Categorising Climateers Creates Cliques

In his article “Climate Deniers Are Giving Us Skeptics a Bad Name” published at American Thinker back in February, S. Fred Singer has a go at those he sees as ‘Warmistas’ and ‘Deniers’ whilst commenting about the group he includes himself in.

In principle, every true scientist must be a skeptic. That’s how we’re trained; we question experiments, and we question theories. We try to repeat or independently derive what we read in publications — just to make sure that no mistakes have been made.

In my view, warmistas and deniers are very similar in some respects — at least their extremists are. They have fixed ideas about climate, its change, and its cause. They both ignore “inconvenient truths” and select data and facts that support their preconceived views. Many of them are also quite intolerant and unwilling to discuss or debate these views — and quite willing to think the worst of their opponents.

James Lovelock: Perspectives on Climate Science and the Blogosphere

I just came across the full transcript of the interview responses made by James Lovelock to Leo Hickman of the Guardian who used some of them in this piece. They make interesting, challenging and thought provoking reading. Lovelock pulls no punches in his criticism of both sides in the climate debate and has a strong perspective of his own. I can’t reproduce the whole page here for copyright reasons, but you can always copy and paste a section from the original into the comments section if you want to discuss it. Here is a small selection to get started with:

The great climate science centres around the world are more than well aware how weak their science is. If you talk to them privately they’re scared stiff of the fact that they don’t really know what the clouds and the aerosols are doing. They could be absolutely running the show. We haven’t got the physics worked out yet.

We do need scepticism about the predictions about what will happen to the climate in 50 years, or whatever. It’s almost naive, scientifically speaking, to think we can give relatively accurate predictions for future climate. There are so many unknowns that it’s wrong to do it.

Yes Virginia – Back-Radiation delivers measurable heat – just not very much

Tim C alerts us to this neat bit of empirical work in progress which uses a peltier to measure the warmth generated by cloud cover. Peltiers are those neat little gadgets used to cool computer CPU’s and miniature fridges. You supply power and a heat sink/fan on one side, and they ‘pump’ heat from one surface to the other. They also work in reverse as ‘TEG’s – Thermo-Electric Generators. If you heat one side while keeping the other cool, they generate electricity. This is the ‘Seebeck effect’. I use a couple on my backpacking trips to recharge AA batteries in the winter when my 100g 3W solar panel fails to get the job done. I have two fixed to a heat sink with thermally conductive glue.  The heat sink sits on my 100g woodstove and a pan of cold water sits on top of the peltiers.

Richard Holle: U.S. Tornado action successfully predicted

Keep an eye on Richard Holle’s Aerology page on the Talkshop and his fully mapped weather prediction service for the U.S. (other areas coming soon). Richard’s tireless work is paying off, and his weather forecasting is proving to be accurate and valuable. Here’s his latest update showing that a forecast he made on WUWT over a month ago is spot on:

Richard Holle says:
April 13, 2012 at 1:06 pm

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/01/tornado-outbreak-tracking/#comment-909920

Seems to still be as valid now as then…
Richard Holle says:
March 1, 2012 at 6:47 pm

Once again the Lunar declinational tidal effect is responsible but goes unmentioned, The moon was maximum North declination on the 1st of March, the solar declination seasonal tide is incoming from the South adding to the effect and making the resultant tropical air mass surge two days sooner than the usual, peak production on the day of Maximum North lunar declination and three days after.

I have had daily forecast maps for this expected precipitation posted for 51 months now;
http://www.aerology.com/national.aspx

Tom Van Flandern: The Speed of Gravity – What the Experiments Say

The Speed of Gravity What the Experiments Say

Tom Van Flandern, Meta Research [as published in Physics Letters A 250:1-11 (1998)]

 

