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Discussing The Second Climate Science Masterclass · UK Column Radio

• 0:18
  Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to the UK column. Tonight, we are
• 0:21
  joined by David Siegel, who has been on the program before,
• 0:26
  of course, and since the last time David was on
• 0:29
  the program, we have run a climate course which lasted
• 0:32
  twelve weeks, and two of the participants of that course
• 0:35
  where Joe Walton and Liz Avramedes. Welcome to the program.
• 0:39
  All and well. First of all, David, maybe we could
• 0:44
  start with you and how was the course for you.
• 0:47
  This was the first time you've attempted to run this
• 0:50
  type of course and you had a very diverse audience.
• 0:55
  Speaker 2: So how did it How did it go from your
• 0:57
  point of view?
• 1:00
  Speaker 3: There are actually three students here because you showed up
• 1:02
  for most of the classes, that's true, and you attempted
• 1:07
  to make sense of all this stuff. So that's that's
• 1:09
  a big effort for a busy guy. And I think
• 1:13
  we had about fifty five students, almost all from the UK,
• 1:17
  although some from Canada and some from one from Costa Rica,
• 1:22
  and I think one or two in the United States.
• 1:25
  And I you know, it's it's it's a pretty complex topic.
• 1:30
  It's I think the one thing everybody learned was that
• 1:32
  it's more complex than you think. Much more, and there
• 1:35
  are many, many levels, and there's as much as deep
• 1:40
  as you want to go. And I think most people
• 1:42
  in the class wanted kind of the first couple of inches,
• 1:46
  but not the next one hundred feet which I presented,
• 1:52
  and it's a lot of physics. So one of the
• 1:54
  interesting things that came out of the class, and I'm
• 1:56
  interested to hear from the other students, is that it
• 1:59
  was just interesting overall because you learned a bunch of
• 2:01
  physics and a bit of chemistry. Although I'm not as
• 2:05
  I'm not as up on my chemistry, but we learned
• 2:08
  a lot of physics and a lot of kind of
• 2:09
  interesting stuff along the way. So it wasn't just climate,
• 2:14
  and we didn't really focus on the politics. We focused
• 2:17
  on the science. That's what a lot of people are missing.
• 2:22
  And so I invited a couple of students. They're kind
• 2:25
  of ringers. They they got it, they spent time on it.
• 2:28
  They they dove down the rabbit hole with us, And
• 2:32
  so I wanted to ask you, guys, you know, how
• 2:35
  did you see it between kind of interesting physics or
• 2:39
  interesting science versus really learning about the climate, versus you're
• 2:46
  there because you want to be armed with facts and arguments,
• 2:49
  so you can tell other people who don't believe you
• 2:52
  know this, who who believe otherwise. So, Liz, how would
• 2:57
  you summarize it?
• 2:59
  Speaker 4: Well, I would say it was learning about science. I
• 3:01
  had no idea how complex it all was and how
• 3:05
  necessary it was to understand the physics in order to
• 3:08
  really get form any sort of opinion. I think as
• 3:13
  a chemist, I found that I thought I understood at
• 3:17
  least some of the basic principles of climate change, and
• 3:19
  then I realized in the end that I understood very little,
• 3:23
  that it's vastly more complex, and that it requires a
• 3:27
  lot of studying in order to get to the bottom.
• 3:33
  Speaker 3: Anybody got to the bottom ever, well, indeed, probably not.
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: But as I got the impression from the course that
• 3:40
  you had a bit of a head start on the
• 3:42
  rest of us because of your chemistry background. How necessary
• 3:47
  do you think it is to have some kind of
• 3:49
  scientific background if going to get grips with this stuff.
• 3:53
  Speaker 4: I think it helps enormously, but I don't think that
• 3:57
  should be a deterrent. My particular take on it put
• 4:02
  me in a good position to understand the radiative series
• 4:06
  on the radiative model of climate change and therefore to
• 4:10
  understand that that isn't really as custom rit as I'd
• 4:14
  been led to believe.
• 4:16
  Speaker 3: So that helped me.
• 4:18
  Speaker 4: But I think everybody can get something out of it,
• 4:21
  as long as they're prepared to put a bit of
• 4:23
  effet into it.
• 4:25
  Speaker 3: I think there were three levels, Mike. The people were
• 4:27
  just completely overwhelmed, who watched the videos several times and
• 4:33
  kind of retained almost nothing just because they probably shouldn't
• 4:37
  have been in the class. They're nice people, interested, but
• 4:39
  it was just too deep for them. Then there were
• 4:42
  the science people. I was probably another third, and they
• 4:44
  were pretty interested and like they got something out of
• 4:48
  every class and had good conversations. And then there are
• 4:51
  kind of people in the middle who who were interested
• 4:55
  for sure, spent a bunch of time, got overwhelmed a lot.
• 5:00
  But still what they've told me is that it really
• 5:03
  increased their confidence in being able to talk with other
• 5:06
  people about They don't remember ninety nine percent of the content,
• 5:10
  but it increased their confidence in being able to talk
• 5:13
  to people who were saying things that were obviously nonsense. Joe,
• 5:16
  what do you how would you?
• 5:18
  Speaker 2: So? Yeah?
• 5:19
  Speaker 5: For me, I came in with a non science background,
• 5:22
  but I read a lot of stuff and feel like
• 5:25
  I can if I study, I can get there. So
• 5:27
  sometimes halfway through a class I'll just play I just
• 5:30
  need to check what that actually is, because I don't
• 5:32
  know what it is. But if you just do those
• 5:34
  little adjustments, I don't think it was too bad. I
• 5:38
  think it was well paced because you started off with
• 5:40
  a nice big picture, you know, the four point six
• 5:43
  billion years, and immediately the scale's taken right out, so
• 5:47
  that that's a great starting point because I think a
• 5:50
  lot of the time people who read the news a're
• 5:52
  very focused on the kind of what's happening now. It's
• 5:54
  really hot now, you know. But yeah, great to starff
• 5:58
  with that kind of looking at things in a big
• 6:00
  scale and then looking at the universe the celestial mechanic
• 6:04
  side of it. I thought it was really interesting. Like
• 6:06
  I said, the physics, and yeah, I think every every
• 6:10
  week i'd sort of feel like I am sort of
• 6:12
  getting there now, and then we'd kind of reset with
• 6:15
  the next episode because it's like there's a huge other
• 6:17
  piece that you have to know to you know, figure
• 6:21
  out the puzzle. So for me, the the water and
• 6:24
  the air movements were tougher to get my head around
• 6:27
  I felt I got a really good understanding of the
• 6:30
  greenhouse effect and more of the physics type stuff, the
• 6:34
  radiative models and things like that, as I probably need
• 6:38
  to study again more the El Nino's in the oceans
• 6:41
  and the air currents, which I'll probably enjoy from doing
• 6:43
  the course again.
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: I can I ask you both how much how much
• 6:47
  time outside of the course did you put into it?
• 6:50
  Speaker 2: While you were while the course was running.
• 6:53
  Speaker 5: I was reading and watching mainly. I did read a
• 6:56
  bit of the book, but it was quite dense, So yeah,
• 7:00
  I think I could. I started reading the book that one. Yeah,
• 7:05
  but I think I probably would need some more scientific
• 7:08
  and statistical study to to kind of read that more fluidly.
• 7:12
  But I was spending a few hours every week watching
• 7:15
  videos and like Tom Nelson's podcast is a great center,
• 7:18
  and we were sharing a lot of material on the
• 7:21
  on the community and I enjoyed that as well. So,
• 7:24
  you know, i'd just be at work at lunchtime, I'm
• 7:25
  just kind of instead of reading the news, I'd be
• 7:27
  like chatting about, you know, photons of something, and that
• 7:31
  was quite nice, just being in a community and doing
• 7:33
  something a little bit different.
• 7:34
  Speaker 3: You know, Mike, did you get it as a student.
• 7:38
  Speaker 2: I got a lot out of it.
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: As a student, I basically knew very little about as
• 7:45
  Joe says, what many billion years we're we're talking about
• 7:48
  four and a half billion years or so. I had
• 7:51
  no real understanding of how the climate has developed over
• 7:55
  that period of time. Also, you know, although I had
• 7:59
  some awareness, shall we say, off to the side here somewhere,
• 8:03
  that that you know, galactic and universal impact on the
• 8:09
  climate on this planet is important to take into a
• 8:13
  koind as well, I didn't understand how that worked, and
• 8:17
  and so there were there were a few eye openers
• 8:21
  along the way. For example, the the whole business of
• 8:25
  the effect of traveling through the spiral arms of the galaxy,
• 8:29
  and it made my understanding of of celestial mechanics there
• 8:34
  completely failed, because I didn't even know that the Solar
• 8:38
  system traveled through the spiral arms of the galaxy and
• 8:43
  so on, So lots to open my eyes on it.
• 8:47
  But as well as that, I would take your point
• 8:51
  about it, just giving you know, whether I retained or
• 8:56
  whatever percentage of it I retained, which probably isn't a
• 8:58
  huge amound, to be quite honest, because it's going to
• 9:00
  require a lot of ongoing effort to internalize that stuff.
• 9:04
  But I would say it has certainly given me confidence
• 9:10
  to know when I'm being sold a pub Let's put
• 9:13
  it that way.
• 9:14
  Speaker 2: And although I may not be able to.
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: Make an educated argument in all cases, I certainly will
• 9:22
  be much better prepared when somebody.
• 9:24
  Speaker 2: Is telling me something which simply is not correct.
• 9:28
  Speaker 3: Good, Where's anything?
• 9:31
  Speaker 4: Well, Yeah, I put quite a lot of effort into it.
• 9:35
  Not every day, but as I had the time available.
• 9:39
  More of the effort I put in was to do
• 9:41
  with what I already knew, so trying to understand in
• 9:45
  more depth so that I could judge to what extent
• 9:49
  I thought I'd been misled by the simplicity of what's
• 9:53
  being presented. So yeah, I think you know, the more
• 9:58
  effort you put in, the more you'll get. Of course, yes,
• 10:01
  and some of the concepts were completely new to me,
• 10:04
  so they would require quite a lot of study.
