Dr. Roy Spencer evaporates Tamino's critique

Hansen’s Bulldog gums another biscuit and proclaims he’s eviscerated a Lion of Skepticism!
Scurry about in fear, Denialists!

The “opposite view” (Foster, et al 2008) was co-authored by Michael Mann and referenced James Hansen in critical areas. Those associations alone should raise concerns of accuracy and integrity. It seems there is too much effort in support a political position rather than enlighten as to the truth.

Not sure why you linked to the comment_on_schwartz. Schwartz himself has revised his sensitivity upwards since then and the first author of that paper is Tamino anyway, so we know just how good the stats are.

Where are the Global Temp. numbers for September?

GISS is Hansen’s playbook… full of data from out of specification surface stations and manipulations by him and totally useless.

Ed Reid,
Well if it isn’t data, perhaps we can think of a few better short words to use instead, maybe GISS stuff, or GISS things, or simply GISS numbers… I like the last one. Anyone else have suggestions? Try to keep ’em clean.
Mike

I don’t really see how Spencer’s response “evaporates” Tamino’s critique. It gives a possible criticism which shows that Tamino’s analog is imperfect and shows why Tamino’s approach to get the correct feedback parameter might be difficult from the actual data in question (i.e., due to radiative forcings that vary on shorter timescales)…but it does not necessarily show that he is wrong on the basic point that he made. In other words, it is the start of an argument…but hardly the end.
It will be interesting to see either or both Spencer or Tamino flesh this out further.

What do the following have in common?
Open Mind
Real Climate
Fair and Balanced

You go Dr. Spencer!! I’ll be purchasing the book for sure…
http://www.cookevilleweatherguy.com

trevor,
I was floored by the next-to-last bullet under “Climate change research topics identified for immediate action”: “Reducing climate sensitivity”
Is this supposed to be “reducing uncertainty in climate sensitivity”, or is someone actually questioning the IPCC’s climate sensitivity estimates?
Or something else?

Sure… UAH, RSS and the GISS GUESS…

Joel Shore
A GCM is a hypothesis and cannot be used to prove anything.

Ed Scott
Thanks for the lists. I have been sifting those for a while. The majority on both are “out of their field” or “retired” or “in the pay of big oil” or … well, you get my drift.
What I would like to gather is a list of scientists whose scientific credentials and focus are on climatology and/or related subjects who have come down on our side of the fence.
I am getting fed up of quoting, for example-
Dr. Syun-Ichi Akasofu B.S. and a M.S. in geophysics at Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan. Ph.D in geophysics at The University of Alaska Fairbanks, USA. Author: Is the Earth still recovering from the “Little Ice Age”? Director of the Geophysical Institute from 1986 until 1999, during which time the Alaska Volcano Observatory was established and Poker Flat Research Range was modernized. He went on to become the first director of the International Arctic Research Center (IARC) upon its establishment in 1998, and remained in that position until 2007. The same year, the building which houses IARC was named in his honour.
“Certainly, global warming is in progress. However, in spite of their claim, not even the [IPCC] presents definite scientific proof that “most” of the present warming is caused by the greenhouse effect, as stated in their summary report. It is simply an assumption. Since the physics of the greenhouse effect of CO2 is well known, and since they thought that no other forcing function is likely to be the cause, the IPCC hypothesized that the warming from about 1900 was caused by it. They assembled a large number of scientists, mostly meteorologists and physicists (not necessarily climatologists who are really needed in climate research) and tried to prove their hypothesis based on supercomputer models. They have continued to do so, in spite of new evidence from some ice core data, which shows that the temperature rises tend to precede CO2 rises by about 1000 years, suggesting that the hypothesized relationship between the temperature and CO2 is reversed, namely that some of the past temperature rises may be the cause of CO2 rises. It is very unfortunate that the hypothesis has somehow become ‘fact.’”
To then be told “he is a founder member of the Heartland institute” and “his science is dodgy anyway”.
It is getting as tiresome as seeing only mention of the unholy trinity of Gore, Hansen and Mann when the opposition are invoked.
Geophysics is quite acceptable to me as “climate related”.

I posted the first response on that thread using the global temp data essentially backing up Spencer’s take on the issue from a different angle.
Tamino then threatened me by talking about my IP address and hence I do not post at or read that site anymore.

