In my digging I discovered that the Apache webserver had open directory listings for folders, and this allowed me to explore a bit to see what I could find. in the \images folder I found a few images that I did not see published on the AIRS website. I’ve saved them to my server should they go offline, but have provided links to the original source URL.
One for Sea Surface Temperature at the tropics seems interesting, though the data period is too short to be meaningful. Note that to eliminate cloud issues, the soundings are done when the satellite has a lookdown to “clear sky”.
I find it interesting that there is a slight global cooling of the oceans during this period of September 2002 to August 2004. The question is: where is the rest of the data and why has the AIRS group not been presenting it on their website? It is after all a publicly funded NASA program.
It is also interesting that this goes against one of the “signatures” of an AGW driven warming. Dr. David Evans writes in this essay:
“The signature of an increased greenhouse effect is a hotspot about 10 km up in the atmosphere over the tropics.”
“The signature of an increase in well-mixed greenhouse gases (such as due to carbon emissions). Warming would be concentrated in a distinct “hot spot” about 8 – 12 km up over the tropics, less warming further away, turning to cooling above 18 km.”
What I’d REALLY like to see is the January version of this map:
Unfortunately, the January version of this image is unavailable. It would be interesting to see if the concentrations in the northern hemisphere maintain which would point to industrialization sources. Or, if the pattern flips, and we see concentrations decrease in the NH and increase in the SH, that would point to seasonal variation and thus likely be driven by biomass.
I’ve put in a request to the AIRS group for the January 2003 image, and others, we’ll see what happens.
UPDATE: 7/31/08 I got a response, see this new posting
I’m looking forward to seeing many more images from September 2002 through today. Thanks Anthony
The July AIRS CO2 concentration seems to correlate well with sunshine at that time of year. CO2 is high in sunny (dry) places, low in cloudy and cold places.
There are probably 2 effects at work. CO2 is dissolved in rain and washed from the atmosphere, and plants grow better in wet places and so take up more CO2.
8KM up, I’ll suggest the former is more important.
Note, the low CO2 concentrations over Antarctica and to the north of India are probably due to altitude (CO2 is denser than air).
This data matches the Argo ocean temp data very nicely. Must be why there aren’t many public attacks on the Argo data!! Ignore it and it doesn’t exist.
Anthony i hope you succeed with your chasing around of data on this one. interesting stuff and nice data.
Nice animation here, Anthony.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/carbontracker/
Some of the links on the site work. Check under Results>View and Additional Projects.
Oops, found a good animation site. Not AIRS, but
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/carbontracker/weather_movie.html
Anthony,
Thank you very much for your contribution to bringing information to basically amateurs like myself about current developments in Climate Science. Although I have a scientific and technical background ( physics and electronic engineering ) my interest in Climate Science is primarily as it influences public policy. I have been dismayed by the corruption of the science and propaganda to influence public policy in a direction, that I do not believe is in the public interest. Your website is an excellent forum for showing current and interesting scientific information. Also, it attracts a knowledgeable and intelligent set of contributors who are additional sources of information. Last, but not least, your unceasing vigilance to enforce the civility of the discussion puts your website above others, which invariably degenerate into name calling.
When I initially got interested in Global Warming – just before Kyoto – , I had enough scientific understanding to realize relatively quickly that catastrophic Global Warming was nonsense and I was willing to leave it that. However, as public policy was inexorably marching towards the AGW dictated paradigm in which I do not believe in, my interest was re-kindled especially when events like decreasing solar activity coupled with an increasing divergence between CO2 model predicted climate and actual climate response is becoming evident.
The message that I am getting that the climate is a very complex and chaotic system and no simple one dimensional – be that CO2, or sunspots – explanation will give you the total answer.
Your website is giving very valuable information to those interested and I hope you will continue to provide this service.