• 10:09
  Speaker 3: I want to let people know, this is an advanced
• 10:11
  climate science class. You should have at least twenty hours
• 10:15
  of independent study. That would be the minimum in climate science.
• 10:19
  It goes pretty deep. And this book is I would
• 10:23
  say graduate level material, not undergraduate. And so if you know,
• 10:30
  for people who have a bit of science background and
• 10:33
  enough time or interest to try to make up those
• 10:37
  gaps in their knowledge. It's pretty fascinating territory to explore.
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: David, I've got a question for you, because you know,
• 10:46
  we went through the climate course and part of that
• 10:49
  was the greenhous effect. Now just recently and we'll put
• 10:53
  the link to this in the show notes for this program,
• 10:56
  but just recently you've been back on Tom Nelson's YouTube
• 11:00
  channel with an update to your view of the greenhouse effect,
• 11:06
  and so maybe you could just explain a little bit
• 11:09
  about why that update is necessary.
• 11:13
  Speaker 3: Oh, I've even learned so much since then because people
• 11:17
  gave good comments. And one of the great things for
• 11:20
  my education in climate science is that GPT has gotten
• 11:24
  better in the last couple of months. At talking with me,
• 11:27
  it's just less full of garbage now, and so I
• 11:30
  can have a real conversations about things and it'll give
• 11:34
  me equations and we can solve them. We can. It's
• 11:37
  been pretty good. So I've so I even have an
• 11:39
  update on that, and I'm going to give that today.
• 11:41
  I have an updated talk today on the greenhouse effect
• 11:46
  as I see it now, which I think is even
• 11:49
  you know, there's more to it than what I gave
• 11:53
  with Tom and it's really just complex. There's there's a
• 11:57
  lot going on and there there certainly is a greenhouse effect,
• 12:02
  and that's what I want to show in the in
• 12:05
  the present today presentation today, there's a greenhouse effect. How
• 12:08
  much of a greenhouse effect is there and how much
• 12:11
  does it affect climate? And the short answer is that
• 12:15
  Javier Venos calls the CO two greenhouse effect the pilot
• 12:21
  light of the of the planet. It's been it's been
• 12:25
  helping warm the planet, especially make overnight temperatures less cold
• 12:33
  since the planet was formed, because the planet was formed
• 12:36
  with plenty of CO two, enough CO two that the
• 12:38
  first hundred parts per million have always been here and
• 12:41
  that's all you need to have that low, higher overnight
• 12:46
  temperature effect. After that, it's saturated. And I want to
• 12:50
  explain that because I come up with a new concept
• 12:52
  for that and more. CO two doesn't do anything, so
• 12:56
  CO two, the up and down of CO two over
• 12:59
  the last four billion years hasn't made a difference at all.
• 13:03
  But there is a huge water vapor greenhouse effect, and
• 13:07
  I've understood that a lot better now too. So that's
• 13:11
  what I want to talk a bit about in my
• 13:12
  presentation today. This will be really kind of the first
• 13:17
  core class we're giving away for free here, so everybody
• 13:24
  gets kind of a whole overview of the class, and
• 13:27
  then the actual class will be ten weeks starting on
• 13:32
  September eleventh, diving into all of these areas and unpacking
• 13:37
  these two models. Try to get it right. I'm always,
• 13:41
  as Liz knows very well, coming back to class the
• 13:43
  week next week saying, oh I screwed this up. I
• 13:46
  got that wrong here, let me correct you. So always
• 13:50
  trying to be just less wrong all the time. Get
• 13:53
  information from other sources. We had three guests last time.
• 13:58
  They were fascinating. So try to put the whole thing together,
• 14:03
  you know, in by filling in, by putting first together
• 14:07
  this overview, and then filling in all the gaps I
• 14:11
  want to talk. I just want to mention quickly. It's
• 14:13
  going to start September eleventh at seven pm UK time.
• 14:18
  There'll be another class for people in North America on
• 14:21
  September twelfth at six pm Eastern. And this class you
• 14:28
  guys have already had. It's the cognitive tests. So there
• 14:32
  are two cognitive tests that help you calibrate your critical
• 14:38
  thinking skills and as we all can, maybe how do
• 14:43
  you feel about the test? Where the test valuable? What
• 14:46
  did you learn? Don't give away the test, but what
• 14:48
  did you learn about yourself and the tests?
• 14:51
  Speaker 2: I learned it. I know nothing but this.
• 14:56
  Speaker 4: Yeah, it was fascinating. The test was fascinating. Yeah, so
• 15:00
  it really makes you think about what your assumptions are
• 15:04
  and sort of try to think about why you're doing
• 15:09
  something or why you're believing in something.
• 15:13
  Speaker 3: And it's useful. Again, Joe, I do you think you
• 15:15
  did fairly well on the tests?
• 15:17
  Speaker 5: I think I did really well in the first round,
• 15:19
  but then sort of progressively worse as I went through.
• 15:23
  Speaker 3: But yeah, it was good.
• 15:24
  Speaker 5: It did make you think, like, why am I setting
• 15:26
  my limits? So why is it's almost a kind of
• 15:28
  arrogant thing that's like I could actually just make this
• 15:31
  easier for myself, you know, by being less biased, which
• 15:34
  I thought was well.
• 15:35
  Speaker 3: These are tests that have nothing to do with climate.
• 15:37
  These are basically epistemology, how you think about fact, how
• 15:42
  you deal with information from the real world. And we
• 15:47
  will start talking about climate in the next in the
• 15:50
  second one when the class really begins. So this is
• 15:54
  just a first session to help people calibrate their thinking.
• 15:58
  It's free and Joe and Mike will put in the
• 16:03
  show notes the links to the two classes. September eleventh
• 16:07
  at seven pm UK time also two pm two pm
• 16:12
  Eastern here, and then September eighteenth for people in North
• 16:16
  America at six pm Eastern and those are free two
• 16:20
  hour webinars to help you kind of understand how you
• 16:24
  think about the world. And you should bring aligned pad
• 16:27
  of paper and a pencil or pen and then the
• 16:31
  class starts a week later on the eighteenth and nineteenth
• 16:34
  of September, and it will go ten sessions, and all
• 16:38
  the sessions are pre recorded. All the lectures are pre recorded,
• 16:42
  so you can go through them at your own pace,
• 16:44
  and then we'll have a live question and answer and
• 16:47
  discussion and present some topical presentations every week at Wednesday
• 16:54
  seven pm UK time and Thursdays at six pm US
• 17:00
  Eastern Time in the US. If the sun is the
• 17:02
  size of a basketball, how far away is the earth?
• 17:05
  And how big is the earth?
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: That was you're giving away one of the questions. So
• 17:11
  that was one of the questions that you have to
• 17:13
  you have to admit that one.
• 17:14
  Speaker 3: Perhaps, no, that wasn't that was actually in the first day.
• 17:20
  That wasn't from the tests. See, already we don't know
• 17:25
  how much we don't know.
• 17:26
  Speaker 2: That's correct. Do you remember the answer of that, Joe.
• 17:31
  Speaker 3: If the sun is the size of a basketball, how
• 17:33
  big is the earth?
• 17:35
  Speaker 2: It's probably gonna be.
• 17:38
  Speaker 5: I can describe it like maybe about four millimeters across
• 17:43
  something size of a wasn't it.
• 17:48
  Speaker 3: Yeah, about one point five millimeters smaller than a peppercorn?
• 17:53
  And how far away is it from the basketball?
• 17:58
  Speaker 5: Ah, totally gone on that one.
• 18:01
  Speaker 2: So I'll just three meters, No, no, no, no, it's
• 18:04
  gonna be. That's gonna be miles, it's gonna uh yeah.
• 18:08
  But remember how far you're You're gonna have to tell us, Liz,
• 18:13
  We've all forgotten.
• 18:14
  Speaker 3: Remember one hundred feet. Think about a peppercorn that is
• 18:20
  one hundred feet away from a basketball. That's the relationship
• 18:22
  between the sun and the Earth. So there's there's a
• 18:25
  lot of little cute things to know like that that
• 18:28
  will kind of, you know, helps keep you sharp and
• 18:32
  thinking about the world. But also it all tends to
• 18:34
  come together when we understand how heat moves from the
• 18:38
  tropics to the poles, and that's what is going to
• 18:40
  be in my my presentation next.
• 18:43
  Speaker 2: Uh uh, David.
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: The other thing that sort of struck me running through
• 18:47
  the first course was that this is still a moving target.
• 18:53
  So although there's there's a lot understood and it's and
• 18:58
  there's a lot that we can and say that demonstrates
• 19:01
  that the official climate change narrative, there are lots of
• 19:05
  questions to be asked about that, and and lots of
• 19:07
  skepticism to be how to run that, And there's a
• 19:13
  lot of science that they're ignoring when they present their reports.
• 19:15
  Speaker 2: And so on. Still the science is not settled, No.
• 19:20
  Speaker 3: Not at all. There's much more to learn, especially about
• 19:23
  the past and the future. The past, it's easy to
• 19:28
  cherry pick your data. So, as we say in climate science,
• 19:31
  the problem with climate science is that the future is
• 19:34
  known with so much certainty, in the past is so
• 19:37
  impossible to figure out. And the future models are just
• 19:42
  all based on computer models that all practically share almost
• 19:45
  all the same code and the same assumptions and are
• 19:49
  tuned for the same reasons. And there are a lot
• 19:51
  of political motivations to get all this, to have it
• 19:54
  go a certain way. And so first of all, there's
• 19:59
  a lot of and second we really are starting to
• 20:03
  understand how the climate system actually works, and I would
• 20:06
  say that this is the leading book on how it
• 20:10
  actually works. Now. If that's what you want to understand
• 20:15
  from a science point of view, my class is going
• 20:17
  to be very appropriate. If you want to understand how
• 20:19
  all the tricks are played in the political agenda by
• 20:24
  various groups. That's that's Tom covers a lot of that.
