Is AGW from CO2 even possible?

According to the IoP, I'm a "qualified physicist" and I'm going to sound the bullshit alarm (I think Bob might also be a "qualified physicist"?). One of the Professors in my department certainly is, he's an active climate researcher and he is of the same opinion about the 'saturation' nonsense.

Prof. Miskowczi may have got equations that 'work', but I'm guessing he's made some clever assumptions to get there. CO2 saturation arguments generally rely on assuming that no pressure broadening takes place and that the atmosphere does not re-emit light - which are both obviously stupid.

Even if he's managed to do this without those assumptions (and I plan to check

If your theory predicts something, and the opposite is observed, then your theory is wrong. End of.

CO2 absorption bands are not fully saturated on Earth and the absorption by CO2 has been MEASURED TO CHANGE:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v410/n6826/ab...

Venus' greenhouse effect is far beyond any saturation value.

All 3 of these disprove the saturation hypotheses as far as I can see. That said, I'm gonna try and read the paper, but I expect it'll be like every other saturation paper made before and therefore bullshit.

EDIT: I can't find an English version. Have you got one? Based on this:

http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2009/05/the-work-...

It appears his results aren't a mistake in radiative transfer models because it's a solution of a DE with chosen boundary conditions for atmospheric thickness. Radiative forcing from greenhouse gases is typically calculated using numerical methods, including line-by-line and layer-by-layer integration such as you get with ModTRAN, and this has a finite atmosphere.

So it appears that's where his theoretical argument is shown to be rubbish. Line by line/layer by layer integration is the most sensible way of doing it, he hasn't found a mistake in this, but in a 1922 equation. Interesting, but his results are countered by a) a better theoretical approach and b) observations showing his results are wrong.

EDIT2: If the predictions were for 'runaway warming' outside what we've seen, then I would think that observations were outside projections. But climate models regularly project such periods thanks to non-CO2 signals - global temperature is changing in line with expectations of current generations of climate models, so I can't see any possible reason to throw them out.

http://ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/globa...

Here's model runs with regular 'flat' periods of similar length:

http://www.4shared.com/photo/HqB1vazc/FlatModel.ht...

any look into individual model runs will give similar examples. Often only the ensemble mean is published, which smooths out the flattened bits, and I think this is where a lot of confusion comes from.

In Monckton's case, it came from making up his own IPCC projections.

True enough as long as there are CO2 'sinks' in other parts of the environment. Water, as in the oceans, forests as in the world's ever shrinking rain forests have been the world's CO2 sinks that tend to scrub excess CO2 from the atmosphere. Unfortunately these CO2 sinks are already overloaded. If that weren't the case the number of parts per million of CO2 in our paper thin atmosphere wouldn't be rising at a rate of 12 to 15 ppm per decade. The thesis that 'warming' isn't happening simply doesn't stand up to the data that proves that it is. While the rate of increase and the exact moment when that increase reaches a tipping point is not known and possibly not knowable due to as yet little understood atmospheric and heat physics, eventually in our near term historical time we WILL reach that tipping point. Possibly the physics mentioned in this question will retard climate change in the near term, but it doesn't change the overall future of this phenomena.

There are 2 the thank you to be skeptical. you'll be a skeptic who accepts that maximum folk of information helps AGW yet perspectives all new contributions to the theory with an independent and severe recommendations. or you'll be a "skeptic" who actively searches for issues that are incorrect with it. Googling the deep documents of the internet for any paper you will discover that questions some minor element of AGW, and then waving it above your head chanting that AGW is scientifically baseless, isn't how technological know-how works. that may not a skeptic, it is somebody who particularly needs it to be incorrect for a reason different than technological know-how. the sole way somebody ought to income the data and picture that AGW isn't the main probable answer is that in the event that they have faith, to a minimum of a few degree, interior the biggest conspiracy theory ever imagined.

Not Miskolczi again! If you're going to try to disprove widely accepted physical concepts, it's probably better to publish your results in a journal that is slightly less obscure than the "Quarterly Journal Of the Hungarian Meteorological Society".

"the global average absolute humidity diminished about 1 per cent."

