Freeman Dyson continues to refuse to be part of the “consensus”:
Wearing an effusively-colored tie that set off his gray suit, Mr. Dyson began his talk at the Nassau Club by encouraging the audience to interrupt him as he spoke, since, he declared, “it’s much more fun to have an argument than do a monologue.”
In the absence of audience interruptions, Mr. Dyson had an argument anyway with the scores of people (like Al Gore) who weren’t present to defend their belief in the dire consequences of global warming. (“There’s no accounting for human folly,” Mr. Dyson said when asked about Mr. Gore’s Nobel Prize.) Saying that on a recent trip he and his wife found Greenlanders to be delighted with their warmer climate and increased tourism, Mr. Dyson suggested that representing “local warming by a global average is misleading.” In his comments at both the Nassau Club and Labyrinth, he decried the use of computer modeling to make “tremendously dogmatic” predictions about worldwide trends, without acknowledging the “messy, muddy real world” and the non-climatic effects of increased carbon dioxide. “There is no substitute for widely-conducted field operations over a long time,” he told the Nassau Club audience, citing the “enormous gaps in knowledge and sparseness of observation” that characterize the work of global warming experts.
Why can’t some people get with the program? Thankfully, though, mz will be along any minute to call Professor Dyson “stupid.”
Come now, Rand. Obviously, what Dyson considers is mythical. The reality is as mz wants it to be, and unless you are a true believer in that reality, then it is impossible to have an intelligent debate. No wonder Dyson didn’t have any interruptions.
Well, he’s been characterized as criticizing the climate models of the sixties, not having caught up what’s been happening in the field since.
And note that he doesn’t deny the existence of global warming per se, nevermind claim an imminent ice age from less than a year’s data. So he’s certainly far above a lot of Rand’s link material.
Too bad Obama doesn’t make Dyson an advisor, he needs someone to talk sense into him.
It looks like he’s intent on ramming all kinds of Draconian rules down our throat.
Here’s a more thorough analysis on what Syson says of global warming:
http://initforthegold.blogspot.com/2007/08/dyson-exegesis.html
Oh my, another link to the PhD meteorologist who uses Wikipedia as a cited reference and decries how meteorology is about short term weather and it is not climatology, which is the field of study for “saving the planet”. No myth to be found there.
Our PhD also makes the statement in comments in the linked article “Second, for the most part there is little overlap between the absorption bands of H2O and CO2.”
Not the last time I looked. The only place they don’t overlap almost completely is at 15nm and there it is partial.
As for the non saturation argument – qualitatively correct but quantitatively the first 20ppm of CO2 has most of the effect. At 380 ppm at present any additional doesn’t do a lot. Of course you can program your model any way you like but go look at some MODTRAN outputs.
Mike, you wrote:
Not the last time I looked. The only place they don’t overlap almost completely is at 15 microns and there it is partial.
15 microns happens to be near the peak radiation wavelength for black bodies at the range of Earth temperatures. For example, at 20C the peak would be 10 microns. At -40C, the peak is roughly 11.5 microns.
Glancing at this chart (from here) seems to indicate that there are two bands where CO2 absorbs much more than water vapor does, from 4-5 microns and from 15 microns on up. The latter is significant because it means that at very high elevations (eg, 100k feet, for example). CO2 should be quite effective at insulating the atmosphere, particularly the mesosphere where temperatures can drop as low as -100 C and water vapor is scarce. I gather this is the part of the atmosphere that radiates most directly into space.
he’s been characterized as criticizing the climate models of the sixties, not having caught up what’s been happening in the field since.
You can “characterize” your enemies any way you choose, MZ.
If you read Prof. Dyson’s recent book review in the New York Times, you would have seen that he discusses models and data from as recently as 2008. Which is a lot later than the 1960’s.
So much for your “characterization.” Do you have any more fictions you’d care to share?
Still waiting for you to call Professor Dyson (as you’ve called me…) “stupid,” mz.
And (by the way) why are you unwilling to attach your real name to your comments here, after all these years…?
Mr. Simberg,
I volunteer to save mz the trouble.
Professor Dyson is STUPID!
There. Now don’t we ALL feel better?
And (by the way) why are you unwilling to attach your real name to your comments here, after all these years…?
Don’t you read comic books? If he says his real name, he’ll disappear back to the Fifth Dimension!
No, he has to say it backward, Edward.
