Error in OLR Model?

My abstract for a poster at the Royal Meteorological Society's Conference has been accepted, but its formatting was lost before it was posted on the conference web site. Here it is laid out more neatly:

The standard model for outgoing long-wave radiation (OLR) views the atmosphere as a series of parallel slabs. It is assumed that each slab is in a state of local thermodynamic equilibrium (LTE) where the temperature of the slab can be used to determine its emission using Planck’s function. This leads to Schwarzschild’s equation:

dI = - Ikρ dz + B(T)kρ dz .............................. Equ. 1

where I is the intensity, k is the absorption coefficient, ρ is the density, z is the vertical coordinate and B(T) is Planck’s blackbody function at the temperature T of the slab.

However, the infra-red emissions from greenhouse gases have wavelengths of 20 microns and less, which requires a vibrational temperature of 719 K and more. Few molecules attain that temperature in the Earth’s atmosphere, and so the IR emissions of greenhouse gases are "frozen out". The value of T used in Equ. 1 should be the vibrational temperature and not the kinetic (or translational) temperature as is used at present.

This error has profound consequences, because it means that the outgoing long-wave radiation (OLR) in the greenhouse gas bands is completely absorbed in the lower 30 m of the atmosphere. Therefore the surface temperature has little effect on the OLR which is in fact emitted by the greenhouse gases in the upper atmosphere. Thus radiation balance is mainly achieved by the incoming short-wave radiation (ISR) being altered by cloud cover, as originally proposed by G. C. Simpson.

This also explains why weather models fail to calculate the correct height for the cloud base, and why climate models are unable to exhibit the runaway greenhouse effect of water vapour which happens during abrupt climate change.

More McDonald meta-Science.

I placed a long comment on Bob Grumbine's blog More Grumbine Science, but have had no reaction [I have now :-)]. Bob was arguing that you can tell the difference between science and pseudo-science by the amount of evidence. As an example of pseudo-science he used the idea of a flat earth. I pointed out that the overwhelming evidence I have is that the earth is indeed flat! It is only because of reports I have had, secondary evidence such as the lesson in geography from my junior school teacher in whose utterances I had blind faith, that I now believe otherwise. Thus Bob's technique for distinguishing science from pseudo-cience is far too simplistic.

I have been re-reading State of Fear by Michael Crichton, for a writing course I am taking. The theme of this blockbuster is difficult to summarise. It takes the author twelve pages to state it in two appendices that follow the novel. Suffice it to say that a fellow student who had also read the book had been persuaded that global warming was not something to be worried about.

The technique Crichton uses is to present all the evidence against global warming and none to support it, while claiming that he is giving a balanced summary. Thus his evidence is impeccable, and would pass Bob's test. However, the book is just science fiction. What he has done is to use agnotology, a term introduced to me by John Mashey, another commentator on Bob's Blog. Although the word is new to me the concept is not. I have long been aware that my deepest convictions could be altered by new facts. That was even before Donald Rumsfeld came out with his inimitable lines:

The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.

—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

Agnotology is not about "known unknowns". It is about "unknown unknowns". Michael Crichton gives examples of papers which show the Antarctic was not cooling, but he does not quote the papers which show the Artic ice is thinning. For my fellow student, and perhaps Crichton, this was an unkown unknown. So pseudo-science is not about quantity of evidence. Pseudo-science is about supressing some of the evidence that conflicts with the thesis.

Sir Issac Newton has a lot to answer for. He put physical science on a mathematical footing. Since we know that mathematics is always correct, we infer that science too is always true. But for natural science there are always unknown unknowns. This is especially true of the earth sciences such as geology. Earth sciences are mainly non-mathematical, and new things are being discovered every day - both uknown knowns and unknowns unknowns become known knowns.

Michael Crichton claims in State of Fear:

I am certain there is too much certainty in the world."

Nice joke, but true! Unknown unknows are ignored because no one knows that they are there!

His final claims is:

"Everyone has an agenda. Except me."

Well my agenda is that you should not trust scientists, especially mathematicians. They believe all of science is true, ignoring the unknown unknows. Why even that mathematical pioneer Euclid was wrong. In the real world the sum of the angles in a triangle are not 180 degrees. We do not live on a flat earth. We live on a sphere where the angles of a triangle can sum up to almost 360 degrees!

