Greta Thunberg to Congress: ‘You’re not trying hard enough. Sorry’

[bver_hunter]

Those who have exploited this young girl should be utterly ashamed. Pure child abuse. Sickening.

Yes, the right wingers are the sickening ones with all their online abuses and insults of this autistic child. Ultra sickening that anyone would agree with them!!

 

[Frankfooter]

Can you point to any evidence of people changing their lifestyle
upon hearing her talks of the emergency of climate change?

Speaking for myself I am walking to Metro after typing
this comment for my groceries. It is only a 15 min walk
but I feel better not having to drive. I used to walk to a
Food Basic nearby which was only 5 min walk from
my residence. Unfortunately the plaza where it was
located was demolished for construction of more
high rising condo in an already over-developed area.

More awareness = more action.

The kids shaming the adults are a strong message.

 

[onthebottom]

She already visited Montreal. Maybe you missed it!!

It’s fair to say I missed it, some of you should be looking to teenagers for policy advice, not much different than the PM from an experience perspective.

 

[JohnLarue]

No, I mean that its incomprehensible.

To a scientific know nothing perhaps, however it is factually correct

Since water vapour mostly reacts to changes in temperature its doesn't drive change. While CO2 does put a forcing effect that is clearly noted by comparing global temp to CO2 levels on charts.

Look I will spell this out for you slowly
Water vapour absorbs Infrared radiation as does CO2
It absorbs to a greater extend and it is far more abundant than CO2 in the atmosphere
Even after it rains there are still clouds in the sky, so the average water Vapour content in the atmosphere is always greater than CO2
Therefore it is the dominate greenhouse gas and by far

You seem to think you can redefine laws of physics because you do not understand them

Where is the physical law that states because water vapour concentration changes with temperature that water vapour can not absorb radiation or trap heat via the greenhouse effect?
Nowhere. that law of physics does not exist except in the mind of a scientific know nothing

Where on earth did you come up with that cuckoo idea?

It is a well known fact that absorbance is a logarithmic function of concentration log Io/I = E X L X C
This shows you have not at all followed along as this was covered many posts ago
http://joannenova.com.au/2010/02/4-carbon-dioxide-is-already-absorbing-almost-all-it-can/

Pay attention or get lost

Your statement 1. fails because you are trying to claim that water vapour is changing the global temperature in some way,

I make no such claim
Your assumption is any and all changes in temperature are due to the greenhouse effect. You make that assumption with out any empirical proof
Water vapor is the dominate greenhouse gas, CO2 is a bit player
Climate has been and will continue to change and climate is an extremely complex , nonlinear chaotic system
Which you do not understand at all
Attempting to state that one specific compound is the control knob for such an extremely complex , nonlinear chaotic system is absurd and unbelievably naive

 

[Frankfooter]

Look I will spell this out for you slowly
Water vapour absorbs Infrared radiation as does CO2
It absorbs to a greater extend and it is far more abundant than CO2 in the atmosphere
Even after it rains there are still clouds in the sky, so the average water Vapour content in the atmosphere is always greater than CO2
Therefore it is the dominate greenhouse gas and by far

Again, you miss the point.
Sure, water vapour is the dominant greenhouse gas but since it act as feedback effect on the climate it doesn't add to warming. And that has nothing to do with the fact that CO2 is a forcing effect on the climate, where when you add more CO2 to the atmosphere it warms more. The fact that there is more water vapour in the air is irrelevant to the fact that adding more CO2 to the atmosphere will warm the planet while adding more water vapour will do almost nothing.


Forcing vs feedback effect.
You still don't get it.

It is a well known fact that absorbance is a logarithmic function of concentration log Io/I = E X L X C
This shows you have not at all followed along as this was covered many posts ago
http://joannenova.com.au/2010/02/4-carbon-dioxide-is-already-absorbing-almost-all-it-can/

Holy shit, another 10 year old incredibly ridiculous claim, written by someone under the pay of Shell, that you fell for!
Now, aside from attacking her personally for accepting oil money, its worth noting that Jonova does not back up your claim that CO2 is too saturated to absorb more IR.
She has some totally wacko theories, by the way.
She says the planet hasn't warmed since 2001, for one.

Seriously, are all your junk arguments really 10 years old?

Here, all your claims were answered way back in 2007 by realclimate.

