Trying to work out the argument that the additional heat pumped into the atmosphere as a consequence of energy use is insignificant yet an amount of the same order of magnitude that is proposed to be added by some CO2 driven process isn’t insignificant is annoying.
Anyway before looking at that. The simpler way to get the temperature left behind by burning a quantity of fuel required to produce a given amount of CO2 turns out to be.
where
E is the energy density in Joules Per Mol
R is the Gas constant 8.314
C is the CO2 density in ppmv (part per million by volume).
So at 890kj per mol and 30 ppmv we get a temperature 2.14 degrees C
If I take aboard the complaint that I should use a lower figure rather than methane to average out all fossil fuels, so lets say half. And remove the assumption that it all stays in the air by allowing half to end up in the ocean then we end up with a 0.53 degrees C change. But that is too close to be true and anyone would think I fudged it. So at least I will show where the fudge is.
Energy In Energy Out
Anyway on to the larger problem.
One of the complaints I keep getting is that it can not be the residual energy from heat, because the energy from the sun is so large. That seems to me to say that the outgoing energy is proportional to the incoming energy. Put more heat in, get more heat out. Also it should be noted we are not talking residual energy. It is all energy. The thing to keep in mid is that all kinetic energy released by any process winds up as heat. So taking your car as an example, it is not just the waste heat from the radiator. It is also all the energy burned off from braking, wind resistance, the indicators flashing, the headlights – everything ends up as heat.
What I cant understand for the life of me is why the heat that has been released as a consequence of producing energy is swept out of the atmosphere and should not be used in any calculations. Yet heat the client scientists study of the same magnitude doesn’t get swept away, but builds up.
When I went to uni there was “Heat” and “Kinetic Energy” used somewhat interchangeably at times, but apparently there is ‘now Heat” and there is “Global Warming Heat” that although similar have some decidedly different dissipation properties. You don’t count the former and you do the latter.
Anyway looking at the climate argument that the heat out is proportional to the heat in which is another way of saying my heat just gets mixed up with the mass of heat from the sun and is radiated away.
Mathematically that would say
for some constant. As such the residual energy would be per unit time
In the end I don’t like this one, because if we assume the incoming energy is more or less constant and we let it run for a long time,
unless .
How old is the earth by the way…
This tends to either plus or minus infinity unless is so close to one as to be insignificant over the integration time scale. Anything else and you end up with Venus or Mars. One bloody hot, the other bloody cold. Neither much use.
In words if you have an in-balance in the incoming and outgoing energy the system will blow up over time.
So how do you maintain a system such as a habitable planet that has the property that it maintains a reasonable mean temperature given that the balance between incoming and outgoing energy has to be so fine?
You can if you want differentiate the above to see what the relationship between and needs to be. You could try a general rational polynomial solution, but unless that solution was effectively a constant over time, things would get interesting to say the least.
Keep in mind we only have say 30 degrees to play with here. Anything outside an average planetary temperature between 0 and 30 degrees and life is going to have a hard time. In the range of temperatures that we could have, 0 to 30 is essentially dead flat.
The Blocked Kitchen Sink
Well the obvious solution is that you either set up a feedback loop between and so that if one increases so does the other. Or you whack a bloody great heat absorber into the middle of the system to smooth out the ripple. The oceans by the look of things will do the trick for a heat buffer.
If we assume a basic system where and are balanced then what we have is something like a kitchen sink with a partially blocked plug hole. If you adjust the flow in to match the flow out you can then add water or energy depending on which half of the analogy you have in mind, to raise the system to a desirable level where it will remain.
If the flow in or out increases or decreases by even a little, then the sink will overflow or empty over time.
With our walloping great heat sink in there to smooth out variations on either the input or the output, then you have something that pretty well looks like this dirt ball we live on.
OK so what happens when we release energy into our balanced system that normally has no net temperature gain?
This should raise the average temperature.
It would be identical to adding a cup of water to our blocked sink. The level would rise.
Now eventually the heat sink would pick up the excess heat – warming the heat sink and lowering the temperature. But it would not all be magically be swept away.
