Global warming is caused by ozone depletion, not greenhouse gases

So what physics would you propose explains EMR in space as having wavelength? What observations, measurements demonstrate the presence of wavelength in space, away from any matter? I assume we agree that when EMR interacts with matter, we do see effects that can be explained in terms of wavelength and that suggest wavelength occurs in matter.

Surface Detail,
What temperature data are these? Where and how were they measured?

Laki was basically an effusive eruption, one of the largest in historic time, but there were ten eruptive phases in June through October. Some SO2 did get lofted to the stratosphere and early cooling was observed to the east over Scandinavia. But major amounts of SO2 was taken by the jet stream to the southeast, causing acid rain sufficient to destroy leases from the British Isles to Finland, to Italy. Ultimately perhaps 50,000 people died, some from respiratory problems, most from famine. Warming of more than 3oC was measured in Europe, especially in the Netherlands and surrounding countries. There is a great deal of information available on Laki and I have spent time walking among the vents.

Please note that in my 2009 paper, I suggested that SO2 might cause the warming. I now believe that SO2 and sulfate are the footprints of volcanism and that volcanism causes ozone depletion that causes the warming. If substantial aerosols are formed in the lower stratosphere, then these cause net cooling.

I am not aware of reliable global temperature data from this time and would like to find out more about the data you plot.

peterlward wrote:
Surface Detail,
The climate4you.com article is relatively well written for a general audience but is thin on science. The best scientific summary is Thordarson, T., and S. Self (2003), Atmospheric and environmental effects of the 1783–1784 Laki eruption: A review and reassessment, J. Geophys. Res., 108(D1), 4011. Figure 8 shows "Deviation of the 1783 July surface temperatures from the 1768–1798 mean." There are many other papers by Thordarson plus his Thesis that give much more detail plus many papers by other authors looking at the climate effects of the Laki eruption. I have 6 pages of notes detailing a timeline based on 9 of these papers.

The temperature data from central England certainly do not represent mean surface global temperatures. There is much work to be done on the Laki eruption and its climate effects. It is complicated by the observation of sulfuric acid aerosols, so it is not a simple effusive eruption. The most noteworthy observation, even made by Benjamin Franklin, was the dry fog blanketing Europe that appears to have been primarily SO2.

As for wavelength, we commonly refer to EMR in space as having a wavelength. But my point is that we do not observed the wavelength directly. We observe frequency and calculate wavelength as the velocity of light divided by the frequency. Wavelength in space is a mathematical quantity, not a physical property of EMR. There is no way for wavelength to physically exist in space. The physical properties of EMR in space are frequency and some form of amount, amplitude, brightness, spectral radiance, all of which get back to the amplitude of the oscillation on the surface of matter issuing the radiation.

The Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) is a versatile "combi-instrument" taking advantage of modern technologies. It combines a camera with a spectrograph, and covers a wide range of wavelengths from the near-infrared region into the ultraviolet.

A spectrograph spreads out the light gathered by a telescope so that it can be analysed to determine such properties of celestial objects as chemical composition and abundances, temperature, radial velocity, rotational velocity, and magnetic fields. Its spectrograph can be switched between two different modes of usage:

1.So-called "long slit spectroscopy" where spectra of many different points across an object are obtained simultaneously.

2. So-called "echelle spectroscopy" where the spectrum of one object is spread over the detector giving better wavelength resolution in a single exposure.

STIS also has a so-called coronograph which can block light from bright objects, and in this way enables investigations of nearby fainter objects.

STIS Facts

Instrument type Camera and Spectrograph
Weight 318 kg
Dimensions 2.2 x 0.9 x 0.9 m
Field of view MAMA - 25 x 25 arcseconds
CCD - 50 x 50 arcseconds
Wavelength range 115 to 1000 nm

The July anomaly is strongest in western Europe and declines gradually with increasing distance from Laki, which can be taken as support for the above hypothesis. However, it is challenged by the fact that at the same time cool conditions prevailed in Iceland and Faeroe Islands [Ho´ lm, 1784; Jo´nsson and Pa´ lsdo´ ttir, 1992; Lievog, 1783], regions which were consistently exposed to the gaseous emissions from Laki. Also, unusually warm temperatures are not seen in the August temperature records from the same European stations although the sulfuric haze was still present in abundance [Thordarson, 1995]. An alternative explanation is that the warm spell may have been caused by somewhat unusual developments in the atmospheric circulation pattern over Europe in July 1783.

peterlward wrote:
Sorry but these instruments do not measure wavelength. They measure frequency. You basically count the number of zero crossings or peaks within a unit of time. This gives you frequency which you can turn into wavelength inside the machine or outside of it using the velocity of light. It is basic physics that waves do not and cannot travel through the vacuum of space. The frequencies making up waves interact with each other and change with distance. The frequencies making up EMR do not interact with each other and frequency is not changed over galactic distances except for Dopplar effects. These are very clear physical observations.

peterlward wrote:
A filter is matter and light interacts with matter in a wavelike manner.

