One of us may need glasses, and I think it is you.

IPCC 2007, IPCC Assessment Report 4 (AR4), 2007, Chapter 9. Figure 9.1, in Section 9.2.2.1, page 675.
http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/AR4WG1_Print_Ch09.pdf

For those that have not or cannot download this,

The chapter title:
“9.2.2 Spatial and Temporal Patterns of the Response to Different Forcings and their Uncertainties”

The first sentence:
“The ability to distinguish between climate responses to different external forcing factors in observations depend on the extent to which those responses are distinct.”

There are 6 “maps” in Figure 9.1, showing temperatures in varying colors.
Here is the explanation for them:

“Figure 9.1. Zonal mean atmospheric temperature change from 1890 to 1999 (°C per century) as simulated by the PCM model from (a) solar forcing, (b) volcanoes, (c) wellmixed greenhouse gases, (d) tropospheric and stratospheric ozone changes, (e) direct sulphate aerosol forcing and (f) the sum of all forcings.”

Not surprisingly, (a) shows neutral temps, (b) shows neutral temps, (c) shows a big friggin red spot in the middle with cooler air at higher elevations, (d) shows neutral to cooler temps, (e) shows cooler temps, and (f) shows an even bigger friggin red spot in the middle, with cooler air above.

NO increase with solar being the forcing agent creating the warming, but a big increase when AGW is the forcing agent.

I was surprised to hear you claim that conditions in this area of the atmosphere over the tropics would change the same regardless of the forcing. And it just clearly doesn’t appear to be the case. That whole chapter is talking about the different scenarios that would be expected from different forcings, be it soot, aerosols, GHGs or solar. It refers to feedback mechanisms, changing systems that all have different influences on the climate, depending on the source of forcing (warming).

“The simulated responses to natural forcing are distinct from those due to the anthropogenic forcings described above. Solar forcing results in a general warming of the atmosphere (Figure 9.1a) with a pattern of surface warming that is similar to that expected from greenhouse gas warming, but in contrast to the response to greenhouse warming, the simulated solar-forced warming extends throughout the atmosphere.”

Different forcing, different conditions, Joel. It is clear as a bell. AGW models predict a “hotspot”, an *increased *rate* of warming in the upper troposphere over the tropics. Which is what I tried to explain to you, an theorized *increase* in rate.

By the way, the adiabatic rate isn’t quite simple physics when it comes to reality. Many factors must be considered along with theory in order to model events such as the mid-trop tropic conditions. Here’s a taste of that:

“The temperature structure of the tropical troposphere resembles a moist adiabat, with a lapse-rate transition toward dry adiabatic where water becomes scarce at an altitude Hma ∼ 8 km (350 hPa). Infrared emission by water vapour cools a deeper layer, extending up to Hrad∼ 14 km (160 hPa). Five consequences of these unequal heights are reviewed. 1. Upper-tropospheric relative humidity is often low, highly variable, and bimodal, due to the rapidity of drying by radiative subsidence. 2. Large-scale divergent circulations (e.g. equatorial v wind) exhibit a two-celled vertical structure, with an elevated convergence layer near 8-10 km in the rising branch. 3. The dominant deep convective heating process changes from latent heating at low levels to eddy heat-flux convergence in the upper troposphere. This requires a substantial updraught-environment temperature difference, which leads to large entrainment near Hma, yielding stratiform anvil clouds which also contribute radiative heating. 4. The rising branches of deep (∼Hrad) vertical circulations export more heat than they import as moisture, so that large-scale tropical dynamics can be characterized by a ‘gross moist stability’. 5. Divergent motions with a vertical wavelength ∼8 km, corresponding to Kelvin or gravity wave speeds of ∼15 m s-1, are excited by simple (e.g. uniform) heating profiles extending through the lapse-rate change near Hma.”
http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=14100024

The jump to fossil fuel 12/13CO2 being the one thing that is increasing (not plant-based 12/13CO2) was made because what else could be causing CO2 to increase if not for some new pump, since 14CO2 was decreasing? The new pump was then assumed to be fossil fuel based CO2, of which coal produces the highest amount when burned.

But here are just a few other theories:

re: 14CO2 isotope
14CO2 is produced by cosmic rays. It is not a gas produced by burning anything that is fossil fuel based because it has decayed too much by the time we dig up the fossil liquid (or coal actually) and burn it. Any measure of 14CO2 in the atmosphere has to be there because of cosmic rays either producing it or not producing it. Long term atmospheric 14CO2 (not what is found in ice-cores, tree rings, or carbon dated fossils and rocks) probably fluctuates with solar cycles. When the sun is geomagnetically active (even during short minimums), which it has been up until the end of 2006, 14CO2 will steadily decrease in the atmosphere as it decays away. But now that we are bombarded with cosmic rays once again, there should be another upswing, if anyone would care to fund a study.

re: 12/13CO2
This is the stuff that is produced by anything that takes in oxygen and gives off CO2 and when we burn fossil-fuel based stuff (IE coal). When the world is in a “plenty of food” warm phase, animal kingdom CO2 producers increase. The human population, Insects, birds, bats, bovine, bacteria, plankton, and Viking farmers in Greenland, all get a boost from the extra food available to it. It would make sense that, it you could measure it before it gets used, 12/13CO2 would be on the upswing.

