Wednesday, October 29, 2014

All Wet


The well named Hockeyschtick (did Eli say something about nyms?) has pulled a piece out of either by  Herman Harde.  To set the stage, Harde, of course, is a professor at the Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg, aka the Bundeswehr Univesitaet.  His presence there also is at least a strong clue about who invited Murry Salby to give a talk last year and Harde is a luminary in the German denial of the possibility of really bad climate change group EIKE.  

Eli wrote something about this in 2011 when Harde was all the rage, but Ceist has noticed a few things, about the latest, namely that it is spreading like Ebola amongst the blogs of denial of climate change, now known as the blogs of denial of the possibility of really bad climate change, or DPPRBC for short, so Eli thought he would take a look.

Indeed the original of which Eli said that while the treatment of radiative transfer was nice, there were some things missing, like a few layers of atmosphere has been filed on.  Prof. Harde has continued to learn about atmospheric physics and published a few papers and a book.  So Eli, being a RTFR type of bunny went and read them starting with the original, an abstract for the 2011 EGU conference, a, what looks like self published, book that appeared in 2011, and finally a paper that appears in the International Journal of Atmospheric Sciences last year and something else  that appeared in 2013 in thepredatory press, in this case the Open Journal of Atmospheric and Climate Change.  Ceist can tell you about that journal

LOL! Thought I'd share something hilarious. I just looked up the Service address of Scientific Online Publishing

498 W. Alton St., Nashville, IL 62263, UNITED STATES

It’s a single family home in a residential area in Nashville Illinois. It shares the same address as a Chinese company which sells anticorrosive paint.

Directions - Fangdai Wen - SINA COVA - 498 W Alton St , nashville, IL, 62263

Nothing suspicious about that publisher at all. *grin*
but Eli is a much more serious bunny.


 Experience has shown the Rabett to first examine conclusions and assumptions before diving into the hieroglyphics, aka the math.  He has Nick Stokes and Deep for that.  So the first thing that popped out was Figure 18 from the IJAS paper showing total upwelling radiation in 12.5 km altitude (blue)  and emission of only the atmosphere by water vapour and CO2 (green). Surface radiation is shown as pink line.

Eli thought deep thoughts about this, well maybe not, but there are a couple of things that pop out.  First, that seems awfully wet as shown by the water rotational lines to the left of the CO2 peak.  To check Eli hied himself over to David Archer's new and updated MODTRAN window and ran a 12.5 km view.  Looking below there appears to be a lot less water vapor.


Well, OK, it appears that Prof. Harde has decreased the effect of carbon dioxide by drenching the atmosphere.  Nothing new in that.  As somebunnies may remember, our friend Miskolczi took the water out by using the wrong version of TIGR, the dry early one, to justify his shenanigans.  Maybe Harde simply borrowed a cup.

If somebunny objects that Eli is using a model (MODTRAN) for comparison, look at the spectrum measured from space by Nimbus in the tropical Pacific


BTW, Eli grabbed that from Willard Tony's place.  (the nipple in the CO2 spectrum is the Q branch and the reason it appears is from emission higher up in the stratosphere

Hermann Harde is all wet



39 comments:

John Mashey said...

Yes, but more...

•Helmut Schmidt University is a German military academy with 4 faculties: Mechanical Engineering, Humanities & Social Sciences, Economics & Social Sciences, and Electrical Engineering (EE).
It has no faculty in climate science or any equivalent, and as best as known from comments, no climate scientists attended.

•EE faculty Univ.-Prof. Dr. Bernd Klauer and (Former) Univ.-Prof. Dr. Hermann Harde, Physics / Materials Science were the local sponsors and introduced Salby.

Harde published physics papers starting in 1974, recent publications were:
2008: “New optical analyzer for 13C-breath test”
2009: “Photoacoustic NO detection for asthma diagnostics”
2010: “Optoacoustic 13C-breath test analyzer”


The talk was actually arranged by Prof. Dr. Fritz Varenholt, involved with German contrarian group EIKE, and well-known to other European contrarian groups, such as Klimarealistene. All this raises questions of venue choice.
According to excerpts from an attendee , Rypke Zeilmaker:

'Salby was invited by Fritz Vahrenholt, writer of the succesfull skeptic book ‘Die Kalte Sonne’ warum der klimakatastrophe nicht statt find’. The German European Institue On Climate and Energie EIKE and the University arranged the lecture,having invited arch-sceptic Fred Singer in Hamburg 2 years earlier.’

