can only radiate what it absorbs. NOT twice.
http://eosweb.larc.nasa.gov/EDDOCS/images/Erb/components2.gif
J
JasonSB
Guest
OK, the fact that you’re asking me about an even shorter period of time means you’ve completely missed the point of that video.
The point was this: don’t use short term temperature trends when you’re talking about climate. The reason they’re not statistically significant is that the signal:noise ratio is too high, not because warming hasn’t been happening. To push it to the extreme, I would think we were suffering imminent and catastrophic global warming every morning followed by an imminent ice age every evening if I took a trend length of a few hours. Clearly we need to take longer-term averages to filter out all that extraneous information and detect the underlying climate trend.
Tamino had a really good post on how long was required to filter out the noise and detect the underlying climate signal but it’s gone missing. His conclusion was that you really need at least 20 years of data to be sure, even 15 years wasn’t quite enough. (Note that one of the model runs I showed in an earlier post above showed a -0.04 C/decade trend for a 20-year period despite having a 0.2 C/decade trend overall.)
These images from RealClimate show the general idea:
Peter Sinclair has something similar:
youtube.com/watch?v=y15UGhhRd6M
Wouldn’t you expect them to be different? Different time periods, and one has had ENSO removed and one has not. Your question is a false dilemma.
Now I did try to check the NOAA report to see what it says but I couldn’t find any reference to what you said anywhere. Could you give me a page number?
That doesn’t make any sense. The theory predicts loss of ice extent in the northern hemisphere, and there is a loss of sea ice extent in the northern hemisphere. Therefore it is worth reporting that. The theory predicts a slight increase in extent in the southern hemisphere due to increased precipitation, followed decades later by a decline, and there has been a slight increase in extent. As I said, I expect Judith Curry’s work on this will probably be cited next time round.
But in what way does it make sense to add the two together? There’s nothing in the theory that says the total is in any way relevant. The two poles are different and separated by as much as they can be and still be on the same planet – hence the phrase “poles apart”!
J
JasonSB
Guest
Sorry, I did have more in there before and got bitten by the 6,000 character limit so I started going through cutting out the less relevant stuff and found I still couldn’t make it fit so I ended up splitting it in two anyway. But I’d already cut out the minor things, unfortunately.
Volcanoes produce CO2 (= enhanced greenhouse effect) as well as aerosols (short-term global cooling) but unless we get a period of intense volcanic activity (like the Siberian traps or the Deccan traps) then the effect of volcanoes on the long-term climate is not huge. Note that this is covered by my statement that there’s only two ways to warm the earth – aerosols don’t warm the earth, and CO2 is still a greenhouse gas whether it’s from volcanoes or your car.
Aerosols are a cooling effect (Figure SPM.2). Ozone is slight cooling to moderate warming (~20% of the magnitude of CO2), depending on where it is in the atmosphere (again, Figure SPM.2).
I think these graphs from the link I gave you before are really interesting because they show direct, quantitative observational evidence for the change in longwave radiation. This is the change in the earth’s spectrum from 1970 to 1996 due to changes in the atmospheric composition during that time:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/images/harries_radiation.gif
You have to love the optimism:
This is the spectrum of downward radiation from the atmosphere with water vapour removed:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/images/Greenhouse_Spectrum.gif
You can see CO2, ozone, CFC, and obviously methane all in there. (Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 and it’s actually been increasing at a much faster rate than CO2 has, but luckily is still only about 25% the actual impact. But methane is now escaping into the atmosphere from the northern permafrost as it warms, and there are also vast quantities in the continental shelfs that are now starting to outgas – making it one of those worrying “positive feedbacks”. I attended an interesting talk at a conference a few months ago about various techniques that the oil & gas industry are looking at to extract that methane to use as fuel while at the same time injecting CO2 back in to sequester it. The speaker didn’t say if it was carbon neutral or not, but I suspect it wasn’t. She also identified some quite serious challenges they have to overcome to prevent a disaster, which was quite a sensitive topic because it was at the same time the BP oil spill was big news. It seems like it’s still quite risky at the moment, with various explosion risks.)
My understanding is that the instrumentation isn’t really accurate enough to be able to detect a long-term trend in that and it’s not actually a fingerprint of AGW like statospheric cooling is. realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/12/tropical-troposphere-trends/, skepticalscience.com/tropospheric-hot-spot.htm
K
kimmielittle
Guest
Here’s another Outlandish claim
Prove that Global Temperatures USED - CAN be relied upon
Can you prove such a thing AS A GLOBAL Temperature in the first place?I believe, they are discussing the G & T papers?
