UAH Global Temperature Update July, 2011: +0.37 deg. C
By Dr. Roy Spencer
How ironic..a “global warming denier” reporting on warmer temperatures 
The global average lower tropospheric temperature anomaly for July, 2011 increased to +0.37 deg. C (click on the image for a LARGE version):
Even though the Northern Hemisphere temperature anomaly cooled slightly in July, as did the tropics, warming in the Southern Hemisphere more than made up for it:
YR MON GLOBAL NH SH TROPICS
2011 1 -0.010 -0.055 +0.036 -0.372
2011 2 -0.020 -0.042 +0.002 -0.348
2011 3 -0.101 -0.073 -0.128 -0.342
2011 4 +0.117 +0.195 +0.039 -0.229
2011 5 +0.133 +0.145 +0.121 -0.043
2011 6 +0.315 +0.379 +0.250 +0.233
2011 7 +0.372 +0.340 +0.404 +0.198
For those who want to infer great meaning from large month-to-month temperature changes, I remind them that much of this activity is due to natural variations in the rate at which the ocean loses heat to the atmosphere. Evidence for this is seen at the end of the sea surface temperature record through last month, which has a down-tick during the recent up-tick in atmospheric temperatures:
Global Sea Surface Temperature through July:
Here are the SST anomalies from AMSR-E on the NASA Aqua satellite (note the different base period, since Aqua has been flying only since 2002…click for a larger version):
I suspect things are going to get worse and tempts are no longer going to be flat like they have for the last number of years. The heatwave that has been going on in the southern US the last few months is unbelievable. I would expect more records to be broken over the next few months as were starting to see more and more effects of man made Global Warming.
What a coincidence, I posted about the preliminary July 2011 Global and NINO3.4 SST anomalies today:
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2011/08/01/preliminary-july-2011-sst-anomaly-update/
Both dropped a small amount in July.
Brian, Clearly not learned to read and write yet, then. Don’t come here making such statements without your proofs in place.
Brian says:
“I would expect more records to be broken over the next few months as were starting to see more and more effects of man made Global Warming.”
Brian, there is no verifiable, testable evidence, per the scientific method, showing any anthropogenic effects. None. This is the internet’s “Best Science” site, so you should really try to base your comments on science, not simply on your beliefs.
There is no evidence that these normal temperature fluctuations are anything other than natural variability. There may be an anthropogenic component. But so far there is no testable evidence supporting that conjecture.
Brian, “Oh no we won’t!”
Pantomimes are great aren’t they? And there’s not bigger pantomime than AGW.
Monthly fluctuations of this magnitude make 0.5 deg / century seem rather trite, especially considering that the satellite record is relatively recent. When pressed on the great inherent inaccuracy of surface-station based estimates of global averages, warmistas retreat to vague handwaving about earlier spring thaws or other regional phenomena, as if this were sure-fire proof of global catastrophe just around the corner. It’s just that they’ve picked an imaginary catastrophe, CO2-induced runaway warming, rather than an actual possibility, a Maunder-style cooling, for which statist fuel-poverty is not the answer.
This doesn’t meet my standard of irony. Rather it meets my standard of openness/transparency, FULL DATA acknowledgement, etc. No iron here what-so-ever.
After all, facts are facts. Good or bad is the emotion attached to the reaction.
Smokey – explain away the change in ocean PH without our CO2 emissions.
Pity about the “read and write yet” insult! The guy’s surely entitled to his opinion. Fundamentally most of the comments on here are nothing more than opinion, as we don’t know what the future holds. And as we don’t know what the Earth’s climate trend (it’s always varied before, right?) would have been without our presence/contribution (if any), how do we know if we’re making a difference or not? I’m just a wee bit sceptical that anyone on here, or on the planet, has an answer to either part of that question that is more than conjecture – possibly very sophisticated conjecture, but conjecture just the same.
looking at amsu 600mb july looks way cooler than june. how are these things calculated….
north queensland in australia has been having a cold winter…
29 July: Rockhampton Morning Bulletin: Rocky’s coldest winter in decades
AS THE nation debates climate change and the need for a carbon tax, Rockhampton is shivering through what could be its coldest winter in decades.
