The Hockey Stick Graph Reality

[SSDD]

The point is that because certain frequencies of light are capable of penetrating many meters into water means THEY ARE NOT BEING RAPIDLY ABSORBED. That other frequencies do not penetrate far MEANS THAT THEY ARE BEING RAPIDLY ABSORBED.

Don't you ever think?

The oceans warm the atmosphere...not the other way around...don't you think...and once again..there is no back radiation warming anything...not the land..not the oceans...CO2 increases the emissivity of the atmosphere...by definition when you increase the emissivity of a system, the temperature drops..

 

[Toddsterpatriot]

The point is that because certain frequencies of light are capable of penetrating many meters into water means THEY ARE NOT BEING RAPIDLY ABSORBED. That other frequencies do not penetrate far MEANS THAT THEY ARE BEING RAPIDLY ABSORBED.

Don't you ever think?

The oceans warm the atmosphere...not the other way around...don't you think...and once again..there is no back radiation warming anything...not the land..not the oceans...CO2 increases the emissivity of the atmosphere...by definition when you increase the emissivity of a system, the temperature drops..

CO2 increases the emissivity of the atmosphere

CO2 increases the absorptivity of the atmosphere.

 

[westwall]

Where to start. FCT is correct that the reason you'll get burned by steel is its high thermal conductivity. However, this ignores the point as to how the thermal energy got there in the first place. The argument that Westwall (and other deniers here) is attempting to make, that the ocean cannot absorb IR radiation because it only penetrates a short distance is completely specious. It penetrates thousands of times further into water than it does into steel and yet - somehow - the steel grows warmer.

Thermal conductivity of selected materials ("the quantity of heat transmitted through a unit thickness of a material - in a direction normal to a surface of unit area - due to a unit temperature gradient under steady state conditions"

Thermal conductivity units is W/(m K) in the SI system and Btu/(hr ft °F) in the Imperial system.

At 25C

Air: 0.024
Carbon steel: 43
Water 0.58

Note that water has 24 times the thermal conductivity of air. That means that a unit of heat energy at the ocean's skin is extremely more likely to be conducted deeper into the water than upward into the air even ignoring the difficulty of crossing the material interface.

This value for conductivity also excludes physical mixing, which is, of course, taking place in ocean water at a near infinitely greater pace than in your slab of carbon steel.

And there is also the difference in specific heat capacity. It requires 4.184 joules of energy to raise the temperature of one gram of water by 1 centigrade degree. The specific heat capacity of air is 1.006 joules to raise one gram by one centigrade degree. Therefore, heat transfer driven by temperature differential is going to tend towards the water, since it can absorb more than four times the energy per temperature change. The water will maintain the differential four times as well as will the air.

And then I would like to address the oft-denier-repeated phrase, "heat rises". First, the phrase is factually incorrect. Heat travels unpreferentially in all directions. The term originates from the effects of buoyancy. All fluids (air, water, etc) experience buoyant effects. Buoyancy is simply the net result of hydrostatic forces versus gravity. Hydrostatic forces, of course, increase with depth. The gradient this creates produces an upward force. If that force is greater than the pull of gravity, the material will attempt to rise. For water, we are of course speaking of the range of 4C up to 100C. For air, there is no point at which the slope changes direction.

The point here, is that the heated and therefore less dense water will tend to come to the surface due to buoyant effects. But that buoyancy comes to a dead end (actually, the net force vector reverses) at the water/air interface. Buoyancy will NOT drive water, or its heat, into the air. The same buoyancy effect takes place in the air. Yet what temperature gradient do we find in the atmosphere? Is the air coldest at the Earth's surface and warmest aloft? No. Why? Mixing and the density gradient. The reason for the temperature gradient we find in the ocean is that it's heat source is above and its temperature vs density properties cause all deep basins to be filled with 4C water. The density gradient in the ocean is trivial compared to what we find in the atmosphere. Thus the heat capacity decreases with increasing altitude and dense, more effectively warmed air, resides at the bottom of its column. There, density-driven convection mixes things about and we get what we find outside our door on any given day.

The ocean DOES absorb energy from IR radiation. Your claims in this regard are completely incorrect.