• 20:27
  I've given a previous talk about that. That's not what
• 20:29
  the class is about. And further to your point, Mike,
• 20:33
  the future, many experts and the people I talk with
• 20:37
  there are many different views on how the next couple
• 20:40
  of hundred or thousand years plays out. But then after
• 20:45
  say a thousand years or so, everybody's pretty much in
• 20:48
  agreement that the Minkavage cycles will take over again.
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: And if anybody wants to know what those are, they're
• 20:55
  going to have to sign up to the course. That's right, excellent, right, Well, look, David,
• 21:01
  would you like to give a sound And.
• 21:03
  Speaker 3: I've got my handy dandy Milankovitch tool, which everybody recognizes
• 21:08
  because we spend so many hours with this thing, and
• 21:12
  so that and me moving various tennis balls and ping
• 21:15
  pong balls and things around to show the relationships between
• 21:19
  the planets and the moon in the sun. So yeah,
• 21:23
  I will excuse Joe and Liz if they want to.
• 21:25
  There's no you know, you'll you're there in the community.
• 21:28
  These are my helpers there in the community. You'll see
• 21:30
  them if you join the class and you can ask them,
• 21:34
  you know, whether I'm full of it and need need correction,
• 21:39
  or if you have any questions about anything. They're there
• 21:43
  wanting to help. And we're all learning all the time,
• 21:45
  all of us. So with that, thank you, Joe and Liz.
• 21:49
  You're welcome to stay or not, but it will be
• 21:51
  about a fifty minute presentation now, okay, okay, well.
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: Let's thank you, Thank you Joe and Liz, and if
• 21:59
  we'll see again soon new diet.
• 22:02
  Speaker 3: All right, here's my updated framework for understanding climate. I
• 22:07
  gave this talk to Tom Nelson in late August. This
• 22:12
  is we're recording this now at the very end of August,
• 22:15
  and I've got here two of my best students, Mike
• 22:19
  and Liz, and this is going to be about a
• 22:21
  fifty minute overview of my framework for understanding climate. The
• 22:27
  more you study the climate system, the more complex you
• 22:32
  realize it is. I've spent a lot of time recently
• 22:35
  re understanding the greenhouse effect, and I've realized that most
• 22:38
  of my previous videos weren't scientifically accurate. So in this
• 22:42
  presentation I want to try to put the climate conversation
• 22:45
  in perspective. I'm always trying to be less wrong, not
• 22:49
  more right, which is a little refreshing in climate science.
• 22:53
  So if anybody sees something I should correct, just put
• 22:55
  some comments and leave sources under this video, and I'll
• 22:59
  be happy to go explore those more. So, we will
• 23:03
  start with the two ways that I think are appropriate
• 23:08
  to think about climate science, all right, the radiative model
• 23:11
  and the thermal model. This is a quick summary. The
• 23:13
  radiative model looks at the energy balance between incoming short
• 23:17
  wave radiation absorbed by the Earth and the long wave
• 23:21
  infrared radiation leaving. This is a popular but inaccurate model
• 23:26
  of the climate system in the real world. Energy coming
• 23:30
  in gets converted to heat, and that heat gets transported
• 23:33
  not just back up to space, but via four important
• 23:37
  gradients that we will explore, and I've shown three of
• 23:40
  them here. So let's start at the beginning. But the
• 23:44
  sung's core. You two will know this question two hydrogen
• 23:49
  atoms fuse into a helium atom, creating a huge amount
• 23:53
  of energy in the form of plasma, gamma rays, and
• 23:56
  high energy photons. Once a photon is generated at the core,
• 24:01
  how long do you think it takes on average to
• 24:03
  make its way, moving at the speed of light to
• 24:06
  the surface of the Sun. Who remembers that? Anybody? Mike, Liz, Liz.
• 24:16
  Speaker 4: I think it was a thousand and something is Oh, no,
• 24:21
  wait a minute, I.
• 24:22
  Speaker 3: Filled your really factoids that it's all scrambled, which is
• 24:26
  a really long time, completely understandable, Mike. How long does
• 24:33
  it take?
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: I can't remember, David, I'm very very sorry, brin is
• 24:38
  not functioning today.
• 24:40
  Speaker 3: One hundred and fifty thousand years, Yes, one hundred and
• 24:45
  fifty thousand years for a photon going from the core
• 24:50
  to the outer rim of the Sun, where it can
• 24:54
  then speed off into the cosmos, all right, and that
• 25:01
  begins its journey into the Solar system and beyond. Eight
• 25:05
  minutes later, some of those photons, a small number arrive
• 25:10
  on Earth. About one hundred and seventy petawatts of solar
• 25:15
  energy arrives to Earth at all times, about thirty percent
• 25:19
  of the photons that should hit the surface or scattered
• 25:22
  by clouds, land and water, and they go back to space.
• 25:25
  That's the albedo what happens to those that hit the surface.
• 25:29
  But we're going to look at this two different ways.
• 25:32
  The radiative model is first starting with the greenhouse effect.
• 25:36
  So the radiative model, and we've all seen this diagram,
• 25:40
  uses the energy balance diagram to show how greenhouse molecules
• 25:45
  like carbon dioxide and water reradiate heat back down and
• 25:49
  heat the surface. They go up, then they come down,
• 25:51
  they get reradiated, and they go round in circles, and
• 25:54
  that heats the surface. According to this model, radiation is
• 25:57
  the primary way energy goes from the surface to the
• 26:00
  top of the atmosphere, while convection and evaporation are small
• 26:04
  compared to radiation. The thick red bar on the right
• 26:08
  shows radiation coming back down to the ground from the atmosphere.
• 26:12
  That's called back radiation, which we'll learn more about. And
• 26:15
  they claim mostly that is from CO two and also
• 26:18
  from water, vapor, and methane of course, which is now
• 26:23
  the new evil gas. CO two is a critical gas
• 26:28
  for life on our planet. I want you to have
• 26:29
  appreciation for this. Every even though there's only four in
• 26:33
  ten thousand molecules of CO two. It's everywhere around us.
• 26:38
  All of us are almost certainly sitting on or within
• 26:40
  a few meters of some carbon based material. Right now,
• 26:44
  What are you, guys, What is around you that's in
• 26:46
  your living room or in your office made of CO two? Well,
• 26:50
  you are wood, limestone, concrete, if you're anywhere near concrete,
• 26:57
  that's all just limestone, plants, pay, vapor, food, animals. All
• 27:03
  of it comes from the tiny amount of CO two
• 27:05
  in our atmosphere. So now I want to tell the
• 27:08
  story of the greenhouse effect. To start, a high energy
• 27:13
  photon comes from the Sun after its eight minute journey
• 27:17
  and strikes the Earth. It hits something, and that high
• 27:21
  energy photon is annihilated and heats whatever it hit, which
• 27:26
  then radiates longwave photons out according to the temperature of
• 27:31
  the thing, the sand, the rock, the pavement, whatever. One
• 27:36
  short wave photon generates about twenty longwave photons, and so
• 27:40
  they have much less energy. So let's follow one longwave
• 27:45
  photon as it goes up. First, If the outgoing photon
• 27:50
  happens to be in the right wavelength of ten to
• 27:52
  fourteen microns, then it leaves to space. Unimpeded. It's called
• 27:55
  the atmospheric window. And Liz, I have huge news about
• 27:59
  the atmospheric and I completely understand it now and we're
• 28:02
  going to go over it in one of the live classes.
• 28:04
  It's very exciting because it was always a bit of
• 28:06
  a mystery to me, but I've figured it out. And
• 28:09
  so that's about twelve percent of the photons go straight
• 28:12
  to space. Second, as we know now, the photon can't
• 28:17
  hit an air molecule like nitrogen er oxygen and transfer
• 28:20
  its energy to the air molecule. That's impossible. These atmospheric
• 28:25
  molecules are transparent to infrared radiation. The photon can only
• 28:30
  interact with greenhouse molecules. So when the photon encounters a
• 28:34
  greenhouse gas molecule, and I'll just use carbon dioxide as
• 28:38
  an example, this molecule absorbs the photon and begins to
• 28:42
  vibrate at a higher energy state. By the way, this
• 28:46
  is not a quantum phenomenon. This is a long wave
• 28:48
  photon adding whatever energy it has to the molecule's energy. Now,
• 28:54
  two possible things can happen. In the first possibility, that
• 28:59
  vibrating CO two molecule could hit an air molecule and
• 29:04
  transfer its energy mechanically versus via collision, so the air
• 29:09
  molecule speeds up, increasing the air temperature, and this is
• 29:12
  like a billiard ball hitting another billiard ball. The first
• 29:16
  ball comes to rest and transfers all its energy to
• 29:19
  the other ball. This mechanical transfer is called thermalization because
• 29:25
  the vibrational energy turns into velocity, and as we learned
• 29:29
  in a previous class, velocity is temperature. In the second possibility,
• 29:36
  the CO two molecule reradiates a new longwave photon out
• 29:40
  in some random direction and then goes back to its
• 29:42
  previous energy state. This is the radiative model. Greenhouse gas
• 29:48
  molecules are constantly absorbing and reradiating longwave photons, so the
• 29:53
  energy makes a random walk up through the atmosphere and
• 29:56
  eventually ends up at the top where it's finally emitted
• 30:00
  and goes to space. This is just radiation, though it
• 30:04
  doesn't change the air temperature at all. As those higher
• 30:08
  energy greenhouse gas molecules encounter air molecules, they transfer energy mechanically,
• 30:14
  thermalizing the energy, increasing the air temperature. The long wave
• 30:19
  photon coming in from the bottom encounters a greenhouse gas
• 30:23
  molecule like CO two that raises the molecule's energy state
• 30:28
  as we just saw, but it takes on average about
• 30:30
  half a second before it deenergizes and reradiates a photon
• 30:35
  out in a random direction. Long before that half a
• 30:38
  second is up, the CO two molecule is struck by
• 30:41
  an air molecule and transfers its energy mechanically heating the air.
