Cap'n Bob & the Damsel

Science

Are They Blowing Smoke Up Our AWS?

awsAutomatic Weather Stations (AWS) collect temperature, humidity and atmospheric pressure (and wind direction and velocity in some locations) from various locations throughout the world. Data from this system is used to record, and subsequently extrapolate, climate patterns. But is there a problem with the accuracy of the data collected by individual AWS installations because of localized urban conditions and features? Can smoke from a nearby BBQ distort readings? Can air conditioner exhaust distort them? Can heat from asphalt?

Image: a remote weather observation unit – click for larger image.

In what might be a major contamination of weather data, weather sensors can be influenced by the effects of surrounding human activity and artifacts. These factors will skew the data in some locations because of unnatural heating and distortion of natural climatic conditions. If you bias temperature readings in some locations, it would be impossible to rely on that data unless it has been normalized to data collected in undeveloped areas.

A Northern California blog, What’s Up With That?, identifies four cases where Urban Heat Island (UHI) effects are likely distorting temperature data.

Continue reading…

01 Jun 2007 by Global Warming Science

Just What Is A Blue Moon?

blue-moon.gifTomorrow night, when the full moon rises over North America, it is believed that this will be a “blue moon.” The modern definition for “blue moon” is the second full moon to occur within a calendar month and tomorrow’s full moon will indeed be the second to occur in the month of May, 2007.

Cartoon Image courtesy of NASA.

But hold on – Sky and Telescope magazine retracted it’s 1946 second-in-a-month definition in favor of stating that the “blue moon” is actually based on the four seasons and is the fourth full moon to occur within a season (Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn). Using this definition, a “blue moon” may or may not occur within a calendar month.

It gets even more confusing.

Continue reading…

30 May 2007 by Astronomy Culture Science

Earth Approaching Maximum Black Body Temperature

tongueIn physics, a black body is an object that absorbs all electromagnetic radiation that falls onto it. No radiation passes through it and none is reflected. It is this lack of both transmission and reflection to which the name refers. These properties make black bodies ideal sources of purely thermal radiation. That is, the amount and wavelength (color) of electromagnetic radiation they emit is directly related to their temperature. Black bodies below around 700 K (430 °C) produce very little radiation at visible wavelengths and appear black (hence the name). Black bodies above this temperature, however, begin to produce radiation at visible wavelengths starting at red, going through orange, yellow, and white before ending up at blue as the temperature increases.

Image: CIE Black Body Color Temperature Chart — “The Tongue” — click for full-sized chart

The color temperature of the Sun is near the yellow zone on the inset chart, while the color temperature of the Earth (obviously) is outside the visible radiation spectrum and in the far infrared (low temperature) corner of the chart. Given the (more or less) constant energy level emitted by the Sun, the Earth can only rise to a finite maximum temperature. An independent study predicts that we’re almost there!

John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.), writing from Brisbane, Australia, passes along this article by Ian Schumacher, in which he offers six postulates supporting the maximum temperature argument: What is the maximum temperature of the Earth?

  1. The average temperature of a body in thermodynamic equilibrium with an external energy source can never exceed the temperature of a black body in the same environment.
  2. The maximum temperature of a body in thermodynamic equilibrium with an external energy source can never exceed the temperature of black body in the same environment.
  3. The greenhouse effect can never produce a temperature that is higher than the temperature of a black body in the same environment.
  4. The earth is operating very close to its maximum possible temperature.
  5. The transition from Ice Age to warm period and back to Ice Age is achieved through a runaway greenhouse effect and its opposite.
  6. The runaway greenhouse effect ends when the Earth has achieved a effective absorptivity as close to unity as it can get after which the earth becomes insensitive to further positive feedback changes.

Read the entire article to get a sense for the physics involved and narratives associated with these six postulates.

Hat tip to my colleague, Rick, for bringing this to my attention.

22 May 2007 by Global Warming Science

An Inconvenient Methane Truth

methane-time.gifApparently, the rate of change of the methane in the atmosphere seems to have gone from increasing to zero change. This must be disappointing to alarmists that claim that unbridled man-made emissions will continue to cause an increase in the levels of tropospheric methane in the 21st century.

Right: Level of Atmospheric Methane 1980-2004 – click image to enlarge.

A recent study published in Environmental Science & Technology shows the unexpected decrease in the atmospheric methane rate of change. Data from the study indicate a trend toward decreasing atmospheric methane.