Climate Crunch

“Whether it is hiring people over fifty, or acting on climate change, it won’t happen unless people are pushed.” Aged 51 and, having admitted that he was an unemployed victim of the Credit Crunch, obviously he spoke from his heart. What a pity Dr Vicky Pope, the Met Office's leading adviser on climate change to the government, was not there to hear him.


The previous week in the Guardian Newspaper she was quoted as saying: “News headlines vie for attention and it is easy for scientists to grab this attention by linking climate change to the latest extreme weather event or apocalyptic prediction. But in doing so, the public perception of climate change can be distorted. The reality is that extreme events arise when natural variations in the weather and climate combine with long-term climate change. This message is more difficult to get heard. Scientists and journalists need to find ways to help to make this clear, without the wider audience switching off."

How does she think that the message can be got across by scientists if they do not try to grab the headlines? She admits that if the public are told the boring truth then they will switch off. Isn’t it better that people have half the truth than no truth at all?



Meanwhile in the February issue of the Royal Meteorological Society’s magazine “Weather” Simon Keeling of the University of Birmingham’s Weather Consultancy Services asked “Could we be in danger of raising the public’s understanding of climate change to a level beyond that of the current science?” Presumably by that he does not mean the public are being converted into Einsteins, but rather he too is worried that the dangers of climate change are being exaggerated.



But you don’t get people to buy house insurance by telling them that their home might not burn down, despite the fact that it is most likely true! Nor do you get people to give up flying to Thailand for their annual holiday, nor abandoning their car and using public transport, by downplaying the dangers of climate change. It seems from what these two scientists wrote that they do not see a major danger from global warming.



Perhaps that is because they are unaware of the facts. For instance, Dr Pope continued with a reference to the Arctic sea ice. She wrote "The record-breaking losses in the past couple of years could easily be due to natural fluctuations in the weather.” But these losses are almost certainly due to the thinning of the sea ice which has been happening as a result of climate change. In fact the recent contraction in the area of summer ice is well outside the limits set by natural variability over the last twenty years.



As Julienne Stroeve, from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, told a meeting of the American Geophysical Union: “The sea ice is entering a new state where the ice cover has become so thin that no matter what happens during the summer in terms of temperature or circulation patterns, you're still going to have very low ice conditions."



Chris Field was a coordinating lead author of the fourth assessment report (AR4) produced by the IPCC, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. Field believes that the dire warnings about the oncoming devastation wrought by global warming were not dire enough. The same day as Dr Pope’s comments were published he wrote "We now have data showing that from 2000 to 2007, greenhouse gas emissions increased far more rapidly than we expected." The 2007 AR4 presented at a "very conservative range of climate outcomes" but the next report will "include futures with a lot more warming," Field said. "We now know that, without effective action, climate change is going to be larger and more difficult to deal with than we thought" the Telegraph reported.



So rather than the dangers being exaggerated, they have been down played. The Credit Crunch may well be followed by a Climate Crunch. In this age of gender equality who can rule out that Dr Pope may not be the first female head of the Met Office. If there is a climate catastrophe how will she behave. Will she, unlike the ex-chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland who led the British economy to disaster, accept responsibility and refuse to take her pension?

What Gavin Schmidt should have written

This ComplexClimate blog was set up as an antidote to RealClimate. I don't really want to fall out with that crew, so since I see a way of saying he is wrong without causing offence I am going to post what I consider a better response to George Will than Gavin's latest blog on that subject.


George F. Will's Op-Ed for the Washington Post "Dark Green Doomsayers" begins: A corollary of Murphy's Law ("If something can go wrong, it will") is: "Things are worse than they can possibly be." That is false; there is no such corollary. Murphy's Law is itself a corollary of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which can be stated as disorder always increases. It is not a mantra of the pessimist. It is a scientific law which is absolutely true. If something can happen and you wait long enough it will happen.


Most times you don't have to wait very long. Just think of those poor scientists in the 1970s who had discovered that the climate changes suddenly. They had evidence that the last ice age ended in less than 50 years. (Now we think the climate of Greenland jumped 20 F in three years.) Moreover the global climate had been cooling from a peak in 1945, see adjacent figure from the CRU Information Sheet , so they were worried that a new ice age would start soon. They wrote a letter to the President of the USA, but Murphy's Law struck and temperatures rose!


