Lets finish this! Numbers do not lie.

Originally posted by TheRedneck
In the atmosphere, the carbon dioxide does not combine chemically with other atmospheric components. It is still carbon dioxide.

I should have chosen a better example. My point is that it has a synergistic effect -- it plus other factors cause a greater increase. Adding CO2 and water vapor produces more retained heat than adding the values for CO2 to the values of water vapor would suggest.

The second point I think you've missed is the dynamics. Take New Orleans, as an example -- when just the Native Americans lived in the area, the CO2 levels were fairly stable. Then people with permanent settlements moved in and they copped out the trees and drained swamps and redirected the river to make the place liveable. One house took away the equivalent of 3-4 trees plus shrubs plus vegetation converting CO2.

Would that not be factored into the average carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere? If we decrease the planet's ability to sink carbon dioxide, the result is an increase in carbon dioxide. That increase is indeed taken into account, in the average carbon dioxide levels of the atmosphere.

At issue is not the measurement but rather its use as a single parameter that is used to provide an answer. Unfortunately, the other effects aren't being put into the calculation (which is why a number of us are suggesting a better modeling software.) Fact is, I could probably plug each single greenhouse gas into the equation and come up with the same answer.

The problem is that it's not ONE gas. It's a LOT of different gases plus a lot of factors such as the additive effects of pollution, heat islands, rain shadows, etc.

Since you are good at math, I can put it into mathematical language and hopefully make the objection clearer: The atmosphere and oceans can be described as two dynamic and interfacing systems using fluid mechanics. You've presented a single variable non-dynamic equation. That's insufficient for a good answer for any question about fluid mechanics and three dimensional dynamic systems. The single variable model introduces a huge amount of distortion and error.

Uhmm... did that help?


[edit on 4-12-2009 by Byrd]

reply to post by TheRedneck


You're to be applauded...absolutely Great Work!!!

reply to post by Byrd

Uhmm... did that help?

Actually, I think it did.

Let me rephrase it to be sure. What you are saying is that each component interacts radiatively with nearby components, thus causing any emitted energy to be re-absorbed. Is that close to what you are suggesting?

Now the problem: the lack of data on such interactions. I have finally given up for the moment on finding data and am working on developing equations for this interaction myself. If I can find solid data that makes all this work useless, I will of course defer to it.

TheRedneck

Originally posted by 4nsicphd
Conceptually dead wrong. Read Feynman's "Quantum Electrodynamics" to see why. They only allow 4000 characters in a post and it would take far, far more to explain photon - electron interactions, much less the photon - hadron interactions involved. Feynman wrote a book on those too.
FOI, do you mean elastic cross section or total inelastic cross section?And at what energy level? It has only been measured at 100 to 500 eV.
And given the wave-particle duality of a photon, it is utterly meaningless to talk about a cross section.
And you ask how many CO2 atoms there are in a certain area. Absolutely none, zero, nada. CO2 is a molecule, a zero dipole linear molecule. Not an atom. An atom is the fundamental unit of an element. CO2 has one carbon atom and two oxygen atems, bound together covalently.
[edit on 4-12-2009 by 4nsicphd]

My physics is only moderate level... maybe intro college level. So I know nothing about molecular cross sections... I was just speculating. Its too bad that the maths involved cannot be so simple.

Cannot simple experiments determine with a fair level of accuracy how much heat is absorbed by CO2 by shining an exact amount of light through an exact amount of CO2 and then measuring the temperature change?

reply to post by truthquest

Cannot simple experiments determine with a fair level of accuracy how much heat is absorbed by CO2 by shining an exact amount of light through an exact amount of CO2 and then measuring the temperature change?

This is where the problem comes in. Carbon dioxide absorbs very little light coming from the sun. All of the absorption bands are in the infrared range of the spectrum, which the sun contributes very little to.

The actual energy absorbed is what the earth re-emits as heat after absorbing the shorter-wave radiation from the sun. This is radiated heat, not conducted. And still, the absorption spectrum of carbon dioxide is far from covering the entire IR spectrum.

I have a literal statistical nightmare here, and I'm not even going to say at this point that I have the ability to solve it. I am very well-versed in mathematics and physics, but some things are still beyond me. The albedo of the earth must be calculated, which in itself is a Herculean task that still introduces uncertainty, and then there are more assumptions... how much of the remaining heat is re-radiated, and how much is absorbed in photosynthesis? Is the re-radiated heat even across the IR spectrum? Heck, I keep getting different data for the exact absorption spectrum of carbon dioxide itself, something that should be readily available in light of the recent hysteria over its properties.