In June, the Weather Channel reported an average minimum temperature of 9.8 degrees in the city, just over one degree lower than the average and the coldest in June since 1994.
July so far is below the average as well, at 8.7 degrees.
These conditions have been mirrored around the State as Queensland battles low temperatures as the La Niña of 2010 has now been replaced with neutral condition…
http://www.themorningbulletin.com.au/story/2011/07/29/rockys-coldest-winter-decades/
Big thanks to Dr Roy for his prompt updates as well as the excellent paper he has had published.
Keep going Roy! Home straight now.
LA Guy – the overall problem with assigning blame in the PH change in the ocean is the assumption that the ocean PH is constant everywhere and has been through out time. So the PH changes, how can it be a big deal when the PH is not constant world wide and yet we have lots of bio-diversity? And don’t call it acidification. Before a solution can be acidic from being a base, it must neutralize first.
La guy,
These articles will help get you up to speed on the “ocean acidification” scare:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/07/12/lowering-the-bar
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/01/10/ocean-acidification-chicken-of-the-sea-little-strikes-again
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/19/the-electric-oceanic-acid-test
Note that there is no testable, verifiable evidence showing that humans are changing ocean pH.
The UAH numbers are diverging strongly from the RSS numbers. The tropical temperatures and the middle troposphere temperatures are diverging even more than the global lower troposphere numbers. There is clearly an error somewhere, either in UAH or RSS. So at this time, both sets of satellite data need to be taken with a grain of salt. HadCrut3 continues to be completely flat.
Here is how things are looking.
http://reallyrealclimate.blogspot.com/2011/07/rss-and-uah-divergence-charts.html
It’s the second chart.
Brian says: “I suspect…”
Sure you do, Brian. Sure you do.
How big a difference is that compared to the old normal again?
One could say, quite accurately I’m guessing, that any anomaly, especially with a changing normal, is just the mere figment of statistical imagination.
The rate of ocean PH change is unprecedented in 50+ million years. Last time this rate of change happened there was a mass extinction.
Smokey – again you are making wild claims. The chemistry here is simple – there is no credible science that I’ve seen which refutes the chemistry. It is the ocean acting as a CO2 sink.
jim hogg says:
August 1, 2011 at 1:04 pm
Pity about the “read and write yet” insult!
The way I understood it, the reference would be to Brian’s ignoring of the fact that the article says Northern Hemisphere temps for July were down and this despite the record temperatures in the US.
La Guy,
Of course anthropogenic CO2 is acidifying the ocean, but you’ll find few here to admit even that.
An excellent comprehensive report on this can be found at:
http://tiny.cc/eg1z9
In regards to this months temperature anomaly…well, since we really aren’t in either a La Nina or El Nino, skeptics can’t really blame either of those, and according to Joe Bastardi, we should be seeing some big time cooling anytime now. The facts don’t seem to be supporting it…
Let’s bookmark this page and come back in 10 years … and we still won’t know what’s going on with the climate but we will have more interesting trends to look at. We could start a pool for the winner/survivor to collect. 😉
[Citation needed]
Without any citation for your claim of unprecedented PH change, who exactly is making wild claims?
La Guy:
“The rate of ocean PH change is unprecedented in 50+ million years. Last time this rate of change happened there was a mass extinction. ”
Citation please!
Your long-term memory capabilities seem to be what is unbelievable. This is August in the northern hemisphere and you state things like “I would expect more records to be broken over the next few months…”
—> Oh wow, where we live is hot now that we’re in late summer! Who would have expected right?! And look! Weather conditions in various places are creating temperature heat records in the summer! Amazing!
