Given Roy Spencer’s credentials, it’s far more likely that apsmith doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Conservation of energy is not the issue. At equilibrium, the energy leaving the atmosphere is approximately equal to the energy entering. The real issue is the latency of the energy at ground level. Spencer’s point was that water at the surface absorbs energy by evaporating and then releases that energy by condensing higher up in the atmosphere, where the energy is more likely to escape into space.

A perfect example is a thunderstorm. The latent heat from condensing water vapor allows the column of moist air to keep rising in a self-perpetuating cycle that can drive water vapor to the top of the troposphere. If water vapor never rose more than a meter higher then the elevation it evaporated at, then apsmith could get away with an assinine statement like “There’s no net warming or cooling effect from the presence of a constant amount of water vapor in the atmosphere.” What a strange world that would be. Apsmith is the perfect example of someone who believes in global warming because of faith rather than knowledge of the science.

compared with the thousands of reputable scientists disagree

This is mostly political opinions. No one can reliable predict weather for 10 days even. Claming predictions for 100 years is woodoo.

calling them a bunch of religious cultists is not exactly engaging in scientific debate on the merits

Your argument “it must be true because a lot of people believe so” is not particularly scientific either.

Spencer seems to be confused about rather basic concepts like conservation of energy

Actually you seem to be confused about conservation of energy. Conservation of energy holds for closed systems only. Earth is not a closed system. Besides, he talks about a local disbalance.

water vapor doesn’t stay in the air – when it rains, all that energy is released again

Yes. And you miss the point again. It’s not that it rains, but where it rains. It’s not about the total energy, it’s about energy distribution

The scenario of only 2 deg F warming is smaller than what is published in the scientific journals. I will believe Dr. Spencer’s claim is plausible only when I see it published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

TCS often publishes factual errors, and the website is operated by a Washington lobbying firm. TCS is not a credible source of scientific information, no matter how prominent a scientist they select to do a column.

The possibility that individual scientists are biased is even more reason to base public policy on consensus science.

Spencer is wrong about estimates of climate sensitivity being a religion. There is plenty of evidence supporting the range of climate sensitivities published in the scientific journals.

I e-mailed a professor of atmospheric science at my university to ask him about Dr. Spencer’s claim of 100 deg F for radiative cooling, and he said “no way” – its more like 20 deg F. But anyways, whatever radiative cooling there is, it is already included in the climate models.

I posted the above and I am new here and did not know I had to use html formatting.

The combobox next to the Preview and Post buttons is “HTML Formatted” by default, but you can change it to instead be “Plain Text” or “Auto Format”.

Thanks for explaining what he may have been talking about. 100 degrees seems a bit much for such an effect however. Sorry I misunderstood his statement. I think I’ve explained elsewhere I’m not an expert in the field, but as you suggest, credentials are important. Most of the people with credentials, including the American Geophysical Union, which I’ve cited, think this is a very serious issue. Nothing you’ve said, or that Spencer said, refutes the seriousness.

weather and climate are two different things. Read up on it.

Are you saying the climat models account for all such subtle effects as <a href="http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/02/040206075522.htm">insect poop</a>?

Most of your links are good – they lead to reputable independent scientific organizations. The reports by the IPCC and the National Academy of Sciences and other expert panels are based on the peer-reviewed scientific literature, and we have no choice but to rely on these experts because we cannot sort through all the complexities on our own.

But I think the Union of Concerned Scientists should be categorized as an advocacy group. (They are a good one though, and they do a good job of explaining the science.)

The figure of 2 degrees F in the next hundred years without any feedback is smaller than the consensus figure (again assuming no feedback).

A good, brief reference book is the one by Sir John Houghton (cheif climatologist for the UK and IPCC chair), “Global Warming: the Complete Briefing.” It gives a range of values for climate sensitivity for different feedback assumptions.

Doubling atmospheric CO2 without any feedback would produce 1.2 deg C (about 2 deg F), but CO2 is more likely to quadruple above preindustrial levels within this century.

And then you also should add in anthropogenic methane, nitrous oxides, CFCs, perflourocarbons, and other greenhouse gases. (Right now these account for half of the enhanced greenhouse effect.)

Here is a good site:
http://www.geosc.psu.edu/~kkeller/teaching/earth02/lecture8.pdf

Anyways, it is possible that only a 2 degree C increase would destroy most of the world’s coral reefs. And, over a period of thousands of years, the 2 degree increase would melt the polar ice caps (which have been around for the past 20 million years).

The figure of 2 degrees F in the next hundred years without any feedback is smaller than the consensus figure (again assuming no feedback).

Let’s just lobby for a law which says science must be conducted by a majority vote. Whatever the majority believes in by definition is the Ultimate Truth.

Why would you base an opinion on clearly wrong assumptions?

A good, brief reference book is the one by Sir John Houghton

Well there is another good book “Man-Made Global Warming: Unravelling a Dogma”. It’s written by mere PhDs, not “Sirs”.