The simple physics explanations for the greenhouse effect that you find on the internet are often quite wrong. These well-meaning errors can promote confusion about whether humanity is truly causing global warming by adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Some people have been arguing that simple physics shows there is already so much CO2 in the air that its effect on infrared radiation is "saturated"— meaning that adding more gas can make scarcely any difference in how much radiation gets through the atmosphere, since all the radiation is already blocked. And besides, isn’t water vapor already blocking all the infrared rays that CO2 ever would?


The arguments do sound good, so good that in fact they helped to suppress research on the greenhouse effect for half a century. In 1900, shortly after Svante Arrhenius published his pathbreaking argument that our use of fossil fuels will eventually warm the planet, another scientist, Knut Ångström, asked an assistant, Herr J. Koch, to do a simple experiment. He sent infrared radiation through a tube filled with carbon dioxide, containing somewhat less gas in total then would be found in a column of air reaching to the top of the atmosphere. That’s not much, since the concentration in air is only a few hundred parts per million. Herr Koch did his experiments in a 30cm long tube, though 250cm would have been closer to the right length to use to represent the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Herr Koch reported that when he cut the amount of gas in the tube by one-third, the amount of radiation that got through scarcely changed. The American meteorological community was alerted to Ångström’s result in a commentary appearing in the June, 1901 issue of Monthly Weather Review, which used the result to caution "geologists" against adhering to Arrhenius’ wild ideas.

Still more persuasive to scientists of the day was the fact that water vapor, which is far more abundant in the air than carbon dioxide, also intercepts infrared radiation. In the infrared spectrum, the main bands where each gas blocked radiation overlapped one another. How could adding CO2 affect radiation in bands of the spectrum that H2O (not to mention CO2 itself) already made opaque? As these ideas spread, even scientists who had been enthusiastic about Arrhenius’s work decided it was in error. Work on the question stagnated. If there was ever an “establishment” view about the greenhouse effect, it was confidence that the CO2 emitted by humans could not affect anything so grand as the Earth’s climate.

Nobody was interested in thinking about the matter deeply enough to notice the flaw in the argument. The scientists were looking at warming from ground level, so to speak, asking about the radiation that reaches and leaves the surface of the Earth. Like Ångström, they tended to treat the atmosphere overhead as a unit, as if it were a single sheet of glass. (Thus the “greenhouse” analogy.) But this is not how global warming actually works.

What happens to infrared radiation emitted by the Earth’s surface? As it moves up layer by layer through the atmosphere, some is stopped in each layer. To be specific: a molecule of carbon dioxide, water vapor or some other greenhouse gas absorbs a bit of energy from the radiation. The molecule may radiate the energy back out again in a random direction. Or it may transfer the energy into velocity in collisions with other air molecules, so that the layer of air where it sits gets warmer. The layer of air radiates some of the energy it has absorbed back toward the ground, and some upwards to higher layers. As you go higher, the atmosphere gets thinner and colder. Eventually the energy reaches a layer so thin that radiation can escape into space.

What happens if we add more carbon dioxide? In the layers so high and thin that much of the heat radiation from lower down slips through, adding more greenhouse gas molecules means the layer will absorb more of the rays. So the place from which most of the heat energy finally leaves the Earth will shift to higher layers. Those are colder layers, so they do not radiate heat as well. The planet as a whole is now taking in more energy than it radiates (which is in fact our current situation). As the higher levels radiate some of the excess downwards, all the lower levels down to the surface warm up. The imbalance must continue until the high levels get hot enough to radiate as much energy back out as the planet is receiving.

Any saturation at lower levels would not change this, since it is the layers from which radiation does escape that determine the planet’s heat balance. The basic logic was neatly explained by John Tyndall back in 1862: "As a dam built across a river causes a local deepening of the stream, so our atmosphere, thrown as a barrier across the terrestrial [infrared] rays, produces a local heightening of the temperature at the Earth’s surface."

Even a simple explanation can be hard to grasp in all its implications, and scientists only worked those out piecewise. First they had to understand that it was worth the trouble to think about carbon dioxide at all. Didn’t the fact that water vapor thoroughly blocks infrared radiation mean that any changes in CO2 are meaningless? Again, the scientists of the day got caught in the trap of thinking of the atmosphere as a single slab. Although they knew that the higher you went, the drier the air got, they only considered the total water vapor in the column.

The breakthroughs that finally set the field back on the right track came from research during the 1940s. Military officers lavishly funded research on the high layers of the air where their bombers operated, layers t**********sed by the infrared radiation they might use to detect enemies. Theoretical analysis of absorption leaped forward, with results confirmed by laboratory studies using techniques orders of magnitude better than Ångström could deploy. The resulting developments stimulated new and clearer thinking about atmospheric radiation.

