Bow to Mark Levin with the human body temperature theory of global warming
June 23 broadcast, heard it the day before I went to measure melting glaciers. (Main link here, might try this if it still works, and go to Minute 101. Below is a rough transcript; the audio was dodgy.)
Caller: [Caller references how body temperature of many people in an enclosed room will raise its temperature, then continues]....It's amazing that the world hasn't gotten warmer than it has since 1980 when the population went from 3 billion to 8 billion 30 years later, there's just no accounting for that if the greenhouse effect were actually true....Levin: ....interesting point...if it's man-made, then why aren't we a lot hotter than we are now because of the significant increase in population.Caller: ....[says billions of people walking around at 98.6 degrees, well above global ambient temperature]Levin: ....[says it's an "excellent point"]
I think we have a theory that might trump Louis Hissink's geothermal warming for its explanatory power. Eat your heart out, Deltoid.
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21 comments:
Direct link to the mp3 file.
bluegrue
That made me giggle.
Then I had to look up who the heck Mark Levin was.
Then I giggled some more.
Yeah, accounting for the energy output from the human population is one of the great intractable problems of science, but let's give it a go anyways. Let's say each greater terrestrial hairless ape consumes 2000 (dietary) calories per day all of which is converted to heat. Then we have ~8.4x10^6 joules/86400 sec or about 100 watts average per ape, giving about 0.7 terawatts total or about 0.0014 watts/m^2 on average. Of course not all of this is excess since a portion of the food energy comes from the sun.
Well, duh. Never heard of the 'Urban Heat Island' probably Not much bunnies in a city, but a lot of humans. More than on the counrtyside. And a lot more than on Antarctica. QED.
"People are evolutionary from Africa so they want an african temperature but most of the food is grown out of Africa so that's a problem", your subarctic bunny c.1998.
Nibi,
You're thinking of natural gas-derived fertilizers? Does that actually contribute significant energy to the plant, or just the right chemicals?
Why not throw in all non-greenhouse direct heating:
"Even if civilization on Earth stops polluting
the biosphere with greenhouse gases,
humanity could eventually be awash in too
much heat, namely, the dissipated heat
by-product generated by any nonrenewable
energy source. Apart from the Sun’s natural
aging—which causes an approximately 1%
luminosity rise for each 10^8 years and thus
about 1ºC increase in Earth’s surface temperature—
well within 1000 years our technological
society could find itself up against
a fundamental limit to growth: an unavoidable
global heating of roughly 3ºC dictated
solely by the second law of thermodynamics,
a biogeophysical effect often ignored when
estimating future planetary warming scenarios."
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2008/2008EO280001.shtml
(Chaisson, EOS, Vol. 89, No. 28, 8 July 2008)
The reason Alaska is cold is because very few people live there. Texas is hot because it has 25 million people in it.
And New York is positively scorchio.
Have there been any stories in the press about mass human migrations to the arctic circle and beyond that I might have missed lately?
Yeah. They're on oil rigs.
If the deniers weren't such humorless dregs, you could imagine them giggling over their concoctions.
Jeffrey Davis
"I think we have a theory that might trump Louis Hissink's geothermal warming for its explanatory power"
Certainly has to be in the running. When evolution came up with endothermy, it was pretty much lights out for the planet.
On the related topic of "CO2 is a very good thing and you can never have too much of it in your atmosphere", there was an Australian fellow who recently argued that pterosaurs and large birds went extinct because they couldn't fly, because the density of the air dropped below some critical threshold when CO2 levels dropped.
I realize you all think you're so clever, but are you accounting for the fact that Celtic warriors painted their faces and bodies half-blue at one time and now do not?
Of course not. Nathan Myrhvold would not have missed that detail.
I followed the link to Deltoid in 2004
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2004/12/hissink.php
where Tim Lambert remarked that the tilt of the Earth's rotation axis changes slowly, in a cycle of 26,000 years. (True so far). Then Lambert goes on to say that this does not affect the Earth's temperature.
