“With increasing global greenhouse gas emissions, and no clear internationally-agreed path for emission reductions, we are faced with a global climate that will be at least two degrees warmer than today in 70 years’ time.“
Only in the virtual realm of PlayStation® climatology. In the real world we have no indication temperature has responded to the rising atmospheric greenhouse gas content of the last decade or so.
The need to adapt to climate change is being recognised at different levels of government in Australia, with the Australian Government requesting the Productivity Commission to undertake a review of Barriers to Effective Climate Change Adaptation and the Victorian Government acknowledging the need to focus on adapting to climate risks in their response to the review of the 2010 Climate Change Act.
In the scientific community, a recent international conference held in the USA considered the challenges of adapting to climate change and this week the Victorian Centre for Climate Change Adaptation Research (VCCAR) and the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility (NCCARF) hosted state and national conferences that will present recent research and discuss how it can improve adaptation policy and practice.
However, these activities in the policy and research spheres are tending to produce more questions than answers, as policy makers consider how to address future climate risks.
Oh bats, even if the “global average temperature” does go up 2 degrees, I don’t think we’ll have to do much to adapt to it. Slightly shorter and warmer winters, longer growing seasons, slightly different weather patterns. Changing over 70 years. I think we can keep up.
I am opposed to adapting to left wing Commie bull shit. If they want the heat higher, burn them at the stake.
At the Engineeringtoolbox it lists thermal conductivity for some common materials. A few examples at 25 degrees C :-
Insulation materials – 0.035 – 0.16
Air, athmosphere (gas) – 0.024
Carbon dioxide (gas) – 0.0146
Water, vapor (steam) – 0.016 – at 125 degrees C
The main greenhouse gases seem to have no special properties other than being slightly better insulators than air. I can’t for the life of me figure out where this supposed powerful backradiation ability comes from as I can’t for the life of me figure out how these conductivities could be determined experimentally without including radiative effects in the results – it is after a measure of heat transfered over unit area and unit distance at a specified temperature.
Doesn’t the conductivity of these gases demonstrate there is no backradiative effect as shown in Kiehl & Trenberth’s diagrams because they seem to do a pretty effective job as an insulator – but then so does air ?
Trouble is Rosco that their insulation properties are of no particular interest here – Earth doesn’t cool by conduction to space. The near-vacuum of space is a great conduction insulator but it does not prevent you feeling the warmth of the sun on your face, for example.
The only interesting feature of so-called greenhouse gases is that they can be warmed by electromagnetic radiation in the same wavebands Earth emits. That Earth’s non-gaseous surface intercepts emissions from the atmosphere is beyond dispute (the atmosphere is composed of molecules of non-zero temperature and those molecules emit in all directions in frequencies determined by their temperature as a spontaneous function of entropy). See, e.g., Pavlakis et al here: http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/4/127/2004/acp-4-127-2004.pdf for 10-year average measures of downwelling longwave radiation.
A quick check calculation demonstrates that 340 W/m2 is a perfectly reasonable figure in line with expectations:
(340/σ)1/4 where σ = the Stefan-Boltzmann Constant of 5.6704×10-8 resolves to 278 K, which is about the expected temperature of the atmosphere at about 5,000′ and we expect to find measuring locations at altitude (observatories, etc.). Such internal consistency leaves very little room for doubt.