The analogy is a little coarse in the sense that there should be increased dissipation with higher temperature. Think of heating a metal ball with a blow torch. If you raised the temperature of the flame you would in fact get more heat out, but the ball itself would also heat up until a new equilibrium is found after which heat in and heat out would be equal.
Have heard different views on this which I will coarsely summarize. To do so I will use the rough analogy of a green house. In fact a glass box.
Imagine if you will a glass box in your back yard on a cloudless day. Inside the box we place a candle and two devices to measure temperature and CO2 levels. We won’t light the candle yet. Outside the box we will place an environmental scientist and a physicist.
So we leave it for a while and notice that the temperature in the box rises initially and then comes into thermal equilibrium. The temperature inside the box is certainly higher than outside, but it is no longer changing.
If we light the candle we notice the temperature inside the box rises and the CO2 level rises.
The environmental scientist tells us that the byproducts of the candle are modifying the inside of the box. In a rough sense the CO2 is adding to the properties of the glass so that less energy is transmitted from the box due to the CO2 layer.
The physicist says “that may be so” but the increase in temperature is the same as the thermal energy released by the candle and corresponds to the CO2 produced by the candle so I must conclude that it is the candle heating up the box.
The environmental scientist says nonsense. The heat from the candle is insignificant compared to the total heat coming into the box from the sun. The additional heat from the candle is simply being mixed with the sunlight and being radiated away. Of course less of it is being radiated away because of the extra insulation, but it’s contribution will be proportional to its ratio to the total input energy.
The physicist asks the environmental scientist; “The fact that the temperature rise matches the heat given off by the candle?”
“Coincidence” is the response.
So who is correct?
The physicist is, but why?
The intuitive answer is to wait for night time and notice that most of the candles heat is still inside the box. Apart from the removal of the external source, nothing has changed. If you ran the whole thing at night, the temperature in the box would rise, hit equilibrium and then remain constant.
The environmental guy is correct that there is a lot more energy coming into the box from the sun than the candle produces. But to correctly compare the solar energy entering the box with the energy released by the candle we would have to “replace” the candle with the equivalent solar source required to raise the temperature by the amount of heat released by the candle. The big question mark is that the energy from the sun is not coming in as kinetic energy, whereas the candle is pumping heat directly into the box.
In one dimension we can imagine light coming into one face of the box and out the other side leaving a residual amount of energy behind that balances the cooling of the gas in the box so that we maintain a reasonable 14 degrees C average temperature. Now the energy in and the energy out over time have to be equal, but it doesn’t mean it can’t change form. So if you imagine a photon, hitting an atom, releasing an electron and another photon. The input and output spectra would be different. The output spectra would have a spike at lower frequency than the input spectra, with the difference being the residual kinetic energy of the electron that is still bouncing around the box.
In this case the “heat” in the box is in effect the residual kinetic energy left behind after incoming photons interact with the atmosphere. The atmosphere also loses energy over time so for a single photon entering the box, it would take a while for all the residual kinetic energy to be burned off. In effect we would have to integrate the output spectra over time to match the power of a single input pulse.
Anyway to work out how the candle was effecting the system compared to sunlight, we would need to replace the candle with an equivalent solar source to create the same residual kinetic energy.
Alternatively we could replace the sunlight with an equivalent number of candles to create the same kinetic energy as the sun created.
But I think it is improper to compare apples to oranges.
Making bold claims about the huge wattage of solar energy entering the box compared to the source energy is dangerous. Particularly as not all that solar flux is converted to kinetic energy of the atmosphere. Even more complicated is that there are lots of layers in the atmosphere where all the real action takes place. When you do see figures about the solar flux interacting the atmosphere you really need to ask and how much of that was the troposphere (the warm wet and cuddly bit we live in) and how much energy was lost in the various more exotic layers above us compared to how much of the residual flux was lost in our warm wet layer.
The fact that the atmosphere we live within is not glowing to a large extent suggests to me that not a lot of photons are being released by energetic electrons so I would suspect that absorption is not high and most of the heat is from the ground and oceans rather than direct absorption.
The more I look at this the, less trivial it becomes.