I suspect you were one of the people complaining about all the talk of snow records set last winter and tried to explain how they were not evidence that CAGW was wrong. But of course, any heat wave in the summer is somehow “unbelievable”.
As many will say to you, I’m not laughing at you, I’m laughing with your future laughter at your own folly.
La guy,
I provided three articles for reference, with hundreds of comments dissecting the issue. You could have learned a lot about the “ocean acidification” scare by reading them. Instead, you came back in only 13 minutes with your version of the CO2 scare. You probably never even opened the three links. You certainly couldn’t have learned anything in that short time [which included typing your response].
If you want to actually learn about ocean pH, the three articles I posted will help get you up to speed on the subject. But if you want to throw out wild scares based on a closed mind, do it somewhere else. The “acidification” scare has been thoroughly debunked here, as you would understand – if you had read the articles and comments.
Thanks UAH for finally posting a map! http://nsstc.uah.edu/climate/2011/july/JULY-2011.png (But what happened to your map for June?)
I was wondering where all this SH warmth could possibly be – as most of the habitable SH is suffering an unusually cold winter. Now I can see that (at least according to UAH) it is/was pretty much all concentrated over Antarctica. (Is that why Vostok station is only about -70F instead of the usual -102 F?)
Still, it seems odd. These July temps are almost up to an El Nino level.
J Calvert N says:
August 1, 2011 at 2:03 pm
“Still, it seems odd. These July temps are almost up to an El Nino level.”
—-
No, not really odd at all. Only odd if you were expecting Joe Bastardi’s cooling to begin perhaps…
“I would expect more records to be broken over the next few months as were starting to see more and more effects of man made Global Warming.”
Brian. Moreover I can predict that no amount of warming will convince some people of the basic physics. GHGs cause the earth to be warmer than it would be naturally. But you will always find people who refuse to accept the physics we used to defend this great country. They will say that they see nothing “unnatural” without defining that term. They will ignore Lindzen, Spenser, Christy, who all agree that more GHGs cause more warming that we would see otherwise. No amount of warming would convince them. No amount of new records. Nothing will convince them. Not and ice free arctic, not more heatwaves, not increased temps. Nothing.
Where the hell have they got their thermometers? Here in NZ we basked in exceptional warmth during June. But July? It has been freezing! And all over – both islands. Massive snow falls, best ski season in ages but bitterly, bitterly cold. Seems like a lot of Aus was the same – cf Pat above – I haven’t checked the rest of Australian states.
So like I say, where ARE the thermometers?
For those who are discussing ocean acidification.
Either the CO2 molecule is in the ocean reducing its alkalinity (ok ok acidifying it) or it’s in the atmosphere warming the surface. But it can’t be in both places at once.
If the theory is that half mans emissions stay in the atmosphere warming it, and the other half is in the oceans acidifying it, has anybody crunched the numbers? There just isn’t enough extra CO2 to make enough of a difference that we could detect with current measuring systems.
Who would have thought that 0.37c could warm up enough bridges sufficiently to excite a surfeit of slumbering trolls
Ain’t science wonderful?.
Brian: “The heatwave that has been going on in the southern US the last few months is unbelievable.”
What were you saying this past winter when we had cooler than normal temperatures and record lows were being set everywhere????
MikeEE
steven mosher,
I’m sorry to see you still don’t grasp the null hypothesis. If you can show us where current temperatures or trends are outside of historical parameters over the Holocene, please post the information.
Yes, CO2 probably does bring about some moderate warming, probably around 1°C per 2xCO2. Maybe a little more, maybe a little less. But contrary to what the alarmist crowd believes, on balance that added warmth is a net benefit to the biosphere, humans included. So is the increased CO2 which, even if it doubled from here [and it most likely can’t], it would still be classified it as a very minor trace gas. And as we know, every additional CO2 molecule has a smaller effect… except on plants.
If temperatures ever exceed those of the Holocene, I’ll sit up straight and pay attention. In the mean time, Occam’s Razor says the simplest explanation is the correct one. In this case it is natural variability.