Only if you use the NCEP reanalysis as Miskolczi has done. Satellite data and more modern reanalysis show an increase in absolute humidity, and the NCEP data has known issues that result in spurious trends.

Trevor quotes a nice rebuttal of Miskolczi's "theories" from here

http://www.realclimate.org/wiki/index.php?title=Fe...

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"I don't accept anything from RealClimate.org as anything but warmist propaganda and lies."

You don't need to accept what realclimate says:

1) That realclimate wiki was not written by a realclimate contributor.

2) The points that the wiki does make are related to basic physical concepts (e.g. the atmosphere does not behave like an *actual* grey-body, which is what Miskolczi assumes) that you can find in undergrad physics and atmos texts.

But it is strange that you disregard sites like realclimate, but completely accept sites like wattsup, SPPI, and climatedepot without any skepticism, despite their countless errors.

And you don't need to go to realclimate to understand that the NCEP reanalysis that Miskolczi uses is no good. Soden et al. 2005 actually state

"Although an international network of weather balloons has carried water vapor sensors for more than half a century, changes in instrumentation and calibration issues make such sensors unsuitable for detecting trends in upper tropospheric water vapor."

http://www.gfy.ku.dk/~kaas/Bornoecourse/Material/s...

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"Bob326 has already launched an ad hominem attack on the author by the somewhat racist approach of saying the science journal is 'obscure' presumably because it's Hungarian."

Racist? How lame. The reason the QJHMS is obscure isn't because it's Hungarian, but because it's obscure. The ISI JCR doesn't even list it as far as I know. It obviously wasn't Ferenc's first choice either, considering he submitted his article to several more prestigious journals prior to submitting to QJHMS.

MTRstudent, here's an english copy

http://realzoldek.hu/dok/PeteriLaszlo/Klima/2006-1...

I don't know what the IoP has to say about it, but I am a "qualified physicist" in the sense that I have had enough physics training (through both formal physics education and self-study) to understand where Miskolczi went wrong. And he did go wrong. Very wrong.

Is AGW from CO2 even possible?

Theoretically it is possible just based on the physics of CO2 absorption. I, however, live in the real world. The lack of significant increased warming suggests that there are feedback mechanisms. That makes perfect sense because otherwise increasing heat would allow more water vapor and that would cause a spiraling runaway positive feedback from water. It makes sense that water vapor may be decreased by warming no matter what the source. It isn't like there is some significant difference between the warming no matter what the source is. The medeival warm period falsifies the notion of a runaway warming from increasing CO2 because there was no increased water vapor runaway feedback that raised the temperature 5 degrees C. It is ridiculous nonsense to suggest that as even reasonably plausible. That is why alarmists aren't scientists. They are activists with an agenda.

It isn't really that complicated. They are living in a fantasy pretending the aerosols are preventing the world from following what their agenda requires. Any far fetch speculation is passed off as fact as long as it preserves the notion that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant. If that article is true, it only suggests that there is a negative feedback mechanism in the climate and whatever it is responds to the increased forcing from increased greenhouse gas concentration by lowering the heat. The logical mechanism is cloud formation and it isn't like it isn't obvious and suggested by simple logic. Just watch the clouds form in the afternoon in the tropics like clockwork. Warmer days probably just make it cloudy a little earlier. Alarmists believe that increased clouds is just a symptom of warming. They make them into warming influences. The clouds involvement is also suggested by the dim earth paradox which also falsifies the positive feedback mechanism, at least for much less sunlight.

Realclimate was put together to maintain the worst fraud in modern history and that is Mann's hockey stick. Nothing they say has any credibility whatsoever. They are just a leftist propaganda site.

The whole premise of the argument is fatally flawed and there are numerous errors at the quantum mechanics level. I would have thought that being a physicist Dr Miskolczi’s would be only too aware of this. Having read Jeff’s answer and noted that the findings were published on the Science and Public Policy website makes me wonder if Dr Miskolczi’s has some ulterior motive for his wild and unsupported claims.

Here then is an explanation as to why he is wrong with due credit going to Nick Stokes (Real Climate)...