When I do come across a scholarly article, the article is written in such a way that the calculations cannot be adjusted to fit differing assumptions. Too many previously-determined values are used with precious little explanation, and too many cross references are made to verify coefficients used. I am finding it more and more difficult to believe that anyone, despite their academic qualifications, could perform the calculations needed to answer the simple question of "how much warming is attributable to anthropogenic carbon dioxide?"

Exactly how can someone justify any action to decrease carbon dioxide without this knowledge?

TheRedneck

uhhmmm......six inches of snow in houston (second time in the past five years), below freezing tempertures...and houston is right on the coast of the caribbean. yup, no climate change here...move along now, we have fossil fuels to burn.

www.youtube.com...

[edit on 5-12-2009 by jimmyx]

reply to post by jimmyx
I'm a little confused: are you claiming

• that local Houston temperatures are indicative of global weather patterns?
  
  
• that carbon dioxide is, by it's thermal properties, somehow removing heat form the planet?
  
  
• that you agree with me, in that anthropogenic carbon dioxide is not producing global warming?
  
  
• that lower temperatures are tied to warming trends?

I would really appreciate some clarification.

TheRedneck

I just wish to add as i did be for some points i think peopple miss here..

lets do a monty python sketch.

man: Wooo hooo
Earth: yeee harrr!!
man: eff me its getting hot here
Earth: yep sure is but its normal!
man: you sure? because like some freaky stuff is going down!!
Earth: nah its just how it works your ok
man: sweet

Now let me point out another tid bit... and questions in relation to this thread.

In order to base all what you know, requires you know what you are talking about, and that is not possible because of one fact that you can not argue about.

WHY ARE YOU HERE

Please understand this a critical factor in every topic here. why?

well if you are not here how can one possibly talk about it?

This brings me to physics and the like,,, in order to effect a system would require a compontet of it "aka YOU" the system then can become 2 things

NORMAL "we effect it by being here that means the path we take is indeed normal" OR not.. in that we as humans are effecting the path of the planet by our own actions that was created by the very thing that made the universe.

its BOTH

you can not have it any other way, and if you think otherwise

YOU ARE DENYING FACTS of you OWN reality

saying YES or NO may seem some what "trival" to some.. but working out HOW you get to make the choice is VERY important to understand.

would we debate it if we was not here? Nope.

the earth is getting hotter and colder.. by a factor of 1

1 = YOU

Great work man! Keep it up

You made a great insight this way, too bad there are many people still follow the play of the IPCC (and their related hoaxes).

It needs time, but enlightenment will come eventually.

reply to post by TheRedneck



Thank you for all your hard work S and F from me.

Peace

YES MAN CAN DO ANYTHING

Originally posted by TheRedneck
Let me rephrase it to be sure. What you are saying is that each component interacts radiatively with nearby components, thus causing any emitted energy to be re-absorbed. Is that close to what you are suggesting?

Yes and no. For instance, sun and water vapor together will create an area of high pressure that will keep more greenhouse gases and pollutants in a local area. That increases the local density of the CO2 and methane and together they act to keep heat in the atmosphere... and so on and so forth.

Now the problem: the lack of data on such interactions. I have finally given up for the moment on finding data and am working on developing equations for this interaction myself. If I can find solid data that makes all this work useless, I will of course defer to it.

Because it's a dynamic system and in order to make estimations they divide the map of the Earth into small sections (I don't know how small, but a square mile or smaller). Because they're doing vector analysis and other types of multivariate analysis, they use supercomputers or supercomputer clusters to get current models (or they used to. I believe they still do, since modeling climate involves so darn many factors that it's a huge number-crunch fest.)

And... it's not Carbon Dioxide. It's everything: en.wikipedia.org...

Increased carbon dioxide apparently makes plants more sensitive to cold temperatures, which may be why we see the long term climates tying in (in part) with the CO2 cycles:
geology.geoscienceworld.org...

HOWEVER... If you're basing your model only on CO2, you've missed the bulk of the data that should be in your equation.

Because such modeling isn't something done with simple linear equations, you can find climate modeling equations in textbooks
like this one

And this older PDF article... goes into some of the details of how models are drawn and mentions some of the math they're using such as Forier transforms (I *hate* those things because I had to do them manually back in the 1980's. Hate, hate, hate. Took bloody forever) and linear regression -- and this is a simplified statistical model.

Here's a 1992 paper on what became the dominant method of analysis: RAMS pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com...
It's a modification of earlier software (sort of an add-on) but there's enough of a discussion there that you get a good feel for the parameters they use and they do give some of the formulas. You can get to the basics by tracking down the papers in the citations.

Just a correction... it wasn't 6 inches. It was 0.6 inches.
www.chron.com...