• 30:47
  Thermalization is far more common than reradiation, could be on
• 30:50
  the order of millions or billions to one because air
• 30:54
  molecules are constantly bouncing off each other billions of times
• 30:58
  per second, so the collision almost always happens first, increasing
• 31:04
  the speed of the air molecules that warmer air than
• 31:07
  rises by convection. At the watch for watch lives. In
• 31:11
  case I make any mistakes, you just raise your hand
• 31:13
  and call me on it. But I think I got
• 31:15
  the number. I think I got the words right, So
• 31:17
  you got you got a mistake already.
• 31:19
  Speaker 4: Well, it's just commondox I. There's a linear molecule. And
• 31:23
  also carbon dioxide is a linear molecule. Yeah, but it
• 31:27
  can bend, It can bend, Yeah, it does bend.
• 31:31
  Speaker 3: That's see all right. So when it's normally and its
• 31:34
  normal resting state. It's linear. Yeah, so we'll go back
• 31:39
  to the collision almost always happens first. But feel free
• 31:43
  to raise your hand.
• 31:44
  Speaker 2: It's fine.
• 31:45
  Speaker 3: Increasing the speed of the air molecules, the warmer air
• 31:48
  rises by convection. At the top of the atmosphere, there
• 31:52
  are far fewer air molecules and actually fewer and fewer
• 31:57
  water molecules. Water vapor so at some point an air
• 32:01
  molecule bumps into a greenhouse gas molecule that finally emits
• 32:05
  a photon to space. And this is how one hundred
• 32:08
  percent of the energy arriving on Earth eventually leaves to
• 32:11
  space through dethermalization via a greenhouse gas molecule. At the
• 32:16
  top of the atmosphere. CO two does a huge amount
• 32:20
  of work ejecting thermal energy out of space. Okay, I
• 32:24
  have to make my CO two molecules straight. I'll do that.
• 32:28
  But CO two is a well mixed gas and it's
• 32:31
  all through the water column and they are always emitting
• 32:35
  long wave photons all the time at the temperature of
• 32:39
  wherever that air parcel is. So some of these photons
• 32:43
  get radiated back down to the surface and start over
• 32:46
  and that's the actual greenhouse effect. But the Earth's surface
• 32:51
  is predominantly water. So let's understand what happens in the oceans.
• 32:56
  Wherever there's a lake or an ocean, some incoming photons
• 32:59
  hit a way water molecule on the surface and evaporate it,
• 33:03
  sending it up into the air. From there, the moist
• 33:07
  air expands and rises as convection moves the expanding air
• 33:11
  upward as it gets higher and colder. Water vapor then
• 33:14
  condenses into droplets that form clouds, and that releases energy,
• 33:19
  which is then dethermalized by a CO two or water molecule,
• 33:23
  and later sent to space. There's no CO two required
• 33:27
  at the beginning of this whole chain. It's just sunlight
• 33:30
  evaporating water from the surface. Here's the picture in the oceans.
• 33:37
  About ten percent of sunlight hitting the oceans reflects back
• 33:41
  to space. That's the albedo. Twenty percent are vaporized on
• 33:45
  the surface and turns it rises into the atmosphere. As
• 33:49
  I just said, that's and then about fifty percent of
• 33:53
  the photons penetrate down tens of meters into the ocean
• 33:57
  the top layers, and then about twenty percent more makes
• 34:01
  their way deeper into the deeper ocean layers for transport
• 34:05
  around the world. So about seventy percent of that incoming
• 34:09
  energy heats the ocean water directly, and not even that
• 34:14
  is true. Is There's all actually a lot of fascinating
• 34:16
  details there. We'll come back to ocean heating in a minute.
• 34:21
  We're now ready to answer an important question for the atmosphere.
• 34:24
  How much energy is transported by mechanical vibration and how
• 34:29
  much by radiation. Some people claim the radiation dominates, others
• 34:35
  claim it's almost nothing. So rather than using theories and diagrams,
• 34:39
  I want to look at down welling thermal radiation using
• 34:42
  real world data from the series' satellites. It's different in
• 34:48
  different places. We'll start with the North Pole. The poles
• 34:55
  are generally under clear skies. In July, the series set
• 35:00
  a light instruments measure about two hundred watts per meter
• 35:03
  of downwelling long wave radiation and going to the Arctic
• 35:06
  surface during those months, the North Pole receives sunlight all
• 35:10
  the time, so the atmosphere there has a mix of water,
• 35:13
  vapor and CO two, and we know there's an inversion
• 35:16
  at that time too. They both produce downweighing both CO
• 35:21
  two and water vapor produced downwlling radiation, but during the
• 35:25
  darkness of January there's still one hundred watts per square
• 35:30
  meter of greenhouse effect. At that time, the air is
• 35:33
  extremely dry, so most of this is done by CO two,
• 35:37
  but not all. So think of it this way though,
• 35:39
  If you look around at night on the North Pole
• 35:42
  with thermal imaging goggles and you look up at the
• 35:45
  sky anywhere, you're not gonna see black. You're going to
• 35:48
  see light because the goggles turn downwhelling infra red radiation
• 35:53
  into light. And from this we can see that during
• 35:56
  the summer about one hundred and twenty watts per square
• 35:59
  meter is coming from water vapor down and another eighty
• 36:04
  watts per square meter from CO two. We're going to
• 36:09
  encounter those numbers again in Antarctica during summer and January.
• 36:13
  We're seeing the inversion and the sunshine. Also during January,
• 36:17
  warm air is coming in from the tropics, and that
• 36:19
  mechanical energy sends more radiation down to the surface. Antarctica
• 36:24
  is the driest place on Earth, so most of this
• 36:27
  radiation is from CO two, but not all. Why is
• 36:31
  the greenhouse effect lower in Antarctica than in the Arctic,
• 36:38
  because Antarctica is that much colder and higher. Average elevation
• 36:43
  in Antarctica is about eighty two hundred feet, so there's
• 36:46
  less atmosphere and it's a bit colder than the Arctic.
• 36:49
  At sea levels, these numbers would be higher. Now going
• 36:54
  to the Sahara desert, skies are usually clear and there's
• 36:57
  almost no water vapor, so CO two is repont possible
• 37:00
  for the overnight temperatures in the desert. At night in
• 37:04
  the Sahara it's cold, but the air is much warmer
• 37:07
  than at the Poles, and it's much less cold than
• 37:10
  it would be otherwise, and that's why the numbers here
• 37:13
  are higher than we saw in the for the Poles.
• 37:17
  I'm not going to translate WASP per square meter into
• 37:19
  degrees because that's where all the fudging is, and you
• 37:23
  can have your way with those numbers and get any
• 37:25
  answer you want. There are too many factors to do that.
• 37:29
  But here we see quite a lot of downwelling radiation
• 37:32
  at night, even under clear skies. This is much of
• 37:38
  this is from CO two. In the rainforest, there's a
• 37:42
  smaller difference between day and night because water vapor is
• 37:45
  doing most of the work than the water vapor is
• 37:49
  there all the time. During the day, evaporation pumps most
• 37:54
  of the energy into clouds and up to the top
• 37:56
  of the atmosphere to escape at night. The greenhouse effect
• 37:59
  is huge, mostly because of water vapor, and this is
• 38:05
  under clear skies. So now let's add clouds. Clouds reflect
• 38:10
  light away from Earth, they reflect heat down, they insulate,
• 38:15
  and they have their own internal radiative activity. Not to
• 38:19
  mention electrical charges. I'm only showing nighttime data because that
• 38:23
  shows the greenhouse effect by itself. With clouds, there's more
• 38:28
  energy being reradiated down to the surface, and this is
• 38:31
  why cloudy nights are generally warmer than clear nights. With clouds,
• 38:36
  water vapor does the vast majority of the work, while
• 38:39
  CO two is probably around the same low level we
• 38:42
  see in the desert and at the poles. So let's
• 38:46
  look at the water that gets vaporized into the atmosphere.
• 38:51
  These are nighttime figures over the oceans. These are nighttime
• 38:55
  figures for downwelling infraredit radiation the greenhouse effect to the
• 39:00
  ocean surfaces. It depends on temperature, air pressure, and moisture,
• 39:06
  but CO two likely doesn't contribute much to this greenhouse effect.
• 39:10
  Water vapor can do all the work here because water
• 39:12
  vapor and CO two cover the same wavelengths, which we
• 39:16
  remember from another class. And since we know down welling
• 39:19
  radiation can't penetrate the oceans, no amount of CO two
• 39:23
  can heat the oceans. So let's just kind of summarize this.
• 39:29
  The oceans determine our climate, and the oceans, both warm
• 39:32
  and cold, have something like three hundred and thirty watts
• 39:35
  per square meter of long wave reflected radiation coming down
• 39:38
  to the surface. That is the greenhouse effect. But how
• 39:42
  much is CO two and how much is water vapor?
• 39:44
  Over most of the ocean, there's a lot of water vapor,
• 39:47
  but at the north pole in darkness, there's hardly any.
• 39:49
  So I would say that most of this hundred watts
• 39:52
  per square meter, maybe eighty watts, is a CO two
• 39:57
  greenhouse effect that would be down here. So on average,
• 40:02
  I think worldwide at sea level, about ady watts per
• 40:05
  square meter of greenhouse effect from CO two really does exist.
• 40:09
  CO two constantly. This is the crux. This is kind
• 40:12
  of the crux slide right here. CO two constantly feeds
• 40:17
  energy into the air column. It can absorb and transfer
• 40:21
  energy mechanically to the atmosphere millions, maybe even billions of
• 40:25
  times per second while emitting a photon every half second
• 40:30
  or so. So in my view, I'm going to introduce
• 40:34
  a slightly different way to say it. I would say
• 40:36
  CO two is actually unsaturated, or we could say it's
• 40:41
  always below its capacity to warm the air. The same
• 40:45
  amount of CO two can feed more energy into the
• 40:48
  air column if more energy comes in from the sun.
