Climate science: adaptation not necessarily a good thing and evolution is much faster than we thought

From The Guardian:

Narwhals have been delaying their seasonal migration because of the impact of the climate crisis, suggesting an ability to adapt to the changing Arctic but increasing the risk that they may become trapped in ice, according to new research.

That's not really adaptation, is it? That relates to more fundamental things.

We like being in the garden in the summer when the weather's nice; we go inside again when it cools off. We don't look at a clock and go inside at a set time each day. It's the same with the narwhals, when the Arctic gets too cold for them in autumn/winter, they move south. Or maybe, as DCB suggests in the comments, the fish move south and the narwhals follow them. The narwhals don't have a calendar that tells them which date to head south, their body thermometer/lack of prey tells them when. That's not adaptation, that is what they are pre-programmed to do.

Having established that they are plenty intelligent enough to cope with such changes, there has to be some bad news ("increased risk that they may become trapped" etc).

“The rate of change that we’re seeing now in the Arctic is a huge concern for a lot of animals because it could exceed how quickly the animals can adapt through evolution,” said Shuert [Canadian researcher].

Evolutionary changes happen on much slower time scales than a few decades and is completely irrelevant here. They have already evolved to cope with very cold temperatures and are pre-programmed to migrate north or south to sort of hit the optimum each year, whenever that is.

I would assume that they are descended from warm water marine animals and gradually evolved to be able to spread to new, colder areas (where there were fewer predators per available fish stocks) over time by developing thicker blubber etc. How long did this evolution take? Longer than the last few proper 100,000-year Ice Age cycles, of which we fragile and delicate humans have also survived several, that's for sure.

Climate Science breakthrough - water flows uphill!

From Sky News:

Just Stop Oil vow to keep causing disruption - and have this message for people who are affected...

Morgan Trowland, a 39-year-old civil engineer, said the demonstration was helping to "reach the social tipping point we so urgently need" on climate change.

And when asked about those who had been disrupted, he added they should "have a thought and empathy" for the 33 million people displaced by floodwater in Pakistan caused by melting ice caps this year.

Wow. I assumed that the floods were due to monsoon rain being a bit heavier this year because of La Niña. This falls as relief rain in the Himalayas, cascades down the Indus and Ganges/Bramaputra basins and then swells these rivers and inundates low lying areas in Pakistan and north east India/Bangaldesh respectively.

(Was the amount of water involved unusual? Nope. Were more people affected than previously? Quite possibly yes, because of higher populations and piss poor urban/land use planning. Most of these so-called natural disasters are usually down to poor planning/land use. As a 'civil engineer' he ought to know this stuff.)

But nope, apparently it was a couple of extra millimetres of sea level from melted icecaps that flowed inland and slightly uphill wot dunnit!

Science Deniers and the "isothermal atmosphere" (Now it's getting silly #2)

The Alarmists don't usually have the guts to say it out loud, but there is a sub-school of psuedo-scientists among them who seem to believe that in the absence of Greenhouse Gases, the atmosphere would be the same temperature all the way up. That's the problem with flawed theories, you have to keep adding new theories to explain the previous contradictions until it gets laughable.

This is complete insanity; we know that there must be a lapse rate, either from direct experience or reliable evidence from others:

1. Space is empty and "cold". There is nothing there to store thermal energy, so it is either close to absolute zero, or simply has no measurable temperature at all. So, the top layer of the atmosphere that merges into space (there is no hard dividing line) is also very cold.

2. Sunshine (or geo-thermal energy etc) warms the surface of a planet. This warms the air above it by simple conduction and convection. Radiation and back radiation are a side show, it does not matter if the atmosphere is 'non-greenhouse gases' like H, He or N2/O2 mix.

3. The atmosphere gets thinner (both pressure and density fall, but not at the same rate) as you go up. So it's thickest at sea level and thinnest where it merges into space.

4. On the basis of this, it would be reasonable - and correct - to assume that the temperature also falls as you go up, as mountaineers and aviators will testify. If a hypothetical atmosphere were isothermal, what temperature would it be? As cold as space or as warm as the surface? The pseudo-scientists never commit one way or another.

