Sunday, March 22, 2009
No Mt. Redoubt eruption please
We have too much global cooling already. A cooling earth is harsh for man and beast alike. At least with the global cooling that is now being caused by the ongoing extended lull in solar activity, we get a silver lining. If lack of solar-magnetic activity is demonstrated to cool the earth, it won't be possible to hide from the public what all the scientists already know: that the small bit of late 20th century warming was almost certainly caused by the "grand maximum" levels of solar activity from 1940-2000, NOT by CO2. If we have to freeze our butts off, at least this natural calamity might save us (MIGHT save us) from the un-natural calamity of having our economy unplugged by the anti-CO2 lunatics who now occupy the White House.
Eruption of Mt. Redoubt, on the other hand, would be a pure bad, like getting hit with a good-size asteroid. Not only would a large eruption substantially hasten harmful global cooling, but it would give the eco-liars something to blame the cooling on besides the lull in solar activity, allowing them to pretend that, if not for the eruption, the world would still be warming, and that warming is still the danger.
The eco-religionists don't need much more time. With control of the White House, another couple years of unchecked alarmism could be all they need to get their anti-CO2 policies in place, and then we are done. We will have pulled the plug on heat, light and power just as the planet is descending into freezing cold.
Sit Mt. Redoubt. Stay. Be a good Iditardog.
UPDATE: Bad dog.
Eruption of Mt. Redoubt, on the other hand, would be a pure bad, like getting hit with a good-size asteroid. Not only would a large eruption substantially hasten harmful global cooling, but it would give the eco-liars something to blame the cooling on besides the lull in solar activity, allowing them to pretend that, if not for the eruption, the world would still be warming, and that warming is still the danger.
The eco-religionists don't need much more time. With control of the White House, another couple years of unchecked alarmism could be all they need to get their anti-CO2 policies in place, and then we are done. We will have pulled the plug on heat, light and power just as the planet is descending into freezing cold.
Sit Mt. Redoubt. Stay. Be a good Iditardog.
UPDATE: Bad dog.
Comments:
<< Home
Some photos of the last eruption in 1990:
http://avo.alaska.edu/volcanoes/volcimage.php?volcname=Redoubt&search_year=1990
http://avo.alaska.edu/volcanoes/volcimage.php?volcname=Redoubt&search_year=1990
Hi Alec,
I noticed your comment on Strata about the giggly President on 60 Minutes.
A simpler explanation is he was "high"
after ingesting some tetrahydracannabinol
in some form or the other.
Sorry it's sort of off topic but anyway
we can get this guy out of office helps to
save us from eco-lunatics.
I noticed your comment on Strata about the giggly President on 60 Minutes.
A simpler explanation is he was "high"
after ingesting some tetrahydracannabinol
in some form or the other.
Sorry it's sort of off topic but anyway
we can get this guy out of office helps to
save us from eco-lunatics.
# posted by 
: 4:25 AM
: 4:25 AM
Okay. Next time I see our smirking, narcissistic, President Obama saying how good he thinks he is at playing the role of president, I'll ask myself: "Wait a minute... is he high?"
Alec,
I think you might be the best guy to field this global warming question.
I saw on a different website (Strata) an
argument that says no greenhouse effect
exists in the atmosphere, that the greenhouse effect with which we are familiar is the blocking of convection and
the removal of heat by conduction.
Trying to think about this has really hurt my head and shown me how little I understand.
Whilst I can see that heat can be removed from the surface of the planet
by conduction and convection, it cannot
be transmitted finally away (into space)
by conduction as there are no molecules in space to conduct the heat TO!
Therefore the final step in removing heat has to be by radiation. I looked
up the equations for black body radiation and kind of gave up. But I did get that energy radiated is proportional to the fourth power of absolute temperature and I can sort of see an integral where air molecules near the surface of the Earth radiate energy in all directions but receive slightly less energy in turn from the air molecules above them (air gets less dense as we go up) and this integral extends all the way up to space. I simply don't know how to evaluate it.
I don't believe in AGW, but I am interested in the science so I can argue correctly. If you have the time, please comment.
Thanks.
I think you might be the best guy to field this global warming question.
I saw on a different website (Strata) an
argument that says no greenhouse effect
exists in the atmosphere, that the greenhouse effect with which we are familiar is the blocking of convection and
the removal of heat by conduction.
Trying to think about this has really hurt my head and shown me how little I understand.
Whilst I can see that heat can be removed from the surface of the planet
by conduction and convection, it cannot
be transmitted finally away (into space)
by conduction as there are no molecules in space to conduct the heat TO!
Therefore the final step in removing heat has to be by radiation. I looked
up the equations for black body radiation and kind of gave up. But I did get that energy radiated is proportional to the fourth power of absolute temperature and I can sort of see an integral where air molecules near the surface of the Earth radiate energy in all directions but receive slightly less energy in turn from the air molecules above them (air gets less dense as we go up) and this integral extends all the way up to space. I simply don't know how to evaluate it.
I don't believe in AGW, but I am interested in the science so I can argue correctly. If you have the time, please comment.
Thanks.
