One of my interests is in understanding how and why the climate is so stable, for sure it has been over the last several thousand years. Where I live, on the Tropic of Capricorn, daily atmospheric temperatures may fluctuate by 20C, yet the seasonal variation in sea temperatures is less than 10C and if there has been any warming over the last 100 years it is probably less than 2C. For sure the global temperature changes and that is especially the case at the higher latitudes towards the north and south poles. On these points of fact, I am very much in agreement with meteorologist William Kininmonth. We also agree that it is tropical convection, in particular the funnelling of energy from the boundary layer sometimes 13 kilometres straight up to the top of the troposphere that stops the tropical oceans from overheating.
I hosted a first two-hour zoom meeting about these things last night; we are working together towards a new paradigm for understanding weather and climate change.
One hundred registered, the maximum capacity given my zoom subscription, and there were 48 who joined to listening-in, mostly to Bill outline his model of tropical convection and how this is critical to understanding how energy moves within the troposphere and to the north and south poles.
William studied under Herbert Riehl at Colorado State University in the 1960s, and he acknowledges that he is building on the work of Riehl and also Joanne Simpson.
The meeting was at a time that suited William, and an Australian audience. I understand that this time was completely inappropriate for 60% of my Mailchimp subscribers who lives in places like Houston, Texas. I am hoping that I can host William again by Zoom all over again in the New Year and at a time that works for those in Texas.
In the meantime, following is a summary of our first Zoom meeting. This summary was compiled by Zoom’s AI and then I made some additions and edits.
After that there is a link to a Dropbox folder with an unedited audio file and the slides from the presentation.
None of this is tidy – especially not the audio, but it is authentic. And we will improve.
Indeed, we will have to work through the current mess that is climate change science if we are to get to something coherent that has integrity because for sure the climate is not chaotic. For sure it is possible to get closer to the truth, and to develop a paradigm consistent with the data and the laws of physics.
For sure I am tired of the many voices, especially on the right side of politics, that just make stuff-up because they want to be a part of a winning story for their team. Much of what they have written and said will soon become irrelevant.
In the meantime, I am very grateful to the B. Macfie Family Foundation for financial support over a long period of time.
SUMMARY OF ZOOM MEETING DECEMBER 5, 2024
1.Earth's Climate System and Convection
In the meeting, William Kininmonth presented a model of the Earth's climate system emphasising the role of convection by air rising within cumulonimbus clouds in the tropical convergence zone straddling the equator. He explained that in the tropics, atmospheric temperatures lag ocean temperatures and that the ocean is regulating the temperature of the atmosphere. Questions were raised about the role of carbon dioxide in the model, William contends that greenhouse gases emit more radiation than they absorb, and that greenhouse gases tend to cool the atmosphere. He stated that this is not contentious within traditional meteorology.
2. Arctic Warming Rates and Seasonal Variations
In the meeting, William discussed the varying rates of temperature change across different latitude bands over the past 45 years. He highlighted that the rate of warming is significantly higher in the Arctic compared to the Southern Ocean, with the Arctic experiencing 6.6 degrees per century and the Southern Ocean experiencing only 0.1 degrees per century. I questioned the data source, to which William clarified that the data is from the National Center for Environment Prediction in the US, combining satellite and surface temperature data. We also discussed the seasonal variation in warming, with the greatest warming occurring in the wintertime in the Arctic and the Antarctic. William emphasised that this is not due to the greenhouse effect, but rather the transport of heat from the tropics. He also noted that the longer growing season due to earlier thaws and later freezes could be beneficial for high-latitude regions like Canada and Russia.
3.Carbon Dioxide's Role in Climate Change
In the meeting, William discussed the role of carbon dioxide in climate change, presenting a chart that showed minimal increase in radiation absorption at the surface due to carbon dioxide concentration. He suggested that other factors, such as the slowing down of the Gulf Stream, could be responsible for the observed warming trends. Interest was expressed in understanding the physical mechanisms behind these changes and the discrepancy between the model output and the IPCC's global warming projections.