So now what is going to happen? Well if something can go wrong it will, and the Arctic ice looks as though it could disappear suddenly. All I can say is that it will happen this summer, and hope that I fall victim to Murphy's Law and am proved wrong :-(

PS. Wikipedia has a list of corollaries to Murphy's Law. I thought I had better check them in case I was doing George Will a disservice, and "Thing are worse than they could possible be" was there. I shouldn't have worried. The second entry in that list is wrong, so the list is unreliable anyway. Item 2 states "Anything dropped in the bathroom will fall in the toilet (or the sink)." I had an ink jet cartridge today that was leaking, and when I took it to the sink, it fell on the bathroom carpet. So much for Wikipedia!

Real Climate? - I think not.

Here's a comment that I posted on RealClimate which has not appeared. Presumable that is because it does not say: "Thank you for giving us hope,...", "Wonderfully hopeful.", "Thank you.", or "David, thanks ..." all which appear in the first 6 published comments. I thought scientists were supposed to be sceptical. The lot replying to RealClimate just seem to be sycophants.

Anyway, RealClimate's latest epistle is entitled “Irreversible Does Not Mean Unstoppable”. It discusses a paper in PNAS by Susan Solomon et al. which "shows that the climate change that takes place due to increases in carbon dioxide concentration is largely irreversible for 1,000 years after emissions stop. " David Archer's spin is that once we stop emitting fossil fuels the increase in temperate will stop. So we need not be terrified by Susan Solomon's paper.

What I wrote was:
************
Well, all I can say is that you have excelled yourselves in this post. It is nothing but denialist rubbish. You state:

"It is not really news scientifically that atmospheric CO2 concentration stays higher than natural for thousands of years after emission of new CO2 to the carbon cycle from fossil fuels. "

So that is all right then. We don’t have to worry unless the levels of greenhouse gases increase. How are you going to prevent that? Stop burning all fossil fuels? That is the only way!

The Arctic sea ice is retreating and the glaciers are melting worldwide. This will reduce global albedo and raise sea level temperatures, so the oceans will release more CO2 even if we stop adding fossil fuels now.

When are you going to face up to the fact that the world is heading for disaster. Unless we take panic measures we are all doomed.

**************

Perhaps I have been too hard on the poor boy who was only trying to counter the real sceptics and deniers who are now claiming it is too late. But all this pussyfooting with public opinion has been going on for too long. The IPCC may have achieved a Nobel Prize but the have singularly fail to get any action from the worlds leading greenhouse gas producers: China, India and the US. In fact since the Kyoto treaty was drawn up the US has increased it emissions of CO2 by an amount equal to the total emissions of the UK.

There is a little hope. Barak Obama seems to be moving towards taking action, but he cannot do all that needs doing without the backing of Congress. Congress only respond to their voters and the voters, Congressmen and Senators must be told how serious the problem is.

Cheers, Alastair.

H-B de Saussure and the Greenhouse Effect

The famous 19th Century French mathematician, J B Fourier, is generally credited with discovering the Greenhouse Effect but he was only reporting the work of a great 18th Century Swiss earth scientist: Horace-Benedict de Saussure. The work of both these scientists has been neglected recently because they wrote in French which is no longer the lingua franca of the scientific world. Recently two new translations of Fourier's work have been made available on the web, by William Connolley and Raymond Pierrehumbert [2004b], but de Saussure's ideas never seem to have been translated into English.

I have translated what I believe are the relevant documents, and I am making my working files available on a new web site: http://sites.google.com/site/saussureproject/. This post has been created to receive any comments regarding the accuracy of the transcription and translation of the two documents: Chapter 35 of "Travels in the Alps" and de Saussure's letter to the Journal de Paris.

It is not intended that this post should be used for comments on the significance of de Saussure's work. I am planning an annotated version of the translation where I will give my views. However, I thought some people might be interested in what I have done so far, and I welcome any comment here.

Cheers, Alastair.

References:

Pierrehumbert 2004a: Warming the world. Nature 432 677.
Pierrehumbert 2004b: Translation of M´emoire sur les Temp´eratures du Globe Terrestre et
des Espaces Plan´etaires by J-B J. Fourier. Nature 432 (online supplementary material to
Pierrehumbert, 2004a)

An even more complex answer

Spencer Weart has commented on my previous post. Since I rather went off topic there, here is a second attempt, hopefully including some new ideas.

