Michael Hammer

GLOBAL warming theory is not that complicated.  According to Michael Hammer it can be incorporated into a simple model which readers can build themselves on an excel spread sheet. 

Mr Hammer gives detailed instructions and formulae to enter for his DIY climate change model.  The model then calculates the temperature rise from carbon dioxide plus water vapour forcing and allows for the time constant in the system.  

A temperature rise by 2070 of 3C for a business as usual scenario, however, gives model output that is not compatible with what we know of past climates.   So, what is wrong with Mr Hammer’s model?

[Read more…] about DIY Modelling of Climate Change

SCIENTISTS have put a huge amount of effort into generating computer models of our climate system.  These models are very sophisticated and complex and their outputs suggest that increasing carbon dioxide will lead to significant temperature rises for our planet.  Indeed the model outputs now represent the main evidence in support of the anthropogenic (man induced) global warming hypothesis.   Why shouldn’t we take careful note of these results?

Computers are a tool allowing many calculations to be done extremely rapidly.  If we can describe a system we wish to explore via a set of interrelated equations we can then get a computer to repeatedly solve these equations with a small assumed time increment between each set of solutions and do it quickly. The output describes the future as predicted from the input equations.  This is a computer model.  It is important to remember that the model output is completely and exclusively determined by the information encapsulated in the input equations.  The computer contributes no checking, no additional information and no greater certainly in the output.  It only contributes computational speed.

[Read more…] about Pondering Problems with Computer Climate Models: A Note from Michael Hammer

ACCORDING to the international panel on climate change (IPCC) any direct temperature rise from increasing carbon dioxide levels is greatly amplified by positive feedback from water vapour. As the theory goes, rising carbon dioxide levels from human activity causes some temperature rise which causes more water to evaporate.  Because water vapour is the dominant greenhouse gas, the additional water vapour absorbs even more energy, so global temperatures rise even, more causing still more water to evaporate and so on in an amplifying spiral.  In this way the roughly half degree direct impact from doubling carbon dioxide is claimed to be amplified to three degrees or more.

An interesting theory, but now consider the following scenario;

We know the earth rotates about an axis tilted about 23 degrees relative to the sun.  This is what causes the seasons and what sets the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn.  Imagine a location on the Tropic of Capricorn (23 degrees south) – say Mackay in Queensland.  In summer the sun is directly overhead – average solar input of around 310 watts/sq meter.  In winter the sun is at maximum elevation 44 degrees – average solar input of around 220 watts/sq meter.  That is a difference summer to winter of about 90 watts/sq meter which, according to Stefan’s law, without any feedbacks would give a temperature difference summer to winter of about 16 degrees.  The amount of positive or amplifying feedback claimed by the IPCC would inflate that about 6 times to more than 90 degrees C, extinguishing all life in Mackay.

[Read more…] about A Reality Check on the Role of Water Vapour in Climate Change: A Note from Michael Hammer

CLIMATE is complex but in an attempt to understand the effects of increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide on global temperatures simplified General Circulation Models (GCMs) have been developed and are used by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).      Al Gore, in his famous movie ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, explained that as the concentration of carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere, more energy is trapped, warming the planet.   This assumption is central to the GCMs and the current consensus on climate change. 

Some sceptics complain that the GCMs do not realistically simulate climate because there are many processes that can’t be adequately modelled including cloud formation.  Michael Hammer, an engineer who specializes in spectroscopy, is also sceptical of the GCM but his criticism is more fundamental.  In the following paper, using the basic laws of spectroscopy, he shows that a significant portion of energy loss from the Earth’s surface is by direction radiation to space at wavelengths not absorbed by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.    This is in direct contrast to the IPCC explanation that there is low radiation from the Earth’s surface to space and potentially high radiation from the atmosphere to space.

Science is a process of getting it wrong and hopefully learning – on this single issue Michael Hammer and the IPCC can’t both be right.  

[Read more…] about Radical New Hypothesis on the Effect of Greenhouse Gases