5. Actual scientists, who do proper observations and measurements without prejudice as to explanations, tell us that the thicker the atmosphere, the warmer a planet is at the centre. It gets warmer as you go down, even if not much (and effectively no) sunlight ever gets to the centre. Gas giants (Jupiter, Saturn) get precious little sunlight, have atmospheres that are tens of thousands of kilometres thick and as far as we know, their cores are tens of thousands of degrees hot. That's how stars form, a cloud of (initially cold) hydrogen has enough gravity to compress the gas in the centre to a very high temperature and pressure, sufficient to trigger nuclear fusion (which also gives off thermal energy, but that is a separate phenomenon).

[6. Sure, some of gas giants' core heat is created by a distant relative of nuclear fusion (I don't claim to understand it, but hey), but we notice it even on Venus, whose hard surface gets very little sunshine, but its atmosphere is a hundred times as thick as Earth's and its surface is hundreds of degrees hotter. I am quite sure, on the basis of all this, that atmospheric thickness is as important in determining hard surface temperature as is incoming sunlight, even though that is a bit counter-intuitive. How else would stars form? There's no sunlight to kick-start them, so where does the internal temperature come from..?]

7. Any other assumptions are madness. This lapse rate or temperature gradient is stable; it exists whatever the constituent gases are. It exists largely because of the trade-off between thermal energy (at the surface) and potential or gravitational energy higher up (energy of whatever type likes to spread out evenly - similar to entropy). And the ratio between temperature, pressure and density is such that it complies with the Gas Laws all the way up. An atmosphere will not and cannot ever become isothermal.

What brings on this rant/recap of things I have explained many times before?

I followed a link from the recent article I covered about hurricanes. The interviewee makes some good points, but being an Alarmist, they let slip that their underlying assumption is that without GHG's, the atmosphere would be isothermal. They must know that this is bollocks and do not actually commit to saying that air would be absolute zero, although this is implied:

... we would not have hurricanes were it not for the greenhouse effect, by the way.

Here’s how it works. The sunlight heats the ocean. And if there were no atmosphere, the ocean would get rid of its heat simply by emitting radiation — it’s called “infrared radiation,” radiation you can’t see — back into space. And it would be a simple balance. That’s, for example, the balance that exists on the surface of the moon and the soil that’s facing the sunlight. And the moon has a certain temperature which you can easily calculate, so that’s it’s emitting just as much radiation as it’s getting from the sun.

But the earth has this nice blanket of gasses around it. And some of those gasses are very important greenhouse gasses, water vapor being the most important, and also carbon dioxide, methane. And those gasses absorb some of the heat coming back up from the planet, and then re-radiate it back down to the surface.

Are we to believe that 'pure' air, with no water vapour or CO2, would not be warmed up by a warm surface? That there is no such thing as conduction and convection?

Surely this would be easy to test with a controlled experiment. First run the experiment with 'normal' air (with a bit of water vapour and CO2) exposed to a warm surface, and then re-run it with 'pure' air - I am pretty sure that they would settle at the same temperature, how would the one with 'normal' air settle at a higher temperature? They cheat by shining bright lights on the containers - the theory says that GHG's 'trap' the IR coming up from the oceans/land, not sunlight coming in, so these experiments prove nothing.

And air (whether pure or normal) absorbs, stores or 'traps' thermal energy, it's an insulator - that's how warm clothing and double-glazing work. There is far more thermal energy in the atmosphere that there is in the top layer of the soil/rocks or ocean surface (those bits that warm by day and cool by night).

And as it happens, the 'effective surface' of the Earth or Venus acts just like the Moon. It emits just as much radiation to space as it receives from the Sun. When you calculate 'effective temperature', you are working on the basis of 'what the planet looks like from space', so only the 'effective surface' that you see from space is relevant.

Which in the case of Venus the effective surface is just clouds, and in the case of Earth it is two-thirds clouds and one-third exposed oceans or land. The actual temperature of these clouds is - not uncoincidentally* - the same as the planet's effective temperature. What happens between clouds and the surface between them is a separate, closed system and has nothing to do with what happens between the planet and space, which is all the effective temperature calculations can tell you.

* Nothing is ever as simple as that - upper surface of clouds on Earth happen to be at effective temperature because of two smaller independent adjustments, one up, one down.

Why "Climate Science" isn't really science (2)

Follow-up to Bayard's post of Wednesday. For sure, some Climate Scientists exaggerate or make false claims, but that doesn't invalidate anything.

