Science Forums 2

[pmaust]

Dr. Glassman responded on this blog. I will quote him here but you can also view them at the rocket science blog.

[RSJ: Hypography Science Forums commentary is welcome, and I am happy to pass on the link.

[In the commentary, you correctly observed,

[He welcomes comments to his work on his web site. I will bring up some of the issues that you folks have brought to the table and see how he replies. Perhaps some of you could chime in there as well. He seems to be inviting reasoned rebuttle or questions.

[Maintaining a single blog is tasking. Sometimes I run a month late researching and composing an answer, and I have been experimenting with quicker posts with promises to answer. In this blog I can respond more or less in a threaded, dialog style to minimize the burdensome restatements. More importantly, the objective of this initial topic in the Rocket Scientist's Journal is to build a self-contained, lasting resource of scientific criticism on the Anthropogenic Global Warming model. The policy is to post all civil comments and to reply, regardless of credentials. You post at the risk of minor edits and in extreme cases, ridicule.

[So, please post any comments or discussion to this site for a fair and honest, if slow, reply. Feel free to extract what you might from anywhere. Links are welcome, but please quote what is important so the reader can follow the argument on a single page. The IPCC routinely relies on citations to papers not freely available or not searchable. This is poor scientific writing, unnecessary, and excessively burdensome on the reader. Copyright material is subject to the fair use exclusion by which it may be freely quoted for the purposes of criticism, commentary, or reporting.

[With that said, here are a couple of comments on the postings in the Science Forum.

[Some readers have not recognized that The Acquittal of Carbon Dioxide paper analyzes one particular data record, the Vostok ice core data. It is a paleontological record, and so the reader should not expect that the resulting model would have any manmade component. The important new result is the extent to which solubility in water accounts for this ancient record. The analysis has implications for the modern era, of course, because nothing suggests that the science of climate processes changed since Fourier invented the greenhouse model or Keeling his Curve. A massive river of CO2 is flowing around the globe, but just not yet through the GCMs.

[The IPCC GCMs fail to account for the record. They fail to model the circulation of CO2 from the atmosphere to the ocean and return. They fail to model the Great Conveyor Belt (less accurately known as the thermohaline circulation (THC)) as the main engine of CO2.

[The IPCC GCMs fail, too, to account for the ice ages (not in the Vostok record) or the glacial epochs (some of which are in the Vostok record). A scientific model that doesn't account for all the data in its domain is doomed to be a conjecture. The GCMs either need to be restated in such a way as to objectively exclude the known record, or be revised to account for that record, even if the triggering events are unknown. That is to be valid, the GCMs need to produce ice ages and glacial epochs, even if the timing is off.

[Climatologists have put forth an accounting for the Little Ice Age, resulting in controversy and the disparaging Hockey Stick appellation. What the critics say, and this may have support in the IPCC reports, is that instead of having the models reproduce a Little Ice Age-like event, the climatologists calibrated away the whole event! In the same way, the self-proclaimed Consensus on Climate calibrated away the variations in the CO2 record to make it fit the preconceived notion that the Keeling Curve represents global CO2. See RSJ, "Gavin Schmidt's Response to the Acquittal of CO2 Should Sound the Death Knell for AGW", comment from Sunsettommy dated 11/26/07, and posted today.

[As to peer review, this is now the coward's refuge. The peer review process is broken, and nowhere so badly as in this field. Climate journals are under control of the Consensus on Climate, and they have a long record of failing to publish criticism. See RSJ, The Acquittal of Carbon Dioxide, response to Jeff Steward, dated 3/22/07. Furthermore, the peer review process is far too slow. DARPA founded the Internet on the need to improve technical communications. Let it be so. Posting a paper on the Internet is publication.

[The observation that the IPCC Reports are not peer reviewed stands as a counterpoint to the claim that its criticism must be peer reviewed. Peer review is never self-review, no matter how many authors might be named. The response that the IPCC Reports make extensive reference to published data and published, peer reviewed papers is to the IPCC's discredit because the organization fails to quote sufficiently from those papers, because the papers are only available for a fee (science for sale), and because the sources often prove unsupportive of the claims. Examples available on request. I look forward to the Freedom of Information Act next year forcing the IPCC to make every citation and data source freely available, on line, and at least Mac accessible. Let the UN pay for any copyright fees.