REPLY: Tom I appreciate the recognition. No matter how it turns out, the science should be done right. Focusing on a single cause in a chaotic system can’t be the sole issue. As you point out it is more complex than that. – Anthony
Anthony. Here is an article in today’s ‘Australian’ newspaper in the Higher education section entitled – by the journalist presenting it – ‘Countering a climate scepticism’. The article concerns a report for global warming ‘deniers’ to read (A term used by the report’s author to describe climate sceptics!). The author is Roger Jones who is a CSIRO principal research scientist and a co-ordinating lead author in the IPCC fourth assessment report. He assisted the Garnaut review in interpreting climate change science.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24097594-25192,00.html
R.S. Lindzen has argued since long that any additional greenhouse gas effect will be partly compensated by enhanced latent heat transport into the troposphere. This negative feedback is the largest in tropical latitudes, where the latent heat content of water vapor saturated air is the biggest.
must have misunderstood the tags, so I’ll try again –
There are probably 2 effects at work. CO2 is dissolved in rain and washed from the atmosphere, and plants grow better in wet places and so take up more CO2.
8KM up, I’ll suggest the former is more important.
Probably neither is important at 8 km where we have ice crystals that form and sublime. I’d guess the only rain up there is in the middle of thunderstorm uplift from down low.
F Rasmin points us to an article in the ‘Australian’ by Roger Jones, a co-ordinating lead author in the IPCC fourth assessment report. A quote –
All environmental observations need to be adjusted in some way, and we use scientific models to do so. … Claims that that this task is not carried out with the utmost care and with the appropriate scientific scepticism cannot be supported.
And yet he says this about scientific skeptics (whom he terms “climate change deniers”) –
My view is that anyone with a higher degree in science who maintains that the Earth stopped warming in 1998 should hand their degree back.
But then, one shouldn’t expect ‘deniers’ to be placed on a panel (IPCC) whose very name mandates the conclusions of its study.
Slightly off topic, but you really should read both this article in the Herald Sun (an Australian newspaper) and especially read all the blog replies.
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,24085879-5000117,00.html
The article in question makes a really sneering attempt to belittle an article by well known Australian sceptic Andrew Bolt in which he used graphs to pose awkward questions for the Climate Change zealots which dominate our press and politics here at present.
The blog responses show clearly that, despite massive funding, a breathlessly fervent government and an apologist media, the AGW theory is in deep, deep trouble with the general public. They’re just not falling for the smokescreen any more.
It is largely thanks to sites like yours that the general public have been able to access the real science in an approachable way and draw their own conclusions. Hopefully a few politicians will start to become aware of this backlash amongst the electorate and back away from crippling our economy for a pseudo-religious belief.
I found on the Internet a text published by the Australian “Sydney Morning Herald” on May 7, 2008.
According to the author of that text, “climate change is happening faster than predicted and the world could be as much as seven degrees hotter by the end of the century, a CSIRO scientist says”.
That scientist is Dr. Roger Jones, who seems to be even more dangerous than Jim Hansen.
Climate change happening even faster than predicted? While during the last eight years the mean global temperature no longer increased, in contradiction to the predictions by the IPCC, Jones pretends that it is increasing even FASTER!!
It is interesting that the carbontracker CO2 map barely resembles the AIRS CO2 map for July 2003. Maybe different parts of the troposphere? Really looking forward to the next few weeks on this issue.
One of the “products” of the AIRS satellite is the Surface Air Temperature Map. This is the website:
http://airs.jpl.nasa.gov/News/Features/FeaturesNewGlobalMaps/
This data is just as important as the CO2 data. Why only January and July 2003?
These images of TRUE surface temperatures could put GISS out of business.
A short quote:
“AIRS can distinguish between the temperature of the surface, and the temperature of the atmosphere adjacent to the surface. This ability is very important since the difference between the two strongly influences how the atmosphere behaves. These maps show the average temperature of the atmosphere just above the surface during January and July 2003.”
F Rasmin (00:56:31)
I read the Roger Jones article you referenced in Autralian News. Unfortunately, that website did not provide opportunities to comment on the article.
If this is the best that the pro-AGW has to offer to counter skepticism, then the movement has more trouble than I thought. Roger Jones might be persuasive to a casual observer, but any one with rudimentary understanding of the issues would see that his arguments are fluff. He cites three unnamed measures of global temperatures and maintains that all three show continued increasing global temperatures on ten-year moving averages. Likely, he is using GISS, HadCrut and perhaps NOAA as his three measures. He later says that although a consistent temperature measure is difficult, adjustments to observed data to arrive at a consistent temperature record is done with utmost care and thorough scientific review. The flaws in his statements hardly need exposition.
