Energy_and_Climate_Facts_and_Physics

Tag: Climate models

  • Earth’s Energy Balance

    How it Really Works

    This is a public WIP summary of a book I am writing to explain the reality of how Earth’s energy balance in space is controlled, at whatever temperature that balance requires. I am publishing it while editing it. Comment welcome if it’s about clarity, data & referenceable facts.

    Earth Energy Balance is a strongly controlled process that is not significantly changed by human activity, because the natural feedbacks are far stronger than any human effect. The simple reality is that modellers have ignored the major negative control feedbacks that stabilise Earth’s energy balance in space, and presumed to only quantify positive feedbacks to make it appear there is a delicate balance, even instability, of this balance in space. This is the opposite of the reality our satellite and other measurement systems have recorded, or is directly supported by quantification using proven applied physics. The artificially contrived science of partially framed UN models is evidentially wrong, so their conclusions and predictions deliberately deceitful if used by anyone competent to claim expertise, and is certainly nothing to do with the reality that the whole system scrutiny of nature by deterministic science can reveal, repeatedly, and by any competent observer.

    Summary: 

    Evaporative Negative Feedback:      6W/m^2 deg K

    Stefan Boltzmann Negative Feedback:                                        3.3W/m^2 deg K

    Adding in other smaller effects from Clouds and positive GHE feeback:

    Net Negative Whole Earth system (net of GHG amplification):           8.7W/m^2 deg K

    This means the changes attributed to small AGW radiative effects of a few W/m^2 are VERY unlikely to ever create more than 1 deg K of warming, before the next cooling of the natural 1,000 year cycles returns.

    Mine is an empirical approach to this problem, so all real and very different to the world of people arguing the presumptions and attributions of climate models that cannot predict what really happens and are wrong by hundreds of percent versus satellite measured reality. The models have no serious relevance to the real world we observe, and they deny, to assert a fantasy from a perceived authority they overtly do not have, because they omit so much of known and measured natural effects from their tales. 

    It doesn’t work like they say. They models don’t even work as as we measure it and know they must. But why?

    It is strange that most people in academic involvement with this matter fall for these opening and crucial deceits of the modellers framing of claimte cintrol, and thus are having the wrong argument before they start, by the wrong initial framing..

    Specialist theoretician academics in particular, even sceptics,  do not seem able think empirically about the whole natural system, which include science outside their speciality,  and are thus unable to imagine how such a complete system might work holistically.  Judith Curry raised the issue of “radiatively obsessed specialists” without breadth in her recent talk in London. It has taken me a long time to understand why that was funny, 8 years, roughly, as I went through the elements of the whole empirical system physics, one at a time. Most people never will, sadly. It’s too easy to believe.

    It is clear many of these “expert climate scientists”  simply don’t have the formation to imagine the whole energy balance system, and hence don’t have the competence to model or debate it. 

    Which is why charlatans like Hansen can pretend to understand how the whole system works, while overtly describing only the positive feedbacks, and leaving the larger negative feedbacks out, and even quantifying those he does include  wrongly as regards “amplification” of AGW with warming by water vapour GHE, as if his obviously limited philosophy of the system controls was all that should be dreamt of, with apologies to Shakespeare. 

    Hansen et al’s claims to understand the whole system model are overtly false on the facts of the many things he omits or gets wrong, and hence his predictions using them are wrong.  But there is more. Much more. Unless I have missed something and my feedbacks are included by implication in their models, but never mentioned?  But where? Here goes….

    The climate is the consequence of the earth’s changing energy balance, because that is what it naturally controls, its not a thermostatic control. Earth’s average surface temperature is a direct consequence of whatever temperature is needed to maintain anenrgy balance, and hence the sneitivity of that control determines the variability of the average global temperature over significat time periods (tens of years).

    An imbalance between the lectromagnetic energy flows to and from space cannot be sustained, because energy in MUST equal energy out, at whatever temperature. THis is an uunavoidable balance, and constantly changing.

    IF the solar input is constant in our time scales (its +/-40W/m^2 over a year at max orbital eccentricity BTW, do the inverse square law maths on 340W/m^2),………..  

