Soren wrote on Dec 27^th, 2011 at 2:31pm:


We're talking about a doubling of river volume in my analogy. That's a pretty good analogy for a doubling in atmospheric CO2.

With no CO2 in the atmosphere, the Earth's mean temperature would be minus 18 degrees C, so that "tiny" proportion of 0.0039 % is pretty effective, don't you think? - and doubling that tiny proportion might also be pretty effective.

I'm sorry, but Soren's Law was despatched to the general garbage many posts ago. It's not recyclable in any way shape of form.

You may do tricks with numbers all you like, but as the resident court  jester, that particular juggling act has lost its appeal. It was quite amusing while it lasted though.

Soren wrote on Dec 28^th, 2011 at 7:03pm:

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Soren wrote on Dec 28^th, 2011 at 7:03pm:


What do you think would happen to the water vapour if you removed the CO2? (this has got to click some time)

Several Magnitudes eh? You mean like 1000 times greater?

Come on, you obviously have a source for your "several magnitudes" gaffe. You do realise that if that was actually  the case, the climate sensitivity would be around 100 degrees? (and I'm not going to explain the term this time. I've explained it many times before)

Tell me what you mean by several magnitudes and I'll extrapolate a few conclusions for you.

Soren wrote on Dec 28^th, 2011 at 7:03pm:


Your approach is simplistic.  For any given planet, the exact same physics applies.  For equilibrium, the blackbody radiation must equal the incident radiation from the sun. You can calculate the effective temperature of a planet from solar irradiation and albedo, and then apply the greenhouse effect.

The frequency of the black body radiation depends on the temperature of the body. It can be predicted using  Wein's Law - the peak wavelength is inversely proportional to the body's temperature. (Incidentally, that's just a useful approximation for illustration purposes, because most planets are what are termed "grey bodies")

Stars are much hotter, and thus the radiation peaks in the visible. Planets generally peak in the Infrared. Now this might surprise you but Nitrogen is a greenhouse "gas" if the black body radiation of the planet is at sufficiently low a frequency to peak in the liquid nitrogen  absorption spectrum in the far IR.  That's actually quite important for planets like Saturn and Uranus, but not important for the Earth which doesn't have liquid nitrogen. 



To save me a lengthy discussion of the physics, here is  a site which does exactly that:
http://bartonpaullevenson.com/NewPlanetTemps.html

As you can see, the physics involved is pretty fundamental stuff. The greenhouse effect of water vapour is about 3 times that of CO2 (not three magnitudes). That's where we get a climate sensitivity of about 3 degrees for a doubling of CO2 concentration.

Now do you follow that?

What I mean is that you are trying to say that the explanation is much simpler than it actually is. It's a strawman tactic.

- and guess what? physics actually works. They were able to predict the surface temperature of Mars based on these very equations long before any probes were sent there.

 

muso wrote on Dec 28^th, 2011 at 10:38pm:

uM,.... PROPGANDA DOESN'T ANSWER QUESTIONS i THINK YOU'LL FIND BUT, HEY, THAT'S JUST MY TWO CENTS!!



 

It has never been about zero CO2. You would have to remove all living things from the earth to remove CO2.

It has always been about complexity and about the lack of understanding of interactions due to that complexity. There is several times more water vapour in the atmosphere than CO2. Research into CO2 is intense because it is the only measurable variable of any significance that humans contribute.

The predictive force of hypotheses about CO2 as the one ring that rules them all kind of villain in the piece have been negligible so far. There has been steady CO2 emission but no steady temperature increase. This points to other factors that evidently come into play.

In 2009:
The planet's temperature curve rose sharply for almost 30 years, as global temperatures increased by an average of 0.7 degrees Celsius (1.25 degrees Fahrenheit) from the 1970s to the late 1990s. "At present, however, the warming is taking a break," confirms meteorologist Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in the northern German city of Kiel. Latif, one of Germany's best-known climatologists, says that the temperature curve has reached a plateau. "There can be no argument about that," he says. "We have to face that fact."

(Der Spiegel and every other publication on the planet)

Yet CO2 emission grew steadily but temperature didn't. This was not predicted by anyone because it doesn't fit the theory of AGW