The folks at CO2 Science analyzed the study:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has long predicted that earth’s tropospheric methane (CH4) concentration would rise dramatically throughout the 21st century; see, for example, Ehhalt and Prather (2001). So entrenched a place did this dogma come to occupy in both the popular and scientific psyches, in fact, that when real-world data suddenly suggested otherwise, Simpson et al. (2002) continued to vehemently contend it was “premature to believe that the CH4 burden is ceasing to increase,” even though their own data bore witness against them in demonstrating that such was in fact occurring, as we indicated in our Editorial of 8 Jan 2003. Newer findings, however, ultimately caused even them to recant (Simpson et al., 2006); and, now, Khalil et al. (2007) have essentially “put the nails in the coffin” of the idea that rising atmospheric CH4 concentrations pose any further global warming threat at all.

Continue reading Atmospheric Methane: The Good-News Trend Continues

15 Mar 2007 by Environment Global Warming Science

The ‘Global Warming And The Climate’ Website

Last weekend, I ran across a website originating in Norway that offers some compelling science that further debunks the hype about man-made global warming. The site, Global Warming And The Climate, is maintained by Per Strandberg of Voss, Norway. Per does a great job of tying several observed climate influencing phenomena together: Solar activity, greenhouse gasses and cosmic ray flux.

I discovered Per’s site after he left a comment on our post, Correlating Sunspots to Global Warming.

Actually I started to look at the cause for global warming by looking at the data. Here are my result. The leading climate scientists use misleading and deceptive methods when they analyze climate data.

Amazingly there are no repository and comprehensive information to be found at any location on the Internet over the existing two theories for global warming.
People should be able to make informative and objective judgment for themselves.

Therefore I collected this information here on my website http://www.global-warming-and-the-climate.com On it I have collected information and graphs covering both the greenhouse gas and the cosmic ray cloud cover theory and made analysis from the data.

Thanks to Per Strandberg for sharing his good work with us.

06 Mar 2007 by Environment Global Warming Science

Cosmic Rays, Solar Flux and Global Warming

A Danish scientist, Henrik Svensmark, Director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research of the Danish National Space Center in Copenhagen, has conducted experiments and studies to validate his theory that interstellar galactic cosmic rays may have a considerable effect on global climate.

Right: Cosmic rays affect global cloud cover

The theory is that when cosmic rays hit the Earth’s atmosphere, they speed up the process where ions combine with sulphuric acid. These combine to form condensation nucleii, or tiny specs of matter that allow water droplets to form. The widespread condensation of water droplets accumulate to form lower-atmospheric clouds, which serve to reflect sunlight back into space and allow the Earth’s surface to cool off. In the absence of heavy cosmic radiation, fewer clouds form and the surface of the planet heats up again.

The Sun affects cosmic rays entering into the Earth’s atmosphere by virtue of particle emission (solar winds) and solar magnetic flux — when particle emission and the magnetic field is strong due to high solar activity, cosmic rays are deflected away and thus allow fewer clouds to form.

Svensmark concludes “it now seems clear that stellar winds and magnetism are crucial factors in the origin and viability of life on wet earth-like planets,” as are “ever-changing galactic environments and star-formation rates.” When you consider the context of this galactic radiation effect, the impact of CO2 emissions caused by humanity literally fade away into climatic insignificance.”

References:

CO2 Science — Cosmoclimatology: A New Perspective on Global Warming

Telegraph.co.uk — Cosmic rays blamed for global warming

Thanks to my colleague Rick for bringing this to my attention.

22 Feb 2007 by Environment Global Warming Science

More Inconvenient Science

polar bearsScientists studying the history of climate variations in Arctic regions have confirmed that the Northern Polar regions were much warmer than today. Over the last quarter-million years, the most significant arctic warming took place some 130,000 years in the past. The warming then had a much greater effect on the ice and vegetation than could happen now with the relatively small increase in global temperature.

Image: Two polar bears sparring on the arctic tundra in Canada.

This is the conclusion from From World Climate Report where an excellent analysis of the scientific report may be found:

Arctic Lessons from the Last Interglacial (Polar bears survived)

The next time that you see Al Gore’s photo collection of decaying glaciers and polar bears drowning as the distance between icebergs and the shore is too far to swim, think of the LIG as a natural period in Earth’s history when hippopotamus and the water tortoise were widespread as far north as Great Britain and birch forests reached the shores of the Arctic Ocean. Remember that then, as now, the Arctic naturally warmed more dramatically than the rest of the world, and also keep in mind that our modern global climate models – those that sit next to the panic button – are stumbling around that reality.

06 Feb 2007 by Global Warming Science Whacko Politics

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