Originally posted by jimmyx
uhhmmm......six inches of snow in houston (second time in the past five years), below freezing tempertures...and houston is right on the coast of the caribbean. yup, no climate change here...move along now, we have fossil fuels to burn.

www.youtube.com...

[edit on 5-12-2009 by jimmyx]

It's happened before. When Santa Anna was marching is troops into Texas to capture the Alamo, they also encountered a blinding snowstorm in the southern regions of Texas and a number of his men died.
www.jstor.org...

Texas weather is very complex. We do and have gotten snow in the southernmost region many times before, as we Texans know.

Have you taken into account that sun is warming up only half of the troposphere at the time? It would probably divide your conservative calculations of energy by 2.

Anyway great thread and great calculations

[edit on 6-12-2009 by Leszek.Cibor]

Originally posted by jimmyx
uhhmmm......six inches of snow in houston (second time in the past five years), below freezing tempertures...and houston is right on the coast of the caribbean. yup, no climate change here...move along now, we have fossil fuels to burn.

www.youtube.com...

[edit on 5-12-2009 by jimmyx]

Hmm, looks loke some (perhaps sarcastic)confusion on the difference between weather and climate. And did they move Houston? I thought it was on the Gulf of Mexico, not the caribbean.

Originally posted by Animal
Well there will be no convincing you, and many like you. That really is too bad. I like how you can justify 5% of the worlds population using 30% of the worlds resources.

I'm not sure the exact numbers of the energy of the world percentage the US uses, but it's not entirely our fault.

You forget to blame the third world nations building our throw away products, the multinational corporations bent on giving us throw away products so that we'll have to buy new ones in 2 years, the politicians who help scheme the system so that jobs can be outsourced over seas, and even the central bankers (privately owned Federal Reserve) who robs our society with inflation and other measures to slowly year by year steal our dollar purchasing power which nudges us to buy the throw away junk.

And another thing, if earth ever does run out of certain consumer grade production materials, all the landfills will become 'mines' full of valuable resources. So perhaps some of you are jealous that we'll have the biggest landfill mines here in the US, not that it'd actually benefit consumers, the captives of this teedering into totalitarianism system.

I hate to buy into this red herring of the thread , but people need to stop trying to punish the consumers and focus on the system itself, which as with pollution issues, anthro. CO2 screamism diverts from the real issues. The consumers have already been punished with outsourcing and the tranistion to most products being throw away junk. A long time ago, a great deal of US built products were built for duration. "They dont make them like they used to". And you can blame the multinational corporations for training us all to obsess over always having 'brand new' stuff, thus pushing us into the isles of throw away junk. Sure many of the corporations are based in the US, but their national allegience is on par with that of the Rockefellars.

And with Al Gore having been one the main salesmen for subsystems such as NAFTA and WTO, he's at the core of the real problems.
www.issues2000.org...

[edit on 6-12-2009 by IgnoranceIsntBlisss]

reply to post by Byrd

Yes and no. For instance, sun and water vapor together will create an area of high pressure that will keep more greenhouse gases and pollutants in a local area. That increases the local density of the CO2 and methane and together they act to keep heat in the atmosphere... and so on and so forth.

True, but these high pressure areas are both localized and offset by low pressure areas. Isn't what you are putting forth just deviations from the average which in the end cancel each other out? After all, the pressure differences that drive weather are minimal when compared to the average pressure of the atmosphere.

The accepted world record maximum "sea-level equivalent" pressure was observed at Agata Lake (66 degrees 53 minutes N, 93 degrees 28 minutes E) in Siberia at 1200 GMT on 13 December 1968: 31.99 in (1083.3 mb).

Source: answers.noaa.gov...

And remember that was the record. The average pressure at sea level is 29.99 in., which gives a maximum deviation from normal of about 7%

Because it's a dynamic system and in order to make estimations they divide the map of the Earth into small sections (I don't know how small, but a square mile or smaller). Because they're doing vector analysis and other types of multivariate analysis, they use supercomputers or supercomputer clusters to get current models (or they used to. I believe they still do, since modeling climate involves so darn many factors that it's a huge number-crunch fest.)

And I agree that if the intent was to provide an exact temperature projection that the use of such methods would be the only way to achieve such results. But a verification should be able to be made using average values, giving results which may not match the predictions, but would at least be reasonably close. My simplified calculations are off by more than two orders of magnitude.

HOWEVER... If you're basing your model only on CO2, you've missed the bulk of the data that should be in your equation.

The bulk?

The following data was taken from cdiac.ornl.gov...

