Solar Minimum 2009, Global Cooling and the Record Breaking Winter

[imokyrok]

Point no.9 needs further explanation from " The scientists "

You should find the answers you need on this list here
Skeptical Science: Examining Global Warming Skepticism

[Malbekh]

Uh, if you hear reports about some guy in south county Dublin going around screaming 'the graphs, the graphs...'

[Cassandra Syndrome]

Does it mention anything about people believing that 18th century financiers are still pulling the strings in 2010?

Well explain the 2nd Second Great Depression.

[ibis]

I rest my case.

The experiment cited by IBIS is a total joke. So sad as to warrant pity.

The Greenhouse effect of course is a misnomer. What it should be called is the Infrared effect. What happens in a real Glass Greenhouse is convectional air or thermally agitated air is prevented from escaping and so the heat builds up.

It's quite sad for IBIS to have to quote Arrhenius and Tyndall from over 100 years ago. These guys didn't have Spectrometers then and were partly right. We all know CO2 absorbs IR energy.

How much would be the real effect of varying CO2 from 200ppm to 500ppm at various heights above the surface of the earth say (5m - 100m) with the only IR light source being the IR emitted from Tarmac or Concrete or dirt during the winter months and summer months.

Anyone who knows what an FTIR Spectrometer looks like will know that it has an IR light source, such as an electrically heated Ceramic filament which is very hot - well above the earth's average temperature of 15 deg Celcius. Most of the earth is water. The amount of IR light emitted from water at 15 deg celcius is negligable. High spec FTIR's have a Water Cooled source to prevent the spectrometer from over heating.

Sadly, poor IBIS fails again.

Er, you're claiming that the earth doesn't radiate in the infrared? Or that it does so only from certain bits like tarmac and concrete?

How do you think the Earth's absorbed solar radiation is emitted back into space?



Possibly I'm wrong here - possibly you're not making such a ludicrous claim, but it sure looks like it.

Earth absorbs solar radiation, and emits it in the infrared. Here's a picture of the infrared picked up by satellites:



Even the lower end of the scale there is 70 W/m2.

CO2 and the other greenhouse gases absorb that IR energy on its way out to space, which makes the atmosphere warmer than it otherwise would be. CO2 is relatively effective, because the wavelengths it absorbs are very close to the ones the Earth mostly emits - and also because those absorbed wavelengths are amongst those not absorbed by water vapour, which is Earth's primary atmospheric 'greenhouse' constituent.

The exact amount of extra energy being absorbed is hard to measure, but appears to be 0.8 W/m2. That doesn't sound like a lot, and it isn't - global warming is a very slow process, pushing temperatures up by a fractions of a degree per decade (0.36 degrees over the last three decades - that's 0.012 degrees annually). Unfortunately, that puts us in the position of the proverbial frog in the saucepan - the heat's being turned up slowly enough that nothing dramatic happens, and many people will sit there croaking happily for a good few years yet. However, on the timescale of major environmental changes, this is still extremely fast - too fast for a lot of ecosystems to adapt, and faster, more global, and more extreme than any change since humans first developed agriculture.

[owedtojoy]

Very good greenman video on the empirical evidence for global warming.

YouTube - greenman3610's Channel

[owedtojoy]

Destiny's Child said:

"What happens in a real Glass Greenhouse is convectional air or thermally agitated air is prevented from escaping and so the heat builds up. "

Can you cite the scientific evidence for this?

[fiannafailure]

Destiny's Child said:

"What happens in a real Glass Greenhouse is convectional air or thermally agitated air is prevented from escaping and so the heat builds up. "

Can you cite the scientific evidence for this?

What DS meant to say was that if you continue to put energy into a system faster than the system can lose energy, it gets warmer.

Sound familiar

[ibis]

What DS meant to say was that if you continue to put energy into a system faster than the system can lose energy, it gets warmer.

Sound familiar

I'm afraid DS' point does sound familiar, but only because I've been through it before with him. What he means is - more or less literally - that there's no roof on the sky.

[owedtojoy]

"Real Glass Greenhouse is... convectional air or thermally agitated air ...prevented from escaping and so the heat builds up"

DS does not believe in infra-red radiation, then?

Does DS stand for De Selby, the mad scientist in the Third Policeman?

[ibis]

After just listening to the radio1 weather forecast for tomorrow I was struck by what seems like an odd prediction... " temperatures will be between 5 and 8 C but will remain at 0 C where fog persists" It appears as proof positive that condensed water vapour is extremely effective at reflecting heat away from the land/sea surface, it then follows that cloud would be an even greater reflector. Global cooling? just check the Met office world satellite sequence and prepare for one of the coolest summers yet.

Clouds reflect both incoming radiation and outgoing radiation. Clouds at different levels have different effects:



Uncondensed water vapour in the atmospheric column is of course simply a greenhouse 'gas' - and a warmer atmosphere means more water vapour can be held before clouds condense.