Paper submitted but rejected by JAS
According to Salby the ‘Remote Sensing’-affair and politics were behind this deciscion. According to JAS there was ‘nothing new’ to Salby’s argument. Carbon Cycle-experts have told me as well: next to the average rise in CO2-content caused by anthropogenic emissions- there is interannual variation in Delta CO2 where temperature influences pe vegetation, respiration and soil moisture and thus release/uptake of CO2: but it is assumed natural resources don’t add to the budget (to the contrary, nature acts as a sink) whereas anthropogenic emissions dó. …

Lay audience and personal testimonies
Unfortunately, only laymen visited the EIKE-lecture. Though EIKE invited climate scientists like Mojib Latif who refused to come.
So we ended up with the usual sorry bunch at ‘skeptic’-meetings:
non-professionals motivated by politics, and annoyed by climate claptrap by journalists in popular media which most of the time is their only source on climate matters. … So we had Laymen and this time a woman, who use question-time as a chance to have their testimony heard in public, in this event someone worried about her schoolgoing daughter. Other people mixed up several other debates, the one on climate sensitivity and sources of CO2.
They are suspiciously motivated by one reason: we don’t care what the cause is and if it is logically sound, as long as it’s not humans.
Which degrades any debate into a waste of time.’

The whole article is worth a read, albeit with one slightly NSFW image, and see the comments as well. EIKE VP Limburg disagreed.

Anonymous said...

Uh no, as usual, the bunny is the one who is all wet.

Harde's model uses the well-known Clausius-Clapeyron relation to determine water vapor concentrations in three different climate zones. This is entirely appropriate and does NOT oversaturate the atmosphere with water vapor, unless the bunny happens to be a denier of the Clausius-Clapeyron relation. Are you?

BTW the address of the journal is at a commercial building in Commerce, CA

http://www.scipublish.com/contact

not as you claim a residence in Nashville, IL. But, the bunny and denziens here could care less about fact-checking anyhow.

Tom Curtis said...

Eli, Fig 17 if the same paper informs you that he uses a WV concentration of 1.46% at the surface, which is not excessive for tropical regions over the ocean. See for example the following upward IR spectrum in the Pacific Warm Pool, and just outside:
http://scienceofdoom.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/dlr-spectrum-pacific-lubin-1995.png

Further, given realistic distributions of ocean, desert, and latitudinal zones, it is quite consistent with the finding of Schmidt et al (2010) that water vapour is responsible for 50% of the total greenhouse effect, and clouds another 25% with water vapour contributing 20%:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2010JD014287/full

Harde is able to draw absurd conclusions from that because of the absurd topology and the restriction to just three uniform climactic zones in his model. The really silly thing is that those who are breathless with excitement over Harde's results are also likely to dismiss genuine OAGCM results because of minor discrepancies from reality, and to make jokes about physicists and spherical cow.

In this case, Harde walks into a room and say, "Consider a truncated icosahedral Earth" and does not realize he is either the first line in a joke, or restricting himself to first order approximations at best by so doing.

EliRabett said...

Tom, his reconstructions show too much water vapor as compared with toa observations and other models, which means he has too much water vapor.

Tom Curtis said...

Eli, no he does not. Specifically, when he shows the "ground plus atmosphere", ie, the blue line, it matches that shown by other models and observed from satellites (at least visually). The reason is that in the atmospheric window, where he shows the green line for atmosphere only, most radiation is transmitted so that the surface radiation swamps the atmospheric radiation. The result is that the green line is only significant for determining the relative contribution of CO2 and H2O to the total greenhouse effect, something for which you need a much better model than that devised by Harde.

