A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
—Max Planck
I remember doing a high school experiment in one of my science classes. It had a big impact on me because I can’t say that I remember any other experiment as well. But it taught me an important scientific principle that I think few people appreciate.
The experiment had to do with the rather lofty-named concepts known as “Latent Heat of Fusion” and “Latent Heat of Vaporization.” All we did was took some ice, put it in a beaker, put the beaker on a hot plate, and put a thermometer inside the beaker to record the temperature. Since the ice started at a temperature below freezing, we watched the temperature slowly climb, then watched the ice melt, then continued to watch the temperature climb, then watched the water boil and evaporate, and then finally watched the temperature of the steam climb. Doesn’t sound all that exciting, I know.
But here’s the interesting observation that people don’t usually realize until they see it for themselves. When the ice was melting, the temperature stayed the same for a few minutes before starting to climb again once the ice was all melted. Likewise, when the water started to boil, the temperature remained at the boiling point until it was finally all converted to steam. After that, the temperature rose once again as the steam got hotter.
It turns out that as heat is added to something, that object heats up and its temperature climbs. But when it goes from one state to another—such as a solid to a liquid, or a liquid to a gas—then it takes heat to change that state, but during the phase transition, the temperature doesn’t climb because the heat energy is being used for the transition itself. That’s what’s referred to as the latent heat of fusion (i.e. melting) and the latent heat of vaporization (or boiling off and evaporating).
So what does this have to do global warming? Well, I’m always impressed that people forget that global refers to the entire planet. Some people overcome the hurdle of thinking only about their own backyard so that they understand that one hot summer in North America doesn’t prove global warming. (But ten hot summers in a row might.)
But another hurdle people have to think about is that our planet is made up of more than just land. In fact, nearly three-quarters is water, and of course there’s the atmosphere as well. Those three components—land, water and air—all absorb heat and all are affected by global warming.
So when some skeptics quibble about land surface temperatures and whether or not they confirm that global warming is indeed really happening, sometimes they forget that there’s an ocean (and an atmosphere) that’s warming as well. Studies have shown that the Earth’s heat content has been accumulating (i.e. a net gain of heat rather than a balanced equilibrium) at a rate of 190,260 gigawatts, with the vast majority of that energy going into our oceans for the simple reason that the oceans make up most of the planet.
Remember: Marty McFly needed 1.21 gigawatts to get “Back to the Future,” and that amount is actually more than most nuclear power generators produce today. That’s why he needed a bolt of lightning in 1955 to accomplish his task. 190,000 nuclear power generators dumping all of their heat into our oceans: that’s effectively what’s happening on our beloved planet.
Over the last fifty years, our oceans have been rising in temperature by about 0.1 degree Celsius per decade. It’s an even faster rise in the Southern Ocean near Antarctica where it’s climbing about 0.17 degrees Celsius per decade. (That’s because the poles are more sensitive to global warming than the rest of the planet.)
That’s a lot of heat to absorb to raise the temperatures of all of our oceans. And when you take into account that some of the absorbed heat on the planet is causing ice to melt at both poles as well as many of Earth’s glaciers—and that heat won’t cause temperature to rise as my old high school experiment helped to demonstrate—well, that’s a huge energy imbalance our planet is undergoing.
We’re not helping this problem. We’re hurting it. As we continue to dump greenhouse gases (more than 30 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, not to mention other gases such as methane), all we’re doing is adding more blankets of insulation to our atmosphere. We’re going to worsen this energy imbalance in the years to come.
As far as I’m concerned, it always comes back to understanding the science. If the adult population alive today can’t get their heads around some of these concepts, we can at least make sure we educate our children so they can get it right where we failed.
I monitor the temperature anomalies from all five reporting agencies. I average them to avoid bias. It is not hard. All five agencies report on the web. I graph them all. All of the links can be found in my stuff at ‘Climate Research’ or you can use your own search engine.
Anyone else actually paying attention is aware that the planet stopped warming over a decade ago. Meanwhile, the atmospheric carbon dioxide has increased since 2001 by 25% of the increase from 1800 to 2001. This demonstrates that we have been deceived by the IPCC and other Warmers and average global temperature is actually insensitive to the level of atmospheric CO2.
The area of the entire US is less than 2% of the area of the planet. It is really naïve to conclude that what is going on at some particular point is indicative of what the planet is doing.
Thanks for your comments, Dan. I’ve reviewed your information which is easily found on the internet. I have a few comments to offer in response.
1. Although you believe your model which you describe as “fairly simple” can accurately predict global temperatures, it seems to me that there are so many variables such as solar irradiance which are so unpredictable that no model can truly predict future global temperatures. I think climate is more complex than that. In fact, that’s one of the usual criticisms about predictions of temperature change and why climate scientists are “wrong:” the models haven’t been accurate enough.
2. If you look at the work of Foster and Rahmstorf published last year where they used five data sets and corrected for ENSO, solar irradiance and volcanic emissions, it clearly shows that global temperatures have been increasing over the last decade. You may choose to ignore these data, but if that’s the case it boils down to which data you want to pay attention to, and which data support your own conclusions.