Abstract. Standard experimental techniques exist to determine the propagation speed of forces. When we apply these techniques to gravity, they all yield propagation speeds too great to measure, substantially faster than lightspeed. This is because gravity, in contrast to light, has no detectable aberration or propagation delay for its action, even for cases (such as binary pulsars) where sources of gravity accelerate significantly during the light time from source to target. By contrast, the finite propagation speed of light causes radiation pressure forces to have a non-radial component causing orbits to decay (the ‘Poynting-Robertson effect’); but gravity has no counterpart force proportional to  to first order. General relativity (GR) explains these features by suggesting that gravitation (unlike electromagnetic forces) is a pure geometric effect of curved space-time, not a force of nature that propagates. Gravitational radiation, which surely does propagate at lightspeed but is a fifth order effect in , is too small to play a role in explaining this difference in behavior between gravity and ordinary forces of nature. Problems with the causality principle also exist for GR in this connection, such as explaining how the external fields between binary black holes manage to continually update without benefit of communication with the masses hidden behind event horizons. These causality problems would be solved without any change to the mathematical formalism of GR, but only to its interpretation, if gravity is once again taken to be a propagating force of nature in flat space-time with the propagation speed indicated by observational evidence and experiments: not less than 2×10¹⁰ c. Such a change of perspective requires no change in the assumed character of gravitational radiation or its lightspeed propagation. Although faster-than-light force propagation speeds do violate Einstein special relativity (SR), they are in accord with Lorentzian relativity, which has never been experimentally distinguished from SR; at least, not in favor of SR. Indeed, far from upsetting much of current physics, the main changes induced by this new perspective are beneficial to areas where physics has been struggling, such as explaining experimental evidence for non-locality in quantum physics, the dark matter issue in cosmology, and the possible unification of forces. Recognition of a faster-than-lightspeed propagation of gravity, as indicated by all existing experimental evidence, may be the key to taking conventional physics to the next plateau.

___________________________________

Some thoughts about the solar system barycentre

Figure 1

There are Talkshop blog readers who have a considerable interest in the solar barycentre, a taboo subject in many places, possibly because of excessive claims and obsession, makes dreadful coffee too.

Personally I don’t know but the idea has merit as a possible mechanism for something, what we don’t know. It’s worth remembering gravity is not the only solar linkage to the outside, magnetic and electrical connections are present, moreover interaction with planets is to a degree selective because they vary in their magnetic field.

Top Flight ex NASA Astronauts and Engineers plea to directorate

March 28, 2012
The Honorable Charles Bolden, Jr.
NASA Administrator
NASA Headquarters
Washington, D.C. 20546-0001
Dear Charlie,

We, the undersigned, respectfully request that NASA and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) refrain from including unproven remarks in public releases and websites. We believe the claims by NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated, especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data. With hundreds of well-known climate scientists and tens of thousands of other scientists publicly declaring their disbelief in the catastrophic forecasts, coming particularly from the GISS leadership, it is clear that the science is NOT settled.

The big oscillation: Ocean heat crossing the equator explains global warming

Bob Tisdale has a post up at WUWT which adds model trends to his regular monthly update Sea Surface Temperature (SST) graphs covering all the ocean basins. It’s a big, comprehensive survey. Great work, thanks Bob. There is so much to  digest however, that it’s easy to suffer ‘information overload’ and get sidetracked by details, so I’ve copied a smaller number of his graphs to illustrate a discussion of inter-hemispheric heat transport.

Firstly, let’s take a look at the distribution of anomalies across latitudes since 1980

Ashwin Vavasada: Lunar equatorial surface temperatures and regolith properties from the Diviner Lunar Radiometer Experiment

Ned Nikolov has kindly sent me the freshly published paper by Vavasada et al which adds a lot more detail to the plot of Lunar equatorial temperature he passed our way recently. This is technical, but worth getting your head around, because it reveals and elucidates matters highly relevant to ideas and misconceptions regarding  theoretical grey body temperature, both for the Moon and Earth. Get it while it’s hot.

                JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 117, E00H18, doi:10.1029/2011JE003987, 2012

Lunar equatorial surface temperatures and regolith properties
from the Diviner Lunar Radiometer Experiment
Ashwin R. Vasavada,1 Joshua L. Bandfield,2 Benjamin T. Greenhagen,1 Paul O. Hayne,3
Matthew A. Siegler,4 Jean-Pierre Williams,4 and David A. Paige4
Received 30 September 2011; revised 20 February 2012; accepted 20 February 2012; published 4 April 2012.

[1] The Diviner Lunar Radiometer Experiment onboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter
has measured solar reflectance and mid-infrared radiance globally, over four diurnal cycles,
at unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution. These data are used to infer the radiative
and bulk thermophysical properties of the near-surface regolith layer at all longitudes
around the equator. Normal albedos are estimated from solar reflectance measurements.
Normal spectral emissivities relative to the 8-mm Christiansen Feature are computed from
brightness temperatures and used along with albedos as inputs to a numerical thermal
model. Model fits to daytime temperatures require that the albedo increase with solar
incidence angle. Measured nighttime cooling is remarkably similar across longitude and
major geologic units, consistent with the scarcity of rock exposures and with the
widespread presence of a near-surface layer whose physical structure and thermal response
are determined by pulverization through micrometeoroid impacts. Nighttime temperatures
are best fit using a graded regolith model, with a ~40% increase in bulk density and an
eightfold increase in thermal conductivity (adjusted for temperature) occurring within
several centimeters of the surface.

