Tuesday, February 07, 2017

A Public Service Announcement

There are times when some comment is so wrong no bunny wastes any time explaining to the hard of learning why it is wrong, and this, as bunnies in the US are learning, is a mistake and, of course, this lets the foolish person claim that they are the discoverers of revelation, which can be annoying.  Twitter, of course, is an annoyance amplifier and as ATTP is finding out, vigilance against inanity is a never ending fight.

Eli is a creature of good will and habits, so he had let one Dr. Mark Imisides an industrial chemist rattle on and on, but everybunny has limits and the well stuffed Dr. Imisides** finally reached Eli's.  Thus this public service announcement which may be tweeted at the well stuffed Dr. Imisides when needed.  To pick a point where to start, let Eli pick this one

Imisides is quite impressed by this argument, which simply calculates the heat content of the oceans vs. the heat content of the atmosphere and concludes
That is, if we wanted to heat the entire ocean by 1˚C, and wanted to do it by heating the air above it, we’d have to heat the air to about 4,000˚C hotter than the water.
The well stuffed Dr. Imisides of course, is confusing heat content with heat flow, which, to be truthful is a common mistake, but there is something about Dr. Imisides' attitude that withdraws the milk of bunny kindness from Eli's furry breast, sort of the Pielke effect as it were.

Allow Eli to state the obvious.  Energy flows in from the sun.  Most of it is absorbed in the oceans, cause the oceans are most of the surface, and increasing at that.  Energy flows out through the atmosphere.  That means that the energy flow in must be balanced by the energy flow out or the whole ball would melt and all of that energy passes through the atmosphere, because, at no place on Earth does the land or sea touch space.  The only way off planet for energy is by radiation to space.

Since the energy lost from the surface of the oceans passes through the atmosphere and is radiated to space, the energy FLOW must be balanced and absent some change in the atmosphere such as increased greenhouse gases, atmospheric temperatures will not change.

True, if you increased the rate at which the sun heated the oceans they would warm, but we know by direct measurement that that is not happening.  We also know that the heat content of the oceans is increasing and the oceans are warming.  If solar irradiation is NOT increasing, and we KNOW it is not, Eli points out that
heating the ocean requires limiting the net rate at which it loses heat.  That's what increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere does.
 So to return to Twitter with an analogy for Mom

However, Eli would not be Eli were he not to pass comment on other Dr. Mark Imisides bon mots.  For example
And another problem is that air sits on top of water – how would hot air heat deep into the ocean? Even if the surface warmed, the warm water would just sit on top of the cold water.
Well, yeah, Mark.  The ocean IS stratified, and the exchange between the deep ocean and the surface does take a long time, like a thousand years and occurs at places where there is upwelling driven by thermohaline circulation.  You could look it up

** A long time ago a friendly analytiker once described to Eli the final ceremony after a certain class of chemists passes their oral exam, that the candidate stands at attention and the examiner stuffs his shirt.

19 comments:

CapitalistImperialistPig said...

Alas, Dr. I is yet another proof that for some, a PhD is no cure for stupid.

DrTskoul said...

Not at all!!! I have years of evidence on that... Ai ai ... My brain hurts reading those comments.....

Anonymous said...

My unpublished AI detection algorithm indicated (at 4σ confidence level) that 'Dr Mark Imisides' was a relatively unsophisticated bot and not worth engaging.

Kevin O'Neill said...

He has a political endorsement from Jo Nova. Do we need to know more?

No. That's already TMI.

Victor Venema said...

"That is, if we wanted to heat the entire ocean by 1˚C, and wanted to do it by heating the air above it, we’d have to heat the air to about 4,000˚C hotter than the water."

The air does not normally heat the water. The water may feel cold (because of its higher thermal conductivity), but water is mostly warmer than the air. The sun heats the surface/water and the surface heats the air is the normal situation not the air heats the surface (even if that does sometimes happen).

Bernard J. said...

I'd ask the good (gag) Dr (gag) to go to his local expansive and shallow salt lake in the morning on a still day, and take vertical temperature profiles both at the edge and in the middle of the water body. And repeat the exercise in the early afternoon.

Then, like any good junior high school student, he could write a report describing the nature of the temperature profiles of the water columns at the edge and in the centre, in the morning and again in the afternoon, and also explain how the extra heat arrived/accumulated in the water. Once he's done that he could explain why infared from the sun can warm water (oops, did I just give a hint?), and why infrared from 'greenhouse' gases cannot. He should "construct [his] argument using logic"...

Jim Hunt said...

Thanks for the heads up Eli,

If tweets render properly in comments on here, this one caused me much mirth this morning:

https://twitter.com/jim_hunt/status/829224023879979009

If they don't, please click through for the full #Lulz experience!

BBD said...

Weirdly, this meme is on the march again (or on the stagger, being a zombie). I got treated to it face to face at the weekend. Goes back to dear old Fred Singer, I think?

Unknown said...

Don't forget the good doctor's Leprechaun logic argument. He demands your personal analysis of AGW science. But if you advise that there is plentiful evidence AGW available, if he bothered to do some research himself, he has this bizarre Leprechaun logic retort that doesn't make sense or stand up to scrutiny. @adlrope.

Anonymous said...

Adam,
Indeed, he asked if I was a Leprechaun denier (which I am) but then seemed to get upset when I asked if he was a science denier.

Susan Anderson said...

