I’m thinking a bit about ‘Science Communication’, a perpetual topic in climate discussions. I don’t have any great insight into the “right” way to communicate science, but I do know one thing: If no one reads, hears, watches or becomes aware of a particular communication, it’s impact is zero. In that light, I posted a graph of Alexa ranks yesterday. One notable feature is that Anthony Watt’s wattsupwiththat.com appears to have more traffic thanthe 60-odd blogger strong ScienceBlogs.com.
On Twitter, O.Bothe asked
@lucialiljegren On your traffic-rank plot. I don’t think that Alexa is reliable. depends on Alexa users. potentially not representative?
I gave an extended answer that amounts to “Kinda-sorta-yes; kinda-sorta-no”. But as the recent “Bora Zivcovic” kerfuffle on twitter seemed to constantly highlight various aspects of the “SciCom” community, I remained curious about the readership levels of ScienceBlogs relative to Anthony Watt’s blog.
I thought: why not compare the number of comments at blogs to the number Anthony gets? I wasn’t going to do heavy processing, but I did tabulate some numbers following links from pages that were currently listed at http://scienceblogs.com. Most top pages showed 10 blog posts, so I tallied the number of comments per 10 posts.To permit people to gauge how this might translate into comments/day, I then scrolled down noted the date of the oldest post. (Hopefully with only a mistakes. I didn’t write a crawler, I just scrolled, copied/pasted numbers and used “sum” in R.)
How many comments do blogs at Science Blogs get?:
Currently listed under “Channel Surfing” at Science Blogs. Starred are also either “editor’s pick” or under “Bora Z” highlights.
- http://scienceblogs.com/lifelines/ : 15 comments * (October 3, 2013)
- http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/ : 51 comments. (October 1, 2013) (PZ myers)
- http://scienceblogs.com/confessions/ : 4 comments. (September 13, 2013)
- http://scienceblogs.com/principles/ : 63 comments * (October 17, 2013)
- http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/: 201 * (October 5, 2013)
- http://scienceblogs.com/thepumphandle/ : 6 (October 9, 2013)
- http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/ : 5 (September 24, 2013) (coby beck)
- http://scienceblogs.com/confessions/ : 7 (September 13, 2013)
- http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/ : 186 (for 30 posts) ~ 63/10 posts. (September 21, 2013)
- http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/ : 2820 (for 25 posts) ~ 1128/10 posts. (September 19, 2013. Note 1115 came from a single post.)
- http://scienceblogs.com/seed/: 15 (August 21, 2013)
An old post by Bora Z was also linked from the top page at ScienceBlogs, so I clicked through to examine the number of comments this man– reputed to be a “blogfather” got when at Sceinceblogs:
- http://scienceblogs.com/clock/ : 96 comments for 10 posts. All from 2010 or before.
Note that 89 of these are for his farewell post written in 2010. Comments include claims like “You’re the heart and soul of the community”.
I also noticed this under “editors picks”
- http://scienceblogs.com/casaubonsbook/ : 219 comments/ 10 posts (April 24, 2013)
How does this compare to WUWT?
- http://wattsupwiththat.com/ 1814 (for 20 posts) ~ 907/10 posts. October 18, 2013
So: in the sample selected, one scienceblogs blog had an average comments/10 posts that exceeded the rate of comments at Anthony’s blog. That one blog’s average was achieved by steady general commenting and then one heavily commented post about anti-vaxers which fell in the sample widow. But that bloggers rate of posting is much slower than at WUWT: http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/ posts go back more than a month ( Sept. 19, 2013); WUWT accumulated their posts in the past 5 days.
Of course this doesn’t prove that Alexa’s rank indicating WUWT gets more than ScienceBlogs is correct. But it does suggest Alexa may very well be correct. As much as “some” might think ScienceBlogs is a big success, depending on one’s definition of ‘success’ it may well be one. But that measure doesn’t seem to include “a network that results in large numbers of comments”. As comments are a rough measure of readers, it also may not include “large numbers of readers” at the blog consortium itself.
The latter would be considered a SciCom failure by most. After all, if the goal is to communicate science, lack of readers would be a serious failing. Mind you: this doesn’t mean that nothing would be achieved by the existence of the blog network. Some of the authors may be have their voices heard in other channels, but the blogs themselves seem to not be heavily read.
What about Scientific American blogs
I’m not going to step through all of scientific american blogs. But if I go here
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/
I see 82 comments for 30 posts; post go back to Oct 20.
That would be 27 comments/10 posts. However, it’s difficult to be certain what this means since SciAm seems to have odd comment policies.
Either way, Scientific American blogs don’t seem to be any more widely read than ScienceBlogs. It seems likely that some of the more informal non-network blogs started by hobbiests do attract larger readership. Whatever that means.
——
Note: (Climate blog aficianados may note the absence of “Stoat”. His blog didn’t happen to appear when I did the tally. However, it has appeared as I write this post: he seems to writing about his foot racing hobby. I’m not going to add the comments/post from Stoat since my goal was to pull a sample; one was pulled. A more thorough tally would require writing a crawler of some sort as it may very well be that blogs by those who almost never post rarely appear on ScienceBlogs list of highlighted posts.)
Both of your measurements are very narrow measures of communication. What if scienceblogs causes their limited commenters to then propagate at other blogs who spread the communications of scienceblogs to a large population? While the wattsuppers simply read and disappear.
MikeN-
Yes. They are narrow. And what if it’s wattsuppers who propagate and the scienceblog visits are all “click, bounce” visits?
People can also look at other things: incoming links. But that can be deceptive because if you look at the twitter profiles of lots of sciAm bloggers, they often blog at SciAm and have their own blog. When they post at sciAm, they write a note at their own blog alerting their blog visitors of the sciAm blog. And so on.
I looked at this because O.Bothe wondered if Alexa might be inaccurate. Alexa and comments are different ways to estimate whether people read the stuff. But they give some estimates.
Sort of like tree rings might measure temperature. 🙂
The lack of comments is deafening:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/staff might be the paid bloggers (?)
>staff=c(0,2,0,8,7,0,6,107,0,0,0,0,0,0,4,3,1,1,9,2,0,0,0,0,2,3,0,0,0,20)
> length(staff)
[1] 30
> sum(staff)
[1] 175
The “107” is the head editor discussing SciAm’s yanking the post where blogger DNLee gave her response to being called an urban whore because she wouldn’t blog for biology on line for free. So… really… if we don’t count that one, they average 2.34 comments per post.
This gets more amazing the more I look. Boraz ‘cofounded’ scionline.
http://scienceonline.com/blog/
If you look today, 9 posts permit comments; one did not. Of those comments that permitted comments not one has any comments. Zero!
The median number of comments is 0. 🙂
Lucia,
“I’m not going to add the comments/post from Stoat since my goal was to pull a sample; one was pulled. A more thorough tally would require writing a crawler of some sort as it may very well be that blogs by those who almost never post rarely appear on ScienceBlogs list of highlighted posts.”
I’ve been running an RSS crawler since July, when I was thinking of making a DIY version of Google Reader. It didn’t go far, because I found Feedly was an OK replacement. So I didn’t do the paging promised, and it’s now heavy to load. It doesn’t have many SciBlogs, but it does inlude Stoat, WUWT, and of course Blackboard. You can select by blog, time interval, commenter etc. It’s
here.
Nick
Cool! But I have to admit, because of OBothe’s questions, what I was curious about today was “all SciBlogs”. I can’t imagine anyone doing it for all.
I’m actually surprised by how low the number of comments is at Sciblogs when looked at more ‘as a whole’ rather than just ‘those posts I landed on because someone mentioned them’ or even ‘those blogs I read because I watch for those’. I’d tended to think of Stoat as getting comments because– mostly– I revisit when there is a conversation going on–and so then assumed that I’m seeing something typical of Sciblogs.
On another note: has your crawler had any difficulty with my banning software? (I’ve been relaxing rules when things hit /feed/ but I’m never quite sure I’m not screwing up. A phenominal number of things hit addresses that say both ‘index.php’ and /feed/ in some order– and that’s not my feed and wouldn’t return the feed if they hit it. So I block that, but I’m always worried I’m blocking a real feed reader.
RomanM
Yes. What’s quite amazing about this is during the twitter blog storm, everyone goes on and on about Bora establishing a “community”. But I’m trying to figure out what “establishing a community” means and what his role was.
I can tell:
1a) He was involved in setting up SciOnline. SciOnline was set up as a non-profit and does have sponsors. Generally speaking, sponsorship means someone forked over some $$. He was involved in setting that up, and so did establish something that could and did bring in an income stream that could be used for something. So, presumably, at least some people had remunerative jobs to do something. Presumably, those people might say Bora Z efforts did something for them.
1b) SciOnline runs conferences which sound like a blast. Lots of people get drunk and party in gatherings associated with these. Since it’s called a “conference” and is supposed be aimed at ‘professional development’ for young people, and people like the idea it’s ‘edgy’, possibly, aspiring writers get people to pay their attendance fee and travel and enjoy the socializing etc. Some science may also occur. This could create a “community” especially if some regulars get paid to present and attend the parties. Attendees may even think they made useful connections (and who knows? Maybe they do!)
2) BoraZ was employed by SciAm. SciAm certainly pre-existed Bora. SciAmerica does have a blogging network where they pay some $$ to some bloggers who write at least 4 post a month. (Number related to me in a tweet.) Maybe Bora was instrumental in persuading SciAm to consider paying some bloggers. Or maybe he just persuaded them to pay him to write what’s called a “science incubotor” and let him pick which bloggers go paid. Or something. If so, those bloggers who got paid something would consider someone getting a magazine to bloggers an achievement of sorts and they might be “grateful” to him for fishing them out of the pool of unpaid bloggers and getting them a gig. However, I think this is a small amount of money smeared over a likely small number of people.
3) Scientific American has something called http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/incubator/ where Bora and another guy wrote posts identifying “The next generation of science writers and journalists. where they
As far as I can tell, what the “Science Incubator/bora” did was find articles and blog posts published elsewhere and describe them. I’m not even sure there was much of a quality filter– though there may have been. It’s not at all clear to me that anyone “linked” by Bora Z at the Incubator owed him any more than I “owe” Anthony Watts, Mark Morano or some such when they link me. Yes. I like the link. Yes, they have lots more traffic than I do. But I don’t call them my “blogfather” or go on and on and on about “how much they’ve done for me and the community” (certainly not to the extent that I would say they should be protected if they did something really bad.)
If you think about it, in some sense, this “incubator” is either a parasite on other blots, or has a symbiotic relationship with them. SciAm’s incubator must regularly identify lots of blogs or– not even blogs– newspaper articles. You can see for example that he might be getting credit for “promoting” Kathleen Raven’s post because he linked her article published by freakin’ reuters. (One hopes reuters is paying it’s writers to write these things. )
Anyway, it’s not at all clear that Bora Z is doing anything of much use for Kathleen (though it’s probably nice to show your boss you got links, and who knows…maybe those uncommeted on SciAm blogs brough traffic. ) But it does seem Bora Z was given “kudos” for “promoting young women” like Kathleen.
Bear in mine, Kathleen was the one who described her interactions with Bora Z here:
https://medium.com/the-power-of-harassment/3e809dfadd77
I won’t repeat any of the previously mentioned tidbits, but here’s another quote
Other things Bora’s links in his SciAm “incubator” article A post at nature middle east: http://www.nature.com/nmiddleeast/2013/131007/full/nmiddleeast.2013.172.html Nature publishes Scientific American. Surprise, surprise.
Generally though, it looks like Bora’s job was to read an RSS feed and pick out articles he thought interesting that happened to be written by people who seemed to be youngish and link those. So: he was a human RSS feed. Sort of.
But his stuff was less cool than Nick Stokes.
All in all… I’m fascinated. But it looks a bit like a big air filled balloon created by people who know how to set up non-profits and make it sound like they are doing something “useful” to the other sorts of groups who donate. Maybe I’m wrong…. but it looks that way.
Lucia,
“On another note: has your crawler had any difficulty with my banning software? “
I download the RSS file. When I initially (June) did this with wget (or maybe cURL) I got banned. We had emails about that. Now I download via R with no problem.
So it is interesting to see that you (Lucia) have demonstrated quantitatively what I surmised through my reading (and discussed on the previous thread). Specifically, Science Blogs has gone from P.Z Myers (Pharyngula), Orac (Insolence); a dozen mid-sized blogs and a number of small blogs to Orac (one of the best science blogs out there), a much-reduced Pharyngula (with most of his interesting posts gone to free thought) and a number of lesser blogs. A sad drop from where it sat five years ago.
Lucia,
I see that the R program I had used for downloading Blackboard RSS hasn’t been running for a while, so there is no new data since August. It’s running now, and I didn’t get banned.
Blair,
I have no statistics on previous readership levels. I think one would need to pay to get Alexa ranks back several years.
I understand that SciencBlogs has an incident called “Pepsi-gate” and a fair number of bloggers quit; BoraZ was among these. But I don’t know if most of those had much readership. It appears BoraZ did not.
To check comments back in 2010, I think I’d need to write a crawler and I’m not going to do that!
“But it looks a bit like a big air filled balloon created by people who know how to set up non-profits and make it sound like they are doing something “useful†to the other sorts of groups who donate.” Meh – the web world is like this. I set up two websites, told all my friends. Near as I can tell, no one visits them ever. Doesn’t mean I didn’t try. Or that anyone can know ahead of time which websites will take off. (On the other hand, I don’t go around now telling people how great it’s doing and they should bankroll it.)
MikeR
You also don’t tell them that your two sites do get a lot of traffic and have a large influence. And people don’t seem to go around acting like “MikeR” is a “big name” who did a lot in founding “BlogCom” or possibly just the “BlogCom ‘community'” so get his advice on… whatever.
Lucia,
Not necessary, suffice it to say that the parent company (Seed) had some serious problems. I was an avid reader of the blog group back then (read Aetiology, Adventures in Ethics and Science, Pharyngula, Respectful Insolence and the Loom -Carl Zimmer’s original blog) daily and scanned others based on the very good cover page. At that time there appeared to be a number of things that all ganged up at the same time. Pepsigate was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Readership appeared to be very high, with copious comments on the big blogs and HUGE comment numbers on Pharyngula and Insolence. Pharyngula had a special thread (the endless thread or the undying thread) that had 135,000 + comments on it. It was broken into chapters to make it manageable to download. Like all good things, however, Science blogs got too big for its britches and is now a hollowed out shell. The readers have moved on, in my case to places like this and Discovery blogs…and frankly to twitter where by following the right combination of people I can find interesting reading from all across the spectrum….
Lucia,
I just checked the figures for sks starting July 25th thru October 24th. (92 days)
They put up 111 posts. 111/92 = 1.21 posts per day.
Allowed 2239 comments. 2239/92 = 24.34 comments per day.
2239/111 = 20.17 comments per post.
Also checked last year July 25th thru Oct 24th.
They put up 114 posts. 114/92 = 1.23 posts per day.
Allowed 3964 comments. 3964/92 = 43.09 comments per day.
3964/114=34.77 comments per post.
Both their comments per post and per day are down 40%-45% from last year, while their posting during both periods is consistent.
People seem to be getting tired of their message.
Well it is pretty repetitive.
Well it is pretty repetitive.
You are missing a number of things. First of all, when scienceblogs changed management there was a significant exodus (Drugmonkey, Janet Stemwedel, etc). Then there is Deltoid which has turned into a forum even tho it remains at sciblogs (Come back Tim, we all miss you). And, of course, in the climate area Skeptical Science which has at least partially filled the hole left when Real Climate decided to do less blogging, and Coby also pretty much stopped, etc.
Blogs are like jello (well Rabett Run is like carrot jello), trying to nail them to the wall is not a useful exercise.
Bob Koss
Not necessarily. Unlike the typical SciAm, SciOnline or ScienceBlogs blog, SkS is one of the sites that has a sizeable amount of traffic and discussion. They’ve always had a decent amount of traffic. I think Dana getting a gig at The Guardian probably increased traffic because he always links SkS and at least some readers will quick.
That said, SkS’s bouncerate is high (68.60% vs my 48.70% vs 38.20% at wuwt all according to Alexa). Bounce rate is the number of visits where people left pretty quickly but I don’t know exactly how alexa detects this. A high bounce rate could also be due to readers at the guardian realizing they don’t want to read Dana’s blog saying the same thing Dana writes in his post at The Guardian… or something. Possibly, many realize they already visited that post when they arrive etc. In contrast, people who go to WUWT know they are intentionally visiting.
FWIW: when I post infrequently, my bounce goes up. When I post more regularly my bounce rate goes down. I tend to attribute that to people arriving, seeing they already read the post and going away. Just a guess though. 🙂 Realize that that rarely happens at WUWT: Freshposts appear constantly at WUWT.
BTW: Scienceblogs bouncerate is 70.10%. Scientific American: 74.00%, realclimate.org 74.20%. Also: all according to Alexa.
FWIW: I don’t know how ‘bots’ affect alexa ranks. I know in early days the rankings were all based on people who voluntarily installed the ‘toolbar’ and that skewed toward counting web developers and people who worked in “seo” since they were the ones most interested in the ‘benefit’ the toolbar provided during browsing. Otherwise, who the heck wants to know a sites rank when browsing? They now write “The panel consists of millions of internet users using one of over 25,000 different browser extensions.” I don’t know what these browser extensions are, but presumably, if they want to correct the bias they had when using only one toolbar, they have tried to create browser extensions with range of entirely different features to lure people with different demographics into using one of their extensions.
That said: bouncerates might be more or less accurate conditioned on the demongraphic that does use a toolbar that reports to Alexa.
Typo or portmanteau? 🙂
Eli
How is this something I “missed”? O.Bothe was asking about how we should interpret the graph in the previous post which was about current traffic. My post is discussing how we might reality check the Alexa with something like comments– and we want to reality check Alex estimates of current traffic. (Among other things, that’s all I have access too.)
Traffic in the past (before SciBlogs “pepsi-gate”) is irrelevant. So I don’t see this as ‘missing’ anything.
Thanks. I wasn’t aware of what was going on at Deltoid– I did realize that Tim didn’t seem to be ‘active’.
It does appear that Deltoid would be “missed” by my method because ScienceBlogs highlights when someone posts. It appears he’s posting once a month and so his post will only appear on their pages the first few days of the month. Had I done the tally then, we’d have this one blog with a huge number of comments /post. I did the tally when I did it– so it didn’t show up. As I said: I would need a crawler to pick up everything, and I didn’t write one.
I’m not sure how one can use comment/post on something that has become a forum relative to a blog. Presumably, at this point, everyone going to Tim’s is arriving specifically to read and write comments. Plausibly, they’d have fewer lurkers, but don’t know. When using this to ‘reality’ check Alexa numbers, we’d have to put an “asterick” in our mind.
And how is this something I ‘missed’? My post is discussing a metric for traffic at Scienceblogs v. WUWT. Traffic at SkS or RC have absolutely nothing to do with either. Coby no longer blogging much matters– but it’s merely an explanation why Scienceblogs traffic may be declining (or at least not rising). But this exercise isn’t trying to find out why; it’s trying to figure out whether WUWT does get more traffic.
If the answer is “yes”, then one might look into getting answers to the question “why” is it getting more. But not delving into “why” doesn’t mean I “missed” anything when trying to figure out whether or not it does get more traffic.
I don’t know who you think might be trying to nail blogs to a wall. Alexa says Anthony’s blog gets more traffic than all of ScienceBlogs. Alexa is imperfect– but has the advantage over Quantcast or others of being easily available for all domains. Plus, the same method (Alexa toolbars) is used for all domains. In contrast, Quantcast gets data from advertisers or tracking the domain owner uses. In principle, that’s great, but in practice, you can’t compare traffic from a domain with little advertising to one that has advertising and so on. (Of course, that deficiency is unimportant to advertisers since they don’t care whether about traffic levels on blogs that don’t carry advertising anyway!)
So, that leaves us with Alexa, with its warts and all. Then we can try to figure out if Alexa ranks seem wildly off or not.
Anyway: with respect to nailing anything. I’m not trying to do any such thing. I’m just trying to get a fiduciary check, not trying to do a formal, be all end all analysis. The comment data tends to support Alexa. It doesn’t prove Alexa is right, but it tends to support it.
Blair
I think twitter has helped people find more interesting blogs. It’s probably reduced the degree to which being in a “network” doesn’t make a blogger much more likely to get traffic.
Keith Kloor gets plenty of traffic at Discover:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/collideascape/#.UmqaCySGFgI
But I think that’s more because he’s Keith than because he’s at discover.
OTOH: I’m sure the bloggers who get paid by SciAm are happy to be paid. So, that’s a benefit. And having the network deal with things like hackers and bots is a benefit (which I’m sure Keith appreciates.) It also ‘looks’ better on a cv or if interviewed by the press or such like. (That said, Keith was well read and respected before moving to Discover.)
I love the skeptical arguments used against alexa. Its like listening to a skeptic talk about thermometers.
Eli is a dunce
Mosher–
Yes. It’s true that Alexa is imperfect. That said, it’s pretty obvious that Google does get more traffic than WUWT, and WUWT thats more traffic than scienceonline.com (BoraZ’s old org.) Just like Alexa says.
And some critics get very carried away. For example: this guy
http://www.realsceptic.com/2013/10/20/watts-alexa-statistics/
http://www.realsceptic.com/2013/08/12/why-you-shouldnt-use-alexa-traffic-statistics
He complains that Alexa admits to biases, tries to correct, but can’t fully correct for. Well..yeah.
So, on this
Always use my own web statistics software for what?
Of course if I want to know a lot about my own traffic, I can process my server logs directly. But I can’t process SkS, WUWT or other blogs traffic that way. I can’t compare my traffic to WUWT using ‘my own web statistics software’ because I can’t plant a web bug on WUWT and count WUWT’s traffic. (Or maybe I could if Anthony would let me. But then… I still wouldn’t have on on all of ScienceBlogs.)
And he complains
Being 20% off on pages per visitors is “significant”? Really? No. That’s pretty close for that sort of thing. Heck given tabbed browsing, and various other things making it difficult to figure out ‘time on web site’,having two different methods of estimating this for the same blog come out as close as 50% seems pretty good to me. It’s clear you shouldn’t compare ‘time on site’ computed using method A for blog I and with one computed using method B for blog II. But comparing the values estimated the same way for two blogs is probably not too bad. Perfect? No. But not so bad.
Then “realskeptic’ goes on about using WordPress counts or Quantcast. Well… fine. WUWT can use WordPress for itself but lots of blogs don’t use WordPress statistics. I don’t. And even if did, does that mean Anthony could compare his to mine? Can he compare to RC? Nope. So, that’s a stupid suggestion.
But as long as the guy is talking about Quantcast and complaining about Anthony comparing to RC or SkS let’s have a look:
https://www.quantcast.com/wattsupwiththat.com click people, usa and per month: 148,161 (Lots of choices are available for WUWT, but these choices are required to compare to SkS or RC which don’t run Quantcasts little counter.)
https://www.quantcast.com/skepticalscience.com 25,810 people usa per month.
https://www.quantcast.com/realclimate.org 43,365.
So, quantcast agrees that WUWT gets a lot more traffic than RC or SkS.
On the other hand, comparing to Science blogs (which is what I looked at) Quantcast says https://www.quantcast.com/scienceblogs.com 186,825 USA peeps/month. This is estimated. So, like on Alexa, the two are close– but Quantcast says Scienceblogs gets more ‘people from the USA’ but Alexa says Anthony has a better ‘rank’. Mind you though: Alexa rank is a sort of weighted quantity: it isn’t page views, it isn’t individual visitors and so on. With Alexa, one person visiting 10 times gives more weight to rank than 1 person visiting 1 time (but not 10 times the weight. ) With quantcast that 1 person is 1 person. So it’s not clear that there is any disagreement between the two measures. They use different methods, but their public pages are also reporting estimates of different things. And relative level of visits is largely in agreement from both groups.
So none of what the guy shows translates intp mean “Alexa is notoriously unreliable with the type of statistics it gives. You can’t do any comparisons with it.†Alexa is imperfect and you have to use some care in making comparisons. But you can make comparisons and they aren’t too bad. If you want better comparisons– collect your own data or pull from other measurement groups too.
Mind you: I know you can’t compare alexa ranks for ‘knitting’ blogs to those for ‘seo’. But that sort of comparison isn’t being made by Anthony, so it’s irrelevant.
Lucia,
I have found Twitter to be both a time consuming and time saving device. I have a stable of people I follow who between the lot will normally provide links to the interesting news of the day and the latest in the scientific fields I find interesting. It saves time searching out information, but for an information junky like me it gives me more than I should be taking in and can accidentally crowd out other useful tasks.
