Kip Hansen’s guest essay – July 30, 2022
One cannot average the temperature.
Let’s start with this simple statement – it’s true but comes with some common sense caveats.
Important Note: The purpose of this essay is not to refute the basic basic concepts of “global warming” or “climate change”. Those concepts and their supporting data are an entirely different topic. This essay is about a scientific point of view: One can’t average temperature. This fact may affect your understanding of some of the supporting points of Climate Science.
Let’s say you run a website for corporations interested in holding a conference in Topeka, Kansas in August, and you want to inform attendees of what kind of weather, in terms of temperature, they should expect. , so they can pack the right clothes for the trip. A chart like this is perfectly appropriate. It displays the average of historical high and low temperatures for each day of the month and shows this appropriately range and not just a number. It provides a casual answer to the company’s question: “What’s the weather like in August in Topeka?” Answer: Hot days and pleasantly warm nights. Therefore, speeches and presentations inside the air-conditioned auditorium during the day and in the evening, Tiki Bar Luau around the hotel’s swimming pool is definitely on!
In this case, they weren’t really trying to “average temperature” – they were just averaging the temperature numbers to find a range of historical highs and lows – they didn’t think this was the case. is the actual measured temperature – they admit it’s rather vague but useful range of the expected daily highs and lows.
This acceptable and reasonable approach is a far cry from taking the high temperatures of San Diego, Los Angeles, Mohave, and Palm Springs, adding them up, dividing them by four, and pronouncing that you’ve produced the average temperature. peace of the SW California Desert. You can have a complete precision – accurate to many decimal places – math average of the numbers used, but you won’t produce anything like numeric temperature or physically meaningful results. Whatever numerical meaning you have just found will not represent the physical reality of “temperature” anywhere, no less the region of interest.
“But, but, but, but”… .. no buts!
One can’t average temperature
Why not? Temperature is just another number, right?
The temperature is Not just another number – temperature is a number – a count or measure of – one of the different temperature units.
temperaturea measure of how hot or cold it is expressed as any of a number Any scale and indicate direction in it heat energy will flow on its own – i.e. from a hotter object (at a higher temperature) to a colder object (at a lower temperature). Temperature is not equivalent to the energy of thermodynamic system. [ source ]
So we can say that objects with a temperature with higher numbers, no matter what scale they are using (°F,°C,K), are “hotter” and objects has a temperature with lower numbers (using the same scale) as “less hot” or “colder”… .and we can expect that heat energy will transfer from “hotter” to“ colder “.
It is possible to do temperature multiplication by numbers, but gives meaningless results partly because temperatures in arbitrary units have different sizes but most importantly due to temperature does not represent heat energy of the object being measured but as relative “hotness” and “coldness”. “Double Hot” in F, i.e. twice as hot as 32°F (the freezing point of water) is 64°F – obviously warmer/hotter but just pointlessly “twice as hot” . In degrees Celsius we would have to say 1°C (we can’t double 0) and we would have 2°C or 35.6°F (far from 64°F above). Yes, that’s because the unit sizes themselves are different. However, if we want to know what “heat” we are talking about, degrees Fahrenheit or Celsius won’t tell us….temperature is not a measure of heat content or thermal energy.
One cubic meter of air at normal sea level air pressure (about 1,013.25 millibars) and 60% humidity at a measured temperature of 70°F contains much less heat energy than one cubic meter of seawater live same temperature and altitude. One cubic meter of stainless steel at 70°F contains more heat energy. The relative heat or coldness of a substance can be expressed by its temperature, but amount of heat energy in that physical body is not indicated by providing its temperature.
In science, how is heat expressed?: the units of heat are calories, joules, and BTUs. [ source ] We see that no heat unit is a temperature unit (°F,°C,K). (Note: If thermodynamics were easy, I wouldn’t have to write this essay.)
The temperature is one property of material things – and the specific temperature is one Intensive Assets.
Extended properties can be added together – Volume: Adding 1 cubic meter of topsoil to one cubic meter of new topsoil is equivalent to two cubic meters of topsoil and fills twice the volume of the raised garden in your yard. Length: Adding one road mile to an existing road mile creates two road miles.
But for Intensive Attributes, this doesn’t work. Hardness is an intensive property. One cannot add numbers Mohs scale stiffness of the apatitehas a value of 5, for a numerical Mohs scale hardness Diamondhas a value of 10 and gets any meaningful answer – certainly not 15 and the like, not “5 plus 10 divided by 2 equals 7.5”.
