Saturday, February 22, 2014

I am back!

I have been away. I had a number of health issues that needed addressing and I got sidetracked into some things. But, things are getting straightened out and I will now be managing this blog more actively.

A particular note, I started writing a book on global warming, but then gave it up. It was, I realized, a book that no one was going to read. People that believe in global warming don't need to read it. People that don't believe, won't. So, it sat on the shelf for some time. Well, last fall I decided that I really wanted to write this book and went back to work on it. Even if no one reads it, its OK. I wrote it for me.

The format of the book is the same as my first book, Dialogues on 2012: Why the World Will Not End. It consists of three friends discussing global warming. The premise is that there is so much scientific evidence easily available to the public that you do not need to be a scientist to prove global warming. Anyone can do it.

I have finished the first, rough draft and am now working on smoothing it out. I hope to have it published (as an ebook) before summer.

Meanwhile, keep coming back to this blog. I will be making posting on the issues and providing analysis of the issues appearing in the news.

Cheers!

9 comments:

  1. Truthfully, if you believe there is no correlation between CO2 concentration levels and global warming you have rejected science. There is positively no question that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and the science is rock solid on this issue. I haven't looked at your blog, but if the rest of your claims are as scientifically sound as that one, then you have no credibility at all.

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  2. I have used science at least since high school. If you had looked, you would have discovered that I am a licensed engineer. Engineers apply science to the needs of humanity. If they screw up, people may die. I made a conscious decision to stop formal education at the MSME level and didn’t regret it until the year before I retired.

    Of course I know that CO2 is a ghg. It is called that because it absorbs IR in the range of 14-16 microns. However, the IR from the planet is (mostly) in the range 5-50 microns. If the atmosphere were all CO2 it would only absorb about 8% of the IR.

    Most (about 95% of all EMR absorption) is absorbed by water vapor. EMR is absorbed and partially thermalized (my rough calcs say about 12% is thermalized. That means that about 12% of the EMR energy shows up as heat, warming the air. A practical observation of this is that the temperature drops faster at sundown in Phoenix, where it is dry, compared to Huntsville, where it is humid.

    Since the EMR gets partially thermalized, the EMR flux declines (logarithmically) with altitude. My calcs say to about half the surface flux at half a km, 95% at 2 km. If you understand how ghgs work you should also understand that slightly more ghg will only result in absorption/thermalization taking place slightly closer to the surface.

    If you had looked at my stuff you would have seen that CO2 change was considered. The coefficient of determination (R^2) excluding the influence of CO2 is 0.904906 while R^2 including the influence of CO2 is 0.906070. Thus, CO2 change makes no significant difference.

    A plethora of sub links and sub-sub links go a lot deeper into all this.

    I just visited your personal profile site and observed how similar our interests are. I only scuba dived once though, in St. Thomas, and they wouldn’t let us go deeper than about 15 ft. I haven’t read Fountain Head, but I did read Atlas Shrugged.

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  3. Everything you say here is irrelevant. You are trying to change the topic of discussion. You stated that CO2 was not one of the drivers. This is a false statement and the fact that there are other drivers does not make your statement true. The reason CO2 is the one most discussed is that it is the one we make the most of and it is very easy to measure in the atmosphere. Other ghg are typically measured in units of CO2 equivalents. Methane and water vapor, in particular, are much more effective as ghg and are the subjects of much research. For instance, we are very concerned about the methane ice in the Arctic tundra that is starting to melt and releasing large amounts of that gas into the atmosphere.

    Diving is one of my greatest loves. I have been diving since 1973 and still get excited every time I get a chance to dive. I am a dive volunteer at the Texas State Aquarium and am going on a dive trip to Belize next month. You should give it another try.

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  4. Why do you think that explaining average global temperatures since before 1900 with R^2>0.9 irrespective of whether CO2 is considered or not is irrelevant?

    Enjoy the trip. I used to work with a guy who combined diving with underwater photography. He brought back fantastic pictures. Its something to think about . . .

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  5. The issue has been your statement that CO2 is not a driver of greenhouse gases. If fact, CO2 is not only a driver, but it is the most important one. A study (at http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/co2-temperature.html) found that CO2 was responsible for about 20% of the greenhouse effect. Water vapor and clouds accounted for about 75%. The remaining five percent came from the minor gases (much more potent than CO2, but in very much smaller concentrations in the atmosphere). The study states, "However, it is the 25 percent non-condensing greenhouse gas component, which includes carbon dioxide, that is the key factor in sustaining Earth’s greenhouse effect. By this accounting, carbon dioxide is responsible for 80 percent of the radiative forcing that sustains the Earth’s greenhouse effect."