Karl:
I’m not quarreling with your result regarding relative importance of CO2 and H2O, but I’m not sure that the chart actually proves anything. The plots are in absorptivity, which I think (fix me if necessary) assumes a concentration and path length for absorption (that’s why the units are 0-1). In other words that plot is specific to an existing atmosphere, and probably shouldn’t be used to extrapolate to a different composition, unless you know the molar constant for each species.
I’ve also never though about whether altitude matters too much. If the photons leave sea level at 10 microns, and nothing above them absorbs them, then sea level is radiating to space, right? Photons don’t cool off with altitude.
I’m not a climatologist, and I think radiative transfer sucks . . .
Karl,
It is my understanding that the effective radiating level of the Earth is at around 5Km altitude where the temperature is around -20C. This would put the peak radiation by your reckoning at somewhere around 11 microns. There is quite a window in the total atmosphere from 8 to 12 microns apart from the oxygen and ozone peak at around 9.5 microns. I don’t think O2 and O3 are considered great contributors to the green house effect overall.
I’ve seen numbers between 70% and 95% of the total greenhouse effect being due to water with around 90% + being most usual and there being way more CO2 than required being already present in the wavelengths where it doesn’t overlap with water, hence more CO2 can’t do much.
In the longer term the atmospheric CO2 trend is downward. We may have to worry about natural sequestration of CO2 ending all life on Earth long before the sun dies.
So I take Mike’s useful response as confirmation of my intuition regarding the importance of altitude. That would indicate that “effective radiating level” is mainly set by the absorption curve and the temperature profile.
After some more thought, I’m pretty sure I’d stop using Wien’s Displacement law to pick wavelengths and then show plots with little or no CO2 or H2O absorption near wavelengths corresponding to normal surface temperatures. I have faith that our climate modelers know how to integrate over all of planck’s function and such, and grant that it isn’t very peaked at 10 microns, but I think that a casual skeptical person might look at those plots, do some math with Wien’s law, and not be convinced.
I have faith that our climate modelers know how to integrate over all of planck’s function and such
So do I, but the whole thing has become a giant game of whack-a-mole, perfectly displayed by GISS’s finding an artic hotspot at the same time they admitted to screwing up the Russian numbers. “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain”, “These aren’t the details you’re looking for”, blah-blah-blah. Bottom line, longterm CO2 trends are downward.
BTW, I think this is perfect:
I’m not a climatologist, and I think radiative transfer sucks…
Great for a sig.
So, mt, you continue to shuffle us to a blog that you post, with little real facts and lots of general babbling, and that is supposed to make us just roll over and say ‘Yes, you are right. We are wrong. Please save us.’.
My point in the other thread, and here, is that there is NO consensus on man-made global warming, or whatever you wish to use to define it.
Is there a consensus that the earth’s temperature changes over time – Yes, I’ll give you that one. I won’t give you that Man is affecting these changes (and many other ‘climate scientists’ agree). When you simply dismiss any science that disagrees with your opinions, you sound like any other religious leader – ‘Anyone who speaks against me or my beliefs must be a heretic’.
Dyson doesn’t go far enough. Emissivity goes up as the fourth power of temperature so even if there is a greenhouse effect, it wouldn’t be runaway. In the NYT Book Review article that was referred to above, Dyson talks about carbon eating trees being available before 2100. Carbon eating trees are available today. We could sequester as much carbon as we cared to by irrigating the desert and planting trees.
Here’s the real crusher: even if the consensus estimate for global warming damage is right and we implement the Gore plan that will cost $10 trillion in today’s dollar’s to the economy over the next 100 years, so what? If global economic growth continues at the 2-3% annual rate that it has been since the industrial revolution, that $10 trillion would be less than one part in one thousand of our productive capacity over the next century.
The world isn’t going to end. And proposed steps to save it will not matter enough to satisfy the rebels whose cause this is that we have sacrificed enough for the sake of sacrifice.
Sam: Who’s said anything about runaway? Or the world ending? Those are strawmen.
We could sequester as much carbon as we cared to by irrigating the desert and planting trees.
How much trees do you think would be needed for, say to absorb the US fossil fuel CO2 emissions in the US, to keep current state of CO2 concentration from increasing? (USA just as an example.) Perhaps 6 billion tonnes of CO2 per year. What kind of areas are we talking about? At the moment it seems US forests absorb about 10% of US human produced CO2, so one would have to multiply the area of US forests several fold.
It doesn’t seem like such an easy solution after all. How are you going to even deliver water to them? Nuclear desalination?
To me it would seem awfully easier to just replace the coal plants producing the CO2 in the first place with nuclear.
