On 24 Mar, 03:20, RWood wrote:
On Mar 17, 11:37*am, Alastair wrote:



On Mar 16, 7:08*pm, wrote:

In message
ups.com
* * * * * Alastair wrote:

On Mar 14, 10:34*pm, Stewart Robert Hinsley
wrote:
In message , Stan Kellett
writes

I think 2005 equaled 1998

The difference between 1998 and 2005 is within the margin of error..
--
Stewart Robert Hinsley

How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

The Arctic sea ice is melting, and when it has gone the climate will
have to adjust. That means disaster, and whether 2005 or 1998 was the
warmest year is irrelevant.

Aren't there any inteligent people out there? No, I suppose not. That
is why we are all doomed :-(

Cheers, Alastair.

Yes the pouring of all of that money into the King Canute like actions
of trying to fight nature will bankrupt us all.

--
Created on the Iyonix PC - the world's fastest RISC OS computer.http://homepage.ntlworld.com/m.dixon4/
Believing is the start of everything to come. *- * Hayley Westenra- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

King Canute sat doing nothing as the waves brought by the tide
erratically advanced. *That is exactly what we are doing! Unless we
take action nature will bankrupt us all.

Cheers, Alastair.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

More power to your pen, Alistair.

It's really hard to be optimistic when you see the unmitigated anti-
GW, anti-AGW tripe that spews forth on an Australian forum -
promulgated by creationist bigots and tolerated by business backers
who have a vested interest in the same old self-destructive path being
followed, as long as they can turn a buck.

I get some consolation from the fact that in my country the chief anti-
warming cheerleader (a weather forecaster, not a climatologist) is no
longer on the scene, and they haven't found an articulate and
convincing successor.

I've just carefully read Martin's post explaining the effect of CO2.
Unless he's making it all up, which I doubt, the logic seems
impeccable. Unless there is some other mechanism going on it would
appear that CO2 has only a minute effect on global temperatures. I'm
certain, as I wrote way back in this thread, that global warming is a
bandwagon that both politicians, business people and mad people have
leapt onto for their own agendas. Unless one of you AGW believers can
come on here and refute all of Martin's points I shall continue with
my healthy scepticism. By the way, have you noticed now that the words
Carbon Dioxide are hardly ever used in the media? It's all Carbon this
and Carbon that. Just shows the ignorance and total misunderstanding
of the whole subject.

wrote:

In message
ps.com
Alastair wrote:


King Canute sat doing nothing as the waves brought by the tide
erratically advanced. That is exactly what we are doing! Unless we
take action nature will bankrupt us all.

Cheers, Alastair.

Right, quick back of fag packet calculation. The sort of reality
check we engineers do all the time.

Fact1: Water vapour, in the same concentration, is three times as
effective as Co2 as a greenhouse gas.

Fact 2: The concentration of water vapour is very variable, but can
be up to 4%. Let's say for arguments sake, it is 1% on average.
10,000 parts per million. Therefore equivalent to 30,000 ppm of Co2.

Fact 3: The concentration of atmospheric Co2 is around 380 ppm.

Thus the TOTAL greenhouse effect of Co2 in the atmosphere is
380/30,000 or 1.26% of the total greenhouse effect (yes this ignores
the other lesser greehouse gases like methane I know. But their
concertations are so small that the effect must be negligible).

I am reliably informed, and have no reason to doubt, that the
greenhouse effect currently results in a raising of "global
temperature" (whatever that is) is around 33 degrees C.

The effect of Co2 must therefore equate to 33 x 1.26/100 degrees C =
0.41 degress C. That is the TOTAL for all of the CO2 in the
atmosphere. Even if we DOUBLED the CO2 in the atmospere, the global
temperature rise would be less than half a degree! And that is
without taking into account the logarithmic effect of CO2
concetration. CO2 only absorbs certain limited frequencies of
infra-red radiation, and is estimated to already be doing so for
around 80% of the radiation at those frequencies. Other frequencies
of radiation will pass straight through irrespective of CO2
concentration. But I have ignored that effect in what follows below.

