CO2 cooling?

Andre

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/con...8582859~db=all



G. V. CHILINGAR, L. F. KHILYUK, and O. G. SOROKHTIN, 2008, Cooling of Atmosphere Due to CO2 Emission, Energy Sources, Part A, 30:1–9, 2008 ISSN: 1556-7036 print/1556-7230 online DOI: 10.1080/15567030701568727

Heads and tails of the study:
I can follow that logic. Discussion?

Count Iblis

I don't follow the logic at all. You need warming due to absorption of infrared radiation leading to expansion and more convection and then you get a net cooling? But if you get a net cooling you don't have the warming you need to explain the expansion and the extra convection you need. It is self contradictory.

ray b

are not the upper levels of the atmosphere near the tropopause cooler then expected
where you get the .2 atm
while the lower air near surface air is warmer

so hot or cooler may depend on how high up you are

Andre

Okay, Indeed, it's not happening on the same levels. Let me elaborate.

First some understanding about convection:

http://www.ace.mmu.ac.uk/eae/Weather...onvection.html

Note that convection is visible most of the time as it produces cumulus clouds, thunderstorms, tornadoes, hurricanes.

Hence, convection is a means of transporting and distributing heat-energy within the atmosphere, causing the higher levels to be warmer than the natural lapse rate from the black body temperature. Why? because convection due to solar heat only works at day time, not at night, when the Earth cools due to radiation. This only makes the air in contact with the surface cooler and hence more dense, which prevents convection backwards.

However, the warmer air that has convected to higher atmospheric layers also radiates out heat, basically 50% to the Earth and 50% to the universe, also cooling in the process, not only at daytime but also at night!

Now the article argues that more greenhouse gas enhances the transfer of heat energy from the surface to the lower layers of the atmosphere, which obviously gets warmer faster but this amplifies the rate of convection and also the rate of cooler air from aloft replacing the convecting air, neutralizing the warming effect at the surface.

At the higher altitudes however, the increase of concentration of greenhouse gasses makes the energy radiation out of the atmosphere more effective, which increases the cooling rate, which is supposed to balance the increase of energy at the surface.

What they don't even consider, is that the overal effect of the 24/7 day night operation of enhanced radiative cooling in the upper atmosphere should compensate more than for the daytime only increase of thermal energy convection. Hence increase of greenhouse gasses seems to cause a net stronger radiative cooling.

Does that help?

Notice again that the greenhouse effect hypotheses attributes the difference between blackbody temperature and actual temperature attributes to radiation, whereas in reality this difference is mainly caused due to the one way convection of energy, only up, not down, just like a vertical conveyor belt..

blimkie.k

I could see inscreased co2 in the atmosphere eventually having a cooling effect. According to global warming increased co2 in the atmosphere inscreases the greenhouse effect and increases temperature. If it is true that temperature is increasing will that not increase evaporation resulting in heavier cloud cover and rain. Also melting of ice caps should cool the ocean or slow down the currents which carry heat away from the equator. I suppose this could also have a negative impace on regions near the equator.

Anyways I live in south east ontario and this summer was not very summerish at all. It was not as hot as it should have been and it rained a hell of alot. We broke 100 year old rainfall records in some areas. There was hardly any days with clear blue skys. Even the nicest days were still filled with cumulus clouds. Shady or even rainy periods. I have been wondering if its just a freak summer or if it could have something to do with climate change.
Also the farmers almanac calls for a colder then normal winter. Just awesome.

vanesch

I think qualitative dynamics like this doesn't mean much, especially when different dynamics work in opposite directions: one should put them in a computational model and see how all this behaves. In fact, as long as one doesn't have a computational model that is 1) based upon sound physical basis (and not on empirical parameter fitting black box dynamics) and 2) corresponds to genuine experimental data, I think speculation is running loose.

Andre

But it's a start, since classic greenhouse effect ideas might underestimate the energy transport by convection, it's unlikely that the current models do justice to the effect of convection.

wolram

This may be totally naive, but why can not scientists fill a chamber with gasses in some proportions and measure it properties to reflect, absorb whatever light/heat.

Gokul43201

Because the physics is not scale invariant. Nor is there any kind of easy scaling theory for any of this.

Andre

Indeed, there isn't, moreover the processes are not linear. You could compare the double effect of heating and cooling with a tap opening a bit more (heating) to fill a bucket with a hole in the bottom, which we make a bit bigger (cooling). there is no way to tell what the water level is going to do, without quantification.

Although you could quantify both warming and cooling rates logaritmically proportional to the density of the greenhouse gas, but quantifying the increase in convection rate would be rather complicated especially when the role of water evaporation and condensation is taken into consideration.

It may be noted that problems in the basic mechanisms of the greenhouse idea have been signalled by Miskolsci here as well as Douglass et al here.

Bottom line however from the study remains that it makes a case that the atmosphere is primarily heated by convection instead of radiative effects. It appears that this would reduce the effect of radiative forcing heating or greenhouse effect considerably.

Andre

It may be recalled that also our cbacba had some issues with his model here.

It seems that Chilingar et al 2008 pretty much have answered that question, convection. Curiously enough I learned that already some four decades ago, going for my glider flying permit. However, there is very little mentioning of convection in the IPCC 4AR WG1 climate issues. Why?

billiards

But surely if CO2 becomes more important to heating at higher altitudes, then this would make the atmosphere more buoyantly stable. In other words, wouldn't increasing CO2 have the opposite effect to that proposed, ie, it would tend to inhibit convection??

Andre

The idea is, that it becomes more important at cooling the higher altitudes by radiating out the convected energy.

Alternately consider the null hypothesis, suppose that there was no greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. It would still be heated by conduction at the lowermost levels, which would still generate convection.

But since the convection is one way traffic only, without the possibility to loose that heat energy by radiation, the atmosphere would continue to heat up by convection until the lapse rate was to become stable, preventing further convection, then the atmosphere would be a lot warmer than without the radiative cooling at higher levels.

hence, in this simplified setting, it appears to be the greenhouse effect, the capability to radiate out the heat in the higher atmosphere, that keeps convection going.

billiards

Why is cooling by radiation more important at higher altitudes? I can see how the inverse would be true: that heating by absorption would be more important as a mechanism of heat transfer at higher altitudes, simply because there is no surface to conduct heat to the air at high altitudes. I guess what we really need to know is the net effect, in terms of relative importance, as to the effect of greenhouse gases to heat transfer as a function of altitude. If it turns out that air at high altitude emits radiation at a higher rate than it absorbs then this is unstable and convection may ensue.

Of course, we have convection, and we can explain it without the need to resort to this effect. Then we may reasonably ask, how important is this effect? What is the relative order of magnitude of this effect in relation to the standard model of atmospheric convection: hot air rises, expands and cools, advects, and sinks. Afterall, the concept of the Hadley cell, which fits global observations of convection patterns neatly, does not rely on this effect. This might suggest that this effect, if it exists at all, is negligible.

Andre

See the OP. Jack:

Andre

Another way of looking at it is measuring the temperature/altitude of the outgoing radiation emitted by CO2 and H2O

http://www.bom.gov.au/weather/satell...atpix.shtml#wV

So if these are the normal atmospheric levels that radiate IR energy out, as a consequence, these levels should logically be cooling.

billiards

Andre, the quote is meaningless in terms of my objections. I'm not objecting to the assertion that convection is important, and that if there were more convection we would lose heat quicker and thus cool, I agree with that point. I was objecting to whether the presence of CO2 actually had a sensible impact on atmospheric convection.


I'm sorry, you're going to have to spell this one out to me. I really don't follow your point.