Spencer, you wrote: "Apologies to engineers! I only meant to report that people who emailed me and self-identified as engineers (often "experienced" or "retired") were a surprisingly large number of the people who demanded to know why they couldn't find a page on the Web with a simple calculation of greenhouse warming. I don't think they are typical of engineers in general and regret the implied insult. Engineers are great!"

Don't apologise. It gave me an excuse to slag off the mathematicians and the physicists who write the climate models :-)

I wonder if "experienced" is just a euphemism for "retired". I don't like admitting that I am retired, and have even thought of calling myself an "emeritus" student :-) On the other hand, "experienced" could mean that he has learnt from his mistakes. Scientists don't seem to make them, since science is always right!

You continued:
"As you know, I agree with you that computer models are problematic. But I think you deeply undervalue the very important successes they have had in actual prediction. Given that they predict -- not a certainty to be sure -- but a large risk of bad stuff, and that many things outside of climate models point in the same direction, it's shortsighted to dismiss the modelers as fools."

Actually I did not know that you thought that the models were problematical, but even so you are not facing up to the fact that they do not reproduce abrupt climate change. We know that it happens, so the models do not reflect reality. They can reproduce the climate over last 10,000 years, but not the 100 before that when the glacial Younger Dryas switched into the Holocene interglacial. Should I give the models credit for the 10,000 that they can get right, or fail them for the 100 they get wrong in the past and the 100 they are about to get wrong in the future?

I do not consider the modellers to be fools. Most have PhD’s in maths or science. I struggled to get an ordinary degree in engineering. But it is their success which has been their undoing. They are not used to making mistakes, so when they do then they cannot believe it. In engineering, the criteria is whether a design works. In science the criteria is whether the theory explains the outcome. In other words, engineers work using heuristics, rules of thumb, or simple models. That is why they are surprised there is not a simple model for the greenhouse effect.

Scientists build on the success of their predessors. As Newton said “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” When their model does not work, then they just build on a bit more. No wonder there is not a simple model now!

But why did their simple model not ework? The reason is that a mistake was made by a giant of astrophysics Robert Emden. In 1913 he applied the equations for internal solar radiation derived by his brother in law, another giant of astrophysics Karl Schwarzschild, to the earth’s atmosphere. The radiation scheme is based on Schwarzschild's equation. However, we have a planetary atmosphere not a stellar one!

The climate modellers have have been dazzled by the prestige of the astrophyicists such as Eddington, Einstein, Milne and Chandrasekar. But these giants were considering high temperature electronic radiation from atomic plasma at phenomenal pressures, not vibrationsl radiation from molecules at room temperatures and pressures or lower. No-one now considers the fundamentals of atmospheric radiation. They consider that those problems were solved in the dim and distant past.

Spencer, it is not, as you suggests, that I think the models are problematical. It is that they have a fundamental flaw in the way they handle greenhouse gases. Otherwise they are fine. I was informed personally by a professor that if I could see the way the model outputs reproduce the global climate then I would find it difficult to distinguish that form satellite imagery. True? Only an hour later a speaker informed us that the models produce a double ITCZ. It would have been too embarrassing and counter productive to have confronted the professor with the fact that satellites do not show two bands of clouds circling the equator.

If the current model was correct, then it would not produce a double ITCZ, nor would the predictions of warming in the upper troposphere be found to be false by the radiosonde measurement. Philipona would not be reporting that it is boundary layer water vapour that is melting the Alpine glaciers, and there would not have been the gross under estimation of the speed of the melting of the Arctic sea ice. The problem with handling clouds would have been solved, and abrupt climate change explained.

Dr Iain Stewart signed off from episode 1 of his TV program “Earth: the climate wars” saying that in the next episode he would describe how the sceptics won. They have won. They have prevented any action being taken by claiming the models are wrong. The scientists have lost by arguing against them, instead of fixing their models! If they had, then they would have found that the greenhouse effect is more effective than currently believed, and they would have been able to predict the next abrupt climate change.

You concluded:
"Clearly I'm not going to change your mind on this, however."

Dale Carnegie wrote in "How to win friends and influence people" that you can never win an argument. Even if your opponent concedes he will still believe he is correct. We cannot bear to lose face. So no doubt you mind, like mine, has not been changed either, but hopefully I have given you some food for thought :-)

Cheers, Alastair.