It has become evident that the Pruitt EPA did not want to challenge the scientific climate “consensus,” either because they did not think that they could win the ensuing battle or because they wanted to avoid angering voters who accept the scientific “consensus” on climate. As pointed out repeatedly in my climate book and this blog, it is evident that the “consensus” is wrong in terms of satisfying the scientific method, that the eminent scientific and government organizations that have supported it are wrong, that the mainstream press is usually wrong on this issue, and that the main losers are those that are forced to pay the resulting higher bills and taxes and reduced reliability, all for negative net benefits.
Getting the world to admit this monumental failure of the scientific establishment, the governmental supporters, and the mainstream media is more difficult. The likely result is that more countryside will be covered with expensive, unreliable “renewable” energy farms as a result of continuing Federal and state subsidies, and then abandoned when the subsidies run out and maintenance costs increase with time.
The issue is now coming to a head in an obscure but important proposed revision of an Obama Administration proposed regulation. The EPA has sent the Office of Management and Budget a replacement for the Obama EPA Clean Power Plan (CPP). It is reported that the replacement requires “inside the fence” reductions of CO2 emissions from power plants. This provides support for the ideology that supports reducing CO2 emissions. It will not require as much of a reduction, I assume, but it will indirectly support the ideology, wrong though it is.
So if this is the case, it shows that even the independent-thinking Trump Administration will not challenge the “consensus.” Then who will? Apparently no one but a few climate skeptics. So the climate “consensus” will live on to create more disasters another day. Only if the climate actually cools enough so that the weather agencies cannot hide the truth will the truth come out in such a way that the climate-industrial complex (CIC) may finally be discredited and the public subsidies (either through taxes or higher energy bills) will end. When the subsidies end, of course, the CIC will finally collapse.
But the Trump Administration is apparently currently unwilling to lead the way towards publicly discrediting the scientific climate “consensus,” even though many members of the Administration appear to be climate skeptics. It rather appears to want to reduce the cost of the climate scam while they are in power, but with little concern for what is likely to happen after they are gone. With the EPA greenhouse gas Endangerment Finding still on the books, climate activists will be more than happy to use it to force the country to do their expensive and disasterous bidding.
This suggests one of the underlying problems created by government intervention into what should be the free market. Once enough public resources are diverted to private gains, it becomes very difficult to fix the resulting mess. And that is what we have.
[…] fellow Caltech alumnus, Alan Carlin, reports the Trump administration while making good decisions about climate policy, seems to not be interested in challenging the […]
I think that it is reasonable to say that the lapse rate (pressure/temperature slope) of the atmosphere is caused by gravity. As an interesting thought experiment, if one could reduce the sun’s intensity, how would you envision Earth’s atmospheric pressure/temperature curve changing? Would the slope remain the same with the curve shifting to the left?
Yes . And that gravitational lapse rate is the cause of our surface temperature being ~ 12% hotter than our radiative equilibrium .
When I get CoSy , the language , https://youtu.be/jsk-zhqz1Qs , established , or if someone is interested in implementing the relationships , I definitely am curious to understand it .
I think the slope has to decrease as you approach 0K radiative input .
Don’t misunderstand me. I am not refuting the point that convective cooling trumps radiative cooling. To the contrary, I am in accord with that premise.In fact, in order to make that point, one can show that a radiative-only model has a height/temperature profile that differs from the observed lapse rate. It generates an equilibrium profile that has the atmosphere below 4km warmer than observed and above 4km cooler than observed. The two curves, (observed lapse rate and radiative-only profile) intersect at 4 km and 10 km. Although, I can’t link you to Salby’s book, I have pasted the salient chapter’s beginning passage as reference
8.5.1 Radiative equilibrium in a gray atmosphere
We are now in a position to evaluate the thermal structure toward which radiative transfer drives the atmosphere. To do so, we consider a simple model of the Earth’s atmosphere: a gray atmosphere is transparent to SW radiation but absorbs LW radiation with a constant absorption cross section that is independent of wavelength, temperature, and pressure. ……….
Salby, Murry L. (2012-01-16). Physics of the Atmosphere and Climate (Kindle Locations 6111-6114). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.
I know Salby has both followers and detractors on the realist side . I probably should watch one of his youtubes all the way thru . ( Have you watched mine ? )
But I get somewhat turned off simply when people start talking in terms of SW vs LW radiation rather than actual measured spectra . You certainly can’t make a semiconductor work with that sort of sloppy thinking .
And this statement is one of the horrendous , I’ll call it “mislabelings” , which cause great confusion :
By any rational definition , a gray spectrum is flat across all wavelengths so drops out of the common weighted SB equation .
So , do you and Salby take the lapse rate , both pressure and temperature ( which is a factor in pressure ) as gravitationally caused ?
I should probably state the obvious that the Earth’s troposphere cools almost entirely due to convection with an average surface temperature of 288 degK based on the radiative-convective model. A radiative-only model with Earth’s greenhouse gases predicts a surface temperature of 350 degK. It does not exist in nature because it is an unstable equilibrium but can be derived theoretically. The results of which you can find in most texts on atmospheric radiation (Salby, Lindzen, etc.) None of this is meant to suggest that the greenhouse effect is not real, however, it is neither simple nor pure as proponents of AGW claim.
And convection is due to divergences from the gravitationally driven pressure.temperature gradient .
That gradient is dependent on mass , not spectrum .
Again , please respond with actual implementable computable equations , not just claims and steers to someone’s entire book or corpus of work . There is no way it can take more than a couple of equations and a couple of paragraphs of explanation .
We could start with your agreement with or correction to the basic computation for equilibrium temperature for arbitrary source , sink , and object temperature I present at , eg: , http://cosy.com/Science/warm.html#EqTempEq .