Please explain what a wave of light IS physically in space. Not an equation. What is physically there and how it propagates. What moves? How does it propagate? How do the waves interact with other waves of light?

Waves are a property of matter. Waves in matter have very different properties from EMR.

peterlward wrote:
It is basic physics that waves do not and cannot travel through the vacuum of space..

peterlward wrote:
Reviewing my notes: Mt. Asama in Japan erupted from May 9, 1783 with the climactic eruption beginning on August 4 and lasting for 15 hours. This was a huge plinian eruption with andesitic pumice falls, pyroclastic flows, etc. and certainly produced a major aerosol and associated global cooling. Laki began erupting June 8, 1783, and lasted until at least October 25th. Some aerosols were noted related to Laki, but sorting out the simultaneous effects of Asama is not easy.

The Spannagel Cave d18O proxy for temperature data, one of the best records of global temperatures for the past 9000 years, show that the greatest low of the Little Ice Age was around 1758 and that the Laki and Asama eruptions occurred during the rapid warming out of the third lowest temperatures of the Little Ice Age.

You have to be very careful drawing any simple conclusions about cause and effect from these data.

Orogenicman: Your dismissal of the up to 3.3oC warming of Europe during July, 1783, (Figure 8 of Thordarson and Self, 2003) is quite unscientific. The observed warming was close to the period of time when the "dry fog" hung over Europe. The cause of this warming is not obvious, but it is related to the eruption of Laki.

The July anomaly is strongest in western Europe and declines gradually with increasing distance from Laki, which can be taken as support for the above hypothesis. However, it is challenged by the fact that at the same time cool conditions prevailed in Iceland and Faeroe Islands [Ho´ lm, 1784; Jo´nsson and Pa´ lsdo´ ttir, 1992; Lievog, 1783], regions which were consistently exposed to the gaseous emissions from Laki. Also, unusually warm temperatures are not seen in the August temperature records from the same European stations although the sulfuric haze was still present in abundance [Thordarson, 1995]. An alternative explanation is that the warm spell may have been caused by somewhat unusual developments in the atmospheric circulation pattern over Europe in July 1783.

Assessing the climatic impact of the A,D. 1783 eruption of Mt, Asama, Japan, is complicated by the concurrent eruption of Laki, Iceland. Estimates of the stratospheric loading of H2SO4 for the A .D. 1108 eruption of Asama derived from the SO42 time series in the GISP2 Greenland ice core indicate a loading of about 10.4 Tg H2SO 4 with a resulting stratospheric optical depth of 0,087. Assuming sulfur emissions from the 1783 eruption were only one-third of the 1108 event yields a H2SO4 loading value of 3.5 Tg and a stratospheric optical depth of only 0.029. These results suggest minimal climatic effects in the Northern Hemisphere from the 1783 Asama eruption, thus any volcanically-induced cooling in the mid-1780s is probably due to the Laki eruption.

peterlward wrote:
I readily admit that discovering that waves cannot exist in space is quite different from what most people think and what most textbooks say.

peterlward wrote:
But recognizing this has major implications for climate and for basic physics.

peterlward wrote:
The bonds holding matter together provide the restoring force required for wave motion.

peterlward wrote:
There are no bonds in space.

peterlward wrote:
Neither of you have been able to explain in actual, observable terms the physics of waves in space.

peterlward wrote:
I have explained frequency in space many times

peterlward wrote:
but here is a draft section from the paper I am writing on the Physics of Global Warming:

Thermal energy: The molecular bonds that hold matter together are not rigid. The length of each bond oscillates around a potential energy minimum between attractive electrostatic forces when atoms are close and repulsive electrostatic forces when atoms are too close [Anderson, 2009]. Both the frequencies and the amplitudes of these oscillations increase when matter is heated - typically increasing the volume [Planck, 1897]. Heated enough, the bonds come apart - solid matter melts. Cooled toward absolute zero, the amplitudes and frequencies of these oscillations approach zero, leading to the smallest volume and highest density configuration of any piece of matter.

