Deltoid

Jo Nova appears to have been responding to comments about her article on the ABC's The Drum blog. On a large and mostly irrelevent comment-chain regarding the greenhouse effect on Venus I found this gem:

"Jo Nova : 05 Mar 2010 7:44:02pm

Yes. And if the sun stopped shining on Venus tomorrow, it would cool, and mainly thanks to CO2. A vacuum stops energy loss quite well (think of a Thermos) but the GHG's emit heat via IR radiation to space. So thanks to CO2, Venus would cool faster than if it had an atmosphere of O2. The irony."

Posted by: Peter Pan | March 6, 2010 5:26 AM

The Met Office has scrapped its seasonal forecasts and it may be time for BOM to do the same.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8551416.stm

Posted by: el gordo | March 6, 2010 5:30 AM

@6: Not before time. They set themselves up for an Epic Fail by issuing them publicly in the way they did. But it's important to note two things:

1: They've only stopped issuing them, not stopped activities in the area (as mentioned in the article). They will continue to develop the tools for generating these forecast products (there continues to be a high demand for them among their stakeholders), so they will presumably bring them back when they get better at it. Although I imagine it'll be a long time before they let their press office use the term 'barbecue summer' again.

2: To remind everyone who seems to have conveniently forgotten (because denialists have this odd habit of doing so), weather is not climate and that goes for seasonal forecasts just as much as short-term forecasts.

Posted by: JamesA | March 6, 2010 8:33 AM

Stop Press!

A prediction of AGW, one I think every climate scientist hoped would never happen, may be coming to pass. A paper in Science states that methane frozen in the Arctic seabed and permafrost is venting into the atmosphere is inceasing quantities. CH4 is a worse greenhouse gas than C02 by a factor >30.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/New-observations-find-underwater-Arctic-Shelf-is-perforated-and-venting-methane.html

Posted by: toby | March 6, 2010 8:52 AM

Here are the 4 questions everyone should always hit the denialists with at every opertunity: The earth is about 33K warmer than its blackbody temperature. This is called the greenhouse effect. True or false. CO2 absorbs in the infrared spectrum, so it can transfer upwelling infrared radiation into thermal energy in the atmosphere, that is to say it is a greenhouse gas. True or false. The level of CO2 has been increasing over the past 200 years, this increase has been measured directly since the late 50s and by other proxies before, these proxies (most especially the ice cores) indicate very strongly that we have the highest levels of CO2 in the past 800 000 years. True or false. There has been a long term increase in temperature over the past 150 years. True or false. The basic physics is our home turf, letting the denialist set the debate with there quibbles and only ever reacting not going on the offensive and seizing the initiative at every opertunity is why we still have a debate.

Answer their quibbles but at every opertunity turn the debate on them.

Posted by: dorlomin | March 6, 2010 5:18 PM

Hey dromloin (#10) : quibble quibble quibble !

1. There still ain't no evidence that the current rate of 'warming' is unusual.
2. There ain't no way to attribute any 'CO2 caused warming signature' to anthropogenic effects alone.
3. There are more important things to worry about.

Posted by: Billy Bob Hall | March 7, 2010 2:16 AM

Shorter Billy Bob Hall:

I see your questions on climate science, but I won't answer them, instead I'll just spew my usual inactivist talking points. Therefore, I'm open-minded. Victory!

* * *

By the way, the cracked/leaked NAS e-mails share one uncanny similarity with the cracked CRU material. Hmm.

Posted by: bi -- IJI | March 7, 2010 5:25 AM

A vacuum stops energy loss quite well...

Ouch! That's priceless!

I missed that - I stopped posting on that thread when I went away for the weekend and haven't bothered looking to see how much crap has been appended while I was away.

Posted by: Lotharsson | March 7, 2010 9:32 AM

@Billy Bob:

1. Seeing as there is no record anywhere of it ever having happened this fast before, I say there is.
2. Who said anything about 'alone'? There are, however, ways of quantifying the relative importance of the forcings and CO2 is the biggest in all the credible sources I've seen.
3. Sez you.

Posted by: JamesA | March 7, 2010 2:36 PM

That's me and I stand by it, but don't fear, the wuwt crew will just ignore me.

Posted by: el gordo | March 7, 2010 4:16 PM

el gordo: Seems you don't have to worry. Realclimate's post on the topic is very anti-alarmist, I think you'll find.

For methane to be a game-changer in the future of Earth’s climate, it would have to degas to the atmosphere catastrophically, on a time scale that is faster than the decadal lifetime of methane in the air. So far no one has seen or proposed a mechanism to make that happen.

Posted by: JamesA | March 7, 2010 6:23 PM

I can't prove the posts were actually made by her of course but going by some of the other posts under her name it certainly seems likely.

Presumably on her blog she can just do a sneaky edit if she makes such an obvious gaffe.