Man has, accrding to the prophets of doom, been responsible for an
increase in Co2 concentration from around 320ppm to 380ppm (it has
certainly increased, but there could ber other causes apart from man;
I will let that pass). That is almost 16% of the total. So the
temperature rise due to man made Co2 works out as

0.41 x 0.16 = 0.0647 degrees C. That is so small we can't even detect
it reliably in the climate statistics, or see any sort of trend among
natural variations.

Global warming scares are the result of computer prediction, nothing
else. I have been programming computers professionally for over 40
years, and know that you can get any result you like out of a
computer. For the results to be credible, you need to show some sort
of track record. In my professional existance, lives could be at
stake if we get it wrong, so we test to exhuastion. I would never
ever trust my life to a computer program that had not been repeatedly
shown to give the correct results.

As far as I can tell, climate models have never ever successfully
predicted anything. They completely missed the cooling trend of the
last couple of years for example. They will have to do a lot better
before I will believe they have any merit.

Nothing that has happened so far has been outside the range of matural
climate variation of even the last millennium, let alone previous
epochs. Mankind seems to have survived those, and even prospered in
times of warmer climate than the present. Yes, I agree that we have
built a society which could be badly affected by dramatic climate
change, but I worry more about cooling than warming. That would be
far more serious, and the sun is currently behaving in a way eerily
reminiscent of the preamble to the so-called "Little Ice Age". We
just don'y yet know enough to make reliable predictions, that much is
clear.

Meanwhile, or politicians worldwide have seen an opportunity to
tighten their control of their populations (the first law of Politics
is that politicians always seek to do that), and certain businessmen
have seen oppotunities for making money, so long as the scare story
persists. So they continue to hype it ever more hysterically in the
face of contrary evidence, hoping that they can fool most of the
people most of the time.

Even if the Thames freezes over, they will still talk about Global
Warming. Such are the vested interests in this particular industry.

Martin

Excellent and fascinating post. I'd be interested to see where the flaw
is in this argument - if there is one.

Right, quick back of fag packet calculation. *The sort of reality
check we engineers do all the time.

Fact1: *Water vapour, in the same concentration, is three times as
effective as Co2 as a greenhouse gas.

Fact 2: *The concentration of water vapour is very variable, but can
be up to 4%. *Let's say for arguments sake, it is 1% on average. *
10,000 parts per million. *Therefore equivalent to 30,000 ppm of Co2.

Fact 3: The concentration of atmospheric Co2 is around 380 ppm.

Thus the TOTAL greenhouse effect of Co2 *in the atmosphere is
380/30,000 or 1.26% of the total greenhouse effect (yes this ignores
the other lesser greehouse gases like methane I know. *But their
concertations are so small that the effect must be negligible).

I am reliably informed, and have no reason to doubt, that the
greenhouse effect currently results in a raising of "global
temperature" (whatever that is) is around 33 degrees C.

The effect of Co2 must therefore equate to 33 x 1.26/100 degrees C =
0.41 degress C. *That is the TOTAL for all of the CO2 in the
atmosphere. *Even if we DOUBLED the CO2 in the atmosphere, the global
temperature rise would be less than half a degree!

It is strange then that global temperatures increased by more than
half a degree ( 0.7 C) during the last century with only a 30%
increase in CO2!

Presumably as an engineer you are familiar with the concept of
feedback, and are aware that if positive feedback exceeds 1 then you
get a runaway situation.

The concentration of H2O in the atmosphere depends on the
temperature. It has been found that in general the average relative
humidity of the atmosphere is 50%. Thus if global temperatures rise,
although the relative humidity will remain at 50%, the absolute water
vapour density will rise producing a greater greenhouse effect.
Without CO2, the temperature would drop below freezing and the water
vapour would virtually disappear from the atmosphere removing the
greenhouse effect completely. This is what happened 600 Ma ago during
Snowball Earth.