Among other things, the new studies showed that in the frigid and rarified upper atmosphere where the crucial infrared absorption takes place, the nature of the absorption is different from what scientists had assumed from the old sea-level measurements. Take a single molecule of CO2 or H2O. It will absorb light only in a set of specific wavelengths, which show up as thin dark lines in a spectrum. In a gas at sea-level temperature and pressure, the countless molecules colliding with one another at different velocities each absorb at slightly different wavelengths, so the lines are broadened and overlap to a considerable extent. Even at sea level pressure, the absorption is concentrated into discrete spikes, but the gaps between the spikes are fairly narrow and the "valleys" between the spikes are not terribly deep. (see Part II) None of this was known a century ago. With the primitive infrared instruments available in the early 20th century, scientists saw the absorption smeared out into wide bands. And they had no theory to suggest anything different.

Measurements done for the US Air Force drew scientists’ attention to the details of the absorption, and especially at high altitudes. At low pressure the spikes become much more sharply defined, like a picket fence. There are gaps between the H2O lines where radiation can get through unless blocked by CO2 lines. Moreover, researchers had become acutely aware of how very dry the air gets at upper altitudes — indeed the stratosphere has scarcely any water vapor at all. By contrast, CO2 is well mixed all through the atmosphere, so as you look higher it becomes relatively more significant. The main points could have been understood already in the 1930s if scientists had looked at the greenhouse effect closely (in fact one physicist, E.O. Hulbert, did make a pretty good calculation, but the matter was of so little interest that nobody noticed.)

As we have seen, in the higher layers where radiation starts to slip through easily, adding some greenhouse gas must warm the Earth regardless of how the absorption works. The changes in the H2O and CO2 absorption lines with pressure and temperature only shift the layers where the main action takes place. You do need to take it all into account to make an exact calculation of the warming. In the 1950s, after good infrared data and digital computers became available, the physicist Gilbert Plass took time off from what seemed like more important research to work through lengthy calculations of the radiation balance, layer by layer in the atmosphere and point by point in the spectrum. He announced that adding CO2 really could cause a degree or so of global warming. Plass’s calculations were too primitive to account for many important effects. (Heat energy moves up not only by radiation but by convection, some radiation is blocked not by gas but by clouds, etc.) But for the few scientists who paid attention, it was now clear that the question was worth studying. Decades more would pass before scientists began to give the public a clear explanation of what was really going on in these calculations, drawing attention to the high, cold layers of the atmosphere. Even today, many popularizers try to explain the greenhouse effect as if the atmosphere were a single sheet of glass.

In sum, the way radiation is absorbed only matters if you want to calculate the exact degree of warming — adding carbon dioxide will make the greenhouse effect stronger regardless of saturation in the lower atmosphere. But in fact, the Earth’s atmosphere is not even close to being in a state of saturation. With the primitive techniques of his day, Ångström got a bad result, as explained in the Part II . Actually, it’s not clear that he would have appreciated the significance of his result even if he had gotten the correct answer for the way absorption varies with CO2 amount. From his writing, it’s a pretty good guess that he’d think a change of absorption of a percent or so upon doubling CO2 would be insignificant. In reality, that mere percent increase, when combined properly with the "thinning and cooling" argument, adds 4 Watts per square meter to the planets radiation balance for doubled CO2. That’s only about a percent of the solar energy absorbed by the Earth, but it’s a highly important percent to us! After all, a mere one percent change in the 280 Kelvin surface temperature of the Earth is 2.8 Kelvin (which is also 2.8 Celsius). And that’s without even taking into account the radiative forcing from all those amplifying feedbacks, like those due to water vapor and ice-albedo.

In any event, modern measurements show that there is not nearly enough CO2 in the atmosphere to block most of the infrared radiation in the bands of the spectrum where the gas absorbs. That’s even the case for water vapor in places where the air is very dry. (When night falls in a desert, the temperature can quickly drop from warm to freezing. Radiation from the surface escapes directly into space unless there are clouds to block it.)

So, if a skeptical friend hits you with the "saturation argument" against global warming, here’s all you need to say: (a) You’d still get an increase in greenhouse warming even if the atmosphere were saturated, because it’s the absorption in the thin upper atmosphere (which is unsaturated) that counts (b) It’s not even true that the atmosphere is actually saturated with respect to absorption by CO2, (c) Water vapor doesn’t overwhelm the effects of CO2 because there’s little water vapor in the high, cold regions from which infrared escapes, and at the low pressures there water vapor absorption is like a leaky sieve, which would let a lot more radiation through were it not for CO2, and (d) These issues were satisfactorily addressed by physicists 50 years ago, and the necessary physics is included in all climate models.

