Which skeptic do you find the most and least tolerable? - Page 6

Not the same.  They just read each other's answers and reinforce. 

So how do I choose a best answer on this one:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090901122336AACsmTw

The responses are what you might expect, non-skeptics generally having first-hand experience with peer-review and the skeptics not, with skeptics having semi-delusional beliefs about the process. 

So who's answer is best?  Dana, you don't really need the points, I'm tempted to go with Antarctica.  Any opinions?

James E, for ironic effect.

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I spaced out selecting one.  Oh well.  The interesting thing is that none of the skeptics who answered have first-hand experience with publishing in the sciences, whereas many of the more reasonable IPCC supporters do.  It reinforces the notion that skeptics are skeptics because their scientific background is nonexistent. 

Inhofe.

Senator from oklahoma, israeli supports, rednecky, don't like him, far too conservative, hjates the environment.

I frankly find people like Al Gore to be nut cases. He writes books and makes speeches to convince people that we're responsible for global warming - at hefty speaking fees, of course. Yet he has a very huge home that consumes a lot of power, but he buys carbon offset credits. We heard not a peep from him about the Obamas using two jumbo jets and a 3rd jet for their trip to Denmark in a vain quest for the Olympics in Chicago. Thankfully it goes to Rio.

COAL can be a clean fuel for power plants and it is being used in other countries, yet the environmentalists here are unyielding. Why is that?  And they are strongly against use of Nuclear power. Windmills and solar panels will not solve all our energy needs, so we have to generate electric power some way. Natural gas is quite costly. Clean coal, dams, and nuclear generation seem the best current sources. But there are those who want dams removed for the sake of salmon. 
I love clean air and yet we don't have it in buildings where smoking is allowed. How many environmentalists are smokers, I ask.  I know some will consider me a wacko for speaking against smoking because it is a sacred right for them.  After we get concerned about the danger of smoking to the smokers and others around them, the clean air advocates or environmentalist may be more credible.
Finally, I am an advocate of Electric cars because I don't like buying gas from foreign countries that enrich the Arabs who finance the Muslims who want to kill Jewish people. We could have cheaper oil if ANWR in Alaska wasn't off limits despite the very tiny footprint and very slim chance of minimum pollution to a restricted area.   But electric cars are years away from being viable since most of them have a range under 50 miles.  OH, the issue of recharging is that they have to use electricity generated by evil coal or more evil Nuclear power. 
CARL

I am a smoker, but I never do it in places where I would force other people to breathe it in. It is hardly a 'sacred right' to be able to inflict harm on others freely and without consequence. The exact same argument can be made for regulation of carbon emissions.

And for the record clean air and smoking are public health issues, not really environmental issues.

I also am a smoker - shame but only for health reasons not to mention that whenever I visit the doctor he is on my back!

At 65 I still run most every day and exercise and am in far better health than most others far younger. My run consists of going 'up over the hill' behind our home and taking a long loop back - about 50 minutes. The butts always go into my pocket until I find a garbage can.

Like dawei I don't smoke where it will bother others - out of courtesy. Personally I am far more worried about fat people and their affect on the health system and the associated costs. 

The information I got about Al Gore's home was incorrect apparently. I did not hear about the LEED certification whatever that is.

I'm in the wrong forum to be debating about using coal to produce electric power since everyone here is totally against the use of it. And natural gas has increased in cost and I say that as a user of natural gas in my home.

We have a nuclear power plant in Oconee County, SC but I am too far away to be on their system and have not compared their power costs versus Duke Power.

As for smoking not being an environmental issue depends on whether your in a confined space such as a small restaurant with several smokers.  It adversely impacts the environment inside buildings and causes problems for others such as headache, burning eyes, respiratory problems, but again that seems not to be an issue with those in this forum.

I subscribed to ecohuddle primarily for the electric vehicle updates and have tried to find info on recycling things like vinyl siding - to no avail.  I'll probably not continue my subscription beyond the end of this year though.  BTW, at the bottom of this page is a link www.americaspower.org that advertises low-cost energy from coal. Meet 3 real people relying on low-cost energy from coal. I'll have to check it out to see if their opinions differ markedly from Dana's. 

@Kingsman42sc - After Gore got smacked down over his home one time he is smart enough to be aware of the PR mess so apparently took steps. I expect he basically bought his way out with REC's

I am surprised you have not heard of LEED - anyone watching building (green or otherwise) has to read about it.

Whether anyone likes coal or not it will be with us for many years to come - pure fact of life. Like Dana said - coal will never be 'clean' but it can be a lot cleaner. 