• 40:51
  More CO two won't help feed more energy into the
• 40:54
  system because it only takes a handful of CO two
• 40:57
  molecules to do the job. Plus, in most cases water
• 41:00
  vapor is doing the same job, so CO two is
• 41:02
  only necessary where it's very dry. Javier Venos calls this
• 41:07
  the pilot light of the climate system. It's been happening
• 41:10
  for billions of years since there's always been at least
• 41:13
  fifty parts per million of CO two in the atmosphere. Now,
• 41:18
  will Happer, just to unconfused people, if I possibly can,
• 41:22
  says CO two is saturated, which is why it has
• 41:27
  reached diminishing returns. There's a technical meaning he uses. It's
• 41:32
  very precise, So I'm using the word differently, and so
• 41:35
  perhaps we could say CO two's ability to reradiate is saturated,
• 41:42
  but its ability to pump mechanical heat into the atmosphere
• 41:46
  is unsaturated. For all practical purposes, it's unlimited. So I
• 41:51
  believe CO two can continue thermalizing arbitrary amounts of long
• 41:55
  wave radiation because it has a huge capacity to do so.
• 42:00
  And perhaps we could say CO two's ability to reradiate
• 42:04
  a saturated, but its ability to pump energy into the
• 42:07
  atmosphere is unsaturated. Is that kind of clear? I'm trying
• 42:12
  because it's a difficult technical and I'm trying to kind
• 42:16
  of change the meaning of a word here. I'm basically
• 42:21
  meaning that water vapor does the lion's share of the
• 42:25
  work to heat the atmosphere, and no a bit more.
• 42:27
  CO two won't heat the air enough regardless of how
• 42:31
  much sun comes in, because it always has the capacity
• 42:35
  to thermalize those photons. By the way, when we talk
• 42:40
  about watts per square meter, we have to keep in
• 42:42
  mind this is long wave, not shortwave radiation. You can't
• 42:47
  compare long wave wasats per square meter with shortwave incoming
• 42:51
  sunlight wats per square meter because long wave photons can't
• 42:55
  penetrate the oceans, and this is a common mistake, these
• 42:58
  numbers aren't comparable. So that's the radiative model. And we'll
• 43:04
  actually go more into these details in the class, and
• 43:08
  Liz and I will have some really interesting conversations about
• 43:10
  how all these things works because it's absolutely complex and fascinating.
• 43:15
  But I want to move on now to the thermal model.
• 43:18
  This is how the Earth's actually climate system actually works,
• 43:23
  and to do that we need to focus on heat,
• 43:26
  not radiation. So I have another presentation that I've made
• 43:29
  with mic on heat versus temperature, and that's the one
• 43:34
  with the water in the oven. Remember, but it's important
• 43:37
  to realize that long wave radiation is not heat. Temperature
• 43:42
  is the speed at which atoms and molecules are moving.
• 43:45
  Heat is the number of atoms or molecules moving at
• 43:48
  the same speed. One molecule zipping or through space can
• 43:51
  be very hot but have almost no heat. Two kilos
• 43:55
  of hot iron has twice the heat of one kilo
• 43:59
  of iron at the same temperature. So photons don't have
• 44:02
  any heat even if they're in the infrared because photons
• 44:06
  aren't atoms. Atoms jiggling. The speed of atoms is heat. Now,
• 44:13
  this is interesting. This is an infrared photograph. You can't
• 44:18
  see the heat directly. You can see the infrared photons.
• 44:21
  Everything gives off infrared photons transport energy, not heat, So
• 44:27
  there's no heat until these photons transfer their energy into molecules,
• 44:32
  until they thermalize. Molecules are atoms and increase their speed.
• 44:36
  That's how you feel heat from a fire. Did I
• 44:39
  screw that up, Liz? I think I might have gotten
• 44:43
  that right. Heat always moves from hot to cold, and
• 44:51
  that's what drives our Earth's climate system. So we'll understand
• 44:55
  that using four gradients, three of which are here. There's
• 45:00
  a mystery gradient coming up in a few minutes. The
• 45:03
  first grading is the vertical lapse rate. Almost all the
• 45:06
  heat in the atmosphere is down here in the tropo
• 45:09
  sphere at the bottom of the first ten kilometers that
• 45:12
  we're familiar with. Most photons escape to space below the
• 45:17
  tropopause here, as we have just seen, and there's a
• 45:20
  whole section on the vertical lapse rate in the course.
• 45:25
  The next grading is the rotational gradient from day to
• 45:29
  night and back. The Sun's energy comes from a single place,
• 45:33
  but it's distributed over a sphere, Yet the radiation to
• 45:36
  space goes out at all angles. So remember that the
• 45:39
  greenhouse effect takes place in seconds from the bottom to top.
• 45:44
  So if you just look at radiation, you'd say the
• 45:47
  Earth is hottest at noon and coldest all night long
• 45:50
  when there's no incoming radiation. This is where we can
• 45:54
  really make good use of this concept of radiator versus
• 45:58
  thermal model, because what actually happens is the surface and
• 46:04
  the air are hottest around five PM six pm at
• 46:08
  the end of the day. We don't experience peak temperature
• 46:11
  at the time of peak radiation because the atmosphere and
• 46:15
  pressure systems build up heat during the afternoon and don't
• 46:19
  release it until after the sun begins to set. This
• 46:23
  is driven by collisions far more than it is by
• 46:27
  absorption and reradiation. During an inversion or heat dome event,
• 46:32
  the radiation doesn't change, but the pressure does, and that
• 46:36
  changes the surface temperature significantly. This shows that the radiative
• 46:40
  model isn't very helpful and the thermal model is a
• 46:43
  better match. So now let's look at the meridional temperature gradient,
• 46:49
  which is a change and temperature from the tropics to
• 46:53
  the poles. We generally, and we spent weeks on this, right,
• 46:57
  students and that's what the book is about, and there's
• 47:00
  a lot to it, so I'll summarize. We define the
• 47:04
  tropics generally as thirty degrees north to thirty degrees south,
• 47:07
  and the temperate zones from thirty to sixty degrees The
• 47:12
  tropics cover half the surface area of the Earth, but
• 47:16
  this area absorbs two thirds of the energy coming in
• 47:20
  from the Sun. This is because outside the tropics, the
• 47:23
  angle of the Sun is spread over a larger distance
• 47:26
  and the Sun's energy has to come through more atmosphere.
• 47:30
  The oceans absorb about sixty petawats of energy at all
• 47:33
  times and transport about eleven petawats away from the tropics
• 47:39
  to the poles where it escapes. From the poles. It's
• 47:42
  about twenty percent of the energy coming in to the tropics.
• 47:48
  So now if we widen this area to forty degrees
• 47:50
  we have a net energy surplus from forty degrees south
• 47:54
  to forty degrees north. So more energy enters these latitudes
• 47:58
  than leaves to Spain. This is a surplus, and that
• 48:03
  water that gets heated first goes west because the Earth
• 48:07
  is spinning east, and when it hits land, like right here,
• 48:13
  it turns toward the poles. You can see it at
• 48:15
  the eastern point of South America, and of course it
• 48:18
  happens in the eastern edge of Asia, and this sends more.
• 48:23
  This is actually the shape of this, because the equator's here.
• 48:27
  The shape of this will send more water to the
• 48:29
  north pole, more heat to the north pole than to
• 48:33
  the South pole, but not by a whole lot. This
• 48:37
  is just one feature of many that influences heat transport
• 48:41
  and invalidates the radiative model. From forty to sixty degrees,
• 48:46
  the temperate zones, the surface and atmosphere are roughly in equilibrium,
• 48:51
  and this is where most of the weather is. The
• 48:53
  warm water interacts with cooler air and causes storms, hurricanes,
• 48:57
  and chaotic air movement that carries heat from the tropics
• 49:01
  to the polar region. So heat is being transported through
• 49:04
  via storms towards the poles, and beyond sixty degrees, more
• 49:08
  heat escapes the system than enters. The heat is transported
• 49:13
  to the poles about two thirds via air currents here
• 49:16
  in the temperate zone and about one third through the
• 49:20
  ocean currents when ice melts during the summer. And this
• 49:24
  is one of the interesting things we learned in the class.
• 49:27
  It's the climate system storing heat like a battery. When
• 49:31
  the polar summer ends, that heat is released as ice forms,
• 49:35
  and that heat goes up through the polar vortex, completing
• 49:38
  the circuit from incoming at the equator up and around
• 49:43
  to out through the poles and up to space. And
• 49:48
  I want to drive this home. It takes a lot
• 49:50
  of energy to melt ice each summer, starting in March.
• 49:55
  When ice melts in the Arctic all summer long. That
• 49:58
  is not a heat wave, it's not weather. That's the
• 50:01
  Earth's way of storing energy, so it can get rid
• 50:05
  of that energy in the following winter. When the water
• 50:09
  freezes six months later, it's all released. Well, a lot
• 50:12
  of it gets released, which then goes up through the
• 50:15
  low pressure zone and the polar vortex to space via
• 50:19
  long wave photons that get dethermalized. The energy gets dethermalized
• 50:24
  at the top of the polar vortex. More melting ice
• 50:28
  does not mean more radiation. It doesn't mean the Arctic
• 50:33
  is melting. It means more heat will be released the
• 50:38
  following winter. So about twenty percent of the excess of
• 50:44
  the energy coming into the oceans gets transported away from
• 50:47
  the tropics and escapes through the polar vortices. Along the way,
• 50:51
  it converts between heat and infrared energy many times as
• 50:55
  it follows the temperature gradient from warm to cold and
• 50:58
  out to space. So far, so good, I hope. Now
• 51:02
  these gradients drive the Earth's climate, and here's how we
• 51:07
  visualize them. The temperature of the equator is in the center,
• 51:10
  and the south pole on the left, north pole on
• 51:12
  the right. The planet has turned ninety degrees to match.
