Tropical Storm Bertha

Quietman – how do you think the magnetic and tectonic and volcanic activity would be affecting this? I’m very doubtful that has anything to do with it (at least in the short term; obviously, continental drift and long-term geologic CO2 emission rate changes will affect climate, but nothing like that would be significant over such a short time as a few hundred years; volcanic eruptions of course have a short term cooling effect, but … what eruptions and tectonic activity are you refering to? High latitude eruptions have a less potent cooling effect.)

Quietman:
In my thirty-five years in geophysics, that is the oddest admixture of nonsense I’ve ever seen written in one paragraph.It is, however, quite original. No geophysicist, geologist, or any other professional would dare blow that much smoke all at once. They’d never work again. Congratulations.

Why mention anything about this storm setting records? This serves as fuel for oil speculators. Do we need $10 gas by next week?

Oh boy! Here we go! For those not interested this is only the beginning besides humanities rising carbon footprint a weak geomagnetic field due to magnetic pole reversal and a star in the prime of it’s life burning hotter than ever, this weather is just getting started! The Midwest is a disaster with off season tornado strikes and it makes sense that a Hurricane season of unprecedented proportions could follow. The signs for such are indeed promising! Those who don’t care will after some of their relatives get hit, let me assure you that likelihood looks pretty for real!

Jock
Thanks for the kind words.

t rasa
P.S. I’m retired on disability – I will never work again anyway so why not speak my mind. That is an issue with AGW, if you take a position youre stuck with it because of political pressure. Hansen (NASA) can’t afford to change his mind. I suggest that you read up on Dr. Rhodes Fairbridge’s hypothesis about planetary gravity affecting the solar cycles.

Allen C. Morse III
Re: “a weak geomagnetic field due to magnetic pole reversal and a star in the prime of it’s life burning hotter than ever”
The pole reversal I was discussing in the ABC forum but I can’t find any information on it. Do you know of any articles or papers on it that I could access?
The burning hotter thing I don’t know about. I was told the heat that reaches us is a constant of 1.99 or something like that. Can you be more specific?

Some how this will be Barack Obama’s fault, LOL!

So, how will John McCain blame this one on Barack Obama too?

“I would only that there would be global warming if CO2 is added to the atmosphere.”
Insert “expect” into the above after “only”

Also, may I bring to yor attention:
“Magma may be melting Greenland ice”
Hot spot could be contributing factor to Arctic island’s record melt
By Andrea Thompson , LiveScience Staff Writer, Thurs., Dec. 13, 2007
“On the Fundamental Defect in the IPCC’s Approach to Global Warming Research”
June 15, 2007
by Syun-Ichi Akasofu, International Arctic Research Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks
The Earth’s Changing Core – And Its Magnetic Field – Scientific Blogging, 22 June 2008
“North magnetic pole heading for Siberia”
Alaska might lose its Northern Lights in 50 years, scientists say
Dec. 8, 2005, AP
“Magnetic north pole drifting fast”
Alaska could lose its northern lights, scientists say – BBC News
“Mysterious Shift in Earth’s Gravity Suggests Equator is Bulging”
By Robert Roy Britt Senior Science Writer, August 2002
“The Northeast is Moving South”
Ker Than, LiveScience Staff Writer, Dec 16, 2005
“Scientists to Study ‘Gaping Wound’ Deep Under Atlantic” By Ker Than, March 07, 2007
“Volcanoes triggered ancient warming event” – Greenhouse gases injected into atmosphere and oceans causing temp rise
By Ker Than, Staff Writer, April 26, 2007
Bacteria – The Greenhouse Gas Source Everyone Laughs About – Scientific Blogging, 30 March 2008
“Fire under the ice – International expedition discovers gigantic volcanic eruption in the Arctic Ocean” Public release date: 25-Jun-2008
Healy Researchers Make A Series Of
Striking Discoveries About Arctic Ocean
ScienceDaily (Nov. 29, 2001)
“Rapidly changing flows in the Earth’s core” Olsen et al.
Nature Geoscience 1, 390 – 394 (2008) Published online: 18 May 2008 | doi:10.1038/ngeo203

On longer timescales, changes in geologic emission and sequestration of CO2 have forced climate changes. These are generally slow processes; removal of CO2 from the atmosphere by chemical weathering of rocks is a slow process that provides a negative feedback on long timescales but is weak on short timescales. Changes in geologic emission can force changes in the CO2 level; warming or cooling will then have an effect on CO2 removal – equilibrium can be reached when the emission and removal are the same on average. Warming due to solar brightenning (significant over 100s of millions of years – so the very high CO2 levels in the more distant past will not result in as warm conditions as they would now, generally speaking) may be partly dampenned by the negative feedback of chemical weathering. The chemical weathering rate is also affected by geography and geology, and biology, and geography and ecology also affect weather and climate more directly.
High enough CO2 will prevent an ice age. Low enough CO2 will prevent an ice age from ending. It has to be high enough or low enough for other given conditions (arrangements of the continents, solar brightness, land cover). CO2 levels did fall quite a bit during the Cenozoic and this eventually allowed ice to build up on Antarctica, and then in other places, and then episodically over North America and northern Europe. That’s not to say that other effects have not had importance – the movements of the continents and their effects on ocean currents, for example.

Patrick 027
This past winter western europe was warmer than average but asia and the middle east were well below average. Here the eastern temperatures set record lows while the western temperatures were above normal.
Global average temperature a0 dropped, b)did not change or c)increased slightly, depending on what source you read – (there is no agreement on the proper method to record adjusted surface temperatures).
The 2007 arctic summer melt was caused by a strong anticyclonic storm which also was strong in 1978 and 1988 (Kay et. al. 2008).
My issue with the IPCC models is that they have committed to AGW and constantly adjust the model to reality while ignoring natural tectonic/volcanic and solar forcing to try to prove that CO2 is a pollutant rather than a normal part of the carbon cycle. Looking at all of the graphs the CP2 follows the temperature (with a short delay) rather than leading it. While it does provide feedback it is not the prime forcing in climate change and the past 10 years prove this if you only use the non-urban stations to eliminate the UHI effect (instead of playing the numbers game). There is AGW from all major cities and industrial centers but that AGW is ACTUAL HEAT, this is why the IPCC has to adjust the numbers to try to prove that its GHGs.
Don’t adjust the numbers – use raw data and you soon discover what the AGW is.

Patrick 027
Reference:
14 MARCH 2003 VOL 299 SCIENCE
“Timing of Atmospheric CO and Antarctic Temperature Changes Across Termination III” Caillon, et. al.
“The sequence of events during Termination III suggests that the CO2 increase lagged Antarctic deglacial warming by 800 +/- 200 years and preceded the Northern Hemisphere deglaciation.”

Patrick 027
Yes, I remember reading most of that earlier – that is what I responded to above. But I responded in 3 parts, the first is missing and I don’t remember what I wrote anymore.

t rasa
I was speaking in reference to:
“There’s been considerable research in recent years, showing that tropical storms and hurricanes really have their roots, not out in the Atlantic, but all the way over in the mountains of northeastern Africa — near the Red Sea. Moisture from there, tumbling over the mountains and then picking up heat as it heads westward over the Sahara — that’s the genesis of many storms.”
(as posted by Ned Potter in the article}. The events I mentioned are verifiable – Its cooler and wetter in the middle east this year and that is the stated origin of this storm. I am afraid that I don’t understand “blowing smoke”. If you are the expert on storm formation please explain. I was under the impression that they were caused by temperature inversions in the tropics where counter-rotational winds meet.

Patrick
A major reason that the Milankovitch cycles have a variable effect is continental drift or by it’s newer nomer plate tectonics. There are some very good representations found at Palaeos.com showing where they think the landmasses were going back to Pangea.
Recent work has indicated that they have misunderstood a major factor in plate tectonics: the rate of drift is not a constant. The deleted post had the titles of recent articles about the shifting magnetic pole and changes in seafloor spreading under the arctic. In 1999-2001 there were major eruptions under the polar ice and those volcanos have remained active. ScienceDaily and LiveScience both have good articles on this subject.

kat
And the eruptions began under the arctic in 1999, changing the rate of seafloor spreading for at least the period 1999-2001, possibly longer.

One thing I haven’t explicitly gone over is the role of rapid (relative to geologic emission and sequestration, organic carbon burial and oxidation) CO2 fluxes among the surface and near surface reservoirs. Without changes in geologic emissions in particular, the atmospheric CO2 content can change relatively fast (but slow compared to human-driven changes) due to net shifting of C among the atmosphere, standing biomass, soil carbon, surface ocean, and deep ocean. This kind of shifting can explain how atmospheric CO2 has risen and fallen with the ice ages and interglacial times. During an ice age, atmospheric C and biomass and I think soil C were all lower, so the difference likely went into (and then came out of) the ocean. Cold water can hold more CO2 relative to the atmosphere above it; although saltier water can hold less CO2, but the cold effect I think was stronger – but this alone cannot explain the entire change. It’s possible that a change in ocean circulation changed the distribution of chemical characteristics of different regions of the ocean, changing the way it took up and released CO2 from/to the air. Winds from dried-out land areas could also fertilize ocean planckton, increasing organic carbon burial, though I’m not sure if that could be rapid enough to explain much of the CO2 variation during glacial-interglacial transitions (as opposed to the overall CO2 reduction over millions of years leading to a time characterized by glacial-interglacial variations). PS as organic carbon falls through the ocean, it is not guaranteed to be geologically sequestered – some portion (My impression is most of it, actually) is oxidized at depth; however, this can pump C from the surface ocean to the deep ocean, where it can’t be exchanged with the atmosphere until currents bring it to areas of upwelling (time depending on location and the configuration of the currents) Upwelling areas tend to be rich in nutrients, of course, so you can get a lot of planckton there (and fish!); upwelling itself is influenced by the winds and temperature variations; for example, upwelling off the coast of Peru is inhibited during El Ninos (when the easterlies weaken, so that the buoyant pool of very warm water near Indonesia sloshes back toward South America). Also, the sequestering of CO2 in carbonate minerals under the water (or in it, as in floating shells of microorganisms, some of which can sink eventually) can be temporary – increasing acidity (such as due to an increase in oceanic CO2) tends to dissolve carbonate minerals. The way CO2 is exchanged among the ocean and atmosphere is complicated because 1. only the surface ocean actually exchanges directly with the air and 2. CO2 doesn’t just dissolve as a gas in liquid; it becomes bicarbonate ions, and the concentration of ions affects how much the water will hold relative to the air’s concentration of CO2.
Some people will look at the size of the fluxes of C to and from the atmosphere from vegetation and the surface ocean and conclude that humanity’s contribution is insignificant. But averaged over a year, and even more so over several years (over ENSO variations, especially hot summers and not so hot summers, forest fires and regrowth, etc.), the natural fluxes tend to balance. Of course they must not have been balanced at times in the past such as during glacial-interglacial transitions, though the unbalanced portion I think was generally smaller than what humanity’s unbalanced (net) contribution is now. But it seems that was due to changes in climate – the large accumulations of change over time were not results of shorter-term random spontaneous blips (which should tend to cancel out over time). The current imbalances outside direct anthropogenic forcing of CO2 are largely due to the additon of CO2 to the atmosphere, to which plant growth and water-air exchange have responded by taking a portion of the added CO2 out of the air. As ecosystems and geochemistry respond to the climate change, however, the same response may not continue, and it can’t be expected to continue anyway because of limited capacity for additional uptake, either in total (how much more vegetation can you have?) or at a given rate (the upwelling of deep water to replace surface ocean water, for example). PS some of each unit of addition to the air comes out of the air relatively quickly (within a year, I think – I’m a little fuzzy yet on why), while if we stopped emitting now, the CO2 level should drop as the remaining atmospheric portion continues to get more slowly redistributed. This takes time. Due to the faster fluxes that tend to be balanced, the average residence time of any given molecule of CO2 in the air is actually just a few years, but the time taken for the level of CO2 to fall back after a ‘slug’ (that’s the term I’ve seen used) of CO2 has accumulated in the air is quite a bit longer.
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PS While there is CO2 fertilization of plants, it isn’t going to affect all plants equally. The plant may or may not be able to take advantage of the opportunity effectively (just as some kinds of trees can’t grow in Canada while others can). Food quality may be affected. Plants evolve over time for different conditions (a generally slow process). My understanding on the matter is that CO2 is particularly important where vegetation is limited by moisture – higher CO2 allows the plants to get the same CO2 without having their stomata open as much, thus not losing as much water. But this won’t do anything for corn – corn leaves it’s stomata open no matter what (I think), which is why it’s not drought-tolerant. Changes in CO2 may also be particularly important with regards to elevation – as CO2 concentration rises, one can go higher up a mountain to get the same volumetric concentration of CO2 (You’ll also tend to go higher up to get the same temperature – not by the same distance, necessarily). Anyway, as the climate changes, decomposition of organic matter may also speed up, releasing CO2 back to the air faster. Drought or other stresses (perhaps via pine bark beetles), either by forest fire or gradual die-off, may reduce vegetation C and add CO2 back into the air. CH4 can also be released (from thawing permafrost in particular, and also perhaps from methane hydrates/clathrates in the ocean); CH4 oxydizes to CO2 on average in a couple decades or so (I’m not clear on whether it’s closer to 12, 15, or 20 years). But each molecule of CH4 has a much stronger climatic effect than a molecular of CO2 – so to avoid warming, you’d rather have an additonal atom of C in the air as CO2, if you have to have it there. Whether or not the release of CH4 adds more CO2 to the air upon it’s oxydation depends on whether or not that C atom would have otherwise gone into the air directly as CO2 or not gone into the air at all.
The changes in low-latitude monsoons due to orbital (Milankovitch) forcing has an effect on the atmospheric CH4 level in particular.
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When there is an imbalance in the fluxes that accumulates over time, the other reservoirs involved will reflect this – regardless of how fast trees may be growing, dying and decaying, how fast organic C is added to soil, exhaled from it during decay, or removed by erosion (added to water bodies), … etc., a climatologically important imbalance will manifest itself as a change in the amount stored over time – the difference in vegetative cover over time, for example (humans have driven a lot of that too, recently).
When CO2 goes into the ocean fast (as it is now, though not fast enough to avoid global warming), the pH level of the water will tend to drop – ocean acidification. Now, why wasn’t that a problem in the Cretaceaous (and Cambrian, I think, etc…) when atmospheric CO2 was so high? I haven’t read so explicitly, but pulling together what else I know, I think that when CO2 levels change slowly, and when the C content of the ocean in particular changes slowly, other chemical characteristics have time to ‘catch up’ – that is, the acidity can be buffered by … dissolving CaCO3 in the sediments? – and adding Ca ions to the ocean by the slow (but generally faster in warm times) process of chemical weathering.
PS Chemical weathering in general – a mineral such as CaSiO3, under slightly acidic rain water (acidic due largely to dissolved CO2), turns eventually into SiO2 + dissolved Ca ions and CO3 ions (or HCO3 ions), which may then be precipitated as CaCO3, either abiotically or by organisms with shells. Burial and heat: SiO2 combines with CaCO3, igneous rocks (if complete melting occurs, otherise it would be metamorphic rocks) form with the mineral CaSiO3, while CO2 is outgassed (in an eruption, or more ‘peacefully’). PS CaSiO3 itself is not that common (if it exists – if it doesn’t, then I was actually thinking of Ca2SiO4 – one of the two is called Wollastonite – but anyway, Ca(x)SiO(y) is not that common, but generally, there are minerals that make up the bulk of igneous rocks and the crust as a whole, and the mantle, that are some combination (stoichiometrically speaking; their actually chemical formulae would be written differently) of A MgO + D FeO + E CaO + G Al2O3 + J Na2O + L K2O + M SiO2, where the coefficients A,D,E,G,J,L,M, may be 0,1,whatever. Mg and Fe are particularly prevalent in the mantle; there is relatively much less Mg in most crustal rocks. Ca and Mg dominate at cations in carbonate minerals.