Your take on what Dawei and I said about smoking means you didn't bother to read the posts - It has been a long time since I have been anyplace where you can light up in a confined space.

Recycling vinyl siding? Sorry we could not help you. I have no experience with it and apparently no one else on the site dose either. I go through hundreds of sites and bing/google pages when I am trying to research something like that.   

The americaspower.org quote "AmericasPower.org is sponsored by the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), which is a partnership of the industries involved in producing electricity from coal."

Everyone/industry has the right to defend what they believe. Anyone that goes to an industry website for factual or unbiased information is not playing with a full deck. The coal industry is at one extreme - another group is at the other  - the truth is somewhere in between.

I stay away from the biased blogs from either the right or the left. Better to read fantasy fiction as it is more accurate.

I personally do not agree with the purchase of REC's to make oneself green. It is nothing more than a way to 'buy your way out' for rich people. I believe Gore still depends greatly on the REC's to achieve the rating.

Let the power company make a common price including the alternative sources for everyone. CA does have a better power cost structure than most places in the country. Not many utilities use 'time of use' for consumer power yet.

No, he participates in TVA's Green Power Switch program.


I also disagree with your opinions on RECs.  You should read the interview with Mike Jackson, CEO of Village Green Energy.

This is one of the items where we will always disagree - nothing wrong with that.

Got me Dana - I used the wrong term - Gore buys green power. He is still buying his way out though.

The energy efficient retrofits on his house are good. The geothermal heat pumps will cut gas use in the winter and should reduce AC costs in the summer. The 34 solar panels should provide maybe 30 kWh per day annual average - a lot to many but maybe 5 to 6% of his present consumption (after renovation).  

I read the interview. I also know how much the company I worked for in India liked carbon trading European style - they loved it as it was easy to game - milking the neighbor's cow. Different place, different people and all yes.

Still seems simpler to me if the power company split the cost of the renewables equally for all kilowatts sold. In Sept 2008 the TVA residential rate was 7.8 cents per kWh. Hard to get people interested in conservation with that price.
Edited by Russ - 10/11/09 at 8:58am

I'll bite.

I consider myself a skeptic although I would consider myself environmentally friendly. As with you, I also tend to find most climate skeptics insufferable. However, the self-congratulatory nature of this thread is one of the reasons I also find the AGW proponents insufferable - in and of itself your agreement does not prove you right or help to further anything productive. Obviously, this thread is not exactly the place to discuss the specifics of the science. I would be happy to open, or link to one that does.

I am not an "idiot". I do not like most of the "falsified" science that the right advances as legitimate counters to the AGW theory. I try to avoid ad-hominem, straw man arguments and the like. That said, I don't see how one can conclude that the science is settled with as many open questions as there are. I don't understand how it is that none of you seem to have any of the skepticism that is present in rigorous scientific inquiry. 

I'm not sure I agree with this statement. The concept of radiative forcing is a creation of the IPCC and is not supported by first-principles physics. In particular, the application of Kirchhoff's Law to gases to produce a radiative transfer function relies on local thermodynamic equilibrium which is not present. In fact, as I'm sure you've seen argued before, the reason an actual house of glass (greenhouse) warms is NOT due to long-wave re-radiation/reflection but loss of convective heat transfer. I find this (the misapplication of Kirchhoff's law) a compelling enough reason to remain skeptical about the causes of global warming. 

The concept of radiative forcing predates the IPCC by 100 years.  These "objections" you're raising are standard internet skeptic fare, raised to sound learned because they involve all sorts of techno babble.  But they are just that, techno-babble.  I suspect you're just repeating stuff you read elsewhere, and have no real physics background to determine whether they are, or are not, correct.  What you are arguing is basic physics that has been studied and studied for a long time, and if there were problems with it at the fundamental level you claim, well, that just isn't possible.  There would be a whole host of astrophysical and planetary observations that wouldn't be explainable using radiative transfer.  And there aren't. 

From Wallace and Hobbs, a text that is at least 30 years old by now:

http://books.google.com/books?id=HZ2wNtDOU0oC&pg=PT137&lpg=PT137&dq=kirchoff%27s+law+radiation+gases+greenhouse+effect&source=bl&ots=C1PIlfq_U1&sig=qW-0-arLYOMqF1qicqYt-yRw5bk&hl=en&ei=6Y38SqyUC4fitgO2uYyABw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CAoQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=&f=false

Now I'm sure you'll come back with some more techno-babble you will happily regurgitate about how these statements in a classic atmospheric physics text are wrong.  But if you believe the fundamental physics of radiative forcing is incorrect, you've moved from being a skeptic to being in denial.  There are a lot of skeptics like this, that sound oh so rational, but when you dig just a little you find people in deep deep denial. 