Citation: Vasavada, A. R., J. L. Bandfield, B. T. Greenhagen, P. O. Hayne, M. A. Siegler, J.-P. Williams, and D. A. Paige
(2012), Lunar equatorial surface temperatures and regolith properties from the Diviner Lunar Radiometer Experiment,
J. Geophys. Res., 117, E00H18, doi:10.1029/2011JE003987.

Are solar flecks being counted?

Figure 1

A frequent question in recent years is whether solar sunspot activity is being exaggerated by including very small marks in the count. This question implies inconsistency in methodology over time.

Recent other work on solar data puts me in a good position to quickly approach an answer, all the resources are already on disk here.

The quick answer is: Not obviously.

I invite further investigation, data used here is provided.

Welcome to Solar Maximum and a Spotless Sun

We were told by the mainstream solar physicists Dikpati and Hathaway back in 2008 that they expected solar cycle 24 to be one of the largest ever. Their prediction model failed. I predicted in 2009 that the cycle 24 solar maximum monthly sunspot count might reach around 50 SSN, similar to levels reached in the Dalton Minimum at the start of the 1800’s.

Leif Svalgaard predicted 70-75 SSN on the basis of a heuristic approximation derived from the strength of the solar polar magnetic fields. With some help from some creative counting by SIDC, who started including the tiniest of ‘spots’, or ‘pores’ in the SSN figures he has been proved right in terms of the peak sunspot number reached so far, but according to Geoff Sharp’s ‘Layman’s Sunspot Count’ his and my lower predictions have been proved correct. Today the Sun is all but spotless. At 9am this morning the last small spot can be seen disappearing over the Eastern Limb of the Sun. This is a highly anomalous situation for this stage in the solar cycle, recently annotated on Leif’s daily updated chart of solar activity with the Legend:

Welcome to Solar Max

Theodor landscheidt: Sun-Earth-Man and the Kepler ratios

In the previous post we discussed the work of Johannes Kepler and the ratios he found in the orbits and eccentricities of the inner solar system planets. It was also mentioned that in addition to the careful and accurate (given the observational data he gained full access to when Tycho Brahe died) work he did, he allowed himself some speculation regarding the Sun in the epilogue of his summum bonum work ‘Harmonice Mundi’ – The Harmonies of the World’. He appeared to posit a relationship between the motion of the planets and the sun’s activity, an intuition which would wait 370 years for confirmation, despite investigation by many scientists ranging from William Herschel in the early C18th, Rudolf Wolff in the C19th, to Paul D José in the later C20th.

The breakthough came not from mainstream solar scientists, who had rejected the idea that the planets could affect the Sun’s activity, but from astrologer and independent solar system dynamics researcher Theodor Landscheidt. He achieved this by considering the motion of the Sun about the centre of mass of the solar system, the  solar system barycentre (SSB).

Johannes Kepler: Harmonia Mundi

Johannes Kepler 1571-1630

During his lifetime of investigations into planetary motion, Johannes Kepler discovered simple numerical relationships between the planetary orbits which exhibited harmonic frequencies which matched those of the musical scale. He was intensely interested in Pythagorean number theory and the geometry of the simple solid figures, the tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, icosahedron and dodecahedron. Analysing planetary position data observed and collated by Tycho Brahe, he found that the golden section, phi, and the square roots and cubes of simple whole numbers permeated the relationships of orbital periods, distance and eccentricity ratios. Convinced he had discovered direct evidence of the Creator’s hand in the apparent  perfection of the cosmos, he devoted much of his life to unravelling the interwoven geometrical relationships of the solar system.

DISCLAIMER: This blog does not take any position regarding concepts of ‘Intelligent design’ or ‘creationism’ . Instead it seeks knowledge using reason and data and follows where they lead.

The laws he discovered governing planetary motion hold up very well for the inner planets as measured and calculated by modern sytems such as the JPL ephemeris.

Kepler’s laws are:

1. The orbit of every planet is an ellipse with the Sun at one of the two foci.
2. A line joining a planet and the Sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time.^[1]
3. The square of the orbital period of a planet is directly proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis of its orbit.