Patrick
That’s quite an explanation. Most of it makes perfect sense.
Re: “Isotopic studies support the conclusion that the increas in atmospheric CO2 is essentially from human activity.” – possibly, but I will assume this to be true.
But I stil have a problem with the amount of forcing from JUST CO2. Neither the Vostok core samples nor the past 10 years support it.
CO2 has not always reflected surface temperature, in fact there was only coincidental reflection from about 1976 through 1998. 22 years is about two sunsupot cycles or about one full solar cycle, and the effect of solar cycles has a lag time of a few years.
So the question remains is CO2 induced AGW making the earth warmer or is that 22 year period a coincidence. Given that CO2 is an extremely weak GHG I think the latter is true.
CO2 can not explain why ENSO has gained in strength since 1978 (record El Nino events were 1978 and 1998). Recent evidence is that the El Nino cycle of ENSO is cause by undersea vulcanism off the coast of Peru near the S.A. subduction zones. Active vulcanism (or tectonic activity in recent terminology) heats the water causing upwelling currents which in turn affect the air currents at the base of the Andes (I don’t remember the web site but it was one of the govenment dot-orgs).
When I say vulcanism has been effecting the polar melts I do not mean with direct heating of the ice. I mean that there have been shifts in ocean currents which in turn change air currents.
Sorry but I still use the terminology that I was taught in school, before continental drift was accepted and the term “plate tectonics” came into being. I have found that this causes some confusion with the younger people out there but I am more comfortable using the older terminology.

Re: “But anyway, the CO2 emitted from fossil fuel power plants, cars run on gasoline, etc, is essentially devoid of C-14.”
This is quite understandable since fossil fuels should not show any measurable amount of C-14 to begin with. It’s way too old.

C-14 N-14 – It is a nuclear reaction; C-14 is radioactive and decays to N-14; since N-14 has one more proton and one less neutron than C-14, I infer that it is beta-decay. I don’t remember exactly how the reverse reaction occurs, but I think it’s something like: cosmic rays bombarding the atmosphere kick off neutrons, a neutron collides with N-14 with enough energy, a proton gets knocked off (presumably this becomes H) and what is left is C-14.
Just to be clear, the great majority of C is C-12; C-14 is useful as a sort of label to us but it is a very tiny fraction of C, even of only atmospheric C. I don’t think the nuclear and related chemical reactions involved play a significant role in energy or chemical budgets (though I do wonder if just maybe exposure to a supernova early in Earth’s history could have actually helped in the origin of life by producing a lot of C-14 and H in the atmosphere, the C-14 then decaying to N-14 in sediments might have helped produce chemicals containing N besides N2.??)

Yes, continental positions, the rise and fall of mountains, the effects on the configuration of the oceans and their currents – very important in climate. But a higher or lower greenhouse effect will tend to make the globe overall warmer or cooler (as would a brighter or dimmer sun).
Faster sea floor spreading should occur with more rapid geologic emissions of CO2 to the ocean and atmosphere. This will tend to warm the climate. A new equilibrium CO2 and average climate would be reached when the increased warmth is enough so that the increased rate of CO2 removal by chemical weathering, +/- any changes in organic carbon burial, are enough to balance the geologic emission. (A sudden increase in the frequency of eruptions that release cooling aerosols will tend to cool the climate in the short term, but over a long period of time, CO2 builds up (until balanced by changes in chemical weathering and organic carbon burial), while aerosols are continually removed and don’t build up over many years).
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(Plate tectonics, geologic CO2 emission, and generally (except in the immediate aftermath of a snowball episode, when conditions might be described as a carbonic acid sauna), chemical weathering, are very slow processes, and such short term fluctuations such as an increase in volcanic activity a few years ago are not going to have a significant global effect on CO2, nor will a change in the motion of continents over such a short time period have noticeable effects – unless some delicate threshold has been reached, in which case (if so delicate and so sharp and precise a threshold), one would think many random variations (like a localized landslide) could contribute to the exact timing of whatever event – PS I’m not saying such a delicate and precise threshold is even concievable – granted, over geologic time, gradual geologic processes would have at some point cut off the Pacific from the Atlantic at the isthmus connecting North and South America, a relatively sudden event in comparison, but still, it’s not like the flow of currents between North and South America could have gone from full force to zero in a day – or even a hundred millenium, and the same goes for the openning between South America and Antarctica, without which, their could be no circumpolar current about Antarctica.)
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I expect the direct heating of the ocean and overlying ice from volcanic/hydrothermal activity to be highly localized. The global average of geothermal heat flow (a lot of which is just from the continouse conduction of heat through the crust) is a little less than 0.1 W/m2; the same should be true about any sufficiently large region containing volcanic activity (although with greater temporal variations). The radiative forcing of the increase in CO2 caused by human activity, on the other hand, is – globally averaged – ~ 1.4 (or 1.6 W/m2?), something like that (doubling CO2 is a radiative forcing of around 4 W/m2). If volcanic activity did significantly raise the Arctic ocean’s temperature (strongly strongly strongly doubt that), it still had a head start from global warming, which is to say, the same volcanic eruptions a few hundred years ago would not be associated with the same sea-ice reduction, if their were any connection at all.
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The magnetic field is set up and maintained by convection in the liquid outer core, organized by the coriolis effect. The core must be losing heat to the mantle as this occurs; Changes in mantle convection, which carry that heat (and heat generated within the mantle by radioactive decay) away from the core, therefore can affect the core; a cool spot in the lower mantle could conceivable affect the organization of the core’s convection currents. But the mantle can’t change very fast. Changes in the magnetic field that occur in less than millions of years are probably just part of the chaotic turbulence of the outer core, just as day-to-day weather variations need no external forcing to be explained. (Not that external factors can’t have an effect, but over such short time periods, the effects of small changes are generally likely to be buried in the heap of butterfly effects that make weather forecasts beyond two weeks impossible (but leaves climatic forecasts out for centuries still possible, because climate, though made of weather, is not the same as weather), and outer core forecasts beyond x centuries? … etc.) PS I might need to clarify that later…
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It has been thought that faster sea-floor spreading should tend to raise sea level – the oceanic crust sinks down away from the mid-oceanic ridges as it cools; faster sea-floor spreading should result in ridges with wider profiles, thus displacing a volume of water. Though I thought I recently read something to the contrary, but it’s possible I misunderstood the implications of what I had read.
Continental collisions that raise up mountain ranges should tend to lower sea level, by moving some volume of crust from below sea level to above it. Depending on the climate around such mountain ranges and plateaus, chemical weathering may be enhanced significantly. It is thought that the rise of the Himalayas helped lower the CO2 level over the last millions of years. (I’m not sure exactly what Tibet’s contribution would be – the Tibetan plateau may also directly contribute to enhanced CO2 removal by weathering; I think it also enhances the Asian monsoon, which would affect the chemical weathering of the Himalayas.)
PS cold and dry weather tend to inhibit chemical weathering. But snow-capped mountains can still enhance chemical weathering, because the mountain glaciers mechanically weather underlying rock, and eventually carry sediment down the mountain when the sediment is dumped by the ice and reaches warmer levels, it can be chemically weathered. Mechanical weathering generally enhances chemical weathering by increasing the surface area of sediments. While during each ice age, chemical weathering is reduced, it’s conceivable that over the course of glacial-interglacial variations, chemical weathering may be enhanced, because each ice age leaves behind glacial till.
In order to have a continental ice sheet, of coarse, one must have a continent in a cool enough location (that is not too dry). But their must also be a moisture supply. A continent in a polar region that is too large may not get much moisture in it’s interior, and also, as large continents tend to experience greater seasonal temperature variations, the polar summers might yet get too hot to preserve last winter’s snow, even if it was a bitterly cold winter (although an extremely snowy winter would help, but again, it may be dryer in the interior of a continent). (PS I think Greenland and eastern Canada can get some of their moisture from the Gulf Stream).
Posted by: Patrick 027 | Jul 5, 2008 9:09:04 PM
One thing I haven’t explicitly gone over is the role of rapid (relative to geologic emission and sequestration, organic carbon burial and oxidation) CO2 fluxes among the surface and near surface reservoirs. Without changes in geologic emissions in particular, the atmospheric CO2 content can change relatively fast (but slow compared to human-driven changes) due to net shifting of C among the atmosphere, standing biomass, soil carbon, surface ocean, and deep ocean. This kind of shifting can explain how atmospheric CO2 has risen and fallen with the ice ages and interglacial times. During an ice age, atmospheric C and biomass and I think soil C were all lower, so the difference likely went into (and then came out of) the ocean. Cold water can hold more CO2 relative to the atmosphere above it; although saltier water can hold less CO2, but the cold effect I think was stronger – but this alone cannot explain the entire change. It’s possible that a change in ocean circulation changed the distribution of chemical characteristics of different regions of the ocean, changing the way it took up and released CO2 from/to the air. Winds from dried-out land areas could also fertilize ocean planckton, increasing organic carbon burial, though I’m not sure if that could be rapid enough to explain much of the CO2 variation during glacial-interglacial transitions (as opposed to the overall CO2 reduction over millions of years leading to a time characterized by glacial-interglacial variations). PS as organic carbon falls through the ocean, it is not guaranteed to be geologically sequestered – some portion (My impression is most of it, actually) is oxidized at depth; however, this can pump C from the surface ocean to the deep ocean, where it can’t be exchanged with the atmosphere until currents bring it to areas of upwelling (time depending on location and the configuration of the currents) Upwelling areas tend to be rich in nutrients, of course, so you can get a lot of planckton there (and fish!); upwelling itself is influenced by the winds and temperature variations; for example, upwelling off the coast of Peru is inhibited during El Ninos (when the easterlies weaken, so that the buoyant pool of very warm water near Indonesia sloshes back toward South America). Also, the sequestering of CO2 in carbonate minerals under the water (or in it, as in floating shells of microorganisms, some of which can sink eventually) can be temporary – increasing acidity (such as due to an increase in oceanic CO2) tends to dissolve carbonate minerals. The way CO2 is exchanged among the ocean and atmosphere is complicated because 1. only the surface ocean actually exchanges directly with the air and 2. CO2 doesn’t just dissolve as a gas in liquid; it becomes bicarbonate ions, and the concentration of ions affects how much the water will hold relative to the air’s concentration of CO2.
Some people will look at the size of the fluxes of C to and from the atmosphere from vegetation and the surface ocean and conclude that humanity’s contribution is insignificant. But averaged over a year, and even more so over several years (over ENSO variations, especially hot summers and not so hot summers, forest fires and regrowth, etc.), the natural fluxes tend to balance. Of course they must not have been balanced at times in the past such as during glacial-interglacial transitions, though the unbalanced portion I think was generally smaller than what humanity’s unbalanced (net) contribution is now. But it seems that was due to changes in climate – the large accumulations of change over time were not results of shorter-term random spontaneous blips (which should tend to cancel out over time). The current imbalances outside direct anthropogenic forcing of CO2 are largely due to the additon of CO2 to the atmosphere, to which plant growth and water-air exchange have responded by taking a portion of the added CO2 out of the air. As ecosystems and geochemistry respond to the climate change, however, the same response may not continue, and it can’t be expected to continue anyway because of limited capacity for additional uptake, either in total (how much more vegetation can you have?) or at a given rate (the upwelling of deep water to replace surface ocean water, for example). PS some of each unit of addition to the air comes out of the air relatively quickly (within a year, I think – I’m a little fuzzy yet on why), while if we stopped emitting now, the CO2 level should drop as the remaining atmospheric portion continues to get more slowly redistributed. This takes time. Due to the faster fluxes that tend to be balanced, the average residence time of any given molecule of CO2 in the air is actually just a few years, but the time taken for the level of CO2 to fall back after a ‘slug’ (that’s the term I’ve seen used) of CO2 has accumulated in the air is quite a bit longer.
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PS While there is CO2 fertilization of plants, it isn’t going to affect all plants equally. The plant may or may not be able to take advantage of the opportunity effectively (just as some kinds of trees can’t grow in Canada while others can). Food quality may be affected. Plants evolve over time for different conditions (a generally slow process). My understanding on the matter is that CO2 is particularly important where vegetation is limited by moisture – higher CO2 allows the plants to get the same CO2 without having their stomata open as much, thus not losing as much water. But this won’t do anything for corn – corn leaves it’s stomata open no matter what (I think), which is why it’s not drought-tolerant. Changes in CO2 may also be particularly important with regards to elevation – as CO2 concentration rises, one can go higher up a mountain to get the same volumetric concentration of CO2 (You’ll also tend to go higher up to get the same temperature – not by the same distance, necessarily). Anyway, as the climate changes, decomposition of organic matter may also speed up, releasing CO2 back to the air faster. Drought or other stresses (perhaps via pine bark beetles), either by forest fire or gradual die-off, may reduce vegetation C and add CO2 back into the air. CH4 can also be released (from thawing permafrost in particular, and also perhaps from methane hydrates/clathrates in the ocean); CH4 oxydizes to CO2 on average in a couple decades or so (I’m not clear on whether it’s closer to 12, 15, or 20 years). But each molecule of CH4 has a much stronger climatic effect than a molecular of CO2 – so to avoid warming, you’d rather have an additonal atom of C in the air as CO2, if you have to have it there. Whether or not the release of CH4 adds more CO2 to the air upon it’s oxydation depends on whether or not that C atom would have otherwise gone into the air directly as CO2 or not gone into the air at all.
The changes in low-latitude monsoons due to orbital (Milankovitch) forcing has an effect on the atmospheric CH4 level in particular.
—
When there is an imbalance in the fluxes that accumulates over time, the other reservoirs involved will reflect this – regardless of how fast trees may be growing, dying and decaying, how fast organic C is added to soil, exhaled from it during decay, or removed by erosion (added to water bodies), … etc., a climatologically important imbalance will manifest itself as a change in the amount stored over time – the difference in vegetative cover over time, for example (humans have driven a lot of that too, recently).
When CO2 goes into the ocean fast (as it is now, though not fast enough to avoid global warming), the pH level of the water will tend to drop – ocean acidification. Now, why wasn’t that a problem in the Cretaceaous (and Cambrian, I think, etc…) when atmospheric CO2 was so high? I haven’t read so explicitly, but pulling together what else I know, I think that when CO2 levels change slowly, and when the C content of the ocean in particular changes slowly, other chemical characteristics have time to ‘catch up’ – that is, the acidity can be buffered by … dissolving CaCO3 in the sediments? – and adding Ca ions to the ocean by the slow (but generally faster in warm times) process of chemical weathering.
PS Chemical weathering in general – a mineral such as CaSiO3, under slightly acidic rain water (acidic due largely to dissolved CO2), turns eventually into SiO2 + dissolved Ca ions and CO3 ions (or HCO3 ions), which may then be precipitated as CaCO3, either abiotically or by organisms with shells. Burial and heat: SiO2 combines with CaCO3, igneous rocks (if complete melting occurs, otherise it would be metamorphic rocks) form with the mineral CaSiO3, while CO2 is outgassed (in an eruption, or more ‘peacefully’). PS CaSiO3 itself is not that common (if it exists – if it doesn’t, then I was actually thinking of Ca2SiO4 – one of the two is called Wollastonite – but anyway, Ca(x)SiO(y) is not that common, but generally, there are minerals that make up the bulk of igneous rocks and the crust as a whole, and the mantle, that are some combination (stoichiometrically speaking; their actually chemical formulae would be written differently) of A MgO + D FeO + E CaO + G Al2O3 + J Na2O + L K2O + M SiO2, where the coefficients A,D,E,G,J,L,M, may be 0,1,whatever. Mg and Fe are particularly prevalent in the mantle; there is relatively much less Mg in most crustal rocks. Ca and Mg dominate at cations in carbonate minerals.
Posted by: Patrick 027 | Jul 5, 2008 11:52:25 P
Oh, I forgot to mention: Isotopic studies support the conclusion that the increas in atmospheric CO2 is essentially from human activity.
Different reservoirs of C have different mixes of C isotopes because of isotopic fractionation during processes involved in exchanges, as well as radioactive decay. Photosynthesis tends to incorporate C-12 preferentially over C-13, and I think there is fractionation in some other metabolic processes. Thus the inorganic carbon in carbonate minerals (from which cement is made, the process giving off CO2 – not the dominant anthropogenic CO2 source, but significant) should, I think, tend to have more C-13, and of course this can be measured. Fossil fuels are essentially devoid of C-14 because C-14 decays to N-14 with a half life a little over 5000 years. C-14 is produced from N-14 in the atmosphere by cosmic rays; the time since C has been taken up from the air, given the fraction of C as C-14 at the time in the air, determines how much C-14 is left. C-14 dating doesn’t by itself give a precise date because of variations in the rate of C-14 production, and from variations in the amount of C in the atmosphere and variations in the fluxes, but an object of known age by other methods can be C-14 dated to callibrate C-14 dating. Of course, if two sources of C of different C-14 ages are mixed…
But anyway, the CO2 emitted from fossil fuel power plants, cars run on gasoline, etc, is essentially devoid of C-14.
Of course, we independently have a pretty good idea of what anthropogenic emissions are (at least from fossil fuels and cement production – deforestation (minus reforestation) is a bit less certain, I think). At issue would be whether or not anthropogenic emissions are the cause of the change in the atmospheric CO2 level. For example, it used to be thought that the ocean would buffer additions very effectively with some relative immediacy. Well, the rise in CO2 that has been observed seems to counter that idea. Of course, one could suppose that the oceans are in control of CO2 levels, and something is changing in the ocean that is driving CO2 up in the atmosphere regardless of what we’re doing, but 1. it seems a bit coincidental that such a rapid increase in CO2 is occuring just when anthropogenic emissions are occuring, given the relative steadiness of atmospheric CO2 over the last thousands of years and, 2. that it seems to significantly be faster now even than during the deglaciation process… and 3. it’s outside the pattern of natural variations for at least the last 650,000 years, 4. human emissions are plenty enough to explain the rise even allowing for significant removal of the additional CO2 by the ocean and vegetation, and 5. enough is understood about the mechanisms involved (how uptake by the oceans works, for example, and observations of land vegetation) to conclude that it’s us.