Your statement was proved false years and years ago. Long wave IR can't penetrate the skin of water. Period end of story. Thus, the very mechanism that we know maintains the temperature of this planet, namely the heat sinks known as the oceans, can't be warmed by the very tool you claim is the driver of global warming.

In other words cricky, the theory FAILS, at its first test.

 

[RollingThunder]

Your statement was proved false years and years ago. Long wave IR can't penetrate the skin of water. Period end of story. Thus, the very mechanism that we know maintains the temperature of this planet, namely the heat sinks known as the oceans, can't be warmed by the very tool you claim is the driver of global warming.

In other words cricky, the theory FAILS, at its first test.

And walleyed is, as always, quite certain that his misunderstandings of science are the only reality......however in the real world.....

How Increasing Carbon Dioxide Heats The Ocean
Posted on 18 October 2011 by Rob Painting
Much like a heated kettle of water takes some time before it comes to the boil, it seems intuitive that the world's oceans will also take some time to fully respond to global warming. Unlike a kettle, however, it's not obvious how the oceans warm.

Adding further greenhouse gases to the atmosphere warms the ocean cool skin layer, which in turn reduces the amount of heat flowing out of the ocean. Reducing the heat lost to the atmosphere allows the oceans to steadily warm over time - as has been observed over the last half century.

Warming on sunshine
Sunlight penetrating the surface of the oceans is responsible for warming of the surface layers. Once heated, the ocean surface becomes warmer than the atmosphere above, and because of this heat flows from the warm ocean to the cool atmosphere above. This process is represented in the graphic below:

Figure 1 - simplified steps of ocean heating

The 'cool skin' layer
The rate of flow of heat out of the ocean is determined by the temperature gradient in the 'cool skin layer', which resides within the thin viscous surface layer of ocean that is in contact with the atmosphere. It's so named because it is the interface where ocean heat is lost to the atmosphere, and therefore becomes cooler than the water immediately below. Despite being only 0.1 to 1mm thick on average, this skin layer is the major player in the long-term warming of the oceans.

Curious behavior in the cool skin layer
The cool skin behaves quite differently to the water below, because it is the boundary where the ocean and air meet, and therefore turbulence (the transfer of energy/heat via large-scale motion) falls away as it approaches this boundary. No longer free to jiggle around and transfer heat via this large scale motion, water molecules in the layer are forced together and heat is only able to travel through the skin layer by way of conduction. With conduction the steepness of the temperature gradient is critical to the rate of heat transfer.

Greenhouse gas-induced warming of the ocean
Greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, trap heat in the atmosphere and direct part of this back toward the surface. This heat cannot penetrate into the ocean itself, but it does warm the cool skin layer, and the level of this warming ultimately controls the temperature gradient in the layer.

Increased warming of the cool skin layer (via increased greenhouse gases) lowers its temperature gradient (that is the temperature difference between the top and bottom of the layer), and this reduces the rate at which heat flows out of the ocean to the atmosphere. One way to think about this is to compare the gradient (steepness) of a flowing river - water flows faster the steeper the river becomes, but slows as the steepness decreases.

The same concept applies to the cool skin layer - warm the top of the layer and the gradient across it decreases, therefore reducing heat flowing out of the ocean.

The ever-present effect of the cool skin layer
An important point not be be glossed over here, is that changing the temperature gradient in the cool skin layer by way of greenhouse gas warming is a worldwide phenomenon. Once the gradient has changed, all heat leaving the ocean thereafter has to negotiate its way through the layer. With the gradient lowered, the ocean is able to steal away a little bit more from heat headed for the atmosphere. It is in this ever-present mechanism that oceans are able to undergo long-term warming (or cooling).

Experimental evidence for greenhouse gas heating of the oceans
Obviously it's not possible to manipulate the concentration of CO2 in the air in order to carry out real world experiments, but natural changes in cloud cover provide an opportunity to test the principle. Under cloudy conditions, the cloud cover radiates more heat back down toward the ocean surface than happens under clear sky conditions. So the mechanism should cause a decline in skin temperature gradients with increased cloud cover (more downward heat radiation), and there should also be a decline in the difference between cool skin layer and ocean bulk temperatures - as less heat escapes the ocean under increased atmospheric warming.

