Definitive Refutation: This is something I wrote about long ago (reference pg. 16), but in a recent Slayer email exchange I re-realized just how important it was.  Hopefully any Slayers will follow up in the comments if anything else needs to be added. 

In Misunderstood Basic Concepts and the Greenhouse Effect, it is stated:

“The tropospheric temperature lapse rate would not exist without the greenhouse effect. While it is true that convective overturning of the atmosphere leads to the observed lapse rate, that convection itself would not exist without the greenhouse effect constantly destabilizing the lapse rate through warming the lower atmosphere and cooling the upper atmosphere.”

However, let us look once again at the derivation for the lapse rate (also reference this previous post):

When there is no longer any gain or loss of energy in a column of gas (i.e., when it is in energy equilibrium), then the energy ‘U’ of an arbitrary parcel of gas is given by the sum of its thermal and gravitational potential energies.  The sum of thermal and gravitational potential energies is:

U = mC_pT + mgh

However, this energy is constant since there is no other energy input (or loss), and so its differential is equal to zero:

dU = 0 = mC_p*dT + mg*dh

which results in

dT/dh = -g/C_p

Note that this equation and its derivation has no reference to greenhouse gases or thermal radiation at all – the lapse rate is dependent only upon the gas’ thermal capacity, and the strength of gravity, and this will occur for any gas even if it is totally “radiatively inert”, and, even if the gas isn’t undergoing bulk convection; the lapse rate develops at the infinitesimal scale of the action of gravity on the particles of the gas.

In the past few weeks, I’ve been re-examining the long-standing dispute over the discrepancy between models and observations in the tropical troposphere.  My interest was prompted in part by Gavin Schmidt’s recent attack on a graphic used by John Christy in numerous presentations (see recent discussion here by Judy Curry).   Schmidt made the sort of offensive allegations that he makes far too often:

@curryja use of Christy’s misleading graph instead is the sign of partisan not a scientist. YMMV. tweet;

@curryja Hey, if you think it’s fine to hide uncertainties, error bars & exaggerate differences to make political points, go right ahead.  tweet.

As a result, Curry decided not to use Christy’s graphic in her recent presentation to a congressional committee.  In today’s post, I’ll examine the validity (or lack) of Schmidt’s critique.

Schmidt’s primary dispute, as best as I can understand it, was about Christy’s centering of model and observation data to achieve a common origin in 1979, the start of the satellite period, a technique which (obviously) shows a greater discrepancy at the end of the period than if the data had been centered in the middle of the period.  I’ll show support for Christy’s method from his long-time adversary, Carl Mears, whose own comparison of models and observations used a short early centering period (1979-83) “so the changes over time can be more easily seen”. Whereas both Christy and Mears provided rational arguments for their baseline decision,  Schmidt’s argument was little more than shouting.

Background

The full history of the controversy over the discrepancy between models and observations in the tropical troposphere is voluminous.    While the main protagonists have been Christy, Douglass and Spencer on one side and Santer, Schmidt, Thorne and others on the other side, Ross McKitrick and I have also commented on this topic in the past, and McKitrick et al (2010) was discussed at some length by IPCC AR5, unfortunately, as too often, deceptively on key points.

Starting Points and Reference Periods

Christy and Spencer have produced graphics in a similar style for several years. Roy Spencer (here) in early 2014 showed a similar graphic using 1979-83 centering (shown below). Indeed, it was this earlier version that prompted vicious commentary by Bart Verheggen, commentary that appears to have originated some of the prevalent alarmist memes.

There’s been a spate of lamentations that science is broken (here, here, here, here). I am a credentialed, working scientist, and I’m here to tell you that, with some exceptions, these cris de coeur are right. Science is a mess.

All of science? No. Robotics is doing well, in a creepy sort of way. All sorts of facts about how proteins are formed, turn themselves into pretzels, and scuttle along chemical gradients are hoorayed about. Physicists still have plenty to say about how to makequark soup. And certain fields continue to be driven forward by their own momentum and profit motive, as in fields connected to information technology.

But these areas of flashy progress mask a deep and growing problem with the institution of science. What is the source of those problems? Politics, money and philosophy. Too much of the first two and not enough of the third; or, rather, too much of the wrong kind of all three.

Boffins’ tale of Neutrino source beyond the Milky Way spotted by Ice Cube observatory.

“Big Bird”, a neutrino spotted in December 2012, probably started its life nine billion years ago in a quasar far, far away: so says the international team of boffins who run the IceCube detector beneath the Antarctic ice.

By 2013, the IceCube collaborators believed they’d spotted extragalactic events: now they believe which source outside the Milky Way they came from.

Neutrinos are hard to spot in the first place: they have nearly no interaction with normal matter, and when they do interact, the signature is really hard to separate from noise. Hence locations like IceCube – instruments watching a cubic kilometre of ice in the Antarctic for the Cherenkov radiation flashes that indicate a neutrino actually hit something.