    THEN surface temperature is the temperature that balance requires to exist at the mainly oceanic surface to ensure the LWIR re radiated to space balances the EMR aborbed, the 240W/m^2. This is naturaly self adjusting system, in which temperature is decided by the controlling need to balance enrgy flux in and out.

    So SST will change if the characteristics of the GHE scattering within the atmospheric component of the enrgy transfer system change, this will create a radiative perturbation to the energy imbalance created by the perurbation. But how much surface change is required to rebalance?

    Most of the negative feedback occurs from evaporative cooling, and the second largest from the direct radiative feedback change across the whole surface, whether scattered by GHE or not, to create the total amount of radiation loss necessary to rebalance the system, neutralising the radiative imbalance caused by the change in the internal atmospheric transfer function of the greenhouse effect..

    But the modellers seem to presume that its temperature that is controlled in their models, which is obs wrong. Temperature is a consequence of system balance, and varies as it must with total GHE, even if the incoming energy is the same. Simple and obvious. Unless you are a modeller, or just hard of physics.

    It is also nuts to assume there are no strong negative feedback responses to changing conditions in the system balance whe you look at its main components and how variable they really are with temperature. The question I have struggled with and now offer empirically derived numbers for.

    Yetvthese these very real effects, measured by NASA satellite, are not even mentioned in the litererature I see, even though they are there in plain sight in the diagrams the literature presents us with.  Only the positive feedbacks are mentioned. I wonder why?

    In 500 Million years the planetary control system  has moved only 14 degrees up and down in 300K or so, mostly cooling so it is now 14 deg colder that 500Ma BP..

    This is clearly NOT a positively fed back (by GHE) and hence inherently unstable temperature control system, that can be destabilised by a few W/m^2 of radiative imbalance. Such a presumption  is overtly false on the observations. The empirical evidence is that of a highly stable energy balance maintained over a range of a few degrees.

    And that means strong negative feedback in the range of the natural energy fluxes we observe..

    QUESTION: How does it do that, what are the negtaive feedbacks, that no body wants to mention?

    Well, first there are the clouds, of course, which I deliberately give a low value of 1.4W/m^2 to, because it’s not important to my point. Because there is more. Much more.

    It seems that there are TWO more self evident truths, negative feedbacks to any surface temperature change that are clear, present, quantifiable and LARGE.  Not GHE related.

    1. First the smaller: The overall direct LWIR radiative feedback spectrum of 240W/m^2 at the interface to space, at whatever height that occurs above the surface, will vary by (289/288)^4 or c. 1.3% per deg K by the Stefan Boltzmann effect, so thats 3.3 W/m^2 deg K negative feedback. Just is, right?

    2. Second is the big one: The oceanic evaporation (that the warmists acknowledge to claim a real but guessed as regards amplitude  GHE amplification, but simultaneously ignore the larger cooling effects of the water vapour.  The  evaporative enrgy is carried to the troposphere and lost to space as LWIR on condensation. It’s part of the 240W/m^2 OGLWR we observe from space. But how much does it vary per deg K?

    Easy again, once you know the magic numbers for water vapour change by weight in the atmshphere per degree. Its c.7% over the RHI of 10-90% and +/- 10 degK..

    So the 86.4W/ m^2 NASA measures for this absolute effect now, give or take the errors, will vary by 7% of this per deg K. That gives a  negative feedback of 6W/m^2 per deg K. That’ll do.

    So I suggest two dominant negative feedback effects, clearly quantified in a few lines of High School maths and physics, that sum to 9.3W/m^2 deg K.. Plus another 1.4W/m^2 due to clouds  I decided on. Based on 50W/m^2 albedo and 30W/m^2 radiative warming, so net 20W/m^2 varying at 7% per deg. Crude, but not my subject….

    So that’s 10.7W/m^2 per degree gross negative feedback, all quite real,  minus 2W/m^2 deg K water vapour GHE amplification, per NASA.

    My quantification of the  net feedback response to any single perturbation to the whole earth system balance is a net 8.7W/m^2 deg K, give or take a bit 😉

    SOME TESTS AND APPLICATIONS: By this measure, 

    The temperature effect on the whole Earth system of a radiative perturbation of 1.6W/m^2, as claimed to be caused by AGW since 1850, will be less than 0.2 deg. 

