The recent discovery of multidecadal oceanic oscillations in each ocean combined with my simple observation of the changes in the latitudinal positions of the weather systems when a warming trend changed to a cooling trend and vice versa is what led to my novel ideas about the climate mechanisms.

This post which I put on another board sums it up very well and I think I’ll post it in many places (and often) whenever it seems relevant:

“Changing temperatures induce circulation changes as the air seeks to restore the sea surface/surface air temperature equilibrium and at the same time resolve ocean induced variations in the sun to sea / air to space equilibrium.

The circulation changes alter all the processes involved in the rate of energy transfer from surface to space. In so far as the air circulation fails for a time to maintain temperature stability then radiation from surface to space will also change but in due course stabilty is always restored between the four said parameters (sea surface / surface air / sun to sea / air to space).

Only huge catastrophic changes capable of altering the temperature of the whole body of the oceans can set a new global equilibrium in the short term (less than millennia). The sun can also do it gradually but it takes centuries e.g. from Roman Warm Period to Mediaeval Warm Period to Little Ice Age to now. The solar effect is heavily modulated over time by ocean cycles. A change in the composition of the air alone cannot do it.

The role of water vapour combined with the latent heats of evaporation and condensation gives the circulation changes the major part of their ability to accelerate energy transfer from surface to space.

So, the most common and by far the largest forcing at any given time is multi decadal variations in energy emissions from the oceans. In the background are slow century scale changes in solar output.

Temperature changes induced by sun and oceans drive air circulation changes which drive changes in every aspect of climate including convection, conduction, evaporation, condensation, precipitation, windiness, cloudiness, albedo and humidity as regards both quantities and distribution.

Water vapour in itself is not a driver nor does it have cycles or periodicities of it’s own. It’s a very useful contibutor to the whole process though and without it the Earth would be entirely different.”

re Comments by Stephen Wilde

Stephen, thanks for your further enlightening comments. I have had a moment to think further about the oceans, and realised this:

1. Ignoring salinity, if max H20 density is 4C, and if all hotter and colder waters float on top of this, then..
2. The hot and cold water must sit side by side at the surface!
3. And so, where hot and cold surface waters meet (somewhere between balmy tropics and polar ice caps), they must eventually cool/heat one another down/up to 4C
4. At which point, this ‘densest’ ocean water must sink, with the less dense hotter and cooler waters closing in over the top of it, meeting again to perpetuate the process
5. Thus there should be an outflow of surface waters form the equator and the poles towards downwelling zones somewhere in between

(I may be one of the few here who didn’t already know this.. a geologist, not an oceanographer)

And then all this will then be made horrendously complicated by the coriolis effect, the prescence of intervening landmasses, sea floor topography, salinity/density differences, geological heating, eg. at mid ocean ridges, etc.

What a different system it is from atmospheric circulation! (And if this is the beast that actually powers the atmospheric weather and climate..how could you ever model the latter in isolation?)

Further thought required

Computer model says UNC will win tournament
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/03/18/ncaa.tournament.bracket.predictions/index.html

“There’s a lot of luck in life. Life is a series of heads and tails, and human beings try to describe rationale behind them … when in fact it may be random.”

If you wish to continue please use the forum that I linked you to.

Stephen,
Never? Yes, never.
Even if you feed all the output of an amplifier back in a negative loop, the resulting output will be half of what it would have been without the feedback. So the best you can hope for is that the close to 4 W/m2 a CO2 doubling would give is reduced to 2 W. What you are hoping for is not negative feedback but that some cooling mechanism will take care of it, but then you are denying the whole greenhouse effect. There shouldn’t be any if such a cooling mechanism exists, the first tiny degree of warming produced by the GHGs would have been countered.”

The amplifier analogy doesn’t work. The Earth as a whole is not an amplifier, merely an obstruction to the flow of solar energy. One could say that the oceans and the air are two seperate amplifiers (or resistors).

The greenhouse effect of the air is as nothing compared to The Hot Water Bottle Effect of the oceans. Since the surface air temperature always moves towards equilibrium with the sea surface temperature any change in the greenhouse power of the air alone is neutralised in the process of maintaining that equilibrium.