DR says:

A GCM is a hypothesis and cannot be used to prove anything.

And, this is related to what I said how exactly?
Mike Bryant says:

Absolutely, don’t believe your lying eyes… believe the models.

But, I didn’t say that, did I? What I actually said is that both Hansen and Spencer have based their climate sensitivity estimates on observational data. But observational data and its interpretation is not foolproof (as is clearly the case here…since they arrive at very different estimates).
And, as for whether one should believe observational data or models, there is no strict rule that says that one is always right and the other is wrong. As someone who does computational science for a living, it is part of my job to determine in situations where the model and data disagree which is more likely to be correct. And, sometimes I have concluded…correctly, as subsequent investigation has shown…that indeed my modeling is correct and the data…or its interpretation…is wrong. (Other times, of course, I conclude that the data is probably correct and the modeling wrong.) And, I think anybody who works with me would tell you that history has shown that, if anything, I to end to err on the side of not trusting the modeling enough rather than trusting it too much.

I posted the first response on that thread using the global temp data essentially backing up Spencer’s take on the issue from a different angle.

…And making lots of incorrect statements in the process.

Tamino then threatened me by talking about my IP address and hence I do not post at or read that site anymore.

I am not sure why noting that you have the same IP address as someone who posted similar incorrect stuff under a different name constitutes a “threat”.
(For those who want to read Bill’s comment and Tamino’s reply, it is the first one in this thread: http://tamino.wordpress.com/2008/07/28/spencers-folly/ )

Re: Joel Shore’s “Or another analogy might be that you (analog of Tamino) calculate the trajectory of a projectile and I (analog of Spencer) point out that it is incorrect because you have failed to include relativistic effects”
Excuse me, but you are putting words in my mouth. Please be so kind as to stay out of my mouth with your irrelevant and specious analogs.
(By the way, space vessel trajectories — which are merely fancy and exotic projectiles — must include relativistic effects to be accurate.
It may be convenient for you and Tamino to try and dismiss Spencer’s work as irrelevant and/or impractical but it shows how models are affected dynamic parameters that are not unreasonable.
Re: Joel Shore’s “Of course, with observational evidence, there is always the possibility that the observations are wrong or that they are being misinterpreted. However, this holds for the observational data and interpretation of Spencer as well as that of Hansen.”
There is also the possibility that you do not exist. Then again, you may. How many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Yawn.

kim says:

Hansen’s interpretations are more likely to suffer from the Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc fallacy than are Spencer’s, though, and I believe they do.

Yeah, like Spencer’s not fishing for observational data and ways to interpret them that support his a priori assumption that climate sensitivity is low? Spencer’s own biases are well-known and his past record with the errors in the UAH satellite data analysis suggest a tendency to make errors that lower the rate of warming (or even falsely show a cooling trend).
I am not saying that Spencer is dishonest, but simply that all sciences have biases. And, yes, Hansen has biases too. However, the scientific process works in such a way that is difficult for individual scientists’ biases to completely corrupt an entire field. AGW “skeptics” are in the position of having to argue that indeed the biases have corrupted the entire field…and also taken in basically all of the credible scientific organizations and now even a lot of corporations (including many, like BP and Shell, who would seem to have a stake in promoting “skepticism” of AGW…and indeed who participated in this through the now-defunct Global Climate Coalition until the science became so overwhelming that they were forced to change their tune).

Re: Fatbigot’s “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, whether something written is right or wrong can only be determined by analysing the substance of what is written.”
You go ahead and analyze all the anonymous bloggers you want. I have far better things to do with my time than examine the tedious minutiae of people who can’t even bring themselves to put their names to a page.

