How One Climate Myth Was Born
As I write this now, it’s 104 degrees in parts of Brooklyn. The record-setting heat wave is broiling the Eastern U.S. If it’s smoking hot where you live, stay inside and cool off to this stellar deconstruction of an enduring climate myth.
That is an extremely well-written article. Hope she does a lot more.
If we have upper case Theory & lower case theory, what ever happened to poor old hypothesis?
Article says:
“So, in a way, the scientific consensus certainly has changed since 1975. But it changed from, “We don’t know,” to “Climate change is definitely happening.”
Really? They didn’t know that climate change was happening in the 1970s. What were they smoking?
Climate change is always happening. Always has, always will.
As for the human influences on that changes, that is another unanswered question.
“This is the almost 200-year-old idea at the heart of the Theory of climate change. For a quick refresher, the greenhouse effect describes the cycle of heat transfer that keeps our planet from becoming a frigid ball of dirt, no more habitable than Mars. First, heat from the Sun passes through our atmosphere. Some is absorbed by the ground and oceans, and some of that heat gets reflected back towards space. But the gasses in our atmosphere don’t let all that reflected heat out. Instead, atmospheric gasses bounce most of the heat back down again. It’s kind of like turning on a laser pointer in a hall of mirrors. Because of the greenhouse effect, Earth is able to trap enough heat to sustain life-as-we-know-it. We’ve known about this effect since 1824.”.
200 year old idea… true, but a classic problem.
Mars Atmosperic Gases:
95.32% CO2
2.7% N2
1.6% Ar
0.13% O2
0.08% CO
0.00021% H2O Vapor
<1% other gases
Temperature (min/mean/max) -87C/-63C/20C
Earth Atmospheric Gases:
78.08% N2
20.95% O2
0.93% Ar
0.038% CO2
<1% Other gases
Temperature (min/mean/max) -89.2C/14C/57.8C
When will these non-scientific types stop comparing Earth to Mars? Water vapor not evil enough for climate change to put on the EPA pollutant list?
Sounds like the normal non-sense from John Cook’s blog.
uppercase theory?
have they discovered any uppercase LAWS?
“But it changed from, “We don’t know,” to “Climate change is definitely happening.”
What a horrible, lazy, simpleton thinking! Packed in Orwelian language. Anti-science at its worst.
Edim-
“But it changed from, “We don’t know,” to “Climate change is definitely happening.”
What a horrible, lazy, simpleton thinking! Packed in Orwelian language. Anti-science at its worst.”
—
But true, I believe.
A history of climatology…
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/climogy.htm
“As late as 1968, a textbook on Climatology and the World’s Climate said baldly, “The subject of climatic change is not given specific treatment in this book.” Applied climatologists continued to base their projections of the future on their hoards of old statistics, simply for lack of anything better. Their work was in fact becoming increasingly useful. As the data base grew and methods of analysis expanded, climatological studies brought a better understanding of how warm spells affected crops, what factors contributed to floods, and so forth.(31) Nevertheless, during the 1960s more and more scientists realized that climate predictions could not rely only on past observations, but must use physical models and calculations. “
Keith, thanks for spotting this article. We are discussing this over at Climate Etc.
http://judithcurry.com/2011/07/23/theories-vs-theories/
Intrepid, why don’t you list the surface pressure for Mars. That CO2 is 95% of about nothing, 600 pascals on average compared to 101.3 kilopascals and about .5% by mass.
In short, a wonderful example of intrepid misleading.
Eli..
Thanks for that much needed slap to Intrepid…Intrepid, indeed.
600 pascals times 95% is 570.
101300 pascals times 0.5% is 506.
The actual amount of CO2 is about the same. The main difference is that there is very little water vapour in the Martian atmosphere, and of course water vapour is the most important of the greenhouse gases. (There are also subsidiary issues like pressure broadening of line absorption spectra.)
The (badly misnamed) greenhouse effect certainly does exist. However, the quick explanation of the greenhouse effect mechanism in the article is incorrect, as it assumes zero convection. (If you tried to apply this mechanism to something as simple as a pond full of water, for example, it would give absurd results.) In the real mechanism the surface temperature depends on the average altitude of emission to space, combined with the pressure-related lapse rate – so an explanation that mentions neither is not very useful. It causes a lot of confusion and doubt. Some climate myths are less susceptible to deconstruction than others, though.
edG,
Try reading for context next time — note the part about greenhouse gases, for example. Or that fact that the article is about ‘getting colder’ vs ‘getting hotter’ models; not whether scientist believed climate had never changed before.
Human influences on climate change is not an ‘unanswered question’, either. They’re real.