3. I was also surprised at the blog post you decided to comment on. I’ve posted many times about record-breaking temperatures around the US which could reasonably be argued to be inconclusive as proof of global warming. (You point out the US is two percent of the area on the planet, but it’s greater than six percent of the land mass of the planet.) And I readily admit that outliers here and there do not predict anything, it’s the trends that matter (which given the records in the last decade I think support global warming rather than refute it.) But it’s as if you missed the point of the particular blog post because I comment more on heat absorption in the oceans and atmosphere, not just land. And also how heat energy can be used to melt ice without increasing planetary temperatures. I think your points would have been better in response to another blog post rather than this one.
Keep up your efforts. I hope to see your work published in a peer-reviewed journal in the future.
Thanks for the review. It deserves a much more detailed response than I have time for right now so will provide it later. I will look in to the Foster & Rahmstorf study.
Dr. Brad,
Thanks again for looking at my stuff at http://climaterealists.c…tid=145&linkbox=true. There is a lot there. The dates are indicative of the process of increased understanding.
I try to be careful to only talk about average global temperature and not weather or even climate. I agree that climate is more complex. It involves rainfall, the effects of ocean cycles (PDO, ENSO, AMO and possibly other named oscillations), jet streams, etc. that I do not address. Solar radiance (also called Total Solar Irradiance or TSI) doesn’t change much, only about 0.1%, and refers to the direct rate at which radiation from the sun reaches earth. The influence of variation in TSI is complimentary to what my equation says but is essentially insignificant. The key discovery expressed in my equation is the time-integral of sunspot numbers which acts as a proxy for energy retained by the planet. The reason why this works was described starting on page 15 in the pdf made public 4/10/10.
I talk about several things that are wrong with the ‘consensus’ (like failing to identify thermalization) and the type of models that they use (they are OK for up to a few days but then fade into computational ‘noise’) in the pdf made public 8/11/10. A further discussion of why sunspots matter is in the pdf made public 6/21/11.
It appears from this “Foster and Rahmstorf (2011) also makes two more assumptions that have little basis in reality. They assume the rise in surface temperatures since 1979 was linear and that it was due to anthropogenic factors.” as quoted from Tisdale here http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/14/tisdale-on-foster-and-rahmstorf-take-2/ that they had assumed what I was trying to discover. I think this is the essence of the mistake made by the consensus, they assumed the answer and then set out to prove it.
Since I refer to average GLOBAL temperatures I submit that the 2% applies. As I said above, I average the published reports from the five agencies to avoid bias. They have been fairly close to each other as shown on page 9 of the pdf made public 11/24/11. The current graph shows 0.475 average for 2011 and 0.485 so far in 2012.
One of the things that I have determined is that the effective thermal capacitance of the oceans is about 30 times everything else. This is indeed a water planet.
I completely agree that trends are what matter. That huge thermal capacitance of the oceans absolutely forbids the month-to-month variations of average global temperature that the agencies report. I have done some statistical fussing with that and conclude that there is a random variation component of these numbers with a one standard deviation of about +/- 0.1C.
As to the trend of average global temperature for the latest decade, here are the temperature anomaly averages from the five reporting agencies:
2001 0.3473
2002 0.4278
2003 0.4245
2004 0.3641
2005 0.4663
2006 0.3930
2007 0.4030
2008 0.2598
2009 0.4022
2010 0.5298
2011 0.3317
(the value for 2011 is different from that given above because the number above was offset (no change in shape) to allow comparison with the other values on the graph.
The slope of the trend line through these values is zero. Meanwhile the CO2 level increased by 25% of the increase from 1800 to 2001.
Ice melts because it is warmer than it was when the water froze. Ice is melting and water is freezing at different points on the planet. Certainly more ice has been melting than water freezing since the depths of the LIA and especially so since the last glaciation which ended about 12000 years ago. Of course if more ice melts than water freezes the planet has gained energy. But it is still not warming as demonstrated by average global temperature measurements.
Wow Dan, that’s a lot of information to digest. Thanks for passing it on and I’ll review it thoroughly. I may have follow up questions for you, I hope you don’t mind.
I think that the average American, Canadian should conduct the same science lesson.
We really don’t see what’s happening, we’re too busy in our jobs, our daily lives to consider what harm we’re doing.
I sometimes think it will only take a serious disaster to happen before the “people” wake up before it’s too late.
I commend you on your efforts Dr B.
We need more people like you
It’s 60 odd years since I did the Latent Heat experiments at school, before climate change was being discussed even though CO2 was known to be a heat trapping gas in the 1800′s or before, the experiments we did then made me aware that if ice is melting around the world a lot of heat is having to be absorbed, and when it runs into cubic miles it’s an enormous amount of energy, so I fully agree with your very good article.
Thanks Bryan.
Thanks so much for your comments, Bryan, they’re very much appreciated. And I agree: if everyone had a better appreciation of what amounts to some basic high school science, there would be much more being done about this problem.