I believe that you are a really smart guy and may be on to something but you are beginning to sound like the wisdom of Chopra.
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Not sure what your point is. The thin window conducts heat to the outside better than the thicker walls. It isn't cooler because it's an infrared absorber. The walls absorb infrared too - most of the materials that the surface of the Earth is made of are very good IR emitters/absorbers.
The reason I don't "fully understand" it isn't because it is complicated, but because I haven't studied it in depth. When I get time I plan to rectify that.
Could you point me to some of the sources you've been reading that seem to disagree with each other? I'd be very surprised if physicists who have worked in this field this disagree on the mechanism. I doubt there is any argument about the basic physics - at least none that would affect the result.
I've been toying with the idea of doing something like that. It might actually make a nice senior project for an physics major. I'm not sure a proposal like that would have much chance of getting funded today, not as basic research anyway, but there are other ways to sell it.
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This is a very good point, and there's no question that climate is orders of magnitude more complex than the kinds of systems engineers need to model. But demanding engineering-level accuracy in climate modeling may be missing the point somewhat. The models aren't intended to predict features that are within the bounds of "natural variability". The paradigm that's usually invoked is that of chaos - the system is so exquisitely sensitive to initial conditions that initial states that are almost identical diverge fairly quickly. It's why we can't accurately predict the weather more than a day or two out, and more than a week or so is no better than guessing. But a climate model doesn't need to predict the weather decades in the future, it only needs to reproduce the *statistics* of the weather over timescales long enough that natural variability averages out. The exact state of a chaotic system may be impossible to predict but it may still be bounded by what chaos theorists call an "attractor" - a limited region of the parameter space. The system never leaves the attractor as long as the boundary conditions don't change and it spends a predictable fraction of its time in each part of the attractor. So the models don't care about predicting whether California has a drought in 2014 or the eastern US gets clobbered with snow this year or next year, they only care about whether California gets 200 inches per decade vs 20,000, and what fraction of the time California has extreme drought conditions, i.e. long term statistics given the known forcings and initial conditions such as landform configuration, ice cover, etc. To my understanding, the forcings are boundary conditions on the models. I don't know whether the known sources of year-to-year and decadal-scale variability (like ENSO, PDO, AMO, etc.) are also put in to tune the models or whether they emerge from the physics -- that's something I've yet to learn. But models that reproduce the long-term climate statistics for a given set of forcings are the ones of interest to try to predict how those statistics change if the forcings change - e.g. if the Sun's output changes, or if more GHGs are added to the atmosphere.
That depends on the process that is used to evaluate proposals. Based on my experience (I'll admit mostly from 20 years ago), political bias for particular results has little effect on whether individual proposals are funded because the politicians are not the ones deciding merit, scientists are. I would worry more about bias on the part of the scientists themselves - not political bias so much as conceptual bias. As Feynman said, the easiest person to fool is yourself.
Right, and I think that's pretty much what I said in the post directly above yours. Politicians do not evaluate proposals, people actively working in the field do. Proposals are evaluated based on scientific merit not on whether the topic conforms to the administration's or anyone else's political bias.
As an academic, I can say that it's mostly true. Academic salaries for tenure-track research faculty are not paid out of grant money. Reputation and advancement, of course, are important to one's livelihood and getting published (which usually requires getting proposals funded) bears directly on promotion and tenure, so early career academic scientists are tied to government funding. And for an active research academic, publication rate bears on salary. (Later on, once one has established oneself as a researcher of merit, there are ways of surviving and even thriving that don't involve grant funding - my former adviser is now associate chair of the department and has a typical administrative salary, i.e. significantly higher than when he was doing research.) But again, as both of us have said, proposals are evaluated according to merit not political bias. So the idea that researchers must tow the line politically is simply not true. I doubt seriously that politics plays a direct role for people working in the national labs either - lots of basic research is done there, again projects are funded depending on scientific merit.
I don't have direct recent research experience, but I think this is probably true to an extent. Belts are tighter now, no question. But good proposals for basic research apparently still stand a good chance of getting funded, as witness the vitality of the high energy physics experimental field. Lots of applied research is getting funded too, especially in up-and-coming fields such as biophysics. Another angle is the PCAST goal of increasing graduation rates in STEM fields - funds for good REU programs are by no means unobtainable.
The research is indeed funded by the feds, almost entirely. And as I said, publish or perish is the rule for younger tenure-track faculty prior to tenure. Once you achieve tenure, it's no longer a matter of staying alive, more one of reputation and, to some extent, salary level.
Right, because it couldn't possibly be that people are convinced by the *science*.The "system" ain't working..........
An argument by authority is saying that because so and so, or all these people, say something therefore it must be true. That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying that these *scientists* have done extensive research on the subject and still believe it, therefore it is much likelier that they are convinced by the science rather than by politics.
I've attached a graph from my notes from an astronomy course I taught at my former institution. It's from an astronomy textbook published around 2012 (Schneider and Arny, Pathways to Astronomy, 3rd ed.). I don't have a copy of the book here to look up the exact reference from which the image was taken, unfortunately. But since just about anything else I could point to you would say does not "count as evidence", it's the best I could do.
I've attached a graph from my notes from an astronomy course I taught at my former institution. It's from an astronomy textbook published around 2012 (Schneider and Arny, Pathways to Astronomy, 3rd ed.). I don't have a copy of the book here to look up the exact reference from which the image was taken, unfortunately. But since just about anything else I could point to you would say does not "count as evidence", it's the best I could do.
I've attached a graph from my notes from an astronomy course I taught at my former institution. It's from an astronomy textbook published around 2012 (Schneider and Arny, Pathways to Astronomy, 3rd ed.). I don't have a copy of the book here to look up the exact reference from which the image was taken, unfortunately. But since just about anything else I could point to you would say does not "count as evidence", it's the best I could do.
You need to learn to read in context, and also to read graphs that display on more than one scale.
What you're saying would only be true if CO2 was the ONLY change in forcing, but it's not and this is well known. Solar output varies as well, as does volcanic activity, and there are decadal and perhaps multi-decadal sources of natural variability in global temperatures that the science is still grappling with.
Another popular misconception. "Climate change" was chosen because the effects of anthropogenic GHG emissions go beyond temperature changes and include rises in sea level, changes in precipitation patterns, alterations in patterns of extreme weather events, etc., not because anything has changed in the basic thinking that the global climate has been and is continuing to warm.
Right, because it couldn't possibly be that people are convinced by the *science*.
If you delve into the field, you quickly learn that there are quite a few people questioning different aspects of the science, in particular the ways the models are used to forecast future climates. But it's a lot easier to just sit back and say it's all politics.
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Has anybody else figured it out too?