The lengths of these oscillating bonds are very small so that the frequencies of oscillation are typically very high. At room temperature, the frequency with the peak amplitude of oscillation is on the order of 30 terahertz (30 times 10^12 cycles per second) and the atoms and molecules are moving at velocities approaching one kilometer per second [Grossman, 2014]. Thermal energy in matter, the internal energy of matter, which we think of and measure as temperature, is simply a broad spectrum of frequencies of oscillation of the bonds that hold matter together. The heat capacity of matter, its ability to store thermal energy, increases with the number of degrees of freedom of these oscillations [Grossman, 2014]. A degree of freedom is often visualized as a spring holding two pieces of matter together. Thermal energy can be thought of as the constant exchange of potential energy and kinetic energy as these "springs" oscillate. In an ideal gas where there are no bonds, thermal energy is stored simply as the mean kinetic energy of translation of all atoms and molecules making up the gas.

peterlward wrote:
These oscillations, when on the surface of matter, induce in air or space, through the motion of charge, an oscillating electric field that induces an oscillating magnetic field that induces an oscillating electric field, and so on. The amplitudes and frequencies of oscillation on the surface of matter are propagated away from the surface as an electromagnetic field. Thermal energy in matter is radiated as electromagnetic energy through air and space.

peterlward wrote:
Maxwell proposed that the velocity of propagation of this electromagnetic field, what we call the speed of light, is equal to one over the square root of the electrical permittivity times the magnetic permeability, basically one over the smallest unit of time that it takes for an electric field to induce a magnetic field to begin to induce an electric field.

peterlward wrote:The frequencies contained in electromagnetic radiation are well observed not to interact with each other

peterlward wrote:
and not to change over distance propagated, even galactic distances, except for Doppler effects where the emitter and receiver are moving relative to each other.

peterlward wrote:
The amplitudes, on the other hand decrease with the inverse square of the distance propagated because the amplitude spreads out over the surface of a sphere whose radius is the distance propagated.

peterlward wrote:
In 1900, Max Planck derived empirically an equation, now known as Planck's law, that approximates the observed spectrum of frequencies and amplitudes observed as a function of the temperature of the matter at thermal equilibrium. To derive this law, he found that he had to postulate that energy in radiation (E) equals frequency (?, the Greek letter nu) times a constant (h), now known as the Planck constant. E= h? is used widely in photochemistry to designate the energy needed to cause a chemical reaction.

The Planck-Einstein relation,[1][2] also referred to as the Einstein relation,[1][3][4] Planck's energy-frequency relation,[5] the Planck relation,[6] and the Planck equation,[7] is a formula integral to quantum mechanics, and states that the energy of a photon (E) is proportional to its frequency (?).
E = h \nu

peterlward wrote:
For example:
O2 + hv (?<242.4 nm) ? O(3P) + O(3P)
which says the chemical bond of an oxygen molecule (O2) in the presence of solar radiation containing sufficient energy (hv) oscillates with high enough energy to overcome the bond energy, forming two oxygen atoms in the ground-level triplet state O(3P). The required energy (hv) has a frequency greater than 1.24x10^15 cycles per second which has an energy greater than 5.11 electron volts. Traditionally we express this energy as a wavelength (?) of less than 242.4 nm (nanometers).

peterlward wrote:
While we are used to calculating wavelength as the velocity of light divided by the frequency, wavelength is a mathematical number, not a physical one.

peterlward wrote:
Waves of electromagnetic radiation cannot physically occur in space because waves deform the bonds holding matter together and there are no matter and no bonds in space.

peterlward wrote:
It was proven in the late 19th century that there is no "luminiferous aether" in which waves of light can travel.

peterlward wrote:
Frequency, on the other hand, physically exists in space, is the form in which thermal energy is radiated, and can be measured.

peterlward wrote:
Note that energy (E=h?) is not a function of amplitude or brightness.

peterlward wrote:
This is a very difficult reality to become comfortable with because we are used to thinking that if we have more radiation, then we have more energy.

peterlward wrote:
This assumption is fundamental to how we calculate radiative forcing in climatology.

peterlward wrote:
For waves in matter, energy is proportional to the square of the amplitude, but for radiation in space, energy is a function of frequency and amplitude (brightness) simply specifies the amplitude of the oscillation on the surface of the matter that induced the oscillation divided by the square of the distance propagated.

peterlward wrote:
There is much to add to this including a plot and discussion of Planck's law, but there is the basics of the physics.

peterlward wrote:
I encourage you to try to move science forward rather than think you can prove me wrong based on your current limited understanding.

peterlward wrote:
As for Laki, I explained that there were 10 eruptive phases of Laki that formed aerosols in the lower stratosphere causing cooling. Aerosols usually win out, are more thermally effective,than basic ozone depletion. The details of the Laki eruption are very interesting and by no means simple. There is amazingly good documentation for that many years ago but it is limited in geographic extent. I wish to keep you focused on the physics of EMR in space and so will not expand on this yet.

orogenicman wrote:
I would agree with both of you gentlemen, and I too wish him well with his presentation at the AGU. Having said that, I tend to think that it won't receive the accolades he is hoping for. What struck me the most was his insistence that care be taken not to make hasty conclusions about data while simultaneous making the hasty conclusion with regard to the a possible connection between short period of warming that occurred in the Netherlands in August 1873 and the Laki eruption, when the very paper he referenced stated emphatically that any connection to the event was dubious, at best.