The proof or rebuttal of what I say will be real world observations. So far the Earth is simply not responding as expected to CO2 variations.

What you are hoping for is not negative feedback but that some cooling mechanism will take care of it, but then you are denying the whole greenhouse effect. There shouldn’t be any if such a cooling mechanism exists, the first tiny degree of warming produced by the GHGs would have been countered.

One cannot deny that matter has heat capacity, so the atmosphere has a heat capacity, which is being missnamed as a “greenhouse effect”.

Also have you ever heard of thresholds?

What about non linear behaviors? Oscillations?

A tiny degree of warming of the oceans does not produce clouds, for example. It is a much more complicated mechanism. Clouds will be a negative feedback in this problem, after a certain degree of warming.

Once the tropical oceans get much hotter than 30 degrees, there are so many clouds and storms, taking the heat up in the stratosphere, they start getting cooler. etc.etc.

I read your links and in principle agree with your pov. In my view also it is all about heat capacities.

I am intrigued with your analogue with a resistance circuit. Ever since looking at this problem I have been thinking of analogue computers. Back in the 1960s, they were holding the fort against digital ones for being able to solve systems of coupled differential equations by making analogue electric circuits with resistors, capacitors and/or inductors and it would seem to me to be an ideal way of modeling climate. The Tsonis paper above seems to be doing something like that except imposed on a digital computer. It would seem to me that an analogue construct would be much more efficient.

Now on the GT paper mentioned in a post above:
My gut feeling is that in the AGW models there are double countings because of intermingling of quantum mechanical concepts and classical thermodynamic concepts.

In their latest paper Gerhard Gerlich and Ralf D. Tscheuschner

Version 4.0 (January 6, 2009)
replaces Version 1.0 (July 7, 2007) and later

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0707/0707.1161v4.pdf

they give a physicist summary, with which I cannot disagree.

Thank you for your support.

Another interesting fact about the ocean surface is that warming of it is never caused DIRECTLY by warmer air above it.

Any ocean surface warming is caused by solar energy previously absorbed working it’s way back to the surface.

It is true that warmer and/or more humid air above that water slows down the energy flow from water to air but as you rightly point out that has no effect on the temperature of the main body of the oceans.

When the energy flow from water to air slows down there is no overall warming of the oceans. All that happens is that the energy flowing from ocean to air ‘pools’ for a while at the surface. It effectively waits in a ‘queue’ at the surface until the air circulation and weather systems increase their speed of ejection of energy to space and neutralise the warming.

That is what happens when oceans naturally increase their emission of energy and the response of the air is exactly the same whether the warmer ocean surface is a result of enhanced energy emission from the ocean or enhanced energy in the air from another cause such as more humidity or more CO2.

The air has to balance both the energy from ocean to air with energy from air to space AND energy from sun to ocean and energy from air to space over time. Everything we observe is a feature of that interplay.

To deal adequately with any warming of the air from extra CO2 or any other increased GHG the air circulation and weather systems just shift their size and/or positions to adjust the rate of energy emission to space to restore equilibrium.

The equilibrium they work back towards is set by the rate of energy flow from the sun modulated by the rate of energy flow through the oceans.

The air circulation changes ensure that over time the energy radiated to space matches the energy received from the sun despite disruptions in the flow caused by the effects of the ocean cycles or changes in the composition of the air.

It has taken me a year to get to this point and I see nothing in AGW theory or literature to counter it.

The occasional surges of warmth in the stratosphere in winter fit into my scenario. When a large surge of polar air moves equatorward it draws a pulse of energy from the oceans in the lower latitudes and pumps it into the stratosphere where most of that energy is pushed out to space but a portion is not pushed out and descends again thus strengthening the high pressure systems on the poleward side of the mid latitude jets.

Features such as that occur more frequently and are larger when the oceans globally are in net absorption mode (surface cooling) such as now. At such times the poleward air masses are ‘stronger’ than the equatorward weather systems. The opposite applies when the oceans are in net emission mode as I describe more fully in my articles.

Everything we see in the air and the oceans is part of that natural energy balancing interaction and human emissions have no part to play other than a very small insignificant human induced shift in positions or intensities of the main high pressure systems. Wholly imperceptible in the face of natural variability.