As for Keith, I, like many others I am sure, followed him from his personal blog to the Discover blogs and through him have been introduced to a number of interesting voices. I’m sure his corporate masters will be happy to hear that after reading the blogs for a while I felt honour-bound to actually subscribe to the magazine itself. This also leaves me with a very reasonable magazine to bring with me when I have appointments etc… I eventually recycle it at our local blood donor clinic so others have a less trashy alternative to read while they wait to give blood.
just wondering whether Planet 3.0 (the Tobis (the world needs fewer people) fan vehicle) has an Alexa rating
Diogenes,
All domains have an alexa rank. If you are interested in finding it, you can empower yourself by googling “alexa”, clickinge link and entering the domain name of your choosing in a box provided at that site.
in the business of pitching sites to VCs ( for investment) you start by quoting your alexa and quantcast. Its a fair way to compare. But before they put $$ in you show them your internal numbers.
My domain doesn’t. I get this
“We don’t have enough data to rank this website.”
Lucia, you pose the question “Always use my own web statistics software for what?” after you quoted this from my blog post:
“All this is known in the industry. That’s why for websites you always use your own web statistics software.”
The answer to your question is in the preceding paragraph:
“It’s why you should only put any serious stock into statistics derived from direct measurement of visitors by the website itself (and event then you need to know about weaknesses and how to interpret data). Indirect measurements can give you a hint, but should be taken with a big grain of salt. As they tend to give you the wrong answer about visitors and how they end up on sites.”
What I’m saying is that you only should only use direct measurements for analysis of traffic statistics. Speaking of direct measurements, the following banner is shown at the top of the SkS and RealClimate Quantcast pages:
“This publisher has not implemented Quantcast Measurement. Data is estimated and not verified by Quantcast.”
This means that these statistics are also unreliable. You can’t use indirect measures to argue that WUWT gets more views based on the direct measures we do have.
The direct measurement stuff that I have running for my website agree with each other (Google Analytics, WordPress Statistics, and Quantcast). Though Quantcast does report a couple of page views more per day. But that might be due to me not yet fully removing a bias (Google and WordPress don’t count my visits, I suspect something is still polluting the quantcast stats). But like I said in my blog post “you need to know about weaknesses and how to interpret [this] data”.
A lot of the things you ask or say I mention in the blog posts from my website that you reference.
Steve Ta–
Hmm… Is there no number at all? Is your domain new? Usually, they’ll have some number like 3 million or something.
Mosher
That’s what makes sense. The Alexa and quantcast are necessary to let VC know if they believe your numbers. Of course they aren’t perfect, but whose goign to believe anyone has lots of traffic if their Alexa is 2 million?
“How is this something I “missedâ€? O.Bothe was asking about how we should interpret the graph in the previous post which was about current traffic. My post is discussing how we might reality check the Alexa with something like comments– and we want to reality check Alex estimates of current traffic. (Among other things, that’s all I have access too.)”
You might look at Scientopia where many of the refugees ended up rather than scienceblogs which essentially died when Pepsi took over.
Mosher: “I love the skeptical arguments used against alexa. Its like listening to a skeptic talk about thermometers.
Eli is a dunce”
Darling Steve, Eli never said anything about alexa. It is what it is. OTOH, if you are going to use alexa to compare sites you have several issues you need to think about. alexa works by looking at information from people who have installed the alexa toolbar on their computers. Would you expect both sites you are comparing to have readers and visitors who were equally likely to have installed the toolbar? Have both sites installed alexa certified site metrics? Have they made them public? After all the certified site metrics are much the better indicators.
Interestingly there is someone who has looked into the issue with respect to WUWT and concluded that as of August 2013, Willard Tony did not have the alexa certified script running, but he does have sitemeter, and quantcast.
Or, you could look at technorati, or google page rank, or the wordpress package statistical package, etc which are also out there.
IEHO, if you can get it the single best indicator is followers.
But you knew that paisan.
Eli
Huh? I’m not sure you are groking the issue here. Traffic at “Scientopia” is not traffic at ScienceBlogs.com. No matter what happened in history, and no matter what the level of traffic at Scientopia is, the traffic has nothing to do with whether the Alexa rank of ScienceBlogs and WUWT give correct relative counts.
Are you seriously losing it? Because you seem to be a few cans short of a six pack on this.
Of course. But since you are telling Mosher this, maybe you should read his comment which precedes yours.
In anycase, “certified metrics” aren’t available for all sites.
As for your referencing realsceptic, I comment on his claims above. Please read.
Eli my comment about the idiots who criticize alexa
Is not directed at you.
You are a dunce for a whole host of reasons. Defending idiots is just one
Expect eli to suggest that the comment proxy should
Be flipped upside down.
The bottom line is this. From all the imperfect measuring sytems we have wuwt crushes everyone. Only a dunce
Would suggest that certified metrics that he has never seen and could never see would change that picture.
Its like the dunces who criticize thermometers at airports
Because there more perfect ways of collecting data.
Its like the critics of tree rings who argue the trees respond
To many factors.
The historical data about web site traffic is what it is.
Imperfect. Biased potentially. But it is all eli has. He can like idiot skeptics argue that a perfect system would be
Better. Well duh. You dunce. Duh. That is not the question.
Only dunces answer questions not at issue and think they are smart. Go back in your hole rabbit.
Steven Mosher–
What’s even more idiotic is he argues by writing something like “Interestingly there is someone who has looked into the issue with respect to WUWT and concluded that as of August 2013, Willard Tony did not have the alexa certified script running, but he does have sitemeter, and quantcast. ”
Without noticing that “lucia (Comment #120569) ” only a few comments above his discusses the argument of that ‘someone’ and explains what’s wrong with that ‘someones’ argument”. If Eli thinks realsceptic’s arguments really impugn the notion of using Alexa, Eli should tell us precisely which argument is convincing, and/or explain how or why my criticism of realsceptics arguments are wrong.
Because it happens that what realsceptic noted about Anthony having bot sitemeter and quantcast is irrelevant to the issue of whether we can use alexa to compare sites. It’s true that if every site had sitemeter monitoring (which they don’t) and all placed the meter in the same relative location of the page (it’s the last thing called on WUWT which mean one should expect it will tend to under count visits and time on site) then we might be able to compare traffic at WUWT, SkS, scienceblogs and RC using sitemeter. But they don’t, so we can’t.. Similarly, SkS, scienceblogs and RC don’t have quantcast installed. So we can’t get good Quantcast numbers for those.
In reality, while realsceptic is correct in saying Alexa isn’t perfect– that is true. And everyone agrees. Even Anthony. So… duh. But he is totally wrong that to suggest that it can’t be used for comparison, and his bringing up Quantcast and site meter is just totally lame-o.
The various fiduciary checks suggest that at least for the type of comparisons Anthony makes between blogs in the same niche relative Alexa ranks works fairly well. Is it perfect? No. But Anthony doesn’t claim that nor does anyone else.
If Eli wants to link to realskeptics article and insinuate that somehow that post shows Anthony’s use of Alexa is unfounded and the results are meaningless… well… that only shows that Eli either hasn’t really engaged his brain when reading realskeptics argument. Because that argument is holier than a swiss cheese and as indigestible as straw.
As a moderately regular lurker on this site. I often pop in to see if anything that will trigger my interest is on the plate at the moment.
As the discussion on blog responses is current I thought I would contribute some figures which I counted manually some 12 months ago. So they are admittedly somewhat out of date but from a layman’s view point will give an indication of the relative impact and importance of each blog and an indication of the trends in the belief of the interested public in the CAGW / climate change meme when compared to any numbers counted in the last few weeks.
If I haven’t got your personal details quite right Lucia, I apologise.
The counts were done on the various blogs covering the identical full ten days between July 16th 2012 and july 26th 2012.
This count would fail a statistically correct approach but I’m not a statistician, just somebody, an old farmer who does numbers like this and has found that over the seven and a half decades of my life, done simply like this, the numbers usually give a pretty good picture of reality.
So the numbers below provide an indication of the various blog’s activities in the ten day period of the count plus the interest shown in the blog entries through the commentary count
First up was 3 well known and well publicised full on warmist sites;
1
A / Real Climate, the propaganda arm of the CRU Hokey Stick Team according the Climate Gate mails.
Posts; 4
Comments; 721
B / Skeptical Science
Posts; 16
Comments; 219
What is not known here is the number of comments that have been deleted, a practice that seems to be somewhat common on the radical and extremist warmist blogs.
C / Tamino “Open Mind”
Posts; 5
Comments; 155
Next is the Luke Warmers, the bloggers who cover a wide range of beliefs in that they believe mankind has and is warming the climate through his activities but either any so called danger is not yet proven or there are no long term problems or that the science is still out on the whole supposed problem.
Some [ most ? ] luke warmers are ex warmists whose search of the science made them realise that the extreme beliefs they had held were unsustainable when the supposed science backing their beliefs was given a hard examination.
2.
A / Judith Curry’s, Climate Etc
Posts; 6
Comments; 2167
Judith Curry has a fairly esoteric site with some high quality and highly qualified commenters which are not that many in number but have a hell of a lot to say in repeated posts on her posts which brings her numbers right up. However I think those numbers of comments and the quality of the comments [ mostly?? ] justifies the standing Judith and her blog have.
B / Lucia’s The Blackboard;
Posts 3
Comments; 219
Lucia Liljegren is a statistician and a luke warmer but generally runs this site as a personal site.
When she does get into the statistics side of climate matters, the going gets real heavy for a layman!
Next and last is a small list of skeptic sites, one from the UK, one from Australia and one from the USA.
There are a hell of a lot of quite reasonable skeptic sites out there but these, one from each main western continents will do as representative of the biggest and best skeptic blogs for this post.
3;
A / UK’s Andrew Montford’s Bishop Hill
Posts; 24
Comments ; 966
[ as of July 2012 ] The “Bishop Hill” site usually deals with the UK climate news and affairs and the now quite rapidly evolving political ramifications in the UK as the UK with the CRU affray as in Climate Gate and Copenhagen, the increasing cascade of FOI’s as CRU and the UEA refuse to release any information and the evolving politics of the now visible political backing away from the longer affordable, massive publicly funded subsidies to the so called “alternative energy” scammers.
For Australia it is
B /The JoNova site;
Posts; 10
Comments; 1636
Joanne Nova is a full on warmist turned full on skeptic.
What I found very illuminating is that in exactly the same identical period of the ten days,JoNova with just 10 posts got some 1636 comments
“Skeptical Science” run out of the University of Queensland where John Cook is located, with 16 posts, got just 219 comments.
Hmmm!
Last up is the King of the climate blogs both Skeptic and warmist; From the USA;
C / Anthony Watts WattsUpWithThat
Posts; 58
Comments; 4979
Need I say any more!
Lucia, my domain name and email are provided by one ISP, but the web space is from a different ISP, since they provide free webspace along with my broadband connection. As a result, any reference to my web site is serviced via another web site address, and this appears in the alexa rankings as beloging to the ISP.
So I guess that’s why I get no ranking, despite being live for over 5 years – but possibly it’s because nobody has ever visited the site ;(
Steve Ta–
I’m not entirely sure what you are saying. But if what you mean is your domain is SteveTA.com but to load your web site or blog , one loads “http://someotherdomain.com”, then Alexa would count those hints to http://someotherdomain.com.
Alexa can only count traffic to domains that are on line and it can tell are on line.
Also, note that
http://joe.someotherdomain.com
http://jane.someotherdomain.com
http://blogs.someotherdomain.com
Usually all get counted under “someotherdomain.com”, not on their own. There may be some exceptions– possibly blogspot. But I’m not sure; I’d have to check.
Things may start to change regarding WUWT readership. I happen to be in Russia now. I’ve visited WUWT in the past from here without problems, also some days ago. Today, however, when trying to access WUWT I get a message from the government warning that access to this resource is limited, which may be due to a resolution by the legislation of the Russian Federation, or due to containing information or links that are prohibited, or breaks some exclusive rights.
As a result, WUWT cannot be accessed from Russia at this moment.
Oooops, Climate Audit was close to follow. It’s an epidemy. Roy Spencer’s blog will also follow soon, I guess. Something seems to be going on… perhaps it’s just because of a link they both shared in their blog roll? I don’t know. But I find it suspicious.
Nylo,
Maybe Russia has a thing about WordPress.com? Who knows.
Snowden!@#
Access to the main page of wordpress is not restricted right now, whereas WUWT and Climate Audit remain restricted… but I won’t be able to give much further details as I’m already at the airport now waiting to fly back to Madrid.
Regards.
Well… if I get on that list:
1) Bad news, no russian readers.
2) Good news: no more russian hack bots!!
Lucia,
Thank you.
If you fish around you can find the sitemeter page for WUWT. It tells you pretty much everything about WUWT, esp with a bit of work to look at who logs in. The RC equivalent is passworded.
The problem with just counting comments is that the same people comment multiple times on a single blog post but ROM has some useful stuff there.
Scienceblogs today is a shell with most of the best bloggers gone. Scientopia is much more of a going thing and pretty much the successor to Pepsiblogs, so why does anyone think that Scienceblogs would not have low ratings?
Eli is much of the same opinion as Tom Coburn on Harry Reid about Mosher and Lucia.
Harry Reid has expressed an opinion about Mosher and Lucia? Who knew?
Lucia have you done your own site stats?
A comment on skeptical science and real climate traffic would be, how come John Cook doesn’t have his purported bots out increasing the numbers ?
Or wait??
Maybe nobody real actually comments at those sites.
On a sad note Skeptical science has a 10 point ad/comment in the News Corp news in Australia today full of the usual guff.
Angech is a dunce.
Actually Eli can be fun to read occasionally.
Remember the reason for seeing him and the other blogging warmists here and at J.Curry’s is that these sites are open, Do put up posts reasonably often [I really miss it when Lucia goes into hibernation looking after her family and real life]
And there is the ability to have an argument and discussion even when you get heaped on or say something stupid and outrageous because the site is open.
Unlike Tamino or Neven etc where only one viewpoint is given, everyone slaps everyone on the back and goes home[no traffic]
Well it is pretty repetitive.
The reason for WUWT success is frequent posting, on topic posting, off topic posting of interest [but not knitting?],
and generally open to multiple viewpoints with moderation of extreme language.
One of my laughs when reading Tamino is how many times comments are made about WUWT, JC and occasionally the Blackboard with the comment” but I never go there anymore or read it”
For my part the reason I go to those sites is I am able to from links from sites like WUWT which are tellingly never reciprocated and without these links they would have even less traffic.
Eli,
“Eli is much of the same opinion as Tom Coburn on Harry Reid about Mosher and Lucia.”
.
You’re a real nice guy Eli. But I wonder: do you mean before of after he apologized for calling Reid “an asshole”?
I used the blog index to check the comments at WUWT for the week ending midnight GMT, Oct 31. There were 1166 comments, 524 commenters. Freq distribution was:
    1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9  10  11  12
334Â Â 98Â Â 25Â Â 23Â Â 11Â Â Â 5Â Â Â 6Â Â Â 1Â Â Â 6Â Â Â 3Â Â Â 1Â Â Â 1Â
13Â 14Â 15Â 18Â 19Â 21Â 25Â 33Â 51Â
 1  1  1  2  1  1  1  1  1Â
The record of 51 went to milodonhari. Full CSV file here
Caveat – I check the RSS file every two hours. In times of heavy commenting, some may be missed.
This discussion reminds me of a popular British saying “Never mind the quality, feel the width”
Nick –
I was curious about the distribution of comments at Judith Curry’s site. But for some reason I can’t use your tool…the pulldown menu for blog selection is blank in both Firefox (25.0) and IE (8.0).
HaroldW,
Yes, they are blank. The menus work as an indicator of what you have chosen; you have to populate them. So to select CEtc_, first click the blog menu. It turns pink. Then click on the red vertical stripe next to a CEtc_ entry. The name (CEtc_) should appear on the line marked “Results”; click Submit and it will be entered in the menu. Then you can order the table by date; the result will be restricted to CEtc_.
Entering dates is similar. Click the date menu; it turns pink (meaning currently active). Find a line corresponding to the first date. Click the red strip there. The date appears on the result line; “Submit” will send it to the menu. You can in the same way enter a final date (default is now). Then any further reorderings will show that subset.
You can copy and paste the resulting list – it will be a tab-separated table which you can read in Excel or R.
Thanks Nick. I didn’t quite get the instructions on the page, thought that perhaps the browser was getting in the way. I can use it now.
typical eli.
cant speak for himself. And he still raises another pointless point.
Eli let me spell it out for you.
1. We dont have perfect thermometers ( site meters yu name it)
2. We have two imperfect thermometers
A) Alexa
B) comments
The sum total of all historical data suggests one thing; WUWT crushes.
There is no historical data that suggests otherwise.
At least stupid skeptics have greenland to point to when they question historical records.
that said, multiple comments by one commter is a problem
but guess what? every piece of data I’ve ever looked at suggests that these distributions are consistent between sites.
There is a reason for that..
Lucia’s may be an exception
there is a reason for that
Quick summary of commenters at Climate Etc. using Nick’s handy-dandy tool:
Comments for Oct/Nov (well, mostly October)
1. 530 unique commenters, of which 243 submitted just one comment.
2. Total of 6238 comments.
3. The top 15 commenters had >100 comments each, comprising 37% of the total comments.
Graph Note that the bin size of the histogram is 1 for #comments between 1 & 10, then changes to 10.
angech,
This week and a half hibernation is for a silly reason related to a change at Cloudflare. I finished up changes that I needed to do to respond to that today around 5pm. So hibernation should end Monday or so.
Eli
Which means we mere mortals cannot compare site meter for the two. IOTW: You made one of my points. Admittedly, you seem to be trying to provide this as a criticism of rebuttal of something I said. But, nevertheless, you are merely providing data to show that what I said is true.
Of course. And the do that at WUWT, RC, Science Blogs and everywhere. Every metric has “issues”. Some sites have high raw visit counts– and nearly 100% bounce rates. And so on… You want to use metric outher than Alexa rank and comments? Knock yourself out.
That’s a rhetorical question. I’ll respond with this one: Why do you think anyone thinks that?
I’ve merely observed that they have low ratings and that WUWT’s ratings seem to be higher than all of science blogs. If you are conceding that is true: Well, ok. Why not say, “Yes. You’re right Lucia. WUWT’s ratings are higher than all of Scienceblogs”.
As for scientopia: if you think it would be interesting to compare WUWT traffic to something else: Have at it.
Not my job to compare it to anythiing and everything to anything and everything. I was interested because of the Bora Z thing. He used to blog at Scienceblogs. Then someone asked a question about Alexa and I looked to see if comments supports the alexa ratings. You want to compare to other things: do your own work.
Mosher is right. WUWT crushes.
That being said the message there is less than ideal. The facts show the the truth is with the lukewarmer, but WUWT is far too far to the skeptical side.
Ignoring the folks who don’t crush for a hobby, how do we get the way of the lukewarmer to the WUWT crowd?
Scott,
The facts show that the truth is unknown. Having read Lucia, Briggs, Ioannides, McIntyre, McKitrick, et al, it is clear that the vast majority of all studies are statistically flawed. Having read the climategate e-mails and Harry Read Me, it is clear that climate science rates an F for quality control and an F for ethics.
If you want to convince people of the truth of a scientific assertion, make sure that all data and code are freely available and that the studies upon which the assertion is based have all been replicated sufficiently. Don’t rely on appeals to authority.
Until that happens, climate science is nothing more than the process Gerald North described, “we just sit around a table and wing it.” We may argue about what to call such a process, but it isn’t truth and isn’t about facts.
Scott Basinger: “Ignoring the folks who don’t crush for a hobby, how do we get the way of the lukewarmer to the WUWT crowd?”
Not sure if I can answer directly. Things I have considered are:
1. A world-wide association of sceptics – but for some strange reason most seem sceptical.
2. A joint-enterprise blog (even dare I say journal). It is noticeable that most sceptic blogs are run by individuals and the more successful ones have posts from more than one person.
Totally OT:
I had reason to look up the URL for the Beenstock, et. al., 2012 paper claiming to prove that only the rate of change of CO2 could influence temperature. When I did so, I found this paper that pretty thoroughly demolishes Beenstock, et. al. for misapplying the tests.
I’m just kind of wondering why you would apologize for saying that.
“how do we get the way of the lukewarmer to the WUWT crowd?”
Why does it matter? What is The Tao that you wish to spread anyway? If I should find for example that 50% people believe that a minimum wage increase is bad because it would cause inflation, should I care terribly that they happen to also not want one if I don’t want one, even though their reason is totally wrong? The outcome is the same and it’s the one I want anyway.
DeWitt,
Hummm.. the rate of CO2 increase, adjusted to account for short term changes in average ocean surface temperature, ought to be (roughly) proportional to the level of concurrent aerosol offset influence (that is, greater rate of fossil fuel use => proportionally greater aerosol offsets). That seems to be the opposite of what Beenstock et al concluded (unless I misunderstand what they concluded).
Andrew_FL, sure, and why should global warming proponents address the many exaggerations used to support their cause? The outcome is the same and it’s the one they want anyway.
A rabid base may provide consistent support, but it’ll also drive away moderates. The only reason WUWT’s polarization doesn’t harm its cause is it is matched by practically the entire other side of the discussion. Even so, WUWT fails to pick up a lot of support it could get because of some of what it posts.
There’s also the value of things like truth and accuracy. You can’t disregard these things when it’s convenient then expect people to care about them later.
Strategic issues aside, some people actually care about truth, accuracy and reasoned discussions independent of any goals or causes.
Re: SteveF (Nov 3 17:06),
Since their methodology was wrong, their conclusions are irrelevant.
DeWitt,
Sure, but I only noted that because of the disconnect between the paper’s conclusion and a reasonable expectation of net aerosol influence. Seems like they didn’t do any simple ‘reality checks’… which ought to have given them second thought before publishing.
Brandon Shollenberger (Comment #120644)-I value truth and accuracy, and I also value outcomes. I don’t value one more than the other, but I do value everyone who wants the same outcome as me having the true reasons for doing so more than I value them wanting the same outcome as me. If someone who doesn’t like the minimum wage is right next to me and says it will cause inflation, I will politely explain to him he’s wrong, and exactly as wrong as someone on the other side who says you can control inflation by establishing price ceilings, for the same reason, but that I appreciate his earnestness and agree that the minimum wage is bad for a host of other reasons. If he should persist in economic error I should think it something of a shame, but not a major tragedy that requires a major proselytizing effort to correct.
If you had said that WUWT creates a living strawman for the opposition to attack I could see your point. But “scaring away moderates” is kind of this dumb thing I hear from time to time where I should care about frightening people who are incapable of thinking rationally.
Sorry, editing comments isn’t worker for me, that should be:
“but I do value everyone who wants the same outcome as me having the true reasons for doing so less than I value them wanting the same outcome as me.”
Not more.
“Scott Basinger (Comment #120636)
November 1st, 2013 at 11:34 pm
Mosher is right. WUWT crushes.
That being said the message there is less than ideal. The facts show the the truth is with the lukewarmer, but WUWT is far too far to the skeptical side.
Ignoring the folks who don’t crush for a hobby, how do we get the way of the lukewarmer to the WUWT crowd?”
##################
1. Remind folks that back when the lukewarmer position was first laid out, that willis was a lukewarmer.
2. Get Anthony to post his range for sensitivity.
just kidding.
WUWT is successful because it is good theatre.. or rather bad theatre. Science is on stage and the crowd throw tomatoes.
sometimes deservedly so, sometimes not. And even though its the same tomatoes, people enjoy it anyway.
lukewarming theatre is very hard to pull off since you have to throw tomatoes twice as fast at two wings. and they throw back.
mmm more like a food fight
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZN4r8p6KbU
http://www.r-bloggers.com/forecasting-the-number-of-visitors-on-your-website-using-r-part-ii/
Andrew_FL, I think there’s a problem in your last paragraph causing me to have trouble understanding what you mean. You seem to be suggesting moderates are “incapable of thinking rationally” either as a class, or at least when confronted with this particular situation.
I’m hoping that’s far off. Thinking people who would be “scared off” by WUWT are all incapable of thinking rationally would be foolish and arrogant.
On another note, how can one claim WUWT creates a living strawman? The nature of a strawman is that it is a misrepresentation. If WUWT exists and receives (at least tacit) support from people, how is there any misrepresentation involved?
Re: Steven Mosher (Nov 4 10:34),
.
Scott and Steven, can you point us to a well-organized piece of expository writing which lays out in one place what the Lukewarmer Position is, including the range of sensitivities covered by the Lukewarmer Position?
.
Thanks in advance.