In fact, the subtle change in the Earth's rotation axis is part of the Milankovich cycles. They have a small effect on the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth's surface. That small effect is then amplified by "positive feedback" to produce larger changes.
Modern climate science takes the position that Milankovich cycles trigger ice ages over the last couple of million years.
The Serbian mathematician proposed this theory in the 1920's. At that time most scientists disagreed. While the timing of the Milankovich cycles matched the timing of the ice ages, the "forcing" of the Earth was inadequate to explain the growth of ice sheets over much of North America.
By the 1960's and 1970's, scientists realized that Milankovich was right. By then researchers had a more accurate picture of the timing of past ice ages. And the timing matched very well.
And the existence of positive feedback explained the ice ages.
This is important for global warming. If you carefully examine the
end of the last ice age, some 10,000 years ago, and if you use that to calibrate the earth's climate sensitivity, and then you ask: how much will the Earth warm up whe the atmospheric CO2 level doubles from pre-industrial level, you get 3 degrees C, right in the middle of the IPCC predictions of 1.5 to 4.5 C.
The rejectionists do not believe predictions that modern anthropogenic global warming will be large enough to cause a problem. Rejectionists claim that the ONLY evidence for a large (3C) temperature rise are computer models, which (the rejectionists claim) are not reliable.
This claim is not true: In fact, the above calculation is not dependent upon computer models.
Marion asks: "are you accounting for the fact that Celtic warriors painted their faces and bodies half-blue at one time and now do not?"
Wouldn't that have made them turn in circles (away from the blue)like Crooke's radiometer?
Perhaps those who did were eliminated from the gene pool..cuz turning in circles is only really useful if you're a radiometer (or talk-show host...or politician...or blog-show host)
More importantly, Horatio has heard the climate was much warmer at the time of the dinosaurs... and that dinosaurs were actually warm-blooded.
Maybe the latter explains the former.
And maybe the dinosaurs are now gone cuz they eventually cooked their own goose.
Here's another example of denier "thinking" that pegs the stupid-o-meter.
(From my hometown newspaper's on-line discussion-board -- linky: http://forums.signonsandiego.com/showpost.php?p=4428624&postcount=61)
"You may be right about the timing of the industrial revolution, but steam does not emit much CO2. Although it does increase the amount of water vapor, the largest "greenhouse gas" by far, into the atmosphere. So did that water vapor cause a global temperature increase?"
--caerbannog the anonybunny
Body heat AGW faces stiff competition from Zombie Drag , because in the long run we are all dead, and as the brain eating demographic grows, enthusIasm for muon heating of the thermosphere, and telluric currents in the blogosphere will give way to Catacomb Coolth Islands as a hot topic at WUWT and Heartland conferences.
Coming soon from Willie: countering global cooling with stratospheric tabasco aerosols
And farts. They forgot that more people means more farts. Farts cause global warming.
Hissink was suggesting sudden changes in the Earth's axis that would be big enough to spill your soup (at http://www.henrythornton.com/article.asp?article_id=2982); Lambert was dismissing that kind of change; several people corrected his imprecise statement in comments, though, ending with http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2004/12/hissink.php#comment-1347737
RE: "Here's another example of denier "thinking" that pegs the stupid-o-meter"
While following up some denialist's (Marc Morano) claims of scientific dissent by checking some of his "smoking gun" links on his gish gallop of links click for posting I found this total joy.
In an article from the US Senate's committee on Environment and Public Works website posted by Marc Morano in 2008 he links to this article from "The Hindu", headlined "Challenging the basis of Kyoto Protocol".
In the article, and attributed to Vladimir Arutyunov of the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Chemical Physics, is this gem:
“There were periods in the history of the Earth when CO2 levels were a million times higher than today, and life continued to evolve quite successfully”
So, Russian scientist, you claim that, in the past CO2 levels were around 390 million parts per million? Faulty Russian calculators, or what?
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