There is plenty to laugh at in Harde's model. Try, for example, his assumption of an average altitude of the cloud tops of 5 km, with which (I notice) he estimates a radiative forcing for 2xCO2 of 4.3 W/m^2 (5.8 W/m^2 for clear sky). He claims to reduce that to 2.6 W/m^2 by considering only the effect on back radiation at "quasi-equilibrium" and by finding an additional absorption of reflection of solar radiation (presumably a cloud feedback, but unexplained). But those claims just show he has no idea what the greenhouse effect actually is, ie, not the change in back radiation at quasi equilibrium.

Tom Curtis said...

"The result is that the green line is only significant for determining the relative contribution of CO2 and H2O to the total greenhouse effect"

Sorry, I got that wrong. Because it is swamped by the ground radiation it is not even relevant for that. So, the radiation for the atmosphere only that he shows is genuine, but almost completely irrelevant to the total greenhouse effect and to the relative contributions of CO2 and H2O to that effect.

Anonymous said...

The Clausius- Clapyron equation relates saturation vapor pressure at saturation to temperature. The air is not always saturated.

Rib Smokin' Bunny

EliRabett said...

Tom, let Eli quote Ray Pierrehumbert
------------------------
Above the boundary layer, much of the atmosphere is highly unsaturated, with relative humidities below 10% occurring frequently in both the Tropics and the extratropics. The satellite snapshot of midtropospheric humidity on 16 January 1992, shown in Fig. 6.3, serves as a reminder of the prevalence of dry air. The prevalence of dry air can be quantified in terms of the probability distribution of relative humidity. This diagnostic has been extensively studied in the Tropics (Spencer and Braswell 1997; Zhang et al. 2003; Brogniez 2004). The midlatitude distribution has not received as much attention, but there is ample evidence that highly undersaturated air is common there as well (e.g., Soden and Bretherton 1993). Early work suggested a lognormal distribution of relative humidity (Soden and Bretherton 1993) but further study has revealed a greater variety of shapes of the relative humidity histogram, including even bimodality (Zhang et al. 2003; Brogniez 2004). For now, the detailed shape of the probability distribution will not concern us; it is enough to know that most of the free troposphere is significantly undersaturated. This widespread occurrence of unsaturated air is a manifestation of the fact that from a thermodynamic standpoint, the atmosphere is a nonequilibrium system. In a state of thermodynamic equilibrium with the oceanic moisture reservoir, the entire atmosphere would be saturated. The prevalence of subsaturated air, and the sorting of air into moist and dry regions, yield a state of relatively low thermodynamic entropy. Evaporation of liquid water or ice into the subsaturated regions, or diffusion of moisture from regions of high vapor pressure into subsaturated regions of lower vapor pressure, would increase the entropy of the atmosphere (Pauluis and Held 2002).
https://geosci.uchicago.edu/~rtp1/papers/CaltechWater.pdf
--------------------

Average relative humidity at 10 km is about 50% globally. If you look at the Harde paper in the OJAS Figure 1, he shows it on average as being 80 - 100 % pretty much everywhere and saturating as one rises above 6-8 km. Relative humidity is very lumpy above the boundary layer (1-2 km) and asshown by some examples here

If you look at the water rotational lines to lower and higher frequency of the CO2 bend you see they are significantly higher wrt the CO2 band for Harde than for the measurements and for the MODTRAN simulation.

Anonymous said...

asshown - Alex, What is 'Hospital Gown?'.

Tom Curtis said...

Eli, at 12.5 km looking down (or 70 km looking down for that matter), the IR spectrum from water vapour in the atmospheric window would be very close to that if you were at 0 Km looking up. The reason is that, first, IR absorption is still very weak by water vapour at that altitude, and, second, the rapid reduction in specific humidity with altitude means that most water vapour is near the surface. That means we can approximately model Harde's "no ground" (= surface emissivity = 0) situation by taking, at each wave number, the lowest value for water vapour only of the 1.5 km looking up and the 70 km looking down. Doing so, you get a reasonable approximation of Harde's Fig 17. If you got the full version of Modtran, and set surface emissivity to 0 to actually repeat the experiment, you would undoubtedly get even closer.