This was observed in an experiment carried out in 2004, aboard the New Zealand research ship Tangaroa. Using intruments to simultaneously measure the 'cool skin', the ocean below, and the amount of heat (longwave radiation) reaching the ocean surface, researchers were able to confirm how greenhouse gases heat the ocean. It should be pointed out here, that the amount of change in downward heat radiation from changes in cloud cover in the experiment, are far greater than the gradual change in warming provided by human greenhouse gas emissions, but the relationship was nevertheless established.

Figure 2 -The change in the skin temperature to bulk temperature difference as a function of the net longwave (heat) radiation. The net forcing is negative as the atmosphere is cooler than the ocean skin layer, but approaches zero under cloudy conditions. See Real Climatepost "Why Greenhouse Gases Heat The Ocean" by Professor Peter Minnett.

Greenhouse Gases: On duty 24/7
The effect of greenhouse gases on ocean heat isn't confined to daylight hours however, they toil away around the clock. The warming of the oceans by sunlight, makes the daytime surface waters more bouyant than the cooler waters below and this leads to stratification - a situation where the warmer water floats atop cooler waters underneath, and is less inclined to mix. At night much of the heat accumulated during the day is lost back to the atmosphere (the overling air still being cooler than the ocean), and this cooling leads to the stratified surface layers sinking and mixing with lower layers. This allows the remaining heat to be transported down deeper into the ocean, causing an increase in ocean heatcontent over the long-term. The typical diurnal (day/night) cycle is seen in the figure below:

Figure 3 - Schematic showing the upper ocean temperature profiles during the (A) nighttime or well mixed daytime and (B) daytime during conditions conducive to the formation of a diurnal warm layer. Image from Gentemann & Minnett (2008)

Warming in the pipeline
Given the atmospheric lifetime of carbon dioxide is many hundreds to thousands of years, we can now understand that long-lived greenhouses will also continue to exert a warming influence on the worlds oceans for a very long time. Indeed, climate models suggest that ocean warming will continue for at least a thousand years even if CO2 emissions were to completely stop. See below:

Fig 5 - Time series of the (modeled) climate response to a cessation of CO2 emissions. a) global mean thermosteric sea level anomaly (b) and zonal mean ocean temperature at 792.5mtrs, 66 S (the Southern Ocean). Green line = cessation of CO2 at 2010 & red line = cessation at 2100. From Gillett (2011).

Ocean warming not just skin deep
Because of their effect on lowering the temperature gradient of the cool skin layer, increased levels of greenhouse gases lead to more heat being stored in the oceans over the long-term. This ocean warming mechanism has been observed experimentally, and is also supported by numerical modeling.

So although greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, don't directly warm the oceans by channeling heat down into the oceans, they still do indeed heat the oceans, and are likely to do so for a very long time.

 

[Crick]

Where to start. FCT is correct that the reason you'll get burned by steel is its high thermal conductivity. However, this ignores the point as to how the thermal energy got there in the first place. The argument that Westwall (and other deniers here) is attempting to make, that the ocean cannot absorb IR radiation because it only penetrates a short distance is completely specious. It penetrates thousands of times further into water than it does into steel and yet - somehow - the steel grows warmer.

Thermal conductivity of selected materials ("the quantity of heat transmitted through a unit thickness of a material - in a direction normal to a surface of unit area - due to a unit temperature gradient under steady state conditions"

Thermal conductivity units is W/(m K) in the SI system and Btu/(hr ft °F) in the Imperial system.

At 25C

Air: 0.024
Carbon steel: 43
Water 0.58

Note that water has 24 times the thermal conductivity of air. That means that a unit of heat energy at the ocean's skin is extremely more likely to be conducted deeper into the water than upward into the air even ignoring the difficulty of crossing the material interface.

This value for conductivity also excludes physical mixing, which is, of course, taking place in ocean water at a near infinitely greater pace than in your slab of carbon steel.

And there is also the difference in specific heat capacity. It requires 4.184 joules of energy to raise the temperature of one gram of water by 1 centigrade degree. The specific heat capacity of air is 1.006 joules to raise one gram by one centigrade degree. Therefore, heat transfer driven by temperature differential is going to tend towards the water, since it can absorb more than four times the energy per temperature change. The water will maintain the differential four times as well as will the air.