R Gates says “No, not really odd at all. Only odd if you were expecting Joe Bastardi’s cooling to begin perhaps…” I believe you’re talking about a warming trend – that will be argued-over for more years to come. I’m pondering a sharp spike – not a trend. All the sharp spikes on the UAH graph since 1998 (and probably before as well) correspond well with El Nino events. This one doesn’t. So it’s interesting.
It’s probably the reason for the July dip in this Antarctic Sea Ice chart. http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_timeseries.png That dip is now finished. So it will be interesting to see if the the UAH August chart shows the spike subsiding.
Actually July in Paraguay was very warm, due to constant high Pressure off Brazil Coast pushing northerly winds straight down from equator through Paraguay, Northern Argentina and Uruguay. Its changed now and its freezing down here….wind has turned south from Antarctica. Its all normal BTW and happens frequently look at temp records…. not due to AGW!
Mosh,
“Moreover I can predict that no amount of warming will convince some people of the basic physics. GHGs cause the earth to be warmer than it would be naturally. But you will always find people who refuse to accept the physics we used to defend this great country. They will say that they see nothing “unnatural” without defining that term.”
Faulty logic. The ‘basic physics’ of GHG does not in any way predict a specifc observable surface temperature. The ‘basic physics’ of GHG is but one input in an incrediblly complex system of other ‘basic physics’ inputs and both positive and negative feedbacks.
“They will ignore Lindzen, Spenser, Christy, who all agree that more GHGs cause more warming that we would see otherwise.”
You will ignore Lindzen, Spencer, Christy, who all agree that the level of ‘more warming’ that the current level of GHGs cause could be imperceptable, given current methods and the variability of the data. Spencer currenty puts it at MAX 0.66 C /century, with the open possibility that it could be lower. The effects of such cannot be seen over these timeframes, and you ignore Pielke Jr when you claim otherwise.
“No amount of warming would convince them. No amount of new records. Nothing will convince them. Not and ice free arctic, not more heatwaves, not increased temps.”
None of those things should convince them, as none of those things is determinative for anthro warming. Warming, new records, ice free whereevers, heatwaves, increased temps (but you repeat yourself) are all facets of climate, anthro warming or not. The ‘amount’ of these things is immaterial to the determination of CAGW. The source is material, but that is not derivable from any particular level in the gross ‘amount’.
@ steven mosher
August 1, 2011 at 2:25 pm
“GHGs cause the earth to be warmer than it would be naturally.”
By how much? Do you include H2O? Perhaps you would care to use your knowledge of the basic physics to inform us exactly what is the contribution made by radiative GHGs to the current Greenhouse Effect? Possibly you could express your answer either as a percentage or in degrees Celsius? Then perhaps you could explain what contribution the GHGs made in 1850?
“But you will always find people who refuse to accept the physics we used to defend this great country.”
Is this different physics to the kind other countries use?
“Nothing will convince them. Not and ice free arctic…”
Not and (sic) ice free arctic? When? I must have missed the memo…
steven mosher says:
Check out the posts from the chaps in Austrailia and New Zealand. AGW disproved by the exact same logic you use to prove it.
It’s also been freezing cold in Chile and South Africa.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/chile/8656274/Chile-hit-by-white-earthquake-of-heavy-snow.html
Ocean to atmosphere to space: the heat build-up since the 70’s will take a while to dissipate, and every summer heatwave sends more warmth spaceward. Those of us who believe the sun might have something to do with global warming should learn if we’re right or wrong in the next few years.
Its been cold in NZ the last couple of weeks. But thats just weather. The autumn and early winter were unusually warm on average here, but that was also just weather. Nothing is proven either way.