4. New Climate Change Paradigm Discussion
There was discussion on the concept of a new paradigm for understanding climate change, referencing the work of Thomas Kuhn and the importance of having a clear language and testable theories to move forward. William Kininmonth shared his perspective on the existing climate change theories, emphasising the importance of understanding energy flow and the role of the Equatorial Trough Zone. Christopher Game raised concerns about the use of shorthand in scientific discussions particularly with respect to the word ‘heat’, arguing that it hinders clarity of thought. The group also discussed the Riehl and Simpson paper from 1979, and I suggesting it as a starting point for further discussions.
DROPBOX FOLDER WITH AUDIO
The meeting ran for two hours. The unedited audio, accompanying PowerPoint slides, an essay by William, and relevant technical paper (Riehl and Simpson 1979) can be downloaded from Dropbox here:
About Heat, Comment from Christopher Game
There is a difficulty with seventeenth century thinking that makes heat a property of a body, thinking in terms of heat as a sort of substance called 'caloric', is incompatible with heat as a mode of transfer between two bodies, which is built around the 1850 discovery of the notion of internal energy, further clarified substantially by G.H. Bryan in 1907.
The caloric theory way of thinking is widely and deeply ingrained and may be hard to dislodge. This is a truly Kuhnian change of paradigm.
The main defining formulas for clarity:
total body energy = whole body gravitational potential energy + whole body kinetic energy + internal energy.
Thermodynamics is focused on internal energy. The internal energy of a body can change in situ (1) by transfer of matter (evaporation); (2) thermodynamic work; (3) heat (conduction, radiation, friction). The internal energy of a body can be transported in convective circulation, loading up somewhere and unloading somewhere else.
Comments in Conclusion
I emphasised in the meeting that this was just the beginning of the conversation. That my objective is a new paradigm from which to understand weather, climate and how and why it changes and sometimes not at all.
I consider William’s model of tropical convection, with an emphasis on energy transfer from the tropical oceans to the poles critical to understanding weather and climate and why the Earth’s climate is fundamentally stable within limits and especially in the tropics.
I don’t agree with everything that William presented: the measurements that he relies upon to come to his conclusions about temperature trends, or his presentation of temperatures as per century linear trends. I do agree with his emphasis on latitudinal gradients and seasonal trends. I admire how he puts numbers around this, even if I don’t agree with them exactly because I see significant cooling at least in the northern hemisphere from 1940 to at least 1975.
If you would like to listen in to future Zoom meetings with different guest lecturers, consider subscribing to my irregular email news and be sure to tick the box ‘New theory of climate change’.
https://climatelab.com.au/subscribe/
Response to
Karen Klemp says December 13, 2024 at 11:50 am Bruce, you have missed something…
https://climate.nasa.gov/vsoverlay-ocean-warming/
Yes, Karen you are right to point to the existence of an energy storage compartment, the sea, that has in the past not been given too much notice, partly because it has been practically impossible to measure its quantity. The celebrated Kiehl & Trenberth diagram, for example, ignores the storage in that compartment; it doesn't say that the storage is zero, but just ignores it.
That is about the structure of modelling, and is worthy of more careful attention.
It seems that at present, the atmospheric temperatures are rising. That has been so since 1978, after the end of the cooling period from perhaps 1945 to 1977.
I am not so sure about the sea temperatures.
Other important aspects of our problem are the rates of accumulation or loss of energy in the three compartments, atmospheric, land ice, and oceanic. A three-compartment model is necessary. This amounts to keeping an account of the amounts of energy in each of those three compartments, and of the time rates of transfer between them. (We may add outer space as a fourth compartment.) One can imagine a true zero of land ice energy. For the other compartments, a true zero is hard to imagine, so that we may have to define an arbitrary or conventional "zero".