And then I would like to address the oft-denier-repeated phrase, "heat rises". First, the phrase is factually incorrect. Heat travels unpreferentially in all directions. The term originates from the effects of buoyancy. All fluids (air, water, etc) experience buoyant effects. Buoyancy is simply the net result of hydrostatic forces versus gravity. Hydrostatic forces, of course, increase with depth. The gradient this creates produces an upward force. If that force is greater than the pull of gravity, the material will attempt to rise. For water, we are of course speaking of the range of 4C up to 100C. For air, there is no point at which the slope changes direction.

The point here, is that the heated and therefore less dense water will tend to come to the surface due to buoyant effects. But that buoyancy comes to a dead end (actually, the net force vector reverses) at the water/air interface. Buoyancy will NOT drive water, or its heat, into the air. The same buoyancy effect takes place in the air. Yet what temperature gradient do we find in the atmosphere? Is the air coldest at the Earth's surface and warmest aloft? No. Why? Mixing and the density gradient. The reason for the temperature gradient we find in the ocean is that it's heat source is above and its temperature vs density properties cause all deep basins to be filled with 4C water. The density gradient in the ocean is trivial compared to what we find in the atmosphere. Thus the heat capacity decreases with increasing altitude and dense, more effectively warmed air, resides at the bottom of its column. There, density-driven convection mixes things about and we get what we find outside our door on any given day.

The ocean DOES absorb energy from IR radiation. Your claims in this regard are completely incorrect.

Your statement was proved false years and years ago. Long wave IR can't penetrate the skin of water. Period end of story. Thus, the very mechanism that we know maintains the temperature of this planet, namely the heat sinks known as the oceans, can't be warmed by the very tool you claim is the driver of global warming.

In other words cricky, the theory FAILS, at its first test.

What fucking test was THAT you fool? The IR is being ABSORBED in microns. Fly over the Grand Bahama Banks someday and look down. What will you see? Light blue to white. How is that color produced? By visible light hitting the bottom and reflecting back UP through the water and EXITING WITHOUT BEING ABSORBED. Water LOVES IR. Use your fucking head for once.

 

[SSDD]

The point is that because certain frequencies of light are capable of penetrating many meters into water means THEY ARE NOT BEING RAPIDLY ABSORBED. That other frequencies do not penetrate far MEANS THAT THEY ARE BEING RAPIDLY ABSORBED.

Don't you ever think?

The oceans warm the atmosphere...not the other way around...don't you think...and once again..there is no back radiation warming anything...not the land..not the oceans...CO2 increases the emissivity of the atmosphere...by definition when you increase the emissivity of a system, the temperature drops..

CO2 increases the emissivity of the atmosphere

CO2 increases the absorptivity of the atmosphere.

All substances that increase the emissivity of a system also increase its absorptivity....increased absorption and emission equals lower temperatures....

 

[SSDD]

What fucking test was THAT you fool? The IR is being ABSORBED in microns. Fly over the Grand Bahama Banks someday and look down. What will you see? Light blue to white. How is that color produced? By visible light hitting the bottom and reflecting back UP through the water and EXITING WITHOUT BEING ABSORBED. Water LOVES IR. Use your fucking head for once.

So your claim now is that visible light is IR?

 

[Crick]

Don't be a fucking idiot. My claim is that water absorbs IR far, far more rapidly than it absorbs visible light. And the contention you're going to repeat, that it is all lost back to the atmosphere because it is absorbed in the skin is refuted by the response of opaque materials like steel and the comparative specific heat capacities and thermal conductance of water and air.

 

[SSDD]

Don't be a fucking idiot. My claim is that water absorbs IR far, far more rapidly than it absorbs visible light.

And your claim is bullshit....

 

[Crick]

Prove it fool. Refute my statements with something besides unsubstantiated assertions that do nothing but display your bias and your ignorance.

 

[westwall]

Where to start. FCT is correct that the reason you'll get burned by steel is its high thermal conductivity. However, this ignores the point as to how the thermal energy got there in the first place. The argument that Westwall (and other deniers here) is attempting to make, that the ocean cannot absorb IR radiation because it only penetrates a short distance is completely specious. It penetrates thousands of times further into water than it does into steel and yet - somehow - the steel grows warmer.

