Granted about the utility of gauging public understanding and knowledge of a subject, and I understand using it for the paper, if anything I hope I'm not too annoying of an outlier, as I'm not really worried about changing minds, I'm happy enough if others look at what they're supporting or believing more closely, especially if they come away more interested in learning about it, regardless of whether they think I'm right or not. Doubt is the first step along the pathway to knowledge after all.
As for the whole idea of an average global temperature representing anything, that's a problem, if it's 50 C in the Sahara and -50 C on Ross Island, does it mean anything to say the average of those two places is 0 C? What physical property does that average represent? I am sure there is probably a point somewhere in between those locations which would be at 0 C, but does it matter?
A map or something like
https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/overlay=temp/orthographic can tell you a lot of information.
Now look at this spot here:
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2016/11/03/1800Z/wind/surface/level/overlay=temp/orthographic=-176.18,8.51,317/loc=-178.343,37.433It's pretty close to the value usually given as the global average temperature. What does that part of the ocean tell you? You can look at the rest of the globe there and see things, you could infer that much of that ocean is warmer than that point, but the actual value: 14.7 C tells you nothing by itself except the condition of the air at that particular spot at that particular time.
Smushing all the colors on that image together and getting the same temperature as that spot is a coincidence, but it isn't a critical piece of information, is it?
What about the same spot at a later time:
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2016/11/04/1200Z/wind/surface/level/overlay=temp/orthographic=-176.18,8.51,317/loc=-178.343,37.433Does it mean anything that
this location is
projected to be ~6 C warmer than the
global average temperature at some point over the next day?
It does actually let you infer something: if said global average remains the same, then other points are projected to be cooler at that time. It's a redistribution of energy around the planet, but this takes place over various time scales due to the masses and properties thereof involved. The lower atmosphere is functionally an ocean of air, it has interfaces with the land and water surfaces, each with their own heat distribution properties.
The atmosphere itself is far from uniform across the surface, but it does have an interesting property when you move away from it:
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2016/11/04/1200Z/wind/isobaric/850hPa/overlay=temp/orthographic=-176.18,8.51,317/loc=-178.343,37.433 <- 14.0 C
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2016/11/04/1200Z/wind/isobaric/850hPa/overlay=temp/orthographic=-176.18,8.51,317/loc=-178.343,37.433 <- 5.1 C
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2016/11/04/1200Z/wind/isobaric/500hPa/overlay=temp/orthographic=-176.18,8.51,317/loc=-178.343,37.433 <- -10.3 C
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2016/11/04/1200Z/wind/isobaric/250hPa/overlay=temp/orthographic=-176.18,8.51,317/loc=-178.343,37.433 <- -44.7 C
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2016/11/04/1200Z/wind/isobaric/70hPa/overlay=temp/orthographic=-176.18,8.51,317/loc=-178.343,37.433 <- -70.4 C
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2016/11/04/1200Z/wind/isobaric/10hPa/overlay=temp/orthographic=-176.18,8.51,317/loc=-178.343,37.433 <- -53.3 C
Look at that! The tropopause is visible, if you move the time back and forth you'll see it rise and fall from the afternoon to early morning.
When we're averaging the global temperature, we're leaving those layers of the atmosphere out, but they're important too, the mass of all that air, even though it gets pretty wispy higher up, is sitting on top of the stuff we're moving around in, and that compression means the bottom of a given column of gas sitting in a gravity well is going to be the warmest part. If you turned the sun off it would relax and cool and settle out, but until that happens it's going to keep getting pumped with energy and it's going to keep redistributing it within the constraints of the system. There's a known dayside input, just like there are known dayside and nightside losses, no need to artificially spread the actual input across the surface, no need to abstract things out so absurdly that you have to invent new mechanisms to explain observations like an "enhanced greenhouse effect", no need to panic and treat an essential component of the biosphere as an enemy.
Trying to describe the state of the globe with a single value, and ascribing importance to that value changing by fractions of a degree doesn't seem as sensible to me when you aren't looking at it as a wiggly line on a graph.
Really I'd be interested in seeing the self-selection effects of support for/against the AGW model in terms of surveys like this, but it's hard to get data on people who don't take a survey, the pollsters lament!
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Topic: Discuss my completed survey! (100% of climate scientists acquired) (Read 5634 times)