# posted by : 2:11 AM
: 2:11 AM
Hi Dave:
I took a quick look at AJ's post the other day. He is right that the "greenhouse" analogy is a misnomer. "Greenhouse gases" do not trap heat the way a greenhouse traps heat. Greenhouses block convection. "Greenhouse gases" do not.
There is, however, a warming effect from greenhouse gases. The more infra-red absorbing gases there are in the atmosphere, the more that infrared radiated by the sun-warmed surface bumps into and gets re-radiated by these infra-red absorbing molecules. That makes the trip back out into space harder or slower, which means it takes more "pressure" (temperature) at lower altitudes to "push" this heat out into space.
There seems to be some high level debate over how energy balance calculations should be done. I haven't looked into it (and probably couldn't understand it), but I assume that any simple "energy in = energy out" criterion would be an equilibrium condition. Thus when energy-in exceeds energy-out, the earth is storing energy (getting warmer). The general balancing condition would be that the difference between energy-in and energy-out must be balanced by a change in the energy inventory.
Now put this together with the idea that it takes more temperature "pressure" to drive a given amount of radiation out into space as the amount of infra-red trapping gas goes up. If solar insolation is constant and CO2 goes up, there will have to be warming of the planet to create the extra pressure needed to get the out-flow of energy back up to where it was, and the planet will heat until that in-out balance is reached.
Watts Up With That had a good post on this issue not long ago. Maybe I can find it. Here you go. Anthony's co-blogger Steve Goddard states the energy balance condition as:
"outgoing radiation = incoming radiation - changes in oceanic heat content"
Sometimes people talk of the heat being trapped closer to the surface when CO2 goes up, which is not completely accurate, but does capture much of the gist. I have no objection to the "greenhouse gas" term either, so long as people know that the label is a reference to the heat trapping effect, not the heat trapping mechanism.
As Goddard notes, the heat trapping effect of marginal changes in CO2 is trivial, and cannot by itself cause more than a tiny amount of global warming. A doubling of CO2 is calculated to cause about 1 degree C of warming. That is a LOT of fossil fuel burning for a temperature effect that is small, not large, compared to natural fluctuations in temperature. To turn this underwhelming anthropogenic warming effect into something dangerous, IPCC models introduce a climate sensitivity multiplier which they jack way up, when empirical estimates of climate sensitivity suggest that it is low or negative.
The IPCC should estimate climate sensitivity from what can be measured directly about it. Instead they treat it as a residual. What does the climate sensitivity have to be in order to attribute 20th century warming to CO2? They get to that bogus method by committing omitted variable fraud, leaving natural sources of warming out of their model, as I have written about before.
Post a Comment
I took a quick look at AJ's post the other day. He is right that the "greenhouse" analogy is a misnomer. "Greenhouse gases" do not trap heat the way a greenhouse traps heat. Greenhouses block convection. "Greenhouse gases" do not.
There is, however, a warming effect from greenhouse gases. The more infra-red absorbing gases there are in the atmosphere, the more that infrared radiated by the sun-warmed surface bumps into and gets re-radiated by these infra-red absorbing molecules. That makes the trip back out into space harder or slower, which means it takes more "pressure" (temperature) at lower altitudes to "push" this heat out into space.
There seems to be some high level debate over how energy balance calculations should be done. I haven't looked into it (and probably couldn't understand it), but I assume that any simple "energy in = energy out" criterion would be an equilibrium condition. Thus when energy-in exceeds energy-out, the earth is storing energy (getting warmer). The general balancing condition would be that the difference between energy-in and energy-out must be balanced by a change in the energy inventory.
Now put this together with the idea that it takes more temperature "pressure" to drive a given amount of radiation out into space as the amount of infra-red trapping gas goes up. If solar insolation is constant and CO2 goes up, there will have to be warming of the planet to create the extra pressure needed to get the out-flow of energy back up to where it was, and the planet will heat until that in-out balance is reached.
Watts Up With That had a good post on this issue not long ago. Maybe I can find it. Here you go. Anthony's co-blogger Steve Goddard states the energy balance condition as:
"outgoing radiation = incoming radiation - changes in oceanic heat content"
Sometimes people talk of the heat being trapped closer to the surface when CO2 goes up, which is not completely accurate, but does capture much of the gist. I have no objection to the "greenhouse gas" term either, so long as people know that the label is a reference to the heat trapping effect, not the heat trapping mechanism.
As Goddard notes, the heat trapping effect of marginal changes in CO2 is trivial, and cannot by itself cause more than a tiny amount of global warming. A doubling of CO2 is calculated to cause about 1 degree C of warming. That is a LOT of fossil fuel burning for a temperature effect that is small, not large, compared to natural fluctuations in temperature. To turn this underwhelming anthropogenic warming effect into something dangerous, IPCC models introduce a climate sensitivity multiplier which they jack way up, when empirical estimates of climate sensitivity suggest that it is low or negative.
The IPCC should estimate climate sensitivity from what can be measured directly about it. Instead they treat it as a residual. What does the climate sensitivity have to be in order to attribute 20th century warming to CO2? They get to that bogus method by committing omitted variable fraud, leaving natural sources of warming out of their model, as I have written about before.
<< Home