[Thank you for asking InfinteNow to justify some of his accusatory comments. You missed a few of his excesses. He first quotes from the Abstract, then claims that it "opens the entire presentation". Actually, Part I, Introduction does that. He again quotes from the Abstract to a paper critical of the IPCC results, and points to a link to the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report to show that results of the paper are wrong. He accuses me of "classic denialist tactics", a term he freshly minted without example or definition. He objects to the Introduction stating that the climatologists have been unable to reproduce the ice ages and glacial periods, providing two entirely irrelevant links.

[The question of the presentation of data is not so much graphical as it is substituting eyeball correlation of snippets of smoothed data for numerical calculations (and presentation) of correlation. The problem is one of quantitative signals in noise. It's not a matter of "doesn't this look convincing held this way"?

[InfiniteNow lifts single sentences out of The Acquittal to say they are unsupported. Then he lifts another to say, "It doesn't matter how many times he says the same thing. It's still unsupported and without basis in evidence." He never mentions the Vostok record or the data analysis, though. This is an exquisite example of out-of-context argumentation. It is snide.

[For more on the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere, see RSJ, "On Why CO2 Is Known Not To Have Accumulated in the Atmosphere & What Is Happening With CO2 in the Modern Era". You might also be interested in the following recently posted by me in response to comments on another website.

[The IPCC conjectures that ACO2 is buffered more than is nCO2. The laws and theories of solubility have to change one of two ways for that to happen. The primary law, Henry's Law, says that the solubility of a gas in water is proportional to the partial pressure of the gas in the water, and the constant of proportionality, Henry's Coefficient, is inversely proportional to the temperature. This is the physics of the carbonated drink. The climatologists have modified this law legitimately, apparently, by making the coefficient also slightly sensitive to salinity (at least a hypothesis, perhaps a theory).

[The IPCC needs Henry's Coefficient to be different for ACO2 than it is for nCO2. Furthermore, it wants the coefficient to be dependent on the concentration of certain ions in the water so as to create a buffering effect. These could be so, but they are just more conjectures. As it stands, the IPCC model that any kind of CO2 is buffered by the ocean requires a change to pretty well-known physics.

[As a part of the IPCC version of ocean chemistry, it shows three models for processes called pumps or carbon pumps in Figure 7.10, Fourth Assessment Report, page 530. IPCC AR4 WG1 Final Figures, page 11. These three pumps, the "solution pump", the "organic carbon pump", and the "CaCO3 counter pump" are likely to be the quick, the medium, and the slow speed absorption models, respectively. The first has a time constant of one to a few years, and the latter takes 35,000 years to make rocks.

[One of these is not chemical. It is the Solubility Pump, which the IPCC calls the "solution pump". This is the mechanism by which CO2 enters the water to create a reservoir of molecular CO2. It circulates around the globe in the Great Conveyor Belt where CO2 is absorbed as the ocean cools and moves poleward, and CO2 is outgassed primarily in the Eastern Equatorial Pacific. This outgassing is about 16 times as great as ACO2 emissions, according to the IPCC. The Conveyor Belt and the pool of molecular CO2 are omitted from Figure 7.10.

[The IPCC calls the Conveyor Belt the thermohaline circulation (THC). The name Conveyor Belt doesn't sound so scientific, but it's probably a better name. The name THC emphasizes the flow of heat and salt, important but overlooking the crucial CO2 circulation. Many of the IPCC's Global Climate Models represent a vertical column of radiative forcing stuff and have no provisions for lateral flow, which is where almost all of the CO2 circulation occurs.