    The ECS for doubling in CO2, assuming that adds 3.4W/m^2 radiative imbalance to the system, no longer needs to be guessed.

    Its balanced by 8.7W/m^2 deg K  in ………………  0.4deg K. 

    Not a problem. Even less an existential threat.

    And this is with only 1.4W/m^2 deg K cloud feedback….  And is all based on real measurements and basic physics, no models required.

    I wholly agree that more CO2 must causes some change in the Earth’s SST. It must. And its effects are mainly beneficial as measured.

    I simply point out the models fail to include obvious natural feedbacks they choose not to include, that are in fact larger and dominant negative feedback controls of Earth’s obvious strong energy balance in a narrow range. Easily able to rebalance Earth’s enrgy system in fraction of a degree.

    It was just waiting for practical scientists, who follow scientific method and understand the laws of physics and basic control systems across the disciplines, to get  involved, and point out this measurable reality, instead of making it up in models. But they clearly aren’t available, or are silenced.

    I hope my easily verifiable approach if accessible, supported by the observations, and I have missed nothing of substance in the energy balance system of Earth.

    I suggest this empirical method includes all the actual effects, at the highest level because it’s what we measure, however accurately, so real. What happens.. And that such a deterministic scientific method must take precedence over the predictions of overtly partial and also falsely attributed models, that were designed to prove assertions that supported political ends, never to test the reality of the presumptions regarding CO2 as control of climate it is not, just a tiny perurbation to.

     Now you can add your clouds to taste :-). 

    OTHER CONCLUSIONS:

    Nature has the Earth energy balance system locked down hard, a convergent syetm, which also means most of the change we see must be natural, as in the past cycles documented by geology and archeology, , which are also presumed by modellers to have suddenly stopped 2,000 years ago to suit their false attribution assumptions, , when before this they were well evidenced by geology, back 0.5Ma at least, at 2deg range every 1,000 years at the poles through the Holocene, 1 deg at the equator. No reason given why these cycles suddenly stopped happening, since modelling began, or how all the geological papers reporting them, or the archeological finds from the thawing ice, even the grape. vinicutures at over 50 deg North, and other historical accounts of past climate from mediaeval, Roman and Egyptian records, are all wrong.  Per the modellers.

    The only obvious reason for such unsupportable claims, on the evidence they had contrived using the UN’s self attributed authority torpomote some bad tree ring proxies, is so all that change can be attributed to human activity, no natural change can be seen or spoken of..  

    Prof Jorgen Peder Steffensen of the Neils Bohr Institute has the best line on this, from years back, when the truth was emerging from under the ice to counter the false narrative. He is also an evidence based guy you can phone to talk about this. Phone number on the University list.

    https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/607494244

    While I will leave the many similar issues of false denial and bad science by the IPCC regarding past change here, this is well supported by other reality geology has measured around the World. The key point, that Jorgen makes very clear in his summary, is that the temperature we measure now is 1.5 deg above the record coldest in 8,000 years, and c.2 deg COLDER than the Egyptian period of the Holocene optimum 3Ka BP, and that this proxy record is consistent with the archeological and historical proxy record, and is also neither unusual nor extreme in the directly comparable measurements of the past made using isotopic proxy records (d18O as also described by Prof Steffensen.). Mostly natural.

    How did I do?

    Brian Catt (Age 81 1/4)

    Brian RL Catt
    CEng, CPhys, MBA, MCIM

  • Climate Change Realists are Having the Wrong Argument

    I would like to make very deterministic science point re climate – and energy if I can do it fast and hard enough. My point is simple. We now know the facts that science did not when all this presumptive science was asserted by those paid for it by Maurice Strong at the UN IPCC in the 1970’s, 80’s and 90’s, when it was based purely on assertion with political objectives, and nobody could prove the causes of climate change either way. Now we have the facts and we know the models are wrong by the 40 year failure of their predictions. Also that what we observe is neither excessive nor abnormal in history. Natural change.

    Q: So why are we even debating the predicted fictions of models and renewable energy when we have the facts?