Although these three laws are all that mainstream astronomy and modern astrophysics eventually distilled from Keplers work, there is much more to tell, and it reveals the reason only a fraction of his work is acknowledged by the mainstream as belonging to modern science.

Kepler didn’t just find the laws of nature governing individual planetary orbits. He discovered rules governing the relationships between the orbits of the planets of the inner solar system, and the ‘consonances and compensations’ built into their orbital eccentricities and inter-related timings. Rules that now turn out to relate to the recently discovered feedbacks that tie the motion of the planets directly to the variation in the main source of energy at the heart of the system, The Sun.

Earth’s atmosphere before the age of dinosaurs

This is a long but very readable reposted paper which presents a convincing argument built up from several lines of investigation to arrive at the conclusion that the young Earth’s atmosphere was like the planet Venus’ is today. Venus has a very thick heavy atmosphere consisting almost entirely of carbon dioxide, CO2. The implications won’t be lost people following the development of the new theory of climate on this blog, or those considering the history of the Sun’s evolution.

Octave Levenspiel is professor emeritus of chemical engineering at Oregon State University (Corvallis, OR 97331-2702; 541-753-9248; octave@che.orst.edu).

Thomas J. Fitzgerald is a senior scientist in the space technology division of TRW Inc. (Redondo Beach, CA 90278; 562-596-8674).

Donald Pettit is a mission specialist (astronaut) at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Johnson Space Center (Houston, TX 77058-3696; 281-461-0630).

An earlier article in Chemical Innovation (1) showed that if you believe that biology’s mouse-to-elephant curve also applies to the flying creatures of the past, and if you also trust aerodynamic theory (which applies equally to flying insects, birds, and airplanes), then the giant flying creatures of the dinosaur age could only fly if the atmospheric pressure was much higher than it is now: at least 3.7–5.0 bar.

If this is so, it raises several interesting questions. For example, how did the atmosphere get to that pressure 100–65 million years ago (Mya)? What was the pressure before that? And how did it drop down to today’s 1 bar? Although we have no definite answers to these questions, let us put forth reasonable possible explanations.

Figure 1. Three possible alternatives for the atmospheric pressure early in Earth’s lifetime, given that it was at ~5 bar, ~100 Mya.

What was the air pressure for the 97% of Earth’s life before the age of dinosaurs? We have three possible alternatives, as shown in Figure 1.

• The pressure could have been at 1 bar throughout Earth’s earlier life, risen to 4–5 bar ~100 Mya (just at the time when the giant fliers needed it), and then returned to 1 bar (curve A).
• The pressure could have been ~4–5 bar from Earth’s beginning, 4600 Mya; and ~65 Mya, it could have begun to come down to today’s 1 bar (curve B).
• The atmosphere could have started at higher pressure and then decreased continuously through Earth’s life to ~4–5 bar ~100 Mya and down to 1 bar today (curve C).

The third alternative seems to be the most reasonable, so let us pursue it. We will also look into the composition of Earth’s atmosphere, but we will first discuss Earth’s surface and see how it affects the atmosphere.

Fossilized raindrops dampen theory of ancient warming

I came across this interesting story on the Institute of Physics website today and thought it worth sharing. More puzzles than answers, but it might jog a few ideas.

A meerkat stands guard over ancient raindrops

A technique that uses fossilized raindrops to work out what the air pressure on Earth was billions of years ago has been used for the first time by scientists in the US. By analysing the shapes and sizes of raindrop imprints in volcanic ash, the team has shown that the atmospheric pressure in the Archaean eon was roughly the same as it is today. This is at odds with a popular theory of how the Earth stayed warm enough for life to exist at the time.

Billions of years ago, the Sun was about 20% dimmer than today because a star burns hydrogen more slowly earlier in its fusion cycle. There would therefore have been less radiation reaching the Earth and the surface should have been frozen. However, there is ample evidence of liquid water at the time as well as very primitive forms of life – a mystery known as the “Faint Young Sun” paradox.

Most scientists agree that the Earth must have been able to retain more heat in the past – but the reason why remains controversial. One explanation, proposed in 2009, is that atmospheric pressure was many times today’s figure

S.Fred Singer: Climategate Heads to Court

My thanks to S.Fred Singer, who has emailed me a copy of this new article, which also appears today at the American Thinker website, where Prof. Singer is a regular contributor.