Stephen,

I find your pieces on the role of the oceans intuitively correct, and they dovetail nicely with the fundamental observation quoted in the German paper, that if you leave the conservatory door open, it does not get as hot inside, as convection then takes over and removes the heat.

The key factors in heat transfer up through the atmosphere (and then back out into space) would seem to be these:

1. The major method of heat transfer in the lower atmosphere is convection, and the major direction of this heat transfer is therefore up
2. The major heat carrier in this convective system is water vapour
3. The major mechanisms of actual heat transfer within this convective system are: the absorbtion of latent heat by water at ground level during evaporation, and then its release at higher altitude during the condensation that eventually results.

Once at the top of the convective system, I am not sure how most of the heat proceeds from there: (Is it used initially in expansion of the air and then convected to higher levels? Is it radiated directly away through the thinner atmosphere?) But it certainly doesn’t come back down to the surface: what falls back to earth is cold rain, hail, sleet and snow, which is then used again in the repeat the process.

In a most extreme example of this, I have sweltered my way through a 40 degree morning in the tropical desert south of Halls Creek, Western Australia, watched huge diurnal thunderclouds piling up over lunch, and then been pelted by hail in the afternoon, till the ground was six inches deep in ice and eveybody was shivering in a temperature close to zero. The gargantuan heat transfer involved in this process was impressive. And it was all upwards, and was almost entirely facilitated by the water vapour that present in the air.

I am not sure that the absorbative/radiative effects of a small increase in the trace gas CO2 can really do much, in the face of the role of a phase change system as powerful as this.

The key points with respect to the predominant effect of water in the system are:

1. Water is by far the largest component in the system (I am including the oceans, which you rightly include as part of the ‘atmophere’, with which it is in a state of dynamic equilibrium), and

2. Crucially, water is the only component in the system that undergoes phase changes, from solid to liquid to gas and back, and it is these phase changes that give it the ability to transfer and then physically transport most of the heat in the system as it moves around.

If we were on a planet where water was solid as rock and it was CO2 that changed phase from moment to moment, absorbing and releasing huge quantities of latent heat as it moved around, then CO2 would cut it and H20 would be a side issue. But on our planet, it is just another little bit of gas.

Now I haven’t got time to stop and think about the oceans this morning. But the vertical heat transfer system there is bound to be very different to tthat of he atmosphere: the only phase change involved is the localised formation of a skin of solid water at the top, which is irrelevant to most of the ocean volume; the convective system is complicated no end by maximum water density being at 4C and colder, or solid water floating on top; lateral ocean currents, land and sea floor topography all interfere.

But judging from the predominance of the effects of ocean temperature / current on local climate over thos of latitude and effective solar radiation, once again it is obvious that water is in charge.

With regards,

LK

The volumetric heat capacity of the air it is 3,227 times less than of water.
Where there is no humidity to keep irradiated heat from below, from the sea water, surface or buildings,etc. heat dissapears rapidly by convection, as experienced in deserts. This is just common sense and third grade science. You just can´t keep the air heat without an efficient accumulator which it is not the unefficient air no matter how much CO2 it could contain.
This why GWrs.use bottles filled with hot CO2 instead of bottles filled with water to heat their now frozen feet (CO2 is for keeping Ice creams cold). :)

Stephen,
That’s not how negative feedbacks work. They can limit the effect of a forcing but never cancel it.”

Never ?

In the case of the Earth there is a vast ocean the surface temperature of which controls the temperature of the air above it.

In order to maintain sea surface/surface air equilibrium either the sea surface has to be warmed by the air or the warmed air has to accelerate any excess energy to space.

Due to the enhancement of the evaporative process caused by extra energy in the air combined with the cooling effect of the latent heat of evaoration I cannot see how the warmer air can heat the ocean.

Thus in this case all the extra energy from human CO2 has to be ejected to space by a speeding up of atmospheric processes.

Now I’m aware that that is not a mainstream view and is singularly unwelcome to many and I have challenged others elsewhere to show it to be false in the real world. So far no one has convinced me.

If you wish to debate the issue with me please feel to go to this forum:

http://climaterealists.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=4