Thus water vapour produces a positive feedback on any decrease or
increase in CO2 concentration

Taking your figures of 33C for the greenhouse (the generally accepted
value) and 0.41C for CO2 (3C is a more accepted value) then doubling
CO2 will raise temperatures by 0.41C. But we know that water vapour
already amplifies 0.41C to 33C, so assuming that the feedback remains
unchanged, the 0.41C increase in temperature will be amplified into a
33C increase, a greenhouse effect of 66C! That is the result of a
back of the envelope calculation when you realise that water vapour is
a feedback and not a forcing! You end up with global temperature not
seen since the Age of the Dinosaurs.

As temperature rises the water vapour density increases sub
exponentially (Clausius-Clapeyron' law).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosph...climate_change
So the positive feedback will increase as the temperature rises. When
it reaches 1 then you get a runaway situation. Every one says that
can't happen but it did at the end of the Younger Dryas. Of course
every one said house prices wouldn't go down too.

Cheers, Alastair.

On Mar 24, 9:04*am, Pete L wrote:

I've just carefully read Martin's post explaining the effect of CO2.
Unless he's making it all up, which I doubt, the logic seems
impeccable. Unless there is some other mechanism going on it would
appear that CO2 has only a minute effect on global temperatures. I'm
certain, as I wrote way back in this thread, that global warming is a
bandwagon that both politicians, business people and mad people have
leapt onto for their own agendas. Unless one of you AGW believers can
come on here and refute all of Martin's points I shall continue with
my healthy scepticism. By the way, have you noticed now that the words
Carbon Dioxide are hardly ever used in the media? It's all Carbon this
and Carbon that. Just shows the ignorance and total misunderstanding
of the whole subject.

I didn't see your post before I replied below. The actual result of
doubling CO2 cannot be calculated on the back of a fag packet or an
envelope.But I think I have shown where Martin has gone wrong.

It is not burning CO2 that is causing the trouble. It is the
production of CO2 from burning carbon that is the problem. Our whole
way of life is made possible by burning carbon based fuels: natural
gas, oil and coal. It doesn't matter what you do, you are burning
carbon. Whether you are boiling a kettle to make some tea, watching
TV, flying on holiday to Thailand, holidying in England and driving to
the beach where you treat yourself to water skiing of a fishing trip,
it is all done by burning fossil fuels. So to stop the climate
catastrophe we would all have to become considerably poorer.

This is why it annoys me to hear that global warming is just a plot
devised by politicians to exert more control. They are not doing
anything about global warming. The third runway at Heathrow is a good
example of that. The politicians can get all the control they want by
scaring us with terrorist threats. You only have to listen to the news
to see that!

Cheers, Alastair.


powering every thing we do

In message
,
Alastair writes
On Mar 24, 9:04*am, Pete L wrote:

I've just carefully read Martin's post explaining the effect of CO2.
Unless he's making it all up, which I doubt, the logic seems
impeccable. Unless there is some other mechanism going on it would
appear that CO2 has only a minute effect on global temperatures. I'm
certain, as I wrote way back in this thread, that global warming is a
bandwagon that both politicians, business people and mad people have
leapt onto for their own agendas. Unless one of you AGW believers can
come on here and refute all of Martin's points I shall continue with
my healthy scepticism. By the way, have you noticed now that the words
Carbon Dioxide are hardly ever used in the media? It's all Carbon this
and Carbon that. Just shows the ignorance and total misunderstanding
of the whole subject.

I didn't see your post before I replied below. The actual result of
doubling CO2 cannot be calculated on the back of a fag packet or an
envelope.But I think I have shown where Martin has gone wrong.

Ignoring water vapour feedback was one of his errors. (Another was
treating greenhouse heating as linear in concentration, even though he
later raised the sublinear response as an excuse to downplay the effect
of CO2.) However, your response had a flaw as well - you assumed that
the amount of greenhouse heating at 0ppm CO2 is 0%; that need not be the
case.

It is not burning CO2 that is causing the trouble. It is the
production of CO2 from burning carbon that is the problem. Our whole
way of life is made possible by burning carbon based fuels: natural
gas, oil and coal. It doesn't matter what you do, you are burning
carbon. Whether you are boiling a kettle to make some tea, watching
TV, flying on holiday to Thailand, holidying in England and driving to
the beach where you treat yourself to water skiing of a fishing trip,
it is all done by burning fossil fuels. So to stop the climate
catastrophe we would all have to become considerably poorer.