re: sinks and vents
Some places on Earth cycle through being a sink and then a vent, like cool and then warm oceans. And sometimes, sinking lags behind venting because it takes a bit of time for the animal kingdom to start multiplying as a result of the CO2 using plants being more abundant. As long as the warm phase continues, either increasing or staying steady, the growing season predicts lots of oxygen and CO2. So much so that when the oceans are warm, CO2 should be streaming out of it.

re: solar cycles
But what happens when we plunge into a cold snap that lasts through several growing seasons, cutting food production? Animals (see the above list) will suddenly decline, whales will go hungry, birds and animals will stop having multiple babies, bacteria stop muliplying, etc, etc, etc, and CO2 goes down. This starves plants, further reducing food, etc, etc, etc.

re: fossil fuels
A little too much concern, a little too late. Coal is no longer the main source of energy in the US. China is sucking up all the oil it can purchase as it switches from coal to petrol. All sources of fossil fuels are becoming increasingly expensive to extract, even if there are loads of it deep in the Earth’s upper layers. I just don’t see it as a major factor here. And I would be willing to bet that CO2 from industrialized nations can’t hold a candle to CO2 from increased animal kingdom growth during warm climate cycles.

re: warm and cold climate cycles
Saw a farmer the other day coming in from the field with a jacket on. It was cold out there mid-morning, bailing hay, in NE Oregon, even though the sun was shining. Folks here haven’t seen these kinds of day temps for decades. And where the hell are my bats and insects?

Just to be really clear here since I am confused a bit by some of your phrasing, when you say “You need to provide evidence that this hotspot is not claimed to be included as one of AGW warming predictions,” my point is simply that, yes, it is a prediction of the climate models but, no, it is not a prediction that is specific to the mechanism that the warming is caused by greenhouse gases. The models predict the same sort of hot spot if the mechanism of the warming is an increase in solar luminosity or a decrease in sulfate aerosols or whatever.

Well, yes, it is expected because of AGW warming; however, it would also be expected if the warming trend were due to something else besides greenhouse gases (like solar forcing). As for the onus being on me, I have given you various links in the posts that I refer to below.

Glenn says: “Bill Marsh said, when referencing an IPCC report…You neither disputed or refuted that claim, that at least one model does include mechanisms said to be responsible for the theoretical increasing warming ‘hotspot’. ”

Au contraire, in my post of 30/07/2008 11:29:02, I linked to a figure at RealClimate shwing that the hotspot occurs in the GISS model whether the forcing is due to an increase in GHGs or to an increase in solar irradiance. Then, when Bill Marsh tried to argue that this was in contradiction to Fig. 9.1 of the IPCC report, I explained to him in my post of 31/07/2008 4:54:02 that he was misreading that figure.

In particular, in the panel of that figure showing the results for the estimated historical solar forcing, this forcing is so small that the contours in the figure are not on a fine enough temperature scale to resolve the amplification that occurs in the tropical troposphere. All that you can conclude from that figure is that the temperature rise at the surface in the tropics is predicted to be between 0 and 0.2 C and that the rise further up in the troposphere is predicted to be between 0.2 and 0.4 C. This is compatible with any amplification ratio between one and infinity…and certainly is not incompatible with an amplification ratio of 2-3 as is seen for the GHG forcing.

So, in other words, I have both provided a link to a figure that illustrates my claim and I have provided an explanation as to why the figure that Bill Marsh cited does not in fact show what he claimed that it showed. I also provided in that first post I mentioned, a reference into the literature that discusses the model predictions in the context of moist adiabatic lapse rate theory and even compares observational data for temperature fluctuations on monthly to yearly timescales with these predictions, showing reasonable agreement. Frankly, I don’t know what else I can do!

Try this link:

http://www.atypon-link.com/IAHS/doi/abs/10.1623/hysj.53.4.671

Discussion ongoing here:

http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=3361

“This recent peer reviewed paper shows that climate models are always wrong. There aren’t any exceptions. So excuse me for being a skeptic, but I prefer to go with the actual data. Which indicates global cooling.”

The link complains about a missing cookie, so presumably you need to be subscribed to this site to be able to access the paper. Could you post the author/title/source for this reference?

Thanks.

“Well, models are never perfect reproductions of the real world. However, in this case, the models do get it right for the temperature fluctuations that occur on monthly to yearly timescales. They disagree with some of the observational data sets for the multidecadal trends, but as I noted there are very good reasons to suspect that it may be more the data than the models that are wrong there …when models and data disagree, there is no general rule that determines which of them is right and which is wrong.”

This recent peer reviewed paper shows that climate models are always wrong. There aren’t any exceptions. So excuse me for being a skeptic, but I prefer to go with the actual data. Which indicates global cooling.

Others are welcome to their beliefs.

Your claim of this hotspot being a normal natural signal having nothing to do with AGW does not conform to the wording of the article.

From the article:
“Yale University scientists reported that they may have resolved a controversial glitch in models of global warming: A key part of the atmosphere didn’t seem to be warming as expected.”