If we wanted our box to match reality we would need to wrap the box in various layers of material, each of different material properties and place our candle in the middle. It could be reasonably modeled using a time domain analysis such as that used in electromagnetism.
And I still have not had an answer of what the process is that has flattened temperature variation through the Holocene. Something has dampened temperature variation and I don’t know what it is. Arrrgh!
Following on from my somewhat tongue in cheek ‘Thoughts of Thor” post below I decided to take this a little more seriously and rework it backwards to see if everything all added up. It appears to. The brief summary is that assuming the validity of the CO2 graphs if you work backwards from the CO2 levels to the amount of heat that should have been added to the atmosphere you get a pretty good match with the observed temperature rise.
The problem is that the causality would seem to be
“Burn Coal”, produce “CO2″ and “Heat”
NOT
“Burn Coal” produce “CO2″ which produces “Heat”.
The problem being is that if you replace “Burn Coal” with anything else you will drop out the “CO2″ bit, but you will still get energy released into the atmosphere.
So yes you will improve air quality, but that is about it.
Anyway you can work it out for yourselves. The math is easy. If the presentation below doesn’t work – it had trouble with equations you can get a PDF here or a Power Point Show here
Old Thor is a dyed in the wool skeptic. Tell him the sky is blue and he will shake his head, look down his prodigious nose and make you wonder whether the sky isn’t blue after all and perhaps you were imagining things.
Well this climate change hysteria had Thor worried. There is something wrong with the arguments, but he just couldn’t figure it out. Once the politicians got involved he was sure something was wrong. Having whole parliaments declare their belief in CO2 driven global warming with the same breath and with the same fervor that they declare their belief in God (if you forgive the profane word) totally tipped him over the edge.
Trouble is he couldn’t come up with a better explanation.
First off it was much worry about the predator prey models for various CO2 absorbing micro organisms, which according to the horned one should adapt to increased CO2 levels by increasing their population size. Thankfully we have no shelf space left or we would be spending the next year or so looking at endless jars of sea water fermenting in a CO2 enriched environment under sunlamps. This wouldn’t be so bad except guess who would end up with the job of counting the plankton when Thor declares the resulting soup “cooked”.
Following this he went off on a Fourier Analysis binge attempting to decompose planetary temperature cycles into periodic terms, but got stumped on the fact that the cycles although obvious would not be integer multiples of some starting frequency. Trying to express a general time series in terms of any non orthogonal set of basis terms is decidedly annoying, even with Gram Schmidt. To find a unique “best” such basis virtually impossible given there is an infinite number of the damned things.
So in the end the whole lot sat on the back burner while Thor started working out whether the strategy of trading shares by flipping a coin to decide whether to long or short rather than thinking would be profitable. Turns out the coin is smarter than most of us by the way as long as it uses a stop loss, which is somewhat humiliating, but that is another story.
An Epiphany.
Anyway Old Thor eventually decided to look at some CO2 vs temperature curves. These he has decided mean that the climate guys are trying to say “That over a 20 year period there has been a roughly linear increase of C02 of 30 ppmv corresponding to an observed temperature rise of 0.5 degrees C in the same period.”
So the initial question he asked was “How much energy per CO2 molecule does that work out to be?”
To do this we first work out how much energy went into the air in general. So if is the change in kinetic energy, and is the change in temperature and is Boltzmann’s constant, we have
Which works out to be
per molecule of air
To work out how much the extra CO2 has contributed we need to work out the total energy and divide it by the average of the extra CO2 over the period. To get the total energy we multiply the above by a million. Seeing as this must have come from the CO2 We need to divide it by the parts per million of CO2 concentration. This is easy thankfully. We know we have an additional 30 parts per million by volume from the graph.
This gives us and amount of additional energy contributed to the air of Joules per molecule of additional CO2.
Despite his age and disconcerting habit of cavorting with mythological beasts, not saying he is off with the faeries half the time mind you, old Thor was converted to the Newtonian heresy long ago and generally agrees that energy is conserved. As such he has no fundamental philosophical issue about the spontaneous creation of energy or spontaneous loss. It simply doesn’t happen. He also likes simple math. So before he starts looking at additional energy absorption or reflection due to variation in atmospheric gas composition he likes to keep it simple and asks how much energy is released from carbon based fuels per molecule when the CO2 enters the atmosphere. In other words how much energy was released when the additional CO2 was released in the first place.