He maintains that 2008 La Nina induced termperatures are an anomaly just like the 1998 El Nino induced temperatures were an anomoaly in the ohter direction. That is a reasonable statement, but 2008 La Nina temperatures are not taking us back to 1998 temperatures, but rather we are below 1988 temperatures according the most reliable record of temperatures (RSS and UAH.)
F Rasmin (00:56:31) :
That is truly awful. It’s tempting to make a copy and tear it apart sentence by sentence. Unfortunately, I’m spending so much time reading here I don’t seem to have time to do write all the pages I want….
(OT alert.) The headline says “climate change deniers have mounted a rearguard action.” I’m a little sensitive to that, as I’ve been involved in some American Revolutionary War reenactments. One of my wife’s and my favorite events is a rearguard battle at Hubbardton that stopped British forces who were chasing fleeing Fort Ticonderoga. Those forces later helped end the “Northern Campaign” at Bennington and Saratoga. Basically, a “lose the battle, win the war scenario.”
I skimmed the Garnaut report’s chapter on science, and was not too impressed. Haven’t these folks heard that the CO2 pathway is saturated? Or that the PDO has flipped?
Where’s all of Hansen’s data? He works on the government dime and everything that’s not a national secret should be published publicly. Everything: raw data, adjusted data, formulas, source code, output, etc.
Oh, how I long for the days when science was based upon things like repeatability.
F Rasmin,
Read the article. Very interesting, but erroneous I think.
For example, regarding the GCMs and their skill in predicting observed warming, the following study recently released seems to be of the opposite view – http://www.atypon-link.com/IAHS/doi/pdf/10.1623/hysj.53.4.671?cookieSet=1 –
Excellent and interesting post.
The global warming signature simply is not there.
It’s time for the AGW eggheads to go back and redo their models – again.
Their models keep predicting warming on every front, but instead we’re seeing just the opposite.
Now I’ve heard of politicians turning a blind eye, but this is becoming willful stick-your-head-deep-in-the-sand-and-don’t-let anyone-pull-it-out circus.
In this video,
Fred Singer brought this aignature point up:
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=BnFfkwmg1K4
I think Tom Klein accurately ( and concisely) summed up how I feel about this web site. I ‘open up’ the site most days.
Please keep up the good work. Ultimately the slow drip of scientific reason must surely overcome the warmists political propaganda.
I like the quote attributed to Duc de La Rochefoucauld, “There goes another beautiful theory about to be murdered by a brutal gang of facts”
Please keep those facts coming!
Bill Bowie
I find it interesting that there is a slight global cooling of the oceans during this period of September 2002 to August 2004
I do not believe it is reasonable to reach this conclusion based on the data chart you presented. I wish JPL had shown the correlation coefficient for their linear regression, because I strongly doubt it is very high. There doesn’t really seem to be a discernible trend from this data; the best conclusion is that the ocean SST’s remained constant over this time period.
REPLY: Well, it’s pretty close to what ARGO is finding for the oceans, which is also a slight downward trend, so it is not at all unplausible. If you look at the scatter plot and take it all in, you can in fact eyeball a slight down trend.
The whole issue would be moot if the data would be published in its entirety. They say they’ll release it in 2008, which I think is due to them wanting to have a 5 year data set available before public release.
As I pointed out in my post the two year period of this plot is too short to be meaningful yet. When the data set is released, we’ll see if the trend holds or if it is simply noise. Hopefully the data set won’t have been “adjusted” as surface data tends to become these days.
Anthony
I’ve been wanting to thank you for your efforts for some time. The note from Tom Klein finally got me to post to you. May I agree with him that you, and others like you, are performing a vaulable service, for those like myself, who care about the environment, but know snake oil when they see it.
I’ve been a field environmentalist/data collector/environmental regulator for the Feds and the State of FL since 1971. I didn’t belieive a word of the ice age scare around 1970…and I don’t buy the AGW line now…but, if those like you, can not get the truth out fast enough, we are going to be stuck with some really bad law based on an outdated theory of climate, that can not match curent data.
Please keep up the good work, please keep the folks on this site civil, and please keep the information coming.
Thank You,
Craig D. Lattig
Environmental Specialist
REPLY: Thank you both for the kind words. – Anthony