Then you can heave a sigh, and wonder how much different the world would be today if these arguments were understood in the 1920’s, as they could well have been if anybody had thought it important enough to think through.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/06/a-saturated-gassy-argument/

 

[canada-man]

 

[canada-man]

 

[jcpro]

I thought that I should watch her speech. What a mistake! I came away bewildered and shaken! That was a lot of hate from a clearly disturbed young girl. And I've seen that before from virulent anti semites and the true believers in communism. G-d forbid that people like her will ever take over. They will grind their opponents into hamburgers. Literally.

 

[Frankfooter]

I thought that I should watch her speech. What a mistake! I came away bewildered and shaken! That was a lot of hate from a clearly disturbed young girl. And I've seen that before from virulent anti semites and the true believers in communism. G-d forbid that people like her will ever take over. They will grind their opponents into hamburgers. Literally.

You think she should be happy that nobody is punishing or stopping the 100 corporations that cause 71% of climate change emissions?
Just 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions, study says

She's mad at people like you, CM and Mr Science. For refusing to fix the biggest problem humans have ever created.
Scientists told us acid rain was bad, gov't regulations fixed it.
Scientists told us the ozone layer was in trouble, gov't regulations fixed it.
Scientists told us tobacco killed us, tobacco industry paid lobbyists to stop gov't, so it took decades.
Scientists told us CO2 is changing the climate, the oil industry has paid lobbyists to spread disinformation that you use to try to stop the problem from being fixed.

 

[jcpro]

You think she should be happy that nobody is punishing or stopping the 100 corporations that cause 71% of climate change emissions?
Just 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions, study says

She's mad at people like you, CM and Mr Science. For refusing to fix the biggest problem humans have ever created.
Scientists told us acid rain was bad, gov't regulations fixed it.
Scientists told us the ozone layer was in trouble, gov't regulations fixed it.
Scientists told us tobacco killed us, tobacco industry paid lobbyists to stop gov't, so it took decades.
Scientists told us CO2 is changing the climate, the oil industry has paid lobbyists to spread disinformation that you use to try to stop the problem from being fixed.

Whatever. My only question is: will she murder someone or herself? I bet she'll set herself on fire.

 

[Frankfooter]

Whatever. My only question is: will she murder someone or herself? I bet she'll set herself on fire.

Is that what you think Exxon et al are planning?
Tar and feather, then burn her for complaining about the science they knew about 40 years ago?

 

[nottyboi]

I don't see how this young lady has all the answers.

 

[nottyboi]

So whats your point Canadaman? The Chinese and Indians should return to the grinding poverty they lived before the turn of the centuary?

 

[jcpro]

Is that what you think Exxon et al are planning?
Tar and feather, then burn her for complaining about the science they knew about 40 years ago?

Roflmfao!!! You people REALLY don't see it? She's clearly mentally distressed.

 

[onthebottom]

The two policy leads are a highschool sophomore and a bartender. Think about that.

 

[Frankfooter]

Roflmfao!!! You people REALLY don't see it? She's clearly mentally distressed.

She's clearly upset that people like you are screwing up the planet for her and her generation.
And instead of discussing it all you can do is try to belittle a teenager.

 

[onthebottom]

She's clearly upset that people like you are screwing up the planet for her and her generation.
And instead of discussing it all you can do is try to belittle a teenager.

It’s funny that some people think she understands any of this....

 

[dickydoem]

Those who have exploited this young girl should be utterly ashamed. Pure child abuse. Sickening.

She may be being exploited but she has become famous and she will reap the riches that come with it.

 

[canada-man]

Greta Thunberg is a distant relative of Svante Arrhenius, father of the global warming delusion. And her father (Svante) was named after him.

Arrhenius believed that electrocuting children made them smarter.






He predicted Siberia would become the greatest farming country on earth.



And he said the world would run out of oil in the middle of the last century, so we would have to use solar.

 

[jcpro]

She's clearly upset that people like you are screwing up the planet for her and her generation.
And instead of discussing it all you can do is try to belittle a teenager.

There's nothing to discuss, not with her, anyway. I watched her speech. It was anger and emotions divorced from reason. As for the predictions of the impending doom, those will turn out exactly the same way the predictions made in the past turned out. She might even notice, living in the Scandinavian apex society, but I doubt it. She's the real believer.