I probably should not comment here as I think the statistics on who visits a blog and how many people visit a blog, while maybe interesting or even important to some of those who need or want traffic as a business proposition, is a bit counter to the idea of blogs reaching niche audiences and allowing discussion and even learning at rather specialized levels. Certainly it is not important as to the correctness of any position on AGW. Further I doubt whether blog attendance or the quality of that attendance has much effect on what actions may be taken vis a vis AGW.
I think the devolving of this thread’s discussion to a luke-warmer message is also fraught with disinformation if one takes the luke-warmer position to have any meaning with regards to attempts to mitigate AGW. A message that gives a range, and possibly wide range, for global warming is but an abstract number put forward that means no more than the finding that 97% of climate scientists judge that at least one half of the recent warming was anthropogenic in origin unless one is willing to relate those abstract ranges to present and/or future detrimental and beneficial effects for mankind.
Beta Blocker, as I recall, the Lukewarmer Position is just that odds are climate sensitivity is in the lower half of the ranges given by the IPCC. That is, 1.5 – 3.0 degrees per doubling of C02.
It’s a fairly non-informative position. Theoretically, climate sensitivity could be 6.0 degrees yet not dangerous. It could also be 1.0 and catastrophic. Taking a position on sensitivity doesn’t inherently dictate a position on things like risks and policies.
At least, that’s my understanding of the position. Someone may be along to correct me.
Ken and Brandon say:
(Ken)
(Brandon)
I never really thought about what range of sensitivity a lukewarmer stakes out, but this gets me thinking. I think “lukewarmers” as a group tend #1 to be on the low side of the IPCC sensitivity range, and also tend #2 to be on the low side of the (damage/sensitivity) range. While there’s no “lukewarmer” position, a Monte Carlo on these PDFs should come up with a decent central value of an overall “damage per doubling” or something.
Further, #3 a lot of lukewarmers seem to be technological optimists, which (correlates with? causes?) a higher estimation of the benefits of energy use (the largest source of anthro GHG emissions) than the average warmist. I’m slightly more of a technology skeptic than some lukewarmers (and somewhat of a “redistributionist” economic liberal; funny that) but I identify as a lukewarmer based on points #1 and #2.
I see lukewarmerism as mainly a reaction to extremism. What I think distinguishes a lukewarmer from an “honest broker” climate scientist with a low sensitivity estimate is the extension of thought into the policy arena, or at least the “economic impact” arena (?). Certainly my lukewarmerism is largely in reaction to what I see as “alarmism” on the side of the “mainstream” climate pundits.
Incidentally it appears that my Ethernet IP has been unbanned! (I usually have to go wireless to even get here let alone comment).
Here’s hoping Roy posts soon.
The lukewarmer’s way:
“The short answer is that we believe global warming to be real and potentially quite serious, but that ‘when offered an over/under bet on 3C sensitivity, we’ll take the under’–Steve Mosher”
http://thelukewarmersway.wordpress.com/2013/04/22/recapitulation-of-some-lukewarm-beliefs-ideas-and-occasionally-knowledge/
Beta
The short history
1. First definition on CA.
A) belief that C02 is a GHG
B) centered on the percentage of warming due to man
there was a group of people who agreed to numbers
in the 30 to 50% ish range
2. The next attempt focused on the rate of warming
That happened here as we discussed the models not be correct
.2C of warming was clearly high, so we looked at
.15C or .17C
3. That was a little lose and folks pressed us to define it with more rigor
A) C02 is a GHG
B) all else being equal it causes warming
C) Lower boundary on ECS is the no feedback number
you could say 1.2-1.5C. another way to say this is we
dont see any solid science supporting net negative feedbacks.
D) Median estimate <=3C.
or, given a bet that ECS is 3C, we take the under bet.
within that position you could have folks who argue for 1.6, or 2.5, or whatever.
On policy? Its a free for all. there is no policy position.
quite simply policy and policy choices are not science based to begin with.
The point of the "label" is very simple: its an intellectual space
where some skeptics and some warmers can co exist.
BillC (Comment #120656)
Yep. Lots of changes in that arena.
Scott and Steven, thanks for the explanations and for the link. These fill the bill for me as a description of what the lukewarmer position represents.
My own guess is for a 1C to 1.5C warming for a doubling of CO2 with temperatures on decadal scales following an up/down oscillating pattern in the same fashion that CET has done over the last 350 years, but with the currently slow century-scale upward trend gradually accelerating.
BillC
Policy views are separate from the definition of lukewarmer.
It is true that lukewarmers tend to advocate more moderate policy responses than people who believe sensitivity is in the “hell-fire and brimstone” range. But that’s rather natural since a person who thinks that warming under BAU will be 2C at the end of the century is likely to be less inclined to drastic cuts relative to someone who thinks it will be 6C at the end of the century and so on. But it’s the level of warming predicted that tells you whether someone is a lukewarmer; it’s not the policy response. If someone thought climate sensitivity was ~7C but advocated a policy of zero regulation, they would not be a lukewarmer.
Well I guess I count as a lukewarmer based on my over/under bet on sensitivity, but I do think that there is an intermediate step between sensitivity and policy – “Do Something!”/”Do Nothing!” that is assessing the odds on the damage function in terms of damage per unit sensitivity. In my time spent at climate blogs, I believe that most self-identified lukewarmers also align with the lower than “consensus” estimation of this function. IOW I agree that if someone thought sensitivity was ~7C but advocated a policy of zero regulation, they would not be a lukewarmer, but I also haven’t seen many or any lukewarmers who think sensitivity is ~1.5C but are very concerned about the damages nonetheless. Maybe one’s view on damages is only dependent on one’s estimate of sensitivity, but I think it also depends on one’s estimation of people and ecosystems’ capacity to adapt (or in the case of ecosystems, whether adaptation is important). Whether it’s included in the “definition” of lukewarmer I don’t know, but it seems like a common tendency, and is definitely an intermediate step in the thought process that reasons from temperature to policy.
BillC
Well, it wouldn’t be plausible for them to be very concerned about damages due to warming if they thought sensitivity near that end. A lukewarmer could plausibly be worried about ocean acidification and remain a lukewarmer. In such an event, they would presumably favor nuclear, solar, conservation, carbon capture and storage or some such thing. I haven’t run across a lukewarmer who goes on and on and on about ocean acidification, but honestly, I don’t hear many hell-fire and brimstone types going on about that constantly either. Some people do go on about it, but it’s not a major arguing point.
Yes. Ones views of damages depends on more than just the estimate of sensitivity. However, all other things being equal, if the amount of warming from CO2 is lower rather than higher, then there is less to adapt to.
I suspect what you are trying to say is that there seems to be a correlation between thinking (a) the climate sensitivity is lowish and (b) even given a defined amount of warming (e.g. 1C) the amount of damages per degree increase is also lowish.
There may be such a correlation. It would not surprise me if it were so, and for a very good reason:
No matter what “lists” people post about how you “should” assess scientific information, people will, in general, follow the same heuristics they do for assessing other information. One of the rules is: If you think there is a factor that results in exaggeration, then you will suspect exaggeration to be present when that factor is present.
You now turn to global warming. Consider this factor: Research funding tends to be available if a case is made that there is “a problem”. If one believes that this factor would tend to result in some exaggeration, one would believe it will operate in both the WG1 and WG2 type studies. Of course one could be mistaken and the factor does not result in exaggeration– but if one believed it does, then they will tend to suspect some level of exaggeration in both areas of study.
There is also another factor which is better defined by “absence”. In contrast to applied research in more medical/industrial fields, climate science and some climate change related fields in environmental science share the feature that generally speaking the studies will not result in creating a marketable product other than research. That is: Where investigations into medical areas might result in a marketable pharmaceutical or treatment, or engineering research might result in marketable things sold to people in outside the field , investigations into climate will rarely result in anything marketable other than more research. (To give an example: a chemical engineer might develop a brighter paint pigment which is sold to a paint manufacturer who sells the paint to a home owner or builder. Someone in semi-conductors might create a better memory chip, a food scientist an ingredient that makes crispier crackers, a biochemist develops a new medicine and so on. Each can then sell this thing to someone else. )
For a while now– but I’ve been thinking that the absence of this in climate science is a factor that could also result in the tendency to exaggerate. Or– possibly– more correctly, the absence of the ability for practitioners to translate their work into something marketable means that there isn’t much of an incentive to drop ideas or methods that just aren’t panning out that there might be in other fields. And there isn’t really a path where a person so correctly sees the “crowd” is wrong percolates to the top because that person profits by being right. In other fields, the way that person profits is the actually make the better drug, pigment, gadget or so on. And beyond that: The avenues that are promising create money often in the pocket of the person who was right and that person is likely to funnel more money into what he thinks is right rather than what the “community” or “funding agency” thinks is right.
In contrast, the main “way” for the climate scientist to move forward in a climate fields is to gain the esteem of other climate scientists with marches hand in hand with getting grant proposals funded in an environment where proposals are sent out to other climate scientists to endorse or knock down. And the main way the field advances collectively is for funding agencies to see the field as important– and this will tend to make those working the the field to exaggerate the dangers (or importance of) climate change and also want to fit in with the “crowd”.
So, it’s really a situation where “self correcting” is going to be slow relative to what we see in other fields. (I do think we are seeing some ‘correction’ owing to “the pause”. But it’s generally going to be slow going!)
Lucia,
Hear hear! Great comment.
I think that comment, were it widely read, wold help people understand the ‘lukewarmer’ position. The POV is a combination of rational skepticism, clear eyed technical evaluation, and most of all, calm perspective about GHG warming in the pantheon of problems (and potential problems) that humanity faces.
Aside from falling into the definition of the lukewarmer, I’m an electrical engineer working in electrical power distribution.
To me, this is a slow moving problem, and whatever changes there may be should likely be easy to adapt to using present and future engineering methods.
In the last century given the problem of population growth in large cities, smog would have been a major hand-wringing issue for futurists. Moving away from wood and coal for heat solved many air quality issues; with use of motor vehicles creating challenges of their own, once again solved by cleaner burning fuels.
1913 futurist looking at 100 years down the road: “Think of all the people in the world in 100 years, what will they do with all the horse poop? And food! It will be impossible to feed everyone!”
I’m surprised that too often people forget that innovation will enable surprising adaptation. Humanity is not stagnant.
Say in 100 years a city is going to actually be below sea level, 100 years of civil engineering projects will ensure the city remains dry. If the appeal of the city isn’t sufficient to bear the cost they’ll build new buildings in a different city or build away from the shore.
It’d be a lot different if it was a fast moving problem…
I remember when people were using the term lukewarmer and being frustrated at nobody defining what it meant to be one clearly. It’s better now but the reason I wanted at the time was because when people would ask me if I was a lukewarmer I couldn’t give them a yes or no answer I had to ask what they meant. When I finally got a definition I was disappointed that, at the time, I was just *barely* excluded.
Actually I can’t remember that I was disappointed.
Either way I see I am still arguably excluded but I think perhaps more people are included on the whole than before.
Hey, progress of the wrong sort is still progress, eh? 😉
I’m not a lukewarmer. Because I don’t really know climate response. However, were I to guess with the knowledge I hold, I would land in the low end of the lukewarmer range.
What drives my policy opinion is the understanding that government policy cannot reasonably drive consumption, only cost. And there is much greater human-caused damage to be had with respect to increasing energy cost by limiting energy use, as compared to consumption.
It isn’t even a close call IMO. In our lifetimes, the effects of warming will be very much beneficial.
Lucia,
Yes, the first part of what you wrote is what I meant. And the rest resonates – thank you.
AndrewFL
I think Mosher and I have both pretty much said the same thing for a very long time. The difficulty is that there have been (and likely still are) people who want to insist that “lukewarmer” includes “coolers”.
The group who wants to say ‘lukewamers’ includes ‘coolers’ does include some hell-fire and brimstone wamers. But the people most insistent are often coolers, who for some reason, do not have the nads to be willing to call themselves coolers. One of these people used to visit this site often. At some point in comments, I did have to tell her that look… you are predicting an imminent ice age. In fact, if I recall correctly, she thought think sensitivity might be negative. (No, when I write “sensitivity”, that is not a typo for “feedback”, and no it doesn’t make sense to think sensitivity might be negative…. but periodically, she said things things that suggested she thought that. And yes, she called herself a lukewarmer and gave all sorts of reasons why she thought ‘lukewarmer’ included people who thought that cooling in more probable than warming in the upcoming century— not just over the next few years. For example — to my recollections– she seemed to think that since she was open to the notion there was a remote possibility sensitivity might not be negative and in her mind this was ‘sufficient’ to self-lable lukewarmer. But it’s nuts! )
Returning to your complaint about no clear definition: very early on, it could be difficult to clarify that these sorts of people were not warmers ( or at least say that I would never call them “lukewarmers”), because they did not yet have their more specific opinions on record. So if you had asked the definition ‘back when’ that person would likely as not say she was a “lukewarmer” her would tell you her definition– but tapdancing a bit to make it sound plausible she was a “lukewarmer”. And… well… because we didn’t have a long history of her statement about possible resumption of ice ages– or temperature dropping over the full upcoming century or the huge variability over the entire history of the earth and so on– it was a bit difficult to point out to her that she was absolutely not a lukewarmer.
Or at least I would not call her one because to do so would turn the term into a meaningless one. After all, it was created precisely to distinguish between people like her– a stone-cold cooler– and people like Joe Romm– a hell fire and brimstone warmer.
So: in my view, Lukewarmer is and always has been a subcategory of warmer not a subcategory of cooler. It is not even a subcategory of “CO2 has no or almost no effect… possibly sensitivity is as low as 0.00000001 C”. Other than climate sensitivity on the lower end of the IPCC range, it can be difficult to pinpoint any individual scientific idea that a lukewarmer must hold. But there are some ideas they can’t hold– and some collections of ideas they can’t hold simultaneously and be lukewarmers. (e.g. No matter what someone says they think climate sensitivity is, it’s extremely difficult to believe they are a lukewarmer if they hold all of the following views at one time: (a) the most recent 10year average GMST this decades might not be greater than it was in 1910-1920, (b) any and all anthropogenic effects are so small relative to natural variability that we can be nearly certain no more than 10% of the temperature swings in the 20th century have anything whatsoever to do with man (c) it is more likely the temperature at the end of the 21st century will be lower than the most recent 10 year average.)
Over time, I have heard people who spout all those simultaneously self identify as “lukewarmers”. I don’t own English. But I don’t own it when discussing colors either. And while I’m not going to argue vigorously over whether “magenta” falls in the “red” or “blue” range, but orange is not purple.
I don’t call them lukewarmers any more than I call “orange”, “purple”. And I can say with confidence that in the past, some people who were “coolers” wanted to call themselves “lukewarmers”. (Not all… but some.)
I recall that is roughly what you said:
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2011/penalty-flag-first-jaxa-ice-extent-rise/#comment-81442
At the time. 🙂
My view is that ECS = sqrt(Ï€) K.
[And odd that the color wheel mis-spells “complementary”.]
I am not now nor have I ever been a Luke-Warmer or a Warmer or a Cooler. I hold that we do not have a sufficient understanding in climate science of the underlying phenomena to make reasonable predictions of past or future climate that would allow me to stake out a favored and meaningful temperature range. Climate is much more than temperature and particularly with regards to effects important to human beings and thus a thermometer stand is a bit over simplified for my tastes. Further I judge that climate science, being driven by advocacy in all directions, will have a difficult time getting the science and underlying statistics and other supporting disciplines sufficiently correct for me to become an ERer for some time – and I do not have a lot of time left.
I see much of the discussion on AGW and its potential effects driven mostly by political inclinations that have much to do with where one stands on the issue of government control and size in the area of economics. That does not mean that those with an inclination for more government are necessarily in favor of applying it to AGW mitigation as they may have another interest they feel needs a higher priority of government attention. Those disinclined for more government may on the other hand have an abiding faith in science, and as practiced by climate scientists, and be influenced by the dumbed-down form of the science message by the media.
As I have noted before, my shying away from becoming an Erer stems from the uncertainties that are piled on uncertainties in this matter of AGW and applying it to policy. We have uncertainty in temperatures, uncertainties in climate as it might affect human beings and uncertainties in the attempts that might be applied to mitigate AGW and/or its effects.
This lets me out. I’m with Kenneth and Jeff I think. If I had to guess, certainly I’d guess that we should see some warming. However, I’ve never understood why we should guess knowing we’ve got an incomplete understanding and somehow be justified in calling that science, but plenty of people I respect disagree with me on that.
HaroldW, would not the hyphenated version of misspells be miss-spells?
Also while I may have a view of uncertainties in these matters larger than some participants, if you allow n to be larger or small than 1 in your equation you have really opened the range. Not that I am sensitive, but you may be funning us Uncertaintiers. Of course, if n can be negative than you may be funning the Imaginers.
Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #120675)- That’s pi, not n. He’s saying about 1.7, which is a lukewarm estimate, although maybe slightly on the low end but not the bottom of the low end.
For my own part, when I’ve attempted estimates I’ve generally gotten close to .7. This is too low to make me a lukewarmer and puts me firmly in what I suppose would be skeptics?
Anyway, I’m not particularly convinced by the arguments that it *must* be greater than 1.2 and probably about 2. It’s possible, I wouldn’t absolutely rule it out, but I’ve never gotten an estimate that high in an analysis I have done.
That being said I *do* have respect for those who have worked hard to rule out the canonical distributions at the high end, and I would certainly cite their work for why the answer is almost certainly less than 3.
I basically agree with you on the politics. I don’t think I agree on uncertainty. I think we are *less* uncertain than alarmists need us to think we are, in that we can rule out very high sensitivities. This is important because if we couldn’t we’d get damage function estimates biased high by the “fat tail.”
I invented the definition of lukewarmer before lukewarmer was coined by TCO back in 2003. It’s really quite simple. If one believes
1)that CO2 is a WMGHG and that petroleum hydrocarbon combustion has raised CO2 levels in the atmosphere
2)that addition of CO2 will cause warming
3)that we don’t know the feedback chain
4)that the feedback chain is not likely a runaway unstable heat engine
5)that there are many other man-caused 1st order forcings (+/-) that are very poorly understood
6)that there is no reason to panic
7)policy should focus on low-hanging fruit with multiple benefits (like reducing toxic and carcinogenic pollution and increasing energy efficiency)
8)policy should create stronger scientific and engineering entrepreneurial environment and not pick winners and losers
I don’t mind that others are constantly taking credit for this because I am quite comfortable in my big-boy pants.
Howard (Comment #120677)-I *would* fall under this broader definition but I suspect a lot of people who are definitely not lukewarmers, too.
I’m not necessarily always in the “words mean what people use them to mean” camp, but when the usage appears to arise from spontaneous order I guess I go along with it.
On the subject of ‘lukewarmers’.
See below two parts of posts on this thread ‘defining’ a lukewarmer:
[“The short answer is that we believe global warming to be real and potentially quite serious, but that ‘when offered an over/under bet on 3C sensitivity, we’ll take the under’–Steve Mosherâ€]
and
[“I invented the definition of lukewarmer before lukewarmer was coined by TCO back in 2003. It’s really quite simple. If one believes…”] – Howard
Does anyone see the common theme? Why do both posters use the word ‘believe’? Because they don’t know. And when people don’t know they tend to assume, or guess.
Any label formulated upon a belief is, in the context of the climate debate, irrelevant. As an estimate of Climate Sensitivity cannot be made using real-world evidence, then any such estimate is in reality nugatory guesswork.
If you don’t know, don’t make things worse by guessing.
Kenneth and Jeff Id are, on the other hand, being objective.
Kenneth’s statement: “I am not now nor have I ever been a Luke-Warmer or a Warmer or a Cooler. I hold that we do not have a sufficient understanding in climate science of the underlying phenomena to make reasonable predictions of past or future climate that would allow me to stake out a favored and meaningful temperature range.” is both clear and objective.
Jeff’s statement: “I’m not a lukewarmer. Because I don’t really know climate response.” is both clear and objective.
Labels are unnecessary; some real-world evidence would be more useful.
Because I’m bored, I’ll play devil’s advocate for a second and point out that whether or not one thinks they are guessing depends heavily on how convincing one considers the available evidence to be. I don’t find certain evidence all that persuasive, so it appears to me that drawing conclusions from such evidence is guessing. I expect that to others who find certain evidence persuasive it appears I’m being dense or deliberately obstructionist.
Arfur Bryant (Comment #120679)- A belief is not the same thing as a guess, it’s something one thinks is true, based upon what one considers the evidence.
Instead of dismissing this as unobjective because of the use of the word belief, you should ask whether the reading of the *evidence* is objective, and whether there aren’t arguments that could be made against those interpretations of the evidence.
I’m curious whether you think Andrew_FL (Comment #120676) qualifies as unobjective belief or a position based on a reading of some evidence.
Howard,
I’m mostly in the “words mean what people use them to mean” camp. But for this to work there needs to be some collective agreement. Moreover, there is a point where conflicting claims can make a word dysfunctional. One of the problems with some “coolers” wanting to call themselves “lukewamers” was that “lukewamer” was (and even still is) a neologism created to distinguish “lukewarmers” from both “coolers” and “hell-fire and brimstone” warmers. If coolers could co-opt “lukewarmer” to include “coolers”, then the term would be useless.
Now: I do understand a motive of some coolers for wanting to be called “lukewamers”, and that is that they don’t like “denialist”. But the solution to that is not to insist people call them “lukewamers”, but to pick another word… like… possibly “coolers”. Or coin their own.
Many nouns could be called “labels”. Sometimes labels are useful. For example: if my husband is going to the store, and I want him to buy tomatoes, I like the fact that we have a word that distinguishes tomatoes from shoes, bananas and nail guns. Labels may be more or less precise and we can argue about whether “flip flops” can really be called “shoes” or whether they are just some sort of illegitimate “footwear”. But words can still be useful. “flip-flops” are not, after all, “underpants”.
Jeff
I actually think this makes you a lukewarmer. I think one is permitted to admit a great deal of uncertainty. But if forced to bet, if you would take the “lower end” of the IPCC range rather than the “upper end”, you are a lukewarmer. If you took below the lower end… you are becoming a cooler. If you are in the upper end, you are a hell-fire warmer. If you insist that the absolute middle is the best value… just warmer.
Doesn’t matter if your view is “based on science”, “gut feeling”, “inspired by stories told you by garden gnomes”. Nor even how absolutely sure you are: I think call you a lukewarmer if you think it’s more likely on the lower end but inside the IPCC range. Of course, as the term was coined pre-AR5 and — I think– during the ascendancy of the AR4, it’s defined based on pre-AR5 values and I think on AR4 values. Possibly in future climate science will all move to “lukewarm”. Or not.
Andrew_FL:
Agree with you here:
Merriam-Webster (my go to for pedagogy) defines opinion as “a view or judgment formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge.”
They define belief as “conviction of the truth of some statement or the reality of some being or phenomenon especially when based on examination of evidence”.
However, faith is belief in the absence of evidence (that is my definition). Sometimes people intermix belief and faith, but I don’t think that is an appropriate word choice, personally.
Arfur Bryant (#120679):
“an estimate of Climate Sensitivity cannot be made using real-world evidence”
Otto et al. 2013 appears to meet that criterion.
Lucia, thank you. The odds of my ever writing anything for publication are small, but gods willing if I get the chance I’m going to use this title. I’ll credit you.
Arfur:
Welcome to geology where the uncertainty is so great that belief in swag’s are the rule until replaced by a new swag after drilling down deeper… von Storch’s Climateweasel blog has a nice discussion of philosophical limitations of hard science that confirms my opinion that we can only have belief and not certainty, even in hard sciences like igneous petrology 😉
Lucia:
If you want to get specific, my swag is that lukewarmistas generally fall in the ECS range of 1.2 to 3 deg K
Well thanks Lucia, I’ve been called worse and it certainly puts me in good company. 😀
I still won’t be surprised if my guess turns out to be completely wrong but lately our ability to predict the future looks brighter.
Andrew_FL (Comment #120676)
November 7th, 2013 at 10:39 am
“Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #120675)- That’s pi, not n. He’s saying about 1.7, which is a lukewarm estimate, although maybe slightly on the low end but not the bottom of the low end.”
Thanks for straightening me out, Andrew, and reminding me why when I want to spot the location of an unfamiliar store from my car I take a grandkid along. I thought Harold was kidding around as he is prone to do. When I see pi in an equation I immediately get serious.
Magenta isn’t red or blue, it’s both. It’s the color resulting from subtracting green from white light.
I would like to believe that Luke-Warmers or people who legitimately call themselves that exist mainly because of those people on both sides of the AGW issue who take positions that are not rationally or logically acquired. The Luke-Warm or middle ground I would hope has more do with the fact that the no-brainers tend to live at the extremes of the AGW spectrum than it does in staking out a position that would be unchanging with more evidence.