First of all, no need to attack me. Second, your source doesn't say anything about radiative forcing. Third, and most importantly, it does talk about LTE (Local Thermodynamic Equilibrium) and claims that it holds to 60km in our atmosphere. I checked a few sources and verified that number. I had assumed the statement "LTE does not hold in atmospheric conditions" to be true for ours but clearly at relevant altitudes it holds.

Since you seem to be aware of the relevant physics involved, I have another question if one of you wouldn't mind. LTE itself is used to simplify the Radiative Transfer equations. Another commonly used simplification is to ignore scattering by setting the coefficient to zero. The general equation is the basis for all climate models (to my knowledge) and essentially forms the basis for theory-based global climate study. The most well-known solution, Eddington's Approximation, leads to a temperature discontinuity at the surface in many models. To your knowledge, is there now a generally accepted solution (and relevant boundary conditions) to this equation? If so, does it still lead to the discontinuity?

I'm not one to argue with basic physics, but I will question assumptions and simplifications. LTE is met, thus the assumption of radiative equilibrium is valid. As far as I know, scientists are still arguing about how to best approach this problem.

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I see no need to pander to people who spout off about all the "problems" with climate physics that are in fact, not issues.  You seem to have backpedaled quite quickly from your initial "huge problem" with yet another "huge problem."  Funny about that ain't it. 
 

A simple two-stream approach as you've described only leads to a temperature discontinuity because it assumes the only upward energy transport mechanism is radiative and neglects advection and latent heat.  A real atmosphere transports heat in several ways.  So, there is no "solution" to a the temperature discontinuity in that approximation.  It is only when you model the dynamics (as climate models do (ok, they parameterize the subgrid scale stuff, but it is still in there)) does that disappear.

This is Climate Physics 101 stuff.  If these really are your objections to why the IPCC got it all wrong and the basis for your "skepticism" you are really a very common variety of climate skeptic.  

This next link seems like a paper by "just some guy" but it's not.  John G. Shepard FRS is a professor of oceanography at Southampton in the UK.  This is the most succint explanation of the concepts above I could find:

http://jgshepherd.com/publications/pdf/Rad-Conv%20Text.pdf

 gnpc,

No need to pander either. I have not moved from one problem to the next. Simplifications to the radiative transfer equation are necessary to solve it (or make models based on it). The "problems" I've been discussing aren't problems anyway - just a set of assumptions. The 1-d climate models MUST be correct if conservation of energy holds (the atmosphere cannot be gaining or losing energy and neither can the "surface" of the ground) and in most models, there are non-radiative transfer terms (for example, Kiehl and Trenberth, 1997).

Your professor (John G. Shepard) solves the transfer equation using the top of atmosphere boundary condition (pg 3). If you replace this with a different set of boundary conditions, you get different results. Let me phrase this another way: If there were a set of boundary conditions which solved the same flux equation but lead to no discontinuity, would you accept that as a possible substitute?

You first stated your "skepticism" of the role of CO2 in driving the observed warming was the "critical problem" that the atmosphere wasn't in radiative equilibrium.  When shown that was simply not correct, you moved on to the next canard (that a purely radiative model of energy flux through the atmosphere does a poor job of simulating observed vertical temperature profiles).  When shown that is wrong as well, you've now moved on to blathering on about boundary conditions.  I now suspect your having a bit of fun. 

Solve the RTE with any boundary condition you want, but the one that makes physical sense relevant to the global energy balance is the TOA.  Why?  Because that's the control volume surface.  So while different boundary conditions would give you a solution for something other than the global energy balance and I would accept it in that context, if you want to solve the global problem you had better use the boundary conditions relevant to the global problem.  I hope you're not going to cite that Hungarian paper as the "different set of boundary conditions."  Please don't.  It's wrong.  Ok?  Wrong.  Don't do it. 

It's all assumptions/boundary conditions. The vertical temperature profile (surface discontinuity) is unphysical even if you add in terms for convection. In fact, one might even call it a boundary condition to the RTE. At the core of the issue is the fact that we've used 2 boundary conditions to satisfy a 1st order differential equation. Don't you think it's appropriate to drop one of those? The one most scientists float is the condition that the ground temperature is equal to the air surface temperature (although, strangely, they solve the surface condition first).