David and Mike,
Not quite so fast on the observational evidence issue. Both of you consider this:
5 People witness a traffic accident. They are interviewed by the same officer. There are five different stories. To integrate those five stories you need to examine the persons physical abilitiies ability to see, hear, stand, etc), their location from the scene, and what their attention was focused on at the time. (there are probably more but these, I think are the major ones). Only then can you bring these separate realities into a reasonable reconstruction.
The climate is a big puzzle, only with pieces that can fit many places and look really good, and only in the big picture start to show they are misplaced.
The issue here is not scientists debating or even if we agree with them. I like many of the folks who contribute here – they have Hutzpa (spelling on that) and are willing to defend their arguments. However, I do have problems with peopeople running around shouting about the climate when so little is known about it. Spending my hard earned tax dollars on some idiotic idea to change the world when there is little proof it will work, is needed or even slightly beneficial drives me up a wall.
I’ll bet my next social security check that 95% of the people examining the problem are trying to be honest and unbiased in their assembling and use of data. The other five percent are in it for the money and that includes many of our elected politicians.
Let’s clean the congress and legislatures. The jury’s out and it still looks like “It ain’t broke, we don’t need to fix it!
Mike

Also, Joel, I would say that James Hansen has been in a position to corrupt the entire field. He has certainly been the trumpeter of doom along with the Gorebellied Fool. I believe Hansen started with the good intentions of saving the earth, but he’s simply wrong, and someone’s going to have to tell him, someday.
================================================

Not just proxy data. He’s relying on massaging precipitation proxies to convert them to temperature proxies.

Correction: As reads “hese effects”, amend to read “These effects”

Why give Tamino the attention? He’s just another coward liberal blogger calling people names while hiding behind a fake screen name on the internet.

This is all very amusing. 55 coments in and not one person has noticed that Spencer is simply wrong – Tamino’s approximate solution is for time varying forcing.
note the variation in s over 0 to t for theta (the time changing forcing term)?
For a bunch of ‘skeptics’, you might try being a little more skeptical.

Still, trying to tell me the data is wrong, not the models, won’t get off the ground. Doesn’t float the boat.
==========================

Joel (06:24:45) I think the answer to (1) is yes, because if that is what is happening, which seems likely, then that is the correct way to look at it. I’m not sure of the answer to (2) but I suspect it would be that Spencer might agree that his vision isn’t perfectly clear, yet, but Tamino, on this issue, is seeing as through a glass, darkly.
=======================================

By the way, you should all go read Tamino’s reply to Randall Semrau at ‘Spencer’s Folly’ at Open mind through the link Anthony gives above. It is vintage Tamino, neither silent, patient, nor firm.
============================================

Joel (07:05:10) I see your point, though I’m not sure it is correct. If those feedbacks are indeed variable, over very short periods of time, then that might be the right way to look at them, and since they are so variable, different periods of time would give you different figures for feedback. But still, this admits a wide range of feedbacks, both to magnitude and sign, and the result of integrating all the feedbacks seems unpredictable.
So shall we look and see if high positive feedback of water vapor to CO2 forcing in present long term? It sure doesn’t explain the present cooling, which is becoming long term.
=========================

“Actually, if you have read much of Hansen’s work”
Yeah, I’ve read his ‘work’ in Fortran77 and there is not a more primitive, unprofessional, poorly motivated body of work extant.

Gavin,

But back to Spencer’s simple model. For temperature to be stable, we must have dT/dt =0, so
F-\lamdaT= 0 or T = F/\lambda

I.e. it’s time invariant
time invariant then he goes on to integrate what he has defined as time invariant.
Then you have this late remark from the great man himself:

He retreats to the “time-varying” mantra because he wants to *justify* his folly — using such short time spans that you don’t really explore the feedback at all.
I suggest you take your feet out of your mouth. With your head so far up your ass, it must be really painful.

I guess he doesn’t think it’s time varying either.

PaulM says

Tamino also does not even seem to understand the word ’stable’. He says that for it to be stable, dT/dt = 0. But that’s the condition for temperature to be steady.”

And, you do not seem to understand that different words can be used differently in different contexts. You are insistent on using one definition of stability from one context when it is clear that this is not the way in which Tamino meant it. In fact, all one would have to do to remedy your complaint if you really wanted to insist that Tamino only use the word in the way that you want it used is to change those places he uses “stable” to “steady”. There would be absolutely no need to change any of the actual equations or other content of his post. Thus your complaint seems to reflect more on your own lack of understanding rather than Tamino’s.