LONDON, April 18 (UPI) — The so-called Gatwick Gusher, a shale basin in the United Kingdom, could add as much as $74 billion to the nation’s economy, a study finds.

U.K. Oil & Gas Investments commissioned Ernst & Young to examine the future potential of oil production from the Weald shale basin.

“Assuming it can be extracted from a development site at the volumes projected by U.K. Oil & Gas, has the potential to generate significant economic value to the U.K. economy,” the report read.

Oil & Gas U.K., the industry’s lobbying group, said the North Sea oil sector is in for a long period of decline, with less than $1.4 billion in new spending expected in 2016. Inland shale, meanwhile, has the potential to add between $10 billion and $74.6 billion to the British economy in gross value, the commissioned report said.

A new generation of muon telescopes has been built to detect the presence of secret structures and cavities in Egypt’s pyramids, a team of researchers announced on Friday.

Built by CEA (French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission) the devices add to an armory of innovative, non-destructive technologies employed to investigate four pyramids which are more than 4,500 years old. They include the Great Pyramid, Khafre or Chephren at Giza, the Bent pyramid and the Red pyramid at Dahshur.

The project, called ScanPyramids, is scheduled to last one year and is being carried out by a team from Cairo University’s Faculty of Engineering and the Paris-based non-profit organization Heritage, Innovation and Preservation (HIP Institute) under the authority of the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities.

There are 2300 new coal plants with 1400GW of capacity planned worldwide. China is planning to keep burning coal and to ship electricity to Germany, where the renewable revolution has made power so expensive it may soon be cheaper to get it from half a world away, from coal. 

[….] The US still gets roughly one-third of its electricity from coal. Rather than climate change and renewables, the fall of Peabody is largely a story of heavy debt burden and increased competition from shale gas.

And on this front, coal is not alone. New-generation solar ­energy company and former Silicon Valley darling SunEdison is itself on the verge of bankruptcy after its value plunged from $10bn in July to $650m. The company was once the great hope of renewable energy but has surrendered under the weight of heavy borrowings used to make overly expen­sive acquisitions as part of a poorly thought through strategy.

There was a lot of news this week about a study, published in the medical journal BMJ, that looked at how diet affects heart health. The results were unexpected because they challenged the conventional thinking on saturated fats.

And the data were very old, from the late 1960s and early 1970s.

This has led many to wonder why they weren’t published previously. It has also added to the growing concern that when it comes to nutrition, personal beliefs often trump science.

Perhaps no subject is more controversial in the nutrition world these days than fats. While in the 1970s and 1980s doctors attacked the total amount of fat in Americans’ diets, that seems to have passed. These days, the fights are over the type of fat that is considered acceptable.

The LEAP Manifesto recently published by left-wing associates of the NDP party in Canada has been described as the brainchild of Naomi Klein and her hubby Avi Lewis. The subtitle of the manifesto “A Call for a Canada Based on Caring for the Earth and One Another” is reminiscent of Pope Francis’ recent encyclical “Laudato Si.”

Stationary “e-bike” for electric power generation

I had the good fortune to attend a talk by conservative author Mark Steyn at the Princeton Club in midtown Manhattan on Tuesday, sponsored by Roger Kimball’s The New Criterion and co-sponsored by the newly formed CO₂ Coalition, founded by Princeton physicist Will Happer. In the talk, Steyn warned that prostitution will increase because of global warming, and that global warming will also cause impotence in Italian men. This is a compounding tragedy because, of course, all those newly formed prostitutes won’t be able to find customers — at least, not in Italy.

It gets worse. Global warming is also responsible for Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder, a mental malady affecting the reasoning centers of the brain, causing its sufferers to run nervously in ever tighter circles as they demand the government do the impossible and stop the climate from changing.

PreTSD was discovered in the maiden science of the psychology of global warming. We can only surmise that it’s caused when people are confronted with the reality that the average annual global temperature has swung dramatically in past ages — long before humans developed a rage for burning fossils — but that of late those same averages have failed to do anything dramatic and, indeed, have failed to cooperate with global warming predictions, which have soared ever upwards (see page 2 of this report).

Summary: After a decade of slow growth beneath public view, the replication crisis in science begins breaking into public view. First psychology and biomedical studies, now spreading to many other fields — overturning what we were told is settled science, foundations of our personal behavior and public policy. Here is an introduction to the conflict (there is pushback), with the usual links to detailed information at the end, and some tentative conclusions about effects on public’s trust of science. It’s early days yet, with the real action yet to begin.

“Men only care for science so far as they get a living by it, and that they worship even error when it affords them a subsistence.”
— Goethe, from Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret.