The figures you linked to show average specific humidity in grams per kg, whereas Harde shows 1.46% by volume at the surface. Scaling by molar mass, that means Harde is using 9 g/kg at the surface, ie, midway between the tropical and temperate bands shown on the graph. Given the relative areas of tropics, temperate zone and arctic, that is not an unreasonable global average. It may well be out, but it is not obviously out.

Anonymous said...

Rib Smokin' Bunny says, "The Clausius-Clapyron [sic] equation relates saturation vapor pressure at saturation to temperature. The air is not always saturated."

Of course not; the Clausius- Clapeyron relation is used to establish the upper bound of water vapor saturation in Harde's paper [i.e. to ensure the model is never over-saturated with water vapor as the big bunny claims], as well as to determine the exponential relation between T and changes in water vapor. As shown in fig 1 and throughout the paper, Harde does not either 1) over-saturate water vapor in the model [using CC relation as upper bound] nor 2) assume the "air is always saturated" as Bunny Rib Smoker apparently thinks.

Is it really so terribly difficult for the bunnies to read the actual paper before making outrageous claims about it?

Pekka Pirilä said...

When using the UChicago MODTRAN on net several people have misunderstood the way moisture is specified. They have assumed that they should enter the relative humidity at the zero altitude, but the number is a factor by which the value of the standard atmosphere gets multiplied. Making this error may lead to an extreme humidity, far above 100% at higher altitudes.

Could it be that Harde has made that error as well?

Pekka Pirilä said...

Having a second look on the Harde paper, it's clear that my above speculation is not applicable to the paper. Neither can UChicago MODTRAN be easily used to verify the correctness of Harde calculations.

The reason for that is that Harde shows separately the emission from the atmosphere, which can be seen in the MODTRAN results only when looking up. Looking down the emission is always combined with the emission from the surface making everything look smoother.

What makes the Harde results look different from Eli's results in the case of total upwelling radiation at 12.5 km is probably mainly the fact that Harde has done a line-by-line calculation and plotted the high resolution results with all its wiggles using, however, a linewidth that colors a wide band uniformly blue, while the MODTRAN calculation has a much lower resolution and therefore much less structure and an apparently narrower band of variability.

Tom Curtis said...

Pekka, he uses MolExplorer, a radiation model of his own devising.
http://www.pas-analytik.com/Downloads/MolExplorer_Manual.pdf

For what it is worth, I left the water vapour setting at 1, although I did experiment with a setting of 0.75 at one point in trying to match Harde's results.

Also, and further to my discussion with Eli, Singh et al (2005) find an average near surface specific humidity of 13 g/Kg, averaged over global oceans. Harde's 9g/kg global average again looks quite reasonable next to that.
file:///C:/Users/Tom/Downloads/2006-randhir-sphum-map.pdf

And as a further sanity check on the value, Fig 15.5 at the site below shows the annual average zonal mean specific humidity by altitude, with again 9 g/Kg being well below tropical values at near surface, and looking like a reasonable estimate.
http://paoc.mit.edu/labweb/atmos-obs/specifichumidity.htm

Tom Curtis said...

Pekka, the biggest difference between Harde's Fig 17 and the Modtran equivalent on the UChicago is that with that version of Modtran, you cannot set the ground surface emissivity to 0, as has been done for Harde's figure. There are additional differences due differences of resolution, but they are not so large that people would fail to recognize that essentially the same thing is shown.

Pekka Pirilä said...

Tom,
As far I can see, we agree totally based on my later comment and the two comments you wrote probably before you saw that comment.

Pekka Pirilä said...

I could add also that I have seen the Harde paper before. I checked only a few details and they seemed to be correct. They did explain also physics that I haven't seen explained nearly as thoroughly elsewhere.

My impression is that the paper contains interesting information that's difficult to find elsewhere, but based on what I know, it may well contain also misleading or even erroneous parts.

Tom Curtis said...