Climategate Heads to Court
S.Fred Singer

As a climate scientist, I am quite familiar with the background facts that Prof Michael E. Mann (now at Penn State U) so shamelessly distorts in his new book “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines.”

First, the scientific background:

Mann’s claim to fame derives from his contentious (and now thoroughly discredited) ‘hockeystick’ research papers (in Nature 1998 and Geophysical Research Letters 1999). His idiosyncratic analysis of proxy (non-thermometer) data from sources like tree rings, ice cores, ocean sediments, etc, did away with the well-documented Medieval Warm Period (MWP — 900-1200AD) and Little Ice Age (LIA — 1400-1800AD) – documented by Prof. H.H. Lamb, the founding director of the Climate Research Unit of U. of East Anglia (CRU-UEA). Mann then asserted that the 20th century was the warmest in 1000 years. His temperature graph, shaped like a hockeystick (on its side) immediately became the poster child of Al Gore and the IPCC, the UN science panel, to support their claim of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

M.A. Vukcevic: Possible Confirmation of Svensmark Hypothesis

Click image to see full page on Vuk’s site

Joseph E. Postma: Copernicus Meets the Greenhouse Effect

In the rush to condemn  all things associated with ‘the Dragonslayers‘ some babies may have been thrown out with the bathwater. A lot of baggage comes along with discussion of ‘slayer politics’, and this has coloured people’s perceptions. However, because this is a site which sticks to discussing the science, and ‘censors’ off topic and inflammatory comment, we can dispassionately examine the scientific content without having discussion degenerate into a ruckus of noisy invective and insult. Last year on Judith Curry’s site ‘Climate Etc‘, this fate befell Joseph Postma’s paper on the greenhouse effect. It was a long, technical paper, and argument over its more controversial aspects and ‘slayer politics’ submerged its central point, as I noted at the time. Ulric Lyons has drawn my attention to this  shorter ‘easy access’ paper by Joseph reiterating this central point which I think merits discussion. Discussion I might add, which will be moderated to ensure house rules are observed.

Copernicus Meets the Greenhouse Effect
Joseph E. Postma
(M.Sc. Astrophysics)
Sept. 10, 2011

The Earth-Centered Solar System
Ptolemy’s epicyclic, nested-spheres, model of the solar system worked wonderfully for
predicting the movements and positions of the planets. It was a model which, for the time-period,
could correctly predict the broad observables, but it accomplished this with, as we now know,
completely unrealistic internal physics and boundary conditions.

M.A. Vukcevic: Every picture tells a story – Missing heat found

Big thanks to regular Talkshop fly-by visitor ‘Vuk’ who pointed me to this page on his site, which contains a graphic which, well, graphically shows where a lot of the Northern Hemisphere land surface warm-up came from in the latter 30 years of the C20th.

click image for fullsize

Stealing the Steel Greenhouse: Cause and Effect in Earth’s Energy Flow

The main plank of the standard theory of the flow of energy in Earth’s climate system is the notion that energy leaving the surface is partly recycled by radiatively active gases, GHG’s, in the atmosphere as ‘downwelling long-wave radiation’, DLR, which warms the surface of the planet relative to the temperature it would have without an atmosphere.

The basic idea is that the surface temperature has to rise in order to be radiating at such a temperature that the radiatively active ‘greenhouse gases’  at cold, high altitude in the atmosphere are able to emit the same amount of energy back out into space as arrives from the Sun, which in the end, along with other radiatively active object in the air such dust particles and cloud droplets, they must. The basic scheme is nicely typified in this diagram by Willis Eschenbach, in his 2009 article on WUWT, entitled ‘The Steel Greenhouse’. (though Willis uses the idea of an internally heated planet with a steel shell to simplify the concept) The diagram shows the difference between a planet with no ‘shell’ (top), and a planet with a radiatively active shell (bottom).

Willis says:

“In order to maintain its thermal equilibrium, the whole system must still radiate 235 W/m2 out to space. To do this, the steel shell must warm until it is radiating at 235 watts per square metre. Of course, since a shell has an inside and an outside, it will also radiate 235 watts inward to the planet. The planet is now being heated by 235 W/m2 of energy from the interior, and 235 W/m2 from the shell. This will warm the planetary surface until it reaches a temperature of 470 watts per square metre. In vacuum conditions as described, this would be a perfect greenhouse, with no losses of any kind. Figure 1 shows how it works.”

In his article. Willis then develops the idea that his model is analogous to the real Earth and its atmosphere.