That's precisely why I was willing to spend time telling people to "follow the evidence", as she helpfully wrote in her post, on that post rather than spending time at her website. It's a lot harder to bamboozle the rubes when you don't have editorial control and people keep posting inconvenient evidence and logic.

Posted by: Lotharsson | March 7, 2010 6:50 PM

Yes. And if the sun stopped shining on Venus tomorrow, it would cool, and mainly thanks to CO2. A vacuum stops energy loss quite well (think of a Thermos) but the GHG's emit heat via IR radiation to space. So thanks to CO2, Venus would cool faster than if it had an atmosphere of O2. The irony."

After five attempts to draft a response to this piece of mind-numbing stupidity from Jo Nova, I gave up. Now my head just hurts.

I guess that explains why the moon doesn't lose heat and justs gets hotter and hotter?

I wonder why physicists bother with IR+ telescopes? Any excuse to con funders and leach for grants.

Posted by: jakerman | March 7, 2010 7:50 PM

Spencer post and a thousand climate widgets are sent to the widget bin, until the next La Nina.

Posted by: jakerman | March 7, 2010 8:08 PM

Roy acknowledged that 'the warm January 2010 anomaly IS consistent with AMSR-E sea surface temperatures from NASA’s Aqua satellite.'

Posted by: el gordo | March 7, 2010 10:06 PM

Steve Goddard has pulled some of the usual stuff at WUWT to try and make light of the methane issues and to discredit a scientist.:

He highlights what is obviously an erroneous report in the NY Times which quotes :

Dr. Shakhova said that undersea methane ordinarily undergoes oxidation as it rises to the surface, where it is released as carbon dioxide. But because water over the shelf is at most about 50 meters deep, she said, the gas bubbles to the surface there as methane. As a result, she said, atmospheric levels of methane over the Arctic are 1.85 parts per million, almost three times as high as the global average of 0.6 or 0.7 parts per million.

In another release which is clearly more scientifically based and easily googled, Shakhova is quoted:

Shakhova notes that the Earth's geological record indicates that atmospheric methane concentrations have varied between about .3 to .4 parts per million during cold periods to .6 to .7 parts per million during warm periods. Current average methane concentrations in the Arctic average about 1.85 parts per million, the highest in 400,000 years, she said. Concentrations above the East Siberian Arctic Shelf are even higher.

Another story linked by Goddard also makes the correct reference to historical geological levels:

Geological records indicate that atmospheric methane concentrations have varied between about .3 to .4 parts per million during cold periods to .6 to .7 parts per million during warm periods.

But the "funny" thing Goddard does is grab a very small part of the global methane time series which leads people to suspect there's no trend.

A longer time series tells a different story.

Why would he do that?

And then Goddard does what all water-muddiers do: provides a host of irrelevant statistics that are meant to distract from the issue, including this:

She estimated that annual methane emissions from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf total about seven teragrams. (A teragram is 1.1 million tons.)

Sounds like a big number – except that burping/flatulating cattle produce ten times more methane than the Arctic. According to the EPA:

Globally, ruminant livestock produce about 80 million metric tons of methane annually.

So what? Something that is already of great concern is being added to by something else of great concern!

Was it really that relevant to this:

These findings were further confirmed when Shakhova and her colleagues sampled methane levels at higher elevations. Methane levels throughout the Arctic are usually 8 to 10 percent higher than the global baseline. When they flew over the shelf, they found methane at levels another 5 to 10 percent higher than the already elevated Arctic levels.

Posted by: BlueGreen | March 7, 2010 10:39 PM

Forgot to provide a link to the WUWT post.

Posted by: BlueGreen | March 7, 2010 10:50 PM

It's probably just a blip, but the Arctic sea ice is behaving badly.

http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icecover.uk.php

Posted by: el gordo | March 7, 2010 11:48 PM

Yes. And if the sun stopped shining on Venus tomorrow, it would cool, and mainly thanks to CO2. A vacuum stops energy loss quite well (think of a Thermos) but the GHG's emit heat via IR radiation to space. So thanks to CO2, Venus would cool faster than if it had an atmosphere of O2. The irony."

I too sat, eyes agog, staring at the Jo 'Nova' interpretation of physics. I wasn't sure that this wasn't actually a parody, but apparently she is serious. "The irony" was not ironic...

So, what do we have - New Physics? New New Physics? Nova Physics?!

Whatever it is, it explains why the sun is so hot - being surrounded by the vacuum of space, and having no greenhouse gas atmopshere, the poor star has no way of shedding its heat...

Who'd 'a' thunk it?

Quite frankly, this exquisite example of scientific illiteracy on the part of 'Nova' should instantly disqualify her from commenting on anything scientific. It's such an egregious scientific faux pas that even a science 'communicator' should flinch with embarrassment and consider a career in night-soil collection instead - at least there is a justification for the spreading of shit in the latter...

Posted by: Bernard J. | March 8, 2010 12:35 AM

Another boringly predictable editorial from The Australian. Apparently time scale doesn't matter when discussing sea level rise. Ho hum.

