Global warming/climate change

The Watercooler
182

@Miguel

That is exactly where my mind has been heading, i.e. in the age of 3D models and increasingly powerful computers, “surely they aren’t using a abstraction, when they can model it?”

So far, I have been rather unimpressed with the details on how the computer models are built. Mostly, because the details are really hard to find! I came across the same types of explanations as yourself, (stacked grids etc), however I found more problems than answers.

As I said earlier, this is quite interesting indeed. I had never had any scepticism towards the “greenhouse effect” itself, but had always regarded the carbon politics as a diversion from actually improving the “lived environment” and the importance of healthy ecosystems.

To have read just last night, that they have never been able to model clouds, as of 2021, still struggling with that, that all the satellite data is skewed towards European and American validation stations (where they compare the satellite data, to actual ground based measurements). There are thousands of “validation stations” through Europe and the US, but the entire continent of Africa has 2!!!

The satellite data has been shown to be up to 20 degrees wrong!

Links not provided because I am pursuing what interests me about this topic, as I am sure others are too.

183

Thanks.
By the way: where do your own quotes come from? I can’t find them anywhere else on the site, (not in this very topic either) and that seems to be the reason why “image.pgn” is not shown in your quote.

184

Yes, @Andrew; now I understand that Richard and @claudiu would be questioning the very formulas applied to each sector.

185

Right, which seems exactly what they are indeed doing.

That really does bother me a lot.

What is dawning on me is that unlike my profession, which is actual world tested every day ( the houses actually get built; and whatever abstractions are used, are tested by the process of building the thing), climatology has no such “proving” going on.

Hmm, I am stating that incorrectly;

My abstraction is done in a very demanding environment where it’s output is tested and economically (no just to whether I still have a job) important that it is as exact as possible.

I see no such mechanism in climatology.

186

To @JonnyPitt s question as to what causes my “bias”;

I am biased to regard those trained and educated, experienced and otherwise employed to do a thing , to be otherwise doing that thing with a level of integrity and skill equivalent to the same that I must use in my profession.

However, I am starting to move away from that bias as I am finding the conditions those who are “trained, educated and experienced” in climatology are not the same as the conditions I am “trained educated and experienced” in.

I don’t have any choice but to perform my profession with as much exactness as is possible in the timeframes I work in.

This forms the “bias” that I project onto those working with climate models. I am biased to assume they work with the same necessary exactness I must. Regardless of any other factors of life, what I do is always proven to be some degree of exact. Or proven to be incorrect. As happened yesterday with a “noise attenuation package” which was mandated because a house was under a airport flight path; my estimate of the cost was significantly wrong! I immediately sent an email to all involved, adjusted all the costing models, and otherwise made it very clear that I had got the cost wrong.

This is my bias which has formed my otherwise not questioning the greenhouse effect.

Perhaps this post is better suited to @claudiu s “stepping back” thread. Or indeed, the original “Bias” thread.

187

Similar boat. It was never cut and dry for me. I assumed it to be a fair and reasonable theory but was never like oh it’s absolutely right and we’re all gonna die. It was just one extra reason to invest in new tech, preserve eco-systems if they benefit everyone and allow women to make their own choices. In fact, when discussing this with Richard and Vineeto, I now see I was categorizing the conversation as more political/policy than scientific. One can still completely reject the consensus while still being far from a bootlicker or water carrier. I had just never come across one before. Though, that could be due to having blinders on.

Kind of like a rule of thumb, maybe? Or am I just reading that into what you said based of what I just written in the other thread?

188

No, that would imply I thought about it first.

I mean in the literal sense of the original question of “bias”. Which Rick used the bias of bowling balls to illustrate.

It had not occurred to me just how different the arena of climatology is to my profession.

I was “biased” without any thought about it at all.

Probably should keep this going in the other thread. For neatness.

189

This one in particular was from an email I wrote – I fixed the image, ty for letting me know it wasn’t working.

190

I’m pleased to say a ten-second Google search cannot refute the facts that Richard dropped. Over the years I’ve always tried to fact check counter-arguments to global warming (caused by humans), hoping to find something, but they never held any water. This new information however shows that the calculations and models that the whole notion of human-caused global warming is built on are bogus in more ways than one.

If you’ll excuse me I’m off to short some green stocks… :joy:

191

The irony is that the stocks themselves might be just fine, because the stock market is based on the beliefs of the market rather than facts

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192

Yes, I wouldn’t be shorting them just yet, though I was talking to someone today at work who recounted that a certain Australian billionaire was investigating in them precisely because of the hype.

193

It really does seem that the state of climatology is more than a little in a flux. Pun intended.

Scrolling through 133 pages of available CMIP5 data (before finding CMIP6 was available), trying to find references to the basic assumptions being feed into the GCM climate models was rather tedious.

I can’t find a simple explanation of whether the Stefan-Blotzmann calculation, which is the basis of the -18c starting point, is being used in these models.

My thinking at this point, which is what Richard’s historical research is pointing too, is there seems to be the same “consensus” view going on in climatology as there is in astro-physics regarding the “big bang”; that is the premise is still all around this “doubling of CO2” being a disaster which must be avoided, which the models are indeed being designed to assume.

If it were a house estimate, I would have to assume the Sales Consultant had been in the estimators ear, there was a lot of beer involved, and perhaps more than a few brown paper bags.

