Re: [Marxism] Chuck Grimes comments on Cockburn (from LBO-Talk)
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 12/27/2009 5:57 PM, Leonardo Kosloff wrote: I was wondering if you've heard of Piers Corbyn and his group in weatheraction.com, who dismiss global warming as 'non-sense'http://www.weatheraction.com/pages/pv.asp?p=wact10fsize=0 . i'm aware of the attempts to correlate weather patterns with solar activity. i don't find them impressive, do you? Piers Corbyn is an astro-physicist so was Jim Hansen ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hansen i first heard about climate change and the greenhouse effect in astrophysics lectures on planetary atmospheres back in the 80's. i always respected the atmospheric scientists' work, it was both data- and theory- rich. having known the community is probably one reason why i pretty much dismiss the CRU email thing, though i would have chosen to handle things differently than Jones et al in terms of battling politically and scientifically. here is Hansen: The nature of messages that I receive from the public, and the fact that NASA Headquarters received more than 2500 inquiries in the past week about our possible “manipulation” of global temperature data, suggest that the concerns are more political than scientific. Perhaps the messages are intended as intimidation, expected to have a chilling effect on researchers in climate change. The recent “success” of climate contrarians in using the pirated East Anglia e-mails to cast doubt on the reality of global warming* seems to have energized other deniers. I am now inundated with broad FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests for my correspondence, with substantial impact on my time and on others in my office. I believe these to be fishing expeditions, aimed at finding some statement(s), likely to be taken out of context, which they would attempt to use to discredit climate science. [snip] There are other researchers who work more extensively on global temperature analyses than we do – our main work concerns global satellite observations and global modeling – but there are differences in perspectives, which, I suggest, make it useful to have more than one analysis. Besides, it is useful to combine experience working with observed temperature together with our work on satellite data and climate models. This combination of interests is likely to help provide some insights into what is happening with global climate and information on the data that are needed to understand what is happening. So we will be keeping at it. *By “success” I refer to their successful character assassination and swift-boating. My interpretation of the e-mails is that some scientists probably became exasperated and frustrated by contrarians – which may have contributed to some questionable judgment. The way science works, we must make readily available the input data that we use, so that others can verify our analyses. Also, in my opinion, it is a mistake to be too concerned about contrarian publications – some bad papers will slip through the peer-review process, but overall assessments by the National Academies, the IPCC, and scientific organizations sort the wheat from the chaff. The important point is that nothing was found in the East Anglia e-mails altering the reality and magnitude of global warming in the instrumental record. The input data for global temperature analyses are widely available, on our web site and elsewhere. If those input data could be made to yield a significantly different global temperature change, contrarians would certainly have done that – but they have not. from: http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2009/20091216_TemperatureOfScience.pdf Here's a video of him with a Russian meteorologist on the issue about those hacked e-mails, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anHuOAXIl0M i'll take a look at this ... Basically, the two things he claims there are that CO2 does not drive temperature and that temperatures have actually gone down in the last decade. the usual fare. if we had a couple years we could have an interesting debate on the science of climate. Les Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Chuck Grimes comments on Cockburn (from LBO-Talk)
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 12/20/09 6:00 PM, Chuck Grimes wrote: From AC, another quote indicating a problem with the physics of the AGW model: ``Greenhouse gasses in the cold upper atmosphere, even when warmed a bit by absorbed infrared, cannot possibly transfer heat to the warmer earth, incredible ... and in fact radiate their absorbed heat into outer space[snip] ... ' AC Cockburn has it exactly backward. The upper atmosphere does not transfer heat to the surface. It's the surface that heats the atmosphere. the greenhouse effect is a little different from the blanket/insulator model .. in the case of cooler gases, they still can radiate energy to a warmer surface, it's just that they absorb from the surface more than they radiate ... the NET effect is that surface radiates to the atmosphere. but look at the numbers: 492 W/m2 is radiated away by the earth's surface in the infrared, for comparison, only 235 W/m2 of solar radiation strikes the *top* of the atmosphere, while 324 W/m2 is radiated from the atmosphere back down to the earth's surface (cf. sylas). the NET energy IS radiated upwards, but without that CO2 (and H2O) absorption, the surface and atmosphere could run cooler. i wonder how these clowns would explain the high temperatures on Venus ... I looked up this article and found it was disputed to near derision, especially among the math-physics crowd. they make some serious errors. but also, the errors are very clever. for example, attacking the heat engine description of atmospheric physics. these guys know the right words to make their article SOUND serious. except they have completely non-understood the heat engine description. these kinds of clever arguments WILL be effective in being distracting ... by the way, there ARE measurements of the radiation fluxes at the top of the atmosphere. Les Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Chuck Grimes comments on Cockburn (from LBO-Talk)