Re: “it seems a bit coincidental that such a rapid increase in CO2 is occuring just when anthropogenic emissions are occuring,”
No argument there. It’s the relationship to warming that is an issue.
PS I do understand that C14 does transmute to N14 via beta decay but I don’t understand how it can gain weight in “decay”.

Re: ” Isotopic studies support the conclusion that the increas in atmospheric CO2 is essentially from human activity.”
By my argument this is irrelevant.

It looks like you got the atomic mass mixed up with the atomic number.
The atomic number Z is the number of protons in the nucleus:
H – 1
He – 2
…
C – 6
N – 7
O – 8
etc.
The atomic mass is the actual mass of the atom (or nucleus itself? – should be quite close); it is often expressed as the number of grams a mole of atoms would have, which happens to be (due to the definition of a mole) close to the number of protons plus the number of neutrons in each nucleus. It can be rounded to that exact whole number for identifying isotopes of an element, which have the same number of protons but different numbers of neutrons.
C, including C-12, C-13, and C-14, each have 6 protons; C-12 has 6 neutrons, whereas C-13 has 7 and C-14 has 8 neutrons. N-14 has 7 protons and 7 neutrons. Thus, if N-14 loses a proton and gains a neutron, it becomes C-14 (an electron is also lost if the atom or ion is to have the same charge – the electron can go hang out with the proton if it wants to (of course, the chance that the proton picks up that same electron is quite low, but it will either be a Hydrogen ion or pick up an electron, while the electron may meet another atom, etc.) When C-14 decays to N-14, a neutron is converted to a proton, giving off a beta particle (high energy electron) in the process. (I think a (anti?)neutrino (nearly massless particle that doesn’t interact much with anything) is also given off during such decay.)
Of course, as energy is given off or gained, E=mc2 – some small amount of mass is lost or gained, but generally much smaller than the mass of a proton or a neutron.

Patrick
Re: “When C-14 decays to N-14, a neutron is converted to a proton, giving off a beta particle (high energy electron) in the process.”
Thank you, that makes sense, the beta decay explanation on wiki did not explain the process very well, hence my difficulty in understanding.

Sorry about the C14 confusion, my scientific studies are on evolution, paleontology and paleoclimatology so my knowledge of chemistry and physics is quite a bit lacking but I am always willing to learn.

”
“why has there been only a 1 degree F increase in global temperature, when climate models predict it should have been twice that amount, given current greenhouse gas emissions?”
Ref. “FactSheet – Global Climate Change”, Thomas W. Blaine, CDFS-186-96
”
Actually, I think we’re approaching 1.5 deg F now (somewhere around 0.8 deg C).
From IPCC’s AR4:
The anthropogenic climate forcing relative to preindustrial time has gradually reached about 1.6 W/m2, although there is considerable uncertainty about that number (a range from 0.6 W/m2 to 2.4 W/m2 is given) – much of that uncertainty is from the contribution from aerosols (mainly a cooling, though some aerosols have a warming effect). The forcing from CO2 alone is about 1.66 W/m2 (range 1.49 to 1.83). The forcing for all long-lived greenhouse gasses (including CH4 but not including O3) is about 2.64 W/m2 (range – well I don’t have that off hand, I think it is similar in proportion to the range of CO2 alone). Solar forcing is about 0.12 W/m2 (range 0.06 to 0.30 W/m2)
So the total forcing may be about 1.7 W/m2, but could be higher or lower
If the climate sensitivity is 3/4 deg C per W/m2 forcing, then the equilibrium climate for a 1.7 W/m2 forcing is about 1.28 deg C. Why would we only be at 0.8 deg C warming so far? It takes time to heat the ocean up, and the climate forcing has been rising up to this point.

Patrick
Also keep in mind that there is a delay in solar forcing from TSI:
“Usoskin 2005 also found that over 1150 years, temperature lagged solar activity by 10 years. Due to ocean thermal inertia, it takes the climate a decade to catch up to long term changes in solar activity. This is exactly what’s observed in the 20th century – in the early decades, solar activity rose sharply with temperature lagging a decade behind. When solar activity leveled out in the 40′s, so too did global temperatures”
Ref. John Cooks Skeptical Science blog
(which links to Usoskin’s papers). Note that John’s blog is supportive of CO2 induced AGW but the reference papers do not always do the same. I believe Usoskin’s number for solar forcing was 1.8 but I really don’t remember. The scientists have done the math already so I don’t pay a lot of attention to the numbers, only their conclusions.

Patrick
It took me a while to find the statement I was looking for (terrible memory) but I remembered that it was in a comment at Skeptical Science, in the “It’s the Sun” discussion:
“From the Vostok ice core data, during glacial periods, often a rising temperature trend with a rising carbon dioxide level suddenly changed direction and became a falling temperature trend in spite of the carbon dioxide level being higher than when the temperature was increasing. This could not be if carbon dioxide causes a positive feedback. The Andean-Saharan Ice Age occurred when the carbon dioxide level was over ten times its current level. What is different now that could lead to run away temperature increase? The determination that non-condensing greenhouse gases have no significant influence on average global temperature is not refuted by any climate history.”

First: I forgot to put a quotation of your comments in quotation – The second to last paragraphy of my last comment should be in quotes, sorry, I didn’t mean to mislead or cause any confusion.
Second, I do have time for a quick question before I’m done for the night.
“The Andean-Saharan Ice Age occurred when the carbon dioxide level was over ten times its current level.”
I have no idea what the date on that is supposed to be.
And a quick point:
“This could not be if carbon dioxide causes a positive feedback. ”
Depends on the amount of delay and temperature and CO2 variation. There are a lot of little short term wiggles and the ice ages don’t come and go in a mathematically simple sinusoidal fashion. But whatever variation is not driven by CO2 but is amplified by it, a lag time of CO2 behind temperature is still compatable with CO2 being a positive feedback, so long as the lag time is not too long compared to the period of oscillation. It’s possible the lag time of CO2 prevents it from responding to the shorter-term wiggles. It’s also possible (actually quite likely) that the CO2 response depends on the state of the system.
(Well I guess this isn’t such a quick point after all, but the time is worth it):
If a forcing makes A go up and down, and then a positive feedback B responds with some lag time t to A and also drives A further, then B cannot respond until after A responds to the forcing. Suppose the forcing, A, and B are all rising. Then the forcing reverses. A slows it’s rising but still rises because of B, but as the forcing falls more, A starts to fall. But note that A rose more and continued to rise because of B, until the forcing became strong enough to reverse A’s trend. B may still be rising because it doesn’t respond immediately to A, but eventually it starts to fall. As B falls, it accentuate’s A’s fall. etc…

I’ve been watching this one. I’ve always had a fascination with storms. When I was young, my mother couldn’t keep me inside during them, hurricanes included. I always knew about Africa’s influence on hurricanes, but for the life of me I can’t remember many in recent years that have formed that far out.
Quietman and Patrick, Jock included, my studies have mainly been with Astronomy and Astrophysics, with some biology, although geology has become a recent addition. I find that your posts are great. There is so much information that you guys put into them about Global Warming it’s almost impossible to keep up. All I know is that the climate is changing, and that we have had some affect. I’m just not sure about how big of an affect we’ve had. Keep it coming and I’ll read with vigor.

“There is a problem with the math. Gerlich & Tscheuschner claim it can’t happen.
Ref. “Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics” Version 3.0 (September 9, 2007)”
I was originally thinking of another erroneous paper that apparently tried to argue that the optical properties of the atmosphere are the same no matter what the optical properties of the atmosphere are.
But I read the Abstract, and … maybe the above is buried somewhere in there, but a number of other points were made.
After reading the abstract, I decided that is indeed total bunk. They’re tilting at windmills. I’ll explain later.

Patrick
Yes, that’s the same paper I read. Discussing it on another blog one person said it was bunk and another said it was correct. As it’s written over my head I have no idea, neither commenter did any more than just state their opinions.

I forgot to mention that Neo-, Meso-, and Paleo- are slowly replacing Late, Middle and Early in Paleontologic terms.

Patrick
BTW my list of reference articles is back : Posted by: Quietman | Jul 4, 2008 3:31:34 PM, so you cen see where I have been getting the information from.

Sources I’ve seen regard the Hadean, Archean and Proterozoic as eons in their own right. One system has a Priscoan eon in place of the Hadean (that may be specific to Eurasian time divisions). Of course there are some local divisions, such as Keweenawan. PS I know an old system divided the Proterozoic into (not exactly the right order or spelling here:) Udocanian, Ulcanian, Riphean (Yurmatian, Karatavian, Burzyan), Sturtian, and Vendian. As far as I know, the last two divisions are still used. I’d sure like to know more about Udocanian and Ulcanian, though – they sound ‘mysterious’ in a way. Also, in addition to -zoic names, I’ve also seen -phytic, as in – I think it was ‘Proterophytic’.
One of the more recent systems I’ve seen has the Paleo-,Meso-,and Neoproterozoic subdivided with names like Orosirian, … Well I guess I forgot the rest.

An easier read is “Ontario Rocks” by Nick Eyles.

