The Flat Earth Society

   Of all the ‘Ad Hominem’ attacks of the  AGW fraternity  against us  so called Climate ‘Deniers’,  the most annoying is the charge  that  we don’t know science!  That we are all

Conspiracy  theorists,   pro smoking,  pro bigoil , pro ‘nobody landed on the moon’ flat earthers.   As far as the  ‘Big oil’ bit goes, it all depends on who is doing the talking.   And like most Multinational organisations ,  “Big Oil”  likes to keep a foot in both camps.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/29/the-log-in-the-eye-of-greenpeace/

But what really gets me  however  is the flat earth  accusation.   My immediate reaction once again is, ”Why should the pot call the kettle black”?  Actually, frying pan would be a better term than pot, because it seems to me that in the light of recent  SunSpot cycles and Cloud experiments, the Global Warming, Climate change, Extreme weather, Ocean warming, Water shortage fraternity  are going to get tipped out of their last refuge into something a lot hotter than  an approaching ice age.

      Because of the complexity of trying to model the  Earths climate  in  grid cells,

http://nas-sites.org/climatemodeling/page_3_2.php  now down to 100kms a side and stacked in up to 30 layers each a kilometre  high, and variously timed  at  X hours around the clock,  the latest Supercomputing  crunchers  have to be run for hours at a time, at considerable expense.  How many storms do we experience that are 100ks wide?  Yet, to half the cell size to 50ks a side requires  10 times the computing power of the present models.  But even now the present level of operation  requires some horrendous  simplications. 

     For years climate modelers have assumed that the energy radiating from the sun has been a constant  figure with maybe 1-2% variability,  ie. ‘The Solar Constant’, but it is good to see that  some authorities are now prepared to  factor in at least the sunspot cycle as a  climate variable. http://atmospheres.gsfc.nasa.gov/climate/?section=136   

My problem  however, is not  how much energy the sun projects on us but  how do we calculate  how much of it falls on the earth?  A  sphere, rotating at an inclined angle, progressively  absorbing radiation on one side and reradiating it on the other at varying degrees  around the circumference  takes some complicated mathematics, even forgetting about the percentage of cloud cover around the clock.   So, what do the Modelers do?  They  make an assumption  that the Earth is a flat disk, of one quarter of the earths surface area.  Did you get that?   A flat disk!  And what do they call us?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_energy_budget

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF02253696

http://www.ess.uci.edu/~yu/class/ess5/Chapter.3.energy.temperature.pdf

   My only consolation is that by the time the World  gets  a  computer  big enough to run a decent model enough times to get a good ensembly,  that  all the billions now being fed into the AGW system will not be enough to pay both for it and all the energy required to keep us warm.

Ken Calvert.