Jeremy says:
August 1, 2011 at 1:58 pm
“Your long-term memory capabilities seem to be what is unbelievable. This is August in the northern hemisphere and you state things like “I would expect more records to be broken over the next few months…”
—>” Oh wow, where we live is hot now that we’re in late summer! Who would have expected right?! And look! Weather conditions in various places are creating temperature heat records in the summer! Amazing!”
“I suspect you were one of the people complaining about all the talk of snow records set last winter and tried to explain how they were not evidence that CAGW was wrong. But of course, any heat wave in the summer is somehow “unbelievable”.
“As many will say to you, I’m not laughing at you, I’m laughing with your future laughter at your own folly.”
Down here in GA it was already hitting in the mid-90’s in June when the average temps are supposed to be in the mid to upper 80’s. Now it’s due to reach the upper 90’s and lower 100’s in the next few days.
“Now I can see that (at least according to UAH) it is/was pretty much all concentrated over Antarctica.”
Could Roy comment on that ?
With a lot of cold air in the southern midlatitudes during the southern hemisphere winter it seems logical that the cold air which flowed out of the Antarctic was replaced by warmer air from the midlatitudes flowing into the Antarctic.
However, looking at the system as a whole more energy in the air over the Antarctic in winter is more likely to lead to faster energy loss to space.
I wonder whether the weighting is correct between Antarctic readings and southern hemisphere mid latitude readings. Is it possible for that to be askew ?
MikeEE says:
August 1, 2011 at 2:47 pm
What were you saying this past winter when we had cooler than normal temperatures and record lows were being set everywhere????”
There is no La Nina out there now is there?
Brian says:
“Down here in GA it was already hitting in the mid-90′s in June when the average temps are supposed to be in the mid to upper 80′s. Now it’s due to reach the upper 90′s and lower 100′s in the next few days.”
Thanks for the regional weather report, Brian. You do know, I hope, that “global warming” over the past century an a half has been about 0.7°C. You’re just experiencing a routine Georgia heat wave. Relax, “carbon” isn’t gonna getcha.☺
[BTW: where I live, in California, the weather has been much below normal this year. It all averages out globally. There is nothing to worry about. The weather always varies from year to year, and from place to place.]
Time for some more browbeating:
“Juuuuuuuuuuly’s blaaaaaaaaazinnnnnnnng heeeeeeeat set rrrrrrecordssssss innnn allllllll 50 staaaaaaaaatessssss!”
🙂
Forecast: Global temps fall to -.25 c ( .15 cooler than drop last year) for Jan-March. AMO goes neutral to cold, giving up first cold pdo/amo couplet since 70s.
Forecast entered, so lets see how good I do ( note: forecasted drop to normal last year for start of this year) BTW most climate models are seeing the drop, the most impressive is frontier research center!
R.Gates, & La Guy
From your link, the paper stated, “Taking this example, even at high CO2 concentrations,
with a significant lowering of ocean pH, the carbonate buffer means that the oceans are still slightly alkaline (ie a pH of less than 7).” I’m glad it states what many here know, that pH changes are difficult due to the natural buffer of the ocean. Also, it incorrectly states a pH less than 7 is alkaline. Gee, was this paper a result of peer review?
Also from your link; “Even the current level of ocean acidification is essentially irreversible during our lifetimes. It will take tens of thousands of years for ocean chemistry to return to a condition similar to that occurring at pre-industrial times, about 200 years ago.” Wow, sounds like ocean acidification is a done deal! That being the supposed case, why then do you & others use it during a discussion about human CO2 emissions; unless of course you feel the need to alarm?
The paper also reported modern ocean pH to be 8.2 +/- 0.3. It also states; “This dissolution of CO2 has lowered the average pH of the oceans by about 0.1 units from pre-industrial levels
(Caldeira & Wickett 2003).” So, a supposed drop of 0.1 units over a 200 year period is statistically significant within a system that is known to vary between 7.9 and 8.5, because of what?
Try harder.
Thanks, Joe, We’ll see if you are right. BTW we in the Pac NW US are finally getting a _normal_
summer it has be well below normal since spring. Hope we get a long, warm, fall this year.