Consider the condition given by your source - dF_net/dTau = 0, pg 5. At the "top layer" of the atmosphere, there is no possible way to be in radiative equilibrium with both the "layer below" and "layer above" since there is no layer above - all of the radiation emitted "up" by that layer is left unbalanced. Thus at the boundary - the boundary condition, if you will - dF_net/dTau != 0. Since you appear to appreciate citations, your source's condition is also a condition used in Goody and Yung, 1995. I am objecting to both treatments. In fact, the only place that "radiative flux divergence" is not 0 is at the discontinuous boundary between atmosphere and not-atmosphere which is the only place it is applied.
Edited by Brohem - 11/15/09 at 6:48am

The radiative equilibrium you speak of is the difference between the incoming and outgoing longwave energy for a layer.  The standard model assumes that the net flux (difference between upwelling and downwelling) is constant through the atmosphere.  At the TOA, the downward longwave flux goes to zero, the remaining upward flux is equal to the net flux, Fnet.  So that the difference between the upward and downward flux is still equal to the net flux, and the divergence of the flux is still equal to zero.  Since the downwelling flux is zero already at the TOA, it is irrelevant that there is no layer above the TOA to provide a downwelling flux.  The whole system is losing longwave energy (which is balanced by the downwelling shortwave solar flux), and that is the net flux out the top.  But the divergenc is still zero at the top, since that divergence is the net flux up. 

I'm not sure why you don't see this, although no doubt you've had this explained to you before (by smarter people than me), but you choose not to accept it because you are not, in fact, a skeptic.  More correctly, you are in denial that it is right.  You've elevated your denial a little beyond most people like yourself, but it's still denial.  For you, if it is right means you might have to accept that anthropogenic CO2 is affecting climate, and you can't do that. 

Anyway, aside from your psychology, I seriously doubt all these people who've made radiative transfer theory their life's work have gotten it wrong by making a freshman error in the boundary conditions.  When I get an answer that challenges decades-old theory worked out by some fairly sharp people that has been verified over and over, I recheck my work.  But that's just me.  
Edited by gcnp58 - 11/16/09 at 12:33am

I'm not sure I've explained myself well here. Clearly smarter people than either you or me are and have been working on this for ~100 years. That doesn't stop the fact that you can't have more boundary conditions than free parameters. The entire physics based argument for global warming revolves around a solution to the RTE which gives contradictory results. In physics, more than any other science, if the data does not match the theory one of the two has to change. Just look at the "Problems with the radiative model" section of the shepherd paper - those issues are the subject of many, many papers in climate science. It's because the science is still being worked out.

I've proposed examining the root of the problem - contradictory boundary conditions - only to be shot down with personal attacks. Once again, however, I'm going to attempt to explain: The problem arises from the fact that Fnet(z) is linear w.r.t. z until we get to TOA then it's constant. It's a piece-wise continuous, but NOT smooth function. The derivative at the boundary is not valid. As Shepard himself says,

"These expressions for Fup and Fdn may be integrated directly (but usually this must be done numerically) for any given temperature profile T(z)..."

This is the approach we are forced to take if we remove the dFnet/dTau|(tau = 0) = 0 requirement.

I guess it's probably time to acknowledge some of the personal attacks - I'm not a denialist, I'm a skeptic. There's a difference. I don't assume the AGW theory is wrong - I assume it's necessarily flawed. I was attempting to show a way to avoid those flaws from the outset (as other papers attempt to account for them). How is that intellectually dishonest? You all seem to have a great aversion to exploring the idea that the boundary conditions might be wrong - if anything, isn't that intellectually dishonest?

Your post above has two huge errors.  First, two boundary values for one free parameter is a classic von Neumann condition.  Second, Fnet is not linear with respect to altitude in radiative equilibrium.  Instead, Fnet is constant (i.e., the derivative of Fnet with respect to altitude is zero).  You continue to harp on things which simply aren't problems.  This denial of yours where you refuse to reconsider what you think you know, is why you aren't a skeptic. 

Shepard's section is actually titled "Problems with the pure radiative model" which implies that in a real atmosphere, more is going on than radiative heat transfer.  The science that is being worked out is how best to parameterize the convective and latent heat terms in the energy budget, not the fundamental science of radiative transfer.  That is known cold. 

You've decided the idea of radiative transfer *must* be wrong somewhere because emotionally you don't like the implications if it is essentially correct in nearly all details, so you've fabricated arguments that sound legitimate but are at best misguided.  Then, when shown your arguments are wrong, you get hurt and accuse everyone of insulting you.  Although I have no reservations whatsoever of pointing out in blunt terms where people are wrong (Dana can verify this, I am equally opportunistic in that regard), and why I think people like you continue to think they are right when they are wrong, it isn't meant to be insulting.  The truth sometimes hurts.  Deal. 

At any rate, I'm through responding to you.  I recognize when I am pounding my head against another oak-thick denialist.