Richard Alley: Climate sensitivity is 16-20 degrees

Richard Alley (on the picture) is a mentally ill hippie so it shouldn't be surprising that he became a professor of climatology at Penn State University, the same place where Michael Mann cooked his fraudulent hockey stick pseudoscience. Michael Mann remains at large.

After some years, Justin Gillis, a watermelon blogger at the New York Times, asked Alley about his research:

Climate Change and ‘Balanced’ Coverage

Alley mentioned that he gets annoyed if people think that 5-6 °F could be an overestimate because such an opinion reduces the holiness of the global warming cult. How does he fight against this undesirable heresy? Well, he invents a new number that could play the role of those 5-6 °F. What is it?

According to Mr Alley, a doubling of the CO2 concentration produces a 16 °F warming. The number was originally reported as 18-20 °F but the figure became a subject of a "correction". Now, despite the Obamacare, the new American socialist healthcare system wasn't able to offer Mr Alley a place in a psychiatric asylum that he unquestionably deserves.





Now, is it really difficult to see that whoever believes in a 16-20 °F of warming per doubling is an uncontrollable lunatic? Do you need to be a top researcher to see this fact? I don't think so.

16 °F of temperature difference translates to 9 °C or so. Can you obtain this warming by doubling the CO2 emissions? Well, we're adding 1.8 ppm - almost 2 ppm - into the atmosphere. At the current rates, the CO2 concentration is doubling in 150 years or so, depending on what you take as the base point. We should see 9 °C of greenhouse warming in 150 years or 6 °C of warming in 100 years.

Is that plausible that the observed data are consistent with the rate of warming that is 6 °C per century? Well, the answer is obviously no. We've seen a warming that is 10 times smaller. So if there is a warming trend by 6 °C per century, there must exist a source of cooling that cancels the warming with an accuracy that is nearly perfect.

This source of cooling would have to be adjusted to the rate of CO2-induced warming at every moment because the temperature change was hugely smaller than those 6 °C per century in every decade in recent centuries. Now, the source of cooling would have to be considered a complete mystery. No one has an idea what it could be and why it should be adjusted to agree with the hypothetical warming.

Even if it existed, it would be reasonable to assume that the source of cooling could remain adjusted to the warming rate so that the total warming would continue as we know it. And the warming was just 0.6 °C in the last century or 1.4 °C per century in the last 30 years. There is no known way, not even a cherry-picked way, to obtain 6 °C per century from anything that is linked to the empirical observations. Why would a sane person believe such a completely idiotic conspiracy theory?

A huge climate sensitivity of this kind predicts many other things and none of them has been observed. A huge climate sensitivity is undoubtedly one of the most easily excluded hypotheses in the climate science. To deny the fact that the climate sensitivity can't be that high, one has to deny pretty much every known fact about physics, the climate, and its history.

As Richard Lindzen has said, people such as Mr Alley are acting just like little children who are hiding in the closet, trying to find out how much he can scare other children.

Why should they stop at 20 °F? One can go further. Alley's comrade hippie Lee Smolin could apply his "knowledge" of quantum gravity to find out a better warming rate. What is the upper limit for the total warming by fossil fuels are implied by quantum gravity?

Well, yes, it is the Planck temperature, the highest temperature that is possible according to the laws of physics:

T_Planck = m_Planckc² / k_Boltzmann =
= sqrt(hbar.c⁵/G.k²) =
= 1.42 x 10³² Kelvin

That's a lot of degrees. In the path integral approach to quantum mechanics, thermal calculations may be evaluated by considering a periodic Euclidean time. For the Planck temperature, the length of the thermal circle becomes as short as the Planck length, the shortest distance that is possible according to the laws of geometry.

There is another simple way to encounter the Planck temperature.

When black holes Hawking-evaporate, they're getting smaller and hotter. And right before they emit the last quanta and completely disappear, their temperature is comparable to the Planck temperature, too. You can't ever reach a higher temperature. If you tried to squeeze too much energy into too few degrees of freedom, you would create a black hole, anyway. And its thermal properties are known; the temperature is maximized for tiny black holes.

So they have 31 additional orders of magnitude in their mission to increase the climate sensitivity. But shouldn't the taxpayer, at some point, move his ass and pay the medication for these ultralunatics' troubled brains?

Stop the ACLU blog dared to disagree with the statement that the climate sensitivity could have been above 15 degrees Fahrenheit as well. The author and his relatives were instantly attacked by a horde of aggressive communist guerrillas. Shouldn't there be a moment when the NATO begins to physically defend decent NATO citizens from the environmentalist terrorists?

Bonus



Newest news from the Israeli Latma TV. Jihad Bells start at 3:12. An interview with an environmentalist scientist who reports that Tel Aviv has been submerged under the sea begins at 6:30. The planet is approaching the boiling point; the more it heats up, the cooler it gets. ;-)