Carbon dioxide (CO2) - 384ppmv
Methane (CH4) - 1865ppbv = 1.865ppmv
Nitrous Oxide (N2O) - 322 ppbv = 0.322ppmv
Tropospheric ozone (O3) - 344ppbv = 0.044ppmv
CFC-11 (trichlorofluoromethane) (CCl3F) - 244pptv = 0.000244ppmv
CFC-12 (CCl2F2) - 538pptv = 0.000539ppmv
CF-113(CCl2FFClF2) - 77pptv = .000077ppmv
HCFC-22(CHClF2) - 206pptv = 0.000206ppmv

And it goes downhill from there. The total amount of other greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide and water vapor add up to less than 2.5ppmv of the atmosphere... less than 1% as much by volume as carbon dioxide alone.

That is not to say they do not have any effect, but it does indicate that their contribution as a greenhouse gas would be much, much less than that of carbon dioxide, and certainly insubstantial as far as radiative forcing goes.

I do thank you for the links. I will check those out thoroughly. The Fourier Transforms may well come in handy while I help my daughter with her math. I think she is studying them now.

TheRedneck

reply to post by Leszek.Cibor

Actually, yes I did. When calculating the total energy received from the sun, I used the normal plane of the earth, which is the crux of the concern over volume vs. area earlier in this thread. By using this normal plane, not only are the differing angles of the ground taken into effect, but also only the energy received by the lit side of the Earth is considered.

TheRedneck

Originally posted by TheRedneck
reply to post by Byrd

HOWEVER... If you're basing your model only on CO2, you've missed the bulk of the data that should be in your equation.

The bulk?

The following data was taken from cdiac.ornl.gov...

Carbon dioxide (CO2) - 384ppmv
Methane (CH4) - 1865ppbv = 1.865ppmv
Nitrous Oxide (N2O) - 322 ppbv = 0.322ppmv
Tropospheric ozone (O3) - 344ppbv = 0.044ppmv
CFC-11 (trichlorofluoromethane) (CCl3F) - 244pptv = 0.000244ppmv
CFC-12 (CCl2F2) - 538pptv = 0.000539ppmv
CF-113(CCl2FFClF2) - 77pptv = .000077ppmv
HCFC-22(CHClF2) - 206pptv = 0.000206ppmv

And it goes downhill from there. The total amount of other greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide and water vapor add up to less than 2.5ppmv of the atmosphere... less than 1% as much by volume as carbon dioxide alone.

That is not to say they do not have any effect, but it does indicate that their contribution as a greenhouse gas would be much, much less than that of carbon dioxide, and certainly insubstantial as far as radiative forcing goes.

TheRedneck

Out of curiosity, doesn't this ignore the fact that some of these 'other' gases, although less in quantity still have measurable impacts because of the fact they they are actually more active or capable of affecting climate?

For example the comparison of Carbon to Methane is:

Carbon: 387 BPM with a estimated radiative forcing of 1.46
Methane: 1745 BPB with an estimated radiative forcing of 0.48
Link

Obviously the comparison between Carbon and Methane is that there is a exponentially higher amount of carbon in the atmosphere yet Methane still is capable of producing essentially 1/3 of the same radiative forcing.

So you can try to dismiss these others as insignificant based on their quantities alone but as I clearly pointed out in this post the other gases you left out and seem to regard as insignificant equal a 75% increase to the forcing of carbon. A proportion that is in no way 'insignificant'.


[edit on 6-12-2009 by Animal]

Originally posted by TheRedneck
reply to post by Byrd

Yes and no. For instance, sun and water vapor together will create an area of high pressure that will keep more greenhouse gases and pollutants in a local area. That increases the local density of the CO2 and methane and together they act to keep heat in the atmosphere... and so on and so forth.

True, but these high pressure areas are both localized and offset by low pressure areas. Isn't what you are putting forth just deviations from the average which in the end cancel each other out? After all, the pressure differences that drive weather are minimal when compared to the average pressure of the atmosphere.

No. They don't cancel each other out and can, in fact, have an additive effect. The climate is a dynamic system, so "tipping points" exist (which is why the Sahara desert is growing) and can have a large impact on other areas... which have an impact on still other areas and so on and so forth.

Increasing desertification has affected the entire climate of the world.

Climate modeling (and weather predicting), as you can see from the papers I linked, looks at large scale areas which are divided into smaller sets and those into smaller subsets and evaluates the effects and "tipping points" and crunches local numbers to find out the larger effect. Even the statistical modeling methods do the same thing since climate's a dynamic system.

And, of course, it also affects the plants and animals (migration or death) and the presence or absence of the animals (like coral reefs) or plants (grass or the lack thereof) is another tipping point for the local climate... which will impact climate in the region even if only in a small way.

You won't get an accurate answer with a single variable stable system model (which you used in your initial assessment.) I'm not sure where the raw data is that you would need to crunch, but I know it's out there somewhere and it's very very large.