    The issue has never been that there are other factors involved. The issue is that you state that CO2 is not a driver, when it is actually the factor controlling the show. I don't know how it is possible for someone to look at plots of the CO2 level plotted with global temperatures and still claim that CO2 is not a factor in global temperature.

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    1. A co-plot of CO2 and average global temperature (AGT) actually corroborates that CO2 does not drive AGT. I have done it. If you just look at the period 1974-2005 the correlation is excellent, but if you look at a longer period, say 1850-2013, you see the temperature trend going up, down, up, down, up, too-soon-to-tell while the CO2 level steadily, progressively increases. After 2001 the separation increases steadily as shown at http://endofgw.blogspot.com/

      CO2 increase from 1800 to 2001 was 89.5 ppmv (parts per million by volume). The atmospheric carbon dioxide level has now (through December, 2013) increased since 2001 by 27.18 ppmv (an amount equal to 30.37% of the increase that took place from 1800 to 2001) (1800, 281.6 ppmv; 2001, 371.13 ppmv; December, 2013, 398.31 ppmv).

      How do you rationalize that the temperature increase to 2001 was caused by a CO2 increase of 89.5 ppmv but that 27.18 ppmv additional CO2 increase had no effect on the average global temperature trend after 2001?

      My stuff shows a match (R^2>0.9 from 1895 on) through all measured AGT and credible estimates back to 1610.

      As to the NASA study (also by 'warmers') they used their flawed climate models and did not account for the sunspot number time-integral. Running a model is not an experiment, particularly if it is a flawed model that cannot calculate what is happening and cannot back-cast with any accuracy. I could not find where they reported R^2. I expect that if it wasn't embarrassing, they would have reported it. It appears that, in climate work, peer review has deteriorated to crony review.

      There are other things that are seldom, if ever discussed. For example, the huge effective thermal capacitance of the planet, which translates to a time constant of about 5 years, absolutely prohibits the AGT changing as rapidly as reported so the reported measurements must have a random uncertainty of about s.d. = 0.09 K. The roiling oceans, shown with animations on the web, and discreet locations of sensors explain how this can be.

      During the last glaciation (http://www.middlebury.net/op-ed/pangburn.html), the temperature trend changed direction (repeatedly). Control Theory mandates that direction change cannot occur if there is positive feedback. NASA (and others) incorporates positive feedback in their models.

      Also during the last glaciation, the temperature trend went from an increasing trend to a decreasing trend with the CO2 level higher than it was while the temperature trend had been increasing. The opposite also occurs.

      In the late Ordovician, the planet plunged in to and emerged out of an ice age while the CO2 level was several times the present. http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Carboniferous_climate.html

      When I started looking in to this, some folks were saying it was CO2 and some folks were saying it wasn’t. I was curious as to what the truth was and started to research it myself. I challenged everything and have made public what I discovered. I have predicted the trend until 2020 since the solar guys seem pretty confident about the rest of this solar cycle and the ocean cycles have been steady for more than a century. What happens after that depends on what the sun does.

      I have about run out of stuff so, if I haven’t piqued your curiosity, so be it. I, for one, will continue to challenge my findings and compare them to future measurements.

      Thanks for the debate.

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    2. Your statement is contrary to all of the actual, factual science. If you cannot look at the factual data and see the stunning correlation between CO2 levels and temperature for the last 800,000 years then I just don't know what to say to you. This is a perfect example of what I call the lost minds. There is no scientific evidence or logic that you are willing to accept. My efforts are not devoted to helping you find the errors in your logic because your logic is non-existent and you find what you want to support the conclusion you want. I do not say that to be offensive, I say it as a mere statement of fact. However, there are still those that have not been lost and I hope I can help them out. I am sorry you have decided you are smarter than all of the physicists and climate scientists in the world that have come to conclusions counter to your beliefs, but that is life.

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    3. If you feel you have the evidence to show global warming is not real, I encourage you to write it up as a proof, via the scientific method, and submit it to my challenge (found on this blog site).

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    4. I am working on a posting that will address many of the issues discussed. I do not believe it is possible to persuade Mr. Pangburn of his errors, but I want to try and keep other people from falling for the bad science. I have been looking at his webpage and I have already seen several errors in his claims. It may take a few days, but it will be coming in a post entitled "Is CO2 a Global Warming Driver?"

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