Pekka, I haven't read the paper published by the International Journal of Planetary Scientists (hereafter Harde13) in great detail, but it mostly seems to be describing radiative transfer physics and seems mostly OK. However, in section 5.3 we read:

"To assess the more or less strong influence of increasing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, as heavily discussed with respect to anthropogenic global warming, Figure 19 compares two simulations, which were performed with 380 ppm (blue line) and 760 ppm (red curve) of CO2 at average global conditions. Due to the strongly saturated absorption and emission on the CO2 band around 670 cm−1, the broad funnel changes neither its depth nor its width. Only the wings and the weak absorption bands at 970 and 1070 cm−1 which are all strongly superimposed by intense water lines contribute to a slightly higher absorption."
That seems fair enough. However, he goes on:

"Subtraction of the integrated spectra yields an intensity difference of 5.8 W/m2; so, this amount is less reradiated by the troposphere at doubled CO2 concentration. While these calculations were done under clear sky conditions, at an average cloudiness of 50% and a cloud altitude of 5 km, this reduces to about 4.3 W/m2. Under new quasiequilibrium conditions, it is found that 61% of this amount amplifies the back radiation, the other 39% go to space (see also [20]). An enhanced downward emission from the stratosphere at higher CO2 concentration [21, 22] is partly shielded by the cloudiness and in the radiation balance further compensated by increased losses of the sun flux, which is absorbed by the earth’s surface (shortwave radiative forcing). So, altogether about 2.6 W/m2 would contribute to the radiative forcing and thus to global heating at doubled CO2 concentration."

Radiative forcing is defined as the change in net downward IR flux at the tropopause after the stratosphere has regained equilibrium. Without the tropospheric adjustment, it is called the instantaneous radiative forcing. Harde's calculation is for 11.5 km, which is close enough to a tropopause calculation except in the tropics. If follows that the 4.2 W/m^2 differential is (at minimum) the instantaneous radiative forcing and almost directly comparible to the Myhre result without further adjustment. His adjustment, however, is to find the proportion "of this amount that amplifies back radiation", which with along with some other minor adjustments gives him the 2.6 W/m^2. So on the simplest terms, he has used an entirely incorrect definition of radiative forcing, and had he used a correct definition, he would have found a similar forcing to that from Myhre et al (1998). (It may not be higher due to being the instantaneous radiative forcing rather than the radiative forcing.) Therefore one of the key results turns out to be based on an apples to oranges comparison.

Worse, how the result is obtained is very unclear. Apparently it depends on restoring "quasiequilibrium" which is undefined. It is not explained how this is done, nor how the proportion of the change of forcing which "amplifies back radiation" is determined. The key result, therefore, is effectively a black box.

Both of these failures (wrong definition, and undefined methods and terms) represent a failure of peer review.

Still, the paper is better than Harde(2014), ie, the second paper linked by Eli above.

Anonymous said...

Anonymouse said:"Of course not; the Clausius- Clapeyron relation is used to establish the upper bound of water vapor saturation in Harde's paper [i.e. to ensure the model is never over-saturated with water vapor as the big bunny claims],"

which is rather different than what it originally said:

"Harde's model uses the well-known Clausius-Clapeyron relation to determine water vapor concentrations in three different climate zones."

As to why I should believe that the level of water is correct for a model of the climate, the paper does not inspire confidence. He assumes a global average at the surface, and exponential decrease. I could find no mention of Clausius-Clapyron in the paper, where would that be?

Rib Smokin' Bunny

Pekka Pirilä said...

Tom,
I have at one time been pondering, whether it would be worthwhile to write more on the micro level physical processes involved and to discuss, where Quantum Mechanical effects have real significance. The paper does discuss several such issues, but it doesn't make any real attempt to present them in a way accessible to somewhat wider readership. I didn't get motivated enough to proceed along the lines I had in mind, but based on superficial reading I think that this paper would provide some help in such an exercise.

Having the figures drawn as they are makes it impossible to see many effects. One example is the Fig. 19, where the red lines are mostly hidden by the blue. For that reason it's not possible to see, how the tails of the 15 µm absorption band change. That means also that the strongest contribution from added CO2 cannot be seen at all. That's misleading.