The no-brainers in my world are to be ignored and probably need not be dealt with except when they agree with me. What I like about those who might fit my description above for Luke-Warmers are people who are willing, and in many cases able, to analyze the current field of climate science in such a manner that would allow informed laypeople to better judge the evidences for themselves.
“I basically agree with you on the politics. I don’t think I agree on uncertainty. I think we are *less* uncertain than alarmists need us to think we are, in that we can rule out very high sensitivities. This is important because if we couldn’t we’d get damage function estimates biased high by the “fat tail.—
Unless we are dead certain on these things we have to place some probability that may well be vanishingly small on the occurrence of an unlikely event. Quantum mechanics in the extreme has some probabilities for very unlikely events. Even an event like a large asteroid hit that we all agree would be the end of mankind has some small probability of occurring in the relatively near future, but that does not mean we will immediately start on some drastic and expensive mitigation program.
Kenneth Fritsch –
Sorry for tricking your eyes. I agree that that it looks too much like an “n”. The pi looked much more distinctive when I typed it in, really it was.
Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #120703)-As far as very high sensitivities go, I think we can safely say life on earth couldn’t possibly have arisen if sensitivity was above 5 K for a doubling of CO2. So some high sensitivities I would place a zero probability on. Maybe other would disagree.
Mark Bofill (Comment #120680)
Mark,
I basically agree with that, although I’m not aware that there is ANY evidence (real, physical evidence) that supports the assertion that CO2 can exert any significant warming effect on the planet’s ‘global temperature’. To what evidence are you referring?
And I don’t think you are being a devil’s advocate! 🙂
@lucia,
[“Many nouns could be called “labelsâ€. Sometimes labels are useful. For example: if my husband is going to the store, and I want him to buy tomatoes, I like the fact that we have a word that distinguishes tomatoes from shoes, bananas and nail guns. Labels may be more or less precise and we can argue about whether “flip flops†can really be called “shoes†or whether they are just some sort of illegitimate “footwearâ€. But words can still be useful. “flip-flops†are not, after all, “underpantsâ€.”]
Context, lucia. I had already stated that I was referring to the term ‘lukewarmer’ in the context of the climate debate. According to Mosher’s definition (and maybe others) a lukewarmer can be someone who believes the CS to be 0.001C or 2.999C. That’s a large spread with the possibility of some major fundamental differences involved.
@lucia,
[“I think call you a lukewarmer if you think it’s more likely on the lower end but inside the IPCC range…”]
Now that’s much more specific! 🙂
Andrew_FL (Comment #120681) and
Carrick (Comment #120685)
I understand belief is not the same as a guess. In the cases of the quotes used in my post the original posters use the word ‘believe’. My point is that any estimate of CS is necessarily a guess because the author of the estimate has based his estimate on a belief, not fact. Therefore the estimate is a guess.
Carrick, I agree that faith is a belief based on no evidence. I actually think faith would be a reasonable word but it tends to rile folk.
@HaroldW (Comment #120686)
Harold,
It might meet the criterion to you. To me, observations that indicate the estimate of CS should be lower do not answer the question of whether a CS actually exists in the first place! Any lowering of an estimate based on an assumption is not evidence that the assumption is correct.
@Howard (Comment #120689)
Hi Howard,
Yep, agree with that. I just hope you can dig deep enough to find the evidence you believe is there! 😉
[“If you want to get specific, my swag is that lukewarmistas generally fall in the ECS range of 1.2 to 3 deg K”]
Like I said to lucia, that specific range makes more sense if anyone wants to define a lukewamer. It does, however, raise the interesting question of how would you label someone who ‘believes’ any possible CS being, say, 1.1C? Where does ‘sceptic’ become ‘denier”?
Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #120702) 
November 7th, 2013 at 2:38 pm
[“I would like to believe that Luke-Warmers or people who legitimately call themselves that exist mainly because of those people on both sides of the AGW issue who take positions that are not rationally or logically acquired. The Luke-Warm or middle ground I would hope has more do with the fact that the no-brainers tend to live at the extremes of the AGW spectrum than it does in staking out a position that would be unchanging with more evidence.”]
Kenneth, how can you rationalise the statement above with your statement below?
“…(#120673) I hold that we do not have a sufficient understanding in climate science of the underlying phenomena to make reasonable predictions of past or future climate.”]
To what evidence do you refer in the first statement?
By assuming a ‘middle ground’ you assume that there is a CS. To assume a CS when you do not have sufficient understanding of the underlying phenomena seems anathema to science.
Arfur Bryant (Comment #120729)
November 8th, 2013 at 12:07 am
You have overlooked the import of my comment. I have stated that those who take a position on AGW at the extremes of the spectrum and have done that by invoking something unreasonable or illogical are the no-brainers. These are people who I hope the Luke-Warmers are reacting. I am not talking here about those who might view the entire issue of AGW and its effects as uncertain.
We have those who refer to climate warming as a hoax and those who deny the physics of CO2 levels in the atmosphere causing warming – never mind the issues of feedbacks. We have others who would take on faith any published paper that might support their view of AGW be it cooler or warmer and then extrapolate that finding to effects that are even more uncertain.
Arfur to Kenneth:By assuming a ‘middle ground’ you assume that there is a CS. To assume a CS when you do not have sufficient understanding of the underlying phenomena seems anathema to science.
You gotta start with a guess to reach deeper understanding. The “multiple working hypothesis” is the fundamental principle in field geology.
http://www.gly.uga.edu/railsback/railsback_chamberlin.html
The trick is knowing when to ditch the bad ideas and when to double-down.
To answer your other question: I cannot precisely define a climate denier, but I know it when I see it. WUWT is what we call the “type locality”
Arfur,
I winced when I wrote that part about certain evidence because I just knew somebody would ask me to particularize. 🙂 Hang on, look:
(Mark waves hands vigorously)
No?
Well, ok then. Some might point to the paleo record and claim that it’s evidence of CO2 affecting temperature. I’ve always wondered, and continue to wonder to this day, if I’ve understood the argument properly, because it seems so weak to me for various reasons.
Better evidence: Some might point to our understanding of radiative physics and say that disregarding feedbacks we have a theoretical basis to expect some warming per doubling of CO2. I agree with this, but the question becomes … philosophical? procedural? What is the proper thing to conclude when one’s knowledge of all the relevant factors is incomplete? Could feedbacks essentially nullify this warming? I have no basis to disqualify this apparent possibility. I have no particularly strong basis to believe feedbacks will do so either. So… ?
Well, in my book, this means that I’m supposed to admit I don’t have enough information to have an expectation.
I’m still working on my first cup of coffee this morning.
Andrew_FL (Comment #120714)
November 7th, 2013 at 5:52 pm
“Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #120703)-As far as very high sensitivities go, I think we can safely say life on earth couldn’t possibly have arisen if sensitivity was above 5 K for a doubling of CO2. So some high sensitivities I would place a zero probability on. Maybe other would disagree.”
We can see estimated levels of CO2 many times higher than today’s levels and of a modern day doubling of those levels and for periods when life thrived on earth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth's_atmosphere
In the Phanerzoic eon of 542 million years and which includes the origins of plant life to present time, we see estimated global temperatures based on short term averages of close to 5 degrees C higher than present time. The resolution of these estimates is such that we would not see time period temperature transitions of hundreds of years.
We also would have another huge variable which is the changes in geological features of earth over these time periods that can effect heat transport to the poles and to space and other phenomena affecting global temperatures. The sun has produced I believe 4% more radiant energy over this period of time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record
I would suppose the better approach to judging the extremes of warming (cooling) of global temperatures from a doubling of CO2 would be something akin to a Bayesian analysis where you start with some uninformative assumption and work your way through all the intermediate uncertainties – and of course work these further through to the detrimental/beneficial effects to mankind.
(RE: Comment #120738 and questions) : My questions were rhetorical in a sense, but I thought they might be permissible because they weren’t meant in the usual rhetorical sense. The point of my questions aren’t to imply specific answers but rather to illustrate the areas I feel contain unknowns or substantial uncertainties.
Yes I obsess about this. Since I’ve started posting here I’ve realized that 95% of what I open my mouth to say is rhetorical. It’s been an eye opener.
Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #120739)-My point was more about billions than millions of years ago, but it’s well taken nonetheless.
Specifically, the more sensitive the climate is, the more problematic the Faint Young Sun Paradox becomes. Typically people trying to resolve it use more CO2 and/or Methane than the geological record can justify-which justifies an amount of greenhouse gases that still constitutes a large negative forcing which should, with very high sensitivity, almost surely result in a completely frozen Earth at the time life arose and when at any rate we know there was liquid water on Earth.
In fact, most modeling efforts leave out the ice albedo feedback because if you include it resolution of the paradox becomes essentially impossible. Unless of course there were a strong negative feedback to counteract it.
See also this paper linked below for a Bayesian approach and with a very wide ranging PDF to climate sensitivity. This paper was published in 1998 and uses the global mean surface air temperature and the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide over the period 1870–1991. It does not use climate models for establishing priors but does use temperature reconstructions to construct priors concerning climates natural variations.
The paper states, “The posterior of climate sensitivity has a strong positive skewness. Moreover, its mode (again 3.8 _C; standard deviation 2.4 _C) is higher than the best guess of the IPCC.”
I would have some major differences with this papers priors and would wonder whether this Bayesian analysis, which lends itself to updating, has been updated with newer evidences. I think the author Richard Tol is the same Richard Tol who appears here at this blog occasionally. We must remember to ask him when he next appears about an update of his analysis.
My point here is not to argue the priors used but rather to show that these analyses end with a posterior result that gives some finite probability for extreme climate sensitivities.
http://www.fnu.zmaw.de/fileadmin/fnu-files/publication/tol/ccbayes.pdf
Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #120735)
Ok Kenneth, that is a fair and reasonable comment. 🙂
Howard (Comment #120736)
Howard,
Nice link. From that link, the paragraph below should be quoted at the beginning of every climate science paper.
[“Our desire to reach an interpretation or explanation commonly leads us to a tentative interpretation that is based on relatively hasty examination of a single example or case. Our tentative explanation, as such, is not a threat to objectivity, but if we then begin to trust it without further testing, we can be blinded to other possibilities that we ignored at first glance. Our premature explanation can become a tentative theory and then a ruling theory, and our research becomes focused on proving that ruling theory. The result is a blindness to evidence that disproves the ruling theory or supports an alternate explanation. Only if the original tentative hypothesis was by chance correct does our research lead to any meaningful contribution to knowledge.”]
Perfect!
Mark Bofill (Comment #120738)
Mark, you have my respect for an honest and insightful comment! I agree the paleo data causation is weak – to the point of non-existence.
As to the radiative effect, I admit I am still unsure about its validity in the real world. I agree there appears to be a theoretical possibility that some warming may occur due to a doubling of CO2 (but not backradiation) but I see no supporting evidence (not a belief!) in the real-world data. “What is the proper thing to conclude…?” Well, for me, I would honestly conclude that the existence of a CS cannot be stated. If any warming exists, it appears to be swamped by other factors to the point that no distinguishable signal remains. That any warming (due to CO2) exists is not evident. This is why I maintain that the idea of a Climate Sensitivity is a theoretical construct. A statement for which I have been criticised on here before! The thing is, a lack of real evidence persists and the longer it persists then the lower the chance that any warming effect will be proven.
I hope you enjoyed your coffee! 🙂
Regards,
Andrew_FL (Comment #120747)
November 8th, 2013 at 11:17 am
Andrew, I could use a reference or two here. I must admit that I am fascinated about eons ago when climate change was changing in a major way and not by a dinky degree C or so. The problem is that I have not read many papers that relate GHGs to those times in the detail we attempt to do it in modern times. I am sure that resolution becomes a problem in relating eons ago to modern times of a century or two.
I will also admit that I have not done much digging beyond the evidence and conjectures that appear on cable TV science shows and mainly because I always suspect there is no there there. Snowball earth comes to mind and particularly how the earth would break out of that frozen state.
Arfur,
Is there a difference in your view between ‘no such thing as CS’ and ‘CS = 0’? I’m trying to avoid getting tripped up by semantics. 🙂
Thanks.
Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #120759)-I did a post on the FYSP a while back:
http://devoidofnulls.wordpress.com/2012/07/15/keeping-the-world-unfrozen/
Which contains the standard references on the problem itself (eg, Sagan and Mullen although I think I was wrong to say they “first noted” the problem. From here:
http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/55161/607563506.pdf?sequence=1
Starting at page 99 there are a lot of references about the standard approaches to the problem. The paper itself proposes an alternative involving feedback. One of the things I took away from it is that standard approaches have to ignore the ice albedo feedback (See on page 90, where it is noted first adding WV feedback makes the paradox worse, and even worse still when including ice albedo, with references to the papers find this). Of course, it’s always possible to work out the math one’s self, which I did with a simple zero dimension EBM. A dependence of Albedo on temperature that constitutes a positive feedback is going to make the predicted temperature billions of years ago even colder.
Mark Bofill (Comment #120762)
Mark,
My straight answer is yes, in my view there is a difference. A CS could be negative if one considers a CS to be ‘the change in global temperature due to a doubling of CO2’. Therefore a CS of zero is different from ‘no such thing’. The point is that any radiation emitted from a CO2 molecule can only be absorbed by a cooler molecule capable of such absorption. If the surface happens to be cooler then absorption will take place but this is a rare situation globally. It is more likely that any radiation from a CO2 molecule would be absorbed by another atmospheric molecule which is capable of such absorption. Hence backradiation on a global scale is very unlikely. This can be seen in the observed data as a non-correlation between CO2 and warming. No-one can say how much of the 0.8C warming since 1850 (IPCC data date) is actually caused by CO2. Hence there is currently no proven observed CS. Hence the CS – even if it exists – could be very close to zero and not necessarily positive. This is me just being objective. I’m not saying CS is zero, just that there is currently no evidence to suggest it is anything far from it! Hence my original post here about the irrelevance of labelling a ‘lukewarmer’. According to some ‘definitions’ here, the difference between a ‘sceptic’ and a ‘lukewarmer’ (or a ‘sceptic’ and a ‘denier’) can be one-hundredth of a degree Celsius! So an entire demographic of the climate debate is chosen on a temperature change which is impossible for us humans even to notice. Just seems a bit silly to me…
Hope that answers your question – semantically? 🙂
Arfuf
This point is incorrect. The surface will absorb any radiation that hits it. Then it can re-radiate in proportion to it’s own temperature.
If your theory is based on an incorrect notion about radiation, your final conclusions about how it works will be wrong. Which they are.
Re: lucia (Nov 9 08:43),
Arfur is apparently basing his argument on Claes Johnson’s theory of radiation. Claes authored a chapter in Slaying the Sky Dragon: Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory. The premise is that photons as we think of them don’t exist. Radiation, then, can only be absorbed if the absorber is at a lower temperature than the emitter. Of course there’s the small problem that temperature isn’t defined for a single molecule. Not to mention all the experimental evidence that a molecule in the first excited state can indeed still absorb radiation at the same frequency.
Science of Doom bans discussion of this sort of thing as unproductive.
Andrew, none of your linked references were from peer reviewed papers. While I see many of the weaknesses of peer review I think that it has a major role to play where comprehensive models and theories are put forward. Otherwise one can get too much Arfuring. I believe the Wikipedia account of the paradox does mention a cloud feedback as an explanation put forward, so perhaps the thesis you linked was published in some form.
I am always pleasantly surprised with the amount and quality of information that those geologists are able to obtain from rocks, but I think in resolving the faint young sun paradox there remain too many competing conjectures.
Questions that not even the geologists have yet resolved appear to me to be: (1) what was the continental structure of the earth in the Archean eon, (2) were plate tectonics, as we know that phenomena today, operating, (3) when did large continents start appearing , (4) how exactly would a non-biological version of the carbon cycle operate, (5) what was the ratio of land to ocean area in this period and what effects would this have on global albedo, and (6) would not albedo feedback operate on a large scale only if you start with a cooler earth.
DeWitt–
Claes. The guy who wrote
Uh. Huh. (I commented on that quote previously here See http://rankexploits.com/musings/2011/slaying-the-sky-dragon-muddled-confusing/)
(The Navier Stokes equations does not describe thermodynamics. They describe conservation of mass and momentum. Thermodynamics has to do with energy, which is different. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navier%E2%80%93Stokes_equations )
Anyway, when Claes uses his theory to correctly account for radiation in engineered devices like blast furnaces, internal combustion engines, homes or can explain why radiation blankets like this do work (when used properly), or even an ordinary non-reflective tent can act as a radiation shield, then people will begin to give Claes some cred. After showing his theory works in simple applications then maybe he can move on to disproving climate change. But in the meantime: we have a theory that works in engineered applications. Climate scientists use the same freakin’ theory. It’s idiotic to decide climate scientists are “wrong” because Claes has proposed a theory that doesn’t work in engineered applications and just imagine that for some mysterious reason climate scientists should use this utterly dysfunctional theory to describe what happens in the earth’s atmosphere. It. Is. Nutso.
Anyway: One’s body, or outer layers of one’s sleeping bag and ground will absorb photons that are either reflected off a mylar film or emitted from a tent ceiling even if the body and ground are at a higher temperature than the film or the tent. (And if one is camping on a cold day, one certainly hopes their body or even the outside of their clothing is warmer than the tent ceiling.) In fact, merely using a tarp as a “roof” with no walls will help keep one warmer even if one has no ‘walls’ to dramatically reduce convection. This fact often recognized in high tech “cowboy” movies. These are simple facts and engineers designing various engineered thermal systems (and people who need to take shelter outdoors) can take advantage of correct understanding to rig systems that “work” and to figure out cost effective and functional methods to achieve design goals. ( Of course conduction and convection must also be taken into account– and in some implementations matter more than radiation. )
The theory that works in application says warmer bodies can and do absorb photons radiated from surfaces that are colder. Claes can write all sorts of theory that contradicts the one that works and has been taught in mechanical engineering HVAC classes, engine design and so on. But has yet to show his theory works in simple applications and until he does no one is going to pitch the theory that worksfor his.
DeWitt
Yes. But historically, I actually started this blog precisely to discuss these stooooopid thermodynamic claims which people wanted to inject at Climate Audit. That was before “Sky Dragoons” was a formal ‘thing’. But the theories now are no stupider than the ones then.
Lucia,
No amount of explanation, no matter how clearly laid out, will even impact the thinking of the truly deranged (Sky Dragoons and their assorted nutcake friends). I ignore them.
Still it helps to occasionally get an accurate physics perspective. Most people aren’t trained to think in terms of photons and individual atoms, so I think the discussion does some good, if not taken too far.
I think this is why Claes eventually had to give up on the photon….he realized that the photon was inconsistent with his erroneous interpretation of the 2LOT. More sensible people would have made sure the foundations of their arguments were sound (getting a correct understanding of the 2LOT for example), sayings about houses built on sand coming to mind here…
Carrick (Comment #120833),
Fair enough. Maybe refuting the deranged helps some bystanders think more clearly about the arguments. Give up on photons? To defend a wacko interpretation of macroscopic thermo? Talk about nuts!
SteveF,
You’re correct. But explanations can impact thinking of lurkers or others.
lucia,
The banning is discussion of unproven physical theories like
CJ’s radiation theory. There’s lots of stuff on how people get the 2LOT wrong. One of the main problems is people whose understanding of thermodynamics is either stuck in the eighteenth century, i.e. refuse to accept Prevost’s Law that all bodies above absolute zero emit EM radiation, or they’re stuck in the nineteenth century at Clausius and his concept of heat.
Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #120824)-I was attempting to link you to places you could find peer reviewed references, because I didn’t want to dump a bunch of references. I wasn’t really trying to use the link itself *as* the reference.
Also I can’t copy the references from the PDF for whatever reason.
Lucia,
You are correct in that I should have said only a cooler surface can absorb for net energy gain. A warmer surface cannot. There is no net energy gained by a warmer surface by absorbing radiation from a cooler emitter. Do you agree with this?
If you do not agree, then by your opinion, placing a metal chair in front of an electric fire increases the temperature of the fire. This is not so. The absorbed and then re-emitted radiation of the chair does not get absorbed for net energy gain by the fire.
[“Of course conduction and convection must also be taken into account– and in some implementations matter more than radiation.”]
The sleeping bag makes you feel warmer because it insulates. It slows heat loss by convection. The tent slows heat loss by convection. Radiation may play a small part but still cannot cause your body to warm. Neither the tent nor the sleeping bag increase your body core temperature! If you wish to compare CO2 to insulation then you have to compare the relative increase in insulation since 1850. As you cannot say – and provide real evidence for – how much of the “GHE’ was contributed by CO2, you are unable to state how much the insulation has increased. Given the tiny amount of CO2 present in the atmosphere, this argument is demonstrably weak.
Others, I’m not impressed by you labelling me as taking any other opinion than that which I have gained by thinking logically. I have no particular agenda about either Claes Johnson or scienceofdoom (apart from sod and I have fallen out because he refused to answer a simple question). I have read what both say.
If you can point out any real-world evidence to support your view that CO2 can cause significant warming of the globe through radiation, then please present it.
Otherwise please stop making snide comments. You are behaving like schoolyard bullies.
Arfur,
It is correct that the warmer surface will not have a net gain from a cooler region. That’s also true of conduction and convection.
Huh? Even if I agree placing something reflective in front of an electric fire increases the temperature of the fire. Believe it or not this increase in temperature actually happens. It’s something that must be accounted for when designing blast furnaces, internal combustion engines and so on.
It is best to try to avoid “proving” your case by saying the contrary view would mean X could happen when X is known to happen.
I happen to be a mammal. My body warms itself by converting glucose or fat into heat. But a radiation barrier will slow the lose of heat from my body. It does so whether a conduction barrier is present or absent. BTW: Many commercial insulation products include both conductive barriers and radiation barriers. Hot pads used to hold pots number among those that often contain radiation barriers.
Uhmm… I could put an argument about this because there are circumstances where my body temperature could increase as a result of being in a sleeping bag rather than in some other environment. But mostly… so what? Everyone– engineers, climate scientists and so on agree insulation’s effect is only to reduce heat transfer away from a body. That’s the effect claimed when discussing global warming. No one claims that CO2 would cause the earth to be warm absent a heat source (which for the earth is the sun.)
So what? You’re just changing the subject from a discussion about your utterly incorrect claims about how radiation works to a more the more complicated one about precisely how much the effect of CO2 radiation on earth might increase the earth’s temperature. Mind you: I understand why you want to distract from discussing your utterly wrong theories about radiation and pretend that somehow the remain correct and can therefor support your more complicated theory. But your theory about radiation is just flat out wrong.
I didn’t label you with anything. I told you the theory you espoused is wrong.
My discussion of Claes is in response to DeWitt bringing Claes theory up. I’m permitted to discuss Claes’s theories and yours in the same thread. My discussing Claes is does not amount to “labeling” you.
First: What snide comment did I make?
Second: Please don’t try to make and enforce rules of behavior here. You aren’t the moderator here. I am.
Lucia,
When I first encountered Dragoons, I was interested in trying to understand were their thinking went wrong. I thought that if you could just explain the part they are confused about they would “see the light” (pun intended). But alas, that is never the case; either the Dragoons simply do not appreciate the inconsistencies in their wacko ideas (simple things like the need for causality) or are not capable of understanding the implication of those inconsistencies: that is, their wacko theories are just 100% wrong. I have never seen a single Dagoon or any of their minions make progress in understanding radiation. That is why I ignore them.
Steve F
The problem is the the Dragons didn’t develop a theory. The started with a conclusion then warped the science to fit. Not unlike a certain Paleo reconstruction.
Hence each time an error is pointed out they just shift the arguement so that their foregone conclusion remains.
John Vetterling,
I try to have the charity to not assume bad faith when simple incompetence or stupidity could be the cause. But in this case, you may be right.
Steve F
I used to lecture on construction fraud. I often said that, from the outside, fraud and incompetence are indistinguishable.
Lucia,
Let me address your last points first. If you read my post more carefully, you will note that, in the last few paragraphs, I was addressing ‘Others’ on this thread NOT YOU! They know who they are. You at least tend to be polite. The snide comments include such words as ‘wacko’, ‘nuts’ and ‘deranged’. I won’t even comment about the ‘Sky Dragoons’ labels. I do not consider myself a Sky Dragoon or a Sky Dragon. I prefer to think for myself – something which I hope you would realise by now. I will, as usual, refrain from returning the ad hominem barbs. At no time in my comment about ‘others’ was I referring to you. As for moderation, it should work for all, unless some commenters are more equal than others…
[“Arfur, It is correct that the warmer surface will not have a net gain from a cooler region.”]
