Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Dana's unremarkable global warming predictions debunked

Paid CAGW propagandist Dana Nuccitelli has an article today in the Guardian and at the SS site gushing about a paper published in 1972 he claims made "a remarkably accurate global warming prediction" "of the next 30 years." However, examination of the paper reveals complete ignorance of the logarithmically declining "radiative forcing" of CO2, and in fact demonstrates that "radiative forcing" from CO2 is less than half that currently claimed by the IPCC.

1. The 1972 paper falsely assumes 100% of global warming from 1850-2000 was attributable to CO2, while completely ignoring natural ocean oscillations, the grand solar maximum in the latter 20th century, the integral of solar activity, solar amplification mechanisms, and reduced cloudiness ["global brightening"] in the latter 20th century. This is obviously a highly unjustified, erroneous assumption.

2. The 1972 paper assumes the radiative effects of CO2 are linear and does a calculation based on an assumed 25% rise in CO2 from 1850-2000, ignoring that the effects of CO2 decline logarithmically. 

3. The paper should have used a logarithmic equation, such as the IPCC/Myhre equation for CO2 forcing with alleged water vapor amplification:

5.35*ln[CO2ending/CO2starting] 

which has a huge erroneous fudge factor of 5.35 that assumes increased water vapor will cause a positive feedback and increase total radiative forcing from CO2 & water vapor by a factor of 3.8 times. In reality, increased water vapor has a negative feedback cooling effect that more than exceeds any warming effect of CO2. The wet adiabatic lapse rate is only one-half of the dry rate, proving that water vapor has a net cooling effect. Satellite observations also prove the net climate feedbacks are negative, not positive as this paper and the IPCC assumes. 

4. Even if one falsely assumes 100% of the global warming from 1850-2000 was due to increased CO2, the fudge factor in the IPCC/Myhre formula should be

x = 0.6/[ln(370/292)*.75] = 3.38    

[Assumptions: 0.6C warming, starting CO2 292 ppm, ending CO2 370 ppm, IPCC (false) assumption that 1W/m2 radiative forcing causes 0.75C surface warming]

based on observations 1850-2000, instead of 5.35, an exaggeration of 1.58 times.

5. Thus, the 1972 paper demonstrates the IPCC exaggerates the climate sensitivity by a minimum of 1.58 times, and that the climate sensitivity to doubled CO2 is a maximum of 1.76C, even if one falsely assumes 100% of the global warming since 1850 was due to CO2 after all feedbacks.

6. Dana also claims James Hansen's 1981 predictions were "impressively accurate" as well, a bald-faced lie given that temperatures are lower than Hansen forecast they would be if humans disappeared off the planet twelve years ago:






4 comments:

  1. Absolutely every "prediction" based on the false assumption that carbon dioxide and water vapour warm Earth's surface is easily debunked with sound physics.

    Just remember there's going to be a genuine $5,000 reward for the first to come up with proof I'm wrong and proof IPCC are right about water vapour - see last paragraph..

    In a horizontal plane you can observe diffusion of kinetic energy in your home. Just run a heater on one side of a room, turn it off or even remove it quickly from the room, and you will temporarily have measureably warmer air on one side of the room. Molecules then keep on colliding and as they do, kinetic energy is shared. Statistical mechanics tells us that temperature (that is, mean kinetic energy per molecule) will even out across the room assuming it's well insulated.

    Suppose now that the room has double glazed windows and it's cooler outside. Which is more effective at insulating the room?

    (a) A window with dry air or even argon
    (b) A window with moist air - say 4% water vapour or water gas
    (c) A window full of carbon dioxide only, like the Venus atmosphere?

    The answer is the dry air or argon, as is well known in the construction industry. Why? Because radiating "pollutants" like water gas and carbon dioxide send the energy across the gap (and up through the troposphere) with inter-molecular radiation. Such radiation only ever transfers thermal energy from warmer to cooler regions. Otherwise what happens is as described in "Radiated Energy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics."

    Why then does the thermal gradient reduce in magnitude because of the inter-molecular radiation between carbon dioxide molecules in the Venus atmosphere, or between a few methane molecules in the Uranus troposphere or between water vapour molecules in Earth's troposphere and Earth's outer 9Km of its crust?

    All these thermal gradients (aka lapse rates) are less steep than they would have been in dry air or (nearly) non-radiating gases. Gravity would have induced a steeper -g/Cp gradient.

    The thermal gradient in the Uranus troposphere does not level out (despite no solar radiation or any surface) because to do so would violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It seems most of you don't understand why, but the reason is that entropy would decrease. If somehow a state were to evolve with more gravitational potential energy per molecule at the top, but no compensating reduction in kinetic energy per molecule (ie temperature) then there would be unbalanced energy potentials at the top, so work could be done and thus entropy would not have been at a maximum. The four molecule experiment demonstrates this and how it happens at the molecular level.

    The Ranque-Hilsch vortex tube demonstrates it, and kinetic energy is re-distributed such that the inner tube gets far colder than the air that was pumped in. So you can't blame friction for heating the outer tube. Nor does pressure alter temperature, because pressure is proportional to the product of temperature and density: temperature is an independent variable and only varies when mean kinetic energy per molecule varies.

    Finally, none of you can explain how the Venus surface actually rises in temperature from 732K to 737K during its four-month-long day, unless you start by understanding that the thermal gradient is the state of thermodynamic equilibrium. Then you need to understand the mechanism of "heat creep" explained in the second part of the four molecule experiment.

    There will be a $5,000 reward for the first to prove me wrong with conditions explained in public advertisements and on all of a dozen or so of my websites. To win the award you will also have to show empirical evidence of the IPCC postulate that the sensitivity to water vapour is of the order of 10 degrees of warming for every 1% increase in the Earth's troposphere.

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    Replies
    1. When you say dry air, is that air comprised of 400 ppm CO2 like we have here? Let's fill a window with dry air with 300 ppm, and another with 400 ppm, and measure the difference. I'll bet you can't even measure it.

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  2. Another simple response is that at the same time as Sawyer was predicting warming, other climate scientists (for example Rasool & Schneider) were predicting cooling. Monkeys typing Shakespeare.

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  3. That "analysis" also cherry picks the start-date of 1850. Our current warming (such as it is) began in the mid 1600s, at the bottom of the Little Ice Age, so there was two centuries of natural warming. That's before co2 began increasing and before the industrial revolution.

    Can anyone seriously believe that the instant co2 began increasing it began increasing the temperature? And what about the positon of most of the (so-called) scientists - those proclaiming the science is "settled" who claimed that co2 did not induce any warming until much more recently?

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