1. The whole theme of the analysis as something that undermines current AGW practice is wrong. Dr Miskolczi’s modelling is of a grey-body atmosphere (no spectral lines or shapes). No global climate model or practical climate study would use such an assumption, or use any body-body theory due to Milne. A body-body model is sometimes used for teaching purposes to convey concepts.

2. The paper is presented as a physics-based theoretical analysis. It is based on three fundamental errors…

• Kirchhoff’s Law says that emissivity equals absorptivity. These are coefficients, which are used with other environment variables (temperature, incident radiation) to determine actual emittances and absorbances (total energy amounts). Dr Miskolczi simply assumes the emittances and absorbances can be equated.

• The Virial Theorem. People who know about this scratch their heads here, because it is a principle which can be important in stars, but applied to Earth just describes the hydrostatic balance of the atmosphere. Dr Miskolczi’s statement is totally mystifying - he says that because of some relation between energies, two fluxes must have a certain relation. No-one can work that out.

• Dr Miskolczi has two equations which describe the result of applying conservation of energy to the Earth and the atmosphere, the two entities in his simple model. In the paper he introduced a third, but never said over what entity or region energy balance was being assessed. In an earlier version of this on-line “proof”, he sought to invoke conservation of momentum instead - a different principle, and very strange in the context. In this latest version, it sounds like it’s back to energy conservation, but still makes no sense.

3. So the proof is now, presumably, held to be empirical. But what does empirical mean here? In the paper, Dr Miskolczi makes frequent reference to plots of 228 points, which seem to have reasonable regression fits. But what are the points? He sometimes talks of (”selected” ;) radiosonde readings, but there isn’t much detail offered. And sometimes of simulations, using his code “HartCode”.

He assembles the results to prove the main principles, but the claim to their observational nature is somewhat undermined by the fact that he has similar graphs for Mars. It seems clear the results are simulations - how real-world observations fit in is quite unclear.

The key finding, often quoted, is that the greenhouse effect is limited. This result follows from his claim that the optical depth has a theoretical value (about 1.84), so if more CO2 is put into the atmosphere, somehow water is squeezed out. But that theoretical depth is based on a claim that the atmosphere must somehow optimise cooling, which he never justifies.

Towards the end of this “proof” site, he lists comments from some of the referees of journals that rejected his paper. I don’t know why; the referees seem to make very strong points. On this particular point, one said: ”The overall concluding statement that ‘the existence of a stable climate requires a unique surface upward flux density and a unique optical depth of 1.841’ makes absolutely no sense at all. An atmosphere can be in stable radiative equilibrium for any LW optical depth, but the equilibrium surface temperature will monotonically depend on the value of the optical depth….” Quite right - the radiative balance can’t remove or add gases to the atmosphere.

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EDIT: Fair enough, if you claim that material on Real Climate is propaganda and lies then maybe you would like to point out the errors and make corrections.

"...this has been peer reviewed by Miklos Zagoni, 2007 IPCC Reviewer, Physicist at Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, Hungary, in December, 2009."

FYI, peer reviewers are anonymous and do publish their names and certainly do not write articles on the works that they review.

Hmmm, work based on computer models. I thought you guys did not trust computer models. Now suddenly a computer model is proof....interesting.

your 'science article' refers to an article on the website Science and Public Policy, a known denier site. I highly doubt this article was published in a science journal.

Vertical distribution of greenhouse gasses does matter when it comes to the greenhouse effect. Approximately 99% of water vapour, the major greenhouse gas in the troposphere, exists in that troposphere while CO2 can exist throughout the atmosphere. This is why scientists have said that CO2 concentration in the stratosphere is more important in anthropogenic global warming than CO2 concentration in the troposphere. And it is not saturated. The fact that it is not saturated exists in satellite measurements of outbound radiation at greenhouse absorbing wavelengths. Specifically that of CO2.

The alarmunists on the site are sorry, but your question is too politically incorrect to get anything except a cursory insult.

I find this to be an interesting data point, and in a few thousand years, when human beings have accumulated enough actual data, we'll know something. In the mean time, the sun appears to be the best indicator.... and it's looking pretty quiet.