Comments on: The Single Most Important Point

By: Roger Taguchi

Roger Taguchi — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 00:19:14 +0000

Interesting comments on a valuable website! Re: The Single Most Important Point: yes, the ASSUMED positive feedback effect is DOUBLE the effect of CO2 alone, giving rise to a predicted warming 3 times that due to CO2 alone. I have shown that when a real-world 0.7 degree temperature increase from 1850 (or 1750) to now is used to check the prediction of increasing CO2 from 300 ppm to 400 ppm, the net feedback is essentially zero. Obviously, assuming even a linear effect, one-third of a 3 degree increase on doubling CO2 from 300 ppm to 600 ppm should give a 1 degree rise; because of saturation effects (diminishing returns), the rise of temperature should be LESS THAN LINEAR, so that the rise in temperature should be MORE THAN 1 degree (e.g. 1.4 degrees) on increasing CO2 from 300 ppm to 400 ppm. This is way too high when compared with the historic data (0.8 degrees being the reasonable maximum, which is why this figure is used by the warmists). Therefore the ASSUMPTION of positive feedback is way too high (when various corrections are made to the argument, the net feedback is close to zero). I can send a WordPerfect document (version X3) or a pdf file of my manuscript on request to my home email address of rtaguchi@sympatico.ca

By: BenAW

BenAW — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 22:50:30 +0000

@hunter:
“And how embarrassingly ignorant you are, to think that Mann 1998 was where CO2 sensitivity equations came from. You can trace that back to Arrhenius 1896, in fact.”
Assuming you are referring to this publication:
Svante Arrhenius, 1896, On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground, The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science
you may want to check this one:
Svante Arrhenius 1906, Die vermutliche Ursache der Klimaschwankungen, Meddelanden från K. Vetenskapsakademiens Nobelinstitut, Vol 1 No 2

Appears the original sensitivity calculations in the first publication were for WATERVAPOR, not CO2.
Perhaps reconsider terms like “embarrassingly ignorant” next time you make this kind of claims as fact.

By: Hans Erren

Hans Erren — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 22:29:17 +0000

Hunter, funny that nobody ever refers to Arrhenius’ 1906 correction, perhaps because it was in german?
http://www.klimatosoof.nl/klimafiles/images/Untitled-13.png

By: hunter

hunter — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 12:34:02 +0000

“If you go back and check their “science” you will see that they altered one of the thermodynamic constants upward by 12-fold. What was a 0.1 Deg rise with doubling became 1.2 deg C rise. Then they cobble onto this the positive feedback fantasy.”

Not a bad Monckton parody. The problem you have is that he’s pretty much too ridiculous to parody. To make it more believable you could at least invent a name for the “thermodynamic constant”.

By: McHarris

McHarris — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 09:08:04 +0000

Copenhagen might be over, but they are not sitting quietly licking their wounds.

The discussion paper, published — but not distributed — on Dec. 14, 2009, assumes that the goal of the green economic transformation is the same as that of the ill-fated Copenhagen conference: a 50 percent reduction in global carbon dioxide emissions by 2050. That, the paper says, will require a staggering $45 trillion dollar to accomplish — much of it in transfers from rich nations to poorer ones.

http://just-me-in-t.blogspot.com/2010/03/happy-anniversary-not.html

By: Charles Higely

Charles Higely — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 19:50:42 +0000

A good look at the work of Miskolczi and Zagoni puts CO2 in better perspective. Basically Miskolczi has looked at the thermodynamics of water vapor and CO2 and found that they interact such that, as CO2 rises, absolute humidity decreases, creating a relatively constant heat-trapping effect, if not a decreased effect with an increasing proportion of CO2.

Essentially, CO2 is irrelevant to climate. Too much CO2 could even cool it, due to increased proportions of CO2 which is less effective than water vapor as a heat-trapping gas.

Dr. Zagoni beautifully sums it up all up:

“Since the Earth’s atmosphere is not lacking in greenhouse gases [water vapor], if the system could have increased its surface temperature it would have done so long before our emissions. It need not have waited for us to add CO2: another greenhouse gas, H2O, was already to hand in practically unlimited reservoirs in the oceans.”

and:
“Earth type planetary atmospheres, having partial cloud cover and sufficient reservoir of water; maintain an energetically uniquely determined, constant, maximized greenhouse effect that cannot be increased further by emissions. The greenhouse temperature must fluctuate around this theoretical equilibrium constant; [change] is possible only if the incoming available energy changes.”

Good Summary: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7715-Portland-Civil-Rights-Examiner~y2010m1d12-Hungarian-Physicist-Dr-Ferenc-Miskolczi-proves-CO2-emissions-irrelevant-in-Earths-Climate

Formal Presentation by Zagoni: Ferenc Miskolczi’s Saturated Greenhouse Effect Theory.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/25071473/Saturated-Greenhouse-Effect-Theory

Add to this the fact that warmists like to talk about the theoretical effect of doubling the CO2 as if it is a possibility.

CO2 partitions between water and air at 50 to 1. Thus, to double atmospheric CO2, we would have to emit 50 times as much as the oceans soak it up. That’s a lot of CO2!

In fact, there is not enough available carbon to accomplish this feat. If we worked at it, we might be able to add 20%. That means a warming (at 0.10 deg with doubling) of 0.02 deg C or 0.24 deg C with the IPCC’s inflated values (1.2 deg with doubling).

Feedbacks are cute, but why pretend that the CO2 idea is alive at all? Dress it up all you want, the corpse is dead!

By: Charles Higely

Charles Higely — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 19:26:30 +0000

The IPCC’s 1.2 deg C warming from doubling of CO2 is itself not settled at all. It was 0.10 deg C before they started altering numbers.

If you go back and check their “science” you will see that they altered one of the thermodynamic constants upward by 12-fold. What was a 0.1 Deg rise with doubling became 1.2 deg C rise. Then they cobble onto this the positive feedback fantasy.

At the time they did this, they lauded the constancy of this particular constant over time at the same time that they were changing it. It’s a sleight of hand trick, pretending that the new value had been there all of the time. Liars.

By: hunter (the realone)

hunter (the realone) — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 14:49:47 +0000

AGW true beleivers suffer from an inability, as we see, to think things through.
Strong positive feedbacks are what AGW depends on.
If there are no strong feedbacks, then we are not at risk for a climate crisis.
And then the AGW community demands are simply more demands, not imperatives that must be followed.

By: j ferguson

j ferguson — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 14:38:17 +0000

Another car/feedback analogy might be with steering. The caster or toe-in on the front wheels of a car cause the car to prefer to go straight (more-or-less). If the direction of the car deviates from straight ahead, the front wheel caster geometry tends to “correct” by steering car back to straight.

This would be crystal clear should you ever drive a car where the caster has been removed. I did. It was a Sprite and it was a bear to keep in the lane. i had to drive it every inch of the trip.

This business with the “tipping point” only makes sense if we can assume that humans are causing a combination of conditions in the environment that has never happened before and which will trigger a heretofore unprecedented positive feedback to this “unprecedented” combination.

And also there will be no simultaneous “tipping point” provocation of an unprecedented negative feedback.

a lot of assumptions.

By: Todd

Todd — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 13:30:40 +0000

- hunter

You clearly are one of those people who can’t follow a chain of logic. This post wasn’t about “CO2 sensitivity equations” – it was about feedback theory. And the CO2 sensitivity he did mention is well documented and accepted by both sides of the debate. So stop letting your emotion drive your logic, and know the facts before you spew out garbage.