Joel (08:19:55) Well the sort of response I’d expect to ‘you are a joke’ would be a refutation, unless he’s the foil and just trying to prove my point, which is what we so often see with him. He becomes ridiculous, but just at moments. Nonetheless, observing him for those short moments is revelatory.
============================================

kim says:

Joel (08:33:55) So Joel, help us to bridge the gap here betwixt the two, even more than you have so far. I affirm that your explanations have been more helpful than either Pielke Pere’s or Tamino’s, and I thank you for that.

Thanks, kim. I very much appreciate the positive feedback (no pun intended…or maybe intended a little bit). I sometimes wonder if it is worth my while to be posting on a blog where it seems rather unlikely to me that many of the commenters are going to take my posts seriously, so it is nice to get your feedback to what I have posted here.
As for helping to bridge the gap more, at this point I think I have gone about as far as I can go myself without doing some serious calculations with Tamino’s model myself (and trying to learn more about the magnitudes of timescales over which Spencer’s time varying forcings might occur)…which I don’t think I can realistically undertake. But, I’ll certainly let you know if I have any further thoughts (or comments on what other people say)!

Joel and Gavin, in Taminos analysis he uses a constant forcing factor F which is not a function of t or T which is NOT a time varying radiative forcing. You cant treat F as a constant and incrementally change it’s constant value and call it time varying. So Spencer is correct in his assertion.

DR (09:20:54) The oceans are not only shivering but shrinking; Kevin Trenberth inadvertently blurted the truth out to an NPR reporter late last winter when he wondered if the extra ‘pipeline’ heat had been radiated back out to space. How stupid does he think his audience is?
=============================

Mike Bryant
sorry a bit slow
GISS AND MAKE UP

R John says:

Dr. Roy Spencer, PhD in Meteorology
Dr. James Hansen, PhD in Astrophysics
Dr. Gavin Schmidt, PhD in Applied Mathematics
What makes the latter two “experts” in climatology? Hansen and Schmidt are like the Mel Kiper of the NFL draft – if you keep telling everyone you are an “expert”, then eventually some people will believe that you are.

This is a pretty weak line of argument. Both Hansen and Schmidt have PhDs in fields that are quite closely allied in terms of the underlying science and analytical techniques are concerned. But, more importantly, both have published a lot of papers in the top peer-reviewed scientific journals in the field…and my guess is that a measure of the citations that these papers have received would also show them to be important contributors to the field. This is a more accepted measure of expertise in a scientific field within the scientific community.
(Note that I am definitely not claiming that ANYONE with a PhD in astrophysics or applied math is qualified to speak about climate science. Clearly, if they haven’t published in the field and aren’t up on the literature, then their knowledge is severely limited. They would tend to have the necessary background to comment on certain narrow issues, say involving mathematical computations or what not…but would not tend to have the broader scope necessary to evaluate arguments within the context of the field and other work in the field. As an example, Al Saperstein who as co-editor of the newsletter of the Forum on Physics and Society [of which I’m a member] read over Monckton’s screed that they published in the newsletter; however, his editorial suggestions did not constitute peer review [by his own admission] because Saperstein, while a PhD physicist, is not particularly up on the climate science field.)

Phil, look at Tamino’s math. The forcing function F is a constant. Verbal handwaving is meaningless and Spencer is still correct.

Tilo:
So, in other words, you and the crowd at ClimateAudit have set yourself up as judge and jury and are now passing judgement on scientists. And yet, you have yet to get any impartial scientific authority to agree with you on these serious charges. In fact, when the NSF was asked by McIntyre to weigh in on the issue of the release of information to him, they told him in no uncertain terms that Mann was not obligated to release to him the computer code that he was demanding. (I should note that Mann did subsequently release the code…and for his latest paper has archived the data and code online, and although he still complains, even McIntyre admits “they did make a much better effort than others in the field”. What he does not say is that such a complete archiving of data and code is almost unprecedented at least in the areas of the physical sciences that I have worked in.

