Martin A

"the energy arriving at the Earth's surface via the so-called back radiation summing to zero with the correspondingly increased emitted energy."

True under stable conditions.

Surface longwave radiation - downwelling radiation = Outward longwave radiation =insolation

Under those conditions downwelling radiation is constant and temperature is stable. The energy content of the system is constant.

You might describe this as a zero-sum system since the the change in energy with time is zero.

Under warming conditions such as AGW the balance is disturbed. Increased CO2 increases the downwelling radiation and increases effective TOA altitude.

The result is that surface longwave radiation - downwelling radiation is less than insolation. The system accumulates energy.

As surface and other temperatures rise, surface longwave radiation increases. Finally this increases by the same amount as the increased downwelling radiation and the balance between OLR and insolation returns.

To achieve this the heat content of the system has increased with time, not zero-sum by ssat's criteria.

Martin A

It seems very restrictive to expect all analogies to be cast in the language of electric circuits. A biologist, geologist or astronomer uses analogies from his own area of expertise. Thus I find it easy to understand energy flow in climate systems because of my experience of energy flow in ecosystems.

You seem to define "useful" as within your own limited area of expertise. Fair enough. You do not seem widely read outside your own speciality, so I will endeavour to keep future analogies electrical.

Hmmmm.... with the speed at which CO2 is increasing, I wonder how valid the claims about "unstable conditions" actually are?

Martin A

You have claimed accompliahments before, unfortunately as long as you remain anonymous I can only judge you by what you write. Like Radical Rodent I can only judge the limits of your ignorance by the areas in which I refer to something and you react with puzzlement. Mapping past replies you seem to have expertise in electronics, but big gaps in biology, geology, chemistry, astronomy and, surprisingly, physics.

SandyS is another electronics man, with similar gaps to yourself.

I haven't worked out what expertise, if any, Radical Rodent and geronimo possess.

OK, I'll bite, EM.
What big gaps of Martin A's knowledge have you mapped in Biology and Chemistry?
I may not have seen them.

Michal hart

I'm not going to dig back through years of comments but a couple of examples come to mind.

He shares Latimer Alder's delusion that you cannot measure pH to better precision than 0.1.

I mention energy flow in biological systems, photosynthesis and respiration, changes in treeline altitude and get the literary equivalent of blank looks.

He was unable to use specific heat and thermal expansion coefficient to calculate a year's energy accumulation in the global ocean.

I recently used a geological analogy when discussing the structure of the OLR and he clearly had no idea of cave structure.

Michael hart

On, he does know game theory. ☺

The problem is that EM is ignorant of physics and the scientific method. He is a scientivist.

Here is the exchange that leads Entropic Man to conclude that Martin A "clearly has no idea of cave structure".

EM:

...
The IPCC definition refers to radiative forcing under standard conditions as a change in downwelling radiation with time. The tropopause reference is because downwelling radiation can often be easier to measure from orbit as the difference between the OLR and the black body radiation at TOA.

To use a cave analogy, think of a limestone cave with a flat floor and a domed roof.

The amount of black body radiation is the total volume of the cave,.

The OLR is the volume of air in the cave and the downwelling radiation is the volume of the stalactites.
...

Jul 4, 2015 at 11:24 PM Entropic man

Martin A:

EM
Sorry to break it to you, but your analogies (eg 'volume of stalectites' ≍ 'downwelling radiation') are distracting rather than helpful.

Jul 5, 2015 at 9:24 AM Martin A

From this exchange, Entropic Man deduces that Martin A "clearly has no idea of cave structure". This is a good illustration of the sort of nonsense that Entropic Man comes up with and states as fact.

(Note as an aside that Entropic Man seems to think that "the total volume of the cave" is not the same as "the volume of air in the cave". Mental confusion?)

It would be a bit surprising if Martin A really could not do O-level physics calculations in specific heat and expansion.

Did Martin A actually admit that such calculations were beyond his abilities? Or did Entropic Man merely deduce it in the same way he deduced that Martin A "clearly has no idea of cave structure"?

MJ, I'll confess I only asked EM for a laugh. He likes to claim things he thinks people said, and I sometimes enjoy reading them.

No known accomplishments or skills.

Mike you are, as ever, right. Most of the so-called lines of evidence are seriously flawed. I suppose you could look for a signal in the GATA data if you were sure that exactly the same weather stations were used over the period under review, and the data was collected in exactly the same way, but that's not what they do, so any hope that there is a meaningful signal about temperature in the data is futile. The notion that the oceans can yield a meaningful average pH is infantile. What's more, the oceans have been around billions of years when CO2 was ten times or more than today and not once have they been acidic. (Note for activists the oceans can only get more acidic if they are already acidic, and they've never been acidic and aren't now).

Robert Burns says it all as far as I'm concerned about EM

Ye see yon birkie, ca'd a lord,
Wha struts, an' stares, an' a' that;
Tho' hundreds worship at his word,
He's but a coof for a' that:
For a' that, an' a' that,
His ribband, star, an' a' that:
The man o' independent mind
He looks an' laughs at a' that.

In Em's case the 100s worshiping at his word would be school children in their early teens, probably no others here.

Mike J. Shame about the Aussies, although it's a five day test and the buggers are nothing if they're not resilient.

"— increasingly charlatans like Nuccitelli are making themselves look ridiculous with claims that a decline in sea ice over 30 years represents the "long-term". It barely represents the long-term in the history of industrialisation let alone the current inter-glacial, let alone the total span of the earth's climate."

They've also got to deal with it increasing instead of decreasing. I was surprised that Richard Betts, late of this parish, found that SkS had some interesting things to say. I don't normal associate the views of people who photoshop themselves in Naze paraphernalia with "interesting". I think Richard's given up on us now.

To be fair I'm not sure that we aren't exaggerating the effects of mitigation because of our own fears. On the other hand we do know that the mitigationers aren't mitigating to save the world, in their own words they are mitigating to change the world.

Never trust an Aussie with a cricket bat - or ball. It's not over yet.