I had said "Currently slightly more than half the net absorption of solar energy is heating the oceans.
Well 71% of the insolation is over water, so I guess you only need to show that about 21% of that is lost to evaporation.
That will cease to be the case.
What does that mean, that the rate of evaporation is going to change? I suppose it will. But thermal equilibrium will prevail. The molecules just below the surface layer -- the ones that don't get knocked into vapor -- will rise in energy just the same.
When it does in 4 or 5 decades, the land will feel the full effect of the net solar heating - and worse - of the greater rate of water evaporation from the oceans."
Ok but water evaporation is limited by saturation. Of course that level rises a little with temperature so of course it will also increase. But not much, right? Enough to account for crashing specific ecosystems, but not enough to crash most of them.
and here is part of Aqueous ID's long post 1555 replying to that.Sorry I did not respond sooner. Answer to your question is: Only at temperatures hotter than the surface of the sun, ~5000K.
Ok but there can be no oceans at >373K.
I.e. sunlight falling on the ocean will always transfer energy to it (even some to ice sheet).
Which follows from the difference between 5000K and 373K.
What I was trying to say was that as the ocean surface warms, more heat will be being removed and given to the air.
That's a little confusing. Maybe it would help to clarify that evaporation accounts for some transfer of heat from warm water into cooler air, usu. aloft. I suppose you could speak to conduction with cool surface air, but you need to treat that statistically over the geoid which I think works the other way.
- Mainly by more evaporated H2O molecules as conduation to the air at nearly the same temperature as the ocean is less, I think, than the 540 calories each gram of rain water releases as it makes the phase transition from vapor to liquid.
Ok but that is limited to some some extent. The vapor either condenses or it doesn't, and that's a function of weather. The moisture has to rain out to lower the vapor pressure at the surface before the cycle can repeat, right? Obviously there are exceptions, as in hurricanes, but even if we were to apply the premises of those apocalyptic weather movies we'd effectively have a couple of perpetual global hurricanes -- but even those would have to cycle.
As the solar energy absorbed by the dry land and ocean on average is constant or actually slightly decreasing each year with more clouds forming,
Is that happening?
and the energy the ocean transfers to the air is increasing,
It's really the energy transferred to the air by the Sun, trapped by the greenhouse effect. I think here you would want to compare the relative feedbacks of land albdeo vs, say, the evaporation/condensation cycles.
it is obvious my statement is true - as the years go by the net fraction of the current solar energy being absorbed: that "~50% will cease to be the case."
I didn't follow that. In my mind thermal equilibrium reigns, except where the masses of air and water are prone to form boundaries due to thermoclines. I would think your strongest argument would be the one that forecasts rising water vapor uptake as the atmosphere warms. But I don't see how that leads to sharp changes somewhere in the near future.
It would have been more clear it I had said that effect in positive rather than negative terms. I. e. would have been better /more easily understood/ if I had said: "The fraction of the solar energy absorbed would increase from the current 50% to near unity (100%) rather than just the fraction will cease to be 50%.
But even if heat transfer into the surface water became perfectly efficient, there is always colder water at depth. I guess I'm not following you here.
In some sense it is even incorrect to say half the current solar energy absorbed is "being stored in the ocean" as "stored" implies it will some day be given back - it will not be - the increased solar heating (to be about double in 40 to 50 years) is not a return of "stored solar heat" but is the cessation of 50% being stored.
I find that confusing. In network modeling we refer to the duals of, say, electrical and thermal capacitance. Just as a capacitor stores charge, bulk matter absorbs heat. But whether or not that happens depends on the sign of the potential difference, and that in part depends on the impedances of the other elements in the network.
- Subconsciously that was why I spoke of the "50% ceasing to be stored." That is what is really happening and very serious.
That assumes the model for thermal capacitance breaks down somewhere but I haven't understood the rationale that would think so.
I am very glad my post was not clear and you asked what was I trying to say.
Well, yeah, wherever ideas don't jibe there is nearly always a basis for meeting somewhere in the middle.
Very few understand that in 40 or 50 years it will be the same as it the sun were twice as great a heat source for Earth.
I haven't followed that rationale. How is the heating of the oceans any different today than it has been since our emergence from the last interglacial?
- That is dam important and should shut up all deniers.
Since climate deniers are lost on really basic stuff like the greenhouse effect, and the reason CO2 is the highest impact anthropogenic GHG, I think they will never understand you. I can reasonably understand those basic principles, and I still don't quite follow you here.
Mankind is in "deep yoghurt" and probable already doomed to extinction before 2100.
I understand that's your position, I just don't understand how you arrived at it.
People calling me "an alarmists" will not change these sad facts.
Unfortunately there is a blurring of the epithet here. By the deniers' standard, all people who attest to the truth of global warming are "alarmists". On the other hand, if you tell someone like me that most ecosystems will crash by the end of the century, I might feel you have an apocalyptic view of the future (like in some of your economics posts) but it's not the same thing as what a denier means by "alarmist" so I will probably just question your premises and wonder why you are so cynical of the future in general.