Taking apart that abstract, point by point:
1.
”
The atmospheric greenhouse effect, an idea that authors trace back to the traditional
works of Fourier 1824, Tyndall 1861, and Arrhenius 1896, and which is still supported
in global climatology, essentially describes a fictitious mechanism,”
NO.
2.
” in which a planetary
atmosphere acts as a heat pump driven by an environment that is radiatively interacting
with but radiatively equilibrated to the atmospheric system. According to the second law
of thermodynamics such a planetary machine can never exist.”
To some people, a heat pump is anything that moves heat, like a pump that pushes warm liquid around to heat a cool room. But in thermodynamics, a heat pump is a device that works as a heat engine in reverse.
Heat can spontaneously flow (in a net sense) from a warmer body to a cooler body. The total entropy increases in the process. If the heat flows through a heat engine, some of the heat is converted to work or ‘free energy’ (Gibb’s free energy – chemistry term) (organized mechanical energy, electricity, chemical energy, etc), and the increase in entropy is not as high; if the heat engine works as an ideal device (no ‘imperfections’) then the process is reversable, and isentropic (no change in entropy). If the device is run in reverse, work is supplied to a device to pump heat up the thermal gradient, from the cooler body to the warmer body. If you live in the cooler body or store food there, you’d call this an air conditioner or refrigerator. Again, if the process works as ideal, there is no increase in entropy (isentropic and reversable – the original conditions could be exactly restored by running the heat pump in reverse, as a heat engine).
The greenhouse effect has nothing to do with a heat pump in that sense. The second law of thermodynamics is not broken (entropy is not destroyed – in fact it is created).
In conduction, two bodies contact each other to exchange heat directly. Perhaps this was a point of confusion for the authors. In radiative heat exchange, both a warmer and cooler body may emit heat to each other, but the radiative power (energy per unit time) emitted by the warmer body and absorbed by the cooler body will be greater than that emitted by the cooler body and absorbed by the warmer body – thus there is a net flow of heat (via radiation) from warmer to cooler. If there is some third body in between that is transparent, it is not thermodynamically involved via radiation; it could be the hottest body of the three or the coldest, and not make a difference. Generally a third body may not be perfectly transparent, but if it is not perfectly opaque, one can have a combination of radiative energy exchanges among each pairing, each from warmer to cooler at some rate.
The sun is hot, The Earth is intermediate, and space is cold. Some Heat from the sun flows to the Earth; heat flows from the Earth to space.
Now throw the atmosphere in there. There are variations in temperature within it and between it and the surface (and the surface temperature isn’t all the same, of course). But the net flow of heat from any part directly to any other part by radiation is always from warmer to cooler. The same is generally true with conduction and convection – conduction being only important in transfering heat from the surface to the air immediately above it; conduction is just too slow within the great bulk of the atmosphere, and due to the size of the ocean, it’s not an influential process there either – temperature/heat diffusion within these fluids is accomplished mainly by turbulent mixing (a form of convection, or a form of advection).
–
(Conduction has some importance on land in transfering heat down and up into and out of the soil or rocks, which is a slow process, hence, go down a few feet and the material tends to follow only long term changes in surface temperature; hourly to daily variation is limited to closer to the surface. This means that when the land’s heat capacity is considered in how the surface temperature responds to forcing, the effective heat capacity per unit area is a function of the period of oscillation. Something similar may occur with the ocean, differentiating the responses to shorter and longer term variations depending on how much mass the surface and deep ocean exchange during the time frame.)
–
There are some heat engines in the atmosphere where mechanical energy is generated. Differential heating ultimately drives the winds. There can also be some heat pumps, where the mechanical energy actually forces colder air up and warmer air down. Ultimately mechanical energy that does not go into a heat pump is lost by friction/mixing (molecular viscosity/eddy viscosity), turned back into heat, but the tendency is for such frictional heating to be less organized and so it doesn’t again drive heat engines so much – anyway, actually, frictional heating, and mechanical energy conversion (as important as it is in convection/advection itself),is a rather small part of the energy budget of the climate system when compared to thermal energy (heat).
But none of this violates the second law of thermodynamics.
And just to be clear, climate models, even the simple 1-dimensional ones, don’t forget convection – climate is equilibrated (or changing) with convection and radiation together – either one alone would be greatly unbalanced as it is (the imbalances in radiative heating require convection).
The claim that the atmosphere as described currently in mainstream climatology somehow violates the second law of thermodynamics is just as fallacious as the claim that evolution and the origin of life violate the second law of thermodynamics.
3.
“Nevertheless, in almost
all texts of global climatology and in a widespread secondary literature it is taken for
granted that such mechanism is real and stands on a firm scientific foundation.”
It really does.
4.
” In
this paper the popular conjecture is analyzed and the underlying physical principles are
clarified. By showing that (a) there are no common physical laws between the warming
phenomenon in glass houses and the fictitious atmospheric greenhouse effects,”
The analogy between a glass greenhouse and the atmospheric greenhouse effect works in so far as in both cases, one form of energy enters, is converted to another form, and in order for that other form to escape at the same rate that it is being created (such that equilibrium is reached), it has to build up to some level so that temperature rises to some level.
But they are mathematically quite different in detail, and climatologists know that.
5.
“(b) there
are no calculations to determine an average surface temperature of a planet,”
Just as there is no formula for the average height of a group of n people. WHAT THE HECK!
It’s the area-weighted average temperature. Simple.
They could quibble over the significance of such a metric (it certainly doesn’t by itself describe atmospheric circulation patterns, ocean currents, short term variability, longer term variability, the frequency of tornadoes, extratropical storm track behavior, growing season quality, the relative timing of things that different species respond to in an ecosystem, the fraction of precipitation that comes in intense downpours, etc. – HOWEVER, there are general tendencies in how these things may change with the global average surface temperature, in general, and then and then in particular if given some general information about the distribution of continents, mountain ranges, available species of plant, etc, and then even more if given more specifics about such things, etc., and also given the reasons for the temperature changes, as the atmosphere will respond in a different multidimensional ‘shape’ in response to volcanic eruptions, ice coverage, solar forcing, greenhouse effect changes)
… But the metric IS DEFINED.
6.
“(c) the
frequently mentioned difference of 33 C is a meaningless number calculated wrongly,”
Nope. But I may come back to that.
7.
”
(d) the formulas of cavity radiation are used inappropriately,”
That has to do with blackbody radiation. Climatologists know it and know how to use it. I plan to explain it, but that will take a little while.
8.
“(e) the assumption of a
radiative balance is unphysical,”
Of course it is. Because if convection were artificially halted, radiation alone would drive the lower atmosphere into an unstable state, which allows vigorous convection. Convection occurs and keeps the atmosphere from becoming so unstable. Climatologists know this. It is included in models.
NOT THAT this is what they may be arguing (I’m not sure), but just in case the matter comes up (ie if Rush Limbaugh et al is following this):
Convection doesn’t carry heat into space – it still needs to be radiated to space and the greenhouse effect affects how that happens for a given temperature distribution, and even if convection did carry heat into space, temperatures, or something else, would have to change to drive a change in convection anyway, so the argument that convection keeps the temperature at the surface or lower atmosphere from responding to a climate forcing is quite ludicrous.
9.
“(f) thermal conductivity and friction must not be set to
zero, the atmospheric greenhouse conjecture is falsified.
”
Maybe they are thinking of the need for conduction to occur at the surface. Conduction is important at the surface and in the lowest … I think few cm (~ an inch or so) of air, only because motion, and thus convection, are inhibited by the presence of a boundary. Aside from radiative transfer, away from the surface, convection dominates.
The same with molecular viscosity (friction)- important just at the surface. (PS I think eddy viscosity can also be considered friction. Do the models set this to zero? I’m actually not a modeller but I doubt that to be the case; climatologists know about this stuff).

“so the argument that convection keeps the temperature at the surface or lower atmosphere from responding to a climate forcing is quite ludicrous.”
That is true given that convection only carries energy, on balance, from where it is absorbed from the sun, generally up (and generally poleward, especially in the winter hemisphere) to where it is radiated, on balance, to space. I may have overplayed my hand discussing what if convection went into space, because (I think) it doesn’t (generally?) take much of a temperature change to drive more vertical convection.
The bottom line is that because the greenhouse effect (more technically, LW opacity) affects how much LW radiation can be exchanged among different levels, and how much from any level can escape to space, for a given temperature profile in the vertical (radiation isn’t significantly involved in horizontal energy transport, simply because the atmosphere is so extensive horizontally and temperature variations are much more gradual compared to optical depth in the horizontal direction), the temperature profile has to change to ‘catch up’ to the radiative properties when they change in order to reach equilibrium. If it has to get warmer where vertical convection delivers heat, it has to then get warmer (not by the same amount, necessarily, because the moist adiabatic lapse rate is temperature dependent, and this is why, in the tropics, the maximum warming is not expected at the surface but in the middle to upper troposphere – sorry for getting ahead of myself there) where vertical convection gets it’s heat, in order to maintain the convective heat transport. Furthermore, the changes in radiative transport among the surface and levels of atmosphere is also affected, which could concievably require convection to carry ‘more of the load’ – although that is only obviously true when the LW opacity increases over most or all wavelengths similarly; CO2 works mainly from 12 to 18 um; water vapor has it’s territoritories (offhand, within the LW band, something like 4 to 8 um and then from 18 um on… O3 claims a narrow region somewhere between 9 and 10 um; otherwise the interval from 8 to 12 um is called the atmospheric window because of it’s relative transparency relative to the rest of the LW band (when clouds aren’t there), although when/where the water vapor concentration becomes very high (at low altitudes in humid tropical airmasses), the curtains get drawn on the atmospheric window even in clear sky … clouds cover the whole LW band where they occur (if the LW band doesn’t extend to energy-budget-insignificant microwaves and radiowaves), etc…

Patrick
That is a lot to digest. I followed you up to “moist adiabatic lapse rate” then lost it. I’ll reread it in the morning when my head clears and after I look up “adiabatic” in a good dictionary.

µm

Unless it’s a meteorological dictionary, it may not cover the ‘lapse rate’ part.
The lapse rate is the rate at which temperature declines with height in the atmosphere (a negative lapse rate is an inversion). The dry adiabatic lapse rate is the rate at which air cools when raised (due to the decrease in pressure with height and consequent expansion), when their is no ‘diabatic process’ (the net radiative heating is zero, there is no net condensation or evaporation of water, and more generally, no friction or mixing – while these things will occur, the concept is still important). The moist adiabatic lapse rate is just the same, but with moisture condensing (in an updraft) or evaporating (in a downdraft), providing or taking up latent heat, with relative humidity held at 100 % (the water vapor has saturation vapor pressure). The moist adiabatic lapse rate is less than the dry adiabatic lapse rate, though it approaches the dry adiabatic lapse rate at low temperature and gets lower at high temperature because saturation vapor pressure increases roughly exponentially with increasing temperature. Since the troposphere generally gets colder with height, moist adiabatic lapse rates approach the dry adiabatic lapse rate going higher into the troposphere.
An (dry/moist) adiabat is just a trajectory on a temperature-height graph that follows an (dry/moist) adiabatic lapse rate.
A lapse rate greater than the dry adiabatic lapse rate is unstable and the fluid will overturn essentially instantaneously (in the atmospher; in the mantle, too much friction (although over time, the bulk of the mantle away from it’s top and bottom should or does maintain an adiabatic lapse rate, I think)… yes, rocks and liquid metal (outer core) have adiabats too).
A lapse rate less than the dry adiabatic lapse rate but greater than the moist adiabatic lapse rate is conditionally unstable – if a parcel of air is forced upward until condensation occurs and then up a little more until it becomes buoyant, it will then rise on it’s own in such an environment.
You can guess what a lapse rate less than a moist adiabatic lapse rate means.
That radiative heating/cooling can occur doesn’t change the stability conditions.
PS an adiabatic process is also a reversable process and an isentropic process (entropy is conserved by the air/ocean/mantle/whatever parcel involved).

“That radiative heating/cooling can occur doesn’t change the stability conditions.”
Just to clarify: any heating or cooling (depending on the vertical distribution) can change the stability if it changes the lapse rate and/or moist adiabat. But the stability itself is an instantaneous condition, while radiative heating or cooling, and other diabatic (irreversable, not isentropic) processes, occur over time.
Moist adiabatic convection is adiabatic and reversable/isentropic in the sense that if the cloud droplets (or ice crystals) that form and grow during ascent remain with the same air, they can evaporate (or melt and then evaporate) during descent. Cloud droplets have a small terminal velocity so they tend to stick with the air; but when precipitation occurs, the process in total is no longer adiabatic, reversable, or isentropic. If a parcel of air rises with latent heating from cloud formation, and then loses some moisture to precipitation (even if that precipitation only falls to lower air and evaporates), then if that parcel is brought back down, it will have a higher temperature than when it started.
—-
Mixing can also affect such processes, for example, on the edges of a cumulus cloud. (When dry air impinges on a thunderstorm cloud and cloud droplets evaporate into it, it can become cold and form a strong downdraft. This can be an aspect of severe thunderstorms, and is involved in tornadic activity (because when there is vertical wind shear, the dry air had a different horizontal momentum than the air below, and when that dry air falls down, the difference in winds is concentrated, providing a source of spin. The spinning can be accelerated by vertical stretching (it’s a conservation of angular momentum issue). Stretching may occur underneath the thunderstorm’s powerful updraft, especially and in particular (for reasons that I won’t go into now) if the updraft is rotating (a mesocyclone); the updraft would get it’s rotation from the vertical wind shear, although the mesocyclone can spin in a different direction than the tornadic circulation below it.)
—-
MORE BACKGROUND ON ATMOSPHERIC DYNAMICS:
Those vertical stability conditions are important in preventing or allowing localized vertical motions such as in thunderstorms. Reduced vertical stability may contribute energy to larger scale motions, but larger scale motions can occur if the atmosphere is locally vertically stable, provided a horizontal temperature variation – if one places a cold airmass and a warm airmass side-by-side, even if each airmass itself is stable, kinetic energy can be produced if the cold air slides under the warm air.
Because temperature falls with height during rising motion, it can be helpful to think in terms of ‘potential temperature’ (commonly represented with the greek letter theta). If, via an adiabatic process, two parcels of air brought to the same pressure level have the same temperature, then those parcels have the same potential temperature. Potential temperature is conserved during adiabatic processes. A dry adiabatic lapse rate has constant potential temperature. The faster potential temperature increases with height, the greater the vertical static stability.
Generally, an adiabatic overturning of fluid that increases the vertical static stability (whether the overturing results from vertical instability or horizontal temperature variation) will lower the center of mass of the fluid (or in a spherically-symmetric gravitational field such as on Earth, it lowers the mass-weighted average height of all the centers of mass of each vertical slice of air). Thus gravitational potential energy is lost. When there is no horizontal temperature variation (technically, this may be specified as a lack of temperature gradients being along any isobaric surface (see next paragraph)) and the potential temperature is either the same or rises with height, the gravitational potential energy is the lowest it can get by adiabatic processes. The difference in graviational potential energy between the state just described and the state of a fluid as is is the available potential energy (APE). A related concept, convective APE (CAPE), is the energy gained by a parcel of air as it rises through surrounding cooler air, assuming lack of mixing or friction, and can be visualized as the space between the adiabat (moist, or dry if the air isn’t saturated) that the parcel would follow and the temperature profile of the atmosphere (if the graph is scaled properly for that purpose). PS when the air parcel intersects the temperature profile, it becomes stable again, but unless it has already lost it’s vertical momentum to friction or mixing, it still has kinetic energy and will continue to rise awhile, converting it’s kinetic energy back into potential energy as it becomes colder air rising through warmer air. It eventually falls back; it may oscillate about an equilibrium level until the energy is lost. This phenomenon produces the ‘overshooting top’ of an intense thunderstorm.
Pressure, by the way, is often used a vertical coordinate instead of geometric height. Geometric height is roughly proportional with geopotential height, a measure of gravitational potential energy per unit mass (geopotential, I think) relative to a reference level. A geopotential surface is a surface of constant geopotential height. The pressure gradient on a geopotential surface (a horizontal surface) is what drives the wind, and is perpendicular to isobars on the geopotential surface (lines of constant pressure). The large scale winds, outside the deep tropics and away from such small scale features as thunderstorms or cumulus convection, tend to be close to geostrophic. The geostrophic wind is the wind for which the coriolis acceleration (which is proportional to the velocity of the wind and acts at a right angle to it – to the right in the Northern hemisphere and to the left in the Southern hemisphere) is equal and opposite the acceleration from the pressure gradient; a geostrophic wind blows along isobars, and kinetic energy is not produced or lost as the wind is perpendicular to the forces acting on it. In order for a geostrophic wind to remain that way, the velocity of air following it’s motion (Lagrangian perspective, as opposed to Eulerian, which is watching the air go by from a fixed point on Earth) cannot be accelerating (either speeding up, slowing down or changing direction), and frictional forces must be insignificant. In the absense of friction, an ageostrophic component of the wind (Vector subtraction: wind velocity – geostrophic wind velocity) is required if the air’s velocity is changing. Near the surface, eddy and molecular friction become more significant. The wind is nearly geostrophic when the forces of the pressure gradient and coriolis effect dominate all else in the horizontal directions, and niether is changing rapidly (in magnitude or direction; the pressure gradient would be the main source of change, since the coriolis force depends on the wind itself; the coriolis effect also varies with latitude but the wind doesn’t cross latidudes very fast because of the size of the Earth relative to typical wind speeds) following the motion of the air, so that the air doesn’t need to accelerate rapidy to maintain near-geostrophy – this is a common state in much/most the atmosphere on a large scale. Deviations from geostrophy become large near the equator because the coriolis effect is weak there, and in association with small scale or rapidly varying features, like thunderstorms and tornadoes, where the air may be changing speed or direction quickly (a tornadic circulation is essentially in cyclostrophic balance – the pressure gradient force balances the centrifugal force).
Also important to note: in large-scale motions, the great majority of momentum and vast majority of kinetic energy are associated with horizontal motion. Vertical motion is generally and relatively very slow in comparison in large-scale systems. Vertical motion is still important in transport because the vertical scale of the atmosphere is iitself quite small compared to the horizontal scale, but because the actual speed is small, vertical accelerations are also quite small. The exception is in cumulus convection and especially strong thunderstorms. (I’m not sure about the eyewall of a hurricane but my guess is that vertical motion is faster there than in any other system of comparable or larger horizontal scale, but I suspect that, in terms of vertical speed, it would be outdone by to the updraft of a severe thunderstorm.) Because large scale vertical accelerations and speeds are small, the coriolis effect’s actions on vertical motion can be neglected (where vertical motion is fast, the time period for which a given air parcel is moving that way is too short for the coriolis effect to matter much (you can make sense of this by considering how much the Earth has turned in a given time period)). Outside thunderstorms, The forces acting in the vertical are almost balanced, and dominated by gravitational acceleration, and the vertical pressure gradient that balances gravity.
When pressure is used as a veritical coordinate, the (roughly) horizontal surfaces are isobaric surfaces. The isobars on geopotential height surfaces correspond to lines of constant geopotential, and the pressure gradient at constant geopotential corresponds to a geopotential gradient on an isobaric surface. Remember that geopotential = geopotential height times gravitational acceleration. (deviation of geopotential height from geometric height are due to variations in gravity, which is a rather small matter within the bulk of the mass of the atmosphere). Using pressure coordinates is mathematically convenient because the acceleration from the pressure gradient force on a geopotential surface is the negative of the pressure gradient divided by the density of the air, whereas in pressure coordinates, it is just the negative of the gradient of the geopotential. Sometimes potential temperature is used as a vertical coordinate (usefual except when and where there is a thick layer of neutral stability, which isn’t all that often, I think – but see next paragraph), in which case, instead of pressure or geopotential, one uses the ‘Montgomery streamfunction’ to find the force acting on the air.
Because of the instant overturning that would occur, no large part of the atmosphere is ever statically unstable with respect to the dry adiabatic lapse rate. Such a ‘superadiadabatic lapse rate’ may be found … I think just at the ‘surface’ of a cumulus cloud or thunderhead (in which case it would be very small in magnitude as far as I know), and within the layer of air just above the surface, when solar heating is strong. This may happen in the daytime over surfaces like cement or rock. I don’t think it would happen where vegetation is significantly thick, because then the absorption of solar radiation is distributed over a greater heat capacity so it can’t maintain such a state as easily. This is especially the case in the oceans, where some solar radiation penetrates 100 m or more into the water – and water has a high heat capacity. Superadiabatic lapse rates can be found over some surfaces for the same reason that conduction of heat through air is important only next to the surface, and the surface’s effective heat capacity has to be low enough for diurnal (daily) temperature variation to be sizable.
——–
A quick note about a criticism of the importance of global warming: Some people note that weather is driven by differential heating or cooling, and depends on temperature gradients. But:
1. Even an even warming will put more water vapor in the air and change the role of latent heating, which is a source if spatially varying heating and temperature.
2. Climate feedbacks are not necessarily spatially-invariant. There is no ice-albedo feedback in the Amazon rainforest, given that it is so far above freezing. Cloud feedbacks will probably vary in space, too.
3. Increasing the LW opacity has a direct effect on vertical variations in radiative heating/cooling.

