On Sat, 30 Aug 2008 07:50:39 +0000, William Asher wrote:

Bill Ward wrote in
news
On Fri, 29 Aug 2008 23:54:26 +0000, William Asher wrote:

Bill Ward wrote:

snip

Bilbo Flyboy:

I'm not going to bother fisking this because you're not going to
understand it anyway. Try to follow along as best you can, 'k?

It's easy to fix. I'll just reinsert the relevant text of my post
you're trying to avoid:


begin repost
Subject: Keep Your Winter Woolies Handy: Sunspots May Vanish By
2015 From: Bill Ward Newsgroups:
alt.global-warming,sci.environment,sci.geo.meteorology Date: Fri,
29 Aug 2008 13:22:21 -0700

On Fri, 29 Aug 2008 17:42:08 +0000, William Asher wrote:

Whata Fool wrote:
I feel the proper way to view GHG effect and the optimum climate
conditions on Earth is to accept that the N2 and O2 warm in daytime,
but cool little at night, reaching a balance where the GHGs radiating
in all directions what they absorb limiting the warming by convection
from the surface in daytime.


And if this has any merit, a little extra CO2 each year should
cool the atmosphere a little more each year, but that small amount of
extra cooling of the atmosphere is overwhelmed by the larger swings in
temperatures caused by El Nino-La Nina and orbital patterns of the sun
and giant planets plus the random natural patterns due to variations
in cloud cover and the resulting changes in evaporation and the wind
patterns and pressure zones.

Basing climate or climate change on such a simplistic trivial
trace gas like CO2 is an adolescent approach to a very complex system.

[WH begins]
Foo-Foo:

Coming from a guy who had to have the ideal gas law, insolation on a
sphere, and atmospheric circulation repeatedly explained to him, and
even then wouldn't take the time to understand the physics because he
didn't like the source, your attempts to change tactic here are
laughable at best. Really, you need to leave the skeptic science to
people who are idea men, like Bilbo the Flyboy, who just *knows* it's
all water vapor, even though he hasn't done a calculation in his life
because a) you don't need to do calculations to be a pilot since they
got GPS and stuff and b) he's afraid he'll get the numbers wrong and
confuse himself.

All of what you've written above is wrong, if you had a smattering of
science you would actually take the time to calculate the energy
budgets. For example, the outgoing longwave flux is around 400 W/m^2 at
300 K.

From what altitude? IIRC, the effective outgoing radiation level is
somewhere in the upper troposphere, about where the cloud tops are. They
radiate LW, you know.

Still no response, I see.

If the average outgoing LW flux is 400Wm-2, and the incoming average is
~340Wm-2, how would you explain global warming? Can you show your
calculations for such an "energy budget"?

You
would be hard pressed to get anywhere near that number for a convective
flux or a latent heat flux (even combined).

OK, show us your calculations, including the measurements of the source
intensities. Hint: Trenberth only used estimated global precipitation
to determine latent heat transfer. He completely omitted the water
cycle in TS, which repeatedly circulates water and ice up and down,
quite vigorously. He also missed virga, but that's probably not as
significant.

http:http://www.atmo.arizona.edu/students...atmo451b/pdf/R
adiationBudget.pdf

Convection is covered on pdf pages 8 and 9.

BTW, he gets 235Wm-2 outgoing LW, where did you get your number?

Of course, you'll ignore
this advice, and keep talking silliness, just like you do with the
"greenhouse gases cool the atmosphere" argument, which if you were at
all clued in would realize was nonsense. (If what you were arguing
were true, then the temperature profile of the Earth with altitude
would deviate below the adiabatic profile. However, it's above the
adiabatic line, a lot.) Of course, you understand none of what I just
said, or why it's relevant, so I realize I am just talking to the
people who do get it.

Or yourself.

But, like all skeptics, especially the ones on the internet, your
science skills are weak to nonexistent so that, like your pal Capt.
Smith, you believe any little idea that someone feeds you, or pops into
your head, regardless of whether it makes physical sense.

I'm sorry your dislike for me keeps you from understanding how the
atmosphere really works, but then, it's more amusing for me this way,
so I'm not really complaining.

