In a move to shore up credibility for climate change science, American scientists and economists are asking the Senate to enact immediate legislation to reduce emissions related to global warming.

Two thousand US economists and climate scientists, including eight Nobel laureates, are sending a letter Thursday to the Senate urging lawmakers to require immediate nationwide cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions tied to global warming.

. . .

“We call on our nation’s leaders to swiftly establish and implement policies to bring about deep reductions in heat-trapping emissions,” the scientists write in the letter. “The strength of the science on climate change compels us to warn the nation about the growing risk of irreversible consequences as global average temperatures continue to increase.”

Only the last blockquote is in the letter. But the summary by the writer of the article seems to me to be correct.

Oh, and their own creditability problems, too.

1.

“The physics of the direct warming effects of increased concentrations of CO2 and other infrared-absorbing gasses is completely clear.”

Let me try, “The physics of radiative-energy transport phenomena and processes given changing compositions of CO2 and other infrared-absorbing gasses in a homogeneous mixture of gases is completely clear.”

In fact, I think this can be expanded to include all radiative-energy transport phenomena and processes, ( absorption, transmission, and reflectance ), for both ultra-violet and infrared radiation, so long as homogeneous mixtures of gases are the material.

For me, one question is, How does this relate to the Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, ice, and land, and all the materials in and on these, and all the phenomena and processes occurring within and between these?

2.

“So, yes, one must combine this measurement of anthropogenic CO2 with the simple radiative physics in the atmosphere to get the fact that we expect AGW.”

The radiative-energy transport phenomena and processes occurring in the Earth’s atmosphere are far from ’simple’. If these were simple, I think the treatment of them in mathematical models could be fairly characterized as being based on the full and complete fundamental equations associated with these, depend solely on properties of the materials of interest free of any parameterizations, accurate numerical solution methods known and fully incorporated into all GCMs, and resolution of all temporal and spatial scales accurately resolved for every calculation.

So far as I am aware, none of these conditions are met. The parameterizations for some of the phenomena and processes associated with radiative-energy transport in the Earth’s atmosphere are in fact used to tune the GCMs when improvements in hindcasts are needed. The properties of materials as they appear in the fundamental equations for any phenomenon or process are never used as tuning knobs.

I’ll add now, that R. D. Cess, V. Ramanathan, G. E. Thomas, K. Stamnes and a few other people might be surprised to learn of the simplicity of radiative-energy transport calculations in the Earth’s atmosphere. The earth’s atmosphere is not a homogeneous mixture of gases; it’s far more complex. Some of the materials that make the Earth’s atmosphere a heterogeneous mixture of gases, vapor, liquid, and solids have critically important interactions with the radiative energy transport.

Recently, I also ran across this statement in an online kind-of textbook:

“To develop this understanding we must discuss various forms of energetic equilibria in which a physical system may reside. Earth (and the other terrestrial planets, Mercury, Venus, and Mars) are said to be in planetary radiative equilibrium because, on an annual timescale the solar energy absorbed by the Earth system balances the thermal energy emitted to space by Earth.”

My bold.

The writer has specified a time scale over which the in-come and out-go of radiative energy for the Earth’s systems are balanced; ‘annually’. In my opinion there is no foundation whatsoever for this statement. By the same token, I think that this is the first time that I’ve seen any temporal scale attached to the radiative-equilibrium hypothesis. This one is clearly unsupported, however. The Earth’s systems both receive and reject energy on all temporal and spatial scales. Yes, the Earth’s systems, at this very instance, are losing energy to deep space and this seems to be frequently overlooked.

Introduction
1. The Earth’s systems at some time in the past were in a state of radiative-energy balance, and will again be at some time in the future in radiative-energy-transport balance, between the energy supply source from the Sun and the energy sink from Earth into deep space.

2. Experimental measurements and theoretical calculations show that addition of gaseous CO2 into a homogeneous mixture of gases acts solely to change the radiative-energy transport response of the mixture. The sole interactions between the energy and the gaseous mixture are radiative phenomena and processes. There’s nothing else in there.

3. Addition of CO2 into the Earth’s atmosphere will act to decrease the fraction of the incoming radiative energy supply that is returned back to deep space.