Energy storage is one part of thermodynamics, a subject (you might say a paradigm) that began around 1850. The breakthrough was the invention of the concept of 'internal energy', based on the distinction between 'heat' and 'hotness'. Clausius denoted internal energy by the symbol U, and this has largely survived in thermodynamics.
Nowadays, in thermodynamics, 'heat' is defined thus: heat is energy in transfer other than by thermodynamic work and by transfer of matter. Heat is explained as energy in transfer by microscopic mechanisms, in particular by conduction, radiation, and friction. Heat so defined is not conserved. Thermodynamic work and heat are interconvertible. 'Hotness' is measured by temperature.
Convection is often advanced as a mechanism of "heat transfer" but, in the language of thermodynamics, it isn't so. Convection is a mode of transport of internal energy or one of its free energy Legendre transforms such as enthalpy.
A valuable history is in Clifford Truesdell's "The Tragicomical History of Thermodynamics, 1822-1854". In 1850, Clausius wrote (translated): "It is, however, almost impossible to explain the heat produced by friction except as an increase in the quantity of heat." Also in 1850, before he could have read Clausius' paper, Rankine used the concept of the interconvertibility of heat and thermodynamic work, and used a mathematical quantity that he called "the thermodynamic function". Later, Clausius also considered that quantity, and called it 'entropy', a name which has stuck.
Because heat and thermodynamic work are interchangeable, in order to track transfers of energy between compartments, thermodynamics needs to keep track of a special variable for 'hotness', that we call 'temperature', often denoted 'T'; it has a conjugate variable, entropy, often denoted 'S'. Their product 'ST' has the dimensions of energy.
Thermodynamics is necessary to convert the quantity of stored energy of the land ice compartment to reference temperatures for the other compartments. One might be tempted to speak loosely by saying that land ice stores 'coolth' !! Of course, thermodynamics is also necessary to interconvert all the stored quantities of energy to a suitable reference temperature.
Perhaps a suitable reference temperature would be the "equilibrium temperature" of a hypothetical earth devoid of greenhouse gases and with a perfectly black condensed matter surface. It would be useful exercise, though quite a task, to refer the usual quantities of stored energy to that "equilibrium temperature".
The above is about scientific paradigms, but it doesn't immediately tackle the question that matters for practical politics, or should I say for practical religion? What is the distinction between religion and politics?
Why are almost ALL coral reefs in relatively shallow, WARMER / tropical water, globally?
The southernmost coral reef on the east coast of Australia (that I have dived on, anyway), is in Moreton Bay, east of Brisbane, somewhat south of the tropic of Capricorn. It seems to be the beneficiary of warm water that is generated out in the "tropical" Pacific and which forms a huge, circulating current that comes ashore along far-northern New South Wales coast. Hence the whole "all-season" Gold Coast. The very rotation of the planet seems to be responsible for such circular currents. Similar circular currents also exist in the atmosphere. Coriolis effect.
So, how does the "warm" surface water find its way to frigid depths to then, "rise again?
Bruce, you have missed something...
https://climate.nasa.gov/vsoverlay-ocean-warming/
As a layman in these things, it strikes me as "interesting" that sunlight striking the oceans surfasce heats the ENTIRE body of oceanic water "catastrophically".
Has anyone ever tried to boil a billy of water by heating it from the TOP?. Now, scale that up to trillions of tonnes of water in vessels that range from ankle-deep to MANY hundreds of metres in depth. And not forgetting that the planet actually rotates, on a roughly 24 hour cycle. The "dark" face MUST be radiating heat accumulated from the big thermo-nuke in the sky, during "daylight" hours.
The planet is not just rotating, but doing this on a constant? tilt; all while orbiting said big bomb in the sky, hence "seasons", as well as day and night. How convenient!
A "Goldilocks" situation.
For the hard-core number-crunchers out there:
https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/water-thermal-properties-d_162.html
And nobody seems to factor in any contribution from geothermal activity, driven by the "nuclear" fires beneath our feet.
Or have I missed something ??