Back to the bad-ass persona already? I think you're just a pussycat
with an image problem.

end repost



I wouldn't expect you to understand this, keeping in mind your aversion
to math. Anyway, the 400 W/m^2 number comes from plugging 300 K into
the Stefan-Boltzman Law.

So it's surface emission, not actual outgoing LW.

It also comes from direct measurements of upwelling LW flux.

Got a link? To a measurement, not a model.

Still no response. I see.

Direct measurements of the latent and sensible heat fluxes are a
relatively small fraction of this, a large surface latent heat flux in
the tropics, for instance, is 150 W/m^2 (this also comes from direct
measurements)

Show a credible link and someone might believe you.

Still no link. How surprising.

and sensible heat fluxes are smaller still, on order of 10 W/m^2
(because there is no temperature gradient across the air-water
interface to speak of). The point is that Foo-Foo seems to think that
the upward fluxes of latent and sensible heat are *larger* than the
upwelling longwave flux, which is nonsense. That neither you, nor he,
appreciate this is not surprising.

Because it can easily be shown to be wrong. Latent heat dominates in
thermals.

Anyway, the 235 W/m^2 is the net outgoing TOA LW flux, I believe. It's
been a while since I worked through Trenburth. The idea is, if you
could do the math anyway, that 400 W/m^2 goes up from the surface due
to blackbody radiation, and the GHGs radiate approximately half of that
back down, to balance the 350 that comes from solar (with the other 150
W/m^2 going up due to the latent and sensible heat fluxes (so that the
total exchanged between the surface and atmosphere is like 500 W/m^2,
except 150 W/m^2 of that is "recycled" energy from the GHGs (no really,
this is going to confuse the hell out of you))).
I know it's confusing, the details are precisely why skeptics like
you think that latent heat flux *has* to be important, even though
you've never actually sat down and worked it out.

I see no response to the example I gave below of the magnitude of latent
heat flux in thermals.

You confuse only yourself. Blathering on about it doesn't help. Just
look at Trenberth's cartoon, and see where the 75Wm-2 comes from.

People may notice that in the post above (which you didn't respond to),
I posted a link to Trenberth. I think he badly underestimated the
latent heat flux. Look at the repost above for more.

Please don't start telling me about how there is a large latent heat
flux out of the desert, or some other stupid pilot nonsense. Just go
through Trenburth's numbers, apply the Stefan-Boltzman law, and you'll
see I'm correct.

Better yet, let's take a real world example. Good thermals rise at
around 1800-2000ft/min, say 10m/s. Air weighs about 1kg/m^3, so a m^3
of air lifted 10m takes mgh work, or 1 x 9.8 x 10 = ~98J/sec
mechanical energy, or 98W/m^2, which is what lifts sailplanes. Long
wingspans cover a lot of m^2/sec.

Then there's latent heat of say 12g/m^3 (35C,30%RH) of water @
40kJ/mole = ~26kJ/m^3, and ten of those cubic meters go by each second,
so the flux is 260kJ/sec, or 260kW/m^2. Steam carries a lot of energy.

I'll omit the sensible heat flux as insignificant compared to the
above.

So that makes 98W + 260kW = ~260kW/m^2 total energy flux in a good
thermal, give or take a few. Oh, yeah, there's supposed to be 75W/m^2
radiative transfer in there, too, but who's counting?

Thunderstorms are even more impressive, because the velocities are much
higher.

If you look at a satellite picture of the Earth, most of those white
things in the tropics are clouds with thermals underneath them, sucking
heat up from the surface and emitting it to space as IR. Too bad
they're so hard to model that they're mostly ignored. Or parameterized,
which has roughly the same effect.

Now where are your numbers?

Foo-Foo is a lost cause, but at least he hasn't claimed GHGs cool the
atmosphere in 12 hours or so.

Are you claiming they don't? How could they fail to radiate if they
absorb?

AgainI see no response to that question.

Up in the air, junior birdman!

I pity you. You've apparently missed a lot in life. There's nothing
quite like soaring the Crestline ridge in a hang glider at 8000ft, with
a little hawk flying formation 10 feet off your wingtip. "Birdman", I
can only aspire to, and that's as close as I've ever got.

Now deal with my post, or admit you can't. Can you find any
significant error in my rough calculations?