4. Some vague average temperature, over grand, but unspecified, temporal and spatial scales, of some part(s) of the Earth’s systems must increase so that the increase in the fraction of retained radiative energy input will be rejected back into deep space.

5. Feedback, primarily (almost exclusively) associated with water vapor, is assigned an important player with respect to the amount of temperature increase associated with the increase in the energy content of the Earth’s systems.

Note, especially, that the change in the radiative energy budget at the outer boundary of the Earth’s systems will highly likely never be subjected to validation. That is, the fundamental hypothesis of the AGW issue will highly likely not ever be validated.

Note, too, that for every hour of every day, some radiative energy is lost from the Earth’s systems back into deep space. The focus seems to always be, without exception, that the energy content of the Earth’s systems is increasing with time. It is not. The energy content of the Earth’s systems is constantly changing at all time and space scales.

Equilibrium
I continue to fret over the fundamental hypotheses that have been presented to support the basis of the effects of increased concentrations of CO2 in the Earth’s systems. And, yes, I know this borders on heresy, but I’m an engineer and have a pretty good grasp of several aspects of energy transport, storage, exchange, and associated responses of materials.

I firstly get stuck at the radiative-equilibrium stage. Surely this equilibrium is not the rock-steady equilibrium as used in thermodynamics and other energy-budget and -balance situations. Equilibrium can generally mean different things within different contexts.

The first, within the context of energy budgets and balance, is that all materials that comprise the systems are at a uniform temperature at all spatial locations and for all time. There are no driving gradients in any potentials that could initiate change. Clearly this is not the equilibrium of interest whenever radiative-equilibrium and the Earth’s systems are the subject. Such a state has never been and will never be attained for these systems.

Secondly it can mean ’steady state’ or ’stationary state’; what comes out is equal to what goes in. I think this is the meaning for radiative-equilibrium. However, so far as I know the statement cannot be held to mean the same degree of equality that is generally associated with the concept of equilibrium. The radiative-energy exchange for the Earth’s systems is always changing at all temporal and spatial scales. What goes out is seldom, if ever, equal to what comes in.

There are no inherent natural physical phenomena and processes acting so as to produce such a response by the Earth’s systems. None of the natural phenomena and processes can possibly be ensuring that as the period of time over which in-come=out-go is theoretically to obtain, say, “Whoa, we need some corrections here because in-come is not equal to out-go.” All the subsystems, both internally and between systems ring as a function of time. There are no over-damped mechanisms that ensure monotonic approach to a state of equality for in-come and out-go over any spatial or temporal scales. The radiative-energy transport phenomena and processes for all components of the systems vary in both space and time.

Thirdly the phrase can refer to some kind of quasi-equilibrium condition in which departures from a nearly-equilibrium state are small. I think maybe this is the condition whenever radiative-equilibirium of the Earth’s energy budget is the subject. The question now is, What have been the magnitudes, and the temporal and spatial scales, of these departures from an equilibrium state in the past.

The Problem
The thermal state of the Earth’s systems have always rang and will always ring. The significant heterogeneous nature of the thermodynamic states of the systems, in both space and time, plus the extremely wide range of time scales for the important phenomena and processes, ensures this response. Again, true equilibrium is a condition never experienced by the Earth’s systems, so we’re here talking about ringing on top of ringing. Some of the past departures from a more-or-less equilibrium state can be traced to known perturbations on either the in-coming and out-going energy, or both. Some of these perturbations occur at very long intervals as determined primarily by the mechanics of the Earth-Sun system.

There are no inherent natural physical phenomena and processes acting so as to maintain the present state of the radiative-energy balance. Natural events, both external from and internal to, the Earth’s systems are free to cause changes in the state of the systems that can either increase or decrease the amount of energy that reaches the important parts of the Earth’s systems; in-come. Natural events can also act to both increase or decrease the amount of energy leaving the systems; out-go. Very likely, the grand-time-and-space-average albedo is changing all the time and thus changing the in-coming energy. So are the mechanisms that effect loss of infrared energy and changes in the out-going energy.