Tom W: I’m certainly not Michael Tobis (though I wish I knew as much, had the patience and could write as well as he did).
And you have to dismiss science that is *wrong* to keep understanding nature. It’s not religion. It is a common occurrence in the media and by people not knowing what it’s about to treat science like drama: a heroic underdog versus the corrupt establishment. Sadly, in reality, the underdogs are often wrong. You can just look at usenet to find lots of cranks who say they are persecuted since the establishment doesn’t accept their views. So the “views” are not discarded because they are anti-establishment or whatever, they are discarded because they are flawed, they do not fit with observed reality.
” Sam Dinkin wrote:
Dyson doesn’t go far enough. Emissivity goes up as the fourth power of temperature so even if there is a greenhouse effect, it wouldn’t be runaway. In the NYT Book Review article that was referred to above, Dyson talks about carbon eating trees being available before 2100. Carbon eating trees are available today. We could sequester as much carbon as we cared to by irrigating the desert and planting trees.”
Sam might be too brief in his statement above. In fact, since trees have definite lifetimes, over the *next* 1-200 years after 2100, almost all those trees would die, and decay would return their carbon to the atmosphere. However, we don’t have to allow that.
At least half of the sequestered carbon could be preserved for many hundreds of years, by turning it into charcoal, that is then used to enrich the soil of tropical and temperate countries. This technique for making highly leached soil fertile comes out of the Amazon Basin, where such ground is called “Terra Preta dos Indios”. Thus, we can make soil that supports many more people today, while reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
This does not even begin to count that you can recover the pyrolized gasses from making charcoal, and burn them immediately for their energy. Thus, we can kill 2 birds with one stone.
“So the “views” are not discarded because they are anti-establishment or whatever, they are discarded because they are flawed, they do not fit with observed reality.”
Sounds like the predictions of the AGW crowd to me. Except that they then torture the data, put wide error bands on their model outputs and then claim that the data “is not inconsistent with their modelling”.
There is no doubt – none at all – that at some point the continuing increase in greenhouse gases will reach a point at which it causes large, and probably irreversible, changes to the world’s climate. As well as this, there are several positive feedback mechanisms that are already beginning to have an effect; an example being the rapidly increasing release of methane from Siberian peat bogs.
The debate, such as it is, centres on the matter of just how much greenhouse gas we can generate and/or release before that happens. Global warming “deniers” (I somewhat hesitate to use that word hence the quotes) remind me of the mythical man who jumped out of the 88th floor of the Empire State Building and was heard, by someone on the 30th floor, to say “Well, I’m OK so far…”.
> There is no doubt – none at all – that at some point the continuing increase in greenhouse gases will reach a point at which it causes large, and probably irreversible, changes to the world’s climate.
“probably irreversible” is an interesting statement since the earth has had far more CO2 in the atmosphere than it does now. And, the temperature wasn’t significantly different than now.
Why will it be irreversible this time? Why will the effects be different?
Anonymous; one reason is that the Sun is now significantly hotter than it was in the Carboniferous, the last time that temperatures were really high. The configuration of the continents has changed, too.
Supporting evidence for the irreversibility argument is that CO2 is currently lower than it has been in hundreds of millions of years. The reason is extremely complex, but can be summed up in the concept that life on Earth creates the conditions for its own survival – sometimes known as the Gaia hypothesis.
One way that this is being done at the moment (at least until the last couple of hundred years) is steadily dropping CO2 levels over geologic time. Unfortunately, there is a lower limit to atmospheric CO2 levels that are still consistent with continuing life on Earth, and the environment was pretty close to it – or was until maybe 1900. Supporting this; apparently the dominant biochemistry of plants is changing to a system that can use lower concentrations of CO2. But if CO2 drops too low, then all the plants die.
So; take a system very close to its control limit, and apply a large forcing stimulus in the direction opposite to where it’s “trying” to go. Any control engineer or cyberneticist would tell you that’s a bad idea – but that is precisely what we are doing to Earth.
Evidence that irreversible change to a planetary environment is possible? Depending on the time of year, look into the East before sunrise or into the West after sunset. If the “stars” are right, you’ll see the evidence.
We haven’t caused that change yet. But at the moment nobody knows when we will – and by the time we find out it will be too late.
Care to provide a citation for this claim? From a peer-reviewed journal of astrophysics, naturally; only peer-reviewed articles in journals dedicated to a given field of study have any credibility. Just ask Alan Sokal.
(And if it turns out that the Sun was colder, but only during that part of the Carboniferous period that experienced a savage ice age, then I will be disappointed rather than surprised.)