Good starting point. We agree.
[“Huh? Even if I agree placing something reflective in front of an electric fire increases the temperature of the fire.”]
Now you are changing the debate. We are not talking about reflection, but radiation. Reflection of the original source’s radiation is not the same as re-emitted radiation from a cooler source (the chair). Are you now claiming that CO2 acts as a reflector?
[“I happen to be a mammal. My body warms itself by converting glucose or fat into heat. But a radiation barrier will slow the lose [sic] of heat from my body.”]
The ‘radiation barrier’ of a sleeping bag is completely dwarfed by the convection and conduction barrier. And slowing the heat loss is not the same as warming the source! If you don’t believe me, wrap yourself up in a space blanket and sleep outside tonight. Note, call an ambulance first.
[“That’s the effect claimed when discussing global warming.”]
Whaaat? See links below. Of course the global warming claim is that the surface (and near surface) temperature is increased! Where have you been?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect
[The greenhouse effect is a process by which thermal radiation from a planetary surface is absorbed by atmospheric greenhouse gases, and is re-radiated in all directions. Since part of this re-radiation is back towards the surface and the lower atmosphere, it results in an elevation of the average surface temperature above what it would be in the absence of the gases.]
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/faq-1-3.html
[Much of this thermal radiation emitted by the land and ocean is absorbed by the atmosphere, including clouds, and reradiated back to Earth. This is called the greenhouse effect. The glass walls in a greenhouse reduce airflow and increase the temperature of the air inside. Analogously, but through a different physical process, the Earth’s greenhouse effect warms the surface of the planet.]
[“No one claims that CO2 would cause the earth to be warm absent a heat source (which for the earth is the sun.”]
Irrelevant. I never suggested anything of the sort. But, since you are now talking about CO2 so you can answer my question about the contribution of CO2 to the GHE. 🙂
[“But your theory about radiation is just flat out wrong.”]
I don’t have ‘theories about radiation’. I think about the subject and use logic and data. If you have data (evidence) to support your idea that the radiative properties of CO2 have or could cause a significant warming of the globe’s atmosphere, then please present them.
Regards,
Arfur
Andrew_FL (Comment #120847)
November 9th, 2013 at 5:10 pm
Fair enough. I’ll dig a little deeper into the peer reviewed literature.
I also do not want to equate, as my off hand Arfur offering may have, that the conjectures you have linked for explaining the faint young earth paradox are at the level of violating physical concepts and laws. I just think that while the geologists have been able to put together a decent picture of early earth there are many unknowns that may have a critical bearing on explaining this paradox.
John Vetterling/ SteveF,
Whatever the motive one of the difficulties with the “no backradiation” theories is that they fail on simple problems. For example, Arfur appears to not understand that if you place something that emits or reflects (either) in front of an electrical resistance heater, the heater will be warmer than if the same heater radiates into a void (e.g. space.)
So, he thinks conventional radiative physics must be wrong because it predicts “X” happens and he, Arfur thinks “X” does not happen. But the fact is this “X” can and does happen, it has been observed to happen, and engineers rely on “X” happening when designing devices that wor, have detected happening and so on. We all count on it happening and if someone is unaware of the fact it happens, they find it impossible to design things like blast furnaces or internal combustion engines and so on.
A similar things applies with Claes (whose theory– evidently– is not the same Arfur’s and presumably differs in some way from Arfur’s.) But in the case of Claes theory, Claes has made little to no effort to show how his theory would apply in simple cases– like what happens to heat transfer in– oh say– a lightbulb and so forth.
Kenneth Fritsch (Comment #120861)-It’s alright.
Anyway, as far as I can tell, the thesis doesn’t violate any physical laws. In fact, it is quite dependent on Arfur being wrong as far as I can tell.
Anyway, Rondanelli’s list of references provides some good places to start reading up on the paradox.
ARfur
I’m not changing it. First: You said a metal chair. Metal as opposed to heavily upholstered comfy armchairs are the subset or chairs that are often reflective. If you wanted and example that did not involve reflection, you should have said so. But second: even if the the chair is upholstered in thick black velvet, it will still increase the temperature of the electrical fire. This is a known empirical fact. So you are remain wrong.
This is irrelevant to the argument about what radiation does. It is true that there are problems where conduction and convection are more important that radiation. So? But the fact is: in many problems of this sort, one needs to include radiation considerations to get the right answer. And radiation does not do what you say it does.
No one claims slowing heat loss is the same as creating a warming source. No one in climate science makes any such claim.
I didn’t say climate scientists didn’t claim surface temperature was “increased”. It is oncreased relative to what it would be if there was no CO2 on an earth on which the sun shines providing a heat flux Q. No one claims that CO2 would result in the earth being warm if there was no heat flux Q. The effect claimed is that CO2 is– essentially– insulating. Note your own link includes this “Solar radiation at the frequencies of visible light largely passes through the atmosphere to warm the planetary surface,”. That is: CO2 is not the heat source. The sun is. Solar is a reference to the sun. If you persist in thinking the source you link says CO2 is a heat source you have some sort of reading impediment.
No. You are (a) ignoring data, (b) not engaging the actual claims of the theory you think you are rebutting and (c) there is no detectible logical in anything you write– including, for example, your providing links to saying an article makes a claim that article does not make.
I suggest that if you have any sort of full logical explanation, you start your own blog and write the full thing out. Afterwards, apply your “logic” to simple problems and see if you can get the correct answers. Start with predicting the temperature of a lightbulb filament when you surrounding by a black box at known temperature T. That’s the problem related to your “chair” issue. Heck, do the problem with a reflective box too. See the difference.
Once you can do that, maybe someone will bother to spend time addressing your larger claims about global warming. But in the meantime: your claims about radiation are simply wrong and a waste of time. Your claims would give wrong answers to simple problems– which you might know if you ever did any simple problems. Which you haven’t.
If you were applying logic you would understand that if your “logic” doesn’t work for simple problems– like a lightbulb inside a box, it doesn’t work for other problems. Get back to me with a link to your
(a) solution for the temperature of the lightbulb filalment and
(b) your experimental data.
Meanwhile, ciao.
Lucia,
“Start with predicting the temperature of a lightbulb filament when you surrounding by a black box at known temperature T. That’s the problem related to your “chair†issue.”
.
Your students could perhaps have done that problem. No chance for Arfur.
Arfur:
Just as a side point, just how does the photon (assume of the same frequency) that is emitted by the cooler source know it comes from a cooler source as opposed to from reflection?
Since the 2LOT is not a fundamental property of microscopic theory, it can’t be argued that individual photons “care” about macroscopic generalizations. Nor is there any special quantum exclusion principle that would allow a photon of the same wavelength emitted from a colder source versus being reflected to “know” it can’t be absorbed. And even if you posited a hypothetical field, this would result in violations of causality, which is a substantially worse thing to do than just violate somebody’s badly understand version of the 2LOT.
It could easily be a problem assigned to student taking 1st or 2nd class in engineering heat transfer. Whether it was in “heat transfer I” or “heat transfer II” would likely depend on the discipline and the order in which radiation, conduction and convection are covered. For those covering radiation first, it would be first. For those covering conduction and convection first, it would be in the 2nd class.
But it’s an easy problem the answer is understood– and important if one wishes to design lightbulb filaments or many similar devices, and whatever theory or “logic” one has about radiation, one ought to be able to get the correct answer for such a problem. And the answer is: The temperature of the outer box will affect the temperature of the filament, photons from the other box do impact on the filament… and so on. Of course, the filament must have a non-zero cross-sectional area, but that’s just something we need to specify for the problem and we would need it to figure out the temperature even if the box were not present. 🙂
By the way, here is the Wikipedia’s statement of Clausius’s principle:
I happen to think for a lay audience (encyclopedic reference) this is a terrible exposition. “Heat” as it is used here is a “process variable”; that is a the amount of heat energy exchanged during one hypothetical cycle of a thermodynamic process.
Notice that the narrative for this section also include the phase “heat cannot spontaneously flow …”. That’s terrible language choice:
“Heat” being a process variable (it’s like the bottom line of a budget sheet), rather than a physically measurable quantity, is not an “it” that can do anything, including “flow”. Nor does heat energy “flow”. “Flowing” implies a fluid, like in the nonexistent caloric fluid. And while saying that “heat flows” is part of common parlance, it has no place as part of an explanation in a technical reference, especially when the reference is otherwise confused and misleading on Clausius’s statement. Heat energy is exchanged, via various mechanisms including conduction, convection and electromagnetic radiation, but does not flow.
Finally it’s worth noting that Clausius’s principle is not the fundamental statement of the 2LOT, but a result from it of limited application. If you want to more gracefully (and in a useful way) describe the interaction between radiation emitted by a warmer and a colder body, use the ordinary expression of the 2LOT, which is “entropy must remain constant or increase over time for any closed, sufficiently macroscopic system”. That is, it applies to interactions between ensembles of particles, rather to individual ones.
Here is a better formulation of Clausius’s principle:
It’s also not really clear whether Clausius at the time of his original writing of his principle understood the distinction between heat and heat energy, so the modern interpretation of Clausius’s principle may be different than his original intended one. Although by that time people understood that mechanical processes like friction could create heat energy, so it’s possible he did.
“Heat” and “heat energy” often get used interchangeably in science (some of us think erroneously), which is all the more reason to be careful how one needs to be very careful in word choices when stating physical principles.
Hey all,
Is the idea that heat cannot flow from something colder to something hotter an absolute, or is it a statistical generalization?
Someone once told me that it’s not that this is exactly impossible, it’s just that it’s a really really really improbable thing to have happen.
I never bothered much about the distinction, since for all reasonable intents and purposes there’s not a difference, but since the topic has popped up I’d appreciate it if anybody could set me straight on this.
Thanks!
(Edit – I should have said, ‘cannot flow from colder to hotter without external work being performed on system‘ hope this was understood)
Mark Bofill, it’s a statistical generalization, but it’s not something you can say is really, really, really improbable. How improbable it is depends on a variety of factors, the primary ones being difference in temperature and time. The greater those are, the smaller the chance.
In theory though, you could have a sitatuon where two objects are close enough in temperature that there’d be a decent chance of it happening for a long enough time that it’d matter.
Brandon,
Thanks.
Yes, temperature, time, and mass involved I’d imagine would be factors in the specific improbability.
This is what I thought actually, but I was curious to see if I was missing anything.
Lucia,
Claes is an interesting case. He has actually done some groundbreaking theoretical work on discretization methods for PDE’s such as SUPG. This method actually helps us understand multiscale problems and subgrid models in a rigorous way in simple cases. He also has some ideas about Euler equation simulations being more accurate than RANS that have some substance to them even though they disagree with the conventional wisdom.
I think his ideas on thermodynamics are surely wrong, but he is worth taking seriously I think.
Mark Bofill
The latter. But the reason for this is the notion of “heat” “flowing” and to a large extent ‘temperature’ is one that dovetails with the “continuum approximation”. The continuum approximation only applies when we are dealing with a problem where you have a very large number of molecules contained in a physical volume one might consider “a point” from the point of view of the macro-scale problem. This is a very large number of problems in engineering applications so the idea “works”. But you will often find the continuum approximation described at the beginning of any engineering text book on fluid mechanics, heat transfer or thermo. No one dwells on it much… until possibly later course or in applications where it doesn’t apply.
David
Possibly. But taking him seriously as someone who contributed something to something doesn’t mean we need to waste time on his theories about thermodynamics nor to relax the requirement that he show his theories about thermo or radiation heat transfer work for simple problems.
Mark Bofill:
I’d encourage you to say “net heat energy cannot be exchanged from something colder to something warmer without work being done on the system”, but as Brandon and Lucia says, it’s a statistical consequence of microscopic physics, and not a fundamental principle by itself.
The modern statement of the 2LOT is $latex dS/dt \ge 0$ for a sufficiently macroscopic body, where $latex S$ is entropy of a closed system. $latex S$ in modern statistical mechanics is defined in terms of configurations, rather than heat, and is more general than the classical definition in terms of heat energy.
Thus while you can obtain Clausius’s principle from the statement that the entropy of a closed system is either constant or increasing, the converse is not true. Clausius’s principle does not imply $latex dS/dt \ge 0$, excepted in a [broad but] limited scope of applications. (Hence I prefer describing it as a separate principle rather than a statement of the 2LOT.)
I still take Claes seriously as an applied mathematician, but he’s seriously gone off the deep end on this one. When you get a very basic physics principle wrong, that doesn’t give one much leeway for slack.
Thanks all. 🙂
Lucia,
Pedantry is often the escape route of someone who has no confidence in her or his argument.
[“But second: even if the the chair is upholstered in thick black velvet, it will still increase the temperature of the electrical fire. This is a known empirical fact. So you are remain wrong.”]
In that case, and remembering we are talking about radiation, please provide one empirical, real-world example of how radiation from a cooler object can be absorbed by a warmer object, thus making the warmer object even warmer – without interference from another source.
[“No one in climate science makes any such claim.”]
Yes they are. What part of the IPCC definition of the Greenhouse Effect aren’t you getting?
[“I didn’t say climate scientists didn’t claim surface temperature was “increasedâ€.”]
Yes you did. By definition of you being a ‘lukewarmer’. You stated that [“But if forced to bet, if you would take the “lower end†of the IPCC range rather than the “upper endâ€, you are a lukewarmer.”] You can’t have it both ways. You either believe CO2 can cause significant warming or you don’t. Remember the key word is ‘believe’. You still have to shown any evidence to support that belief. The IPCC defines a CS as:
[“It is broadly defined as the equilibrium global mean surface temperature change following a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration…”]
See: http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch8s8-6.html
[“I didn’t say climate scientists didn’t claim surface temperature was “increasedâ€. It is oncreased [sic] relative to what it would be if there was no CO2 on an earth on which the sun shines providing a heat flux Q. No one claims that CO2 would result in the earth being warm if there was no heat flux Q. The effect claimed is that CO2 is– essentially– insulating. Note your own link includes this “Solar radiation at the frequencies of visible light largely passes through the atmosphere to warm the planetary surface,â€. That is: CO2 is not the heat source. The sun is. Solar is a reference to the sun. If you persist in thinking the source you link says CO2 is a heat source you have some sort of reading impediment.”]
What nonsense is this? Are you deliberately trying to falsify my words? This is not about a comparison with a ‘no CO2 atmosphere’. Why would I even want to go there? This is about whether ‘back-radiation’ from atmospheric CO2 can possibly cause an increase in surface or near-surface temperature in the real world. Stop obfuscating the issue. The IPCC link is quite clear. I do not have a reading impediment.
[“No. You are (a) ignoring data, (b) not engaging the actual claims of the theory you think you are rebutting and (c) there is no detectible logical in anything you write– including, for example, your providing links to saying an article makes a claim that article does not make.”]
What data? You haven’t even bothered to give any! You are now trying to run away from your mistaken belief that THE THEORY of radiative AGW actually has any merit! You can’t transpose the accepted CO2 = warming theory into ‘some theory ‘ that you think you are defending. If CO2 (being generally cooler) can’t warm the planet surface (being generally warmer) – as you have admitted, how can you say – as a lukewarmer – that the CS can be between 1.2 and 3 degrees (lower end of the IPCC range)? At some point you have to provide evidence that backradiation causes warming.
The rest of your comment is just a rant. I’ve asked you to provide evidence to support your ideas. You can’t. All you can do is try to make out I don’t understand how YOU want radiation to act. I’ve shown you what the IPCC thinks and you can’t even acknowledge that. Is there no integrity on this blog at all?
Data? Here are some facts for you, Lucia. Since 1850, the ‘globe’ has warmed by appx 0.8C. Contemporaneously, but not necessarily causatively, atmospheric CO2 has increased by appx 40%. There is no evidence of thermal inertia lag. There is no evidence of feedback. There has been no surface warming in the last fifteen years in spite of increased levels of CO2. So where do you lukewarmers get the figure of 1.2 to 3 C, when you can’t even state (with evidence) how much of the 0.8C is due to CO2? Not only that, you can’t even state how much of the GHE is due to CO2. Jeesh. Talk about a lack of objectivity.
I am sorry we couldn’t have a sensible discussion about this.
Ciao.
Arfur
I gave you one: electric lightbulb with known heat addation (Q=IR) in a box held in a box with box walls held at know temperature T. Evacuate the air from the box. Do the experiment with T=0K. Do the experiment with T=300K. Do the experiment with T=600K. Come back.
Or how about this: you find one example where the radiation from the cooler object with temperature T such that 0<T does not make the warmer object relative to what would happen if the cooler object was takein out of the ‘line of sight’ of the cooler object and instead replaced either with (a) an object with zero emissivity or (b) an object at T=0.
No they aren’t. You are just confused to the extent where this is pointless. I’m not going to argue about this with you when you don’t even know what the IPCC claims.
Bye.
Carrick
[“Just as a side point, just how does the photon (assume of the same frequency) that is emitted by the cooler source know it comes from a cooler source as opposed to from reflection?”]
Pathetic
Lucia,
Like I said:
“I have never seen a single Dagoon or any of their minions make progress in understanding radiation. That is why I ignore them.”
.
Trying to help them is pointless, they can’t (or won’t) understand what you explain no matter how clear the explanation. See for example my comment at #120865 and the subsequent reply… full of misunderstandings and non-sequiturs about radiation and other physical processes. Carrick asks the quite reasonable question: “how does the photon (assume of the same frequency) that is emitted by the cooler source know it comes from a cooler source as opposed to from reflection?” but Arfur does not even appreciate that this question is both perfectly legitimate and shows one of the reasons why his ‘theory of radiation’ is 100% wrong. Engaging them is nothing but a waste of time.
Arfur
“please provide one empirical, real-world example of how radiation from a cooler object can be absorbed by a warmer object, thus making the warmer object even warmer – without interference from another source.”
How do we know the temperature of Neptune? We know it because we can measure the radiation from Neptune (a colder body) that is absorbed by Earth ( a warmer body). QED
Warmer bodies absorb radiation from colder bodies all the time.
Arfur:
LOL.
Right.
All,
Lucia, please provide a link to your black box experiment so that I can learn.
IPCC: …”the Earth’s greenhouse effect warms the surface of the planet.” What is your interpretation?
Carrick.
It doesn’t ‘know’ anything. A reflected photon will not have the same energy as a re-emitted photon which has been emitted from a cooler object which has been warmed by radiation from the original source.
SteveF
What comment #120865?
John Vetterling,
For net energy gain, John.
What net energy gain does Earth have from absorbing Neptune’s radiation? Measure that.
Now my questions for all of you…
How much of the Greenhouse Effect is contributed by CO2?
How much was contributed in 1850?
SteveF, you are completely correct, trying to “help” them is pointless, because they are willfully ignorant and want to stay that way.
I ddi argue above a limited form of engagement is useful for others, as long as “you don’t carry the argument too far.” Taking the argument too far involves engaging with these people beyond simply pointing out their flaws. They will never admit the flaws are flaws, and I’ve had enough examples of where that eventually leads (emotional outbursts and feet stomping for starts) to know that is pointless.
Arfur seemed to think I was addressing him, when I was commenting on a remark he made. I wasn’t. I couldn’t careless whether he finds anything I say of value. In addressing the problems with what he was arguing possibly will help others (e.g., Mark) see the some of the many obvious flaws in these sorts of arguments. If “the others” get something from this, then the discussion is useful. If we define “useful” as converting the unconvertible, it is a waste of time.
At least Claes understood there was a problem with his concepts when you started discussing microscopic physics. Unfortunately, instead of taking the time to go back and addressing the deficiencies in his own understanding of the 2LOT, he elected to try and undermine the theory of quantized radiation:
Talk about throwing out the baby, the baby’s family and the entire universe with the bath water!
Arfur
If you wish to learn, enroll in a program of study involving heat transfer rather than requesting people find you the perfect link to something that would convince you. If you want to convince engineers, metallurgists and physicists that what is taught in all their introductory coursea and agreed by all of them is wrong, you’ll have to set up the experiment yourself and do it describe the results and set up in a way that will permit others to replicate it. If you attempt to “rebutt” by insisting others reprove what is taught in skads of undergraduate course in multiple disciplines and used to design nifty devices you will just fail. Sorry, but I’m not going to waste my time with your attempt to “assign homework” to me.
Ciao.
Hi Carrick,
I appreciate it. But only insofar as anybody feels like it, obviously. I like the Blackboard because the technical discussions are such that I can (sometimes) follow if I put in some effort. Generally they are at a level where I can’t contribute. In other words, I learn stuff here and get exercise for my rust covered undergraduate understanding of physical science and statistics. This said, I’ve got decent heuristics to separate wheat from chaff when it comes to commenters and even if I didn’t, caveat emptor, that’d be my problem.
I guess what I’m saying is, I appreciate it but please don’t indulge in onerous refutations of elementary garbage on my behalf. I may profit from it, but I’d prefer you guys just do what you do. 🙂
lucia:
I would say an introductory book on thermodynamics and an open mind would suffice.
The problem IMO is with the misunderstanding and misapplication of Clausius’s principle. As soon as you fix that problem, absorption of a photon by a warmer object emitted by a colder object is allowed and it’s no longer necessary to go through the radiative physics.
Brandon Shollenberger (Comment #120651)- Sorry, I missed this comment. Okay, a couple things. Disagreeing with a position only because it is “extreme” is, in fact, irrational. As is disagreeing with a position because you think people associated with it are “extreme.” Holding the view that the truth is always somewhere in-between is a full on logical fallacy. So yeah, people who are generically moderate are irrational.
Second; on the living strawman; it is not a requirement that the position being criticized is held by no one. If I argue that World War II did not really help the economy, and my opponent criticizes me for “being an isolationist,” is he not attacking a strawman just because there is such a thing as an isolationist?
Carrick,
This little gem sums up the problem:
“A reflected photon will not have the same energy as a re-emitted photon which has been emitted from a cooler object which has been warmed by radiation from the original source.”
.
Wow so many fundamental errors in one statement. Speaking of which, why the hell doesn’t Brownian motion slow to a stop due to friction? Ha, I betcha can’t explain that can ya?
.
For anyone to believe such utter rubbish means their technical knowledge is early 19th century or less… bizarre, but also more than a little sad.
No. While it’s true he is attacking a strawman, he attacking a strawman because criticizing you for being an isolationist when you didn’t advocate isolationism. Whether there is such a thing as an isolationist is irrelevant to determining whether he is attacking a strawman.
The definition of attacking a strawman is attacking an argument you did not make (and generally one that is weaker than the one you made.)
(BTW: if the definition of ‘isolationist’ is “person who adocates isolationisms”, then there is such a thing, and I’m pretty sure at least one — in fact more than serveral– isolationists exist. )
lucia (Comment #120897) That’s the point I was driving at.
Andrew_FL,
Yep.
That said, at blogs, there is a situation where it matters if no one advocates something. That’s the situation where some one (say an author at ‘SkS’) purports to rebuts what “they” say, but no one advocates that. Or, nearly as bad, almost no one says it– or no one who is read says it.
The problem there is that “they” are not named and so could be anyone, and one can attribute any argument– even weak versions of what someone actually does say and then claim to have rebutted “them”.
lucia (Comment #120899)-Well, it’s a given that that is even worse!
Arfur,
To start:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbxty6aDfhU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTxs1usXSmk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTnpb9YPrQs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKH7g9axXGM
With British accent:
http://www.youtube.com/user/DrPhysicsA?feature=watch
Lots there, and you need most of it.
Andrew_FL, I’m going to try writing a response tomorrow. My hope is your comment will make more sense to me then. As it stands, your response seems unhinged. I can’t begin to imagine where your first paragraph came from.
In the meantime, you should reread what I wrote and decide whether or not you think your characterization is fair and/or accurate.
Arfur,
A more complete link: http://www.bobeagle.co.uk/drphysicsa.html
Brandon Shollenberger (Comment #120902)-I really don’t get what should be so controversial about this, especially since I generalized my comment as much as possible to describe no situation in particular.
Try and clarify what I am saying here:
First: To the extent someone generically moderate on an issue forms a moderate position or a position somewhat off center in the opposite direction *based on the existence of people he deems extreme*, he is irrational. This is just an irrational thing to do, even the term “scared off” belies that the judgement is irrational.
Second: To the extent someone generically moderate on an issue forms a moderate position out of a belief that “extreme” positions are *a priori* wrong, he is irrational.
Third: To the extent someone generically moderate fetishizes having an opinion in the middle of two “extremes” which are deemed *a priori* not only wrong, but equally in error in opposite directions, he is not only irrational he is committing a well known logical fallacy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation
None of this should be even remotely controversial, I don’t understand what it is you find so offensive about it.