This turns out to be 890 kJ per mole or J per molecule for methane
CH4+2O2 ->CO2 +2H2O + Energy
To summarize, the energy released due to burning is
and energy attributed to CO2
The ratio of energy released from burning to that attributed to CO2 is
Which in the scheme of things and making allowance for the back of a beer coaster math is bloody amazing. In a mathematical sense numbers when dealing with gasses range from the order of to range. Which is huge. Errors are similarly large if you get things wrong, so to obtain even an order of magnitude similarity let alone something like 4 is amazing. Keep in mind stored energy, and radiated energy needs to be factored in which would bring this even closer to unity.
To understand this you need to understand that when you do any work at all energy is released or stored. Stored energy for example occurs if you build a sky scraper and lift things up in the air. Energy is stored as potential energy in all the cement that has been lifted against gravity. When you make a plastic and change the chemical composition you store energy in the chemical bonds that you can release if you burn the item.
But apart from stored energy, all energy consumed must go somewhere and that generally means into the atmosphere as heat.
Think of every light globe, fridge, car radiator etc all pumping out heat.
So Is CO2 The Problem?
Here is where Thor is now sees a problem. You see the relationship is energy release driving temperature and also driving CO2. Think of burning coal, it releases heat and CO2. Its not CO2 driving heat, although some atmospheric absorption changes are possible. Consider though that you replace the coal burner with a nuclear power station. The heat that results from energy will still be pumped into the air although the amount of CO2 will drop.
Due to the closeness of the energy released and apparent gains due to temperature in the calculation above the first thing to look at should be general man made energy. If you want to factor in other terms such as solar energy being stored due to some “greenhouse” effect you still need to account for the general energy release. In simple terms if the temperature rise is not due to general energy release you need to explain where the energy that was released along with that CO2 went.
By the way the “greenhouse” effect bit is why the micro organisms should increase. Apart from the heat in a normal greenhouse, a trick used to increase plant size (tomatoes in particular) is to pump CO2 into a greenhouse which the green things duly scavenge. The natural question is then “Why does additional CO2 in the atmosphere not drive additional photosynthetic micro organism growth?”
So think CO2 as a by product.
In simple terms if the above holds CO2 trading schemes will not work. Even if they drive people to other energy sources, you will still have the problem that the energy released by any source is going to eventually end up as kinetic energy of the air.
Wind, Hydro and Tidal may arguably be exceptions as they act as energy sinks, although this is non trivial. The issue being that the energy in the Wind and Tides has built up over time and harnessing it is simply another way of concentrating energy and releasing it all at once.
In fact thinking about it all energy from Wind, through to Hydro Electric, through Geothermal and Solar all attempt to concentrate energy that has been stored over time and release it. In the case of coal the energy was stored long ago.
Where it gets worse is that no matter how efficient you become the energy requirement per person has a lower bound. That is to say there is an absolute minimum amount of energy used to boil water, move an object, lift the tiles onto a house roof. This is as a function of each individuals technological level and is constrained by physical law not politics. With an exponentially growing population of increasing technological requirements you are not going to be able to stop it.
King Canute couldn’t hold back the tides, perhaps you humans should learn to surf….
Final Words.
Well we don’t have a real conclusion here yet because old Thor still has not satisfied himself about the normal variation in temperature anyway. That weird flat spot called the Holocene still worries him.
It does look like you have your causality all screwed up though. Wouldn’t be the first time.
What can be said on the matter is that you need to focus on the right problem and so I will digress into things you do need to worry about.