So, it seems to me that to discern the effects of human activities on the radiative-energy equilibrium balance, we need to determine the delta ( increase or decrease ) in energy content, not from some unattainable equilibrium state, and not from the long-time-scale perturbations in a quasi-equilibrium state, and not from the natural perturbations, but from the perturbations of these latter states.

This is a very confusing description. Let’s try the following. Draw a horizontal line to represent the unattainable equilibrium state. Superimpose along this line the long-time-scales perturbations due to Earth-Sun orbital mechanics. Superimpose on this latter curve the perturbations due to natural variations in the radiative-energy transport properties and characteristics of the systems. And, finally, the effects of human activities are superimposed on this last curve.

Unfortunately, we don’t know the time scales for all the perturbations, so we don’t know which is which. However, some might be better understood than others. Additionally, if we restrict criteria and metrics to planet-wide averages, we don’t know the spatial extent of perturbations that might be of sufficient magnitude to affect the over-all energy balance.

It’s a very tough problem, in my opinion.

I’ve read ‘peer-review’, ‘peer-reviewed’, and ‘peer-reviewed literature’ just about as many times as I’ve read ’science’, ‘the science’, and ’scientists’. I was beginning to doubt the validity of my own, merely engineering related, publication record. I was becoming depressed and thinking that I was unworthy of commenting and that I should follow only the advice of Peer-Reviewed Scientists.

But now I see that my publication record, and all the engineering literature that I have worked with, is more nearly completely peer-reviewed than the real-world standard set by the IPCC. The technical documentation for almost all engineering literature falls under the first column on the left at the post, plus technical reports from the middle column. I will argue that if these technical reports are in any way associated with organizations performing work for government / public agencies, they have been peer-reviewed. And actually reviewed in much more depth than that typical peer-reviewed journal reviews.

Additionally, I think that I can say that the engineering literature is on a much firmer foundation than the IPCC when it comes to peer-review. I have never, for example, cited, ‘articles in the daily papers and magazines’, or lectures, or audio/visual media, or blogs, or preprints, or e-prints. And I’m certain that I’ve not seen these cited in any of the engineering literature that I’ve used in my work. I have, however, cited technical reports from the middle column.

This information is yet another example that certain buzz-phrases have been over-utilized in The Climate Science Community to the extent that they have become, as jstults has noted, merely words and have no real meaning.

Maybe I’ll start working on a Climate Science Bingo scoring pad.

That’s ok.  I prefer a small, boutique-ish, highly-focused environment.

The critical aspect, in contrast to trust by the general public, is as follows. Policy decisions the outcome of which affect the health and safety of the public are never based solely on the basic concepts of science and scientists. Every one of these outcomes, without exception, have been implemented through independent regulatory agencies of governments. These agencies have been designed first of all to be placed between advocates and the general public. The agencies are also responsible for conducting rigorous, independent, deep, and difficult, review of not only the background science, but more importantly the science, engineering, and technology that is necessary for implementation of products and services. All of these agencies have set in place procedures and processes that must be followed without exception.

The reviews, by the way, are almost never based solely on the peer-reviewed literature as published in only selected properly approved journals by selected and approved authors. Instead, while some peer-reviewed literature will of course be considered, it is the internally conducted science, engineering, and technology that will be the basis of the decisions. Much of this research, development, engineering, and technology, by its very definition, is not, can not, and will not be available to the general public. In this respect, most of the general public may not be even vaguely aware of the nitty-gritty details of the basis of decisions that affect them. They couldn’t care less abut the science. They only want the decisions to be correct.

Additionally, note that while the climate change community insists that mistakes and errors will appear in peer-reviewed literature as published in only selected properly approved journals by selected and approved authors, these will potentially be corrected at some unspecified times in the future. Assumption of merely potentially timely resolution of errors will never be used as a justification for implementation of policies that affect the health and safety of the public.

Some of the independent agencies have acronyms familiar to the general public; FDA, NRC, FAA, DOT, among hundreds of others. Independent approval is mandatory for certification of aircraft, marketing of drugs, building power plants, damns, bridges, elevators, roads and highways, automobiles, escalators, composition of concrete, building materials and an almost endless list of others. The processes and procedures imposed on various industries are accepted as standard operating conditions and correctly followed by tens of thousands of employees in hundreds of industries. It’s not rocket science.