There's also a minor misleading point in chapter 2.3.2 on transition rates. (Eli told me the right facts on this point, when I had erred in the same way.) Harde refers to the collision rate of several billions collisions per second as, if that would be directly indicative of the rate of transitions between vibrational states, while it's actually to rotational transitions only. Transitions between vibrational states are more rare by a factor of 100,000 or so. Such transitions are still frequent enough for the main argument.

The observations we have made tell that the paper cannot be trusted to be correct on any particular point although most of it seems to be ok.

Anonymous said...

Eli says "Tom, his reconstructions show too much water vapor as compared with toa observations and other models, which means he has too much water vapor."

Why won't Eli address the actual number that Tom gives for Harde's specific humidity ( 9 g/kg at the surface) rather than simply waving his hands around and adamantly insisting "Harde is all wet, just look at that graph"?

Does Eli have an aversion to numbers?

Anonymous said...

Bunny Rib Smoker says "I could find no mention of Clausius-Clapyron [sic] in the paper, where would that be?"

Uh, discussed on pages 6, 33, 34...

http://www.scipublish.com/journals/ACC/papers/download/3001-846.pdf

Pekka Pirilä said...

As I have my version of SoD's line-by-line model readily available, I decided to check the upwards radiation from H2O at 12.5 km in the standard atmosphere for midlatitude summer. The result can be seen here:

http://pirila.fi/energy/kuvat/H2Oonly.png

It's not too different from what Harde shows for his choice of atmosphere.

Anonymous said...

Rib Smokin' Bunny said "I could find no mention of Clausius-Clapyron [sic] in the paper, where would that be?"


In other words, Rib (or is it Bone?) Smokin' Bunny (who has claimed previously to have a PhD in chemistry) couldn't find the reference because he doesn't know how to spell "Clausius-Clapeyron", even though the correct spelling was in the statements that he was responding to above.

Too funny.

EliRabett said...

See Harde Is A Very Wet. the mechanism for why the free troposphere drys is very interesting.

EliRabett said...

Pekka see Pressure Broadening @ RR back from 2007. The Spectral Calculator does this stuff a treat

Pekka Pirilä said...

Eli,

SoD's Matlab-based line-by-line model has pressure broadening. My version of it is extended to have also the Voigt profile, which affects the results for the upper stratosphere. (I didn't use it in this calculation.)

A further issue that came out in the calculations is that sometimes the tails of the lines get very important. The full Lorentz line shape (or Voigt) without cutoff at the tails gives clearly erroneous results for very high CO2 concentrations, but this effect is almost negligible even for the highest concentrations that are credible on the Earth. I have added to the model a way of introducing a smooth cutoff.

Perhaps more relevantly for the present case, SoD included in the model continuum absorption of H2O using parametrization presented in Pierrehumbert's book. SoD's model in it's original form or as extended by me is not perfect, but it's good enough for net arguments, and probably more accurate than the the UChicago implementation of MODTRAN.

Anonymous said...

For Anonymouse's information, I could find no mention of Clausius-Clapeyron in the paper I was examining, http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijas/2013/503727/abs/. Anonymouse was referring to another paper mentioned by Eli. http://www.scipublish.com/journals/ACC/papers/download/3001-846.pdf

The use of three simple functions of water vapor pressure with height is a ridiculous thing to do in a model that one wishes to base grandiose claims on.

Anonymous said...

Rabbit Smoker says, "Anonymouse was referring to another paper mentioned by Eli. http://www.scipublish.com/journals/ACC/papers/download/3001-846.pdf "

Uh, that is the most recent & comprehensive paper, but you didn't bother to look and read the 2014 paper before making your false claims.

Now corrected on that, you continue to make additional false claims: "The use of three simple functions of water vapor pressure with height is a ridiculous thing to do in a model"

You are wrong once again. Here is what Harde did, and which is entirely appropriate:

"From GPS-measurements [10], by which the integral water content in the three climate zones can be
determined, together with the temperature and pressure dependence we can calculate the water vapour concentration as a function of altitude (for details see [11]). The mean concentration is in good agreement with the Average Global Atmosphere, but almost 2x larger than the data derived from the US Standard Atmosphere [9], which is only valid for mid-latitudes. The respective graphs for the saturated and unsaturated partial pressures are shown in Figure 1. These vapour variations as a function of altitude form the basis for the further spectroscopic calculations."