cturple
I think there is a workbook. I’m doing my best to keep up without one.

Patrick
I am going to take your word for it because you lost me on that last one. But hoe does this explain the formation of storms near the red sea or the shift in climate? You don’t think that very active undersea volcanos can change the ocean currents thereby affecting air circulation?

Okay, well … for the sake of tying things together a bit, I’m going to try wrapping up on atmospheric motions first. But I’ll try to make it short.
“Superadiabatic lapse rates can be found over some surfaces for the same reason that conduction of heat through air is important only next to the surface, and the surface’s effective heat capacity has to be low enough for diurnal (daily) temperature variation to be sizable.”
- well, at least if their is significant daily solar variation – this would not be the case near the poles, where one has six months of day and six months of night.
—
The atmospheric boundary layer is the layer where frictional dissipation of momentum to the surface is a significant player. It is often characterized by turbulent mixing, driven by wind, and/or by heating from below (during the daytime); the mixing causes most of the layer to have neutral stability (constant potential temperature). A typical thickness is 600 meters, but it can vary depending on conditions.
If conditions are right, the top of the boundary layer may contain boundary layer clouds (as the air mixes up and down, it crosses the level where it cools to the point of saturation).
—
How is a thermally direct circulation a heat engine; how is a thermally indirect circulation a heat pump?
When air is heated, it expands. In the atmosphere, thinking in terms of pressure coordinates, the heat capacity is that at constant pressure —-(maintained by the weight of the air above; if air is rising or sinking (changing pressure) while being heated, one can break the process into time steps of infinitisimal size, adding and infinitesimal amount of heat at constant pressure, than changing the pressure by an infinitesimal amount, etc. – this is calculus. ).—- This is bigger than the heat capacity at constant volume, because when pressure is constant, the air expands as the temperature rises, and this does work against the pressure. The pressure in this case comes from the weight of the air above that point, so this work raises the average gravitational potential energy of the air by lifting the air above. This can be a point of confusion, because it is the same energy that makes the heat capacity at constant pressure (cp) higher than that at constant volume (cv). PS I think Temperature T * cv = internal energy and T *cp = enthalpy, though I’d want to look that up to be sure (PS it might be a bit sloppy to call cp and cv heat capacities, because heat capacity can be the total for a body of a given size – cp and cv are the specific heats, which is the heat capacity per unit mass (or per number of molecules, whichever is more convenient).
Thus heat energy is related to the gravitational potential energy, including that portion which can be converted to kinetic energy during thermally direct circulation (hot rising, cold sinking). Thermally indirect circulation would do the reverse.
When warmer air rises and colder air sinks, the sinking air rises in temperature and the rising air falls in temperature. But the net effect, if the rising air has a higher potential temperature than the sinking air, is to reduce the average temperature of the air as a whole. Multiplying by the specific heat cp (I think I should use cp rather than cv for this point), and one finds a reduction in heat energy. Presumably this must be the same energy as the APE referred to above.
Thus, heat energy really is converted to kinetic energy in the process, and the reverse is true in thermally indirect circulations.
——
The forces that make hot air rise and cold air sink result from, at a given pressure, the difference in density (because air at a higher temperature is less dense). When air is less dense, the change in the mass of the rest of the air above as one goes up in geometric or geopotential height is less rapid than when the air is more dense. Thus, if there is a bubble of air at some level in the atmosphere, that is warmer relative to it’s horizontal surroundings, then – if there is no horizontal pressure gradient above this level, then there must be an area of lower pressure underneath the warmer air, because it is less dense than the surrounding air and thus there is less mass over the lower levels. Otherwise, if there is no horizontal pressure gradient below the level of the warmer air, then a high pressure area must exist above the warm area. Or a combination of the two could occur. And the opposite with a pocket of cold air.
Thus, when warm air rises and cold air sinks, this generally involves air at different levels moving horizontally from high to low pressure – the change in pressure of each bit of air being converted to kinetic energy. (And the reverse process can happen in thermally indirect circulation).
But the coriolis effect, acting over time, can make the wind blow nearly parallel to the isobars. (As the air speeds up, the coriolis acceleration grows and turns the wind’s direction.) Thus, the coriolis effect can impede thermally direct circulation, which would otherwise happen spontaneously. Thermally direct circulation still happens because geostrophy cannot be strictly maintained if the air is to accelerate, and the air will accelerate as it moves around and the forces around it change. Also, friction allows air to consistently cross isobars near the surface.
But because temporal changes can also disrupt geostrophy, air which is being warmed at a faster rate than surrounding air (or cooled at a slower rate) will tend to rise, even if that air is colder than it’s surroundings.
But something very important – when warm air is brought into a cooler area, geostrophy can be disrupted and the warm air may rise. Cold air may sink in a similar process. This is very important in midlatitude circulation patterns, which are more complex than the simpler thermally-direct circulations that reign in the lower latitudes (those being: on the large scale:
1. The Hadley cell (one in each hemisphere, though the one in the winter hemisphere is strongest)
2. The Walker circulation (which reorganizes during an El Nino)
3. The seasonal monsoons (driven by land surfaces’ tendency to have larger temperature changes over the year).
And on smaller scales (the following can occur at higher latitudes, though tropical storms will weaken, of course):
1. Tropical cyclones, cumulus convection and resulting thunderstorms.
2. Land-sea and mountain-valley breezes, which are in a way analogous to monsoons in that they are related to spatial differenes in temporal cycles of temperature.
3. I think the polar low might be in this category
Tropical cyclones in particular are characterized by small environmental horizontal temperature gradients – the horizontal temperature gradient of most importance is roughly circularly symmetric to the cyclone and is maintained by the cyclone. Cumulus convection can be similar. The Hadley, Walker, and Monsoon circulations are similar – they are organized by independently existing variations in temperature and/or heating, but they correlate with the externally-imposed pattern and can even add to it or transfer it to different levels (latent heating).
In contrast, there is a significant horizontal temperature variation associated with the kinds of circulations that characterize higher latitudes. This horizontal temperature variation causes the pressure gradient to change with height, so that there is vertical wind shear (the jet stream of the upper troposphere is associated with a temperature gradient below it, which may take the form of a lower tropospheric front). Vertical wind shear discourages the development of tropical cyclones, but is an ingredient in severe thunderstorms and tornadoes.
When there is vertical wind shear and a corresponding temperature gradient, a kind of instability can exist called baroclinic instability. Waves or perturbations in the pattern can grow, taking APE from the average conditions and converting it into APE that coincides with the waves, while some of that APE is converted to kinetic energy as warm air and cold air are shifted around in such a way as to make them rise and sink, respectively. The details are very very interesting but hard to describe in a brief way – but this is what causes the ‘synoptic scale’ midlatide low-pressure systems (‘extratropical cyclones’) to grow in strength, and can also build up high pressure systems as well. The low pressure systems tend to eventually shift into the colder side, away from the thermal contrast, and loses it’s source of energy. The high pressure systems tend to move the opposite way, and may move into the subtropics, where… I think … they can become associated with the dry, downward branch of the Hadley cell, and the subtropical deserts.
The westerly winds of the midlatitudes sare affected by thermal contrasts but also by topography. Some kinds of waves can develope in the westerlies which tend to propogate against the flow – the longer wavelengths propogate faster, and some wavelengths can remain over one spot on the Earth as the winds blow through them. Mountain ranges, and thermal contrasts associated with land-sea seasonal cycles and the ocean ccurrents (althouth the relative importance of the thermal contrasts has been uncertain, I think) can maintain such patterns and so organize the storm tracks and tendencies of high pressure systems. PS such waves are called planetary waves. They may also be called Rossby waves, though there may be a distinction between the two.
——-
Without going into all the whys, the general pattern expected with global warming is:
reduced pole-to-equator temperature gradient in the lower troposphere (generally from the distribution of snow and ice albedo feedbacks – this tendency will be strongest in the cold seasons and might dissappear in the summer).
the opposite in the upper troposphere (not as much seasonal variation??).
But this isn’t distributed evenly across all latitudes and longitudes. Where it does occur, you might expect the first to reduce the strenght and/or number of midlatitude storms and the second to have the opposite effect. Exactly how that works out is as of yet beyond my knowledge (I also wonder how their movement may change – slow down, speed up? fewer in number but more intense? No? One thing to keep in mind, the increased thermal gradient of the upper troposphere may not correspond in space and time (seasonal variations) with the decrease in the lower troposphere). There will be an increased role in latent heating, however (I wonder how that may affect the character of midlatitude storms). In general, the global tendency will be for more precipitation (balancing more evaporation, not necessarily matched in space and time, so some seasons and places may dry out while others get wetter), and more of that precipitation will come in concentrated packets. Back to storm tracks – they are expected generally to shift poleward, and so will their precipitation, so desert belts generally may also shift (or expand?) poleward.
One major caveat – remember the longer-term lag time due to upwelling of deep ocean water? Depending on where it comes from, it may take more than a thousand years (and maybe more than that?) for the ‘warming signal’ to work its way through the deep ocean and come back up in upwelling areas. In the mean time, thermal contrasts can be affected by this upwelling: for example, the difference in temperature across the tropical Pacific will grow – this could have an effect on ENSO (the more general term for El Nino and it’s opposite, La Nina). Changes may also affect where and how much upwelling occurs (upwelling is wind driven, and may work against water temperature in the sense that it is generally thermally indirect, so changes in temperature and wind can affect it) – again, if that happens in the western tropical Pacific, it could/would affect ENSO. Changes in upwelling can of course affect marine ecosystems (and the fishing business, … (humor alert!)…and therefore how much Omega-3 fatty acids you can get… In other words, global warming will decrease our inteligence!? (I’m being facicious now – flax and Walnuts have Omega-3 as well, but anyway…)).
One major effect of upwelling is that some of the general trends I just mentioned regarding changing thermal contrasts – they won’t happen quite that way in the Southern hemisphere. A ring of cold upwelling water is wrapped around Antarctica (I think there is a ring of downwelling water inside that outer ring, though now I’m not quite sure). As the water equatorward of that warms, the thermal contrast grows, I think increasing the storm track activity, and increasing the westerly winds – the very winds that drive the upwelling!
Also, while sea ice dominates (up till now) the heart of the Arctic, sea ice is a rim around Antarctica. The sea ice can be expected to melt back faster than the thick continental ice sheets. In one of the worst case scenario, where large parts of the continental ice sheets melt, the East Antarctic (the grand mother of all ice, I think it’s significantly more then the rest put together) likely will be the last to go, because it is so very cold as of yet. The West Antarctic ice sheet is more fragile because much of it’s base is below sea level, so warmer water will affect it directlly (but it’s weight is not by and large supported by the water, so it will raise sea level a lot if it melts). Greenland also appears to be more fragile. Not that they will melt fast – and then again, not that even a slow melt wouldn’t be a problem – and then again, not that we even know how and when they could melt.
The ozone hole has also affected Antarctica. Letting UV light is a heat source, but ozone is also a greenhouse gas, and I’m not 100% on this but I think at least in this case the reduced greenhouse effect from ozone loss wins out (not that it is as big as the increase from other gasses. I’m not sure about regionally but definitely not globally).
The reason the polar low level warming is largest in the cold seasons (at least in the Arctic): as sea ice melts back (at first in the summer – it will continue to reform in the winter for awhile, though the new ice is thin and melts easily in the summer), the albedo drops and the sun heats the water more. But the solar heating will be greatest in summer (even if the sea ice didn’t grow back in the winter – it’s dark then). But the water has a high heat capacity, so the temperature doesn’t rise so much. What happens is, the heat builds up in the summer in the water, and then as the fall and winter come, the water has to release the extra heat to the air and then to space before the ice can form (and the formation of ice also releases latent heat, of course – melting absorbs that heat).
PS one thing that could affect ocean circulation is changes in sea ice formation and melting. That, and changes in rainfall and evaporation, affect salinity. Unlike the atmosphere, composition (the concentration of salt) is a major player in driving ocean overturning – hence it is called the ‘thermohaline circulation’ (an example: as the gulf stream heads north, evaporative cooling leaves it salty. As it gets cold and salty, it is more likely to sink. When ice forms, since ice is fresh water (except for any salt trapped in between grains of ice), the process also leaves the water more salty and dense. Exchanges between the Atlantic and the salty Mediterranean may affect this, and I once read that this may cause a multidecadal mode of internal climate variability. (In the atmosphere, water vapor can add to buoyancy (a water molecule is lighter than an average air molecule), but this only becomes significant in the warmest air masses, and even then?… well, maybe an increase role in humidity-induced buoyancy could be one of the subtle effects of global warming, but then again…).
Warmer water can give hurricanes more power via greater water vapor concentration in the air, thus more concentrated fuel for the latent heating (a mechanism for intensification: faster winds, faster evaporation, stronger storm, faster winds). However, increased wind shear (if, when, and where it occurs) impedes the development and intensification of such storms. I wonder if it might be that, when wind shear and sea surface temperature (SST) compete, the result might be fewer storms but stronger storms? El Nino seems to be associated with more wind shear in the Atlantic. I’ve read that the timing of El Nino and La Nina conditions may have boosted the 2005 Atlantic season by at first impeding storm development, allowing the heat to build up more, and then unleashing the power.
Does the upper level wind shear affect tropical storms as much as lower level wind shear? I don’t know. A good first guess is yes, I suppose.
———
Well, I should probably stop there with circulation patterns.
———
A quick note about CO2 vs solar forcing.
At least some of the above applies more or less to most any surface and tropospheric warming. However, a big difference is:
An increase in the greenhouse effect tends to warm the nights more than the days, and it cools the upper atmosphere while warming the troposphere and surface.
Solar forcing has the opposite effect on day-night differences and the upper atmosphere.
Now, the water vapor feedback, reacting so solar forcing, would, I presume, reduce the difference between solar forcing and greenhouse forcing somewhat (although maybe with a different spatially-varying signature?). But I think the solar forcing effects are still expected to be of the same sign as I described above.
The stratosphere has cooled, and the nights have warmed more than the days, alghough the later may not be as consistent over time so far.
Stratospheric cooling and tropospheric warming suggests that the tropopause (top of the troposphere) will rise (that itself may happen with solar forcing too, but maybe not by as much?). This implies deeper convection. I think the temperature difference from top to bottom of the troposphere should increase, even though the moist adiabatic lapse rate will decrease, which means the lapse rate should decrease generally (in the tropics, anyway – polar regions have more stable air and so warming can be concentrated toward the surface).
———
Would you like to know more about radiation? Things I had intended to address:
1.
What is blackbody radiation? How does it apply to bodies that are not ideal blackbodies?
2.
What is Local Thermodynamic Equilibrium?
3.
How is radiative forcing defined? Why is the temperature profile what it is, and why will increasing the greenhouse effect cause stratospheric cooling?