Lucia,
I’m not interested in what the other groupthink members want to say. They mean nothing to me. You, on the other hand, have more class. Lets get into this box/filament thing a little more, shall we? You said:
[“The temperature of the outer box will affect the temperature of the filament, photons from the other box do impact on the filament…”]
I asked for you to provide evidence and your response was to tell me to perform an experiment! That is not providing evidence.
I don’t want to put words in your mouth but it seems you think that surrounding an electric filament with a black box will cause the filament to increase in temperature.
It won’t. It can’t. An heat source cannot use its own energy to heat itself more!
Now, if you really can provide evidence to support your idea I am asking you politely to show it. Don’t throw it back to me. You need to provide evidence to back your assertion.
If surrounding a filament with a black box DID make the filament hotter, then the increased emission from the hotter filament would warm the box even more, which would then re-radiate (or back-radiate) back to the filament, causing it to be even hotter, which would then cause the box to be even hotter etc, etc. Great, you have made a new energy source just by putting a box around something! You could put a small fire in a large room and the fire would just get hotter and hotter! A-freakin-mazing!
Do you actually think frosting a light bulb makes it burn hotter? Seriously?
So, please, I can’t believe you meant that. Please produce supporting evidence to straighten this misunderstanding out.
Politely yours,
Arfur
Ps, I hope spending the night outside in a space blanket didn’t cause any lasting harm… 🙂 Just a joke…
pps, Everyone else – politely butt out.
Mark Bofill (Comment #120892)
Mark,
I am not asking you to believe what I say. I would politely ask that you do not fall into the groupthink mentality and just encourage you to think for yourself. That’s all. Treat all imposters the same…
Kind regards,
Arfur
Yup, unhinged is the kindest description. I didn’t say a word suggesting I took offense to anything. I didn’t say a word indicating I found your view controversial or wrong. I didn’t even say a word relevant to the view your advancing.
I don’t know how to respond to you repeatedly arguing against points not even remotely close to anything I’ve said. I’ll try this. Please answer these questions:
1) Where did I suggest I took offense to anything?
2) Where did I say the view you’re advancing is controversial or in dispute in any way?
3) Where did I say anything about people who disagree “with a position only because it is ‘extreme'”?
4) Where did I say anything about people “disagreeing with a position because [they] think people associated with it are ‘extreme'”?
5) Where in the world did I say anything about people who hold “the view that the truth is always somewhere in-between”?
As far as I can see, the answer to all of those questions, “Only in your imagination.”
Arfur Bryant, I’m afraid I can’t butt out, politely or otherwise. I have to say, your latest appears insane. I advise you to take some think about this remark:
Re: Arfur Bryant (Nov 11 07:56),
You don’t think so? Seriously? Do you not think that an oven with an IR transparent window would have a lower temperature at the same applied power level than an oven with an IR opaque window?
I bet you think that Wood’s 1909 experiment was correct too. Hint, it wasn’t. Nobody believed it at the time. See, for example, the published rebuttal of Wood from no less an expert than Charles Greeley Abbot. Low-e glass works. Low emissivity coatings for solar water heaters work.
The problem with Wood’s experiment is that he never proves his two boxes are identical by switching covers and repeating the experiment. There are at least two problems that could have caused him to have erroneous results: First, the insulation of the boxes could have been different. We know the insulation was poor because the internal temperature would have been higher if the boxes had been well insulated. So if the salt plate covered box had been better insulated than the glass covered box, its temperature would have been higher. Second, there are large temperature gradients inside a box exposed to sunlight. A relatively small change in thermometer position between the two boxes would result in different temperature readings leading to an erroneous conclusion.
If you think that Nahle’s recent work proves Wood was correct, then you didn’t read his paper carefully. His IR transparent plastic film covered box was insulated while the IR opaque covered boxes weren’t ( see this illustration from Nahle’s paper if you don’t believe me ).
Brandon Shollenberger (Comment #120912)-
“1) Where did I suggest I took offense to anything?”
(Comment #120902)-“you should reread what I wrote and decide whether or not you think your characterization is fair and/or accurate.”
“2) Where did I say the view you’re advancing is controversial or in dispute in any way?”
(Comment #120651)-“You seem to be suggesting moderates are “incapable of thinking rationally†either as a class, or at least when confronted with this particular situation.
I’m hoping that’s far off. Thinking people who would be “scared off†by WUWT are all incapable of thinking rationally would be foolish and arrogant.”
“3) Where did I say anything about people who disagree “with a position only because it is ‘extreme’â€?”
(Comment #120644)-“A rabid base may provide consistent support, but it’ll also drive away moderates. The only reason WUWT’s polarization doesn’t harm its cause is it is matched by practically the entire other side of the discussion. Even so, WUWT fails to pick up a lot of support it could get because of some of what it posts.”
“4) Where did I say anything about people “disagreeing with a position because [they] think people associated with it are ‘extreme’â€?”
Ibid.
“5) Where in the world did I say anything about people who hold “the view that the truth is always somewhere in-betweenâ€?”
This is what a philosophical moderate is.
“As far as I can see, the answer to all of those questions, “Only in your imagination.—
As far as I can tell, no, not at all.
Arfur
FYI: When someone simultaneously insults a collection of people and follows it with some attempt to give me a “compliment”, I become very annoyed. I consider this sort of behavior a form of rudeness aimed at me. Please don’t do this.
Yes. That’s right. I suggested you do the experiment to test your own idea which differs from the “group think” in undergraduate textbooks in multiple disciplines. You can do the experiment. Or not do it. But if you are going to whine about my suggestion about how you can educate yourself, whine about it elsewhere.
What I think is if you hold the heat addition to the filament at a constant value Q, and the temperature of the box walls at T_box, you will find is the temperature of the filament T_filament is a function of T_box (and the emissive properties of the box walls.)
(Also: you can tweak the experiment to have an inner box and an outer box with the outer box temperature held at some value T_outer, but the inner box temperature free to vary. And then do the exact same thing with no inner box. The temperature of the filament will be higher when the inner box is present.
To avoid conduction and convection, you must make sure to evacuate the contents of any gas or liquid. You may need to be careful to design this to minimize heat conduction through the sidewalls of the box, but that might also be accommodated by using batteries to run your bulb. These things are challenges for you the experimentalist who wants to prove that your “logic” is correct and that the currently understood laws of radiative physics taught in textbooks all over the world are wrong.
The temperature of the filament will depend on the temperature of the box walls. Instead of telling me that you can prove the conclusions of your “logical” process by simply decreeing that you know what can or what can’t happen, get some observations. This is necessary for you because your conclusions differ from those in the standard theory of radiative transfer. (And calling the standard theory “group think” doesn’t really help you any. Yes. It’s what people who have done experiments, work in engineering, design blast furnaces and so on “think” about radiation. Deal with it.)
Nonesense. The temperature of the filament will have one steady state value without the outer box and (provided you don’t actually cool the other box relative to what surrounds the outer box) a different higher one with the box around the fillament. Do the experiment. Or do some experiments. Take a class in heat transfer. Your lack of undestanding of what actually happens in the real world is mindboggling. Sheesh.
Oh stop!! The mental pain caused by your lack of knowledge of what actually happens in the real world is nearly beyond endurance.
Instrument the heck out of some lightbulbs, paint some opaque black and leave others transparent and find out. (Resistance of the filaments can vary due to manufacturing tolerances and will vary as a function of temperature. So ideally, you should vary current to ensure the heat flux is the same for all bulbs. So try to incorporate this control into your test rig.) After you do your experiment get back to me. Seriously.
Or try to claim you know what happens and sarcastically suggest that you are right (when in fact all of us who subscribe to the “group think” taught in heat transfer text books believe you are wrong.)
Even if you don’t believe me and don’t want to do the experiment, note the text in this pdf about lightbulbs
physicsed.buffalostate.edu/pubs/TPT/TPTDec99Filament.pdf
Yes. The coating on a lightbulb raise the temperature of the filament. (Doing so would actually improve the efficiency of the filament in the ‘energy’ sense, but degrade its lifetime.) Obviously, lightbulb manufacturers are not going to explore the potential for increasing efficiency by making the outer coating opaque because then visible light would not escape. And while an emmisive coating will increase the temperature of the filament just as much as a reflective one, no manuracture is going to chose that application. (If you want to know why, any number of people who you are insulting on this thread will be glad to tell you the reason.)
But you can go ahead and instrument the heck out of your lightbulb and test for yourself. Given your vast lack of understanding of what actually happens with lightbulbs or other systems involving radiation, I think hands on application would benefit you. I advise you some hands on experienece before stamping your little foot and telling me coatings can’t and won’t raise the temperature of the filament because everyone knows they can and do. Criminy!
Had I wished to spend the night out in a spaceblanket, I would have also used a foam mattress pad, airbag or cot. And beyond that: what I said is I would stay warmer with the spaceblanket rather than without it, not that the spaceblanket alone would be sufficient. So stop being silly.
If you continue to pretend you are the moderator here even after I told you to stop doing so, while also being rude to me (as above) you will be banned. In the meantime, I suggest even if you don’t do the experiment with the boxes, you try painting lightbulbs black.
lucia,
I think that what you would find if you paint a light bulb black is that at constant voltage, the power consumption would go down because the resistivity of the filament is proportional to temperature. I should try that. I have a watt meter and some high temperature black paint.
Arfur,
A few points.
1. I’ve got no interest in arguing about back radiation and thermodynamics. If asking about ‘CS=0’ vrs ‘no CS’ led you to believe this was the case, I apologize for that, it was not my intention.
2. In my opinion, you do the regulars at the Blackboard an injustice by suggesting that they are indulging in groupthink or that they are ‘imposters’. I am embarrassed for you that you would suggest this. I’d recommend that you rethink this and consider an apology, but frankly that you’d go there in the first place gives me little reason to believe you’ve got that much sense, so I’m not going to hold my breath.
3. I would prefer to be left out of the remainder of this discussion.
Mark
DeWitt Payne
First: Thank you ignoring Arfur’s order to butt out. I would hate to be deprived of conversations with my own blog visitors merely because Arfur — a visitor here– doesn’t like others conversing here.
Now:
Yes. As temperature of the filament rises (as, contrary to Arfur’s claim it will), resistance of the filament likely drops. So if voltage is fixed the power added to the lightbulb will be reduced. But, obviously, not so much to make the temperature of the filament drop below the level without the coating because if it did, the resistance would be high again and the power draw would increase. ( I tremble in fear at the thought of how Arfur might apply his “understanding” of the 2LOT of thermo to this!)
This variation of resistance with temperature is why, ideally he needs to control the power supplied to the bulb. Doing so may exceed his skill level, but I think if he merely masters figuring out how to measure the temperature of the filament, he will have a good enough experiment to discover what lightbulb manufacturers have known for a long, long, long time: the presence of a coating and the properties of the coating do affect the temperature of the filament (and for that matter can affect the temperature of the outer part of the bulb. )
Why Arfur thinks the coating does not affect the temperature of the filament can only be explained by this: Lack of knowledge.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #120917),
You may want to collect your data quickly; unless you run the bulb well under its design voltage it may not last too long once painted black. Heck, you might even crack the base of the bulb from too much heating of the glass. An oven bulb is designed for higher glass temperatures and may be a better bet for your experiment.
Lucia,
I will have a small celebration if you ban Arfur. The lack of knowledge is terrible, but the arrogance and endless insults when someone tries to explain why he is wrong are much worse. It has been his MO since the first time he commented.
Re: SteveF (Nov 11 10:05),
I hope oven light bulbs have been excluded from the future ban on incandescent bulbs. I can’t imagine trying to run a CFL or an LED in an oven. But then that would have required the drafters of the legislation to actually think about consequences.
I suspect the filament will fail long before the bulb cracks. But my bet is that the resistance will increase enough that neither will happen. Incandescent bulbs are fairly good power regulators when put in series with a load with variable resistance, as I remember.
DeWitt
Possibly. After all, people do paint lightbulbs for various decorative effect– obviously not to the point of opacity though. But if the outer covering is really opaque– which is the limiting case and in many ways results in the ‘best’ experiment, the glass casing temperature will tend to be quite a bit hotter than otherwise. (That’s why it will ‘back radiate’ to the filament as well as ‘front radiate’ out to the room.)
I don’t know enough about how that affects glass to say much more. (Also, there can be an issue of temperature gradients which can be a problem for glass.) Obviously Arfur, who by now must be running errands to buy incadescent lightbulbs, find something to control the power supply, and figuring out how to measure the temperature of the filament, needs to take some care.
I suspect the best way to determine the temperature might be to include a measurement of the filaments resistance, and then use the resistance-temperature curve obtained from a manufacturer. It’s indirect and so Arfur might disbelieve the results when the experimental data don’t do what he anticipates. But others would likely be willing to use resistance as a proxy for temperature measurement– particularly if the test rig is described so that others can replicate his work. 🙂
DeWitt Payne (Comment #120926)-I don’t know about real ovens but I recall a story about toy ovens being negatively effected. Poor kids…
Andrew_FL, your answers to my questions are only helping confirm my impressions. You say this suggests I took offense:
Nothing in this indicates offense was taken. I said you should reread what I wrote and decide if you characterized it accurately and fairly. That says nothing about any feelings I might have had.
You say this is me discussing people who disagree “with a position only because it is ‘extreme'” and people “disagreeing with a position because [they] think people associated with it are ‘extreme'”:
This is seemingly based upon the idea:
I’m fairly well acquainted with philosophy, and I’ve never heard of a person holding those views and being considered a “philosophical moderate.” I used Google to check my knowledge, and it returned only ~300 results for the phrase, none of which seem to support your claim.
Moreover, even if what you said is true, it is a non-issue. I never said anything about “philosophical moderates.” I said “moderates.” There is nothing about that which implies I was referring to your “philosophical moderates” as opposed to a different type. For example, “political moderate” returns about 100 times as many results via Google as “philosophical moderate.” “Religious moderate” returns about 20 times as many results. I could certainly have been referring to groups like them. It’s certainly plausible I’d refer to things which have Wikipedia articles and dictionary references:
It should not be surprising I’d use the word “moderates” to refer to people who are “moderate in opinion.” Even if one wasn’t sure that’s what I meant, it’s certainly a possibility to consider rather than assuming I was referring only to people who disagree “with a position only because it is ‘extreme'” That’s especially true given philosophical issues hadn’t even been referred to.
As far as I can tell, your responses to me are based entirely upon interpreting the word “moderates” to refer to something that may not even exist instead of how the word is commonly used.
By the way, I know there’s the topic of straw men to discuss, but I can’t bring myself to comment on it. It seems too silly.
SteveF
The incredible thing this time is he is trying to repeatedly prove his point by reasoning like
“If what you claim were true, then X would happen. I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but you seem to be saying ‘X’ happens. That’s impossible because (insert long explanation of why X happening is impossible — possibly violating 2LOT). ”
The answer is, of course that X not only can happen, it does happen, it’s been observed to happen and nothing about X happening violates the 2nd law of thermo.
Of course, the other category of counter argument is:
“Radiation doesn’t work the way radiation text books say it does because conduction and convection exist and dominate in some problems.” These are generally accompanied by silly totally irrelevant ‘examples’ like for example: if you lay a radiation blanket on top of a block of ice and lay naked on top of the blanket, the radiation blanket would be insufficient to keep you warm and if you lay there long enough you would likely die. Well.. yeah… duh. But that doesn’t mean that you couldn’t reduce heat loss from your body, and campsite by placing radiation barrier overhead between yourself and the clear night sky when camping in the desert. This sort of thing does help in the desert
Well it be “enough”? Maybe. Maybe not. Is part of the effect blocking upward convection? Possibly a little. Would a reflective canopy be better than an emmissive one? Almost certainly. But an emmissive barrier will “back radiate” works and if one suddenly finds themselves outdoors in the cold desert after sunset and that’s the only thing available, I advice scooting under the canopy because it will back radiate some energy and if you are worried about exposure to cold, back radiating some energy is better than back radiating no energy.
Curt Wilson had reported on some radiation experiments on WUWT. I and others had noticed that his current went down slightly. Not sure that he ever followed up on this.
DeWitt’s experiment should work, as long as he paints it uniformly with a high-temperature paint, and he has a decent ammeter. I recommend using spray paint to improve the uniformity of the coating. If you coat it thin enough, you might be able to get several measurements (current draw versus number of coatings).
I’d use some sort of cover, like an ordinary aluminum shop lamp cover, to keep air flow off of the bulb (improves uniformity of results).
I had considered covering the bulb with aluminum foil and then sand. I have a variac that can use to set the voltage anywhere between 20-140 V. With this, I can adjust the voltage to get the same temperature that would be there with nothing to impede the outgoing radiation from the filament.
I do know that a 60-W tungsten bulb is around 20-ohms at room temperature and around 250-ohms at 3000°C (approximate operating temperature), and is roughly linear. That would allow an estimate of the magnitude of the effect you’d expect to see.
Brandon Shollenberger (Comment #120929)-The accusation that I was being unfair to you is obviously a statement indicative of offense taken at perceived mischaracterization. If you didn’t mean to suggest you had taken offense, you really shouldn’t have made a statement indicative of having taken offense.
“It should not be surprising I’d use the word “moderates†to refer to people who are “moderate in opinion.—
No, it really is not. If one is *already* of “moderate opinion,” one cannot be “scared off” or be “driven away.” A person who could be driven away or scared off is someone who holds the (erroneous) philosophical view that extreme beliefs are a priori wrong.
“As far as I can tell, your responses to me are based entirely upon interpreting the word “moderates†to refer to something that may not even exist instead of how the word is commonly used.”
This is a class of people that absolutely exists and is almost synonymous with common usage. Political moderates in large numbers justify, implicitly or explicitly, their moderation based on the fallacy of the golden mean. If you don’t think this is true you are just wrong.
Moreover, it is the *only* sort of person of moderate persuasion remotely relevant to the question of whether people of “extreme” positions have the effect of reducing support for closely aligned positions. You can’t lose the non philosophical moderate, you couldn’t have him in the first place.
Brandon Shollenberger (Comment #120913)
Brandon,
I’m really sorry you feel that way, as I respect you more than any other poster here.
Bearing in mind the context is radiation from and back-radiation to the heat source, could you please provide an example of such a heat source where you think this happens?
Regards,
DWP,
[“You don’t think so? Seriously? Do you not think that an oven with an IR transparent window would have a lower temperature at the same applied power level than an oven with an IR opaque window?”]
Who said anything about the oven? Lucia said the filament heats up!
lucia (Comment #120916)
[“When someone simultaneously insults a collection of people..”]
Up to that point, where had I insulted anyone? And yet you were quite happy to read descriptions such as ‘deranged’, nuts and wacko aimed at my posts…? Nice sense of fairness.
The rest of your post is very long on telling me to do an experiment and very short on actual evidence. This repeated avoidance on your part is quite revealing.
*Light bulbs*.
[“Some day, filament lamp systems will exceed the theoretical maximum efficacy of melting tungsten because of new reflective bulb coatings. Such coatings (which reflect IR energy back into the bulb to further heat the filament) are currently under development, and when sufficient IR energy is reclaimed into visible wavelengths,”]
That’s it? Your evidence? Something that may happen one day and some people are working on it. That’s evidence? LOL
Here, try this (you and DWP)…
Two bulbs from the same manufacturer.
http://genet.gelighting.com/LightProducts/Dispatcher?REQUEST=COMMERCIALSPECPAGE&PRODUCTCODE=11585&BreadCrumbValues=CATG,_Lamps_Incandescent_A-line_A21&SearchFieldCode=null
http://genet.gelighting.com/LightProducts/Dispatcher?REQUEST=COMMERCIALSPECPAGE&PRODUCTCODE=16069&BreadCrumbValues=CATG,_Lamps_Incandescent_A-line_A21&SearchFieldCode=null
Same filament. Same wattage. Same voltage. One bulb clear and the other coated. Hey, guess what? Same colour temperature… Wow. Who knew?
[“Yes. The coating on a lightbulb raise the temperature of the filament.”]
No, it doesn’t.
Ok Lucia, I apologise if I have offended you (or anyone else). I think if you read back over my discussions over the years here that you will see I have been insulted more than the other way around. Be that as it may, I still offer an apology to you.
Provide clear, real evidence that radiated energy (from a filament), which has been absorbed and re-emitted from a cooler surface and which then returns to heat the filament to a greater temperature than it was before without any additional energy being supplied from anywhere… and I will never post here again. Fair enough?
Arfur Bryant, normally I’d say no as it’s too silly, but if I’m willing to respond to Andrew_FL’s insanity, I suppose I have no room to ignore yours.
My example would be, “Everything.” Everything in our world radiates energy in the form of heat. Everything in our world absorbs energy in the form of heat. How much things cool/warm depends on the proportion of these two. With that in mind, what happens when you introduce an object into the proximity of something with net emissions?
As the new object absorbs energy from the heat source, it will begin emitting more energy. Some of those emissions will return to the heat source, altering it’s emission/absorption ratio. That will lead to the heat source being warmer than it would otherwise.
It happens with everything. Sit in the middle of a couch with arms. Sit on an end. There’ll be a change in temperatures.
Andrew_FL, I’m going to pick a single point and focus on that in the hope that we can resolve it then move on to other points. Simplification sometimes helps.
You claim I indicated offense by saying you mischaracterized my views. You say this is obvious.
If merely saying one has mischaracterized my views necessarily indicates offense, it would be impossible for me to say anyone has mischaracterized my views without indicating offense. That’d mean any time I say something like, “That’s not what I said,” I’d be indicating offense.
From this, it follows it would be impossible for me to feel someone mischaracterized my views without being offended. Mischaracterizations commonly stem from misunderstandings. That means it is “obvious” I must be offended by people misunderstanding me.
Additionally, mischaracterizations often stem from a person being unclear about their views. If someone misunderstands my views because I misspoke, and this misunderstanding causes them to mischaracterize my views, the fault is mine. You say pointing this out would necessarily indicate offense.
That is all nonsense. One need not feel anything when pointing out a mischaracterization. One could be offended. One could be upset. One could also be happy. One could also be sad. One could be amused. One could be apathetic. All of these are possible for one pointing out a mischaracterization.
There is absolutely nothing in my comment which indicated offense.
I believe someone at Watts’ blog ran and explained (took pictures of his thermometer readings) an experiment where he showed with considerations for convection and conduction the heating of a light bulb with a cooler source by both reflection and radiation. I believe an Arfur was commenting there and not accepting the results.
I have no problem with someone being skeptical or even skeptical with or from a lack of the relevant knowledge as long as they appear to be wanting to learn. Those people who are willing to learn and accept new knowledge handle themselves differently than those who are not willing to learn or except new evidence. A discussion with a learner can be pleasurable and rewarding. With a non learner not so much and it will often end in a discussion of personalities.
Arfur
You accused people who disagree with you of “groupthink”. That’s an insult.
Once again: I am telling you to do an experiment. That’s right. In response to your describing “thought experiments” about (a)the chair in front of a fire and (b) your specific prediction that
I am telling you to do real experiment to test your claim about what will happen in these cases.
Note well: I am in no way pretending that I am not telling you to do experiments: I am telling you to do experiments. and more specifically to do one using a filament– which for your convenience may be inside a lightbulb. But if you want to break the bulb and put it in some other evacuated container, have at it.
But if you return and whine “You told me to do an experiment”, I’m going to say: Yes. I told you to do an experiment. You, I and everyone can agree that I have told you to do an experiment to back up your specific claims.
Good lord. So you think the fact that people who actual work on improving lightbulbs think the coating affects the temperature of the filament and that some day someone might invent a coating further raises the temperature of the filament and so improve the efficiency of the lightbulb is not “evidence” to show that your notion that coatings can raise the temperature of the lightbulb is wrong? Wow.
But as I suggested: Do the experiment. Or not. If you want to do it, people can give you tips. (You’ll need to get the temperature to ‘steady state’ which might take minutes. You’ll need equipment and so on. ) If you don’t want to do it: Take your claims about wanting to learn elsewhere.
Heavens! The things you consider evidence. I said paint the bulb opaque black to trap all the light. The goal in your experiment to maximize the effect (so you can detect it). I didn’t say compare one bulb with a teensie beensie coating that barely affects the transparency of the bulb then look at manufacturers specs that are rounded. (And which, in fact, don’t tell you enough because– though you may not have noticed it, there are all sorts of things not revealed in that spec.)
Gracious. Are you really telling me what I need to do to get you to grant me the boon of you not posting here? I realize you think you are going to count the number of times you insulted people– but do you realize how insulting it is for you to propose rules of behavior at my blog?! Because if you don’t know that’s insulting– especially after I’ve asked you to stop trying to play moderator (see above), I suggest no one is going to believe you are able to count the number of times you insulted someone.