Once again, the Clausius-Clapeyron relation is used by Harde to determine the UPPER BOUND of water vapor concentrations, to ensure the model is NOT over-saturated with water vapor, and NO assumption is made that the "air is always saturated" as you claimed. BTW, the same CC upper-bound assumption is made in conventional IPCC models.


Further, Harde points out the Standard Atmosphere assumptions [e.g. MODTRAN as the bunny prefers] are only valid for mid-latitudes.

Anonymous said...

Eli is still not addressing any numbers.

Just cutting and pasting text and linking back to himself as Roger Pielke Jr loves to do.

Tom Curtis said...

Anonymous:

1) As mentioned by Eli in the OP, and anonymous(2) above, there are two papers. Discussion has focused on the first paper (Harde2013) which details the results of spectral line calculations for a "single globally" averaged profile. Harde2014 is the most recent, but not the most comprehensive, being a discussion of a "climate model" and hence having a different subject matter.

2) The use of a single profile to determine globally averaged radiative forcing introduces large errors, a fact shown in Freckleton et al (1998), and commented on in Myrhe et al (1998), the later of which Harde should at least have read given that he refers to it.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/qj.49712455014/abstract
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/98GL01908/abstract

To make it worse, Harde's single profile is not in fact a globally averaged profile. It uses the US Standard atmosphere for CO2, but a global average for watervapour.

3) The UChicago implimentation of Modtran can use a variety of atmospheric profiles, only one of which is the US standard atmosphere. I used the default tropical profile. I am not sure which profile Eli used.

4) Harde2013 used the average of three functions to determine his water vapour profile (one each for tropical, temperate and arctic). Attempting to rebut anonymous(2) by quoting from a different paper where Harde did things differently is irrelevant.

5) And as I am correcting your numerous errors, Ceist said:
"I just looked up the Service address of Scientific Online Publishing

498 W. Alton St., Nashville, IL 62263, UNITED STATES"
(My emphasis)

Looking up Scientific Online (the publisher of Harde2014), we find:
"Register Address: 5668 E. 61st Street Commerce, CA 90040, UNITED STATES
Service Address: 498 W. Alton St., Nashville, IL 62263, UNITED STATES"

So, Ceist was correct and you were merely playing bait and switch. They were right about Sina Cova as well:
http://www.trademarkia.com/map/sina-cova-86002760.htm

Anonymous said...

"I used the default tropical profile. I am not sure which profile Eli used."

Uh, makes a huge difference, as Harde points out: "The mean concentration is in good agreement with the Average Global Atmosphere, but almost 2x larger than the data derived from the US Standard Atmosphere [9], which is only valid for mid-latitudes."

Unlike water vapor, CO2 is a well-mixed gas, therefore, Harde's assumption is entirely appropriate.

"Attempting to rebut anonymous(2) by quoting from a different paper where Harde did things differently is irrelevant." No, it is not irrelevant and the most recent 2014 paper is what prompted the bunny to write his post above, and in fact, both papers arrive at very similar climate sensitivities.

"Ceist was correct and you were merely playing bait and switch"

Uh no, the official/registered address is in Commerce CA, and their phone number is area code (213) - i.e. that of Commerce CA, not your bait and switch address in Illinois. As, usual, the bunnies will try any trick in the book to divert attention away from what the paper actually says and its scientific merit.

Tom Curtis said...

Anonymous:

"Uh, makes a huge difference, as Harde points out: "The mean concentration is in good agreement with the Average Global Atmosphere, but almost 2x larger than the data derived from the US Standard Atmosphere [9], which is only valid for mid-latitudes.""

Only if you accept the analysis of a PhD thesis written in German based on GPS data (?) in preference to the data from NASA using purpose built instruments and a published method. Eli links to that data in his new post on this subject (where my further comments will be located).
http://rabett.blogspot.com.au/2014/10/harde-is-very-wet.html

"Unlike water vapor, CO2 is a well-mixed gas, therefore, Harde's assumption is entirely appropriate."