“Letting UV light is a heat source,”
Well, letting more UV in is a heat source for the surface and troposphere, but it deprives the stratosphere of the same heat.
The reason the stratosphere and mesosphere exist is the ozone layer, which is heated directly by the sun. Many planets (lacking significant oxygen in the atmosphere) have only a troposphere and a thermosphere.

Polar air stability: That just means that the temperature doesn’t fall with height as quickly (in fact, there tends to be an inversion near the surface, especially in winter), so vertical motion is more inhibited. Horizontal motion still occurs, of course.
One quick note about radiative forcing – when refering to a change, it’s the change in incoming radiation (that will be absorbed) minus the change in outgoing LW radiation. Because the layers of the troposphere and surface are generally coupled together by convection (or the potential for it), radiative forcing can be defined for some purposes to be at the tropopause – after the upper atmosphere has been allowed to adjust to a forcing. Positive radiative forcing means that, before feedbacks and climate response, that much more energy is going in (down) than coming out (up). It isn’t necessarily going down to the surface – the direct effect of the forcing may be heating may be distributed or may be larger in the upper troposphere, but generally, warming above will slow convection and trap more heat below (until the temperature adjusts), etc, so the troposphere and surface warm together (although after climate response and all the feedbacks, convection may transport more heat, not less, depending…). While polar air is more stable, it is heated from horizontal heat flow from lower latitudes, and more generally, the air flows around horizontally as well as vertically, so… etc. (refer back to yesterday’s comments if you feel like it).
(Some people think that the direct radiative forcing at the surface is what is meant by ‘radiative forcing’ if otherwise unspecified).

Patrick
As far as terminology goes, an Ice Age is a series of Glacial and interglacial events when for the entire period the earth is colder than normal (90% of earths history is HOT and 10% is Ice ages, a total of 4, of which we are in the 4th currently).
The article you said you will look up can be found at Science Daily in the Earth Science section.
On the ENSO, there has been a lot of new information on both its source and its world wide effects. The U.S. government sites have a lot of data on it. The department of the Army had done a study and papers on how it affects troop deployment worldwide.
306 Ma during the Late Carboniferous, Gondwanaland was largely ice covered and sat on the south pole. The north pole was open ocean and ice free. In the Mesozoic the entire globe was ice free. By the middle Eocene Antarctica had finally settled over the south pole and began accumulating ice, the rest of the earth was still quite warm. By the Middle Miocene it was completely frozen and has been ever since.
The Glacation in question was in the southern hemisphere, I am not familiar with it, but considering the recent age of the Andes it was most likely within the 4th Ice Age. I will try to find some details on it.

Patrick
“An anticyclonic pattern formed in early June 2007 over the central Arctic Ocean, persisting for 3 months (Gascard 2008). This was coupled with low pressures over central and western Siberia. Persistent southerly winds between the high and low pressure centers gave rise to warmer air temperatures north of Siberia that promoted melt. The wind also transported ice away from the Siberian coast.”
Reference:
John Cook,

“306 Ma during the Late Carboniferous, Gondwanaland was largely ice covered and sat on the south pole. The north pole was open ocean and ice free.”
Do we know there wasn’t sea ice around the North pole?
During that time, CO2 dipped to around where it has been the last few million years.
“In the Mesozoic the entire globe was ice free.”
And CO2 was high.
“By the middle Eocene Antarctica had finally settled over the south pole and began accumulating ice, the rest of the earth was still quite warm. By the Middle Miocene it was completely frozen and has been ever since.”
From p. 440 of IPCC AR4 WGI, in Chapter 6:
“Major expansion of antarctic glaciations starting around 35 to 40 Ma was likely a response, in part, to declining atmospheric CO2 levels from their peak in the Cretaceous (~100 Ma) (DeConto and Pollard, 2003). The relationship between CO2 and temperature can be traced further back in time as indicated in Figure 6.1 (top panel), which shows that the warmth of the Mesozoic Era (230-65 Ma) was likely associated with high levels of CO2 and that the major glaciations around 300 Ma likely coincided with low CO2 concentrations relative to surrounding periods.”
(Why they implied the Mesozoic Era started at 230 rather than 250 Ma, I don’t know, maybe they were refering to the time span of some dataset?).
The point being that CO2 also has an effect. If CO2 were high enough, for the given conditions, an ice age can be ended or prevented. But I’m not saying that continental arrangements don’t play a role.
In particular, changing the geography (including topography) and reshaping the oceans can/will:
1. Change atmospheric circulation patterns.
2. Reshaping the surface ocean currents (wind-driven) and the thermohaline circulation.
And 1 and 2 feedback on each other.
One change could be the amount of heat transport from the tropics to a polar region. This tends to increase with an increasing temperature difference, but the circulation patterns of the ocean and atmosphere are obviously important…
In a warm world, reducing poleward heat transport could help contribute to glaciation (and the ice albedo feedback has a globally-averaged as well as regional effect). But that can only do so much; the global climate can’t be too warm if this is to happen.
In a cool world, increasing poleward heat transport might be accompanied by moisture transport, and if cool enough, perhaps build up snow faster (but what happens in summer is important).
A warm ocean current flowing near a cold region could supply moisture for snow.
Poleward heat transport is strongest in winter.

Patrick
“The Andean-Saharan glaciation was from 460 mya to 430 mya, during the late Ordovician and the Silurian period.”
Source: Wikipedia
That was within the second ice age and so far the shortest of the four.

Here they still have the Proterozoic, Archean, and Hadean as Eons. This comforts me greatly. A ‘Proterozoic Era’ just seems out of whack.
What should the next era be? Neozoic? If humans stick around awhile, maybe Anthrozoic? Sapiozoic? The Anthropocene epoch would be the first of the Agrigene period (reference to ongoing cultivation?)…
ANYWAY:
From the paleos website (PS thanks for reminding me about that – I had visited it a few years ago but I think they’ve added to it since then):
During the Ordivician, CO2 was high, and this makes the ice age at the end of it surprising.
It may be that the total length of spreading ridges was shorter for a time.
Mountains in North America and Europe that were building at the time were at low latitudes (like the Himalayas now).
The climate in the early Paleozoic was more zonal – greater variation of temperature with latitude.
—-
Remember that the Coriolis effect has gradually weakenned over Earth’s history? My understanding is that a stronger coriolis effect should tend to reduce heat transport from tropics to polar regions (I think). This may not explain the early Paleozoic pattern (at least not in whole), but just something I thought I’d mention.
—-
“Appalachians Triggered Ancient Ice Age”
“”The models for CO2 that span that interval have always shown levels that are much too high to have an ice age,” he explains. “That was a real paradox.” ”
The following comes immediately after the above; I just broke it up for emphasis (that it is/was a paradox – the same impression given at the Paleos website).
“Researchers believe that the last ice age, which began 40 million years ago, was kicked off by the rise of the Himalayas during the collision of tectonic plates and a corresponding plunge in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Ocean deposits of calcium carbonate, or limestone, indicate that CO2-rich rainwater stripped calcium and strontium from the Himalayan rock; these elements fused with the carbon dioxide and spilled into the sea, effectively pulling carbon from the atmosphere.”
And:
“The same chemical weathering commenced before the Ordovician ice age,” … “The pair analyzed the ratio of strontium isotopes in rocks from Nevada and Europe that date to the Ordovician climate reversal.” … “suggesting weathering of relatively young rock.” … “”We have pretty good evidence that in fact there was a weathering event that had to involve a significant removal of carbon dioxide,” Saltzman says. “If you include the strontium data [in CO2 models] then you can very easily force the drop in CO2 that hadn’t been there.” ”
————
Two other things:
Continental albedo:
(snow/ice-free) Continents have higher albedos than the (ice-free) oceans. The difference is weak for forested land but quite great for desert. Before some point in the Palezoic, all exposed land was mainly desert, regardless of climate.
The spread of vegetation into dry regions, induced by CO2, would have an albedo feedback. It can also have a cloud and moisture-supply feedback – clouds both being a warming (LW) and cooling (SW) factor…
Tectonic-driven (as opposed to climate – via ice sheet and glacier mass changes) have raised and lowered sea level by large amounts, and often in the Earth’s past, large portions of the continents were under shallow seas (which I suspect would have been fun to play in). That would have affected albedo and, maybe, CO2 drawdown by chemical weathering.
Of course the distribution of exposed land among different latitudes would affect global albedo.

“From: “G-8, CO2 And The Garden Of Eden” ”
(What I read was the second website, but I also put the first website there since that seems to be the original source).
Apparently you cited an editorial from Investor’s Business Daily. From my experience, these have a history of being biased and factually inaccurate (outrageously so). Granted, I’m basing that on the three editorials sent to me by a friend, that were all about the same subject matter.
Richard Lindzen is referenced. He has done some good work but he’s also a bit of a joke.
“As Solomon notes, CO2 levels were five to 10 times higher when dinosaurs roamed the Earth on a fertile planet where lush vegetation sustained those immense beasts. The Earth is cooler now than then,”
Would Solomon really prefer to live with dinosaurs roaming around him?
” and cooler than it was during the Medieval Warming Period.”
That’s probably not true. Anyway, it’s going to get warmer from here.
“remaining essentially flat since 1998.”
1998 was one of those blips (related to an extreme in ENSO behavior in this case) that occurs on top of a longer term trend. I’ve been losing weight since lunch but that doesn’t mean I can have all the sugar I want tomorrow.
“According to Al Gore, each time you exhale while reading this editorial, you have contributed to global warming.”
Exhaling has nothing to do with it – that’s the same C that the plants took from the atmosphere to make your food.
“Carbon dioxide is in fact not a pollutant. Rather, it is the basis of all plant, and therefore all animal, life on Earth.”
The same is true of water. Remind me of this the next time my house is underwater.
I’m getting into a different matter than most of our discussion, but what is often overlooked is the time it takes for adaptation, and the costs of that.
It isn’t that we have an ideal climate. It’s that we’re adapted to the climate we have – socially, psychologically (I grew up in the upper Midwest so I would take the threat of tornados over the threat of earthquakes), economically (food, soil, and water, and the design of buildings), as well as ecologically (some of the above being more serious matters than others).
We’re also warming up from a relatively warm state for the last million years – wo conditions we’re going into are less familiar for the life that is here now.
CO2 is not the only thing that affects plants.
Greenland’s ice sheet did not significantly melt and refreeze around the time of Viking settlements.

Patrick
I used that article (on plant health) simply because it was most recent. I have been following the added CO2 experiments and so far all have proved positive results. Add the fact that there has been more moisture overall and we get healthy plant growth. This isn’t news, I was taught that back in the 1950s. Carbon cycle fundamentals!

Re: “In spite of their apparently cutting off 20 million years from the beginning of the Mesozoic, I still think they are a good source.”
Sorry but I view the IPCC as way too political to be trustworthy doing science. I do not trust political organizations or government organizations. They are the most likely to have an agenda and fudge the data.

Patrick
Re: “they determined that the ice receded” – But by how much?
That I don’t know. I saw the article and read it quickly as it was not really news to me. Glaciers advance and recede, nothing new. If I can relocate the article I will post an abstract for you.
As far as the IPCC doing science: they have specific scientists on their payroll, not truely independent. I have seen several articles about how they are intimidated by political pressures to support the original hypothesis. That makes the IPCC reports untrustworthy. I’ll stick with the independent results.

“That the work of the IPCC has been biased against the existence of internal sources of radiative forcing is clear from reading the IPCC reports. For instance, even though “radiative forcing” is defined early in the Technical Summary of the Report of Working Group I in such a way that would include both internal and external sources, the report’s subsequent 100 references to radiative forcing are only in the context of external sources. These typically include anthropogenic greenhouse gas and aerosol emissions, volcanic eruptions, and variations in solar flux.”
Reference:
“Internal Radiative Forcing And The Illusion Of A Sensitive Climate System” By Roy Spencer, April 22, 2008

“Internal Radiative Forcing And The Illusion Of A Sensitive Climate System”
I haven’t yet found the defininition given in the Technical Summary, but the definition in the glossary (under Annexes) is quite clear.
I read the first part of that article by Roy Spencer in detail and skimmed the rest; he seems to be asserting that internal variability can cause changes in radiative ‘forcing’, not in the external forcing sense of the word.
Well, I agree with that.
But it is established how much external radiative forcing there has been from CO2; with more uncertainty from other things, but anyway, the world is warming as we’d expect – it seems superfluous to assert that something we understand less well accounts for something that can otherwise be accounted for. And climate models do produce some internal variability (yes, not perfectly, but that’s a different kind of criticism and … might fill in that blank later) and presumably, even if not caused by temperature changes, they would include the radiative effects Spencer is talking about.