Please point to the actual computation of the 350K static value you claim , ~ 37% hotter than the generally agreed upon tho inexcusably crude 255K radiative equilibrium for the lumped planet and atmosphere ( energy density 350% greater ) . And , for that matter 25% higher ( energy density 250% greater ) than the gray body temperature in our orbit which simply corresponds to the total energy supplied by the Sun to our orbit .
Please show how your computation overcomes the Divergence Theorem constraint . Also , how the delta in gravitational energy between the top and bottom of the atmosphere can be ignored in the computation .
In response to Bob Armstrong’s comment:
I believe that you are mistaken in stating that bottoms of atmospheres are hotter than their radiative equilibrium. It is quite the opposite. if the Earth’s surface were restricted to pure radiative cooling then the Earth’s surface would have an average temperature of 77 degC given present concentrations of Greenhouse substances. The radiative-convective model provides the correct answer with an average surface temperature of 15 degC. I refer you to Salby – Physics of the Atmosphere and Climate, 2012
My computation of radiative equilibrium for arbitrary spectra is at http://cosy.com/Science/ComputationalEarthPhysics.html#EqTempEq . I have never seen the equilibrium calculated for the best estimated measured actual absorptive=emissive spectrum of the Earth , just the uselessly crude 255K meme . But it does appear to be somewhere around 9% below the ~ 278.6 of a gray ball in or orbit .
My argument beyond that is simply the second year calc Divergence Theorem which implies that the interior of a ball must come to the same mean temperature as that of it’s surface . In http://climateconferences.heartland.org/robert-armstrong-iccc9-panel-18/ I show the quantitative absurdity of the notion that any spectral phenomenon can explain the extreme bottom of atmosphere temperature of Venus , ~ 2.25 time the gray body temperature in its orbit ( energy density 25 times that delivered by the Sun ) .
I get tired of people pointing be to whole books when all that is needed is a quantitative equation .
Can you give us or point us to the equation which gets around the Divergence Theorem ?:
Further , if you do not explain what happens to gravitational energy in your balance equations , you are essentially saying you don’t believe in conservation of energy .
Well , I do . And if you browse http://CoSy.com you will see my focus is on implementing computational notation itself so I’ve not worked thru the equations of the now quite a few papers and blogs showing that gravity quantitatively explains the overall temperature gradients on all planets analysed .
Could you extract and point Salby’s computations ? But if they don’t start with actual computations on spectra , I’m not interested .
Mr, Carlin, you nailed the problem with this comment. Politicians are afraid of the green mafia and of its power after 3 decades of mass brainwashing on man-made climate change.
In Canada, Stephen Harper was Prime Minister for 10 years until 2015, and although privately a climate skeptic, could never bring itself to publicly challenge the consensus.
The new Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, has now fully embarked in the fight against AGW. No doubt the US will rejoin the rest of the world in that fight when Donald Trump is gone.
On an optimistic note about Canada, Ford recently took over in Ontario. He knows the climate scam. Someday the chump Trudeau will be gone.
It seems like rejection of the climate scam is spreading among conservatives. It has dawned on more and more people that this is just a Fake News fad and farce.
Bob Armstrong is correct about James Clerk Maxwell’s gravitational pressurization of atmospheric gas as the tested and proven greenhouse theory. Another failing of the “consensus” view is its failure to address the threshold question of the temperature at which carbon dioxide interacts with solar radiation in its spectral absorption/emission wavelength of 15μm.
That temperature has been readily determinable since the early 20th century by the Einstein-Planck relation and Wien’s Displacement Law. Cutting to the chase, CO2 absorbs, briefly retains, and then emits solar radiation at 193K, or -80°C, at 15μm. It does its handiwork at the poles, where it rises to a 1:1 ratio with water vapor (the major “greenhouse” gas at 29:1 by weighted average) and in the upper troposphere, where one expects to find minus-80-Celsius activities.
Of course, nobody asks at what temperature CO2 interacts with solar radiation, and perish the thought of getting an answer – much less discussion of it.
Thanks for your comment Bob, you’re absolutely right but the closing sentence in the above report says it all. The Gravy Train is simply to huge and overloaded to stop. Questioning the UN IPCC is apparently impossible: http://tech-know-group.com/essays/UN_IPCC_Trusted_or_Questioned.pdf
Yep . The money and resources and the damage to human welfare and ecological welfare due to this useful falsehood is staggering — on the order of legacy economic marxism itself .
We are reminded that President Trump is a realist and uncommonly willing to counter misbehaviors. He excoriated EU deadbeats and free riders for not maintaining sufficient military forces for the NATO alliance and called out Germany for dependency on Russian gas. Delightful. Then he slammed prime minister May for a pathetic Brexit. She needs to be deposed. Richly deserved.
Yet for perspective, the Boss did not withdraw from NATO as yet. Rome was not built in a day. The stage is now set for expulsions in future and Germany profoundly deserves expulsion On grounds of feebleness and cluelessness.
So let’s look at global warming. We withdrew from an international treaty. It’s known the boss thinks it is nonsense. There have to be political reasons for persistence of the scam. A few turncoats led To Pruitt losing his job.
Wheeler is going to soldier on resolutely and achieve what is feasible politically at the present time. It is what it is for the times being.
Go Wheeler!!!
Unfortunately both sides in the GHG paradigm have ignored the testable analytical method of classical physics . The field is conducted more like a theoryless social science rather than a branch of applied physics .
The paradigm is simply provably wrong at an undergraduate level . The reason bottoms of atmospheres are hotter that the radiative equilibrium of planets with their atmospheres is rather easily shown both theoretically and quantitatively to be gravity which is determinedly excluded from the paradigm .