Joel (19:43:39) Joel, the defense is exercising its right not to incriminate itself. We’d love to hear from it, instead.
=============================================

I have not followed this closely so cannot really comment on the content.
I can only repeat what I have been saying from the beginning of reading climate papers that one of the main problems is the concept of “forcing” to talk about energy balances. It is a convoluted concept, full of epicycles and it is inevitable that things will go wrong.
I will state once more: radiation is not conserved, energy is conserved. Energy is not a vector, as the word “forcing” falsely implies. Transforming thermodynamic quantities from heat and energy into radiation epicycles is something that still boggles my physicist mind. A whole branch of physics, thermodynamics, has been developed to study heat transfers and energy transfers and it works extremely well from delicate engines to huge factories. No forcings in there.
If a new branch of physics is needed for climatology, that is chaos and complexity theories that are slowly being developed in many fields of physics, chemistry and biology. It would be good for climatologists to dig into that and try and create models ( example Tsonis et all with a neural net model of PDO + ENSO) that include better the extreme non linearity of the solutions of the coupled differential equations that may describe weather and climate.
http://www.uwm.edu/%7Ekravtsov/downloads/GRL-Tsonis.pdf
Anastasios A. Tsonis et al
GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 34, L13705, doi:10.1029/2007GL030288, 2007

Joel (19:34:03) The effort may be unprecedented but it’s also an unmitigated disaster. Watch Steve try to make sense of that heap of garbage at climateaudit.org
Phil. (21:08:40) So can you bridge the gap? Why isn’t Spencer’s method appropriate, if you think it is, and why don’t temperatures in the real world support the sensitivity estimates of the models? What about the fundamental error in the assumptions, the one-way cause and effect of temperature to clouds, and the neglect of the C&E of clouds causing temperature change? All this relates to the inadequacy of the parameterizations of the convections and the clouds, as the skeptics have been crying about for awhile, now.
=============================
==========================================

Joel (07:05:10), yesterday. Oh my God, now Gavin’s Pussycat is trying to argue that the data is wrong.
So far, Tamino hasn’t responded. Phil. and Hank are cheerleading, but dodging the question.
=======================================

kim: The issue that Gavin’s Pussycat and me are talking about over on Tamino’s blog has nothing to do with Spencer’s current work. It is a hijack that Neil Fisher started when he asked why there is no observed “hot spot” as you go up in the tropical troposphere as the models predict.

kim says:

So what is it? Spencer’s methods? His data? Or the models? Where’s the beef?

I think the problem is most likely with Spencer’s method of analyzing the data. His method looks over very short times and, while he shows that it recovers the correct climate sensitivity for a very simple model where all the feedbacks are assumed to operate instantaneously, it will not do so if the feedbacks operate over any reasonable period of time (as Tamino demonstrates).
Now, Spencer might rightly criticize Tamino’s example for being too simplistic because of its assumption of a constant forcing; however, at the end of the day, I still don’t see how that can get him around the very basic problem that any method that tries to diagnose climate sensitivity from data over very short time periods won’t see the feedbacks that operate over longer timescales.

Joel, Spencer challenges the “modelers”
“Now, if the modelers STILL insist that this short term (5-year) feedback behavior — even in the models — does not invalidate positive feedback for long-term global warming, I will respond: “OK, then adjust the models so they behave like the satellite observations on the short (5-year) time scale, and THEN show us how much global warming the models predict”.
So do you throw up your hands and say the “real data” only covers short time scales and ignore it? Or do you try to accept real data over models and try to fit “data” into the models? I go for the latter.

Joel (08:25:50) Hah, Neil’s hijack is hardly one. He restarted the conversation a couple of days ago and it generalizes with ours.
========================================

kim:

Thanks for your answer over there, Joel, but if the models work for monthly or yearly time scales, but not for shorter or longer periods, it still points to a problem in the models rather than in the data.

