Eli Rabett

According to information that came my way, the article was reviewed. That's all that Eli knows.

Eli didn't take any offense, but Rabett Run looks at the metascience of the thing a lot. G&T's paper is the usual type of provocation, 50 pages of fulminating and irrelvancy followed by 40 of bad science based on silly assumptions with fulmination mixed in. The point of the fulmination is to suck the believers in, cross the eyes of anyone actually trying to understand what is going on and then to sneak the pea out of the pod. Phil Felton put it well "This runs to ~90 pages, the first 40 of which are devoted to proving that real greenhouses rely on cutting off convection rather than differential radiation effects! The authors seem very proud of themselves and slip in several very non scientific sneers as well. They consider the IR portion of the solar spectrum to be the same as the IR of the thermal radiation from the earth, they don’t seem to consider the TOA at all (I may have missed it in all the verbiage)." If you want another example of this sort of thing try http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0609190. This is a real never minder. The error is trivial

There are three methods of heat conduction, convection, conduction and radiation. The conductivity of air is pretty low so we can ignore that. In a greenhouse convection is cut off by the glass, in other words a significant method of heat transfer between the inside and the outside is cut off. The same thing happens in a car when you close the windows. In fancier greenhouses the windows can be open, partially closed or fully closed. The greenhouse will heat proportionally to how far closed the windows are This is very well known and you find it in every atmospheric science textbook. G&T for some reason spend a huge amount of time trying to explain the and do so badly. For the earth the rate at which energy entering the earth system must match the rate at which it leaves. Eli is using rates here not energy, in other words Watts, or Joules/sec. Visible light from the sun that strikes the surface is either directly reflected back out to space or absorbed. An amount of energy equal to the amount absorbed has to be radiated back to space, almost all in the IR. Without any IR absorption in the atmosphere (or atmosphere), the temperature of the surface would heat up enough to emit the energy at the rate needed for an equilibrium. This is about 255 K. If the radiation rate is reduced, the system has to heat up to restore the balance In the atmospheric greenhouse effect, convection between the surface and the atmosphere is not cut off but the rate of radiation to space at the absorption wavelengths of the greenhouse gases, aerosols and clouds is slowed. IEHO, this is similar to a greenhouse, because one of the set of "windows" the mechanism involved in radiation to space, is closed down significantly. You (Eli) could think of this as similar to how a greenhouse works, but working through restricting the radiation window, rather than the convection window.

No, Eli merely points out that they attacked the usual sketch of energy flow by saying which has to be among the stupidest things ever written. What Feynman diagrams have to do with the matter is nothing, and the standard language of systems theory is also well off in left field. (1) and (2) are not much better. In G&T speak, this thread (5) does not fit into the framework of stellar evolution so it must be wrong, wrong wrong. After doing that THEN they used a similar energy flow diagram themselves!! In other words, either they are clueless and trying to mislead or they are simply trying to mislead. SNIP.... Trake you mine even up

You have read that paper and the one from the same group in Tellus (1996)? If you had you could have realized a couple of things. First Schauinsland is about 1000 m high and looks out over the Rhine valley. The Giessen station, on the other hand is surrounded by hills. At night Schauinsland station is above the boundary layer inversion of the Rhine valley, during the day not, so published measurements at Schauinsland were taken ONLY AT NIGHT and only for wind speeds above 2.5 m/s. You cannot say the same thing for Giessen. The Giessen measurements were in the middle of an agricultural research station where changes in plant respiration through the year and day were large. Schauinsland was identified as a place where the position and meteorology isolated the measurements from local influences under certain conditions. In short, at Schauinsel measurements representative of CO2 in Europe could be isolated from local influences. This says nothing about Giessen which pretty clearly is not an ideal place for such measurements.