Thermal conductivity of selected materials ("the quantity of heat transmitted through a unit thickness of a material - in a direction normal to a surface of unit area - due to a unit temperature gradient under steady state conditions"

Thermal conductivity units is W/(m K) in the SI system and Btu/(hr ft °F) in the Imperial system.

At 25C

Air: 0.024
Carbon steel: 43
Water 0.58

Note that water has 24 times the thermal conductivity of air. That means that a unit of heat energy at the ocean's skin is extremely more likely to be conducted deeper into the water than upward into the air even ignoring the difficulty of crossing the material interface.

This value for conductivity also excludes physical mixing, which is, of course, taking place in ocean water at a near infinitely greater pace than in your slab of carbon steel.

And there is also the difference in specific heat capacity. It requires 4.184 joules of energy to raise the temperature of one gram of water by 1 centigrade degree. The specific heat capacity of air is 1.006 joules to raise one gram by one centigrade degree. Therefore, heat transfer driven by temperature differential is going to tend towards the water, since it can absorb more than four times the energy per temperature change. The water will maintain the differential four times as well as will the air.

And then I would like to address the oft-denier-repeated phrase, "heat rises". First, the phrase is factually incorrect. Heat travels unpreferentially in all directions. The term originates from the effects of buoyancy. All fluids (air, water, etc) experience buoyant effects. Buoyancy is simply the net result of hydrostatic forces versus gravity. Hydrostatic forces, of course, increase with depth. The gradient this creates produces an upward force. If that force is greater than the pull of gravity, the material will attempt to rise. For water, we are of course speaking of the range of 4C up to 100C. For air, there is no point at which the slope changes direction.

The point here, is that the heated and therefore less dense water will tend to come to the surface due to buoyant effects. But that buoyancy comes to a dead end (actually, the net force vector reverses) at the water/air interface. Buoyancy will NOT drive water, or its heat, into the air. The same buoyancy effect takes place in the air. Yet what temperature gradient do we find in the atmosphere? Is the air coldest at the Earth's surface and warmest aloft? No. Why? Mixing and the density gradient. The reason for the temperature gradient we find in the ocean is that it's heat source is above and its temperature vs density properties cause all deep basins to be filled with 4C water. The density gradient in the ocean is trivial compared to what we find in the atmosphere. Thus the heat capacity decreases with increasing altitude and dense, more effectively warmed air, resides at the bottom of its column. There, density-driven convection mixes things about and we get what we find outside our door on any given day.

The ocean DOES absorb energy from IR radiation. Your claims in this regard are completely incorrect.

Your statement was proved false years and years ago. Long wave IR can't penetrate the skin of water. Period end of story. Thus, the very mechanism that we know maintains the temperature of this planet, namely the heat sinks known as the oceans, can't be warmed by the very tool you claim is the driver of global warming.

In other words cricky, the theory FAILS, at its first test.

What fucking test was THAT you fool? The IR is being ABSORBED in microns. Fly over the Grand Bahama Banks someday and look down. What will you see? Light blue to white. How is that color produced? By visible light hitting the bottom and reflecting back UP through the water and EXITING WITHOUT BEING ABSORBED. Water LOVES IR. Use your fucking head for once.

Blue=UV light silly boy, UV!

 

[Old Rocks]

No, it does not. UV is shorter wavelength that violet, and not visible at all.

 

[Toddsterpatriot]

The point is that because certain frequencies of light are capable of penetrating many meters into water means THEY ARE NOT BEING RAPIDLY ABSORBED. That other frequencies do not penetrate far MEANS THAT THEY ARE BEING RAPIDLY ABSORBED.

Don't you ever think?

The oceans warm the atmosphere...not the other way around...don't you think...and once again..there is no back radiation warming anything...not the land..not the oceans...CO2 increases the emissivity of the atmosphere...by definition when you increase the emissivity of a system, the temperature drops..

CO2 increases the emissivity of the atmosphere

CO2 increases the absorptivity of the atmosphere.

All substances that increase the emissivity of a system also increase its absorptivity....increased absorption and emission equals lower temperatures....

All substances that increase the emissivity of a system also increase its absorptivity

Excellent! Glad you've cleared up your confusion.

increased absorption and emission equals lower temperatures....

And there it is again.
If CO2 and water vapor absorbs IR from the ground and emits it in all directions, how does that make it cooler than if the IR from the ground left the atmosphere unimpeded?

