After the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC)* conference finished in London, I caught a British Airlines flight to Seattle, to visit with my daughter. She has just recently moved there, to begin a PhD at the University of Washington.
The view from BA53 was of snow covered tundra as we flew from Greenland, then over Baffin Island towards Hudson Strait near Repulse Bay. The outside air temperature was showing as minus 23 degrees Celsius (minus 74 Fahrenheit) at 11,576 metres (37,979 feet) altitude. I could see deep, evenly-spaced channels cut along the eastern edge of the island, presumably cut by water from the snow as it melts each spring. I assume the snow is melted by the Sun. I can't image it is melted by the atmosphere even though the atmosphere is, I am repeatedly told, on average some one-degree warmer now, because of all the carbon dioxide.
In Seattle, my daughter took me to the most wonderful second-hand bookshop, Magus Books. I purchased several books, as I inevitably do when I visit a bookshop, including Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress. That was after I checked the book’s index and saw it had a good number of pages on ‘climate change’: pages 136 – 154.
I was hoping to find some ‘reason’ and ‘science’ concerning ‘climate change’. I was hoping to better understand the mainstream view given all the obfuscation I had just experienced at the ARC conference in London. All these talks on 'Energy and the Environment' beginning with an acknowledgement that carbon dioxide causes warming without any explanation of how and why.
Even Richard Lindzen suggested at ARC that I should be more accepting of the mainstream historical temperature reconstructions, more accepting of the idea there has been a 1-degree temperature increase and not so concerned about what he mentioned as some slight discrepancies associated with the transition to electronic probes for measuring air temperatures.
Scott Hargreaves, Richard Lindzen and Jennifer Marohasy just before the ARC Energy and Environment dinner.
I know I have a tendency to go down 'rabbit holes' and get into a level of detail many find too tedious. Here, I thought as I read the cover of Pinker's book, here was a book written by a most reasonable person and with a section on climate change. It might help me take a few steps back, as Lindzen was suggesting, and see how more mainstream intellectuals describe the physics.
After all, I reasoned, for anyone to be convinced that human-caused global warming is real and caused by carbon dioxide, the Earth must have physical properties that permit it.
According to Wikipedia, Steven Arthur Pinker is a Canadian American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual. He is an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. And this book was ostensibly promoting ‘reason’ and had a section on climate change. And I know many of my colleagues are fans of Steven Pinker, as they are fans of Jordon Peterson another Canadian psychologist.
Scanning inside the book, I read: anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change is ‘the most vigorously challenged scientific hypothesis in history’.
Great I thought, Pinker is going to lay out the arguments, the case for and against.
But he didn’t and he doesn’t. Much in the same way John Anderson went on about the importance of debate and discussion and Western civilisation being special because of science at the ARC conference while at every opportunity avoiding any meaningful discussion on the same.
Rather, as I discovered only after I purchased the book by Steven Pinker, he writes that,
By now, all the major challenges – such as that global temperatures have stopped rising, that they only seem to be rising because they were measured in urban heat islands, or that they really are rising but only because the sun is getting hotter have been refuted …
Well. I thought, he might have acknowledged that for much of the twentieth century temperatures were actually falling. I also tried to have some discussion with Bjorn Lomborg about this. But he just defers to Judith Curry.
A version of this chart was first published in 'Atmospheric ResearchVolume 166, 1 December 2015, Pages 141-149' with comment from me that,
'All series show significant cooling of maximum temperatures from 1921 to 1950, which is at variance with Australian and global homogenized temperature series."
Further more, global temperatures could be rising due to something other than 'the sun getting hotter', but he’s clearly avoiding the core issue, or at least the one that has been concerning me more recently, exactly how carbon dioxide causes the warming. What is the physical mechanism causing carbon dioxide to warm the Earth and the oceans ... or is it just that carbon dioxide is warming the atmosphere?
A page earlier Pinker explains the theory thus: we have excess carbon dioxide from the burning of wood, coal, oil, and gas that ‘wafts into the atmosphere’, where it ‘traps heat radiating from the Earth’s surface.’