This is the critical focus area. I suggest that until climate science can identify an exception, climate science will continued to be an area which will be subjected to unrelenting, independent, public, and in public, verification and validation. The activities for which the climate change community should take responsibility, many already imposed on members of professional engineering societies and their publications, will be conducted by persons outside the community.

For a different outlook on the situation, consider the following. Here are several issue that have the potential to affect the health and safety of the public;

1. Irradiation of all organic food would save lives and at the same time reduce the resources needed to produce foodstuffs by a significant reduction in food wastes. With a bonus of needing less hydrocarbon-based supplements for crop production.
2. Nuclear power is at present the best alternative fuel source to fossil fueled base-loaded electricity production.
3. Genetically modified food crops have the same benefits as listed in 1 above.
4. The proper use of DDT can very significantly reduce unnecessary deaths in less-developed countries.

There are others and some more or less controversial among the general public. Note firstly that none of these have been approved solely by ‘the science’. Instead, every one of them has had independent regulatory agency approval. Secondly, note that not only has the science been known for decades, but more importantly the engineering and technology to safely implement them have been researched and developed to the extent that safe and effective products and services are available. Finally, note that some have not yet been widely implemented and remain contested. Why does the science change community consider themselves immune to the outcome that these have experienced.

And consider the following:

1. Use of biomass crops to reduce consumption of oil for transportation has very significant adverse impacts on the environment and more importantly on human populations through higher costs for food necessary for health and safety.

A climate-change community issue for which no one in that community will accept responsibility. An example that the just do something application of the precautionary principle will generally lead to failure.

A postscript:
As the headlines come out day after day, climate science is very likely at the present time not among the sciences in which much public trust will soon remain. But from my view that is another issue altogether. And, also from my view, they did it to themselves. On moderated blogs, why is it ever necessary that demeaning and obscene comments appear? Obscene characterizations of persons exhibits nothing more than stupidity. In one case of which I am aware, the blog owner has made such characterizations. Presumption of motives also frequently appears. Unfounded labeling runs rampart. If a label is applied, it should be accompanied with documentation that the label is correct. Mistaken characterizations of the results of the science are let stand if the characterization is favorable to the perception of a rapidly approaching, and enormous, unavoidable, fatal calamity of global proportions. Mistaken characterizations of the AOLGCM codes are let stand if the characterization implies that the bases of the software is at an extremely fundamental level. Recently the AOLGCMs were characterized to be a computational physics problem and thus devoid of any heuristic or ad hoc or empirical or EWAG or hand-waving aspects. All that is needed to get significantly more nearly accurate results is a little more computer time.

One of the reasons that I became interested in climate issues was the overwhelming appeal to their own authority that is evident in the area. Fundamental documentation issues and the total lack of, and complete dismissal of, use of fundamental processes and procedures in software development are among the main problem areas that I see. The fundamental processes and procedures in software development have been accepted and successfully integrated into every-day working environments by thousands of professionals in a very wide range of other engineering / technical / scientific disciplines. The climate change community seems to expect an exemption from application of these standard and critically necessary processes and procedures.

Other problem areas are the lack of respect for the informed understanding of others. The community seems to have overlooked the fact that there are lots of semi-retired, highly trained individuals with quite a bit of free time on their hands and looking for something to keep them busy.

Foolish assignment of the roles of Big Something in the views of others that are contrary to the revealed wisdom. Equally foolish, and just plain wrong, assignment of the sources of funding for those that have an informed understanding that differs from the accepted. and expected, norm

The appeal to, and extremely unusual assignment of prime importance to, so-called peer-review published papers in only the proper accepted journals. Again overlooking the fact that there are millions of people having both written and reviewed such papers and are very aware of exactly what the process accomplishes. And more importantly, what the process does not accomplish and was never intended to accomplish. The appeal to, and extremely unusual assignment of prime importance to, a very narrow range of areas and expertise that are allowed to express an informed understanding of issues.

These problem areas, coupled with an overarching appeal to supreme authority and associated arrogance are not conducive productive discussions. On the other hand, many associated with the climate change community are openly hostile to the very idea that productive discussions should be tolerated or even allowable.