    A: Because that’s where the money is at and scientists are not good thinkers outside their boxes or grant criteria. There is no money in showing climate change is natural and renewable energy cannot replace fossil fuel use on the physics. Only nuclear can do that. And if nuclear will get you though the winter when its dark and the wind doesn’t blow, you don’t need renewables and the climate change protection racket is blown.

    As an engineer and physicist I prefer such basic physics and the facts of observations to the theories of activists and politicians who cannot prove their assertions so attack the questioner.

    Because “If the theory  doesn’t match the observations, its wrong”. Feynman. 

    Even though we have the observations that overtly disprove the predictions, and thus the causal science regarding CO2, academics who disagree with CO2 as significantly causal still argue about models when confirmatory and independently verifiable observations are the only absolute test of reality. So those most able to argue the reality are lead into and comply with the antagonists agenda and have entirely the wrong argument, about things that cannot be proven. If you have direct evidence you use it, circumstantial evidence is a distant second.

    e.g. It ain’t happening as claimed, so its wrong.

    Also the measures taken to claim to change the non problem are pointless waste of money on the engineering facts, imposed by bogus law based on disproven science. The climate change protection racket.

    The observations of the last two decades on tree rings, cosmogenic partickles and ice cores clearly show the range of climate change in the current interglacial as cyclic with a range of roughly 2 deg every 1Ka.   There are a number of such papers,  but the general conclusion from the data is the same. This is GISP2 from Greenland, with my markups. 

    https://www.dropbox.com/s/e1n7oivlcpylkh4/Interglacial_Temperature_Observations_BRL_CATT.jpg?dl=0

    The recent temperature rise since 1870, measured directly, but poorly early on, added to the end of the GISP2 ice age cores, which become unreliable after 1850, is close to the peak of this current warming phase, already turning towards zero as its rate of rise diminishes.. The “hiatus” is simply the next turning point. maximum. Downwards. Forget the statistical guesswork that is wrong on the facts of measurement. The actual temperature now is also known to be well inside this well studied range. So why are some scientists claiming otherwise, when this is untrue on the know facts? Could it be the money?

    No models are required. What we measure now is cooler than other warm peaks this interglacial, 4 degrees cooler than the last interglacial. Measured, not modelled using guesswork about how the ocean and atmosphere work.

    We know from written history that the Vikings could farm Greenland. It is currently permafrost. So there is no high temperature record now this appears the coolest warm peak in the entire interglacial series of warm peaks. Its also normal in rate and scale of variability, on the observations. Proven by those observation, so the models are wrong in fact.

    Wrong because they assume an unproven effect from CO2 in the Troposphere is amplified by the much stronger presumed effect of water vapour to absorb and re emit infra red radiation at characteristic frequencies, this raising the surface temperature. Another unproven guess that doesn’t actually happen when we measure it with satellites since 1979 (Prof Christy). Because that model  is wrong, again. 

    https://www.dropbox.com/s/potr730d8e2qo9w/Tropospheric%20models%20versus%20actual%20measurements.jpg?dl=0

    In fact the way the atmosphere insulates our planet from space, as with other planets,  is as a smart gas lagging held onto the planet under pressure by gravity, This creates a thermal gradient to space that also retains solar heat in the atmosphere and thus creates a thermal gradient to space. THat raises the surface temperature above the black body temperature that would apply if there were no atmosphere through Wien’s Law. But there is. 

    Sothis atmospheric lagging is not mysterious at all. We also now know this effect is similar across the solar system regardless of gas, the height the transition to warming from cooling starts wherever 0.1 Bar occurs.  So the lapse rate  to space is mainly a function of gas pressure which determines the lapse rate (gradient) any such process will naturally have. Our surface temperature is not mysterious. It’s warmer because our atmosphere insulates us, held onto the planet by the gravity which also pressurises it. Simples!

    The paper linked here might be of interest. 

    https://www.dropbox.com/s/3ayvamq0h5bg7ei/Greenhouse_Effect_at_work.pdf?dl=0

    So  NASA also know this. But are not shouting about it very loudly. The problem here is that the CO2 ist narrative, and all the easy money flowing in its name to fund an easy money by law snake oil cure, depends on theories created to support the political ideology designed to end energy fuelled progress – by blaming the natural CO2 combustions produces for the actually natural observed warming, and writing models to prove that theory, not to test it. 

