Bad Science

speaking of septics, the economist has taken up the term

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21574492-being-tough-bank-credito…

\/\/ writes:
> an ‘unholy alliance’ of scientists helped make
> sure the issue was made public.

I just want to say that in \/\/'s original, linking "unholy alliance" [of scientists] to a Wikipedia reference unrelated to the scientists or what they did -- is clever.

> he is only postdoc with a nature publication

Izzat the one and only postdoc ever to publish in Nature?
Or izzat merely a postdoc despite having a Nature publication?

Speaking about bad science, there's a nice paper by Benestad, etal in open comment here.. It examines the errors in a set of peer-viewed, but bad papers, and looks for commonalities.

[Wrong link? That's Muller -W]

Hank Roberts" \/\/ writes:
> an ‘unholy alliance’ of scientists helped make
> sure the issue was made public."

And another wrong link. I did not write that.

You probably mean this post by Andy Extance:
http://simpleclimate.wordpress.com/2013/05/04/google-search-basis-under…

William, thanks for the compliment.

Re the Nature Geo article - this raises again the question of effective vs equilibrium climate sensitivity. Equation 1 in the letter is actually describing effective sensitivity, as defined by the IPCC, of which equilibrium CS is only a special case: http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/345.

My question is still whether we can rule out that their calculations are significantly different from a true equilibrium measurement using truly equilibrium temperature, heat, and forcing numbers. I don't have a view either way, but I've not seen a clear response, and ultimately the onus is on the authors to rule it out.

Another bad link. Try this
http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/345.htm

Sorry, thanks for that.

not suppressing the unusual but good

try not suppressing the unusual but interesting (and wrong). Sometimes those are the important ones.

re: #5, Argh.
Benestad, Hygen, van Dorland, Cook and Nuccitelli. Agnotology: learning from mistakes.

Well, regarding climate sensitivity, what is your take on the new research published by Julie Brigham-Grette, showing that a few million years ago, temperatures were much higher at current levels of CO2 than today, indicating a very high climate sensitivity?
Link is http://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/ice-free-arctic-may-be-our-future , or here http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/350292/description/The_Arcti… .

Some comments on that? Sounds quite worrying to me

> \/\/
My mistake, I wasn't referring to "Victor Venema"
-- I was referring to a reference I saw at Russell's "\/\/attsup" blog, and must've pasted to the wrong window.

You found the source he was referring to -- Andy Extance's writing. Thank you.

Speaking of bad science, Forbes continues:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterferrara/2013/05/26/to-the-horror-of-gl…

[Definitely bad, but not science. Denialist trash -W]

[This one got held in moderation, and I didn't notice. Its junk, though. See the "visiting physicist" comments at The idealised greenhouse effect model and its enemies for more of the same -W]

You are believing in "bad science" if you believe that planetary surface temperatures are all to do with radiative forcing rather than non-radiative heat transfers, then you are implicitly agreeing with IPCC authors (and Dr Roy Spencer) that a column of air in the troposphere would have been isothermal but for the assumed greenhouse effect. You are believing this because you are believing the 19th century simplification of the Second Law of Thermodynamics which said heat only transfers from hot to cold - a "law" which is indeed true for all radiation, but only strictly true in a horizontal plane for non-radiative heat transfer by conduction.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics in its modern form explains a process in which thermodynamic equilibrium "spontaneously evolves" and that thermodynamic equilibrium will be the state of greatest accessible entropy.

Now, thermodynamic equilibrium is not just about temperature, which is determined by the mean kinetic energy of molecules, and nothing else. Pressure, for example, does not control temperature. Thermodynamic equilibrium is a state in which total accessible energy (including potential energy) is homogeneous, because if it were not homogeneous, then work could be done and so entropy could still increase.

When such a state of thermodynamic equilibrium evolves in a vertical plane in any solid, liquid or gas, molecules at the top of a column will have more gravitational potential energy (PE), and so they must have less kinetic energy (KE), and so a lower temperature, than molecules at the bottom of the column. This state evolves spontaneously as molecules interchange PE and KE in free flight between collisions, and then share the adjusted KE during the next collision.

This postulate was put forward by the brilliant physicist Loschmidt in the 19th century, but has been swept under the carpet by those advocating that radiative forcing is necessary to explain the observed surface temperatures. Radiative forcing could never explain the mean temperature of the Venus surface, or that at the base of the troposphere of Uranus - or that at the surface of Earth.

The gravitationally induced temperature gradient in every planetary troposphere is fully sufficient to explain all planetary surface temperatures. All the weak attempts to disprove it, such as a thought experiment with a wire outside a cylinder of gas, are flawed, simply because they neglect the temperature gradient in the wire itself, or other similar oversights.

The gravity effect is a reality and the dispute is not an acceptable disagreement.

The issue is easy to resolve with a straight forward, correct understanding of the implications of the spontaneous process described in statements of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Hence radiative forcing is not what causes the warming, and so carbon dioxide has nothing to do with what is just natural climate change.