Heat of Confusion
I wanted to reply in some detail to Lumo's comment on my last post, so I'm doing so in a new post. Lumo's comments and my responses:
Student – The student, who is flattered to be addressed as such even though he had a PhD before Lumo was born, disagrees. To review:
My numbers showed that the seasonal heat transfer to and from the Northern hemisphere (NH) oceans is more than 25 times that to and from the Arctic sea ice. The major NH climate moderating heat sink is the ocean.
Student – What does this refer to? I don’t think it refers to anything in my post.
Student – Don’t try to change the subject. We are talking about the NH. The South Pole is on a mountainous continent, has km thick glaciers, and relatively little sea ice – it is a very different case.
More to the point, sunlight does not melt the Polar sea ice. The net radiation budget for the North Polar Cap is negative for all but a tiny fraction of the year, and almost zero for that period (at the South Pole it’s negative all year around). The melting of the sea ice in summer is almost entirely due to heat transfer from the atmosphere, air that was heated outside the Polar Regions. More than an order of magnitude down is an oceanic transfer, which consists mainly of replacing exported sea ice (icebergs) with water at the same temperature. The foregoing is the reason that it makes no sense to consider polar heating and melting in isolation – essentially all the heating and melting is a result of sunlight falling on the rest of the planet.
CIP - Here I feel the role of student is no longer appropriate – a stern disciplinarian is required. Your claim is not honest. You have repeatedly accused the models of neglecting effects that they in fact consider. Dishonesty is a serious fault in anyone and intolerable in a scientist – much worse than stupidity. You have extrapolated from a perhaps typographical error of one scientist in a casual blogversation to a condemnation of a whole systematic science.
Lumo – “ok, let me talk to you as to a student. You can't say that anything in the actual numbers has proved any point that Connolley has ever made because such a conclusion is nothing else than faulty logic.”
Student – The student, who is flattered to be addressed as such even though he had a PhD before Lumo was born, disagrees. To review:
Connor: “. . . the Arctic sea ice, the northern hemisphere's major "heat sink" that moderates climatic extremes.“
Connolley: “No. The arctic sea ice *isn't* a major heat sink . . .”
My numbers showed that the seasonal heat transfer to and from the Northern hemisphere (NH) oceans is more than 25 times that to and from the Arctic sea ice. The major NH climate moderating heat sink is the ocean.
Lumo - The main quantitative calculation has shown that the truth was closer to me by 3 orders of magnitude. The latent heat is simply 1,000 times greater than what Connolley feels and estimates to be the case.
Student – What does this refer to? I don’t think it refers to anything in my post.
Lumo - In the Polar Regions that I will count together, one needs one year of systematic inflow of the sunshine to melt the sea ice. If the inflow us changed by 1% by a changed CO2 concentration, and again I am pretty cavalier, it speeds up the melting processes by something like 1%. Whatever statistics you imagine, you will need centuries for significant meltdown caused by human activity.
Student – Don’t try to change the subject. We are talking about the NH. The South Pole is on a mountainous continent, has km thick glaciers, and relatively little sea ice – it is a very different case.
More to the point, sunlight does not melt the Polar sea ice. The net radiation budget for the North Polar Cap is negative for all but a tiny fraction of the year, and almost zero for that period (at the South Pole it’s negative all year around). The melting of the sea ice in summer is almost entirely due to heat transfer from the atmosphere, air that was heated outside the Polar Regions. More than an order of magnitude down is an oceanic transfer, which consists mainly of replacing exported sea ice (icebergs) with water at the same temperature. The foregoing is the reason that it makes no sense to consider polar heating and melting in isolation – essentially all the heating and melting is a result of sunlight falling on the rest of the planet.
Lumo - All the catastrophic predictions that they made are unsupported by a good calculation. They're always based on a silly error like this one by Connolley - huge overestimate of the speed how various processes in nature can change in response to various changes of the environment.
CIP - Here I feel the role of student is no longer appropriate – a stern disciplinarian is required. Your claim is not honest. You have repeatedly accused the models of neglecting effects that they in fact consider. Dishonesty is a serious fault in anyone and intolerable in a scientist – much worse than stupidity. You have extrapolated from a perhaps typographical error of one scientist in a casual blogversation to a condemnation of a whole systematic science.
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