Yes, Singer is recurring now he's an insider driver in the Trump/Koch/Republican denial of humanity apparatus. A truly evil man.

Further to the experiment suggested by Bernard J, he could do those measures in spring, summer, fall, and winter and explain why the temps vary. Seems obvious. Or just at late Spring and early fall, and note the difference.

Where is the temp at which humans can't survive without protection and machinery ? Thinking of traveling to Mars?

4000 degrees is not a fuzzy concept, it's a temperature. Seems to me climate science detractors/deniers don't believe in temperature, only in hypotheticals.
https://phys.org/news/2010-05-future-temperatures-livable-limits.html

(by 2090, and that was in 2010. I think the date is moving closer ...)

Michael Tobis said...

Imisides is an Australian politician with a grudge against climate.

Apparently he did a little chemistry a quarter century ago. So he gets to emblazon Doctor on his Twitter account.

I don't know of any reasonable people with PhDs who introduce themselves as "Doctor". Even MDs don't do that when it matters.

I thought it might be just a curable acute case of Dunning Kruger syndrome, but no, it's chronic. The dude, sorry, the Doctor Dude, is a waste of time.

Bernard J. said...

"I don't know of any reasonable people with PhDs who introduce themselves as "Doctor"."

In my experience it's very much the opposite: people who feel the need to emphasise their honorifics outside of a professional biography are almost to a person wankers, narcissists, and blinkered Dunning-Kruger ideologues who are an afront to the very idea of titular respect.

JohnMashey said...

Re: Doctor
Let us return to 2008, with this piece on the Monckton/Schulte attack on Oreskes.

Monckton comnmmented 2008-03-25:
'"DR." JOHN MASHEY
“Dr.” Mashey says Mr. Schulte plagiarized my research. He did no such thing. It was he, not I, who conducted the research. “Dr.” Mashey was told this.

“Dr.” Mashey submitted his over-long complaint formally to Mr. Schulte’s academic institution, whose investigator rejected it on all counts.

“Dr.” Mashey is now himself under investigation for circulating his complaint publicly, in a form in which which inter alia he breaches doctor-patient confidentiality. For this reason, please remove all links to “Dr.” Mashey’s document.

One realizes that the news that the scientific “consensus” no longer believes in climate alarm (if it ever did) is unwelcome in certain political circles. But the science is the science.

Perhaps it would be better if “Dr.” Mashey were to write a peer-reviewed rebuttal of Mr. Schulte’s paper, rather than interfering in an unlawful manner on the blogosphere, which is not the best place for serious scientific discourse.'

I commented

'1) “Dr”
No big deal, but there *are* people around who claim things they’re not… so …

I happen to have an earned PhD from a credible university, so I guess I can be called “Dr” …
but most people I know don’t. My wife has one, many of our friends do, 10% of adults in our town do, Stanford (a few miles a way) has masses, and then there are the MD-doctors as well. To call everyone “Dr” would get wearisome. Competent professionals with track records rarely care much. Also, I’d hate to be grabbed on a plane to help with a medical emergency. :-)

But, given the extreme rarity of “mashey”, I’m really not that hard to find, and maybe that’s the first step for “investigators”:

Google: john mashey

First hit is a short Wikipedia entry, which points at the Computer History Museum Trustee entry from which I think it was mostly taken:
http://www.computerhistory.org/trustee/John,Mashey/

In more detail, since it’s been raised:
1968: B.S. Mathematics [& one course short of a 2nd degree in Physics]
1969: MS Computer Science
1974: PhD Computer Science

All from The Pennsylvania State University. If anyone is still concerned about fakery, they can contact the PSU Deans of Engineering and Science, both of whom know me.
====
I’d been recruited to work at PhD-dense Bell Laboratories, which *explicitly* discouraged “Dr” in normal usage:

a) With so many PhDs, calling us all “Dr” would just waste a lot of time.
b) But mainly, because what you accomplished was more important than the title.
c) About the only mention of degrees was in external articles, but even there, a bio would say “…PhD. Mr. X…”

Anyway, if Viscount Monckton wants to keep typing “Dr”, OK with me.'


The Old Man is back said...

FYI: http://whogoeswithfergus.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/23-minutes-to-kiss-planet-goodbye.html

It's relevantly depressing.

Fernando Leanme said...

We must recall the earth does add a little bit of heat that comes from below. This as far as I'm concerned makes ocean energy content reanalysis a bit goofy because it ignores a factor that's really important when we consider really deep water (that's water down there where those awful looking fish with huge teeth, the ones with lamps on their foreheads, and glowing shrimps live).

BBD said...

We must recall the earth does add a little bit of heat that comes from below.

And the thermal profile of the ocean is warm upper, cold abyssal. So as always, you are wrong.

Which reminds me - no La Nina for 2017 by the looks of things. You were wrong about that too.

Kevin O'Neill said...

Fernando - "We must recall the earth does add a little bit of heat that comes from below. "


Oh, but he is sssoooooo correct. 47 TW of energy comes from internal heat -- mainly radioactive decay. 47 TW!!!!

Of course in context that number is exceedingly small. Says wiki:
"...heat energy coming from Earth's interior is actually 0.03% of Earth's total energy budget at the surface"


Solar insolation = 173,000 TW

Another yawner from F.L.

Anonymous said...

Fernando: "We must recall the earth does add a little bit of heat that comes from below."

Jebus Kristus, Fernando. Do you even think before you say these things?