First, where did you get the statement that the models don’t work for shorter periods? I didn’t say or mean to imply that. I don’t know if they have been tested for shorter periods. However, since the convective processes that lead to the moist adiabatic lapse rate predictions operate on short timescales, there is every reason to believe that if these processes are dominating on the monthly-to-yearly timescale, they are dominating on the shorter timescales where they actually operate too.
Look, the take-home message is that the models predict convective processes to dominate and produce results close to moist adiabatic lapse rate predictions over all timescales (or at least all that I know about). The data shows this occurring except when one looks at the longest timescales in the data, which corresponds to then looking at the multidecadal temperature trend over the whole data set rather than fluctuations. For those longest timescales, the data deviates from the predictions and from its behavior at the shorter timescales…or, at least, some analyses of the data do (e.g., UAH does significantly but for RSS the deviation is not very significant). However, the data for the multidecadal trends has known problems (e.g., a cooling artifact for the radiosonde data due to better shielding of the sensors from the sun over time) and attempts to correct for that in various ways bring the data into much better alignment with the models and theory. Hence, lacking even any proposed mechanism that I know of for why the moist adiabatic lapse rate theory predictions should break down, it seems reasonable to think that the problem is most likely due to the known deficiencies in the data.
By the way, as a side comment, it is worth pointing out that this lapse rate effect provides a negative feedback in the climate models because the notion that the upper troposphere warms more than the surface means that the surface does not need to warm as much in order to warm the part of the atmosphere that is effectively emitting most of the radiation back out into space. So, at least naively, if this notion is wrong and the surface really warms as faster or faster than the upper troposphere then this would tend to imply less negative feedback and a higher climate sensitivity, all else being equal.

It’s just not going to work, claiming the data is bad.

There is no doubt whatsoever that the data is bad for the longtime trends in the tropical troposphere. First of all, the coverage of the radiosondes is very sparse, the problems with the changes in shielding and such over time are well-known, and the size of the estimated corrections that are needed is not small. As a result, there are a wide range of estimates from the analyses and re-analyses of the data. Second of all, for the satellite data, there are considerable differences between the different analyses…and again well-known problems with stitching together the results from the different satellites.

What about Spencer’s question about the inadequate cause and effect between clouds and temperature which damage the assumptions in the models?

Okay, so can you explain to me how this mechanism could cause the moist adiabatic lapse rate predictions to break down on the very long time scales but to still hold for fluctuations on monthly to yearly timescales? It seems unlikely to me that this could be the case since I believe that Spencer it talking about processes that occur on shorter timescales than this.

“So, in other words, you and the crowd at ClimateAudit have set yourself up as judge and jury and are now passing judgement on scientists.”
Yes. What’s your point?
“And yet, you have yet to get any impartial scientific authority to agree with you on these serious charges.”
Give me the name of an impartial scientific authority that has dealt with the subject of Mann refusing to update his series to the present. Give me the name of an impartial scientific authority that has even looked at the source and collection of the Graybill data and who has compared this with the Ababneh data.
“In fact, when the NSF was asked by McIntyre to weigh in on the issue of the release of information to him, they told him in no uncertain terms that Mann was not obligated to release to him the computer code that he was demanding.”
I don’t give a damn what NSF said. If he is developing computer code on the public dime, then the computer code belongs to the public. Beyond that, if you are trying to get the world to spend trillions of dollars based upon your computer code, then you have a moral obligation to let others look at the details of your gloom and doom.

Joel, climate science right now is a total disgrace. Just look at this little snippet:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=4064
There are trillions of dollars at stake and yet we get stonewalling from people put in charge that mostly work for us. I personally think Hansen should be fired.
As Anthony has put on his blog, climate science badly needs some sort of ISO 9000 type oversight.
As fas as Spencer’s data goes–I think you are stretching suggesting his data is wrong and the models are correct—-only in climate science does this type of joke happen.

