Dear rstuart,

Thanks for doing the homework. It is a little clearer and I think we are getting closer to a more complete answer. I'm still puzzled by the idea of a cold layer existing between two warmer ones.

I started thinking along the lines of the following.

In a steady system such as a body of water the warmer layer is on the top and it is cooler on the bottom. We have been conditioned to think of our atmosphere the other way but 1200C at the outer stratosphere says otherwise. Without the greenhouse effect the ground would be far colder and gases, including water vapour, heated by sunshine would make their way right through the atmosphere.

In a pot on the stove the heat applied on the bottom rises to the top to be replaced by colder water which in turn heats up. But if a barrier to that heat rising was in place the lower section would heat up considerably and there would be a cold section above the barrier grading to higher temps closer to the surface. As you point out “the stratosphere doesn't mix (much) vertically so the upper layers heat up and because hot air rises they stay up the top.”. Not only that the UV from the sun heats the stratosphere's ozone in a uniform manner increasing the temp.

So I thought because our sun is capable of warming the 'bottom of the pot' without warming the contents on the way through and we have a barrier in our green house gases that reflect the vast proportion of that rising heat into the lower atmosphere rather than out, thus driving a circulating heat engine.

However I'm wrong, at least in part. I can't escape the fact that the temperature of a rising parcel of air decreases with height in the troposphere regardless of whether it carries water, although the presence of water vapour does slow the temperature drop because of the release of latent heat.

So the answer seems to lie in the 'lapse rates'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapse_rate#Environmental_lapse_rate

My next port of call.

Touche'

Dear Examinator,

I too am struggling a little with the chemistry, especially in David's primary field, seawater CO2 chemistry.

While more than happy to go with the problems caused by atmospheric carbon the seawater stuff is the area of climate change predictions I have the greatest issue with. I have just sat through Lecture 19 and still fail to see how adding 2.5GTons of carbon annually to an ocean presently containing 38,000GTons is going to have a discernible impact on its acidity. Perhaps he will explain it more fully later.

Dear UOG,

For reasons already stated I am going to let the bulk of your post pass but you did ask;

“it strikes me that the error in modeling..comes about by excluding night/time temp drop...we have no doudt watched their models..where the earth gets redder and redder..but the reality is..it gets red in the day...and not red at all..in the night..but not in their models”

In the spirit of the thread if you wanted to provide a link to the model you are referring to I am willing to take a look.

Rather than wade through all the technical information, may I respectfully suggest you ALL google 'Professor Bob Carter' then find and WATCH '7 torpedoes' both informative and funny. He will explain the 'scam' perpetrated by political entities and inform you all of facts I'll bet you didn't know. A real eye opener. Do it for yourself and everyone else who thinks the world is heating up with human contributed CO2.

Csteel,

I think the latency of the heat is the answer to night time cooling.
As I understand it(?), more heat is added that than escapes at night.
I think of it like a heater in a thermos flask once the water is hotter the clouds atmosphere slow the cooling untill the next bout of heating.
The differential is is positive but marginally so. thus we have as an average a small increase in over all temperatures.
At least that's, sort of how, it was explained to me.

The graphs are in lecture 20/ 23 I think (ok, I cheated, I got to about 9 then jumped to the end, now I'm filling in the blanks) naughty corner?

While doing measurements in the bay, as a volunteer, I was told the issue of water chemistry i.e. PH, was an incremental thing, again part of the process and topping up. The 2.5 Gt refers to the Carbon taken out (naturally) sequestered.

NB there is a difference between CO2 saturation and sequestered C.
4 to 1 (?). the additional unprocessed CO2= PH change. Hence the long time lag (I think)

_________________________

Pepper,

Bob Carter is a geologist, and his book has been roundly panned, as he is out of his field and like Plimer, his relevant science is wobbly.
Keep in mind, Geologists work in time spans of eras, eons etc not centuries.
Ask a geologist to give you a century either way on anything and he'll rightly tap dance.

As I pointed out earlier, on the 15/12/09 alone there were 20 relevant papers released pertaining to fields involved in AGW . I can assume there would be a mass of Geology too so it is reasonable to conclude that he isn't a full book on all the science involved. Apart from which, he is a lecturer in geology therefore he's busy enough with his own field.

I distrust all mega or multi discipline conspiracy theories, they lack credibility. The system is far too robust.

csteele: "So I thought because our sun is capable of warming the 'bottom of the pot'"

Since I was wrong initially I didn't make a guess. But they were my thoughts too. The troposphere is stired by the land heating it from the bottom, whereas the stratosphere is heated from the top and is stable.

Given that is the case you end up with a situation where the top and the bottom are both hot, and the middle colder. There has to be a boundary, and it is the tropopause.

csteele: "I can't escape the fact that the temperature of a rising parcel of air decreases with height"

Yes you can. Because if it keeps rising it will hit the stratosphere, and it is hotter than the parcel. At that point it stops rising because the air above is lighter than the parcel.

examinator: "corresponding gradient drop in CO2 for the first 1000 years, of perhaps a 25% from the peak. Then a steady, but slower reduction for the reminder of the 500k years"

He doesn't say. But I will make a guess. By definition CO2 enters the ocean at the surface only. The limestone (calcium carbonate) being a rock, lies on the bottom of the ocean. Those two have to come into contact before the reaction can proceed. The thing that brings them into contact is the deep ocean currents which have a cycle time of 2 thousand years.

csteele: "fail to see how adding 2.5GTons of carbon annually to an ocean presently containing 38,000GTons is going to have a discernible impact on its acidity"

Again he doesn't say. But from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_cycle#In_the_ocean

"Since this ion is three steps removed from atmospheric CO2, the level of inorganic carbon storage in the ocean does not have a proportion of unity to the atmospheric partial pressure of CO2. The factor for the ocean is about ten: that is, for a 10% increase in atmospheric CO2, oceanic storage (in equilibrium) increases by about 1%"