By the way, do you have to go to college to get a “Sir” degree? What does it have to do with science? If nothing, then why do you bring it up?

Great. Does this we’ll have to endure yet another illuminating post from ‘jdoe’ each and every time some crank speaks up?

Does SciScoop have a twit filter feature?

Great.

Thank you

Does this we’ll have to endure

Please list the names of people who are included in we above and what kind of authority you have to speak for them.

post from ‘jdoe’

So, what do you, ‘zappini’ have to say on the subject, except for feeble attempts at insulting me?

each and every time some crank

OK, suppose the scientist is a crank because you disagree with his views. Now, considering your own very professional post, please try to qualify yourself. Be fair.

Does SciScoop have a twit filter feature

Are you sure it’s not going to be used against you?

Have the ice caps been there for 30-20 million years, or only since the beginning of the Pleiocene about 5 million years ago?

Oh, but you said “polar ice caps”. You must have mean the Antarctic, as the ice in the Arctic Ocean is already in the ocean. And large amounts of the ice in the Arctic have been regularly melting anyway.

Oh, 2 degrees of warming is fine, if we’ve warmed 1 degree already. The temperature during the mid-Holocene Climatic Optimum was about 3 degrees warmer than our recent cold spell.

What are your information sources? To me it sounds like your science is coming from a coal-industry-sponsored website such as co2science.com, or a lobbyist run website such as techcentralstation.com.

My information sources say that an additional 2 degrees C of warming, sustained over thousands of years, can completely melt the Antarctic ice cap, which has been around for 20 million years. If I remember correctly, I got that from an article published in Science.

Also, be careful not to confuse Celsius with Fahrenheit. (degrees Celsius are bigger).

Obviously, the scientists themselves decide based on observations and mathematical theories, not by majority vote. The rest of us who are not experts much rely summaries of the scientists findings put out by recognized panels of experts, such as at http://www.ipcc.ch. You can also take a look at the scientific journals.

What Roy Spencer is doing is bypassing the scientific peer review process and presenting his own personal opinions to the public on a website run by lobbyists. This is why people here are calling him a “shill.”

Obviously, Sir John Houghton has a PhD, and he has authored many books and hundreds of papers on atmospheric physics, and he chaired the world’s most comprehensive assessment of climate change science. I do not know exactly how a British citizen gets to be called “Sir.” I know you get called “Sir” if you get knighted, but I am not sure how else you can get the title.

The “Unravelling a Dogma” book was written by people who do not have any scientific expertise on the subject.

I see what you have done. You confused Celsius and Fahrenheit and you confused Antarctic temperatures with global temperatures.

“polar temperature change is larger than global mean temperature change by about a factor of two.” from http://naturalscience.com/ns/articles/01-16/ns_jeh3.html

This article by NASA scientist James Hansen shows the paleoclimate record and gives a balanced discussion of global warming.

Obviously, the scientists themselves decide based on observations and mathematical theories, not by majority vote.

Exactly. Decisions are based on theories. Theories are accepted or rejected based on their testable predictions. I.e. conduct such and such an experiment and get such and such results. Where are the experiments unambigiously proving that the warming is technogenic? In the past 2000 years there were periods when global temperatures were higher and lower than now. During the last Ice Age temperatures were much lower than now. How do you know the current warming is not a part of a natural cycle? Computer models can be constructed to prove either way.

The rest of us who are not experts much rely summaries of the scientists findings put out by recognized panels of experts, such as at http://www.ipcc.ch

It’s still an opinion, not fact. No matter how much respect they have, they can’t have a monopoly on an opinion.

So far it’s been a mostly political battle of opinions, not scientific facts. The observations can be interpreted both ways, computer models are not precise enough. Both sides have a lot of money at stake. It’s politics, not science.

Obviously, Sir John Houghton has a PhD

Maybe it’s obvious to you, but a far as I am concerned one can be a high school dropout and still have a “Sir” attached to his name.

You should register instead of posting as AH.

I intentionally did not specify F or C because it doesn’t matter much. The temperature has changed by much more than these few degrees.

If you look just before your “polar temperature change” quote you’ll see that it says right there that right now we’re about as warm as the Holocene Optimum, and it was a little warmer in the Eemian. Indeed, Figure 2 shows similar patterns across 400,000 years.

..and of course warming in a cold area is more significant than in a warm area.

Actually, I was asking your sources. My sources were numerous — hop to Google and collect your own set. That 20-30 million year age is hard to find as a date for how long the ice sheet has been there.

A fresh Google (antarctic ice sheet million years) now shows a variety from 3-40 million. But the oldest dates are when the Antarctic Circumpolar Current was established, and when the present ice sheet first could begin. That doesn’t mean the ice is that old. Indeed, the 5th Google result says that 3-5 million years ago the ice sheet was perhaps half its present size. So at least half that ice (area, or volume?) has not existed undisturbed for 40 million years.