Even if it brings out warmists …
Smokey says:
August 1, 2011 at 4:23 pm
“Thanks for the regional weather report, Brian. You do know, I hope, that “global warming” over the past century an a half has been about 0.7°C. You’re just experiencing a routine Georgia heat wave. Relax, “carbon” isn’t gonna getcha.☺
[BTW: where I live, in California, the weather has been much below normal this year. It all averages out globally. There is nothing to worry about. The weather always varies from year to year, and from place to place.]”
The weather has always been one of those things for me. I’ve even had dreams about 150 degree days. Crazy stuff.
But I never really paid attention to Global Warming until this spring because I figure it was a lot of political jostling and not much of anything else. But the big Tornado outbreaks this spring was a real eye opener.
noob here.
How come we talk about record highs in July and August but not in December? And, isn’t the summer supposed to have high temperatures?
And, I’ve heard it said someplace: More people nowadays work and live in Air Conditioning than did back in 1930s and even 1980s. Thus, the summer temps will “feel” hotter since we jump back and forth between outdoors and indoors.
Also, many are citing the record highs set recently. But, aren’t they “canceled” out by the record lows set last winter?
And, how can we measure 0.37C change? When the best measurement we can do is in whole numbers?
Brian says: August 1, 2011 at 12:28 pm …. propaganda
Listen Brian, it is not necessary to disprove that these temperatures are due to AGW; it is necessary to disprove the NULL hypothesis: that these temperatures are not natural, as changes in temperature have happened in the past, although you natural global-warming deniers refuse to acknowledge that fact.
Thank you Roy. It is so refreshing to see clean science and clean thinking on climate matters. Most people here at WUWT are not here to prove a point.. We prefer to let the points prove themselves.
@Brian: “I suspect things are going to get worse and tempts are no longer going to be flat”
And yet:
“The forecasts in the [IPCC] Report were not the outcome of scientific procedures. In effect, they were the opinions of scientists transformed by mathematics and obscured by complex writing. Research on forecasting has shown that experts’ predictions are not useful in situations involving uncertainly and complexity. We have been unable to identify any scientific forecasts of global warming. Claims that the Earth will get warmer have no more credence than saying that it will get colder.”
GLOBAL WARMING: FORECASTS BY SCIENTISTS VERSUS SCIENTIFIC FORECASTS by
Kesten C. Green and J. Scott Armstrong, ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT,
http://www.forecastingprinciples.com/files/WarmAudit31.pdf
Brian: “But I never really paid attention to Global Warming until this spring because I figure it was a lot of political jostling and not much of anything else. But the big Tornado outbreaks this spring was a real eye opener.”
I live in OK. Right in the middle of tornado alley. We actually had fewer tornados than normal. You had more than normal. The area just shifted this year to the east a bit. Seems to me that the area designated Tornado Alley is only named that due to the TENDENCY of torndados to form there. Yet, tornados form in all 50 states and all over the world.
California contributed mightily to the reduced Northern Hemisphere numbers – the state was 0.8 degrees C colder than the “normal” for July, whatever that is. The link below has the July results, for the next 30 days then the August results will appear.
http://www.calclim.dri.edu/
My suspicion is that the colder California climate has some connection to the colder Pacific Ocean right next door. All that CO2 just isn’t heating up the ocean surface, dontcha know?
Also, the colder Pacific is likely due in part to the wee bit less ice in the Arctic, which allows more heat to escape to space. Since ice’s primary purpose is to act as an insulator to keep heat in the water layer below it, less ice allows more heat to escape. Engineers have known this for decades, and that is why we place some sort of cover or barrier on the top of liquid storage tanks. Homeowners with heated pools also know this, and place insulated covers over the pool at night to keep heat in the water.
Water evaporation as a cooling mechanism is an issue for some open-top storage tanks (and also for lakes), but evaporation is not an issue for liquids with low volatility such as heavier oils. Heat loss via radiation is stopped by an insulating roof – just like ice in the Arctic.