Mickey Kaus referred to undernews as those “stories bubbling up from the blogs and the tabs that don’t meet MSM standards.” More broadly, it refers to information which mainstream journalists pretend not to see. By mysterious processes it sometimes becomes news. A  sufficiently large story can mark the next stage in a social revolution. Game, the latest counter-revolution to feminism, has not yet reached that stage. The replicability crisis of science appears to be doing so, breaching like a whale from the depths of the sea in which it has silently grown.

The dinosaurs were already in decline 50 million years before the asteroid strike that finally wiped them out, a study suggests.

The new assessment adds further fuel to a debate on how dinosaurs were doing when a 10km-wide space rock slammed into Earth 66 million years ago.

A team suggests the creatures were in long-term decline because they could not cope with the ways Earth was changing.

The study appears in PNAS journal.

Researchers analysed the fossil remains of dinosaurs from the point they emerged 231 million years ago up to the point they went extinct.

In this age of specialization, it is very difficult for scientists to integrate information and create a wider cross-discipline understanding of how the Earth works. Three scientists, Alfred Wegener, Milutin Milankovitch, and Vladimir Köppen, had such abilities and their work profoundly impacted our view and understanding of the world and climate.

Sadly, because of the glorification of specialization and denigration of generalization, and control of knowledge and education by the government they are little known or understood today. As always happens with a history they are accused of saying things they never said, or not saying things they did say. It is why in all my classes students were required to go back to the source and not perpetuate the practice of what I call “carping on carping.”

Assignment of the three to the arcane backwaters of the history of science and climate reflects the loss of perspective in climate science manifest in the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). That political body deliberately directed climate science and world attention to anthropogenic global warming (AGW), and more narrowly to one greenhouse gas, CO2. They even proved the validity of their attention with computer models that pre-determined that CO2 from humans explained 95 percent of all temperature and climate change since 1950.

Wegener, Milankovitch, and Köppen knew each other very well (Wegener married Köppen’s daughter). The three produced groundbreaking individual and specific research, but the fruits of their collaboration led to the production of general global theories that underpin so much of climate and earth sciences today.

Vladimir Köppen’s global climate classification, the basis of most systems in use today, combined meteorology, climatology, and botany so that plants were a primary indicator of climate categories and regions. It introduces the important and mostly overlooked concept of the “effectiveness” of precipitation. Wegener produced the continental drift theory that provides the foundation for geophysics and the understanding of earthquakes and volcanic activity. Milutin Milankovitch, a Serbian mathematician, and climatologist, combined the effects of changes in Sun/Earth relationships to determine their role in varying the amount of energy reaching the Earth and causing climate change.

Sunday’s devastating earthquake in Ecuador might just be the beginning, according to a seismologist who says that current conditions in the Pacific Rim could trigger at least four quakes with magnitudes greater than 8.0.

Roger Bilham, a University of Colorado seismologist, told the Express, “If (the quakes) delay, the strain accumulated during the centuries provokes more catastrophic mega earthquakes.”

A total of 38 volcanoes are currently erupting around the world, making conditions ripe for seismic activity in the Pacific area.

More than 270 people are now confirmed dead after Sunday’s quake in Ecuador, with the number expected to rise.

A group calling itself “The FS-UNEP Collaborating Centre for Climate and Sustainable Energy Finance,” working out of the Frankfurt School, in collaboration with the United Nations Environment Program and the Bloomberg New Energy Finance Group has published study called “Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment,[2] according to which, in the period between 2004 and 2014, the world expenditure on so called “renewable energy” amounted to 1.801 trillion dollars (US).  Of this, 711 billion dollars was applied to developing wind energy, an amount exceeded only by the investment in solar energy, which was 875.1 billion dollars in that same period.

The total “investment” in so called “renewable energy” in the last ten years is greater than the annual GDP (2013) of 179 of 192 nations as recorded by the World Bank[3], only 75 billion dollars smaller than the GDP of India, a nation estimated to contain a population of 1.396 billion human beings as of 2015, roughly 20{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of the human race.[4]  For the amount of money spent on so called “renewable energy” in the last decade we could have written a check for about $1,200 dollars to every man, woman and child in India, thus almost doubling the per capita income[5] of that country.  It is roughly comparable to the 2013 GDP of Canada, a few hundred billion dollars larger than the annual 2013 GDP of Australia.

NEW YORK – The collapse of a Spanish-based multinational renewable energies company could cause election-year embarrassment not only to President Obama, Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation and the Democratic Party, but also to Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz and his wife Heidi, through their ties to Goldman Sachs.

Announced Tuesday, Seville-headquartered renewables multinational firm Abengoa plans to sell off four solar photovoltaic power plants in Spain for a collective value of $65.13 million, $57.26 million and a net cash flow of $13.9 million, helping the company meet its debt-restructuring targets set out in its feasibility plan.

The asset sale announced Tuesday comes after the company sold in February its 20 percent share in the 100MV Shams-1 concentrated solar power plant in the United Arab Emirates to the Abu Dhabi-based renewable energy company Masdar.