Contrary to what seems to be the general impression, radiative energy transport in complex interacting media is not a slam-dunk given. Until the numerical values of the dominant driving potential for the Earth’s climate systems are pinned down, the uncertainties in the response of the systems will continue to be large.

All comments, especially corrections for incorrectos, will be appreciated.

Update January 6, 2010

I have uploaded a file that has additional details about the calculations.

A radiative-energy balance for the Earth is

where

Solving the equation for the Earth-surface temperature gives

None of the quantities in the equations are known with absolute precision. Interval arithmetic provides a convenient method to automatically account for the uncertainties in the quantities.

The nominal values for the parameters of interest include

and we’ll take the Earth-Sun view factor to be known with precision. The value for the luminosity of the Sun has been calculated using the listed value for the Sun temperature.

We take the following estimates (EWAGs) for the uncertainties; the ultra violet reflectivity varies by plus or minus 5 %, the infra red reflectance also by 5 %, and the Sun temperature by plus or minus 50 K, we get the following ranges for the quantities

I’ll check that luminosity ‘Real Soon Now’.

1255553034.txt

In the middle of October 2009, Tom, Gavin, Mike, and a bunch of other people discuss models, measured data, and presentation of comparisons.

I’ve added some bolding.

See the whole thing to ensure that The Context is proper.

From: Tom [...]
To: Gavin [...]
Subject: Re: BBC U-turn on climate
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:43:54 -0600
Cc: Michael [...], Kevin
[...], Stephen [...], Myles [...], peter [...],
“Philip [...], Benjamin  [...], Thomas [...], Jim, Michael  [...]

<x-flowed>
Gavin,

I just think that you need to be up front with uncertainties
and the possibility of compensating errors.

Tom.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++

Gavin  [...] wrote:
> Tom, with respect to the difference between the models and the data, the
> fundamental issue on short time scales is the magnitude of the internal
> variability. Using the full CMIP3 ensemble at least has multiple
> individual realisations of that internal variability and so is much more
> suited to a comparison with a short period of observations. MAGICC is
> great at the longer time scale, but its neglect of unforced variability
> does not make it useful for these kinds of comparison.
>
> The kind of things we are hearing “no model showed a cooling”, the “data
> is outside the range of the models” need to be addressed directly.
>
> Gavin
>
> On Wed, 2009-10-14 at 18:06, Michael  [...] wrote:
>> Hi Tom,
>>
>> thanks for the comments. well, ok. but this is the full CMIP3
>> ensemble, so at least the plot is sampling the range of choices
>> regarding if and how indirect effects are represented, what the cloud
>> radiative feedback & sensitivity is, etc. across the modeling
>> community. I’m not saying that these things necessarily cancel out
>> (after all, there is an interesting and perhaps somewhat disturbing
>> compensation between indirect aerosol forcing and sensitivity across
>> the CMIP3 models that defies the assumption of independence), but if
>> showing the full spread from CMIP3 is deceptive, its hard to imagine
>> what sort of comparison wouldn’t be deceptive (your point re MAGICC
>> notwithstanding),
>>
>> perhaps Gavin has some further comments on this (it is his plot after
>> all),
>>
>> mike
>>
>> On Oct 14, 2009, at 5:57 PM, Tom  [...] wrote:
>>> Mike,
>>>
>>> The Figure you sent is very deceptive. As an example, historical
>>> runs with PCM look as though they match observations – but the
>>> match is a fluke. PCM has no indirect aerosol forcing and a low
>>> climate sensitivity — compensating errors. In my (perhaps too
>>> harsh)
>>> view, there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model
>>> results by individual authors and by IPCC. This is why I still use
>>> results from MAGICC to compare with observed temperatures. At least
>>> here I can assess how sensitive matches are to sensitivity and
>>> forcing assumptions/uncertainties.
>>>
>>> Tom.

I have discovered that all links to posts and documents internal to this site are broken. I had to move the site from its previous server to the present location and the URLs to site-internal locations all point to the previous server.  URLs to external servers still work, so long as those servers are still up and running.

I’ve also noticed that funny characters have popped up in the text again as they did when the original site had problems.

I have a day job now and don’t have time to fix these problems.

If a post has a URL that links to a previous post you’ll have to track down the previous post and open it directly.