    When they wrote the models they failed, because they got it wrong and underestimated or ignored natural effects so under predicted the past,  so the cure was to turn CO2 up to 11 to make models track reality in the past. But that was wrong, and meant their predictions became hopelessly wrong …. but only in fact. As Christy and the natural record of the past have both shown.

    Climate Change = AGW = CO2 theories have been proven comprehensively  wrong by observation in the last twenty years. It’s just nobody seems to see that arguing about models when we know the facts is plain stupid, the GCM models are partial and wrong in their assumptions on the facts, so FAIL the most basic test of science. The facts.

    Remember the Attorney’s rule. If you have evidence use it. If you don’t have hard evidence use circumstantial evidence. If you have no evidence, attack the witness who has. That is where climate science of change by CO2 has now got to. The prosecution should be using the hard evidence, not making up its own circumstantial evidence, leave the defence to rely on attacking the character of the witness. We don’t need no stinking statistics!

    I would love to give this talk somewhere. In fact I did. To the U3A though. All the fats are in it. People get it. So why don’t those who understand present this most basic science of the record versus the predictions?

    https://www.dropbox.com/s/wm5co3w50y2e5mb/Climate%20Science%20Fact%20and%20Fiction%20BRL%20CATT.ppsx?dl=0

    THE RENEWABLE ENERGY SCAM: As for energy, intermittent renewables capture weak/diffuse and intermittent energy from weak sources that we abandoned to become developed, with wood then coal fired steam. Not enough energy in renewable sources. And they must necessarily use far more resources per unit of weak energy when available than is necessary to collect intense fossil energy on demand, that itself uses much more per unit energy than much more intense nuclear, etc. 

    Renewables are a mediaeval energy source and a known , demonstrably expensive and ultimately inadequate way to create the levels of energy needed by a developed economy, because of the lack of energy sources and their unpredictable intermittency, the amount of material and land required, plus the expensive modifications to the grid required to support a very unreliable and sensitive source of electricity vis a vis steam turbines. 

    INERTIA is another problem, the stabilising force of thousands of tonnes of spinning steam turbines the grid has must first slow by the drag of its load that reduces the key control of frequency under load, which historically gives time to spin up generation reserves when failures occur. Renewables don’t have inertia or robust resilience to transients, they trip after one dodgy cycle, 20mS. But that’s another story.

    Blackouts! Coming soon to a grid near you. The more the renewable % of supply, the closer they get.

    As well as being more expensive than fossil or nuclear 24/7 supply by virtue of their source characteristics, renewables depend on clean efficient gas generation for up to 100% backup when not working. Being all renewable is not realistic, but if it was, without fossil support, over producing what is weak, feeble and unreliable, and storing the diffuse electrical energy produced in batteries or pumped storage for when it isn’t working,  makes it roughly ten times more expensive, if a week’s storage is required, assuming a 1/3 duty cycle, using best prices and life cycles for Li-Ion or Lead acid. Easy maths, not a model.

    In reality renewables depend on 100% reliable and controllable fossil on the grid, mainly clean CCGT, to push off for their subsidies when working, making the cycled CCGT which could have supplied all the energy anyway more expensive. You can’t make it up. That’s government’s job. And the UN.

    http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3274611

    As our electrical energy needs rise with development, and ultimately heat and transport need to transition to electricity as fossil reserves become more expensive,  tripling the electrical enrgy damand, ONLY nuclear energy can only replace intense fossil energy sources with its much more intense so more sustainable energy, and no CO2 – if that mattered. 

    Not a cure activists like because it is a progressive solution, not sending us back to feudal Malthusian/limits to growth economic dogmas the UN and ER plan to impose that are simply not grounded in the facts we observe . The same goes for GM crops as an answer to reducing pesticides. Progressive solutions don’t match the elite’s ideology or deliver easy money to insiders, so are VERY inconvenient solutions. But very real, and the lowest cost and risk on the facts. Best for those using the energy and eating the food in fact. But offering those who would control us and slow human development no easy money and control from imposing the climate rackets by creating and exploiting fraudulent fear of a catastrophe that clearly isn’t happening in observed fact.