Joel Shore
Thanks for contributing to discussion on this blog.
However in answer to Kim’s question: –
“What about Spencer’s question about the inadequate cause and effect between clouds and temperature which damage the assumptions in the models?”
Your answer: –
“Okay, so can you explain to me how this mechanism could cause the moist adiabatic lapse rate predictions to break down on the very long time scales but to still hold for fluctuations on monthly to yearly timescales? It seems unlikely to me that this could be the case since I believe that Spencer it talking about processes that occur on shorter timescales than this”.
dodges the question.
I believe Spencer is saying that the assumption that the observed cloud variability that was believed by some scientists to be the result of feedback , ignored the possibility that some, not fully understood or accepted phenomena, was partly responsible and this lead to the adoption of a climate sensitivity that is too high. In fact Spencer’s current work (see below) shows that, over the 5 year periods of his analysis, low clouds increased with warming i.e. negative feedback and that water vapor + lapse rate + high cloud feedback was weakly positive.
See his latest research update here: –
http://www.weatherquestions.com/Roy-Spencer-on-global-warming.htm
“October 8, 2008 RESEARCH UPDATE #2:
We have submitted a paper for publication to Geophysical Research Letters entitled, “Satellites Reveal a Climate System Less Sensitive than in Models”. This paper should answer the previous criticisms of our August 2007 GRL paper on negative feedback in the tropics that (1) it only applied to the tropics, and (2) that feedbacks diagnosed on short time scales might not apply to long-term global warming.
In the new paper we diagnose feedback parameters from 5 years of NASA Aqua satellite data over the global oceans AND perform exactly the same diagnoses on all possible 5-year periods in transient CO2 simulations from 18 IPCC climate models.
The results are, as you can see below, somewhat stunning…NONE of the five year periods from ANY of the IPCC climate models show the negative feedback behavior seen in the satellite data:
Contrary to my expectations, though, the negative feedback was not in the longwave (infrared); there was an excellent match between the models and satellite observations in that component, suggesting that the total [water vapor + lapse rate + high cloud] LW feedback was weakly positive.
Instead, the negative feedback was entirely in the reflected shortwave (solar)…suggesting that low clouds increase with warming. This is actually somewhat consistent with the IPCC AR4 report which admitted that feedbacks related to low cloud behavior were the most uncertain in the models. Since this is an apples-to-apples comparison between the models and the satellite observations, it will be difficult for the IPCC to ignore this kind of evidence.
The question of WHY the IPCC models would be so far off is, in my view, related to what I discussed above, in my Research Update #1: In previous analyses of natural co-variability between clouds and temperature, only feedback has been assumed to be operating, when in fact some of the variability is actually cloud fluctuations causing temperature change. In simple terms, there has been a mix-up between cause and effect, and that has led to climate models being built upon faulty assumptions.
Now, if the modelers STILL insist that this short term (5-year) feedback behavior — even in the models — does not invalidate positive feedback for long-term global warming, I will respond: “OK, then adjust the models so they behave like the satellite observations on the short (5-year) time scale, and THEN show us how much global warming the models predict”. ”
Touché!
It will be interesting to read this paper and the responses.

I don’t give a damn what NSF said. If he is developing computer code on the public dime, then the computer code belongs to the public. Beyond that, if you are trying to get the world to spend trillions of dollars based upon your computer code, then you have a moral obligation to let others look at the details of your gloom and doom.

And to extend that, if you’re confident in your conclusions and methods, you’d be happy to have anyone examine your data. It’s blatantly obvious that McIntyre is eminently more qualified at statistics that Mann and his team. And absolutely everything about the Hockey Stick is statistics, not “climate science”.

The whole conversation with Joel Shore reminds me of a defense attorney who is paid to defend his client come hell or high water. If you can’t beat them with real data, then try to discredit the character of the prosecutor and the witnesses, and don’t overlook the power of trying to argue about the definition of tiny little words in order to distract attention from the main argument. Like Bill Clinton asked “What do you mean by “sex?””.
Joel, you are so obviously committed to AGW, it has become for you a marriage for better or for worse. You have now become irrelevant, and in my case-ignored.

Joel (18:57:53) The satellites are more reliable than ground and probably more than you think.
Dontcha’ know the models have failed? Or been falsified? Or disconfirmed? See Lucia’s Blackboard and don’t try to give me any guff about projections not predictions.
I don’t think the models parameterize the convections, and water phase changes at the time spans that Spencer is measuring, and they fail at the long term.
We have descended to repetition in this dispute. You believe in the models, I don’t. They are not useful.
========================================

When quoting or continuing, a reference post name & timestamp is helpful for us slower latecomers.

Jeff Alberts says:

And to extend that, if you’re confident in your conclusions and methods, you’d be happy to have anyone examine your data.

Well, by that standard, Mann must be since his latest paper has the data and programs available freely on the web. Over at ClimateAudit, they seem to be having a field day looking at although so far they seem to be generating a lot more heat than light.

I doubt there is any “law” involved. The fact of the matter is, McIntyre is a qualified peer reviewer. The IPCC saw fit to use him as an expert reviewer, so why does Mann see him as an amateur funded by oil companies?