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Hi Les, I was wondering if you've heard of Piers Corbyn and his group in weatheraction.com, who dismiss global warming as 'non-sense' http://www.weatheraction.com/pages/pv.asp?p=wact10fsize=0 . Piers Corbyn is an astro-physicist and an ex-member of the Internationalist Socialist group and was quite active back in the day, it seems. Here's a video of him with a Russian meteorologist on the issue about those hacked e-mails, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anHuOAXIl0M Basically, the two things he claims there are that CO2 does not drive temperature and that temperatures have actually gone down in the last decade. And there's also an interview, apparently done by the Larouchites, here http://www.larouchepub.com/other/interviews/2007/3422piers_corbyn.html ...is he our climate Hitchens? _ Your E-mail and More On-the-Go. Get Windows Live Hotmail Free. http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/171222985/direct/01/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Chuck Grimes comments on Cockburn (from LBO-Talk)
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == (from Turning Tricks, Cashing In on Fear): In other words, only a few weeks before the Copenhagen summit, here is a scientist in the inner AGW circle disclosing that “we are not close to knowing” whether the supposedly proven agw model of the earth’s climate actually works, and that therefore “geo-engineering” – global carbon-mitigation, for example -- is “hopeless”. Alexander Cockburn http://www.counterpunch.org/ -- AGW stands for Anthropogenic Global Warming. AC sets up the conflict between the warmers and the coolers and puts 99% of left and progressives on the warmers side. Evidently, AC is a strong skeptic about AGW and uses his essay to dismantle the credibility of the warmers via the emails from the East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU). The claim is that the data base was cherry picked for the warmer's while the mitigating data supporting the coolers was actively suppressed. The integrity of this data is important because the UN panel IPCC based their `Summaries for Policy Makers' on these (and other?) reports. AC goes on to charge that much of the academic research, journal articles, and scientific publications devoted to climate change supporting the warmers was driven by needs for grant money and boosts in circulation. He includes Scientific American, Science, and Nature in the lot. Near the end of the essay AC writes: ``As for the nightmare of vanishing ice caps and inundating seas, the average Arctic ice coverage has essentially remained unchanged for the last 20 years, and has actually increased slightly over the last 3 years. The rate of rise of sea level has declined significantly over the last 3 years, and its average rate of rise for the last 20 years is about the same as it has been for the last 15,000 years...'' AC I realize CounterPunch is not a science journal and Cockburn is probably not used to writing about science. But if I was going to write something like the above, I would note where I got those figures. It's very simple, you write, `So-and-so found that...' In addition, I would try to verify the correctness of how those figures were found. There are a lot of misleading implications in the above. For instance, ice coverage might have remained little changed, but the ice thickness has changed, and changed a lot more. The perimeter or area can change little, while the changes in volume can be large. What's going on here is a math trick. The rate of change of surface varies as the square of radius r of a sphere. The rate of change of volume varies as the cube of r of a sphere. From AC, another quote indicating a problem with the physics of the AGW model: ``Greenhouse gasses in the cold upper atmosphere, even when warmed a bit by absorbed infrared, cannot possibly transfer heat to the warmer earth, and in fact radiate their absorbed heat into outer space. Readers interested in the science can read mathematical physicist Gerhard Gerlich’s and Ralf Tscheuchner’s detailed paper published in The International Journal of Modern Physics, updated in January, 2009, `Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics'. '' AC Cockburn has it exactly backward. The upper atmosphere does not transfer heat to the surface. It's the surface that heats the atmosphere. I looked up this article and found it was disputed to near derision, especially among the math-physics crowd. The essential problems with the article depend on the methods to make theoretical measures in their contra-warmer model. In other words the authors were accused of using math tricks, of similar type to my example of the difference between rates of change of area and those of volume. We have an atmosphere which is heated from the surface. The heat is radiated away in space in greater or lesser quantities over time through the atmosphere. In the long view there is no violation of thermodynamics, because given sufficient time, the totals absorbed and radiated away will balance. However, the empirical case is the atmosphere acts like a semi-permeable insulator and slows or speeds these potential heat losses. The best candidate for this insulator effect are carbon compounds. More carbon, fewer losses, greater rise in temperature. Less carbon, greater loss, lower rise in temperature. Go here, then scan down to comment by sylas for the arguments against the journal article Cockburn cited: http://www.physicsforums.com/archive/index.php/t-300667.html ``At the end of section 3.7.6, page 66, the authors make two claims. The speaks of a physically incorrect assumption of radiative balance. That's ludicrous. By the first law, there is necessarily a long term balance between the energy arriving from the Sun
