Kerry, Graham, Lieberman announce a "dual track" on the climate bill

Washington Post ^ | 11/4/09 | David Fahrenthold

[Mozilla]

Even before a Senate committee could begin marking up the "Kerry-Boxer" climate bill, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) himself announced a new "track" of negotiations over climate policy that makes his original bill look somewhat irrelevant.

Kerry, appearing at the U.S. Capitol with Sens. Lindsay O. Graham (R-S.C.) and Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), said the three legislators would work with business groups and the White House to forge a compromise climate measure that could get 60 votes in the Senate.

These negotiations would be separate from the work that six different Senate committees are doing on climate legislation, including the markup that the Environment and Public Works committee was supposed to begin Tuesday, the senators said. Republican committee members, demanding more Environmental Protection Agency analysis of the bill's impacts, are boycotting that markup, so progress on the legislation has stalled.

Kerry said that the senators were not circumventing that committee's process or ignoring the bill being marked up -- which bears his name, along with that of Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.). "We're going to take the best [of the bill the committee produces], and we're going to build on it," he said.

Kerry gave few details about when he and the other senators would be done with their work. "When and how it becomes a piece of legislation will be determined by Harry Reid," he said.

Kerry, Graham and Lieberman offered few details about the elements of a climate bill they considered non-negotiable. Graham said that the bill should protect the climate, but also allow for more offshore drilling, an expansion of nuclear energy and an emphasis on "clean coal" technology.

[your local physicist]

But I’ll grant you this: your cynicism about politicians is justified and the number of politicians who know GW is a hoax could be more than I think.

[stephenjohnbanker]

I am no scientist, but I know how to use reason to arrive at an intelligent conclusion. There are a number of top scientists at M.I.T. and Caltech who have shot global warming all to hell. Many of the phony ones don’t even take water vapor into consideration. That is like doing an autopsy after having creamated the corpse ;-)

[stephenjohnbanker]

By the way, your home page is very well written.

Salute!

[palmer]

Warming from CO2 is simple:

Until you add the effects of water vapor. That is highly nonlinear, and can't be solved with equations or models with oversimplified weather.

The Bush White House didn't know that global warming theory is based on some of the same equations originally developed in 1921 which a group of Hungarian scientists have shown to be completely wrong

No and no. The warming from CO2 is real and is shown in the equation plotted above, but the feedback cannot be modeled with equations. However, water vapor feedback doesn't appear to follow the alarmist models (no big rise in UTWV seen).

[your local physicist]

That’s a nice-looking graph but it’s based on highly questionable assumptions. The basic equations underlying global warming theory are in dispute and new equations have been developed that fit the climate history record much more accurately. Current global warming theory doesn’t match the climate history and did not predict the lack of warming in the last ten years.

Take a look at this:

http://www.dailytech.com/Researcher+Basic+Greenhouse+Equations+Totally+Wrong/article10973.htm

From this article:

“Runaway greenhouse theories contradict energy balance equations,” Miskolczi states. Just as the theory of relativity sets an upper limit on velocity, his theory sets an upper limit on the greenhouse effect, a limit which prevents it from warming the Earth more than a certain amount.

How did modern researchers make such a mistake? They relied upon equations derived over 80 years ago, equations which left off one term from the final solution.

Miskolczi’s story reads like a book. Looking at a series of differential equations for the greenhouse effect, he noticed the solution — originally done in 1922 by Arthur Milne, but still used by climate researchers today — ignored boundary conditions by assuming an “infinitely thick” atmosphere. Similar assumptions are common when solving differential equations; they simplify the calculations and often result in a result that still very closely matches reality. But not always.

So Miskolczi re-derived the solution, this time using the proper boundary conditions for an atmosphere that is not infinite. His result included a new term, which acts as a negative feedback to counter the positive forcing. At low levels, the new term means a small difference ... but as greenhouse gases rise, the negative feedback predominates, forcing values back down.

NASA refused to release the results. Miskolczi believes their motivation is simple. “Money”, he tells DailyTech. Research that contradicts the view of an impending crisis jeopardizes funding, not only for his own atmosphere-monitoring project, but all climate-change research. Currently, funding for climate research tops $5 billion per year.

Miskolczi resigned in protest, stating in his resignation letter, “Unfortunately my working relationship with my NASA supervisors eroded to a level that I am not able to tolerate. My idea of the freedom of science cannot coexist with the recent NASA practice of handling new climate change related scientific results.”

His theory was eventually published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal in his home country of Hungary.

The conclusions are supported by research published in the Journal of Geophysical Research last year from Steven Schwartz of Brookhaven National Labs, who gave statistical evidence that the Earth’s response to carbon dioxide was grossly overstated. It also helps to explain why current global climate models continually predict more warming than actually measured.

The equations also answer thorny problems raised by current theory, which doesn’t explain why “runaway” greenhouse warming hasn’t happened in the Earth’s past. The new theory predicts that greenhouse gas increases should result in small, but very rapid temperature spikes, followed by much longer, slower periods of cooling — exactly what the paleoclimatic record demonstrates.

[your local physicist]

BTW, there's nothing "simple" about climate science. It's extremely complex with hundreds of assumptions and variables built into it, which is the main reason why the IPCC's climate model is totally useless and riddled with errors.

It's very telling the way NASA suppressed Miskolczi's research. NASA chose to suppress his research because Miskolczi makes a strong case for an alternative climate model that contradicts the theory NASA is heavily invested in. The EPA also suppressed one of its own analysts who wrote a report concluding that any global warming in the climate history is not caused by human activity or CO2. Why do government agencies insist on suppressing alternative viewpoints held by qualified scientists? It's because the current climate models and global warming theory owned by NASA and EPA are filled with errors and false assumptions and did not predict the historical climate record.