• 51:16
  During the Cretaceous one hundred million years ago, the temperature
• 51:19
  gradient was pretty flat. Most of the Earth was very warm,
• 51:23
  the continents were concentrated near the equator, and there were
• 51:27
  very few storms. It wasn't as easy to move heat
• 51:29
  to the pole. So this Earth is very hot and
• 51:32
  very humid. Here's snowball Earth, which probably happened seven hundred
• 51:37
  and fifty million or four hundred and forty million years ago,
• 51:40
  although there's still uncertainty about that. It would have been
• 51:44
  caused by a combination of low eccentricity, the arrangement of
• 51:47
  the continents, and feedbacks. At its coldest, the temperature at
• 51:52
  the equator might have been below freezing at the equator,
• 51:57
  and there may have been some solid CO two at
• 51:59
  the poles also called dry ice because the poles were
• 52:03
  much colder than today. The distance from the Earth to
• 52:07
  the Sun, along with the shapes of the continents, gives
• 52:09
  us the meridional temperature gradient we have now. And this
• 52:13
  is this blue line here, So we're in an ice
• 52:16
  age because we have ice at the poles year round.
• 52:19
  The shape of this curve determines the Earth's climate. This
• 52:26
  diagram from Javi A. Vnos's book shows the energy distribution
• 52:29
  by latitude. The light blue dotted line represents the incoming
• 52:34
  energy from the Sun, with the equator in the center
• 52:37
  and the South pole to the left, north Pole to
• 52:39
  the right. Now, notice the blocking of sunlight here at
• 52:41
  the equator due to clouds. That's this little dip, and
• 52:46
  there's a heat surplus inside of forty degrees as shown
• 52:50
  by the red area. So I'm taking the previous concept
• 52:52
  and just putting data into it, and a net loss
• 52:56
  of heat at the poles shown by the blue shaded areas.
• 53:00
  This data shows that the radiative model is invalid and
• 53:03
  the climate system moves quite a bit of heat from
• 53:06
  the tropics to the poles. This is not much mentioned
• 53:10
  in the IPCC document. So now I'll build a simple
• 53:14
  but realistic energy budget. About twenty nine percent of incoming
• 53:19
  energy is reflected off clouds and land and water back
• 53:22
  to space. That's the albedo. About three percent is absorbed
• 53:26
  by ozone in the stratosphere, twenty percent is absorbed by
• 53:29
  the atmosphere itself, at least forty eight percent going to
• 53:34
  the surface. About seventeen percent of that energy is absorbed
• 53:39
  by the land, and it makes its way back out
• 53:41
  to space via convection, conduction and radiation. As we have seen,
• 53:45
  about thirty one percent twice as much energy goes into
• 53:49
  the oceans, and about half of that energy actually more
• 53:56
  seventy percent of that energy, oh sorry, a small amount.
• 53:59
  About percent of that energy evaporates water and goes up,
• 54:03
  and the other about eighty percent penetrates and heats the water,
• 54:06
  and that heat gets transported forward. So there's one final
• 54:12
  temperature gradient I haven't shown, and that's the thermal cline
• 54:15
  going down into the oceans. The thermal cline is largely
• 54:18
  driven by salinity, since the salty saltier water is the
• 54:23
  heavier it gets. In the North Atlantic Ocean, the formation
• 54:26
  of ice sends tons of salty water down hundreds of
• 54:30
  thousands of millions of tons. I don't know, lots of
• 54:33
  salty water down to the bottom of the ocean to
• 54:36
  return back through the along a kind of a belt
• 54:40
  at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean and Pacific. Did
• 54:44
  you know that all sea ice is essentially fresh water.
• 54:47
  The sea ice ice saltwater doesn't like to freeze. So
• 54:51
  because of this sinking water that's more salty, the Earth
• 54:54
  can be out of radiative balance as xs heat can
• 54:58
  go down into the oceans and stay there for hundreds
• 55:01
  of years, and it can come back out over decades
• 55:04
  or centuries as the gradients allow. It's part of the
• 55:08
  Global Ocean Conveyor Belt, which connects four of the world's
• 55:13
  five oceans in a current that's driven by temperature and salinity.
• 55:17
  It takes a given water parcel about one thousand years
• 55:20
  to complete its journey around the Earth. So some light
• 55:23
  can go into the ocean and that heat can stay
• 55:25
  in the ocean for hundreds and hundreds of years before
• 55:27
  finally coming back out and going to space. You don't
• 55:30
  see that in the radiative model, but you do see
• 55:33
  it if you study pressure systems, ocean currents, and oscillations.
• 55:39
  So here's an important slide from Javia Vinos, and this
• 55:41
  is just a summary of what we talk about in
• 55:43
  the class. It shows de trended data, which is just
• 55:46
  a relative ups and downs. At the top is the
• 55:48
  Atlantic multidecadal oscillation, a sixty five year cycle that's going
• 55:53
  to turn negative in about five or six years. In
• 55:56
  the middle is the Pacific decadal oscillation and look at
• 55:59
  as a very strong correlation to temperature. This tells us
• 56:02
  that oscillations play a very important role in our climate system.
• 56:08
  There's an assembly of most of the main temperature series
• 56:11
  that try to show how CO two is driving temperature
• 56:14
  with this hockey shape hockey stick shape, but even here
• 56:18
  the fit with the AMO and PDO graphs is better
• 56:21
  than with C two. You can see the temperature is
• 56:25
  going up, then down, and this matters. Anything over about
• 56:28
  thirty years counts as climate change, and then back up again,
• 56:33
  down again. This corresponds much more to the solar cycles
• 56:36
  and ocean cycles than it does to CO two. It's
• 56:42
  even more pronounced if you remove the urban weather stations
• 56:46
  that are heated by humans. Here the blue dash line
• 56:49
  shows data from rural stations that haven't been compromised. The
• 56:54
  blue line shows the very cold years that occurred about
• 56:57
  three years after the Krakatoa Vault volcano erupted in eighteen
• 57:02
  eighty three. Despite the volcano, rural stations generally show warmer
• 57:08
  and then and then it equalized warmer temperatures in the
• 57:12
  past and milder temperatures in the last few decades, which
• 57:16
  is the opposite of the red graphs you see on
• 57:20
  social media. Now, that's because CO two is not the driver.
• 57:26
  On the order of hundreds and thousands of years. Temperature
• 57:29
  trends are mostly driven by sunspot cycles, which drive more
• 57:33
  or less energy into the oceans. There's a twenty five
• 57:36
  hundred year cycle called the Brave cycle and another thousand
• 57:42
  year cycle called the Eddy cycle. And you see how
• 57:45
  they both were at their minimum four hundred years ago,
• 57:48
  and that caused the Little Ice Age and two more
• 57:51
  times before. This is quite sunspots are quite regular, sunspot
• 57:58
  series are quite regular, and these cold periods put an
• 58:03
  end to several flourishing civilization. The end of the Bronze
• 58:08
  Age was particularly brutal. We can predict from this that
• 58:12
  the next double low point will be around twenty four
• 58:16
  to fifty when it may again be possible to ice
• 58:19
  skate on the Thames River no matter how much CO
• 58:22
  two is in the atmosphere. Then, So, to sum this up,
• 58:27
  and I've talked about this in the Class A lot,
• 58:29
  we have two main drivers of climate at all timescales
• 58:32
  momentum and chaos, and this transcends all the time. Scales
• 58:37
  momentum drives the orbits of the planets around the Sun.
• 58:41
  It almost certainly drives sunspots in some way. Momentum drives
• 58:45
  the continents inter different configurations, which drives ocean currents into
• 58:50
  their oscillations. We can predict certain cycles better than others.
• 58:55
  There's plenty of variability both within the cycles and from
• 58:58
  one cycle to the next. Nothing repeats perfectly because there
• 59:01
  are too many things in motion and they all influence
• 59:04
  each other. On the other hand, we also have chaotic
• 59:07
  mixing and stochastic events that can't be predicted and can
• 59:12
  be catastrophic or very surprising. For example, when two or
• 59:16
  more cyclic events happen, the result is a chaotic phenomenon,
• 59:20
  like the modern minimum. Many phenomena are in a build
• 59:24
  up and release cycle, like earthquakes. Something has to reach
• 59:28
  a certain threshold to trigger a release, and this creates lightning, strikes, animos, earthquakes,
• 59:36
  sudden stratospheric warming, volcanoes, and much more so. There are
• 59:40
  also things in the chaotic domain we don't understand, like
• 59:43
  cloud formation and precipitation. Some of these are quasi cyclic
• 59:48
  and many are simply unpredictable. I saw I'm going to summarize.
• 59:53
  In the radiative model, greenhouse gas molecules are necessary to
• 59:57
  heat the air, and the more of them there are,
• 1:00:01
  the more air they heat. In the thermal model, greenhouse
• 1:00:04
  gases are necessary to heat the air, but CO two
• 1:00:07
  is already working to convert energy to heat and heat
• 1:00:10
  back to energy, and it has plenty of capacity to
• 1:00:12
  do so. More CO two has no effect on temperature
• 1:00:16
  because we already have the minimum amountain heeded, which is
• 1:00:19
  around one hundred parts per million. On the other hand,
• 1:00:22
  more water vapor does contribute to overnight temperatures, but is
• 1:00:26
  dwarfed by the thermal effects during the day. So now we're
• 1:00:32
  going to ask eight inconvenient questions for people who use
• 1:00:35
  the radiative model to explain how their model is the
• 1:00:37
  right one. We've been over all these in the class,
• 1:00:39
  so let's see if we can remember some of these.
• 1:00:42
  The first one is why is the earth temperature highest
• 1:00:46
  in July when the Earth's overall temperature is highest in
• 1:00:50
  July when the Earth is farthest from the Sun by
• 1:00:53
  about three million miles, and its coldest in January, when
• 1:00:58
  the Earth is closest to the Sun. A radiative model
• 1:01:02
  can't explain this, but a thermal model can, because the
• 1:01:06
  northern hemisphere has far more land to heat up as
• 1:01:09
  the heat moves from the tropics to the North Pole,
• 1:01:13
  while the southern hemisphere has far more water, which absorbs
• 1:01:16
  heat and sends it directly to the South Pole. Land
• 1:01:19
  has a much larger influence on surface temperatures than oceans do,
• 1:01:25
  and that's where we measure surface temperatures. We talk about
• 1:01:28
  the temperature of the Earth, it's almost always land temperature.