I can’t yet get to Richard’s tl:dr “there is no greenhouse effect…or greenhouse gases” but I am seeing a lot of really obvious (and openly discussed) problems with the models.

194

So as to save myself some money on an IR detector (I really don’t need many excuses to spend money) I thought I would use chatGPT to crunch some ideas for me.

I asked it to calculate the temperature of the earth if it was made of granite, sans atmosphere, water and biomass, explicitly without using the Stefan-Blotzmann equation.

For granite it came to 21 degrees!

For water 5 degrees.

For limestone 57 degrees.

For a surface 70% water, 20% limestone, and 10% granite; the surface of the earth would be 14.7* degrees according to chatGPT.

Of course, I will run it’s numbers through a spreadsheet when I get a moment of inspiration.

So far, and as to whether the Stefan-Blotzmann equation is a reasonable abstraction (Richard’s points 1-6), No, that abstraction is looking rather silly to me.

Edit 14.7 degrees, not 13.7 degrees.

195

ChatGPT is unfortunately especially delusional when it comes to mathematics

196

I will run it’s numbers myself when I get a chance.

197

It took me around 2 hours to bash it into what I wanted it to do, including feeding it’s own answers back into it to “remind” it that indeed it was possible to calculate without the SB equation.

198

This is my formal public reply to Richard, beyond my previous replies, which where also public, hence making this entire introduction rather surpiflu…Ah, I can’t spell it…

It is indeed, quite astounding that I can’t find a single example of anyone who has openly published a representation of the earth, as a geological thing, floating in space, sans atmosphere, oceans, and biomass, as a starting point for verifying the (modified) Stefan-Blotzmann law.

That is, something as simple as taking say the thermal properties of an rock and working up something like a however makeshift, attempt at verification as to what the theoretical starting point is asserted to be.

That isn’t to say, if I continued to look I wouldn’t find someone who had, but the very fact that I would have to look so long at all is not a good sign that anyone in the mainstream has even bothered to do it.

So indeed, why should I bother to do it?

The need for the abstraction, is to my mind, skipping way ahead of what can be achieved with far simpler methods. Considering the diameter of the earth, it curvature, it basic surface composition, some form of recording it’s temperature, has been in human knowledge for thousands of years, I can’t find anything which models it with that basic understanding.

Every source I find, jumps straight to the modified Stefan-Blotzmann law, with not even as much as a passing acknowledgement that any other way of calculating it could even exist.

In other news, I am feeling really good right now. :joy:

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199

They, the consensus of scientists, are waving around a very long pole.

So very long.

I would have been fired many times over if I was to use such measurements!

There isn’t even any hits on google of “whack jobs” building scale models of the earth and getting a blow torch to it. Very disappointed with that.

I guess It’s going to be up to me.

Which is of course, the point. The burden of proof is reversed.

Not so much as a scale model in a vacuum cooled to 3 K.

This reminds me of my favourite zoo joke;

I went to a zoo in a city I was visiting; all the cages where empty except one cage in the middle.

In the cage was a dog.

It was a Shih Tzu.

200

Richard, this is quite an odd angle of attack if your goal is to discredit anthropogenic global warming. The greenhouse effect was demonstrated in the 19th century well before the “guys-n-gals at Quantumville” produced any proper climate models of the Earth, and can be observed in action just as well on other planets like Venus and Mercury.

Are you really complaining that they didn’t write out and evaluate the surface integral over the daylit hemisphere ∫∫S Isuncos θincidencedS? I assure you that it simplifies to Isunπr²

In the physical world no externally heated substance can raise the temperature of its heat-source.

I assume you are referring to the second law of thermodynamics? The greenhouse effect doesn’t violate the second law. The net heat flow is still surface>atmosphere>space. The fact that infrared-absorbing gasses reflect some of this heat back to the surface would not cause the surface to “heat up” in the absence of external solar radiation. The net effect is to slow down the rate of energy emission from the surface out into space. Net heat flows from hot to cold in every step.

You may be confused by how the locally-valid rule I = Isuncos θincidence can give rise to the much simpler rule PEarth = Isunπr² when summed over all localities. The way to resolve such confusion is to evaluate the integral yourself and see that it all cancels out.

tl;dr: there is no “greenhouse effect” in reality (nor “greenhouse gases” either).

The greenhouse effect is so trivially shown experimentally that it’s a fairly standard activity for 6th grade kids to do.

I’m wondering where you got this rather interesting sequence of thoughts from. There are a whole bunch of various obvious errors that jump out - for example you seem to be confused as to what is actually warming, as you seem to think the Earth itself is a single system (like when you say no substance can raise the temperature of its heat source).

PS.: Can you link to a source for the supposedly-erroneous models?

201

Actually that does not demonstrate the greenhouse effect!

From the PDF at the link: “This activity mirrors how a greenhouse works, but it’s not exactly the same as the greenhouse effect that is taking place in the Earth’s atmosphere.”

The effect of the actual greenhouses is due to the glass preventing the air dissipating its heat due to convection.

The poorly-named “greenhouse effect” doesn’t actually explain how greenhouses work, it has to do with the so-called “back-radiation”.

Do you have a link to an experiment that demonstrates the actual effect in action? It should be easy to find one if the effect is real.

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