K
kimmielittle
Guest
Here’s another Outlandish claim
Prove that Global Temperatures USED - CAN be relied upon
Can you prove such a thing AS A GLOBAL Temperature in the first place?I believe, they are discussing the G & T papers? Hey, It wasn’t anti-AGWers who made the claims of Amazongate - Himalayangate - PolarbearGate - HurricaneGate etc etc etc
ADMIT IT - If Skeptics look bad - AGW stink with false claims
PS save your UTUBES - I’m not allowed to D/L them - besides, they must leave a Large Carbon Footprint - Just think what we could reduce if people just stopped D/Ling them
J
JasonSB
Guest
Correcting obvious errors – in particular being made by someone who is so cavalier in calling others liars – is not an Ad Hominem.
And if you honestly don’t think that “skeptics” promote blatant falsehoods – not even half truths – then you obviously haven’t been paying attention. Even the page you linked to was full of them. The fact that you don’t seem to realise that should really give you pause.
Feel free to state explicitly what you think are half-truths, blatant falsehoods, and obfuscatory comments from the IPCC et al.
Again, please be explicit.
Wow, you’re really confused by that factor of two, aren’t you?
Fine, let’s do it again and make it even simpler. This time I will use “R” for the total energy absorbed by the greenhouse gas layer. It will also be the total energy re-radiated by the greenhouse gas layer. R will go in, R will go out. It will be radiating exactly what it absorbs.
Now where is the re-radiated energy going to go? There are an infinite number of possible directions. It could go straight up. It could go straight down. It could go up on an angle of 45 degrees and to the north-west. It could go down on an angle of 30 degrees and to the south. It could go anywhere.
Now half of the directions it could go in will be towards the ground at some angle.
Half of the directions it could go in will be away from the ground, again at some angle.
So the radiation going in the direction of the ground – any direction towards the ground, not necessarily straight down – will be R/2.
And the radiation going in the direction of space – any direction, not necessarily straight up – will be R/2.
R/2 (going towards the ground at any angle) + R/2 (going towards space at any angle) = R
So far so good.
The equations now become:
Surface: S + R/2 = G
Incoming:
S = radiation absorbed from the sun
R/2 = radiation going towards the ground from the greenhouse gas layer
Outgoing:
G = radiation leaving the ground
Incoming must be equal to Outgoing because we’re at equilibrium.
Atmosphere: lambda x G = R
Incoming:
lambda x G = portion of the radiation leaving the ground that’s absorbed by the greenhouse gas layer. ((1 - lambda) x G – what’s left over – will slip straight through.) In other words, lambda is just the proportion of the radiation emitted by the ground that’s absorbed by the greenhouse gas layer. It must equal R because that’s what we defined R to be above – the total amount of radiation absorbed by the greenhouse gas layer, which is also the total amount of radiation emitted by the greenhouse gas layer.
Outgoing:
R (Yay!)
Incoming must be equal to Outgoing because we’re at equilibrium.
Planet (top of atmosphere): S = R/2 + (1 - lambda) x G
Incoming:
S (from the Sun)
Outgoing:
R/2 = radiation going towards space from the greenhouse gas layer (i.e. the other half of R)
(1 - lambda) x G = portion of the radiation leaving the ground that wasn’t absorbed by the greenhouse gas layer.
Incoming must be equal to Outgoing because we’re at equilibrium.
Now substitute the second equation into the third equation:
S = R/2 + (1 - lambda) x G
= lambda x G / 2 + (1 - lambda) x G
= lambda x G / 2 + G - lambda x G
= (1 - lambda/2) x G
Re-arrange for G:
G = S / (1 - lambda/2)
Exactly the same as before. No “x 2” anywhere, the results are the same, what you label the energy radiated from the atmosphere makes no difference. If you want to call it “R”, that’s fine. If you want to call it “2 x lambda x A”, that’s fine. Nobody is suggesting that anything is emitting “twice what they absorb”.
Seriously, if this confuses you, you really should think twice before disparaging others because you think their equations are wrong.
K
kimmielittle
Guest
Oh Oh…Observational Temperatures Prove Lake Michigan is Boiling.
O’kay mistakes can happen…BUT what?
It seems that as soon as the graph / chart was pointed out - Well… It was hmmm…magically removed.
http://climatechangedispatch.com/images/stories/pics3/2010_Jul04_959EDT.gif
O’kay mistakes can happen…BUT what?
It seems that as soon as the graph / chart was pointed out - Well… It was hmmm…magically removed.
http://climatechangedispatch.com/images/stories/pics3/2010_Jul04_959EDT.gif
- Status