[your local physicist]

Here's an excellent summary of many of the errors and false assumptions in the IPCC's climate model. And they want to crush our economy and force us to cut CO2 output by 80% because of climate forecasts generated by a model that is a complete piece of trash and has been terribly inaccurate at forecasting historical temperatures. These UN people are dangerously insane.

[palmer]

His result included a new term, which acts as a negative feedback to counter the positive forcing. At low levels, the new term means a small difference ... but as greenhouse gases rise, the negative feedback predominates, forcing values back down

This is the part that I tripped on. The only plausible negative feedback is weather, mainly things like concentrated convection in the tropics. There is no way on earth that a weather model will fit into an equation.

[palmer]

Miskolczi makes a strong case for an alternative climate model

His is a model only in the sense that the incoming SW and outgoing LW can be analyzed for a particular column of air to determine net warming. Doing that for varying latitude columns is nice and gives you some general ideas. The problem is that the main parameter in the column is water vapor which can only be determined by modeling weather. In a sense Miskolczi makes the same mistake as the IPCC modelers in oversimplifying weather to a parameter or set of parameters. Then the argument devolves into whose assumptions are correct for which the answer is emphatically: neither.

[your local physicist]

"In a sense Miskolczi makes the same mistake as the IPCC modelers in oversimplifying weather to a parameter or set of parameters. Then the argument devolves into whose assumptions are correct for which the answer is emphatically: neither."

If you don't have confidence in the IPCC's model, then why did you post that graph?

You don't see any plausible reason for the negative feedback in his alternative climate model. But I'm sure he had a good reason to put that in the model. We would have to read his paper published in Hungary to find the reason. It's not easy to deduce what the reason is because climate science is so complex. There are all kinds of physical processes going on in our atmosphere: reflection and absorption of EMR, transfers of heat from the atmosphere to land and seas, radiation of heat away from the earth by the atmosphere, land, and oceans, etc.. It's not simple and it's very difficult to model correctly. That's why we need to stop cap and trade immediately until we get the science completely figured out.

[your local physicist]

Then there are all the physical processes involved in CO2 transfers between the atmosphere and soil and between the atmosphere and oceans. There are hundreds of assumptions in these models and if just one key assumption is substantially in error, then all the forecasts produced by the model can be totally wrong. That’s what has happened with the IPCC’s model, except that model has numerous errors.

[palmer]

That last link isn’t bad but has errors, IPCC models do include cloud albedo for example. Many of the other points apply to some models but not others (I don’t enough about the differences to comment intelligently). On point 4, the author makes a big deal about Mona Loa measurements versus polar (e.g. in ice cores). But that gradient is less than 1 ppm where we are talking about 20 ppm rise per decade. On the general point of CO2 increases, there is little doubt that the bulk of CO2 comes from fossil fuels, however some of the increase is natural. The IPCC consistently fails to quantify the natural component, but the natural CO2 arguments are also not quantitative (like those in that link).

[palmer]

Because it is not the IPCC's graph. It is from a well-researched skeptical site. The CO2 warming effect is not in question, only the magnitude and especially any feedback.

The reason they can't just put in feedback is that it depends on the concentration of water vapor. Higher concentrations, especially at higher altitudes, are warming. More diffuse water vapor is warming. OTOH, concentrated water vapor turns into rain and is cooling. Concentrated convection also dries the upper troposphere and is cooling. I think the biggest gap in your list of heat transfer and his equations is convection. Convection is really about weather. I agree with your last sentence 100%.

[palmer]

I’m sure the CO2 modeling is quite poor. But that doesn’t really change the fact that the CO2 increases are primarily fossil fuels, not outgassing. But plant uptake and sequestration in soil is not modeled well, however it is fair to say that those physical processes change slowly compared to the current rise in CO2.

[your local physicist]

Well the Hungarians and Steven Schwartz are questioning the magnitude of any warming and saying it's greatly overstated. The Hungarians seem to be saying actual warming is close to zero. It makes no sense to me intuitively that a small concentration of CO2 replacing a small concentration of O2 in the atmosphere could cause such a dramatic amount of warming, especially considering that water vapor is far more abundant than CO2 and has 30-50 times more impact on the earth's climate. I think you're on the right track and the modeling problems are most likely in the feedback effects of water vapor. That's a tough process to model because you can't create an artificial atmosphere in your lab and run measurements. They would have to use an airplane capable of flying at high altitude and then run a lot of measurements of temperature and electromagnetic radiation at various altitudes to try to figure out how much energy is absorbed and reflected by clouds.

The most amazing thing to me about the global warming debate is the overconfidence with which these IPCC people state their conclusions. Climate science is really just getting up to speed and there are all kinds of unanswered questions. I suspect some of the IPCC people are just trying to error on the side of caution, but in the long run it's a mistake to greatly overstate the certainty level in their climate forecasts. There's human vanity involved here too; people like to think they know more than they really know about incredibly complex subjects.

[your local physicist]

My intuitive sense for global warming theory is that the actual warming effect of CO2 is very small and less than 10% of what the IPCC says it is, and essentially all of this warming is canceled out by negative feedback from the reflection of sunlight by clouds, so that the actual impact of CO2 on temperature is very close to ZERO. That’s what the temperature history has started to confirm. I’ll bet anyone a six-pack of their favorite beer that this will be the scientific consensus in ten years. I’ll freepmail all takers in ten years to collect my bets, then “party like it’s 1999.”