Do the experiment. Or go away. I’m not going to collapse, die or be especially worried about the thought that you think you have used “logic” to “discover” things about radiation and thermodynamics that violate the principles of heat transfer abd thermodynamics taught everywhere. Anyone reading this thread can see you are unwilling to :
a) read thermodynamics texts.
b) read heat transfer texts.
c) do simple heat transfer problems.
d) do experiments to observe what happens in the real world.
And you will persist in your claims about what happens in the real world despite all that. My instructions to you:
(a)Do the lightbulb experiment. As I said above: control heat flux Q= Voltage applied * Current. Ideally, show us traces so we can see Q is held constant when you measure tempeature (or — I’ll accept you measure Q and report resistance by computing resistance based on Q and Voltage V or current, i). Paint the half the bulb opaque black; leave the others unpainted. Other than that, all bulbs should be identical. (I recommend about a dozen of each kind so you have replicate samples). Do not try to come up with a feeble substitute involving different bulbs or approximate specs.
(b) After you’ve done it, carefully describe what you’ve done, including the equipment, time procedure and your results. Photos, sketches graphs and so on.
(c) Until then, stop whining for evidence.
You‘re the one who made a claim about what ‘can’t’ happen to the temperature of the filament. Go do the dang experiment. Don’t expect me to find a link where someone has already done the experiment to show the wild eyed claim you made isn’t true.
Or conversely, if you think your wild eyed claim is true, and you think someone has done this experiment you find the dang link where they describe their experiment. It’s not my job to find experiments that address any and every possible incorrect claim about what happens on earth you might concoct now or in the future. If you think the claim you made is true you show it. And stop whining about my telling you to do it merely because doing so requires you to do a dang experiment. Sheesh.
(And yes: Once again, I have asked you to do an experiment. Or, failing that, I have asked you to support your rather novel and unusual claim.)
I see Carrick has already linked the experiment at Watts’ blog in his post above. Obviously the increase in resistance of the filament gives a more direct picture of radiation from cooler to hotter increasing the temperature of the hotter.
The question posed somewhere above of how does a photon know whether it came from a cooler of hotter source before being absorbed by a hotter source should be a big clue in this matter for even the layperson with some reasonable concept of what a photon is.
Arfur,
The oven and the lamp filament are the same experiment in principle, only the geometry is different.
The problem can be reduced to it’s simplest form by assuming parallel infinite planes with a vacuum between them. If infinite planes are too big for you, consider a square box with a side having an area of one square meter. Take two sides opposite to each other and make the other four sides perfectly reflecting. Now we’ll put a resistance heater (perfectly insulated on the outside ) on one side and a cooling coil on the other. If we apply 100 W to the resistance heater, that side will warm up until the power radiated away equals 100 W. Call its temperature T1. The temperature of the cooled side, T2, is maintained constant by controlling the flow and temperature of the coolant. The temperature of the heated side will depend on the temperature of the cooled side. Assuming an emissivity of 1 (actually not necessary as long as the heated and cooled sides are opaque), the governing equation is power = σ(T1^4-T2^4), where power is in watts (or W/m² for infinite planes), T is in degrees Kelvin and σ is the Stefan-Boltzmann constant. Solving for T1 gives:
T1 = ((power/σ) + T2^4)^0.25
This is simple conservation of energy, First Law not Second Law.
If T2 = 0, T1 = (100/0.0000000567)^0.25 = 204.9 K
If T2 = 300K, T1 = 315.1K
The increase in T2 requires that T1 increase to more than T2 so that the net energy transfer remains 100W. If you can’t see how this relates to the light bulb filament problem, there’s little that can be done.
There’s little that can be done.
I don’t think the paint experiment is worth doing as the increase in the filament temperature is going to be small. A 40W bulb has a diameter of 2.25 inches. For simplification of the calculation, assume that it’s a sphere with that diameter. Converting to metric, the surface area equals 0.010 m², which is about what I guessed before doing the calculation. For a perfectly opaque bulb, the surface temperature of the bulb would be, assuming the bulb is in a vacuum radiating to the CMB (or absolute zero, it makes little difference).
(4000/σ)^0.25 = 515K or 242 C or 468 F.
For a 300 K environment, the surface temperature goes up to 530 K. The T^4 thing is going to make absorption vs transmission not very significant. 3,000K is 4.59E06 W/m². Going from absolute zero to 515K would result in a filament temperature increase of 0.65K.
Reflection is a different story. In a perfectly reflective container, any non-zero power level will cause the temperature to increase without limit. Yet another reason that perfect reflection is an absolute with no real existence. Note that low emissivity is identical to reflectivity, so a low emissivity bulb would get very hot. Putting a bulb in a box lined with space blanket material (metal side in) would be more interesting. Aluminum foil might work too, but I don’t think it’s as reflective as space blanket.
For a bulb with a = 0, r = 0.5 and t = 0.5 (at all wavelengths), the filament temperature would have to be 3568K if the temperature were 3000K for t = 1.0, if I did my sums correctly.
Dewitt
This is why we need the bulb painted black if we are to use regular bulbs: 0.65K might be detectable. A translucent coating designed to barely interfere with the opacity while merely reducing glare will be undetectable.
But, you have a good point. I hadn’t thought about the actual area ratios. Now that I looked at the equations and Arfur needs a special rig with a larger ratio of filament area to bulb area than for a standard lightbulb. A nice big barely red glowing filament– more like a radiant heater– would be nice. Or maybe something scavanged from a blow dryer. Or failing that, we need lower temperature for the filament (which is easy.)
If we stick to lightbulbs might old fashioned christmas lights do? Those have smaller bulb surface areas but I imagine they also have smaller areas for the filament.
But if Anthony already did the experiment with a electric oven and Carrick showed Arfur that experiment and Arfur is unconvinced there is really little one can do.
Re: DeWitt Payne (Nov 11 15:47),
Check that. Low emissivity is complementary with reflectivity. For a given wavelength and direction, emissivity is equal to absorptivity. Reflectivity is then 1 – a – t.
Ok: The watts experiment:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/28/slaying-the-slayers-with-watts-part-2/
Curt solves the area ratio problem by measuring the temperature of the bulb casing and having the outer box be outside the bulb. And then he uses foil which — as DeWitt points out– will have a larger effect than paint which would make it an emissivity problem. But that could be repeated with paint. The only real issue is a need to have more sensitive equipment or adjust area ratios to get a larger effect.
And then there would be the difficulty of actually convincing Arfur.
Dewitt
Yes. But it’s difficult to have low emissivity materials unless you have some reflectivity. See values here:
http://snap.fnal.gov/crshield/crs-mech/emissivity-eoi.html
Note that only the metallic paints are low or lowish emissivity.
Of course that would satisfy all of us who:
1) Already know what standard (non Arfurian) radiative physics predicts
2) Know the predictions of standard (non Arfurian) radiative physics are actually reliable and
3) Also know that the experiment at Anthony’s falls right in line with the expectations of standard (non Arfurian) radiative physics.
Previously, Arfur got a bit testy when I assumed his metal chair was chosen to give an example of something reflective. So I suspect he’d get upset if we actually used something reflective in the experiment.
That said: if he’s admits Anthony’s experiment proves his notions about back radiation are wrong… then I’ll admit I was wrong and see that Arfur is willing to consider real observations as being more relevant than his predictions of what would happen if he were willing to do experiments he seems unwilling to do.
Curt Wilson’s experiment linked by Carrick where it’s the temperature of the bulb that is being measured is better as the temperature difference isn’t as large so the effect is more easily measurable. Note that, assuming constant voltage, the resistivity changed by 0.2% from the highest reflectivity case to open air. That’s so small, I would need to see repeated experiments to see if that’s significant.
The temperature of the frosted bulb in free air was 93.5C or 367K, so the absorptivity of the bulb is significant. Assume the emissivity of the bulb in the thermal IR is 1 and the surrounding is at 296K and the bulb area is 0.01 m², then the bulb surface is radiating 5.9W, which would imply an absorptivity in the visible/NIR of ~0.15.
I would have mounted things upside down to minimize convection at the bulb surface. I also would have also tested a cover of only polyethylene film for a high transparency test. That would put a stake through the heart of the Wood experiment too, not that it really needs it.
The comment section is either very funny or very sad, or possibly both. I love the guy who says that visible light can’t heat anything followed by a poster saying that he heats soot particles to 5,000K using a frequency tripled YAG laser at 532 nm, solidly in the green part of the visible spectrum. I wonder how he explains laser ablation with an excimer laser at 193 nm.
If you’re either looking for a good laugh or a glutton for punishment, PSI posted a ‘rebuttal’ article.
Re: lucia (Nov 11 16:50),
That’s average emissivity. The really good stuff for passive solar is selectively emissive. It’s highly absorptive in the visible and near IR (a ~ 0.95 ) and very reflective/low emissivity in the thermal IR ( e < 0.05 ). Or low-e glass which is highly transparent in the visible and highly reflective in the thermal and near IR.
So did my comment above go to moderation because I linked to an organization that shall not be named? I don’t normally link to them. Maybe I should have said that the link was in the WUWT article.
Dewitt–
Yep. That’s why it was moderated.
Carrick:
There is no such thing as an IR photon.
I’m impressed I remembered that statement exactly enough to get a Google singularity on it.
Lucia,
Please (pretty please, with hot chocolate sauce over Haagen-Daas) don’t let Arfur post any more. Whether he is nuts or just terminally stupid matters not at all. He is a waste of time.
Re: BillC (Nov 11 18:33),
I think astronomers would dispute that statement. See for example this article:
Background Limited Infrared and Submillimeter Instruments
And there are many more referring to photon noise as the limiting factor for detection at long wavelengths, not to mention other photon related terms like quantum efficiency. I would also like to see how he knows that Einstein and Schrodinger ‘knew’ there was no such thing as an IR photon. While it is possible to describe stimulated emission in classical terms, that’s not how Einstein derived the concept.
BillC, not only does Claes think that, but he thinks Einstein and Schrödinger “knew that too”.
This type of ignorance can not be helped.
DeWitt:
Yes, I agree. The effects are small, so repeated measures is important here to convince oneself that the measured differences are meaningful.
Brandon Shollenberger (Comment #120939)-Yes how foolish of me to think I had offended the person who has called me insane and unhinged. That would be absurd, surely.
Look, if you didn’t mean to indicate offense, then that would be fine. But it raises the question 1. Why you would care so much and 2. Why you would resort of rather abusive language directly at someone who said nothing similarly directed at you.
If you take no umbrage to what I say, then what the hell is your problem, pardon me?
Re: Andrew_FL (Nov 11 20:33),
Apparently he thinks you’re Mosher. Or maybe he just reacts to everyone that way.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #120966)-Well that can be a compliment or an insult depending on the context and the person making it-no offense intended to Mr. Mosher even if he didn’t always remember I was not the same Andrew as that other Andrew. 😉
Anyway, I think I have grown equally tired of an unproductive line of discussion, if not moreso, as everyone else has. I’m gonna go back to analyzing some data for a while.
Andrew_FL:
Calling someone insane and/or unhinged does not inherently imply any offense was taken. Moreover, when I explicitly asked you where I indicated offense had been taken, you quoted this:
When I challenged you on this point, you said:
At no point did you refer to me calling you unhinged or insane as justification for deciding I had indicated offense. That is a new argument you’ve raised only when your previous arguments were challenged.
To make matters worse, I never called you unhinged or insane. You’re simply making that up.
My biggest problem appears to be you are incapable of reading simple sentences.
To summarize, there was nothing remarkable about my use of the phrase “drive away moderates,” a point I demonstrated by using Google to show it’s used quite often. For some reason, you decided to take issue with that phrase, misquoting it as “scaring away moderates” then claiming the moderates in question are “incapable of thinking rationally.” You also determined I took offense by claiming one neutrally worded comment “obviously” indicated offense, but when challenged on the point, changed the subject to something you simply fabricated.
As an aside, I find it interesting your fabrication held that I called you unhinged and insane given you started this exchange by saying an entire class of people are “incapable of thinking rationally.” Similarly, it’s interesting you just cursed while (incorrectly) saying I “care so much.”
DeWitt Payne:
It’s interesting you’d lend support to a comment to criticize me despite the fact the comment contains an obvious fabrication about me.
Brandon, Andrew_FL etc.
Maybe it’s a good time to stop the argument about the argument. If there are any technical points, maybe switch to those?
Brandon Schollenberger,
“Everything.”
[“As the new object absorbs energy from the heat source, it will begin emitting more energy. Some of those emissions will return to the heat source, altering it’s emission/absorption ratio. That will lead to the heat source being warmer than it would otherwise.”]
So, placing a bag of frozen peas six feet in front of an electric fire will increase the temperature of the filament? What about ten bags?
Roy has posted…dammit I was (almost, maybe) in the money based on the initial press release, but far off it now. I guess during the gov’t shutdown they had time to “massage” the data /sarc.
Lucia,
[“Curt solves the area ratio problem by measuring the temperature of the bulb casing and having the outer box be outside the bulb. And then he uses foil which — as DeWitt points out– will have a larger effect than paint which would make it an emissivity problem. But that could be repeated with paint. The only real issue is a need to have more sensitive equipment or adjust area ratios to get a larger effect.
And then there would be the difficulty of actually convincing Arfur.”]
But we ‘re not talking about the temperature of the bulb surface. You are claiming that the filament heats up inside your black box.
[“That said: if he’s admits Anthony’s experiment proves his notions about back radiation are wrong… then I’ll admit I was wrong and see that Arfur is willing to consider real observations as being more relevant than his predictions of what would happen if he were willing to do experiments he seems unwilling to do.”]
Did I miss the bit where Watts shows the filament getting hotter?
I know you like to use sarcasm but I do not accept Watts’ experiment as evidence that a cooler object can warm a hotter object by back-radiation. Sorry to disappoint.
And I’ve read physics text books. Maybe the wrong ones and I will have to read more, obviously. I still can’t find where it states that the radiation from a cooler object can warm a warmer object (particularly when the warmer object was the source of warming the cooler object). Any help here would be appreciated.
So, me using the word groupthink is insulting but apparently me being described as deranged isn’t? I’m just being objective.
Arfur
I am not necessarily addressing you with that comment. I am addressing those who know that a bulb in a box has similar physics as a filament in a bulb. I realize that those who do not understand the physics will not see the similarity and so was talking to DeWitt and others about Curt’s experiment. I anticipated that for you, it is necessarily to do something with a “filament”.
No. And owing to your obvious lack of understanding about the physics, I anticipated that you would not recognize that Anthony’s experiment shows the principle of the phenomenology under discussion and so you would remain unconvinced. As it appears you do.
I am not using sarcasm. I was quite literally predicting that you would not accept Watt’s experiment and in fact you do not. Why would you think my prediction of your behavior is “sarcasm”.
First: no one has said there is net heat transfer from the cooler object to the warmer one. No one says any such thing in climate.
Second: What people are saying — and plenty of text books show plenty of examples of– is the cooler object doing what you call “back radiation” and acting as a radiation shied for the warmer one. More specifically, if seen from the “photon” point of view, photons from the cooler object hit the warmer object. These are absorved by the warmer object and warm it.
That you might be unable to see that the radiation textbooks contain scads and scads of examples of this is a deficiency for you. That you might think you need to find a quote that happens to address your specific misconception and write a paragraph in words you recognize telling you your misconception is wrong is your defiency, not that of the text books or those who you accuse of having “group think”.
I haven’t called you or anyone deranged. You have characterized those who take my position as being involved in “groupthink”. And even if you followed that by somehow claiming I am some sort of “exception”, you nevertheless insulted me by calling my position “groupthink”.
I’ve looked back and not found anyone calling you specifically deranged. SteveF said the skydragons are deranged. You have told us you do not agree with Claes and more over you say ” I do not consider myself a Sky Dragoon or a Sky Dragon”. So I don’t know why you would take SteveF’s criticism of a group you don’t belong to as having anything to do with you.
Of you are concerned about people calling theories nutso: I think Sky Dragon’s theories are nutso. I’m willing to say it. I don’t think it’s unfair to call a theory nutso. I also don’t consider SteveF writing
To be unfair. The skydragons do have a wacko interpretation of macroscopic thermo. It appears you also have one– though you tell us yours is distinct from theirs. I do not consider someone saying that someone adhereing to or defending a whacko theory is nutty behavior to be unfair. So theories are whacky and I think it’s fair to say so.
In anycase, to the extent that someone saying the SkyDragon theory is nutso, I don’t think you have a right to take personal umbrage. After all: You say you are not a Sky Dragon and don’t share their views. So the comment has nothing to do with you.
With respect to this
I recognize that this this insinuates your utterly incorrect notions about thermodynamics and heat transfer, and your stupendous confidence that you are correct when, in fact, application of your ‘rules’ of heat transfer or thermo to simply undergraduate problems would result in an F in any undergraduate thermo or heat transfer problems may spring from terminal stupidity or being nutty. Generally, neither are seen as flattering. And of course, there could be other reasons why you have been unable to gain even the tiniest bit of understanding of heat transfer or thermo during the many years when you have been commenting at blogs. If so, maybe you could suggest a reason. But until you do, many people are going to share the view that it’s not worth while to devote much time debating these with you.
That is why I have suggested that you get someone to help you perform the experiment on the “filament”. You predicted a certain outcome– so presumably if your view is correct, you should be able to do the experiment, collect data, and show everyone the data that reveals that the data are consistent with your view of physics and inconsistent with their view. This means the onus is on you to do
(a) understand what their view of physics predicts
(b) understand what your view predicts.
(c) design an experiment where the predictions differ and where the difference falls inside the detection limit of the experiments and
(d) report the experiment.
Until you do that, I would suggest you stop coming around and telling everyone your novel theories about radiative physics. Because they are wrong. In fact they are sufficiently wrong to be “nutty”. If you think my saying your theory about physics is nutty– too bad. I don’t consider calling your theories nutty is a personal insult. In science, logic, and even daily life, it is sometimes necessary to deem certain theories sufficiently wrong as to be “nutty”. And even if it might be less than polite to call those who adhere to nutty theories fruitcakes or nuts, it is not wrong to call their theories or beliefs nutty.
Your theories about heat transfer and thermo are nutty.
I will drop the argument, except to say that anyone reading this thread can decide for themselves whether or not I have been called unhinged or insane. The record speaks for itself.
Anyway, sorry to have gotten into this stupid argument Lucia. I appreciate not getting thrown out on my ass, I probably deserved to be.
Arfur
Whether a bag of frozen peas increases the temperature of the filament relative to the temperature before the bag is placed there depends on what the temperature and properties of whatever was in the line of sight of the filament before the bag of peas locked that view.
Assuming or or less equal emissivities for the bag of peas and other surfaces in this problem (heck, lets assume everything is a blackbody): if a bag of peas at 31 F is placed in front of a block of dry ice at a much lower temperature, yes, the temperature of the filament will increase relative to the temperature prior to placing the bag of frozen peas in front of the filament. This is because the frozen peas, while cooler than the filament are warmer than the dry ice. However, if the bag of peas at 31F is placed in front of a wall that was 70F, then the filament will get colder. This is because the peas at 31F are colder than the wall at 70F so the back radiation from the peas is lower than the back radiation from the wall at 70F. Meanwhile the back radiation from the peast at 31F is higher than from the block of dry ice.
These results are all consistent with the theory that the filament can and does absorb heat emitted by objects with temperature lower than the filament.
But hunting for weird exceptions is not going to prove your version of physics. If we understand correctly you are claiming that the rule is that
(a) if one places an object with a temperature lower than the filament, then the filament will never warm up as a result of the presence of the lower temperature object being placed there and
(a) is the rule because
(b) the amount of radiation emmitted from any and all low temperature object that can be absorbed by the high temperature object is zero.
This means– if I understand your not fully explained theory correctly, that the filament’s temperature (which I assume to be much greater than 70F) should be the same in all three cases above. That is: it can face a block of dry ice, or the wall at 70F or the bag of peas, and there will be no difference in the temperature of the filament in any of these cases because in your theory, no heat can transfer from the dryice/peas/wall to the hot fillament.
If that is your contention, then your argument fails if we can find any cases where placing an object with a lower temperature than the ‘hot’ object causes the temperature or the hot object to increase. In fact, your theory fails if the temperature of the filament even varies based on what we put in front of it. In contrast, if that happens — and in the direction we predict– our theory is supported.
So, stop trying to find “cases” where putting something in front of the filment would simply fails to raise the temperature relative to not putting something there. Because that’s not enough to cause our theory to fail. Our theory predicts that the filaments temperature will be a affected by what you put in front of it. To disprove ‘our’ theory (i.e. the ones in undergraduate textbooks) you have to find an example where results are inconsistent with our theory. And— yes– our theory does make specific predictions. So if you actually learn the theory (which btw you must do to disprove it) you can identify those examples.
Meanwhile, the main thing that prevents us from fully understanding your theory is that you haven’t really elaborated on it. You have made some individual statements that are clearly wrong– and which we can show wrong. (This is not to say we can get you to accept that. But. Oh. Well.) But your theory seems to have quote a few details held in reserve. (For example: it seems that somehow the “filament” problem has some aspect that makes it sufficiently different from Anthony’s experiment to prevent you from believing your theory is wrong in light of Anthony’s experiment. What that aspect is I do not know. It seems to be “it’s not a filament”. But…well.. there you go. I’m left to wonder what it is about “being a filament” that is the important feature that somehow lets you think your theory stands despite Anthony’s results.)
Andrew_FL,
I permit a certain amount of feistyness because it often gets resolved. People do frequently go back to the main point. But sometimes… not. Neither you nor Brandon need to beh trhown out on your asses. It’s just that that side issue does not need to be resolved at this point.
lucia (Comment #120976)
November 12th, 2013 at 10:03 am
“I am not necessarily addressing you with that comment. I am addressing those who know that a bulb in a box has similar physics as a filament in a bulb. I realize that those who do not understand the physics will not see the similarity and so was talking to DeWitt and others about Curt’s experiment. I anticipated that for you, it is necessarily to do something with a “filamentâ€.”
Your comment covers what my next one was going to be.
We are probably not going to change Arfur’s mind here but since the discussion has gotten this far, I am have become curious as to what Arfur’s technical background is and whether he should or could know the physics involved here. Also does he have some non technical interest here in maintaining his ignorance of the technical matters.
Arfur could you please give us the details of your technical background and where you might stand on non technical issues that might be relevant to the AGW discussion?
Andrew Fl: Sadly, no one cares.
Lucia: Arfur gets his jolly’s engaging earnest people in his science fantasy. You might choose to put on the BBP’s and quit providing psychological pron to a mental prevert.
lucia (Comment #120980)- Well, alright then. Anyway, I’m having a hard time following the main conversation here, so I’ll be on my way at any rate. Thanks again.
Brandon and Andrew, you are two bright young men who should avoid getting into personalities. I think all that off topic waste of time stuff came from not being specific enough in your main arguments.
PS: This is what old men do. And not so much that younger people listen to them but mainly for their own edification.
Lucia
[“These results are all consistent with the theory that the filament can and does absorb heat emitted by objects with temperature lower than the filament.”]
Just to clarify, you mean absorb thermal radiation from the cooler object for net energy gain, right? Where is that theory written? Just curious.
[“… because in your theory, no heat can transfer from the dryice/peas/wall to the hot fillament [sic].”]
Well, it’s not my theory. I have never referred to it as such. I believe, however, it may actually make sense. I make no claim to it as a theory. Perish the thought.
[“If that is your contention, then your argument fails if we can find any cases where placing an object with a lower temperature than the ‘hot’ object causes the temperature or the hot object to increase.”]
Yes, I would agree that my argument would fail if you could produce real evidence of such cases.
Isn’t this fun? Come on, don’t pretend you’re not having fun…:)
This is fun:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=VnbiVw_1FNs
I will repeat what has been said over and over on this thread: Not net. (And, to repeat again, climate scientist also absolutely, positively do not say CO2 causes net radiation from the sky to the surface of the earth. All claims about CO2 warming the earth involve net heat flowing from hot to cold.)
Now: to explain (math typos may need to be fixed after hitting submit.)
If we are discussing perfect black bodies so emissivity is 1 and reflectivity is 0:
The cooler object emits
Qc = σ Tc4Ac
Qc energy/time.
Tc is the temperature of the cold object
Ac is the area of the cold object.
The amount of Qc that hits and is absorbed by the warm object is
Qc->w = QcFc->w
= σ Tc4AcFc->w.
Fc->w is a called the view factor describing the amount of area of the ‘cold’ object subtended by the warm object. (If the cold object completely enclosed the warm object, the product of {AcFc->w} is equal to the crossectional area of the enclosed warm object. But other possible geometries exist.)