As far as his errant milk drinking, beer swilling, dog loving, pork eating, war mongering Anglo Germanic Celtic Nordic etc misfit children are concerned, it is your reproduction rate that keeps him up at night. More specifically the lack thereof. You need 2.1 children per couple just to break even allowing for deaths etc before adulthood. The Caucasian populations are running at about 1.6. If you treated yourselves as an animal species you would be classed as “Near Threatened” across most of your territories and “Threatened” in your major cities. To put this in practical terms it means that each generation your populations are down by a quarter. The immigrant groups in your territories are running in the 3 to 5 children per couple, so their numbers effectively double each generation. This also compounds itself because it means that the probability of you even meeting another Caucasian to have children with also drops each generation.
In simple terms if you are of European descent your children’s children’s children etc won’t be here in a thousand years to worry about climate problems. While no more white guys seems a good idea to some, it also means Western legal principles, styles of government, arts, culture, science and philosophy goes as well. That may not worry you, but is does worry the horned one.
Western governments are funded by Ponzi schemes of immigration where you hope to fund the baby boomer retirement by bringing in immigrants to pay taxes to pay for baby boomers whose tax money has been lost or misspent
Have you thought about who is going to pay for the immigrants retirement? Another wave of immigrants? or do you expect them to pay for their own retirement and yours as well? Using developing world populations to feather your own nest is not a good way to make friends methinks.
Western industries are in melt down. If a war started tomorrow between say you India or China would the West even have the industrial capacity to make the boots uniforms and tanks? Don’t forget it was industrial capacity that won WW1 and WW2, not brilliant tactics. Could you do the same today?
With these issues on the plate at this moment in history climate change is not at the top of the list. Get your long term survival, territorial control and independence in order first. This is a planet where you lot are dying out and every other racial/cultural group with the possible exception of the North East Asians are rapidly expanding and moving into Western lands, legally or illegally. If you don’t reverse or at least hold it constant the outcome is inevitable. Just imagine that you were an animal species. Picture a map with the density of different groups in different regions over time . It is a one way migration into Western lands.
In other words you are stressing yourselves out trying to create a really nice world, for someone else to live in.
Whether you like it or not, its a game of rats in a cage at this moment in history, a game that will only get more intense as populations rise. At this moment in time the West is the group losing territory and reducing in numbers.
When you can guarantee that as a people you will still be here in a thousand years, that you will be dependent on no one other than your selves for your knowledge, your technology, your medicines, your land, your defense, your resources and your food, then you can worry what the weather will be like.
Don’t let the snake oil salesmen distract you from the real issues with smoke and mirrors. They would sell their own mothers if they thought it would elevate their status for a term.
In the West we currently live in a world where more and more of our industrial activity is driven offshore. The United States in particular, once a power house of industrial activity now can barely support the very automotive industry that it created.
Companies continually justify off shoring their manufacturing as being good for the economy. It is worth a thought to see if this is actually true. For that you need to have to be able to answer the question of “What is the value of a company to an economy?”
The more or less abstract view I currently have of an economy is of a pool of circulating tokens called money and counter circulating items called product. In simple terms you exchange money for product. Money moves one way and product moves the other. You could in fact hide the view of one or the other and see either flowing tokens, or flowing value added raw materials. Imagine for a second raw iron coming out of the ground, being shaped into steel, further shaped into components, coming together to form a car and ending up in your driveway.
Without loss of generality we will discuss token flow here – while keeping in mind that we could equivalently look at the flow of value added materials. In this view the value of a company to an economy is its value as a pump of sorts. Money (tokens) flow into a company and then are pumped out to other parties who in turn distribute money to other parties.
With this view in mind, the value of a company can be considered to be the gross amount of money that flows into the company. Forget taxes, forget profits, forget everything except the flow of tokens into the company’s coffers.
These tokens then get distributed to various parties. Shareholders, Suppliers and Government. Here staff are classed as suppliers and retained profits as he company distributing profits to itself as a shareholder. As companies tend to collect taxes for employees the government component will include all taxes, tariffs etc that the company as an entity pays to the government. Denote each of these quantities as; , , respectively.
This allows us to say the gross value of a company is
Where a company does business in several different economies, we can split this up and sum it over each of the N different economies to give
Where the is simply a shorthand way to write “sum up all the terms”.
With that you have a picture of a company being a pump of sorts, that sucks money in and then pushes it out to various parties. The value of a company to a single economy is the amount that is distributed to shareholders, government and suppliers within a single country.