• 1:01:32
  Next question, could something else be causing the warming of
• 1:01:36
  the last few decades. Doubling CO two would have a
• 1:01:40
  tiny effect on temperature, if any, but that's not true
• 1:01:43
  for clouds. Even a one percent reduction of cloud cover
• 1:01:47
  would have a significant temperature effect on temperature. More clouds
• 1:01:52
  increase reflection and reduce temperatures. Fewer clouds mean more direct
• 1:01:58
  sunlight hits the Earth, creating higher temperatures. Over the past
• 1:02:04
  twenty years, clouds have decreased, so more energy has entered
• 1:02:09
  the system, and we see a corresponding amount of energy
• 1:02:12
  leaving the Earth's atmosphere, which shows that the heat isn't
• 1:02:17
  being trapped, there's just more energy coming in from the Sun.
• 1:02:20
  So the question is what could possibly explain more heat
• 1:02:24
  escaping to space. The radiative model predicts that outgoing long
• 1:02:31
  radiation will remain the same as heat builds up in
• 1:02:35
  the climate system from a build up of more CO
• 1:02:38
  two because the Sun doesn't change in the radiative model,
• 1:02:42
  but CO two does. But the thermal model accurately predicts
• 1:02:46
  more heat escaping to space as more heat enters, though
• 1:02:51
  with various time lags for heat transport. Question number four,
• 1:02:57
  what caused the spike in temperature in the last year
• 1:02:59
  or so. Was there a rush of increased CO two
• 1:03:03
  that even the models didn't predict, or was it several
• 1:03:07
  factors working together. Decreased albedo positive phase of the AMO,
• 1:03:13
  A couple al ninos, the peak of solar cycle twenty five,
• 1:03:17
  which we're just ending now well, which we're just at
• 1:03:20
  about at the peak out right now. Actually a change
• 1:03:24
  in ship fuel type last year which put fewer aerosols
• 1:03:28
  into the air, and a huge underwater volcano eruption. The volcano,
• 1:03:34
  the Hunga Tongua volcano, added one hundred and forty megatons
• 1:03:37
  of water vapor to the stratosphere, has increased the greenhouse
• 1:03:42
  effect in the stratosphere and has caused a lot of
• 1:03:44
  surface warming by radiating downwelling rate long wave radiation down
• 1:03:51
  to the surface. But it'll dissipate over the next five
• 1:03:54
  to ten years. Might be radiative, but it certainly isn't
• 1:03:57
  man made, and it certainly isn't climate and Liz I
• 1:04:00
  know much more about how that happens now, so we'll
• 1:04:03
  discuss it in the class, all right. Question five, What
• 1:04:07
  is heating the oceans? The Argo floats started measuring mid
• 1:04:11
  level ocean temperatures eighteen hundred meters under the surface in
• 1:04:15
  two thousand and four, and the result is about point
• 1:04:18
  zero four degree per decade in less than two decades.
• 1:04:22
  Back radiation from CO two can't warm the oceans. In fact,
• 1:04:26
  if anything, down welling infrared radiation actually cools the oceans
• 1:04:32
  a bit through evaporation. The only thing that explains this
• 1:04:35
  rise in ocean heat is more direct sunlight penetrating the water,
• 1:04:40
  fewer clouds, not more CO two would do that. Six.
• 1:04:46
  Why is an Antarctica heating? What's up with Antarctica. It's
• 1:04:50
  not obeying the rules. Antarctica is the driest place on Earth.
• 1:04:54
  CO two has risen there the same as everywhere else.
• 1:04:57
  You can see it in the background here. No change
• 1:04:59
  on that, and it's well mixed gas around the world.
• 1:05:02
  And yet temperatures on the Antarctic plateau are not moving
• 1:05:06
  with CO two. This is East ant This is the
• 1:05:08
  coldest weather station on Earth on the East Antarctic Plateau.
• 1:05:13
  Here's the actual South Pole station where the researchers are.
• 1:05:17
  They recorded their lowest ever surface temperature in twenty twenty one.
• 1:05:23
  No hockey stick shape here. This year Antarctica had a
• 1:05:29
  sudden stratospheric warming event. They might now it had happened
• 1:05:33
  a few months ago. The last one was in two
• 1:05:36
  thousand and two. Those events have been happening for millions
• 1:05:40
  of years. They're rare, but like they're more counterparts that
• 1:05:43
  we've studied in the Arctic. They are part of the
• 1:05:46
  natural cycle moving heat to the poles. That's because CO
• 1:05:50
  two doesn't cause any warming at the poles. Here's any
• 1:05:55
  I want to stay on this for a second. Two
• 1:05:57
  twenty sixteen paper in Nature Climate Chine, which is the
• 1:06:01
  official dogma of the Church of Climate, shows proxy and
• 1:06:05
  satellite temperature data for Antarctica going back two hundred years. Now,
• 1:06:09
  I want to read you their conclusion in the paper
• 1:06:13
  climate model simulations that include anthropogenic forcing are not compatible
• 1:06:18
  with the observed trends. This suggests that natural variability overwhelms
• 1:06:24
  the forced response in the observations. Yes, the IPCC does
• 1:06:29
  not cite that particular paper in their literature. And look
• 1:06:33
  at the tropics. Why aren't temperatures in the tropics increasing?
• 1:06:38
  This is Pamban, India. From a thermal point of view,
• 1:06:41
  stable tropical temperatures makes sense because it's covered by clouds
• 1:06:46
  and water vapor to the same degree all year round.
• 1:06:49
  If albedo's going down, you'd expect a slight rise over
• 1:06:52
  the last twenty years ago or so. And that's exactly
• 1:06:55
  what we see, a slight rise in temperature Papa, New Guinea.
• 1:07:00
  From a radiative point of view, we should see a
• 1:07:02
  hockey stick shape here, but the tropics are insensitive to
• 1:07:06
  changes in co two Seychell's Mahi Island. This is interesting
• 1:07:12
  has data since eighteen ninety and look, you can see
• 1:07:15
  about a one degree rise since nineteen eighty. That's from
• 1:07:19
  a remote weather station that they moved to the airport
• 1:07:25
  when they built it in nineteen seventy two so the
• 1:07:28
  weather people could more easily record temperatures near their offices.
• 1:07:33
  So this story is of stable temperatures followed by the
• 1:07:37
  growth of their tourism industry. This is an a thermal model.
• 1:07:41
  This is data manipulation model, which is also very popular.
• 1:07:46
  Here's a hockey stick shape showing sea level rise in
• 1:07:50
  the American Samoa island, where the UN Secretary General Antonio
• 1:07:54
  Guterrez last week made a video saying sea the level
• 1:07:58
  is rising fast. He went to American Samoa specifically because
• 1:08:05
  there was an earthquake in two thousand and nine and
• 1:08:08
  since then the island has been sinking at a rate
• 1:08:11
  of six inches every ten years. And Guterras said for
• 1:08:16
  the cameras, this problem that we see in Samoa will
• 1:08:20
  not stay in Samoa. It will be happening more and
• 1:08:23
  more everywhere in all coastal areas. So I'm guessing that
• 1:08:28
  means CO two is going to be causing a lot
• 1:08:30
  more earthquakes in the coastal areas around the world. If
• 1:08:36
  you only have the radiative model, it looks like CO
• 1:08:39
  two drives our climate. So here's a question. Look, if
• 1:08:42
  water vapor is the main greatehouse gas, oh, why doesn't
• 1:08:46
  the IPC say we just should reduce water vapor? Why
• 1:08:49
  are there billions of dollars available for entrepreneurs to suck
• 1:08:52
  water out of the atmosphere. Well, the answer to that
• 1:08:55
  is it's not about climate, and it never was. I'm
• 1:08:59
  going to leave the questions here, but there are many more.
• 1:09:03
  So now let's talk about the future. If you use
• 1:09:05
  a radiative model, then the Earth is going to cook
• 1:09:08
  over the next two hundred years because there's no way
• 1:09:10
  humans are going to reduce their CO two emissions. This
• 1:09:13
  graph is from Javier's book, shows about one hundred and
• 1:09:16
  twenty years in the past and one hundred and eighty
• 1:09:18
  in the future. The IPCC prediction is this jagged red
• 1:09:23
  line produced there by their models which are programmed to
• 1:09:26
  be sensitive to CO two. And this is the new
• 1:09:28
  four point five prediction because the previous eight point five
• 1:09:31
  prediction wasn't selling very well, so they shifted. Now we
• 1:09:35
  know CO two will continue going up until nuclear power
• 1:09:39
  becomes mainstream because and it will take hundreds of years
• 1:09:42
  to go back down. So the radiative people are sounding
• 1:09:46
  the alarm and selling solutions that undermine privacy, security, and
• 1:09:50
  the economy in exchange for authoritarian control over the weather.
• 1:09:56
  If you use a thermal model, you understand that solar
• 1:09:59
  variation and drives our climate via the oceans. The black
• 1:10:03
  line is Javier's prediction, and on this timescale he believes
• 1:10:08
  solar cycles, these are the sunspot cycles, will be the
• 1:10:11
  main driver of temperature. He thinks temperature will continue to
• 1:10:15
  rise for another fifty years and then it will start
• 1:10:17
  to descend after the Eddy solar cycle peaks. Here's the
• 1:10:21
  Eddy thousand year solar cycle peaks later this century and
• 1:10:27
  then start to descend back down. My prediction is a
• 1:10:31
  little different, shown in red here. I think that it
• 1:10:35
  won't quite be as hot as Javier predicts. I think
• 1:10:38
  the AMO and the Pedo will have the biggest influence.