The warmer object also emits energy as a function of its temperature and emissivity. That would be:
Qw = σ Tw4 Aw.
here “w” represents warm.
And the amount of heat amount of heat emitted by the warm object that is absorbed by the cool one is
Qw->c = σ Tw4 AwFw->c.
Now for an simple example: for the purpose of the following assume everything is happening in a vaccuum. (This is merely to be able to focus on the radiation which happens whether or not there is a vaccuum. If we permit convection of conduction the problem becomes more complicated, I need more subscripts and so on, but the equations above continue to describe the radiation portion of the solution.)
Suppose we have a heated filament inside an black sphere (like a black painted bulb casing). The black sphere is then completely enclosed in an evacuated room whose walls are at ‘room’ temperature Troom (say 70F). (We will ignore how the walls are held at that temperature and merely say that we manage to hold them at 70F; it is the case that to stay at this temperature there must be some heat transfer from the walls to something outside the system I have described.). We will heat the filament by applying power at a steady rate: This is P=VI where V is a voltage and I is a current. Then we allow everything to come to a steady state, which is to say temperature no longer vary with time. (Note: this will happen provided P is steady and the walls are kept at 70F.)
On a scale of hottest to coldest: filament will be “warm”. The sphere will be “cold”. The room will be “very_cold”. That is: the temperature of the sphere will be between that of the filament and the room.
When the system is at equilibrium, the net — meaning the difference between heat emitted by the filament and the heat absorbed by the filament from the cooler black sphere is positiv . That is: { Qw– Qc->w} will be positive. {This btw is what the 2nd law of thermo requires. It does not require Qc->w=0, and in fact, this quantity will be positive. This quantity is what is called “back radiation” from the “warm” black sphere to the “hot” filament; its magnitude is not affected by the temperature of the hot filament at all. It depends on the temperature of the blackpainted sphere. }
Now, we can move onto a 2nd example. We can compare two cases:
1) Filament inside black painted sphere inside room with walls at room temperature and
2) Same filament as above but just placed inside the room.
We will find the temperature of the filament is higher in case (1) than in case (2). And this happens because of the “back radiation” represented by Qc->w above. However, in problem (2) “back radiation” will still exist. In this case, it will be back radiation from the room walls held at 70 F. This will be a lower amount of back radiation because the room walls are colder than the black sphere would be in case 1.
So: in my physics net Qw – Qc->w will be positive if the warm body “w” is warmer than the cold body.
This is also very, very similar to the argument for what “back radiation” does in the atmosphere. The net heat is from warm to cold. But back radiation does have an effect– and it is to make the warm object warmer than it would have been had there been no back radiation (or just less back radiation).
Arfur
Whether or not you call your claim a theory or just something you think “makes sense”, it is evident that you advance it as “true”. It is false.
Well…. I don’t need to do that. No one believes your “non-theory” which you advance as “true”. And if you want to tap-dance around suggesting you don’t even really believe it, obviously there is no reason for anyone to disprove something not even you believe is true. If you think what you claim “makes sense” is true, you need to prove it to the world. But whenever I suggest you do an experiment to prove that which you seem to insist we must accept as true, you whine that I’ve suggested you do an experiment.
I am, btw, pretty close to moderating you. 🙂
If a warm body can’t receive energy from a colder body then how does an IR pyrometer measure the temperature of a freezer?
I’ve just checked and my frozen peas are at -18C. 🙂
Arfur said
You seem to be mixing up a few different concepts here. The filament experiences a net energy gain, true, but NOT from the back radiation. The filament has got a constant inflow of energy from the resistive heating of the electric current flowing through it, and a constant NET outflow of radiant energy from its hot surface to its colder surroundings. At steady state, these are equal and the filament’s temperature, or internal energy, stays constant. Note though that the net outflow of radiant energy is the energy radiated from the filament minus the energy radiated TO the filament by its colder surroundings.
Increase the temperature of the colder surroundings and the energy radiated TO the filament increases. There is still net outflow, just a smaller net outflow. Net energy is still going from hot to cold. However, the constant inflow of electrical energy has not changed so the temperature of the filament rises until a new steady state is established. No rules have been broken, no energy has been manufactured out of nowhere, and there has been no net flow of energy from cold to hot.
If we don’t have a constant inflow of electrical energy, e.g. we replace our filament with a red-hot iron bar fresh from a furnace, it still has a NET outflow of radiant energy from its hot surface to its colder surroundings, falling with time as its temperature falls. And this net outflow is still the energy radiated from its hot surface minus the energy radiated TO its hot surface by its colder surroundings. Increase the temperature of the colder surroundings and the energy radiated to the hot iron bar increases, but there is still a net radiant outflow from hot to cold. The temperature of the iron bar doesn’t increase – it simply loses heat less slowly.
If people were claiming that a hot object radiating into vacuum spontaneously increases in temperature when you surround it with cold objects, they’d be wrong and you’d have a point. But a filament is not just a hot object, it’s a hot object with a constant inflow of electrical energy, and that changes the situation considerably.
Kenneth Fritsch:
I agree we should avoid getting into personalities. That’s why I studiously avoided discussing personalities. I always try to do that. I’ll freely discuss what a person writes, but I’ll rarely discuss them as a person. That’s why I said Arfur Bryant’s comment appeared insane but did not discuss him as a person (while other people did).
I don’t agree. lucia suggested getting back to technical points so I’ll revisit what I said:
All the latter part of my comment meant was extremists cause groups/positions/causes/etc to lose support from the less extreme people. That’s how the phrase is used all the time. You can see it in newspapers and hear it on talk shows. It’s published in books and said in political debates.
My argument was simple and clear. Andrew_FL didn’t dispute it. He disputed the meaning of the words I used (and thus misrepresented my argument). Given even a moment with Google shows I used those words in the most common way, I do not believe specificity was an issue. I could be wrong though so I’ll go into a bit more detail.
People like Christopher Monckton can be counted on to oppose the global warming movement. It doesn’t really matter what evidence is found. It doesn’t really matter how popular the movement may become. They won’t waver. They won’t swing back in forth with public opinion. They will always provide consistent support for one side. There’s value in that.
On the other hand, people that far to one side are relatively rare. They make up a small proportion of the people involved. As such, they cannot “win” things on their own. That’s where moderates come in. Moderates make up the majority of people in almost all cases. They are also the only group of people who’s positions are likely to change. That makes them the target audience for most public debate.
The key to gaining support is not to convince these moderates your position is right. The key is to get them to care about your position. The more people recognize and respect a position, the more people will hear about it and consider it. The more people who consider a position, the more who’ll adopt it. In other words, you have to get people’s interest before you can convince them you’re right.*
Rabid supporters get in the way of this. People see their ravings and find them unappealing. Insofar as those supporters are associated with opposition to the global warming movement, people will find that opposition unappealing. That drives them away.
My follow-up to that was to point out there are similar influences on the other side. The net effect is people aren’t driven to either “side” of the global warming debate by extremists. They’re just driven away.
This is actually relevant to the topic of this blog post. The things I said about support for a position are generally true of blog traffic as well. Blogs which cater more to a far end of the climate spectrum (such as Open Mind) tend to get activity across a narrow demographic. Blogs which cater to a more central position (such as Climate Etc.) tend to get activity across a wider demographic.
Anyway, most of what I just said probably makes you go, “Duh.” It’s fairly self-obvious. That’s why I don’t think being more specific would have helped. If I were going to be more specific, I’d be better off delving into details. For example, WUWT’s demographics are interesting. It shows you can create a base that is both large and relatively narrow. It also shows the downsides of doing so (such as limited room for expansion).
Hopefully this serves as a lesson for you. Asking me to be more specific can be very dangerous!
*To be more precise, this isn’t a one-off sort of thing. It’s a continual process. You don’t get their attention once; you get and keep their attention. You don’t convince them you’re right once; you get them to agree with you then get them to maintain that agreement.
lucia and all,
Technically they’re not Sky Drago(o)ns, they’re Sky Dragon Slayers. AGW (or the greenhouse effect itself) is the Sky Dragon.
DeWitt,
They need a “what you should call us” page.
Matt,
[“Increase the temperature of the colder surroundings and the energy radiated TO the filament increases. There is still net outflow, just a smaller net outflow. Net energy is still going from hot to cold. However, the constant inflow of electrical energy has not changed so the temperature of the filament rises until a new steady state is established. No rules have been broken, no energy has been manufactured out of nowhere, and there has been no net flow of energy from cold to hot.”]
**
Thanks for being prepared to discuss this reasonably. I appreciate it and it makes a refreshing change. On first glance, your comment seems reasonable; however I would like you to think on it further please. The filament is the only heat source – agreed? It sends higher energy radiation to the wall which absorbs that radiation and warms. Ok so far? Now if, as you then state, the back-radiated energy from the now slightly warmer wall increases the temperature of the filament (by being absorbed for net energy gain), the now even warmer filament must radiate even higher energy to the wall, which will absorb this energy (being from a warmer heat source) and warm further. This cycle must, logically, continue – according to your (and Lucia’s) understanding. There will be no ‘steady state’. As there will always be a temperature differential between the warmer filament and the cooler wall, there will always be heat flowing to the wall. Therefore, logically, the cycle can have no end unless the filament or the wall ceases to exist.
Matt, the flaw in your argument is that you (and Lucia) believe that the back-radiated radiation from the wall is absorbed for net energy gain by the filament. This cannot be right. It is the ‘broken rule’ – that heat cannot flow from cold to hot The filament molecules are at a higher energy level than the incoming back-radiation. Any incoming lower-energy radiation will not add to the energy level of the filament. Conceptually, think about adding a glass of water at 4C to a glass of water at 6C. (Please note this is NOT analogy, I just want to show you can’t always numerically sum things!) You do not end up with a glass of water at 10C. Unlike the water, the filament neither cools nor warms. The incoming lower (cooler) back-radiated energy has no effect on the filament. The net heat flow will reduce as the wall warms. The filament temperature will NOT increase in response.
Ask yourself this – when the wall heats up significantly, and then the filament heat further (according to you and Lucia) – from where has the filament received this extra energy? Answer – from itself, because it is the only heat source in the system.
So, I would ask, please help me out here by showing me any reputable piece of physics text which shows conclusively that radiation from a cooler object can be <absorbed for net energy gain by a warmer object. Seriously, just one. Please.
Thanks again for your reasonable approach.
Respectfully yours,
Arfur
Lucia,
[“This is also very, very similar to the argument for what “back radiation†does in the atmosphere. The net heat is from warm to cold. But back radiation does have an effect– and it is to make the warm object warmer than it would have been had there been no back radiation (or just less back radiation).”]
No Lucia, back-radiation cannot make the warm object warmer.
[“Well…. I don’t need to do that. No one believes your “non-theory†which you advance as “trueâ€.”]
So your reason for not producing evidence to support ‘your’ theory is that no-one believes my opinion? Nice get-out!
[“I am, btw, pretty close to moderating you. “]
I’m not surprised. Moderating someone because they disagree with something neither you nor anyone else here can actually prove seems to be the sort of behaviour which is manifest in ‘climate science’. But if it makes you happy – crack on. I promise not to lose sleep but you should know that your reason for moderating me diminishes the point of wanting to allow discussion. Ignore me, by all means. It’s your blog. Do what you want.
Maybe you could change the blog banner to read …”where climate talk gets lukewarm”?
Arfur must be trolling, he can’t be that stupid. Can he?
Niels A Nielsen (Comment #121025),
Some wells are far deeper than you might imagine.
Arfur (#121022): “This cycle must, logically, continue – according to your (and Lucia’s) understanding. There will be no ‘steady state’.”
This is a false conclusion. The fact that one can write an infinite series (as you seem to be trying to do) does not mean that the series does not converge to a finite sum. What you’re omitting, in thinking that this runs away to infinity, is that in the interval in which the filament absorbs some thermal radiation from the wall, it has lost far more energy itself by radiation.
You seem to want to consider the process in a time-discrete way. This is fine; one can solve the problem numerically rather than analytically. So let’s think of what happens in a given time interval of delta_t. First effect: ohmic resistance to the current flowing in the filament adds energy to the filament. Second effect: Filament loses energy by (incandescent) radiation; this reduces the energy in the filament. Third effect: Filament gains energy by intercepting some of the (thermal) radiation from the nearby wall. The first term in constant [if we can ignore for the time being, the change in resistance with temperature, which isn’t germane]. The second term is a function of T_filament, following the S-B formula. The third term is a function of T_wall. (And a constant view factor.)
OK, if you have those terms, you can write a short program, or a spreadsheet, to numerically produce a temperature vs. time trajectory for the filament. Run the program once with the view factor set to zero, i.e., no wall. This will establish a baseline temperature for the filament for the current you’ve selected. Now try it with a non-zero view factor, and T_wall fixed– that is, removing the heat which the wall absorbs from the filament by some external device. Try it again with T_wall varying (that is, include the absorption by the wall of a fraction of the filament’s energy).
Arthur
No.
First: My theory is the standard one and in plenty of text books. I don’t need to hunt for the particular application that will somehow convince you Arthur. The reasons I don’t need to do that are (a) I am not your slave and (b) I don’t care if you wish to continue to be misinformed, badly educated and so on. In short: I do not have any obligation or even desire to tutor you or convince you personally.
Second: Plenty of evidence exists for the standard theory. I realize that you are unaware of it, or do not have sufficient technical competence to understand the evidence when you see it. But that doesn’t mean the there is no evidence for the theory. It only means there is no evidence you Arfur accept. And no, I am not ‘required’ to convince you. (I am also not required to convince people who don’t believe corn is a plant that corn is a plant and so on. It would not change the fact that corn is a plant.)
Third: Above, you’ve just told me that even you don’t consider “that which you seem to describe as true” to be any sort of “theory”. So, it seems to me that you may be suggesting that even you don’t believe your theory is true. If, in fact, you don’t even have a competing theory, it rises to the level of lunacy to spend time trying to “disprove” whatever it is you seem to say you don’t even really believe is true is true.
I am moderating you not because you disagree but because:
(a) you persistently misunderstand things. The number of times you have suggested that we are telling you that there is net heat transfer to the filament when we are telling you it is not net is amazing. Your notions of what climate science even says about backscatter is simply befuddled and so on. This much confusion on your part is a useless time sink.
(b) you refuse to do experiments required to test the physical problems you concoct, and whose outcome you “predict”. You also get upset at the thought that after you describe the system and “predict” what must happen and I tell you to do the experiment to see if what you predict happens happens. This is a waste of time for me.
So: until you do some experiments or learn what the standard model for radiation predicts I am not going to explain any more to you. I have other more enjoyable to me things to do. I advise you set up a blog, attract readers and describe what you’ve discovered. If it’s interesting, I can come read what you wrote. Otherwise… not.
Given the most recent exchange, yes. It’s difficult to believe someone can be that stupid. I’m going to moderate Arfur and encourage him to seek knowledge elsewhere.
Lucia #121029,
Today is my birthday, so I now have two reasons to celebrate. One better than the other, of course. 😉
Happy B-Day! I recommend chocolate cake and champagne!
Happy birthday, Steve!
The stupicity burns
Here he is claiming that according to my understanding there will be no steady state. According to my understanding there will be a steady state and I said so here:lucia (Comment #120916) and later here lucia (Comment #121011).
Obviously arguments where Arfur simply saying I claim Y and Y is wrong, when in fact I’ve never claimed Y is ridiculous. HaroldW has note one of the many mistakes in Arfurs reasoning and now explained to him how the sum of an infinte series can be finite. The fact that HaroldW is right eviscerates Arfur’s argument about how the existence of back radiation would mean that steady state would never be achieved (thought I’m sure Arfur doesnot see this.) And in fact HaroldW is completely correct. There are an infinite number infinite series whose sum is finite.
This is a well known fact btw– I’m pretty sure it was known to the ancient Greeks before the birth of Christ. And HaroldW and even given Arfur a tip on how to convince himself empirically using a spread sheet. Will Arfur program the spreadsheet? I bet not. He’ll probably come back and once again tell us all that according to “our” theory, steady state doesn’t occur. But actually, that conclusion is a result of Arfur’s incorrect assumption about how math work– an assumption that I have doubt he will never test by doing any math problems.
HaroldW (Comment #121027)
HaroldW, bless you. That is a hoot.
[“What you’re omitting, in thinking that this runs away to infinity, is that in the interval in which the filament absorbs some thermal radiation from the wall, it has lost far more energy itself by radiation.”]
Lucia and matt have both argued that the filament heats up. Now you are saying that the filament loses far more energy than it absorbs (even if that were true). So the filament cools then in spite of back-radiation?
[“So let’s think of what happens in a given time interval of delta_t. First effect: ohmic resistance to the current flowing in the filament adds energy to the filament. Second effect: Filament loses energy by (incandescent) radiation; this reduces the energy in the filament. Third effect: Filament gains energy by intercepting some of the (thermal) radiation from the nearby wall. The first term in constant [if we can ignore for the time being, the change in resistance with temperature, which isn’t germane]. The second term is a function of T_filament, following the S-B formula. The third term is a function of T_wall. (And a constant view factor.)
OK, if you have those terms, you can write a short program…”]
There is no third effect because it is impossible for the ‘cooler’ radiation from the wall to ‘be intercepted’ for energy gain by the filament. So your model will fail – just like the IPCC models. Because you – like the IPCC – put garbage in.
Arfur wrote:
No. That’s not what HaroldW is saying. This is yet another example of your simply not understanding. The energy filament radiates away will ultimately be the sum a of what is being supplied by electrical power (Voltage* current) and the amount it recieves by back radiation. Harold is saying the former is much larger than the latter but the latter is not zero.
So… that’s nor “not a theory” theory…. sigh.. Oh well… . Ciao.
I once spent a day trying to unravel where the funding comes from for Sciblog. It’s like peeling an onion. Tracked it back to a Canadian PR firm. Can’t remember the name, but it has a stock listing on the Canadian exchange, and it’s stock was dipping.
Cratering would be more accurate. They were on a Hindenburg type crash and burn trajectory, then around Christmas time (2009-10) they were given a half a million cash infusion. And I do mean ‘given’.
It wasn’t like someone had suddenly bought up their stock. It was more like some shadow backer, a foundation perhaps, just squatted and shat SCIBLOG’s dumbie corp. parent some cash.
This was all well before Sciblog’s Pepsi kerfuffel.
Last go at this: Arfur said:
Heh, that takes me back to discussions of Zeno’s paradox! You appear to have been misled by a peculiarity of mathematics, the convergent series, whereby an infinite number of decreasing steps added together sum to a finite total. This can lead to some understandable but erroneous conclusions.
The classic is the race between the hare and tortoise, where the tortoise is given a ten yard head start. The hare is 5x faster than the tortoise, but when the hare has traversed the first 10 yards, the tortoise has moved on 2 yards. When the hare traverses the 2 yards, the tortoise has moved on 0.4 yards. When the hare traverses the 0.4 yards, the tortoise has moved on 0.08 yards… Obviously the sum of increments by which the hare gains on the tortoise has an infinite number of steps, and it’s tempting to conclude that the hare never catches the tortoise. This however is wrong: the fallacy is that you are adding an infinite number of increments of distance but they sum to a finite a result. You can even calculate the distance from the start line where the hare overtakes the tortoise both by summing the convergent series and by the much simpler method of relative velocities, and get the same result.
With the filament, there isn’t a “cycle” or even an “infinite escalator” of upward steps: – introduce surrounding walls and it rises smoothly to a new steady state just as the hare smoothly overtakes the tortoise.
Didn’t I address this before? From the electrical energy constantly being supplied to the filament! If we weren’t talking about radiative transfer, if the filament was losing energy by convection in air and you wrapped it in a blanket, would you accept that it would gain in temperature despite being the “only heat source in the system?”
I cannot, because THAT IS NOT THE SITUATION with a filament – there is no net energy gain from the cooler object! The filament is sending heat away constantly, in all directions, at the same rate that the current is sending energy into it, and it continues to send heat away in all directions when you introduce the walls. NET energy transfer from hot to cold, always and forever. The energy level of the filament DOES increase, but only because the rate of NET energy loss is decreased due to the presence of the walls. It’s analagous to insulation. If you have a hot rock and you wrap it in a blanket, the rock’s temperature won’t increase due to the insulation – it will just lose heat less slowly. If you have a rock that is generating heat within it, say by chemical reaction (e.g. damp plaster that is setting) and you wrap it in a blanket, its temperature WILL increase. The blanket doesn’t add any energy to the system or make heat flow uphill – it just retards the flow of heat downhill.
Sorry to be late to the party here! I had no idea that the thread had veered off in this direction. Carrick linked to the light bulb experiments that I performed last spring and described at WUWT. In those experiments, I focused mainly on the bulb surface temperature.
In doing so, I wanted to run an experimental test of Willis Eschenbach’s “steel greenhouse” thought experiment, which posited that a body with an internal power source would increase in temperature when an radiatively absorptive shell surrounded it. Key slayer sites said of this thought experiment, “What Willis does is so intellectually offensive, so mentally incompetent, that it beggars the imagination.”
This difference of opinion was pretty stark, so I figured experimental evidence could point solidly one way or another. Since I did not have access to a vacuum chamber, I controlled for conductive/convective losses by comparing reflective and absorptive shells to a transparent glass shell.
My key measurement was a thermocouple reading of the temperature of the bulb’s glass surface. I considered this the important measurement, as this was the point of contention in the Steel Greenhouse, and as earth surface temperature is the key metric for the atmospheric greenhouse effect.
Of course, both the reflective (aluminum foil) and absorptive (black-anodized aluminum plate) shells yielded bulb temperatures significantly higher than with the glass shell, even though the shell temperatures were lower than the bulb surface temperature. This was solid experimental evidence in support of Willis’ thought experiment, and for the possibility (at least) of an atmospheric greenhouse effect.
So of course the slayers switched gears and said that my bulb surface measurements were consistent with their theories and what really mattered was the filament temperature (which is what Arfur is still arguing). I thought this rather bizarre, as no one thinks that the earth’s surface is the source of the thermal power, or that the atmospherice greenhouse effect on earth has a noticeable effect on the sun’s surface temperature.
In those experiments, I did a quick current measurement intended to demonstrate that the temperature increases were not a result of increased electrical power input to the bulb. Those measurements showed current slightly less when the bulb surface temperature was higher, at least suggestive of the idea that the filament temperature was higher, but possibly within the margin of error. (If the current measurements were accurate and the voltage unchanged, it would have indicated a filament temperature 3 to 4K higher.)
Carrick asked above if I had done more experiments. The answer is yes, I have. But I have also gotten very busy, and the time to write it up to cover all of the crazy objections from the slayers has eluded me.
I did repeat those key experiments with a clear bulb, and got fundamentally the same results as with the frosted bulb the first time. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, the presence of a radiatively reflective or absorptive shell increases the bulb surface temperature, even though the shell temperature is always less than that of the bulb surface it is “back radiating” towards.
But I also did more careful electrical measurements the second time around. I employed a Variac (variable-ratio transformer) to control the voltage more closely, and used a high-grade voltmeter to monitor the voltage and permit me to tweak the voltage to keep it as constant as possible. I had real-time voltage and current measurements to be able to calculate both power input and filament resistance.
After directly measuring the bulb resistance at room temperature, I operated the bulb at 30, 60, 90, and 120 volts (ACrms), first open to the air, then tightly wrapped with aluminum foil. In each case I recorded the voltage and current measurements.
Then using an equation for the material resistivity of tungsten metal as a function of temperature obtained from the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, I could calculate the filament temperature in each case. The resistivity of tungsten, as for all metals, increases with temperature, and this equation showed a quadratic relationship.
Anyway, in each case, the readings gave the result that the filament temperature was higher for a given supply voltage with the foil reflecting energy back towards the filament than without it.. Typically, the temperature was 10K higher with the “back radiation” than without. The bulb surface was 220K higher!
The kicker is that since the filament resistance increases with temperature, the electrical power input was actually lower in the cases of the back radiation increasing the “source” filament temperature!
Curt, thanks for the lengthy reply.
I am always interested in relatively simple demonstrations of this sort that could be turned into undergraduate physics teaching opportunities.
I’d say you are well on the way to an American Journal of Physics article along these lines, if you were interested.
Carrick, thanks for the encouragement. I hope to cut loose the time soon to write these experiments up better. For AJP, I would need to understand length and format requirements. Lucia can give you my e-mail if you want to contact me directly.
Curt– I don’t know your background. If you are going to write this up, do you need help writing the heat transfer theory portions? Or reviewing them? Generally, you might want a section on that, and if possible one could write a simple model to compare to your data. That might be something one would also want if it were an undergraduate laboratory experiment as it would let people isolate the different bits (conduction, convection and so on).
You did all the real work, but it might be fun to do.