jethro, Sitemeter allows me to see who is reading Rabett Run, and I occasionally click through to see what is going on. While there was considerable material quoted from my previous posts, what I posted here was a summary of the problems one has measuring concentrations of gases at low levels from the atmosphere, and why one needs to be very cautious. I also should have stuck around. On the contrary, Beck clearly has no experience in field measurements, wet titrations and spectroscopic measurements and as a consequence has no basis on which to evaluate the papers. Measurements of CO2 atmopspheric concentrations are not the same as measurements of emissions. It is well known that much of the emitted CO2 rapidly is absorbed by oceanic and surface sinks, many of them biogenic. I discussed this in a recent post on carbon cycles, providing a series of simplified models as well as links to realistic models that you can run on line. This is a very basic point. My argument is that there are MANY sources of error, including siting, sampling, calibrating, and skill in carrying out the titration. I have read enough of the older literature to have seen multiple examples of each. Further, we have a some good ice core measurements which show that [CO2] was pretty much unchanged at ~280 ppm until about 1800, when it started smoothly rising. Given so many problems, sadly, the answer to your question is no. The IPCC is accretive, the process is designed to concentrate on new information. For example the TAR is taken as the starting point for the AR4, otherwise the task would be much too difficult. The earlier work had been evaluated and it was understood that most of it was artifact. There have been previous evaluations, and what I wrote are their basic conclusion. On reviewing many of the references Beck cites, what I find, as those who looked at them critically in later years, is an essentially absolute lack of stated calibration against standard samples. That is about as big a no-no as you can find in analytical chemistry. I find it hard to credit ANY measurement without such a calibration. While the accuracy of the various titrations might be is 1-3% based on the stoichiometry of the method, the actual error in any particular measurement without a calibration is an unconstrained GUESS.

There are a huge number of problems with atmospheric CO2 measurements between 1850 and ~1960 when Keeling introduced IR absorption based instrumentation. They can be summarized as not paying attention to detail. Paying attention to detail was Keeling's strength. Let's start from the beginning. You first have to understand and thoroughly characterize the location where you are making the measurements. This involves taking measurements at all times of day and year and correlating with winds, vegatation and many other things. Keeling, for example, found that when the winds blew from LA to La Jolla, his measurements were higher. He also found effects from the respiration of the vegatation at different times of day. There are some areas which are totally inappropriate. Paris is one, Essen another. One of my posts links to a CO2 measurement done while moving through the Ruhr. You can easily get high measurements. Then, of course, you have to sample the air. The IR method allows you to continuously sample, but before that you had to grab a sample by sucking it into something. This is very tricky, and of course there are any number of dumb ways of doing this of which Mr. Roland Ploennige's playing the Fronselius trombone has to be the worst. Compare this with the careful way that Keeling describes how the gathered grab samples at the same link. Preparation of the sample volumes and their storage is also vital. For example, Keeling found that exposure of the glass bulbs he used was using to light for a couple of weeks produced an artifact. Of course, you want the largest possible volume to minimize surface effects and give you material to work with. Then you need a method. Beck is delusional about the wet chemistry methods. At best they are a few percent in the hands of an expert, but they easily can give bad readings if not done perfectly. The IR method has all the advantages of an instrumental measurement. Since readings can be taken frequently, it is easy to build a statistical distribution that characterizes each sample. The titrations take a long time and require much more sampled material so one cannot get nearly the number of measurements from a single grab sample. As Keeling commented This Scandinavian program, started by Rossby in 1954, had been a major factor in triggering interest in measuring CO2 during the IGY. Nevertheless it was quietly abandoned after the meeting, when the reported range in concentrations, 150–450 ppm, was seen to reflect large errors. 3 3. At two stations in Finland, samples collected by station personnel had been sent to Scripps. These samples yielded nearly the same concentrations as those measured at Mauna Loa Observatory, proving that the errors in the Scandinavian program were mainly analytical rather than due to variable CO2 in the air being sampled. Calibration is, of course the key. Several of Beck's cited references do not mention how they calibrated their measurements. To make matters worse, you want to calibrate with mixtures that you know the concentration of the CO2 in as exactly as possible and making such mixtures at the ppm level, and maintaining them is a magical art as anyone who has tried it knows. In the instrumental system, calibrations are done interleaved with the measurements, think about how you would do this with a titration. One could go on at length, and I suppose when I have some more time I will, but in short it would be amusing to give the Good Diplom Beck a couple of well characterized grab samples to analyze by titration. For Z I refer you to Some Are Boojums