Gotta love these AGW types. It’s seriously no wonder that their models are wrong, and projections from those models are failing to materialize.
La Guy says August 1, 2011 at 1:30 pm
The rate of ocean PH change is unprecedented in 50+ million years.
La Guy, what is your evidence for this statement?
Tilo Reber-UAH is the data set that is likely most correct. RSS makes use of a method of correcting for orbital drift of it’s satellites which is A) too aggressive and B) currently unnecessary in UAH since AQUA has a stabilized orbit. John Christy has done many papers documenting the evidence for biases in RSS’s method and how UAH is highly consistent with radiosonde data that RSS is not.
Steven Mosher, why are you so antagonistic? Why do you assume that everyone who disagrees with the end of the world doom and gloom is in denial of “basic physics” and why in God’s name ally yourself with a crackpot like Brian? Why on earth rush to the defense of someone who is attributing individual weather events to AGW? I often suspect that you are trying really hard to be “fair” and throw equal invective at “both sides” as it makes you feel better about yourself. You are the sort of person who lives and dies by the fallacy of the golden mean. And seriously, what did the WUWT readership ever do to you to warrant the constant anger from you?
Here is the way I see it: the evidence suggest that the effect of AGW is primarily to warm the coldest air masses, in other words, high latitude and cold winter day concentration of warming, especially at night. This is hardly a way to create more extremes of climate, and hardly contributes to more heat waves. Now, it what way am I in denial of basic physics for not being convinced otherwise by anecdotes, rather than actual evidence?
has this one been posted already?
Satellite methods underestimate indirect climate forcing by aerosols
Joyce E. Pennera,1, Li Xua, and Minghuai Wang
Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic, and Space Sciences, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109; and bAtmospheric Sciences and Global Change
Division, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA 99354
Edited by Robert E. Dickinson, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, and approved June 27, 2011 (received for review December 11, 2010)
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/07/25/1018526108.full.pdf+html
steven mosher;
No amount of warming would convince them. No amount of new records. Nothing will convince them. Not and ice free arctic, not more heatwaves, not increased temps. Nothing.>>>
C’mon mosher, that’s over the top, even for you.
The question isn’t about how many new records or how much warming or if there will be an ice free arctic.
THE QUESTION IS ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTION OF CO2 INCREASES TO THE TEMPERATURE.
And if you will refer back to the very names you spouted like Lindzen and others as supporters of the notion that GHG’s increase the surface temperature based on known physics, you’ll find that they ALSO say that the amount is negligible, and based on the known physics, additional CO2 over what we already have will be INCREASINGLY negligible.
Sorta left that part out, didn’t you.
Why?
@ Brian, mate did you read the part that said “Even though the Northern Hemisphere temperature anomaly cooled slightly in July, as did the tropics, warming in the Southern Hemisphere more than made up for it:” Unless I am severely mistaken Georgia is in the Northern Hemisphere, which cooled overall in July. Sorry that it’s so hot where you are, but apprarently other places were cooler. Remember – Weather is about differences in temperature and climate is about overall temperature – which interestingly enough rose in the Southern Hemisphere – this is something that I can attest to. Last year in Western Australia it was dry with clear skies and Winter was cold and very dry -something that many AGW people believed was due to climate change. This year, its warmer, cloudy and we are getting near average rains. Hmmm go figure!
La Guy says:
August 1, 2011 at 1:30 pm
The rate of ocean PH change is unprecedented in 50+ million years. Last time this rate of change happened there was a mass extinction.
================================================================
No change of sea level or pH in your neighborhood……………
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2011/07/25/monterey-bay-shows-no-change-in-sea-level-or-ph/
steven mosher says:
August 1, 2011 at 2:25 pm
But you will always find people who refuse to accept the physics we used to defend this great country.
