Al Gore has called
climate change
“high school physics"
and "settled science".
Perhaps a child
could explain it,
with a few crayons ?
If it’s high school physics,
then why are climate models
so complex, yet they make
consistently wrong
climate predictions ?
If it’s high school physics,
and settled science, then
why does it take thousands
of scientists to study
the subject ?
Of course
there's no
uncertainty,
except for:
-- The core concepts
-- Measurement problems
-- Modeling problems
-- Huge gaps between models and reality
-- And the many things we don't know yet,
about the physics of climate change
"Simple Physics"
is just another
empty leftist slogan,
almost as bad as
"Settled Science" !
William van Wijngaarden
is a professor of physics
at York University in Canada.
He’s made detailed studies
of the physics of energy
at the molecular level.
He’s published many studies
of temperature and precipitation
changes around the world.
William van Wijngaarden's
words follow:
The Basic Mechanisms:
" ... it isn’t just CO2 but water vapour, that’s the big greenhouse gas that people should talk about more, it’s water vapour, CO2, ozone, N2O and methane, those are the five big naturally occurring greenhouse gases.
If you have, say, a photon, or some heat, it goes up, it gets absorbed by one of those molecules.
Well if that molecule has absorbed that heat, it will re-radiate it, but it will re-radiate in general in any direction. So some of the heat will come back down and some will come back up.
So it’s a bit difficult for that infrared radiation (cooling our planet) to just go out into space.
Its trip to space is going to be slowed down and in being slowed down it turns out that results in the heating of the Earth’s surface."
Computing the Radiative Forcing
of Greenhouse Gas Molecules:
Step 1:
"We have to ask ourselves what are the transitions where you can absorb this infrared light or heat.
And by considering these five molecules, water vapour or H2O, CO2, ozone, N2O and methane, we’ve considered several hundred thousand different transitions.
So that’s one, just getting that data. Now there are libraries available where people have measured the frequencies and how strongly each of those frequencies is absorbed. So that’s Step 1."
Step 2:
"You have to know what’s the concentration of each of those molecules with altitude.
So there you also rely on observations."
Step 3:
"We need to know what’s the temperature versus altitude.
So there are these standard temperature profiles that are also based on observation.
And then you have to calculate for each of those frequencies how each of those say 200,000 transitions absorb your different frequencies of light and you have to do that at every altitude.
So that’s pretty involved."
The Logarithmic Relation
Between CO2and Temperature:
"If you look at the greenhouse effect, the amount of warming, that depends logarithmically on CO2 concentration.
So if I increase the CO2 concentration from 400 to 800 parts per million and get, say, a temperature increase of, say, 1 degree C, to get an additional 1 degree C of warming on top of that I can’t go from 800 to 1200, I have to go from 800 to 1600 parts per million.
So it goes logarithmically.
And that’s accepted by everyone."
Estimating the Temperature Effect
of Doubling CO2 and Other
Greenhouse Gasses
"We see what happens if we double CO2, double methane, double N2O and have about a 6% increase in water vapour, which corresponds to about a +1 degree C increase.
We find then that the temperature increase due to all those doublings is about 1 to 1.5 degrees C.
That’s far below what many of those Armageddon folks like to talk about.
The big uncertainty is water vapour and especially clouds.
And people don’t know what clouds do.
If you have clouds during the day they block the sunlight and things cool down.
If you have clouds at night they’re going to trap heat hence the temperatures stay warmer.
So are we going to have more clouds?
Fewer clouds?
We just don’t know."
Lots We Don’t Know
"We don’t know how to model ocean currents very well.
Convection is extremely difficult to model, you’re dealing with a turbulent process, the equations are very complicated and no one can model that very well.
So that’s why we have focused on radiation.
Right now we are unable to make a prediction of how turbulence, those fluid equations, how that behaves.
That’s just too hard for us to model.
And even if we get much, much faster computers that’s going to remain a very, very tough problem."
The H2O Continuum
"Some basic physics that even isn’t very well understood:
For example, people like to talk about when you calculate the absorption of these different wavelengths, they say OK you have all these different lines for CO2, H2O etc.
So then they make some predictions based on those lines of absorption and then they look at observations and then they look for the difference and they find that there’s a big difference and that they say is due to something called the H2O continuum.
Well you ask “What is the H2O continuum due to?” and no one seems to know.
So when you ask, is this well understood, no it’s not.
I think the problem in this field is people have not said, make some predictions, what are the observations, is there agreement between the model and the observations?
And sometimes these models just have failed abysmally.
That doesn’t mean the modelers are dumb folks.
But it’s just a very difficult thing sometimes to model.
Climate is not simple to model."
Al Gore is a failed politician
who once claimed
he invented the internet,
and later decided he was
a climate scientist !
Al did take two elementary
science classes in college
... but couldn't manage to get
an A or B in either of them !
Al got a grade of “D”
in Natural Sciences 6
(“Man’s Place in Nature”),
and a grade of “C+”
in "Natural Sciences 118",
as reported by the liberal
Washington Post in 2000.