For example, nuclear power stations 'work'. They use uranium etc to produce electricity, fact. They also appear to be profitable. We can argue - quite reasonably - about the risks and costs of pollution, safety, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, decommissioning and long term storage etc, but those are not nuclear science issues. Just because some politicians make outlandish claims like them producing "electricity too cheap to meter" does not invalidate the science.

My big bugbear with Climate Science is that it is based on the bald claim that Earth's surface is 33 degrees warmer than it should be based on incoming sunlight.

Therefore, they say, something must be 'trapping' thermal energy in the atmosphere; and that something is Greenhouse Gases (which sometimes includes water vapour and sometimes doesn't, depending what point they are trying to make).

And therefore, if Greenhouse Gases at 'pre-industrial levels' cause 33 degrees of warming, any increase in them must cause more warming (whether linear, logarithmic of geometric). And as a matter of fact, things have warmed up a bit since the end of the Little Ice Age.

The 33 degree claim was originally made, and the calculation explained by Hansen back in the late 1980s and has been Climate Gospel ever since, completely unquestioned, even by many Climate Deniers. Some Climate Deniers have put forward other explanations, some with good pointers, none watertight and some pretty flaky.

So how do they calculate the 33 degrees? By comparing half an apple with an imaginary pear is how. Here are the workings (refer to Stefan-Boltzmann equation to convert between temperature and W/m2):
What are the obvious flaws here?
- They take clouds into account when calculating weighted average albedo of Earth's effective surface (which means that part of the surface that can absorb radiation FROM and emit it directly TO space - oceans/land under cloud cover simply can't, so can be ignored here) , which reduces solar radiation IN to 238 W/m2, but then just ignore clouds from there on.
- They then assume that solar radiation IN is all absorbed by oceans/land. Nonsense, over half is absorbed by clouds, less than half by oceans/land.
- The actual question is: is the effective surface at the right temperature to emit this much (238 W/m2 on average) back to space?
- They skip these this question, come in at a tangent and say that a black body (an imaginary pear) would have to be 255K to emit as much radiation as the effective surface absorbs in solar radiation IN (this is true).
- They compare this with part of the effective surface (half an apple) which has an average temp of 288K (also true), discrepancy = 33 degrees (mathematically correct).
- They then put forward an explanation for the 33 degree difference - it's Greenhouse Gases, and the rest is all built on that - all the pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo like "radiative forcing" and "fluxes" and "effective emitting altitude" and "atmospheric windows" and "computer models" and "positive feedbacks" until your head spins (I know what these all mean. They are all dead ends or working backwards from the wrong answer).

Why not compare a whole apple with a whole apple, and take all its physical properties into account, in particular the low temperature and emissivity of clouds? That seems to be a lot more rigorous to me, so you should consider clouds and cloud-free oceans/land separately when looking at solar radiation IN and LW emissions OUT.

This is the more scientific approach. For sure, it's all rounded and mid-points of estimates and so on, but it follows the general idea based on what information I can glean. I could keep digging and add more and more lines and home in ever closer to an even more robust answer: If you do it properly, you find that Earth's oceans/land and the clouds above them are the right temperature to emit as much LW radiation as they absorb in solar radiation. Sure, the sea level surface is warmer than in the pseudo-scientific calculation, but so what? An aluminium frying pan in the sunshine gets warmer than the pavement it is resting on, that has largely to do with aluminium's lower emissivity (plus/minus dozens of other adjustments). Look at the whole of the real apple and all its physical properties, not just a part of it/them!

[Completely different sets of rules apply when considering the temperature difference between sea level and clouds - the gravity-induced lapse rate; latent heat of evaporation; reflection and re-emittance of of LW between the two; dew points at different absolute humidity, temperature, density and pressure etc etc. I can't cover all that here, but it is irrelevant to the actual topic of 'what gets to space'].

Therefore, I conclude, unless somebody can show why their approach is better than mine, I refuse to believe anything based on the 33 degree Greenhouse Effect, because there simply ISN'T ONE IN THE FIRST PLACE!!

Bonus: the above approach neatly explains the alleged Greenhouse Effect (or absence thereof) on Venus and Mars, regardless of the fact that their atmospheres are nearly 100% CO2 - it's the clouds (or absence thereof) wot dunnit.