CO2 is a well mixed greenhouse gas, but still has a variable concentration profile as you move north or south. More to the point, strong thermals result in a much higher tropopause such that the vertical concentration profile of CO2 (which is also not constant) is very likely to be different in the tropics than in the subtropics or higher latitudes. Further, that higher tropopause makes a significant difference for calculating radiative forcing. As much as 9% difference relative to a constant altitude method according to Freckleton et al.

The silliness of your other comments refute themselves.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous thinks I should be current with the latest greatest in crank literature, realizing that the there was more than one 2013 paper. Anonymous mentioned Clausius-Clapeyron and I couldn't find it in the paper I thought it was referring to. Ah well.

Anonymouse extensively quotes reinforce my claim (made after seeing the second paper, and LOLing a bit) that Harde used three simple functions - that is what is plotted.

Neither I nor the Rabett think the Clausius-Clapeyron equation is wrong, just wrongheadedly used to make assumptions about the average water content.

Tis a shame, Harde seems to have done a lot of work.

Rib Smokin' bunny

Anonymous said...

So Tom, are you refuting yourself above?

"EliRabett said...
Tom, his reconstructions show too much water vapor as compared with toa observations and other models, which means he has too much water vapor."

Tom Curtis said...
Eli, no he does not... Harde is using 9 g/kg at the surface, ie, midway between the tropical and temperate bands shown on the graph. Given the relative areas of tropics, temperate zone and arctic, that is not an unreasonable global average. It may well be out, but it is not obviously out...Harde's 9g/kg global average again looks quite reasonable next to that...with again 9 g/Kg being well below tropical values at near surface, and looking like a reasonable estimate...

----------------
"CO2 is a well mixed greenhouse gas, but still has a variable concentration profile as you move north or south."

Only by ~5ppm or so, insignificant to GHE and calculation of approx climate sensitivity

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Nasa_AIRS_CO2_July03.jpg

----------------------

It appears the water vapor pressure profiles in fig 1 of Harde 2014 do approximate the observations, and that the water vapor pressure, rather than relative humidity, is used by Harde as the basis of the spectrographic calculations.

Ceist said...

Anonymous writes: "Uh no, the official/registered address is in Commerce CA, and their phone number is area code (213) - i.e. that of Commerce CA, not your bait and switch address in Illinois. As, usual, the bunnies will try any trick in the book to divert attention away from what the paper actually says and its scientific merit. "

The CA address is their registry address. Guess what's at that address? http://www.attorneyscorpservice.com/

where you can purchase an All-in-One Corporation Kit.

SOP's Service address is a private house in residential Nashville Illinois and is shared with a Chinese company that sells anticorrosive automotive paint.

Seriously, all you have to do is read SOPs website, see all the poor English and grammatical errors, look at the "Journals" and see they all have the same out of the box template, look at the 'editorial board' etc.

Here is their FAQ about paying.

Q5: Do I have to pay for my articles?

A5: As an Open Access publisher, SOP charges nothing from readers or any academic institutions. However, SOP needs certain sum of payment for experts and editorial board to maintain first-class publishing quality. SOP also keeps our website running to increase visiting and download numbers of your article as well as to make your research outcomes known to all. Meanwhile SOP proofreads and edits every article with full meticulousness. Obviously all above is capital required. Thus you may need to pay a little number of money to make SOP better. Of course we can’t make a fortune out of it. And under affluent circumstance, SOP will publish your articles for free.


It's clearly a scam publisher.

Look at Beal's list of Predatory publishers and the criteria used:

http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

Like the Editor of the pay for play journal in question, anonymous needs a course in truth as asecond language.

Hank Roberts said...

Is this the same "toilet water" Anonymous who stalks Brian, or a different one?

In other news, how's this paper look to Eli?
http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/14/25083/2014/acpd-14-25083-2014.html

EliRabett said...

First thought is something like the CO2 laser in the atmosphere of Mars

http://laserstars.org/history/mars.html

which was kind of cute.

Didn't have time to read the paper, but would not be surprised if the energy transfer mechanism is like that of the CO2 laser which is v-v from N2 to CO2 either.