    “If you can get though the winter on nuclear, you don’t need renewables.” I will let SirDavid MacKay explain this very fundamental physics, 10 days before he died. 

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/03/idea-of-renewables-powering-uk-is-an-appalling-delusion-david-mackay?CMP=share_btn_fb

    As a globally respected Cambridge physicist and author on energy futures, this Cambridge Professor of physics and Chief Scientist to the UK DECC from 2008-2014 was comprehensively ignored by politicians in favour of an Eng Lit degree FoE activist, Bryony Worthington, who drafted the unachievable and economically ruinous to even attempt Climate Change Act, based entirely on what MacKay named an  “Appalling Delusion” – the absolute physics denial that the UK economy could be powered by renewables, from a physicist grounded in the hard science who had done the maths..

    SUMMARY: Forget the statistics and models! Debate the reality we observe, not what we believe or what models claim when the observed reality says NO.

    We should end the overtly fraudulent imposition of  very expensive technically undeliverable non-solutions to the non-problem of CO2 claimed to be causing unusual climate change that isn’t happening. This is already costing nearly 1$Trillion pa globally in the name of solving a non problem, robbing the public by law for no technically measurable benefit, either in energy supply or “Climate Change”. 

    As above, we know from observation the change we observe is probably all normal and natural,  changing as we have measured in the past, certainly not significantly changed by humans in the last 50 years.

    We know it is cooler now than earlier warm periods this already cool interglacial, and versus earlier interglacials. There is no unusual warming to respond to, if we could. So the calims and predictions are wrong in fact.

    By the time the natural cooling phase b is clearly established, on the 30 year moving average, the snake oil salesmen like Gore and the political Malthusians at the UN will have retired clutching their easy money, and the mug public who believed the sales pitch will be wondering why they believed it and paying the price in damaged economies and personal energy poverty, which the developing countries leapfrog us, continuing to burn as much fossil fuel as it will take. China currently has 3 times more coal fired power stations than the rest of the World put together, and plans 260GW more. Not even trying to slow their development, because they need the energy to make everyone’s stuff and dominate the World as de facto leader.

    WHY??HOW?: Because the lumpen conformist and innumerate public were too stupid and lazy minded to validate rather than believe, so easy to fool, and be forced by the media to conform to the herd belief of carefully contrived lies, self evidently disproven by the facts these same people could have checked. Lies  from corrupted activist scientists with larger egos than abilities trying to “save the planet” they can have no real effect upon, and greedy  renewable capitalists cynically exploiting the fraud for a fast renewable energy buck by law, laws that the politicians involved were also well rewarded for passing into law. With well paid untesting board level jobs after office, or businesses consulting on how to profit from the laws they helped create and/or pass into law. Huhne, Gummer, Hendry, Yeo are blatant examples in the UK . Legalised corruption is designed into the British political system, set up by the elite and fronted by a veneer of elected democracy with little real power and a short term of office, to legalise the corruption the rich could get away with in their own right, directly, when the poor had no rights and the aristos were above the law that applied to the common people. The rich get richer and the compliant veneer pass the laws to keep m poor poor for the profit of the elites they join after office, if not members before.

    AND, to my opening point, because those who knew the truth and had a voice allowed the climate change protection racket to control the agenda by arguing about flawed models instead of the observations that proved the models wrong, for 20 years too long, instead of attacking fictional models with factual reality of what science can prove is happening and what will probably happen, using the deterministic physics of the real World. 

    Definitely not by arguing statistical pseudo science.

    COVID gave us a more real taste of dodgy statistical models made from guesses and presented as hard science, when they are just guesswork, that was wrong. Nut in that case the dodgy scientists couldn’t hide the bodies so easily. Epidemiology is statistics, not science. Like the climate models. . Only proven deterministic science is absolute, relatively. Like physics. 

    There is only one beneficiary from the claims and laws that state that climate science = CO2 = renewable energy, which the facts disprove. Those who befit personally and fiscally from the impositions made in its name.

    Follow the money. Ours, that they created these carefully constructed lies to take.

    We now know the facts on both energy and climate change very well. So why do people prefer to argue about proven wrong guesses still falsely promoted as if facts? Why not argue the facts we observe?

     Brian RL Catt age 77 1/2 CEng, CPhys, MBA