Caveats:
- I have only been looking into this for two-and-a-half years and 'only' did O-level physics forty years ago, so clearly have plenty more to learn.
- Has the climate changed in many areas over the last century? It would appear so. Has it remained surprisingly stable in other areas? It would appear so. If the clever scientists with their millions of measurements say it has changed, then probably it has. Just because nobody is sure of the real reason doesn't mean that we should latch on to one particular explanation, especially if it based on pseudo-science.
- There are lots environmental, economic and political reasons for using less fossil fuels, sure, but those are quite different topics. For example, I'm against nuclear weapons, but that does NOT mean that I don't accept the science of nuclear fission. I am, in fact, broadly in favour of reducing fossil fuel use for precisely those reasons, but that does NOT mean that I just blindly accept their pseudo-science. We bribe our kids with the promise of Xmas presents for good behaviour; we don't waffle on about Santa's Naughty List. Treat people like adults and they might just behave like adults.

Greenhouse effect, what greenhouse effect?

I know I keep posting the same thing, but I always end up with long posts, I'm trying to whittle it down to the basics, so each subsequent post gets a bit shorter (hopefully). When it's short enough, I will email it as a question to Climatologists, or pester them in the comments. Greta says 'follow the science' and I have done.
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To quote from James Hansen et al, ca. 1980:

The effective radiating temperature of the earth, TE , is determined by the need for infrared emission from the planet to balance absorbed solar radiation... [insert complicated looking formula which is actually quite simple]... this yields TE = 255 K. The mean surface temperature TS is 288 K. The excess, TS - TE, is the greenhouse effect of gases and clouds, which cause the mean radiating level to be above the surface.

The actual definition of 'effective temperature' is correct and the part we need to focus on. And let's accept his assumptions (nobody has ever seriously challenged them) that average mean sea-level temp = 288K; the weighted average albedo of clouds and cloud-free oceans/land = 30%; and so average absorbed solar radiation (which has to be matched by outgoing LW) = 238 W/m2

The sleight of hand is the 255K result. This is completely incorrect, whether by accident or design, but is taken as Gospel by Climatologists to this day. To arrive at 255K you have to assume uniform surface; all at the same temperature; and with 100% emissivity. All of which is completely unrealistic.

And we mere Earth dwellers assume that "surface" means ocean surface or land - but as far as incoming and outgoing radiation is concerned, it's a combination of clouds and cloud-free oceans/land (there is a separate cycle between clouds and the oceans/land below them). Climatologists skip back and forth between both definitions of "surface" as it suits them.

Here's the proper way of calculating it:
* Cloud altitude 5km, temp 256K, emissivity 70%, two-thirds of surface as seen from space. Emitted LW = 170 W/m2.
* Oceans/land, temp 288K, emissivity 96%, one-third of surface as seen from space. Emitted LW = 375 W/m2.
* Weighted average LW emissions = 238 W/m2, which balances absorbed solar radiation.
* As a check, cloud temp and sea-level temp are different by exactly the amount you'd expect, given a gravity-induced lapse rate of 6.5 K/km, adjusted for latent heat of evaporation (which reduces it from hypothetical 10 K/km to 6.5 K/km).

Conclusions:
1. Earth is - by definition - at the correct effective temperature, because LW emitted by clouds and cloud-free oceans/land ("the surface") = absorbed solar.
2. No radiation goes missing on the way out or is trapped by Greenhouse Gases.
3. Therefore, using his definitions, the greenhouse effect = zero, not 33 degrees.
4. He mentions "the greenhouse effect of gases and clouds". In truth it's just clouds. There is no need to factor in "gases" (by implication C02) as there is no discrepancy left to explain.
5. And of course the "mean radiating level" is above sea-level, but it is not "above the surface". It IS the surface (as seen from space).
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Yes, I am perfectly aware that all my inputs (cloud altitude and temp, emissivity etc) are just mid-points of ranges of estimates. Nobody will ever know the exact figures, although they could be firmed up a lot by using weather balloons with IR thermometers at lots of different locations and latitudes and different times of day. The more data we have, the better.

This would cost a tiny fraction of the $ billions they spend on 'climate models' and hunting round for evidence with satellites and expeditions to the South Pole. However conscientious the measurements and however rigourous the analysis, there will always be margins of error and uncertainty. But I am sure, you could get to +/- a few W/m2 or a few degrees K of my above zero-conclusion. And Greenhouse Gas Theories that are built on what is basically margins of error and uncertainty wouldn't really be sound science, would it?