I’d say it would be reasonable to assume that “expected” meant expected because of AGW warming. The onus is on you to show why that is not true.

Here’s the abstract:
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v1/n6/abs/ngeo208.html;jsessionid=09DC079B41D591F0DC052A59606E2239

“Climate models and theoretical expectations have predicted that the upper troposphere should be warming faster than the surface.”

Not “should be a certain temperature or should be warmer than the surface, but expected to be warm*ing* *faster*. The word “faster” indicates an increasing trend. Normal conditions do not increase on their own, Joel, and if they appear to be or are hypothesized to increase, models that attempt to reproduce those increases *must* include the known mechanisms. Your “basic physics” like “pegged to the moist adiabat” must have a mechanism for this expected increase in temperature over the tropics.

“Surprisingly, direct temperature observations from radiosonde and satellite data have often not shown this expected trend.”

Clearly there is an expected increasing temperature trend(warming faster).

“We derive estimates of temperature trends for the upper troposphere to the lower stratosphere since 1970. Over the period of observations, we find a maximum warming trend of 0.650.47 K per decade near the 200 hPa pressure level, below the tropical tropopause.”

They are not talking about some normal phenomenon, but of an increasing warming trend.

Bill Marsh said, when referencing an IPCC report: “You will see that the ‘hotspot’ is only given in the model that assumes the heating is caused by increases in GHG plot (C).”

You neither disputed or refuted that claim, that at least one model does include mechanisms said to be responsible for the theoretical increasing warming “hotspot”.

You need to provide evidence that this hotspot is not claimed to be included as one of AGW warming predictions.

Part of my job is to understand why such discrepancies occur and to let my colleagues know if I think it is likely to be model error…or whether they should go and recheck their data. It is actually kind of fun to be able to tell people, “Well, you say you put down 2000 Angstroms of that material but it looks like you really put down about 3000″ and then have them come back and tell me, “We just checked our tooling factor and found it was off by about a factor of 1.5.”

And, by the way, I think most of my colleagues would say that if anything I probably err a bit on the side of having too little faith in the modeling that I do, not too much.

If we abandoned all models and theories (or tried to force changes in them to make them agree with every piece of observational data), we’d still be back in the Dark Ages. There are no hard-and-fast rules in science…Theories and models can be wrong but so can the observational data.

As an engineer, I can’t convey how much this appalls me. There are no words. If an engineer working for me told me they adjusted measured data to fit a model for publication, I’d fire them on the spot. It’s a pretty good example of why many hard scientists distrust climate modeling. I wish we could run this way of thinking by any of the great philosophers of science of the past.

When model and nature disagree, the model is wrong. Period. If you think the data is not good, you have no excuse for trying to use it. Don’t adjust it.
If you torture numbers long enough, they’ll confess to anything.

As Feynman said, “The first principle (of science) is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool…”

However, I said “And they are aware of the problem, to the extent that more indirect observational data had to be used to clean up the discrepancy.”

Why did you ignore that, and choose to use “However” and an exclamation point, Joel?

And let’s go back to your claim “This is probably one of the most oft-repeated misconceptions at the moment. The fact is that the models predict such a hotspot independent of the mechanism causing the warming.”

On the surface I find it hard to accept that any mechanism thought to contribute to warming would be left out of a model. So I quoted the ScienceDaily article: “the models predict the fastest warming should occur at the Tropics at an altitude between eight and 12 kilometers.”

Care to comment on why you think “The signature of an increased greenhouse effect is a hotspot about 10 km up in the atmosphere over the tropics” is a misconception?

Isn’t “increased greenhouse effect” about the same as saying “warming”, and doesn’t “the models” refer to global warming models?

In response to the first part, I don’t see the usefulness of quibbling over words. The IPCC uses “projections” to emphasize the fact that one has to come up with certain scenarios regarding how our societies develop in order to determine what future emissions levels might be…and that is in large part under our control.

As for the second part, when models and data disagree, there is no general rule that determines which of them is right and which is wrong. One has to look on a case-by-case basis. In this case, since the amplification with height in the tropical troposphere comes out of some pretty basic physics and is actually seen on timescales over which data quality is not expected to be an issue, and since data quality is KNOWN to be a major issue on the timescale over which there is disagreement, it seems reasonable to look carefully at the data.

However, I strongly encourage you to come up with a proposed physical mechanism currently left out of the models that would bring the models into better agreement with the data for the multidecadal trends but would not screw up the agreement seen for temperature fluctuations on shorter timescales. I’ve thought about it a bit and haven’t come up with any plausible mechanism…Have you?

First, I believe that it is generally agreed that the models are only good for projections, not predictions, second, why should the data be continually massaged until it agrees with the models? Surely, the other way round is the correct way to go.

So, such venting is happening at all of the stations shown here: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/carbontracker/tseries.php?type=mr#imagetable ?!?

And, what is happening to the CO2 that we know we are producing from fossil fuels…CO2 which, unlike the exchanges occurring between oceans and atmosphere and biosphere and atmosphere, has been locked away for millions of years?