By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM, AMS Fellow

As prophecies fail - CO2 fails to accelerate and temperatures fall instead of rise, to keep the pressure on governments to continue efforts for carbon emission controls, the forces of alarmism turn elsewhere, this week to the oceans and that dreaded ozone hole to try and save their cause. Take this The Johns Hopkins University Office of News and Information Release and New York Times story.

GLOBAL WARMING MAY DELAY RECOVERY OF STRATOSPHERIC OZONE

Increasing greenhouse gases could delay, or even postpone indefinitely the recovery of stratospheric ozone in some regions of the Earth, a Johns Hopkins earth scientist suggests. This change might take a toll on public health. Darryn W. Waugh, a professor in the Morton K. Blaustein Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, and his colleagues report that climate change could provoke variations in the circulation of air in the lower stratosphere in tropical and southern mid-latitudes - a band of the Earth including Australia and Brazil. The circulation changes would cause ozone levels in these areas never to return to levels that were present before decline began, even after ozone-depleting substances have been wiped out from the atmosphere.

The ozone hole has not closed off after we banned CFCs, in fact was last year the 5th largest in size. See this story in Nature about how the Consensus about the Ozone Hole and Man’s Role (with CFCs) May Be Falling Apart.

See larger image here.

And in the New York Times, Cornelia Dean reports:

RISING ACIDITY IS THREATENING FOOD WEB OF OCEANS, SCIENCE PANEL SAYS
The oceans have long buffered the effects of climate change by absorbing a substantial portion of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. But this benefit has a catch: as the gas dissolves, it makes seawater more acidic. Now an international panel of marine scientists says this acidity is accelerating so fast it threatens the survival of coral reefs, shellfish and the marine food web generally.  The panel, comprising 155 scientists from 26 countries and other international groups, is not the first to point to growing ocean acidity as an environmental threat. For example, a group of eminent scientists convened by The Nature Conservancy issued a similar assessment in August. But the new report’s blunt language and international backing give its assessment unusual force. It called for “urgent action” to sharply reduce emissions of carbon dioxide.

See this landmark study by Craig Idso of CO2 Science on SPPI completely destroying the notion that acidity changes were a bad thing here.  Note the Nature Conservancy was an organization ENRON reportedly funded heavily to find evidence of CO2’s role in climate or our environment so that ENRON could benefit from carbon trading.

See PDF of this story here.

Posted by reasonmclucus

The claim that carbon dioxide (CO2) can increase air temperatures by “trapping” infrared radiation (IR) ignores the fact that in 1909 physicist R.W. Wood disproved the popular 19th Century thesis that greenhouses stayed warm by trapping IR. Unfortunately, many people who claim to be scientists are unaware of Wood’s experiment which was originally published in the Philosophical magazine , 1909, vol 17, p319-320.

Wood was an expert on IR. His accomplishments included inventing both IR and UV (ultraviolet) photography. Wood constructed two identical small greenhouses. The description implies the type of structure a gardener would refer to as a “coldframe” rather than a building a person could walk into. He lined the interior with black cardboard which would absorb radiation and convert it to heat which would heat the air through conduction. The cardboard would also produce radiation. He covered one greenhouse with a sheet of transparent rock salt and the other with a sheet of glass. The glass would block IR and the rock salt would allow it to pass.

During the first run of the experiment the rock salt greenhouse heated faster due to IR from the sun entering it but not the glass greenhouse. He then set up another pane of glass to filter the IR from the sun before the light reached the greenhouses. The result from this run was that the greenhouses both heated to about 50 C with less than a degree difference between the two. Wood didn’t indicate which was warmer or whether there was any difference in the thermal conductivity between the glass sheet and the rock salt. A slight difference in the amount of heat transfered through the sheets by conduction could explain such a minor difference in temperature. The two sheets probably didn’t conduct heat at the same rate.

The experiment conclusively demonstrates that greenhouses heat up and stay warm by confining heated air rather than by trapping IR. If trapping IR in an enclosed space doesn’t cause higher air temperature than CO2 in the atmosphere cannot cause higher air temperatures. The heated air in the greenhouses couldn’t rise higher than the sheets that covered the tops of the greenhouses. Heated air outside is free to rise allowing colder air to fall to the ground. Atmospheric CO2 is even less likely to function as a barrier to IR or reflect it back to reheat the ground or water than the sheet of glass in Wood’s greenhouse.