There are several things we can do which don't involve becoming poorer -
there's energy conservation, energy substitution (I've seen it claimed
that America's power needs could be satisfied by geothermal), and even
carbon sequestration, and if we get desperate enough, geoengineering.


This is why it annoys me to hear that global warming is just a plot
devised by politicians to exert more control. They are not doing
anything about global warming. The third runway at Heathrow is a good
example of that. The politicians can get all the control they want by
scaring us with terrorist threats. You only have to listen to the news
to see that!

Cheers, Alastair.


--
Stewart Robert Hinsley

On Mar 24, 8:29*pm, Stewart Robert Hinsley
wrote:

of CO2.) However, your response had a flaw as well - you assumed that
the amount of greenhouse heating at 0ppm CO2 is 0%; that need not be the
case.

I assume you are referring to the greenhouse effect from the water
vapour subliming from ice, which will exist, but Snowball Earth shows
that it is not enough to prevent a complete freeze up. Methane is
biogenetic so on an ice covered earth will not play a factor.
Volcanoes will still release CO2 into the atmosphere, and it is the
build up of CO2 from them that released us from Snowball Earth.

There are several things we can do which don't involve becoming poorer -
there's energy conservation, energy substitution (I've seen it claimed
that America's power needs could be satisfied by geothermal), and even
carbon sequestration, and if we get desperate enough, geoengineering.

To stop the Greenland ice melting we would have to stop emitting all
CO2 immediately. Energy conservation would not achieve that. Energy
substitution such as geo thermal, wind, wave, and solar energy, e.g.
biofuels, are just not going to replace all the energy now coming from
fossil fuels, And certainly not in the time scale needed.
Geoengineering is likely to have catastrophic results at first, as all
engineering projects are susceptible to Sod's Law.

There is no point in we believers telling the sceptics that there will
be no pain. It is an obvious lie. What we have to get over is that
without action the pain will be even worse :-(

Gordon Brown is trying to get the economy back to the state it was in
before the Credit Crunch so he can win the next election. He should
be persuading us all to accept the new economic status, and find a way
of spreading the jobs and wealth at a sustainable level. But all he
can think of is growth. That is totally incompatible with fighting
climate change, and to say that it is all a plot by politicians is
just plain stupid.

Cheers, Alastair.

In message
ps.com
Alastair wrote:


Right, quick back of fag packet calculation. *The sort of reality
check we engineers do all the time.

Fact1: *Water vapour, in the same concentration, is three times as
effective as Co2 as a greenhouse gas.

Fact 2: *The concentration of water vapour is very variable, but can
be up to 4%. *Let's say for arguments sake, it is 1% on average. *
10,000 parts per million. *Therefore equivalent to 30,000 ppm of Co2.

Fact 3: The concentration of atmospheric Co2 is around 380 ppm.

Thus the TOTAL greenhouse effect of Co2 *in the atmosphere is
380/30,000 or 1.26% of the total greenhouse effect (yes this ignores
the other lesser greehouse gases like methane I know. *But their
concertations are so small that the effect must be negligible).

I am reliably informed, and have no reason to doubt, that the
greenhouse effect currently results in a raising of "global
temperature" (whatever that is) is around 33 degrees C.

The effect of Co2 must therefore equate to 33 x 1.26/100 degrees C =
0.41 degress C. *That is the TOTAL for all of the CO2 in the
atmosphere. *Even if we DOUBLED the CO2 in the atmosphere, the global
temperature rise would be less than half a degree!

It is strange then that global temperatures increased by more than
half a degree ( 0.7 C) during the last century with only a 30%
increase in CO2!

So something else must be causing it! Much greater natural variations
have occurred in the past without corresponding changes in CO2.

Presumably as an engineer you are familiar with the concept of
feedback, and are aware that if positive feedback exceeds 1 then you
get a runaway situation.

Indeed. But that has never happened, so the system must be
sufficiently stable to cope with such things.