So What Is Happening
The issue we have at the moment is that Western companies are reducing the amount they are paying out to suppliers and government in the economies they are based in so that they can increase the amount being paid to shareholders. The total gross is the same in the sense that the amount of money coming in is unchanged, but how it is distributed does change.
With that concept in mind I have to argue that while the value of a company to shareholders may increase the value of a the company to an economy decreases unless the payments to shareholders within an economy meets or exceeds the lost payments to suppliers and associated tax revenue – which includes income tax paid to employees that is lost to an economy when labor is off shored.
In a sense I am repeating earlier posts where I have argued that in a welfare state where people are protected the government also has to protect the revenue streams that pay for the medicine, pensions, roads, defense of the modern state.
The shortfall is debt as the developed world is finding out in no uncertain terms.
As I have argued before you can not have a welfare state and low cost goods and services. If you wish to have the benefits of a welfare state, you have to accept that product produced within that economy will have a higher tax burden associated with it. Worse you not only have to accept that local products will cost more, but you have to be prepared to pay for them. No money, no welfare as simple as that.
The counter argument does exist that off shoring manufacturing results in companies within other economies spending their wealth within your economy. In a nation like Australia which is resource based that may hold to an extent, although you need to be careful with profits distributed to offshore shareholders and taxes paid by companies based in foreign economies. But with a nation like the United States which has more of an industrial rather than resource profile then this loss of economic value as their industries collapse is a total disaster. For reference General Motors and Chrysler have both gone into bankruptcy in the last couple of weeks.
To get back to the point. The value of a company to an economy is a different kettle of fish entirely to the value of a company to shareholders. While off shoring actions by companies may increase shareholder value, they decrease the value of a company to the economy in which they are based. These companies do have a legitimate argument that they simply can not compete against companies that manufacture in non welfare state economies. This is an issue for government.
We have a couple of choices. We do away with the welfare state to reduce our cost of business to levels that are competitive with the third world. This means reducing social infrastructure to third world levels. or we protect our economies by burdening up third world products with the delta between the welfare state burden they are carrying and the amount we are carrying. In simple terms it means that we penalize economies that do not provide social support for their populations by imposing a burden equivalent to the one they would be carrying if they did. At the moment we are in a reverse protection situation where the social costs we carry ourselves act as a tariff on our own product which tends to protect countries that do not protect their own people.
It might also help stem the flow of economic refugees who are seeking the social benefits of the West that are not provided within their own economies. Why would they want to come to the West if they could get equivalent levels of social support, education, medicine and opportunity in their own lands?
In any case I see no other choices. The West either loses everything it has worked for since Napoleon ended the Holy Roman Empire of the Ostragothi and bought the enlightenment and humanist law to Europe or we impose the values, principles and cost burden of the modern liberal humanist state upon our less burdened competitors.
Old Thor was kicking back waiting for the Lateline Business show to start last night – we think the Horned one has a thing for Ali Moore but daren’t mention it – when a story on coal came up. Unusual for the ancient one, he didn’t fire up into a tirade and then settle into the usual funk. This time he went quiet, wandered off the library and hammered out an email to the ABC only to find he couldn’t send it.
So rather than waste a good letter, here it is in it’s entirety. If you are from the ABC please learn to use use an email address not a data entry form. Blocking spam is one thing, but blocking valid feedback is quite another.
Dear Lateline.
I tuned in last night to your story about clean coal and was dismayed with your question to the coal industry spokesman along the lines of “Do you accept global warming”. It was put across in a manner as if you were asking “Do you believe in God?”.
Can you please be a little more skeptical or at least neutral on the matter. Put yourselves above the politics and have a look at the actual temperature data before asking questions. I assure you most of your “guests” haven’t bothered. In fact a good question to ask global warming proponents and skeptics alike is “Have you looked at the data?” followed by “Can you describe the key features of it?”.
The actual temperature data can be found at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The Yanks can be annoying, but they are really good with public access to things like this.