Bilbo Flyboy:

Before I get to your error, let me clear something up for you, since you
are confused.
The TOA LW flux is 230 W/m^2, that's top-of-atmosphere. Now, just for
grins, multiply 300*300*300*300 and then multiply that by 5.67x10^-8 and
you will get a number that is around 400. That would be 400 W/m^2 and
300 would be kelvins, or the temperature of the equatorial ocean, more
or less. So the outgoing *surface* LW flux is 400 W/m^2. The atmosphere
intercepts most of that, I forget exactly, but it's something like 350
W/m^2 on average. Of that 350 W/m^2, half gets radiated back downwards
by the greenhouse gases. Combine that 175 W/m^2 with the downwelling
fraction of the solar shortwave flux and you match, approximately, the
upwelling *surface* LW flux (because the Earth is in radiative
equilibrium). The figures you are calculating above include energy
provided to the atmosphere via the upwelling longwave flux, so it's not
a good estimate of the radiative balance number (another way to think
about this is that what you are talking about is transporting heat
through the troposphere (where there is no argument that convection due
to latent heat is huge), whereas I am talking about how that heat got
into the troposphere to begin with)

So you think the latent heat radiated there? Perhaps you could explain
how you can radiate hundreds of kW/m^2 with a surface T of 300K. Or maybe
you just couldn't follow the calculations. FYI, the water came from the
surface, evaporated by the sun.

(as an aside, this is another example of how
using stuff you learned in pilot school is not a good idea for climate,
which is why you thought formation of clouds aloft indicated there was a
large latent heat flux from a desert).

I still do, and posted an example above showing why. Where's your evidence
that they don't? And where is your rebuttal to the example I gave?

The upwelling *surface* latent
heat flux, which is the relevant parameter as far as the energy balance is
concerned is around 100 W/m^2, I'm not going to look that up for you, you
can use google as well as I can. Google "ocean surface latent heat flux"
or something like that ("tao heat flux" will give you lots of links to the
TOGA-TAO array data set). But like I said, it's been a while since I
worked through Trenberth, but it does all work out like above, even if my
memory led me to get some of the numbers a little off. (I am rock solid
sure about the surface LW flux though.)

Well, I'm not talking about "surface LW flux", I'm talking about the
latent heat flux due to the convection of water, which overwhelms
radiation. You still haven't addressed the example I gave above. You're
still all wrapped around the axle with radiation.


What you should do, which you won't, is sit down with Trenberth's paper
and try to figure out why it's correct, rather than read it thinking it
*has* to be wrong because you don't like the implications if it is
correct.

Not at all. I posted an example of latent heat transfer based on personal
experience, which shows several orders of magnitude more latent heat flux
than radiation. Can you find an error or not? Surely it wasn't
completely over your head.

What you are arguing, in essence, is that you understand
radiative transfer better than Lindzen, since even he agrees with
Trenberth's radiative budget (Lindzen just thinks that the latent heat
flux will increase to offset the increase in GHG forcing from CO2 (which
is not a very large number yet even so takes a *huge* increase in the
latent heat flux, from around 100 W/m^2 to something like 140 W/m^2)).

Why should I need to believe something I can show is wrong? Radiative
transfer is trivial compared to latent heat transfer. I'm not just
arguing it, I'm giving an example which you apparently can't understand.

That you seem to believe that a few dozen hours of glider school about
thermals matches Lindzen's background is absurd. If I were in your
shoes, and had a shred of introspection left, that even a staunch
climate skeptic like Lindzen accepts Trenberth's numbers on the
radiative balance might give me pause for concern about my position.

But apparently, in your shoes, you can't even critique my example, much
less come up with your own numbers.

I like it when you get all poetic about flying. For a second I thought
you were going to go on about how you had slipped the surly bonds of
earth and danced the skies on laughter's silvered wings.

Nope, that was someone else, but I know the feeling.

Now, are you going to show me an error in my rough calculations of surface
latent heat flux, or are you going to admit you were wrong, again?

Do you ever stop to think how ridiculous your lame little derogatory
comments make you look, when you can't even follow a simple example? Or
are you like John M, who thinks since it's Usenet, he has to be rude?