First of all, because it tries to be very open, the IPCC more-or-less allows anyone to become an “expert reviewer” who wants to. (Technically, you may have to be nominated by a government or an organization…but surely someone like McIntyre can find an organization skeptical of AGW who would be happy to nominate him.) Second of all, intellectual property rights are a matter of law. And, the NSF was very clear on what Mann’s obligations were to McIntyre or anyone else in the letter that they sent to McIntyre.
Dennis Sharp:

Joel, you are so obviously committed to AGW, it has become for you a marriage for better or for worse. You have now become irrelevant, and in my case-ignored.

Do what you want. Sure, we all have our biases and I won’t deny that I have mine. But, perhaps you might examine your own biases and commitments too. And, I try hard to call them as I see them…and in this thread when Gavin Schmidt said something that I thought was incorrect (or at least partially so), I said so. I also have not dismissed Spencer’s work out-of-hand but I also don’t think Spencer’s short response to Tamino’s critique constitutes anything like a complete rebuttal.

Joel (05:11:21) The legal requirements about documentation and retention of intellectual property nearly become irrelevant when we are talking about policy decisions of this magnitude. In this sort of circumstance, the motive for not following the moral requirement of complete and utter disclosure and openness becomes germane. Why does Mann persist in the manner he does? Watch the last tape from Rhode Island. Something is not right.
===========================================

“I also don’t think Spencer’s short response to Tamino’s critique constitutes anything like a complete rebuttal.”—What??? Tamino has shown nothing–nada. His math does not apply–he wasted his time. I am still wating for the analysis showing a time varying forcing function.

Bob B (07:51:59) That’s why I suggested Tamino might be breaking pencils over there. Not in anger but in concentration. Too bad he can’t work with Spencer.
=================================

That the GCM models cannot be correct in “projecting” far into the future is inevitable.
1) The bands around each “projection” are not error bands. They are estimates of bands for what errors should be according to the feelings of the modeler. This is written in black and white in the AR4 report. If true errors are used the “projections” will be all over the temperature space. Have a go at this toy model from Junkscience.com
http://junkscience.com/Greenhouse/Earth_temp.html .
If you change the albedo by 3% the temperature changes by 1 degree. Can anybody insist that the albedo is known to 3% 1 sigma error?
2) And more importantly, what I have said several times here, is that the GCMs are using linear approximations of the putative solutions of the many coupled differential equations that control the thermodynamic engine that is the climate/weather.
Linear approximations work up to a point. The GCM models when used for weather predictions show us up to what point they do work: some days, i.e. an N number of time steps through the code. When these programs are transformed into climate models, i.e. more linear approximations (averages) the effect does not disappear. It changes scale, but still there will be an N1 number of steps after which the non linearity of the true solutions will appear in force.
Even if all the differential equations that apply have been taken into account, (which is not true) still linear approximations will inevitably fail.
—
The simplest point of clarification though comes from the errors. It is inconceivable that the true errors are not plotted for the “projections” so that the hoi polloi can see what nonsense is being pushed down their throats at the expense of trillions and million of lives.
The AR4 waffles on the errors:
Let me repeat the direct quote from the AR literature, from chapter 8 that is supposed to evaluate the models:
” 8.1.2.2 Metrics of Model Reliability from the AR:
“The above studies show promise
that quantitative metrics for the likelihood of model projections
may be developed, but because the development of robust
metrics is still at an early stage, the model evaluations presented
in this chapter are based primarily on experience and physical
reasoning, as has been the norm in the past.””
We should insist on seeing true errors on the “projections”. That is where statisticians with their hands on a model can come in strong.
The toy climate model above is frightening, in that it shows on what flimsy foundations the world is asked to destroy its economies ( though it seems we are on the way of doing that without the help of GCMs).

kim (07:52:49) :
“anna v. (22:09:00) If the globe’s climate regulating mechanism is a gigantic analog computer processing all the inputs, can it be modeled successfully on a smaller scale?”
I do not know. It seems that an analogue computer might do the job. Analogue computers are computers that use electric ( resistances, inductors and capacitors) elements in a net simulating coupled differential equations, and were invented in parallel with digital computers back then. They are orders of magnitude faster than decimal computers in solving differential equations ( look it up). In the beginnings, I met them in the 1960s, they were a strong part of research, but then the all purpose utility of the digital won out.
I do not know whether any research is going on still, what with chaos and complexity problems.