Color is an intensive property. Color there are two measures, wavelength/frequency and magnitude. Most of us can easily distinguish the colors of matter – our eyes tell our brains the general wavelength of light that is reflected or emitted from an object, which we translate into color names . Scientifically, the wavelength (or composite wavelength) of reflected or emitted light can be measured as a frequency (in terahertz – terahertz, 10twelfth Hz) and wavelength (in nanometer). Colors cannot be added as numbers. In colored light, adding three primary colors evenly produces “white” light. In pigments, adding three primary colors produces “black” and other combinations, such as magenta and yellow, give surprising results.
Similarly, it is not possible to add a temperature, an Intensive Attribute.
“In contrast, the intensive variables are independent of the system size and represent the quality of the system: temperature, pressure, chemical potential, etc. In this case, combining the two systems will does not yield the sum of the intensive quantity equal to the sum of its components. . For example, two identical subsystems do not have a sum of temperature or pressure that is twice the temperature or pressure of its components. A sum on intensive variables has no physical meaning. Dividing meaningless sums by the number of components cannot reverse this result. In special cases, averaging can approximate the equilibrium temperature after mixing, but this is not relevant for analyzing an imbalance such as the Earth’s climate. ” [ source: Does a Global Temperature Exist? By Christopher Essex, Ross McKitrick and Bjarne Andresen ( .pdf ) ]
It’s a great explanation, but dense. Let’s look at the individual highlights:
1. Temperature, an intensive characteristic, is independent of system size and representation quality of the system.
2. Combining two systems (such as the temperature of two different cubic meters of atmosphere surrounding two Stevenson screen or two MMTS unit) will not yield the sum of the intensive quantity equal to the sum of its components.
3. A sum over intensive variables has no physical meaning – adding the numerical values of two intensive variables, such as temperature, has no physical meaning, it makes no sense.
4. Dividing meaningless sums by the number of components – in other words, averaging or finding the mean – this result cannot be reversed, the mean or the mean remains meaningless.
5. Surface air temperature (2 meters above the surface) are all measurements of in situ temperature inside a non-equilibrium air mass with respect to temperature, pressure, humidity or content. ambient temperature at any scale.
We can see that even on a very small scale, a few meters around the MMTS sensor at the Glenns Ferry weather station in Idaho, the air temperature system is far from being in equilibrium – air through a machine heater transformers, bare grass, patches of snow and brushes, each absorbing heat from the sun and with a different heat content. All of these smaller subsystems actively radiate or absorb heat from unequal systems around them. In a practical sense, if one were to stand next to the sensor, you would know it was “cold”, the air at the sensor was below freezing – but for a short while you could cuddle the transformer and feel warmer sharing its heat. However, it is scientifically impossible to “average” the air temperature even inside a two meter block of air on an edge around the sensor.
One can’t average temperature.
# # # # #
Author’s comment:
I have no illusions that this essay will be universally accepted by all who read here. However, it is scientifically and physically true and can break a lot of firm beliefs.
I’ll write a sequel, Part 3, that covers the excuses used in CliSci to pretend they can have a valid average temperature – including the lame excuses: “We don’t measure average temperature, we average anomaly”; “We not only found vehicles, we also found vehicles with weight“; “We are not average, we krig”; “We don’t generate data, we ‘use numbers from the nearest existing stations, as long as they are within 1,200 km'” [750 miles]. (Note: This is an approximate distance from Philadelphia to Chicago or London to Marseille, as we all know, has no common climate, no less air temperature); and many more. In all cases, the temperatures were inappropriately averaged leading to meaningless numbers.
However, one can average and work with interesting content which is a universal property of matter. That is interesting content of the “combined non-linear chaotic system” is the climate of the Earth that is of interest to Climate Science as they emphasize that the amount of CO in the atmosphere increases2 concentrations are trapping more heat in the Earth system. But CliSci doesn’t measure interesting content of the system but instead emphasizes the substitution of meaningless numbers by different groups labeled as Global average surface temperature.
Please state your opinion in the comments – I won’t argue the point – it’s just too basic and true for you to bother arguing. I will try to clarify if you ask specific questions. If talking to me, start your comment with something like “Kip, I wonder….”
Thanks for reading.
# # # # #
Related