 

[SSDD]

If CO2 and water vapor absorbs IR from the ground and emits it in all directions, how does that make it cooler than if the IR from the ground left the atmosphere unimpeded?

Well you see...that's where the magic comes in...increase the emissivity of a system with any other substance known to man and the result is a lowering of the temperature...increase the emissivity with CO2 and you raise the temperature...not only do you raise the temperature...you raise the temperature of a convective system in which radiation is nothing more than a small bit player till you reach the top of the atmosphere...magic is the only explanation...

 

[Toddsterpatriot]

If CO2 and water vapor absorbs IR from the ground and emits it in all directions, how does that make it cooler than if the IR from the ground left the atmosphere unimpeded?

Well you see...that's where the magic comes in...increase the emissivity of a system with any other substance known to man and the result is a lowering of the temperature...increase the emissivity with CO2 and you raise the temperature...not only do you raise the temperature...you raise the temperature of a convective system in which radiation is nothing more than a small bit player till you reach the top of the atmosphere...magic is the only explanation...

increase the emissivity of a system with any other substance known to man and the result is a lowering of the temperature.

Any actual backup for this claim?

And I noticed you didn't answer the question....
If CO2 and water vapor absorbs IR from the ground and emits it in all directions, how does that make it cooler than if the IR from the ground left the atmosphere unimpeded?

 

[mamooth]

Wrong. It CAN heat a rock.

Good! We're making progress!

Now, explain the discrepancy in your reasoning. That is:

You say sunlight can warm a rock, even though it can't penetrate a rock deeply.

You say IR can't warm the ocean, because it can't penetrate the ocean deeply.

Why the wild inconsistency, and why should anyone take your crazy claim seriously?

 

[mamooth]

I've heard that ruse about 4 or 5 times now and need to have you ponder deeper into the problem.

Our pondering is fine. Yours went off on a red herring hunt.

Steel is a wonderful heat conductor. In fact, any good thermal conductor will burn the crap out you even if it's surface temperature is not far from your skin temperature.. The REASON is - you're getting juiced by a EFFICIENT heat flow.. If you put a slab of black ABS plastic and allowed the surface temp to reach the same as your steel. It would be initially hot, but dissipate quickly with little damage to the skin.

That's totally irrelevant.

Water, rock, plastic, steel, whatever, it doesn't matter. If it absorbs the EM energy, deep or shallow, it heats up. Period.

The ocean "skin" is considerably LESS of a heat conductor than your slightly tarnished steel.. Any small breeze or mixing will remove the amount of heating from LWIR quite quickly.

That's in agreement with the theory (and directly measured reality) of how backradiation heats the oceans.

Nobody is saying LWIR heat dives down into the oceans. It does get lost to the atmosphere quickly. Point is, it takes the place of other heat in the ocean that would have otherwise gotten lost to the atmosphere. It slows down ocean heat loss, so it warms the oceans in that fashion.

 

[westwall]

Wrong. It CAN heat a rock.

Good! We're making progress!

Now, explain the discrepancy in your reasoning. That is:

You say sunlight can warm a rock, even though it can't penetrate a rock deeply.

You say IR can't warm the ocean, because it can't penetrate the ocean deeply.

Why the wild inconsistency, and why should anyone take your crazy claim seriously?

Where did I say it couldn't penetrate a rock deeply? Please provide some proof of that. Long Wave IR can penetrate (well penetrate is a misnomer, it can warm a rock and that is the point) while it can't penetrate the skin of the water. And that too is the point. Fluids don't behave the same as solids....or did you not know that?

 

[Crick]

No, that is NOT the point. You tell us that visible can penetrate meters but that IR is restricted to the first few fucking microns. Well, you hit that rock and you will be lucky to get a few nanometers into the material. HOW does that rock, get warm? Why doesn't all that heat immediately return to the atmosphere as you claim happens with water?

 

[westwall]

No, that is NOT the point. You tell us that visible can penetrate meters but that IR is restricted to the first few fucking microns. Well, you hit that rock and you will be lucky to get a few nanometers into the material. HOW does that rock, get warm? Why doesn't all that heat immediately return to the atmosphere as you claim happens with water?

Wrong again. I stated that UV can penetrate the oceans deeply. Not visible light. Learn to read with comprehension.