The concentration of H2O in the atmosphere depends on the
temperature. It has been found that in general the average relative
humidity of the atmosphere is 50%. Thus if global temperatures rise,
although the relative humidity will remain at 50%, the absolute water
vapour density will rise producing a greater greenhouse effect.
Without CO2, the temperature would drop below freezing and the water
vapour would virtually disappear from the atmosphere removing the
greenhouse effect completely. This is what happened 600 Ma ago during
Snowball Earth.

It is arguable whether lack of CO2 was the cause of that cooling.

Thus water vapour produces a positive feedback on any decrease or
increase in CO2 concentration

If that feedback was sufficient to override negative feedback effects
which must be present, runway warming or cooling would result from ANY
perturbation of the equilibrium. The climate change of precious
centuries such as the medieval warm period and little ice age would
hce caused runaway warming/cooling if positive feedback is
predominant.

Taking your figures of 33C for the greenhouse (the generally accepted
value) and 0.41C for CO2 (3C is a more accepted value) then doubling
CO2 will raise temperatures by 0.41C.

Not necessarily. Once all of the re-readiation on the frequencies
absorbed by CO2 is being absorbed, more CO2 will have no effect. It
is estimated that at present around 80% of that radiation is being
absorbed.

But we know that water vapour
already amplifies 0.41C to 33C, so assuming that the feedback remains
unchanged, the 0.41C increase in temperature will be amplified into a
33C increase, a greenhouse effect of 66C! That is the result of a
back of the envelope calculation when you realise that water vapour is
a feedback and not a forcing! You end up with global temperature not
seen since the Age of the Dinosaurs.

With respect, we DON'T know that. The implicit assumption is that CO2
is doing the driving and nothing else. The fact that in recent years,
whist CO2 has increased, temperatures have remained steady or
decreased means that some other factor must be more powerful than CO2
and its consequences in causing climate change. Otherwise that simply
could not happen!


As temperature rises the water vapour density increases sub
exponentially (Clausius-Clapeyron' law).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosph...The_Clausius-C
lapeyron_and_global_climate_change
So the positive feedback will increase as the temperature rises. When
it reaches 1 then you get a runaway situation. Every one says that
can't happen but it did at the end of the Younger Dryas. Of course
every one said house prices wouldn't go down too.

Cheers, Alastair.



--
Created on the Iyonix PC - the world's fastest RISC OS computer.
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/m.dixon4/
Believing is the start of everything to come. - Hayley Westenra

In message
ups.com
Alastair wrote:



Gordon Brown is trying to get the economy back to the state it was in
before the Credit Crunch so he can win the next election. He should
be persuading us all to accept the new economic status, and find a way
of spreading the jobs and wealth at a sustainable level. But all he
can think of is growth. That is totally incompatible with fighting
climate change, and to say that it is all a plot by politicians is
just plain stupid.

Cheers, Alastair.

Hi Alistair. "Fighting Climate Change" is something that mankind
again has not track record of ever doing successfully. But we know
that man HAS changed the climate, at least locally. The hours of
sunshine in many parts of the UK have increased dramatically as a
result of the Clean Air Act for example.

Climate change has always happened, and probably always will. In the
past we have learned to live with it, and it seems to me that that
would be the most sensible course of action now, especially in view of
the uncertainty about its causes and what can be done counter them.
Tryinmg "fight" climate change will be hugely expensive, with no
guarantee of success. In fact we could well make things worse in our
present state of understanding.

Martin


--
Created on the Iyonix PC - the world's fastest RISC OS computer.
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/m.dixon4/
Believing is the start of everything to come. - Hayley Westenra

In article ,
says...
Climate change has always happened, and probably always will. In the
past we have learned to live with it,


Actually, I think you'll find that historically, many people didn't
learn to live with it.


--
Alan LeHun

On Mar 30, 9:44*pm, Alan LeHun wrote:
In article ,
says...

Climate change has always happened, and probably always will. *In the
past we have learned to live with it,

Actually, I think you'll find that historically, many people didn't
learn to live with it.

--
Alan LeHun

Actually I think you'll find that historically, people had no idea
whether it was happening, or not.