But he has not explained to me how this causes the temperature of the Earth to rise, though he claims it does. He writes,
If the emission of greenhouse gases continues, the Earth’s average temperature will rise to at least 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above the preindustrial level by the 21st century …
This was more or less as much detail as Bjorn Lomborg, Michael Shellenberger and Steven Koonin could manage at ARC.
We know that carbon dioxide levels were much higher in the distant past, and temperatures also, but what exactly is the physical mechanism that causes the warming of the Earth and the oceans?
If Pinker, Shellenberger and Lomborg, can't explain this, which they don't, well they are just repeating what the King says. Everyone knows King Charles III is a great proponent of global warming, he insists we believe as much.
Pinker claims to have written a book about reason, but he doesn’t even acknowledge any one of the very valid challenges to this theory of human-caused global warming.
It was like this at the ARC conference in London, there was this assumption that everyone knows carbon dioxide causes warming of the Earth and the oceans and that as atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide rise we risk even more warming, but no-one was prepared to engage in any detail or explain the physical mechanisms. Certainly no-one wanted to explain to me how the spike that was occurring in global temperatures while I was in London, how it had been caused by carbon dioxide.
Satellite measurements of atmospheric temperatures do show an increase since 1979, and atmospheric global temperatures have been spiking since at least July, though there was no mention of this during Will Happer's tour in September, nor at the ARC conference in London beginning late October. If we really care about climate change, we should want to know everything about it and we should want to talk about the spike so evident since July 2023 in global atmospheric temperatures.
It got me thinking, how do I explain succinctly in plain English, why I have come to conclude, that on average, carbon dioxide is not warming planet Earth – not at all!
It got me thinking, I really haven't explained why I don't subscribe to even the Will Happer view of global warming: that carbon dioxide is causing some warming, just not much more than 1 degrees Celsius. I have pressed Happer for more mathematics and calculations and more explanation as to how he gets to his 1 degree of warming. But he has not been forthcoming on any of this. There is of course the very popular IPA YouTube from his Australian tour. But it doesn't have enough detail for me.
If we are going to work from average values, which is how Happer, Lindzen and the IPCC present information, then I just can't understand how considering overall energy budgets and averages, how carbon dioxide is going to warm the Earth.
To put it very crudely, and appealing to only known physical properties of the Earth: the average temperature of the lower atmosphere is just not warm enough.
The lower atmosphere is certainly not warm enough to warm the oceans that are on average17 degrees Celsius.
And certainly the ocean is a lot warmer where I go scuba diving which is mostly in the Tropics. In the Tropics, ocean temperatures mostly range between 20 and 30 degrees Celsius. Which got me thinking: how can the atmosphere warm the ocean in the Tropics and Subtropics when ocean temperatures are so much warmer than the temperature of even the lower atmosphere and all year around.
To be continued.
This is part 4 of a series that I began with my visit to London late October, you can read part 3 by clicking here.
Jenn descending to 10 metres at Stanley Reef at the Great Barrier Reef, July 7, 2022, with the Sun shinning through. I do understand how the Sun warms the oceans, and how the oceans warm the atmosphere. But how exactly does the atmosphere warm the oceans?
Water temperatures at Yongala, not far from Stanley Reef, have been measured at different depths for a good number of seasons now. It is the changing declination of the Sun, that causes the seasons, that causes the cycles so evident in this chart. But I can't see any overall rise in water temperatures as one might expect given the rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
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* According to Wikipedia, ARC was founded by four people including Paul Marshall. It also says:
"He is the co-founder and chairman of Marshall Wace LLP, one of Europe's largest hedge fund groups.[8] Marshall Wace[9] was founded in 1997 by Marshall and Ian Wace.[10] At the time, Marshall Wace was one of the first hedge funds in London.[6] The company started with $50 million, half of which was from George Soros.[6]"
Many of the downward spikes in the charts above correspond to volcanic activity after the end of the Little Ice Age (warmer than now) . The trend is probably regression to the norm of Arrhenius 1906 (the forgotten paper) and NASA's estimate today. There are el Nino and la Nina to sort out but they probably cancel in the long run. IPCC has not removed the effect of global volcanic events from 1883 to 1932! Their models had a cool start. CO2 is a weak hypothesis.
