UOG “establish the mechanism, the structure, and above all the funding for a world government.”
Ah Lord Monckton is someone else who sees the UN and the machinations of AGW and ETS and all the other bunkum for what it is

a smokescreen for what I have repeatedly referred to as

“Socialism by Stealth”

Now doubtless, our own pseudo-scientist and “emeritus wannabe”, Q&A, will try and lay scorn on my observation and claim only scientists are allowed to comment on Global warming and the rest of us, who have real jobs and work to pay for the holy elites of academia to regale themselves in floppy velvet hats should shut up.

Just another tactic of the left.. seek to silence the opposing view

Typical of the collectivists.. demanding, through their entryism of the environmentalist movement that they have their way

Their “way” despite the proven failure which lead to the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and the transition of China from the poverty of a collectivist oligarchy to the economic recovery which ensues from becoming a quasi-capitalist state (I said “transition” because China still has a long way to go along its journey of change).

AGW is a left wing hoax

The world has warmed and cooled cyclically for millions of years

Nothing humans can do will either stop or encourage it…

certainly not the ranting hysterice of a bunch of bodgey scientific theorists, driven to promote their perverted political values and egos.

It might have been a vain hope on an opinion site such as this but I thought a conversation might have been had on the science of global warming forecasting as presented by Mr Archer.

I had made this clear in my original post and reinforced it subsequently.

I felt it presented an opportunity to advance mine and others knowledge of global warming without the clouds of controversy and vitriol obscuring that learning.

I certainly had no objection to robust debate on GW occuring elsewhere within the OLO forum and have on occassions availed myself of those opportunities. The hope was that an admittedly layman's discussion of Mr Archer's lectures might have informed that debate a little further.

I suppose the fact that posters seem unable to help themselves even on a thread such as this speaks of the intensity of the discourse but also, I would have thought, a little about people's manners.

csteele: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Atmospheric_Transmission.png

Until this lecture series came along that diagram summed up my entire knowledge of how CO2 effected the atmosphere. It makes the blanket analogy obvious. I personally find the physics EnergyIn==EneryOut equations in the lecture series easier accept. I feel much more comfortable with maths and physics deriving the situation from first principles and with relatively few assumptions than I do diagrams where the underlying assumptions may not be obvious.

csteele: "In Lecture 9 David talks about the water vapour in the air ..."

I have now viewed that lecture 3 times, looking for answers to some of my questions. I don't think they are there.

Q&A's explanation was somewhat beyond me, but I think it gave me a starting point for further investigation. I summarise what Q&A said in my own words, in the hopes that if I have it wrong someone will shoot it down:

- The principle cause of water's GHG effect in the atmosphere is from the vapour, not the clouds. (That at least answers one of my questions).

- The place that takes effect is the upper troposphere. There is a section above the Cirrus cloud layer contains water vapour. The existence of this section was news. This section is where the action occurs. It makes some sense, because we have to drag the Earth's apparent surface temperature to -20 or so to get the energy budget in balance. The layer we are talking about is the coldest, so GHG's in there would have the biggest effect.

So far Q&A has eliminated one major complication - the clouds. You might recall clouds were very complex. Their hight, the droplet size, the conditions they formed at all were impossible to calculate from first principles. Worse, their effects highly variable. They could cause cooling or warming and by a large amount. And now Q&A tells us their effects are minor. Maybe they cancel each other out? I don't know. I just hope he is right because would makes the model understandable.

(cont'd...)

(...cont'd)

But then he goes further and says:

- The amount of water vapour in the upper atmosphere is not highly complex like the clouds, but in fact can be predicted by fluid dynamics. There are big words there, so I will try to put it in terms you already know about. Recall how the entire atmosphere was replaced in the first lecture by a pane of glass? It wasn't a perfect model of the atmosphere, but it got close. The beauty of the pane of glass is compared to the atmosphere with its temperature variations, parcels of air moving about, water condensing in and out and god knows what else is the pane is dammed simple. A couple of small physics equations described the entire thing. Even so, it got to within a few degrees of the real answer. While the equations describing fluid dynamics aren't near as simple as that pane of glass, they are still just equations and compared to the effort of predicting what happens with the clouds they border on trivial. Yet, even so, Q&A says they get to within 5% of the correct answer!

Despite all that, Q&A's answer still leaves questions open for me. Like what is the nature of the negative feed back loop here. He gave hints about it being the temperature of the upper troposphere, and that makes sense. If it increased, it would shut down the warming (because again it is the coldest GHG's that have the most effect). And besides, as I said Q&A's wonderful response is a little beyond me - I need a David Archer like dumbing down before I can understand it fully. Fortunately, the lecture titles from Q&A's first link give hope they might do just that, so they will be my next port of call.

(cont'd...)

(...cont'd)

As for the ongoing discussion here about whether the climate science consensus is "valid science" or indeed the best model we have. The first point is the whole point of physics is to build models of how the world works. Even f=ma (force = mass x acceleration) is just a mathematical of our world. We gained confidence in it centuries ago not because it is sounded better than "Jesus did it" or whatever, but simply because every time we looked at what happened, it was always true. We lost confidence in it when observations showed Einstein's relativistic equivalents were a better fit. All physics is in some sense just a model of reality. And what is more we know all of it is in absolute terms wrong, and will remain so until we join somehow square Quantum Mechanics with General Relativity. Wrong or not, it is clearly the best model of reality we have now. And that same criterion, ie "the best model of reality we have now" is all that we can ask of climate science. To criticise it as some have (but not here) because it is just a model is absurd.

(cont'd...)

(...cont'd)

But it is being attacked as not being the "best". Well, in one of his latter lectures David Archer said something came pretty close to sealing that they are the best for me. He said the current models have been run over the last 800k(?) years, where the major forcing was not CO2 but rather changes in the Earth's elliptical orbit around the sun. Thus the sunlight hitting the Earth was the trigger. The models predict temperature, CO2, other GHG levels and what not from there until the present. He said they are are pretty accurate - showing for example the CO2 levels trailing the temperature rise. Unless the critics can come up with some other model that does a better job than the current ones at doing this, I don't see how they can claim they have a better model for the climate. Until they do, such a claim makes no sense. Even the claim that the current models "lack predictive power" looks pretty weak if what David Archer said is true.

That is the one weakness in what David Archer said however. He just said it. He didn't give citations, did not show graphs with sources, or indeed provide any other assurance what he said was correct. They only think I have is during his 16 hours of speaking, he managed to convince me he was presenting the state of play as fairly as he could. So looking up those models is another port of call to me. Some links from our more knowledgeable mates here would be real helpful.