The temperature profile of this planet over the last half million years from the Vostok Ice Cores is below. (Editors Note: Click on the images for a close up)
The scale is degrees variation from present. Now is at the far right. The annotated picture below shows some key features that anyone who has looked at it should be aware of and anyone who is studying it would be expected to have reasoned explanations for.
Most of the global warming arguments only look at the last few centuries as they attempt to show that temperature change is caused by man. The problem with doing this is that it is a bit like looking at the recent share market and assuming because it is currently down, that it has always been down. The last few centuries is about a millimeter of the data on the far right of the graph. The so called “Hockey Stick” effect that all the caffuffle is manifests itself in the spike in the very last data point.
It may be possible to ignore the periodic patterns, but would require an explanation as to where they went. The periodic cycles are driven by something. For them to stop would require a significant change in whatever that thing was.
Perhaps it may be worth your while to find a mathematician or engineer and ask them how you add up a collection of periodic curves to obtain a “flat spot”. While you are at it ask them how “flat” such a flat spot is really likely to be and what would you expect if you were inside one. Another question for the maths guy when you talk to him is what would you expect to see when such a “flat” spot was ending.
There are also valid questions about whether CO2 levels and temperature are a causal relationship or a temporal one. (One causes the other, or do they both occur at the same time but aren’t causally related)
Anyone who has looked at the actual data should also be aware of the flat spot on the right. They should be aware and can account for the repeating saw toothed pattern and they should be able to state that the mean temperature is about -4 degrees colder than present. If they can’t, then nail them.
The big problem is that you are in an unusual flat spot. It gave you a fairly flat environment within which to develop civilization, but it is long overdue to end. The planet is normally a lot colder, and the normal temperature variations are huge by comparison with anything humans can dream up. Any analysis has to not only factor in proportionally small human effects – but also account for the massive natural effects.
What you are doing is equivalent to measuring the temperature in a room, blaming it on someone leaving the stove turned on while ignoring whether it be summer or winter.
The human response needs to be framed accordingly. In simple terms are you trying to stop a rising tide by marching into the sea and commanding it so? Last time that was tried it failed dismally but was endlessly amusing.
If large scale temperature change is inevitable – and early analysis of the long term trend components suggests it is – then are you perhaps taking the wrong strategy in trying to stop a rising tide, when you should be preparing to ride with it? I would suggest you think about the consequences of making the wrong call. Perhaps you should be moving cities rather than trying to clean up?
In any case, opinions on whether the temperature will go up, down or forever remain the same aside, can you sort out the cheer squad from the players by asking some pointed questions to see if they even have looked at the data? And don’t assume they have just because they have lots of letters after their names. That is like assuming a priest is moral because he wears a collar. Science in a democracy is political – and in this day and age science funding is dependent on having “with application to climate change research” somewhere highly visible on the front of the research submission.
Don’t fall for the argument that “well I didn’t but respected scientist such and such did” or “it’s far too complicated for a simple analogy and requires extensive computer modeling to understand” because that only boils down to ” I didn’t look, I assume that someone else did” or “I don’t understand math but I assume that the person who wrote the software does”. What is that story about “Ass You and Me” ?
By the way how do you spell clusterfuck? Is that two words or one?
In fact if you have a situation where two scientists agree on something and don’t answer a question with “On one hand it could be this and on the other hand it could be that” then you know you have a problem. They are a bit like economists in fact.
Your Sincerely
Thor.
Horned God Of The Anglo Germanic People.
Editors Note: Cough! Ancient old bastard with a silly hat more like it. Cough!
some constant. As such the residual energy would be per unit time
.
and 
needs to be. You could try a general rational polynomial solution, but unless that solution was effectively a constant over time, things would get interesting to say the least.
is the change in kinetic energy, and 
is the change in temperature and 
is Boltzmann’s constant, we have
Joules per molecule of additional CO2.
J per molecule for methane
to 
range. Which is huge. Errors are similarly large if you get things wrong, so to obtain even an order of magnitude similarity let alone something like 4 is amazing. Keep in mind stored energy, and radiated energy needs to be factored in which would bring this even closer to unity.
, 
,
respectively.
of a company is
is simply a shorthand way to write “sum up all the terms”.