3) 1883: Krakatoa, Netherlands Antilles (Indonesia) – The eruption produced the loudest sound ever heard in recorded history and was heard 4,800 km away. It caused a 5-year volcanic winter. More than 36,000 died from the eruption or the tsunamis caused by land and sea slides. Anak Krakatoa erupted violently in 2018.
4) 1886: Okataina [aka Tarawera], N.Z. – In Auckland the sound of the eruption and the flashing sky was thought by some to be an attack by Russian warships. Approximately 2 cubic kilometres of ash erupted, more than Mount St. Helens ejected in 1980.
5) 1897: Mount Mayon, Philippines – Mayon's longest uninterrupted eruption occurred on June 23, 1897, and lasted for seven days. Eleven kilometers eastward, the village of Bacacay was buried beneath 15 m of lava. Ash was carried as far as 160 kilometres from the event, which killed more than 400 people.
6) 1902: Mount Pelée, French Department of Martinique, Lesser Antilles – The island arc of the Caribbean. The eruption killed about 30,000 people.
7) 1902: Santa Maria, Guatemala – The eruption in 1902 was one of the three largest eruptions of the 20th century, after the 1912 Novarupta and 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruptions. It is also one of the five biggest eruptions of the past 200 (and most likely 300) years.
8) 1907: Ksudach, Kamchatka, Russia - The last eruption of Ksudach was the largest ever recorded in Kamchatka. The eruption in 1907 sent ash which was transported by the jet stream made North America east of the Rockies unseasonably cold.
9) 1912: Novarupta, Katmai Peninsula, Alaska – The 1912 eruption that formed Novarupta was the largest to occur during the 20th century. The 60-hour-long eruption expelled 13 to 15 km3 of ash, thirty times as much as the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens.
10) 1913: Volcán de Colima, Mexico – Colima which has erupted more than 40 times since 1576 is one of the most active volcanos in Mexico and in North America. One of the largest eruptions was in 1913.
11) 1914: Sakurajima, Japan – AKA Cherry Blossom Island is the most active volcano in Japan. Formerly an island, it is now a peninsula, in Kagoshima Prefecture, Kyushu, Japan. The lava flows of the 1914 eruption connected it to the mainland.
12) 1916 – 1918: Tungurahua, Ecuador – Tungurahua in the Central Andes erupted every 80 to 100 years. The major eruptions have been in 1773, 1886 and 1916–1918.
13) 1918: Katla, Iceland – The last major eruption started on 12 October 1918 and lasted for 24 days. The 1918 eruption extended the southern coast by 5 km.
14) 1932: Cerro Azul, Chile – Cerro Azul is responsible for several of South America's largest recorded eruptions, in 1846 and 1932.
Hi Jennifer,
I have to admit I’m a bit disappointed… I expected some sort of feedback from your side…
Anyway, let me give some further comments on your reaction.
If you look at the calculations made by Van Wijngaarden and Happer, you see that the energy flow to space is 277 W/m² when the CO2 concentration is 400 ppm and ceteris paribus (all other things being equal) this would reduce to 274 W/m² by a CO2 concentration of 800 ppm. So the ‘glowing’ would DEcrease.
Of course, all things won’t remain equal, as the Earth will react to this CO2 doubling and restore the balance at TOA. So in reality the ‘glowing’ will undergo some (small) shifts in frequencies but the total energy flow – read glow - to space will stay the same.
In fact the direct warming effect of the atmosphere by an increase of the CO2 concentration can be neglected. The real warming of the oceans is done by the Sun; as described above an increase in CO2 results in less heat loss by the Earth to space, so the incoming solar energy will start warming the Surface (oceans being the biggest part of this) until the balance at TOA is restored
And also a comment on your original text.