• 1:10:41
  So the next AMO negative cycle, which starts just in
• 1:10:44
  about five or six years, will bring temperatures down or
• 1:10:48
  flat for about thirty five years, we'll have a little
• 1:10:51
  rest from all the alarming Guardian articles, and then the
• 1:10:55
  radiative alarmists will have three decades of new record. It's
• 1:11:00
  heat waves and fundraising. It'll be fantastic. Then there will
• 1:11:05
  be a drop in solar radiation around years twenty one
• 1:11:08
  hundred and twenty two hundred from the Fineman cycle. You
• 1:11:13
  see this Fineman cycle. That's a cycle of cycles which
• 1:11:17
  you can see. And you know who the Fineman cycles
• 1:11:19
  are named after, don't you, Mike, Liz, Richard Joan Fineman.
• 1:11:27
  You're Richard Feynman, who was a solar scientist, and she
• 1:11:32
  this this cycle of cycle is named after him. So
• 1:11:34
  at the end of every century, roughly temperatures come back down.
• 1:11:38
  That's why we had the pause before, you know, twenty
• 1:11:41
  years ago, and we'll haven't. We'll have more pauses in
• 1:11:44
  the future as we have lower lower sun spot activity.
• 1:11:50
  All right, So I believe ocean oscillations will continue to dominate,
• 1:11:53
  but the solar cycles are the big input to the
• 1:11:57
  to the ocean oscillations. So it's all based on solo variation,
• 1:12:00
  which the IPCC does not acknowledge. And these are of course,
• 1:12:04
  just educated guesses it'll turn out differently in reality are
• 1:12:08
  we going to like? At least we can look forward
• 1:12:10
  to more plant growth for the rest of the century
• 1:12:13
  because of increased CO two. Look at that. Look at
• 1:12:16
  how green it's going to get in the next fifty years.
• 1:12:20
  Fantastic longer term And we had a class on this,
• 1:12:25
  so this is a refresher. We will again have ice
• 1:12:28
  sheets coming down and covering most of North America and Europe.
• 1:12:33
  Although in twenty thousand years, I don't know if North
• 1:12:36
  America and Europe are going to be cold North America
• 1:12:38
  and Europe, but twenty thousand years ago it was very cold,
• 1:12:42
  and twenty two thousand years from now it will be
• 1:12:45
  very cold. Starting in about fifteen hundred years or so,
• 1:12:49
  temperatures and I think maybe maybe closer to one thousand
• 1:12:52
  temperatures will start to descend and the ice sheets will
• 1:12:55
  start marching down over the northern parts of the continents. Well,
• 1:13:01
  obliquity will be high enough in thirty two and thirty
• 1:13:05
  five thousand years to start a new interglacial like we're
• 1:13:08
  in now, but eccentricity at that time will still be
• 1:13:14
  too low for a strong one. But if you go
• 1:13:19
  out eighty thousand years, both obliquity and eccentricity will combine
• 1:13:23
  to make a really nice, comfortable, warm, great vacations interglacial
• 1:13:32
  climate a bit warmer than what we have today. And
• 1:13:35
  so the lesson is by your beachfront property when it's
• 1:13:38
  still underwater about seventy thousand years from now, and then
• 1:13:43
  just wait a few thousand years later, you'll be glad
• 1:13:45
  you did so. I've talked about two mental models for
• 1:13:50
  understanding climate, and it turns out you need both the
• 1:13:54
  radiative and the thermal model because they always work together.
• 1:13:58
  It depends on temperature, moisture, and air pressure, but there's
• 1:14:03
  always been about fifty part at least fifty parts per
• 1:14:07
  million of CO two to keep the surface at sea
• 1:14:10
  level about eighty watts per meter warmer than it would
• 1:14:14
  be without the CO two. And we need to study
• 1:14:16
  heat transport via temperature gradients since they drive the rest
• 1:14:21
  of our climate. And for that learning, I turned to
• 1:14:23
  two people who've helped me the most, and he May
• 1:14:27
  whose books and blogs are a great example of unbiased
• 1:14:29
  critical thinking. Many of us who are trying to figure
• 1:14:32
  these things out are flexible because many of our assumptions
• 1:14:35
  are wrong, and there's still a lot we don't know.
• 1:14:38
  The IPCC is frozen in their views and will do
• 1:14:41
  anything to drive their political agenda. At Javievinos, who has
• 1:14:46
  taught me so much, and I'm glad to help others
• 1:14:48
  learn from him. This first book is difficult, but not
• 1:14:53
  but is good for people who want the big picture
• 1:14:55
  without all the details. The one on the right that
• 1:14:57
  we use for the class is really a master's de
• 1:15:00
  read level climate science, so are The class begins on
• 1:15:07
  September eleventh at seven pm in the UK. That's with
• 1:15:11
  the tests, and Thursday the twelfth at six pm, and
• 1:15:15
  then again the actual class begins on September eighteenth and nineteenth,
• 1:15:21
  and you can register for all these classes at climate
• 1:15:25
  curious dot com. Did I screw it up too bad?
• 1:15:29
  Speaker 2: You did not?
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 3: But any general questions or it's been, it's been for
• 1:15:36
  your viewers, it's been over an hour. So if anybody's
• 1:15:41
  still here watching, we'll get maybe the last words for.
• 1:15:45
  Speaker 1: Mike, Well, David, I'm just gonna say thank you very much,
• 1:15:50
  and thank you Liz and also Joe for being here.
• 1:15:53
  Joe had to go unfortunately, but thank you Liz for
• 1:15:55
  being here.
• 1:15:57
  Speaker 3: Just thanks for lighting.
• 1:16:00
  Speaker 2: Thing that we should say about.
• 1:16:01
  Speaker 1: This, David, is that that anybody that did the previous
• 1:16:04
  course is going to be allowed to join for this
• 1:16:07
  one as well. And so I have no question, no
• 1:16:13
  doubt in my mind that there are going to be
• 1:16:15
  lots and lots of questions from people that have already
• 1:16:20
  completed the first the first attempt, and and I'm going
• 1:16:25
  to be very interested to see how the second go
• 1:16:28
  at it improves the situation for us all because I
• 1:16:33
  think it probably is going to take several attempts to
• 1:16:37
  get to.
• 1:16:38
  Speaker 2: The bottom of it.
• 1:16:41
  Speaker 1: The one question that I had was you said on
• 1:16:45
  a number of occasions, and you said that on the
• 1:16:49
  climate course that we did as well, that that once
• 1:16:53
  you get above one hundred parts from me and SEO two,
• 1:16:56
  that anything above that doesn't really make any difference. I
• 1:17:00
  don't want to go into any detail on this right
• 1:17:02
  now because we need to end, but maybe you could
• 1:17:04
  just sort of summarize why that is.
• 1:17:09
  Speaker 3: Sure. And this is hard, but I wanted to try
• 1:17:13
  to put it into my presentation that CO two can
• 1:17:18
  take incoming long wave radiation coming off the ground and
• 1:17:24
  thermalize it, right, but it can do that almost forever
• 1:17:28
  it is not saturated in that regard. It could because
• 1:17:31
  why because it only emits a photon every half a second,
• 1:17:35
  and billions of times a second, it's available to just
• 1:17:39
  absorb and then get hit, get struck by a molecule
• 1:17:43
  and transfer its energy like a billiard ball to that molecule.
• 1:17:47
  So let's say at sea level on a hot day,
• 1:17:51
  I don't know, somewhere, it's like a couple billion to
• 1:17:54
  one ratio, and and you can do more. All to
• 1:18:00
  do is get hit by a molecule and it just
• 1:18:02
  transfers its energy. So it's not really that it's not full.
• 1:18:08
  You know, it's pumped its capacity. CO two's capacity to
• 1:18:12
  pump heat into the atmosphere is practically unlimited, and we
• 1:18:19
  need it for the first fifty or one hundred parts
• 1:18:23
  per million or so to do that because there are
• 1:18:25
  places where there isn't enough water vapor, and it's been
• 1:18:29
  doing it for four billion years. And if you add
• 1:18:33
  more energy coming in through say more sunlight, hits more
• 1:18:38
  asphalt or whatever and then turns into thermal infrared photons,
• 1:18:44
  those photons can easily get thermalized by the CO two
• 1:18:48
  that we have, and adding more CO two does not increase.
• 1:18:52
  Could think of it as a capacity thing. It has
• 1:18:55
  tremendous capacity to continue to thermalize that energy, and more
• 1:19:00
  CO two won't won't do anything, won't change the capacity.
• 1:19:07
  Does that? It's hard. I probably need better words. We're
• 1:19:11
  better good analogy or something.
• 1:19:13
  Speaker 1: Yes, I mean I get I get what you're saying.
• 1:19:15
  But it is hard. It is hard.
• 1:19:17
  Speaker 2: It is Yeah. That's it's also.
• 1:19:20
  Speaker 3: Hard because we've been trained to believe that more CO
• 1:19:25
  two produces more heat and that's just simply not true.
• 1:19:33
  Or c O two won't do more. More incoming energy
• 1:19:35
  produces more heat. That's why. That's why the Earth has
• 1:19:40
  been warming since three hundred years ago in the Little
• 1:19:43
  Ice Age, and it will continue to warm next next
• 1:19:47
  century or so because we're going to be getting more
• 1:19:50
  energy in from the sun.
• 1:19:52
  Speaker 2: Then.
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's not really building up, it's leaving the
• 1:19:57
  system as it comes in. Okay, there's no tipping points
• 1:20:04
  and there's nothing scary, and the Atlantic decadal oscillation is
• 1:20:10
  not about to shut down. There is no shutdown. It's
• 1:20:15
  going to be business as usual and a little warmer
• 1:20:19
  over the next couple hundred years.
• 1:20:21
  Speaker 2: And who can complain about that? At the best time.
• 1:20:25
  Speaker 1: So okay, well, look David, Liz, thank you very much,
• 1:20:29
  and Joe as well. We will end it there for now,
• 1:20:33
  and let's see how this course goes. And I just
• 1:20:37
  would recommend anybody that has any interest in this sign
• 1:20:40
  up because it was a lot of fun the first time.
• 1:20:43
  I'm quite sure it's going to be more fun this time.
• 1:20:46
  So thank you very much both.
• 1:20:49
  Speaker 3: Thank you