The blackened cardboard in Wood’s greenhouses was a very good radiator of IR as is typical of black substances. The water that covers 70% of earth’s surface is a very poor radiator and produces only limited amounts of IR as is typical of transparent substances. Water releases heat through evaporation rather than radiation. The glass sheet provided a solid barrier to IR. Atmospheric CO2 is widely dispersed comprising less than 400 parts per million in the atmosphere.

Trapping IR with CO2 would be like trying to confine mice with a chain link fence. Glass reflects a wider spectrum of IR than interacts with CO2. The glass sheets reflected IR back toward the floor of the greenhouse. CO2 doesn’t reflect IR. At the time of Wood’s experiment, it was believed that CO2 and other gas molecules became hotter after absorbing IR. Four years later Niels Bohr reported his discovery that the absorption of specific wavelengths of light didn’t cause gas atoms/molecules to become hotter. Instead, the absorption of specific wavelengths of light caused the electrons in an atom/molecule to move to a higher energy state. After absorption of light of a specific wavelength an atom couldn’t absorb additional radiation of that wavelength without first emitting light of that wavelength. (Philosophical Magazine Series 6, Volume 26 July 1913, p. 1-25)

Unlike the glass which reflects IR back where it comes from, CO2 molecules emit IR up and sideways as well as down. In the time interval between absorbing and reemitting radiation, CO2 molecules allow IR to pass them by. Glass continuously reflects IR. Those who claim that CO2 molecules in the atmosphere can cause heating by trapping IR have yet to provide any empirical scientific evidence to prove such a physical process exists. The experiment by R.W. Wood demonstrates that even a highly reflective covering cannot cause heating by trapping IR in a confined space. There is no way CO2, which at best only affects a small portion of the IR produced by earth’s surface, can heat the atmosphere by trapping IR. Contrary to the lie repeated in news stories about climate, science doesn’t say that CO2 is causing higher temperatures by trapping IR. Empirical science indicates that no such process exists in this physical universe. Read post here. See also this and this.

By Andrew Bolt

Professor Eric Steig last month announced in Nature that he’d spotted a warming in West Antarctica that previous researchers had missed through slackness - a warming so strong that it more than made up for the cooling in East Antarctica. Whew! Finally we had proof that Antarctica as a whole was warming, and not cooling, after all. Global warming really was global now.

The paper was immediately greeted with suspicion, not least because one of the authors was Michael Mann of the infamous “hockey stick”, now discredited, and the data was reconstructed from very sketchy weather station records, combined with assumptions from satellite observations. But Steve McIntyre, who did most to expose Mann’s “hockey stick”, now notices a far more embarrassing problem with Steig’s paper.

Previous researchers hadn’t overlooked the data. What they’d done was to ignore data from four West Antarctic automatic weather stations in particular that didn’t meet their quality control. As you can see below, one shows no warming, two show insignificant warming and fourth - from a station dubbed “Harry’ shows a sharp jump in temperature that helped Steig and his team discover their warming Antarctic.

See larger graphs here.

Uh oh.

Harry in fact is a problematic site that was buried in snow for years and then re-sited in 2005. But, worse, the data that Steig used in his modelling which he claimed came from Harry was actually old data from another station on the Ross Ice Shelf known as Gill with new data from Harry added to it, producing the abrupt warming. The data is worthless. Or as McIntyre puts it:

“Considered by itself, Gill has a slightly negative trend from 1987 to 2002. The big trend in “New Harry” arises entirely from the impact of splicing the two data sets together. It’s a mess.”

Read this link and this to see McIntyre’s superb forensic work.

Why wasn’t this error picked up earlier? Perhaps because the researchers got the results they’d hoped for, and no alarm bell went off that made them check. Now, wait for the papers to report the error with the zeal with which they reported Steig’s “warming”. See Andrew Bolt’s post here.

Another black eye for Nature, another perversion of science by Mann and yet another foot-in-mouth embarrasment for George Moonbiot who just today attacked Christopher Booker’s attack on Steig, highlighted Antarctic warming and defended Mann’s hockey stick. Moonbiot in 2006 said “Every time someone dies as a result of floods in Bangladesh, an airline executive should be dragged out of his office and drowned.” Cognitive dissonance in action.

UPDATE: See this Bruce Hall Report on the flurry of activity after Steve McIntyre’s discovery, including post by Gavin Schmidt of Real Climate taking credit for descovery of the problems. See also Anthony Watts study of the problem here.