The spikes – plural since there are several in the Spencer graph – are NOT caused by carbon dioxide. These are weather related, more specifically to ENSO (El Niño-Southern Oscillation).
But at the same time it shows one of the “tools” the Earth has to “control” the temperature of the atmosphere: it you look carefully at the graph you see that in between the spikes a kind of plateau installs and since we are in a phase of (slightly) increasing temperatures, each plateau is a bit higher than the previous one.
When Roy Spencer reports that since 1979 the temperature is rising by 0.14 °C per decade, this doesn’t mean that it will be 0.014 °C each year; it goes in steps with ENSO as the driving force.
Hope this makes sense and is useful for you.
Amazing how much work and discussion has gone into searching for the mechanisms controlling this moving target.
Has there been any thought given to wind speed and evaporation cooling the ocean surface more quickly? These would be local and unpredictable factors, unless storms could be provoked in some way.
I think that all bets are off until we can remove the effects of global contamination at high altitude from the relentless “geoegineering” going on today. It’s clearly visible from the ground and from satellites, but apparently is totally imaginary, and we are supposed to be quiet about it, and ignore the few pilots speaking out and even governmental institutions admitting the existence of these programmes over decades.
Dispersing “cloud seeding” nuclei by the kiloton, and dimming the sunlight might possibly mess up NASA’s predictions that we’re all facing a quick and lethal temperature rise, entirely due to CO2 increasing.
There’s no control group in this experiment. Let’s begin one by turning off all aerial spraying and see what happens. Can we please leave the skies alone?
Hi Jennifer,
You say: (hope the html instructions work)
Sorry to say but your impression is wrong.
The driver is that yellow ball we all like to see in the sky: the Sun.
The greenhouse effect determines the difference between the energy fluxes at the Earth’s Surface and TOA (Top of Atmosphere).
The Earth system evolves to an equilibrium (at TOA): incoming energy equal to outgoing energy, bearing in mind that about 30% of the incoming energy is reflected back to space without any energetic impact to the Earth.
These are the key processes and although the Earth system has an important role to play on the environment in which the greenhouse effect has to work, any hypothesis you want to test must be in agreement with these basics.
The three values that are fundamental to the GHE: temperature, pressure and concentration of the GHG.
@Graham,@Noel;
Concerning the amount of solar energy that is absorbed by the Earth’s Atmosphere, please check the famous Kiehl-Trenberth diagrams where it is at least 20%….
The jumper is an analogy Jen, that means you start from the premise it is not the same thing, but it can demonstrate some things about the phenomenon you are talking about. A thermos demonstrates both the principles, if you are familiar with that. It has a vacuum to separate the fluid from any conductive surface, and it has a slivered surface to reflect the IR. The thermos doesn't get hot, and the liquid stays warm.
The physics says that the air temperature just over the sea has to be lower than the sea which is confirmed by a couple of references I can find quickly. Global average sea surface temperature is calculated to be 16.1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_surface_temperature#cite_note-SSTMEAN-44 (the site is down atm, but Wikipedia seems to be correct) and global average air temperature is 15 https://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/airplane/airprop.html.
So you are correct empircally speaking - something colder can't be warming something hotter on average.
Graham Young makes several points
"No, the atmosphere is warm, but on average less warm than the oceans, because it is warmed by the oceans." Do you have some data on air temperature vs ocean temperature to support this?
"the atmosphere as being like your jumper, except that unlike your jumper it can only be heated by your body warmth, not any sunlight that falls on it – the sunlight just passes straight through."
To be pedantic, the atmosphere will absorb a small amount of the sun's heat directly primarily due to greenhouse gases. Of course the bigger issue is that the outgoing radiation is more strongly absorbed due to its different wavelength.
"putting on a jumper keeps us warmer without itself bringing any of its own heat to the event" Yes- and we are putting on a thicker jumper every day atmospherically speaking.
You might find the jumper analogy helpful, but it doesnt really allow for radiation emitted by greenhouse gases. Jumpers largely cut down on convection and evaporative heat loss.