[The other two pumps, the Organic Carbon Pump and the CaCO3 Counter Pump, are chemical processes. A minor error in Figure 7.10 has the flow of carbon to the atmosphere connected backwards for the CaCO2 Counter Pump. Regardless, the chemical processes are quite unlikely to react with atmospheric, molecular CO2! Chemical pumps need to access ions. A better conjecture is that the models should be connected instead to a reservoir of molecular CO2 in the water, fed by the solubility pump, and the place where ionization first occurs. In this version, the conjectured pool of molecular CO2 is a buffer that supports the solubility pump and feeds the other two pumps so that all three pumps can operate without interfering with (buffering) one another. This model challenges the notion that ocean chemistry buffers against the dissolution of CO2 in water.]

I very much look forward to continuing this discussion. This is how I learn. I also found a fascinating paper written by: Robert H. Essenhigh
E.G. Bailey Professor of Energy Conversion; Department of Mechanical Engineering
201 West 19th. Avenue; The Ohio State University; Columbus, OH: 43210
Ph: 614-292-0403; Fax: 614-292-3163

More about him here ==> Mechanical Engineering Faculty - Robert Essenhigh

Does Co2 really drive global warming? ==> Viewpoint: Does CO2 really drive global warming?

I have a copy of his revised manuscript February 2006 entitled

Prediction of the Standard Atmosphere Profiles of Temperature,
Pressure, and Density with Height for the Lower Atmosphere by
Solution of the (S-S) Integral Equations of Transfer and Evaluation
of the Potential for Profile Perturbation by Combustion Emissions

In this paper Dr. Essenhigh reaches this conclusion:

7. Conclusions
The agreement shown in Figures 1 and 2 between the
prediction-model equations and the Standard Atmosphere
experimental results supports the conclusion that the dominant
factor governing the temperature, pressure, and density profiles
in the atmosphere is radiative (quasi)-equilibration, governed
by the S-S integral radiative Equation of Transfer, even in the
approximate form needed for analytical solution. Convection
behavior, possibly influenced strongly by short-distance and lowlevel
absorption of the shorter wavelength bands, most likely
is important as a short term perturbing and mixing factor, but
does not appear to be dominant in setting the Standard
Atmosphere (quasi-)steady-state profiles.
The further critical conclusion is that the analytical solution
to the governing integral equation, with the stated approximations,
is also well-supported by the agreement between the
prediction forms and the experimental data. This conclusion
applies primarily to the structural/functional form of the
equations. The numerical values of the related coefficients may
be less certain, and these will most likely be modified by more
detailed numerical solution(s) of the related equations. However,
this does not invalidate or void the primary factor of support of
the functional form(s) of the solution equations.
The principal predictions and conclusions thus supported are
then
(1) the (approximately) linear variation of T4 with pressure,
P (eq 21, Figure 4);
(2) the (approximately) linear decline of T with altitude, h,
up to the tropopause (eq 23, Figure 1);
(3) the more complete, nonlinear solutions for the variation
of pressure, P, and density, F, with altitude, h, up to 20-30 km
(eqs 6, 20, and 23, Figure 2);
(4) the operational validity of the dependence of the group
pair (kp) on density (eq 7) with the value of n determined as
unity and constant; and
(5) that the equations show no evident potential for “forcing”
or bifurcation behavior that would result in any significant
change in the temperature profile because of “small” increments
in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide.
Using these results, identification of the governing absorbing
emitting gases and bands is still incomplete, but the balance of
evidence does at this time support the importance of the longer
wavelength bands of both water and CO2 and, also, the evident
dominance of the water bands, even with water at about the
same concentration as CO2 at the higher altitudes. The remaining
factor for evaluation is now seen to be the independent
prediction of the effective absorption coefficient (and corresponding
concentration) for the mixed gases, written at this time
in the combined form, (kp)0. A separate prediction of this
parameter, if in agreement with the values given here, would
then provide numerical closure on the calculations. It will also
provide the required basis for further exploration of the potential
impact on “climate change” of increases in carbon dioxide from
fossil-fuel combustion.

I have the complete paper in pdf form. As far as I know, it is not up on the web but if anyone is interested, I can email it to you.

I look forward to your reasoned responses to this very important topic.

Paul