Patrick
Re: “Where?”
At “Climate Debate Daily”
(Sorry ABC won’t allow links).

“were taken as forcings for the purpose of calculation”
This is appropriate (so long as things are kept straight) when the context is determining how conditions, including some portion of feedbacks, are maintaining a climate state or participating in a climate change (which would include the feedbacks not included in the former grouping), even though physically some of them were feedbacks caused by climate itself.

Okay, I’m not waiting anymore. The missing comments, typo corrected, and some changes so that the comments may not dissappear again (I have a hypothesis about it)…
_______________
… at least one comment I made yesterday is gone, and I can’t find the comment you made to which it was a response… (about internal vs external radiative forcing and the definition of radiative forcing used by the IPCC)
Since they’ll probably reappear in a day or two, I won’t bother reposting the comment for the time being.
—
On solar – climate connections:
(both are from RealClimate)
“How not to attribute climate change”
“Another study on solar influence”
Scafetta and West’s method probably overestimates climatic responses to solar forcing, as they could have found at least some correlation between unrelated random data.
PS IPCC website (well, that’s a link on the right hand side at RealClimate, so I won’t bother)
—-
“There has been no warming that could not be explained by other forcings.”
Could be? … but then, how do you explain what’s happenning to the radiative forcing of known forcings? Granted, the aerosol forcing has a lot of wiggle room, but greenhouse gases have a lot less.
Would you like to know more about radiation. I had planned to go into that earlier but got sidetracked by atmospheric dynamics. I think I can describe the ‘basics’ of radiation more briefly.
—
You may also want to visit (if you don’t have dial-up – otherwise plan on having something else to do for awhile):
“Keeling_20051206″
“Is There Still Time to Avoid
‘Dangerous Anthropogenic Interference’ with Global Climate?*#
A Tribute to Charles David Keeling
James E. Hansen
NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and
Columbia University Earth Institute
New York, NY 10025
December 6, 2005″
Particularly interesting is the Climate sensitivity section, and in that, the ice age radiative forcings (which include ice albedo as well as greenhouse gas changes and other things), from which a climate sensitivity of 3/4 +/- 1/4 deg C per W/m2 forcing – (in this case the ice albedo, greenhouse gases, etc, are all put in as forcings for the sake of the calculation – Hansen is not implying that they were not feedbacks to other changes on a long time scale; the remaining feedbacks would include water vapor, clouds, etc.) – this is about what is suggested by computer climate models, though the later have some greater uncertainty.
PS some people talk about uncertainty as if any finite uncertainty might as well be infinite, as if losing track of a few buckets of sand invalidates the conclusion that you’re on a beach.
——–
Oh, another thing about models and the concept of ‘internal radiative forcing’ – many runs of models given certain boundary conditions (= external vorcings) may spread and cover some range due to internal variability; I only expect that internal radiative would be a part of the physics of that and would not, at least by entire category/in principle (as opposed to computing power / resolution limitations and imperfections in parameterizations used to deal with those limitations), be excluded. As a response to internal variability modes, some of the internal radiative forcings (the positive feedbacks) (which are truly feedbacks within the internal variability modes) would tend to increase the overall spread of output (at least in some subset of output variables) more so than if they were not there.
Running the models with and without anthropogenic forcing yields different results, closer to and farther from the observations thus far, respectively.
_____________________

“Average over wavelengths ”
No, that should be “integrate over wavelength”, or “sum over wavelength intervals”.

Re: “Hansen is not implying that they were not feedbacks to other changes on a long time scale; the remaining feedbacks would include water vapor, clouds, etc.) – this is about what is suggested by computer climate models, though the later have some greater uncertainty”
On this I disagree and it is fundamental to Hansen’s critics. GHGs are fundamental feedbacks that enhance warming. CO2 levels in the past are symptomatic of warming, not the cause.
Methane produced by bacteria is much more likely to be a cause even though it too can be seen as a bio-feedback.

noemal s/b normal – sorry

A few clarifications first:
1.
“of what is behind it and has a visibility (more technically, emmissivity)”
Here I’m using ‘visibility’ to refer to what can be seen and how much – the visibility of nearby things increases at the expense of visibility of more distant objects as opacity increases, the distinction between near and far in the above also shortenning as opacity increases, remaining proportional to a unit of optical thickness.
2.
“the troposphere as a whole (and generally, because of the role of convection, the whole does together in some pattern) warms up to balance an imposed reduction in net upward LW at the top of the troposphere.”
The imposed reduction being from increased LW opacity within the troposphere – although it could also come from heating up an overlying layer (cooling of the stratosphere due to an increasing greenhouse effect causes some reduction of the change in LW greenhouse forcing at the tropopause, but I don’t think it’s typically large in proportion – it can be calculated, of course), but anyway, more generally, the surface and parts of the troposphere, linked by convection, will tend to warm up or cool down together to change the net LW radiation at the top of the troposphere (the tropopause) until the net radiation at the tropopause nears zero (SW radiation absorbed below the tropopause is nearly balanced by net LW radiation coming back up).
—-
(Net SW and LW fluxes at all levels above the troposphere would come to an exact balance in a ‘one-dimensional model’ – in the full climate system, some (I believe a small portion of) kinetic energy produced in the troposphere (A small portion of the heat energy budget) drives large scale overturning in the upper atmosphere, being converted to heat in the process – and the overturning makes regions of the upper atmosphere significantly warmer or colder than they would be if at radiative equilibrium – however, in the global average, net radiative cooling must only be small to balance the small net kinetic energy flux into the upper atmosphere, so my understanding is that the global average can still be approximated by having the atmosphere above the tropopause in radiative equilibrium.)
(Specifically, the tropical (lower?) stratosphere and especially the summer polar upper mesosphere are made colder and the polar winter upper atmosphere is made warmer by these circulations – that in itself at least partly fits the pattern you might expect from thermally direct circulation, given solar heating distributions, except that the resulting cooling and warming are too great).
(Above extratropical cyclones, there is a thermally indirect circulation that corresponds to the thermally direct circulation below it. I’m not sure how much kinetic energy is lost to heat vs how much might be recovered by ‘rebounding’ (like a spring – cold air might fall back down after being lifted up) in this case, but the smaller synoptic scale variations tend not to penetrate far up into the stratosphere; farther up, the longer-wavelength patterns dominate. The winter midlatitude eddies drive stratospheric circulation, which is a rising at the tropics, poleward drift, and sinking at the poles (PS important in redistributing ozone). Vertically-propogating gravity waves (a kind of ageostrophic disturbance, that can be produced by wind blowing over mountains, among other ways) drive the mesospheric circulation, which is rising in the summer polar region, drift across the equator, and sinking in the winter polar region. There is also the QBO, a fluctation – over roughly two years – in the east-west winds of the equatorial stratosphere (I’m not sure how far up it goes, actually), which is caused by wind-shear dependent damping of vertically propogating equatorial waves – I don’t know offhand how or whether this is connected to large scale overturning.)
—-
For the the three dimensional troposphere, of course there are regions where there is not much localized overturning (polar regions, near the surface on low-humidity calm cloud-free nights, subtropical deserts – at least not in the bulk of the troposphere, as far as I know), although they may have some overall vertical motion (such as the slow sinking over subtropical desert belts, or in anticyclones in general) and are connected horizontally by more actively vertically-mixed portions of the troposphere.
Sinking motion adiabatically warms the air (tending to evaporate clouds), while it is typically radiatively cooling. Cumulus convection involves adiabatic cooling in the updraft accompanied by latent heating.
Because of such complexities, I would imagine there is some wiggle room in the global average effect of the tropospheric lapse rates – in that it isn’t set exactly by the moist convective lapse rate of, say, the midlatitudes… But it is still determined by circulation patterns and … etc.
3.
“As the opacity is increased, eventually different portions of the atmosphere can significantly cover up other parts from other parts as well, and the net radiative flux from the warm to cold continues to drop as the visibility of the temperature variations is induced”
Before parts of the atmosphere block other parts of the atmosphere from each other significantly, they would first (upon increasing opacity from near zero) become visible to each other, as thinner slices of the air gain significant visibility. This would increase air-to-air net LW radiative exchanges at first (except to the extent that LW opacity is from scattering (not much on Earth), in which case it is to a degree reflecting radiation from elsewhere to elsewhere), but still generally tends to result in a reduction of total net upward LW fluxes because of coming in between the surface and space (again, assuming generally decreasing temperature with height – at this point, the upper atmospheric temperature variations caused by solar UV absorption are too small scale to contribute much, at most wavelengths).
—-
(At some wavelengths a lot of the optical thickness is concentrated (relative to mass) in the upper atmosphere – this being near/at wavelengths of peak absorptivity or emissivity. Aside from the concentration of ozone, this is due mainly to pressure broadenning – at very low pressure and temperature, gases have line spectra – narrow peaks in absorptivity and emissivity. Higher pressure and temperature broaden these peaks, while lowering the absorptivity and emissivity at the lines. Pressure broadenning dominates at most levels. I would expect temperature (doppler) broadenning to be important in the thermosphere, but that layer is very optically thin in the LW band and very low in mass – it is hot because it is a very very small mass that absorbs a very small fraction of SW radiation – the shortest wavelengths – and doesn’t have much LW emissivity. To at least a first approximation it can be ignored in the energy budgets of the climate system as a whole).

2b.
“The winter midlatitude eddies drive stratospheric circulation, which is a rising at the tropics, poleward drift, and sinking at the poles (PS important in redistributing ozone). Vertically-propogating gravity waves (a kind of ageostrophic disturbance, that can be produced by wind blowing over mountains, among other ways) drive the mesospheric circulation,”
Well, I’m not sure the drivers are limited to those things, but they are, respectively, major contributors.
The term eddies in that context may refer in part to quasi-stationary waves in the mid-to-upper tropospheric and lower stratospheric westerlies – to the extent they are stationary and not changing on sub-seasonal time scales, they might not seem like eddies on a map (though time-varying variations superimposed on them would be), but they would be eddies relative to the zonal mean flow (zonal mean = averaging along a line of latitude).
Also, the sinking in the stratosphere would be in the winter polar region.
2c.
“I’m not sure how much kinetic energy is lost to heat vs how much might be recovered by ‘rebounding’ (like a spring – cold air might fall back down after being lifted up)”
The kinetic energy is converted to heat energy as soon as it forces such a redistribution of mass, but there is APE in that state which could be converted back to kinetic energy – but the APE can be transported to elsewhere (where it could still turn into kinetic energy), or it can be destroyed by radiative processes (or mixing), in particular, the thermal perturbations produced in a thermally indirect circulation would tend to induce radiative heating and cooling that would dampen those perturbations.
That radiation can play a role in thermal damping of waves or thermal perturbations had me speculating on possible more subtle direct effects of increasing the greenhouse effect, but to the extent that this depends on air-to-air transfer, except for cloud feedbacks and water vapor feedback in areas of high humidity, there might not be much effect?… (** – see chapter 4 of that book)
8b.
“The intensity of ideal blackbody radiation increases with temperature at every wavelength, but much more so at shorter wavelengths (at longer wavelengths, I think it approaches a linear proportion – a blue hot surface emits more red light than a red hot surface does, if emissivity is the same at each wavelength.). ”
The distinction between long and short wavelengths (in the above description of blackbody intensity as a function of temperature) is relative to the distribution of intensity over wavelength – the intensity per unit wavelength peaks at some wavelength, that peak wavelength being inversely proportional to the temperature.
Intensity, and blackbody radiation intensity, might instead be given as a function of frequency [ I(frequency) instead of I(wavelength ]. Converting from I(frequency) to I(wavelength) requires a little calculus because I(frequency) is per unit interval of frequency, whereas I(wavelength) is per unit interval of wavelength.
If there is no scattering or absorption, or refraction, along a path, intensity is conserved. In space, the sun has about the same intensity of radiation at the orbit of Mercury as it does at the orbit of Mars. But it appears bigger from Mercury than it does from Mars – it is the same intensity covering a larger solid angle.
I mentioned refraction because, without reflection, intensity of a beam of light is proportional to the square of the index of refraction, as is blackbody radiation within a medium(something not typically mentioned, by the way, but if it were not true, I could break the second law of thermodynamics! – see also thermodynamics of total internal reflection) Wavelength is shorter within a medium of higher refractive index, so remember that blackbody radiation as a function of wavelength is given in the wavelength the light would have in a vaccuum (I presume – that would make the most sense, anyway).
Radiation has a temperature and an entropy. The entropy of radiation is increased by scattering. etc. See also thermodynamics of luminescent concentrators, geometric optics concentrators, prisms… (if you can put the radiation ‘back together’, than entropy and monochromatic intensity have been conserved).
Blackbody radiation is emitted from thermal energy.
More on Local thermodynamic equilibrium … but not here…
—-
So,
Clouds with high tops block upward radiation from all the air below; CO2 and water vapor would have less impact on the whole tropospheric energy budget when underneath a cloud. Low clouds have less of an impact on LW radiation at the tropopause because of all the air above them. Of course clouds reduce SW absorption within the troposphere, though they can increase SW absorbtion at their tops and above them, and forward-scattered light might be absorbed more than it otherwise would have (within the air) if the sun is close to overhead.
Increasing water vapor adds to the greenhouse effect. It also adds to SW radiative heating within the air, and thus decreases SW heating at the surface. I think the decrease in LW cooling of the surface is stronger, though. Of course, SW effects have a stronger diurnal (daily) variation than LW effects. It’s conceivable that water vapor feedback will drive more low-level convection at night in particular, though I’m not sure about that. Cyclical daily temperature variation tends to be strongest where SW heating per unit heat capacity is greatest, which is at the surface on land (and by convection, within the atmospheric boundary layer over land), and I think in the upper part of the upper atmosphere, the thermosphere especially.
CO2 does absorb some SW radiation but it’s LW effects dominate (hence it is a greenhouse gas).
Of course, temporal-variation disrupts equilibrium among SW, LW, and convective fluxes, but in the average, those fluxes must balance in an equilibrium climate.
___________
I put the following together quickly so I hope I didn’t get anything mixed up:
What might decrease the net upward LW flux in the troposphere, even after warming to a new equilibrium in response to an increased greenhouse effect (aside from cloud feedbacks)?
decreased lapse rate (at low latitudes)
decreased LW exchanges at wavelengths where optical thickness has increased from moderate to strong.
decreased LW cooling from the surface to space in general, unless made up for by the greater temperature difference between those two end points.
What would do the opposite?
increased lapse rate (polar regions in general)
increased LW exchanges, particularly at shorter wavelengths, due to increased temperature.
Increased air-to-air and surface-to-air and air-to-space LW exchanges at wavelengths where optical thickness has gone from thin to moderate,
The effect on radiation particular at wavelengths with thin to moderate optical thickness by the increased temperature of the troposphere and surface relative to the upper atmosphere and space.
… and the point of all that – curiosity about convection – depending on how feedbacks affect SW fluxs, changes in LW fluxes at levels within the troposphere will have to be balanced by changes in convective heat fluxes (including horizontal fluxes in the full three-dimensional climate system).
One interesting matter – the size of wavelength intervals of moderate optical thickness may not vary that much for increasing the concentration of some gases, such as CO2 – because as wavelengths with moderate optical thickness change to having higher optical thickness, wavelengths at which the air is optically thin may change to having moderate optical thickness. This is true within certain limits. This is also why, within certain limits, CO2 radiative forcing is roughly logarithmically proportional to the CO2 amount, and within certain limits, this may be expected for other gases as well (but I’m not 100% sure – see chapter 4 of that book).
———–
PS while stratospheric cooling is a small negative feedback on tropopause LW radiative forcing, tropospheric and surface warming will again tend to warm the stratosphere, but it will still generally be cooler than before the changes (at least for Earthly conditions, as far as I know).
———-
PS note that one can divide the climate system into some number of components, for example, spatially, either just into global layers, or into a finer grid – and even without knowledge of what happens within each grid cell, one can apply certain conservation laws to it – an imbalance in fluxes in and out (via top, bottom, or sides) must lead to a buildup or draw down of X within the cell, X being one of the following:
water (as a liquid or gas, accounting for potential conversion between the two)
latent and sensible heat (accounting for conversion between the two and to kinetic energy)
momentum (after accounting for coriolis effect)
angular momentum (but remember coriolis)
(friction doesn’t destroy momentum, it transfers it)
mass in general
etc.