Posted by: foram | March 8, 2010 2:13 AM

Elsewhere in The Australian, Andrew Trounson acknowledges the War on Science, sort of:

THE head of the peak university body has denounced "tabloid" attacks on climate scientists and called on researchers to better communicate with the public.

Addressing the National Press Club in Canberra, Universities Australia chairman Peter Coaldrake said scientific researchers were always vulnerable to attack when identifying "uncomfortable" trends such as climate change.

but of course:

The release of hacked emails from the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit fuelled allegations that data was being manipulated to support the theory of man-made global warming. The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has also been embarrassed by mistakes in its 2007 report on climate change.

well if you repeat it often enough it must be true, but anyway:

Professor Coaldrake said the resulting debate had amounted to little more than a "tabloid-style decimation of science".

What? Where? Who? Not The Australian of course.

Posted by: foram | March 8, 2010 2:45 AM

That thread on The Drum is a train wreck of Denialist ignorance.

There is too much to summarise succintly in one post, but several gems merit repeating...

According to Eddy Aruda (05 Mar 2010 11:05:02am):

The Earth has never had life before the advent of an oxygen enriched atmosphere.

Oh, really?!

Or this at 05 Mar 2010 11:11:23am:

The reason CO2 causes warming on Venus is because the atmosphere has so much more weight and therefore pressure. It is the pressure, not the fact that it is CO2 that causes the heat.

Eddy Aruda has obviously never dived, or he'd know what happens when one fills a SCUBA tank, and what happens afterward... Graeme Bird actually uses (incorrectly) that example, but the underlying physics seems to escape him too!

Eddy continues (05 Mar 2010 7:34:37am):

The reason Venus is so much warmer is because the atmosphere is over 90 times more dense as [sic] Earth's atmosphere. It is the pressure created by the atmosphere that causes the hear [sic], not the CO2.

For a moment I thought Eddy might be getting it, but he rapidly assures one and all of his cluelessness.

RayS valiantly tries to educate Aruda, Bird, and other scientific giants on the thread by pointing out that there is a difference between pressure and compression, but he is forlornly fighting the increasing gradient of Stupid that exists between their monitors and the centres of said individuals' brains.

Evidence that Stupid itself has pressure?!

Jo Nova makes regular and (for anyone with a clue) embarrassing comments, inluding (oh, the irony!):

I loved that Science Communication course, except that like most science courses in Australia it doesn't teach logic and reason, and that's a travesty.

[04 Mar 2010 10:32:39pm]

Soon afterward the thread rapidly decends into the vapidity of extreme ignorance, with Lotharsson, RayS and jakerman heading several others in trying to keep Teh Stupid from escaping and thence engulfing the planet.

I have wondered how 'Nova' managed to get away with spouting as much scientific tripe as she does. Seeing the bottomless pool of ignorance that infects the Australian public, as exemplified on The Drum, I have my answer...

Posted by: Bernard J. | March 8, 2010 5:45 AM

Jeff & Bernard, on The Drum (and not only on the Nova thread but the previous 8 days on climate change), there are also endless calls for "empirical evidence" from several commenters. It's apparently the only tactic some of them have for debate.

When some is posted they generally don't understand that it is empirical evidence, or they dismiss it because it is deemed up front to be fraudulent or biased or something, or they don't like that it's coming from (say) skepticalscience or RealClimate or Deltoid...

It was sadly amusing to see Nova at The Drum state exhort following the evidence (which I applaud), and then have a whole bunch of people (including Nova when pressed) not do so.

And it was interesting that Nova (and/or someone pretending to be here) brought out the ad homs (which she had said should not be used) and tone trolling when I pushed back on some of her ... less well supported assertions - including failing to bow down to the wisdom of Spencer, and pointing out reasons why others might be ignoring his work. I didn't notice any concerns expressed over the tone of commenters calling for scientists to be prosecuted for crimes against humanity and the like.

If you've nothing better to do it's worth visiting the "missing hotspot" post to check out the misdirection - she snips the bottom one out of a larger figure that doesn't support her point as well when shown in entirety, places it against the top one which uses a different colour scale - and then asks her audience to eyeball them to verify for themselves no hotspot - never mind statistical analysis in the original report. Mendacious or clueless? I report, you decide ;-)

Posted by: Lotharsson | March 8, 2010 7:01 AM

Since this is an open thread, I've been practically dying to have a conversation somewhere on an idea I've had. I don't know if anyone's had this idea before (goodness knows someone probably has), but has anyone pondered getting rid of genetic disorders by simply making eggs and sperm that carry alleles for them unviable?

Posted by: Katharine | March 8, 2010 10:14 AM

Nice one Jeff, it's obvious you have been to the Science Communication Course.

Of course el gordo is writing from his chair in the school of assertion without evidence.

Posted by: jakerman | March 8, 2010 4:00 PM