“Assuming X is not more than 6 or 8 or 10, there have been some but not like what we’re heading into now, in terms of change from start to finish,”
And at least some of that is due to precession (the highest frequency Milankovitch cycle).

setting aside all else for a minute:
“But I do not see the relevance to changes in wind patterns.” … “While GHGs may change the strength of air currents I can’t see them changing the direction.”
If you don’t think the direction will change, what would make you think the speed would change?
If the speed changes, the rates of q advection, q being any quantity that would be carried by the wind and that varies along the direction of the wind in at least some cases (q could be temperature (proportional in some way to sensible heat energy), water vapor (and therefore latent heat energy), momentum and angular momentum and kinetic energy, etc. (the thing to keep in mind with momentum and angular momentum – air has relative momentum and angular momentum – those things relative to the Earth underneath it, and it has the momentum of the Earth underneath it).
Changing just the speed of the wind can change the fluxes of kinetic energy and momentum and angular momentum – which directly affects the wind’s speed and direction. Changing the fluxes of sensible and latent heat can affect the heat distribution and where/how much cumulus convection will occur, and that affects pressure gradients, thus affecting the forces acting on momentum and wind.
More generally, a large scale generalized wind may carry within it variations in that wind and associated variations in pressure, temperature, cloud cover, moisture, etc. – some of those directly affect local/regional radiative heating and cooling.
The instantaneous or short term circulation pattern is varying all the time (although it can be divided into rapidly varying perturbations (eddies) superimposed on a mean flow pattern that may change slowly.) The average of combined eddy and mean fluxes over time, however, might be balanced so as to allow a long term equilibrium state of the circulation pattern – or, there may be imbalances that cause longer-term fluctuations, although on even longer time scales, these fluctuations might fall into some pattern (not an exactly repeating pattern like a tesselation, but maybe something like a ‘texture’ that helps describe a climate state).
Anyway, a change in greenhouse (LW) forcing such as from CO2, itself is not spacially and temporally invariant, although there is a global time average. Aside from that, the feedbacks are also not invariant. So as the global average surface temperature rises (and other global average changes occur), at the same time, the spacial and temporal variations in those things that drive the wind change, thus changing the winds, thus changing the winds again, etc…

Before answering your question,
Another point on winds: If the speed of the generally westerly winds of the midlatitudes changes, then they blow through the ‘quasi-stationary’ wave pattern at a different rate. This means the wave pattern is propogating through the air at a different speed in order to remain stationary. The propogation speed is wavelength dependent. Thus, a change in speed could amplify or reduce the strengths of different wavelengths in the flow. These waves are exited as the wind blows over varying topography, and maybe somewhat by east-west variations in temperature, some of which is from ocean currents and some of which is from land-water contrasts (and other things) (hence a seasonal dependence – continents have greater temperature variation over the year than the oceans). Also, if the strongest westerlies shift north or south, that would change the length of the latitude circle the waves must fit into, and also change the topography and other surface features that they blow over. How significant this is in the overall picture, I’m not quite sure; it’s something I’d like to know more about.
In addition (PS not sure again how important this is in the overall picture of climate change, but it’s something interesting to know), some smaller scale phenomena are also produced by wind blowing over mountains (among other things) – gravity waves. Whether gravity waves … been awhile since I read this, but I think, whether they can propogate vertically or whether they are trapped depends, among other things, on the wind speed and the shape of the topography. Vertically propogating gravity waves can transfer momentum and deposit it in the stratosphere and mesosophere upon being mechanically and thermally damped.
————
“So you are saying that Bertha started farther east because of AGW?”
Yes and no and otherwise.
Yes at least in the sense that since AGW is happenning and it is global and the climate system is interconnected, and since weather develops within the climate system, it must have some affect, but that’s a somewhat trivial answer, for it must also have some effect on the words I’m choosing right now (butterfly effect and all that, plus, if it didn’t exist I would be at least somewhat less likely to be writing about it).
No, in the sense that any individual weather phenomenon has a number of proximate causes, and tracing back through a chain of events, … well, many will have been influence by climate since they are embedded within it – see previous answer.
One of the best analogies is this: climate change is like changing the weight on weighted dice. If I put the weight on to give me more 5s, I can’t really say that every 5 I get is because of that – I would still get some 5s with unweighted dice – maybe if it were such a severe climate change that I went from not having a 5 on the dice… but anyway, statistically I might be able to say that ‘half of the 5s are from this weighting change’, but of course, it would be hard if not impossible to identify which half of the 5s those were (on the other hand, if I had videotape of the rolls, one could go over each and look at how the dice are bouncing … but with the butterfly effect prominant in such a phenomenon, very slight changes smaller than the weighting could change each individual identity of each 5 rolled without affecting the statistics in a detectable manner – if 5 were a category of weather phenomena, one could break them up into subcategories and find that the weighting of the dice played different roles in the different subcategories)
Bertha probably could have happened with or without AGW (although the slightest change far enough back in time and it might have been the C hurricane of 06 or the A hurricane of 09 instead, depending on how I’ve broken the tropical cyclones up into different categories (you might want to talk specifically about hurricanes that reached category 3 for x hours, had a double eyewall at some point, occured during July during a La Nina(was there one?), and followed a snowy midwestern winter, just for example), but it could have been more likely to occur with AGW – or maybe not, because I don’t know enough about that specific aspect of climate to say. Certainly, as temperatures rise, there should be a general trend to increase the area (and length of season) over which SSTs (sea surface temperatures) are high enough for a given strength of storm, and maybe that includes spreading eastward in the tropical Atlantic, though I’m not sure. There are other factors in tropical cyclone behavior and global warming could affect those as well (wind shear for one).

Patrick
Re: “Bertha probably could have happened with or without AGW”
That is not the issue. It is the location of it’s origin that is at issue. Before Ned posted this blog, I was unaware of the shift eastward. Something had to cause it and I do not feel that it is AGW related. The reletively recent tectonic activity is more likely than CO2 changing air currents (if it shifted at all – our knowledge of formation of tropical storms may have been wrong to start with.

Patrick
The water vapor we produce that I was referring to is industrial. Converting Fossil fuels to power by combustion we then convert the byproducts of said combustion into water vapor and CO2.
That is the job done by catalysts in car exhausts and industry stacks.

“The only true AGW that can actually be proven without a doubt is the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect”
If your point were that UHI were biasing the global average record, then, here’s a recent quote of myself at another blog:
—
“Is there no urban heat island in southeastern U.S.?” [a region that has not experienced as much warming - PS Atlanta Georgia has produced it's own thunderstorm at least once] … “What about glaciers melting, sea ice disappearing, oceans warming and sea level rising, and other things?”
[Other things including migration of plants or other species up mountains or poleward - I think those things have been observed - and shifts in timing of ecological processes.]
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I think satellite records have also shown the surface and tropospheric warming, and an increase in H2O vapor (warming feedback).
The increase in sea level is both from losing ice and thermal expansion.
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If your point was to suggest that urban heat islands actually produce the global warming, well, … What fraction of the globe is covered by urban areas and how much warmer are they? If ~ 50% of people live in urban areas now, and … just guesstimating here to get a ballpark figure, but maybe an urban population density of 2000 people /km2 (it can be quite a bit higher than that, actually), that’s ~ 3 billion p * 1 km2 / 2000 p = 1.5 million km2, about 0.3 % of global surface area. if the heat island is 6 deg C warmer than surroundings (I vaguely remember hearing 10 degrees, being in the U.S. I figure they gave it in F), that’s a global average effect of 6 deg C* 0.003 = 0.018 deg C, about a global warming of 0.02 deg C, a small fraction of the total.
Furthermore, I’m not clear that UHI actually makes the globe slightly warmer on average than it would be otherwise – rather I wonder if it’s just caused by a tendency to concentrate heat into a smaller effective heat capacity. (I say this because urban areas, at least those in green vegetated regions, look brighter from space during the day – granted that albedo must include solar UV and especially IR, but … I’m not sure, but I wonder if it has something to do with a lack of on-site evapotranspiration.)
“and the actual production of heat from our engines of all types.”
Global energy usage is about 10 TW (terawatts). The surface area of the Earth is about 510 trillion m2 (not quite that because I calculated it as a perfect sphere when it fact it’s slightly oblate, but close enough), so global energy usage is about 0.02 W/m2. Too small compared to CO2 radiative forcing, aerosol effects, even to just solar TSI(*.7/4) forcing.

Re: “If your point were that UHI were biasing the global average record,”
No the bias is mostly removed in the models (there is more likely some bias not accounted for but I don’t think it’s significant). I refer to actual production of heat. If only urban stations are looked at there is no significant rise in temperatures.
It all seems to come from Urban and Industrial areas. What I am saying is that this is proof of AGW but not much.
The UHI is a mainly nocturnal phenomena, the heat is retained longer so the heat loss is less overall.
Re your talk about UV, I can see the change there as UV indices have risen over the last few decades. Point taken.
Sea level rise is cyclic, it’s called the Fairbridge cycle. Sea level is not rising as shown by models because of a couple basic errors – the released water has other places to go (growing california glaciers, growing eastern antarctic ice sheet, antarctic sea ice except in the one area on the western side where the submarine tectonic activity is high, along with the active very large volcano under the western ice sheet.
Your last thought on UHI is interesting. I’ll have to think about that a little more.

“that would be a radiative forcing of -0.009 W/m2 (quite small).”
Actually, if the heat that raised the temperature of 0.3 % Earth’s surface by 6 deg C came from a cooling of the other 99.7 % of the surface, and if the effective heat capacity were the same per unit surface area (not true, of course), then the global average change in LW radiation from the surface would be 0.003142 W/m2, and that portion escaping to space might be 0.00029 W/m2.
Or, if the heating of the urban surface came from a cooling of the air above due to a lack of condensation to balance the lack of surface evaporation … etc., of course, the wind will spread the humidity variations around, or how else would Atlanta generate it’s own thunderstorms? – anyway, I haven’t even taken into account the day-night variations (urban heat islands are stronger at night, I think), and the difference between surface temperature and surface air temperature. So anyway…

“they can exert torques on the equatorial bulges they generate on the sun in so far as those bulges lag behind the planets (probably not much considering how long a year is)”
Obviously I meant they can exert torques on the TIDAL bulges they generate on the sun…
I also wrote cun above somewhere where I meant sun. That’s pretty obvious, though.

“they can exert torques on the [TIDAL] bulges they generate on the sun in so far as those bulges lag behind the planets (probably not much considering how long a year is)”
Oops, that last bit about how long a year (each planet’s year) is pretty inconsequential – it’s the rotation of the sun that’s the big factor there.
“PS this can be shown with calculus – not too hard actually, it was an assignment in math class – I solved it by taking advantage of the inverse square law, and perhaps inspired by the similarity to radiation, used solid angles”
IF you want to know, the trick is: within a body of constant density, the mass with an increment dr of distance away from point P that falls within a given increment of solid angle dw as seen from P is proportional to the square of the distance r from P. The gravitational force acting at P from a mass m at distance r is proportional to the inverse square of r. Thus, the incremental gravitational force at P due to the incremental mass dm within the incremental space defined by dr and the incremental solid angle dw is invariant in r.

“If only urban stations are looked at there is no significant rise in temperatures.”
Sorry, that I had meant non-urban or rural.

“”If only urban stations are looked at there is no significant rise in temperatures.”
Sorry, that I had meant non-urban or rural.”
A lot of skyscrapers sitting out in the ocean now?

On Dr. Fairbridge, I said cycle when I shoud have said curve:
“In the early 1960s, he developed the so-called Fairbridge Curve, a record of changes in sea levels over the last 10,000 years.” (Wikipedia)
This is accepted now although originally it was named in derision.
Thw article you spoke of is his solar hypothesis which is different from his sea level studies.
“If only urban stations are looked at there is no significant rise in temperatures.”
That sentence was meant to say:
If only RURAL stations are looked at there is no significant rise in temperatures.
I was thinking too far ahead of myself, sorry.

Re; However, appearing cooler from the surface might cause the climate system to begin storing heat due to surface and above surface feedbacks (somewhat like **internal radiative forcing**)…
Yes, I can see that.

I was going to compare energy lost in tidal drag to the wind energy lost in driving ocean currents, but I don’t have those numbers yet. Decided to calculate some Earth-moon stuff….
In the meantime, a fine point about:
“Sometimes one can develop an idealized (first approximation) physical description of a phenomenon and then observe it. But it might not be exactly the same thing. Nonetheless, real world conditions can be similar to an idealized situations enough so that the easier to understand idealized explanation can be understood as a significant part of what is really going on… ”
Imagine the idealized situation can be described by M, M being a vector or tensor or matrix, whater… and N is the same kind of variable that describes the real world. Let N-M = M’
What happens in the idealized situation is a function F of M, F(M). F(N)-F(M) = G(M,M’), etc… And taking more and more accurate versions of M to reduce M’ leads to fuller understanding, bit by bit. F(N) is from observations, presumably. OR, maybe the function is idealized … although that might be reformulated mathematically to be the same function with an idealized set of variables, etc…
F(M) itself can be a computer model. Some computer models are for studying the way things work more than predicting global climate – people might see how well reality can be described by a simplified version of itself… and then see how complex the model needs to be before this or that feature or aspect of the real world can be described by it to some degree of accuracy, etc…

“There are immense water systems underground, the largest discovered so far is under asia and is referred to as an ocean. This water tends to seek sea level and there is room enough for the water table to rise in porous rock and soil which means seas will not rise as far as they would if the continents were thought of as displacing water only. In other words the capacity calculations were incorrect.”
Won’t the water table often be above sea level, due to precipitation over the continents (even if scarce in some areas)?

Preliminary update:
Energy lost in tides ~ somewhere around 0.08 W/m2 to maybe 0.003 W/m2 (if the moon recedes from the Earth at 6 cm per year, then it’s 0.006 W/m2)?… (PS not 100% of that goes into the oceans; some will go into deforming the crust and mantle; I have no idea what fraction that is.)
Wind energy spent driving oceanic motions = ?
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Back-of-the envelope estimates of the height of a tidal bulge raised on the sun by a planet, relative to height of lunar tidal bulge on Earth:
Venus: ~ 1/130,000
Earth: ~ 1/200,000
Jupiter: ~ 1/2,000,000
Can give more accurate answers another time…