=======================================================================
Nancy Pelosi says:
“I’m trying to save the planet; I’m trying to save the planet,
I will not have this debate trivialized by their excuse for their failed policy.”
Brian: “But I never really paid attention to Global Warming until this spring because I figure it was a lot of political jostling and not much of anything else. But the big Tornado outbreaks this spring was a real eye opener.”
The number of strong tornadoes has been trending down over the last 60 years: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/tornado/tornadotrend.jpg
I must also confess to being confused by the numbers I am seeing. I understand different groups measure different things and there are differences in how the data is processed, however it almost seems as if two groups are not even on the same planet. The following GISS data has an anomaly of 0.57 for March and 0.50 for June, or a DROP of 0.07 in that period. See http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt
To be consistent with the June month, UAH went from -0.10 to + 0.32 or UP 0.42 between March and June. See
http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt
This gives a huge net difference of 0.49 for these two data sets comparing March 2011 to June 2011.
Do not fully believe the figures they come out with-much higher than what really is the case. The weather patterns have a cooler than normal signature to them-even the heat wave in the central USA isv being caused by a blocking ridge-put in place by an expansion of the circumpolar vortex-most of canada quite chilly as well as much of the rest of the hemisphere-as the vortex expands south-it concentrates the heat in the southern US-the heat cannot expand north toward the Arctic, so it builds more and more giving the appearance of warming in this area-but the overall picture features chill and not warmth. A wall of chilly air is blocking the warm air at about the 50th parallel through much of the hemisphere.
Brian: “I suspect things are going to get worse and tempts are no longer going to be flat like they have for the last number of years. ”
Don’t get your hopes up Brian. RSS is still trending down and HadCrut3 is still dead flat.
See the second chart here.
http://reallyrealclimate.blogspot.com/2011/07/rss-and-uah-divergence-charts.html
Two thoughts:
Climate is not simply the average of weather. It is a combination of sunlight/heating days, record temps at the extremes, precip amount/type, local topography, distance and direction from large bodies of water, etc. Both day to day weather and the average of weather is…weather.
As to heat, La Nina, La Nada, and El Nino conditions will, depending on location, send temps up OR down. It is all together revealing of a lack of understanding when a commenter states that temps are warm in spite of La Nina.
From R. Gates on August 1, 2011 at 1:42 pm
Which is actually a 2005 Policy Statement from The Royal Society, which has long been pushing (C)AGW:
http://eprints.ifm-geomar.de/7878/1/965_Raven_2005_OceanAcidificationDueToIncreasing_Monogr_pubid13120.pdf
(This is a great example of why I don’t like these “short URLs” as they conceal what you are actually clicking on. Could be kiddie pr0n, WWF climate pr0n, EPA-endorsed “educational” child-abusing climate pr0n, even pdf’s.)
Direct link: http://royalsociety.org/Ocean-acidification-due-to-increasing-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide/
It has the following alarming section in the Summary on pg vi (bold added):
This contrasts with the June 2009 Inter-Academy Panel statement on Ocean Acidification posted at the Royal Society’s site:
http://royalsociety.org/Inter-Academy-Panel-statement-on-Ocean-Acidification/
Selected bits (bold added):
Clearly you have erred by supplying outdated information. Climate Science™ has moved rapidly to more shocking, even more alarming proclamations. In just four short years, it has moved from continuing CO2 increases yielding by 2100 a pH “probably lower than has been experienced for hundreds of millennia”, to “The oceans are now more acidic than they have been for 800,000 years.”
Also (requiring better numbers for proper examining of the differences) we’ve gone from the oceans absorbing “In the past 200 years” “approximately half of the CO2 produced by fossil fuel burning and cement production” to only “about a quarter of the carbon dioxide emitted to the atmosphere by human activities since the industrial revolution”. According to the US EPA, referencing IPCC AR4, in 2004 the anthropogenic CO2 emissions were, as a percentage of total GHG emissions, 56.6% fossil fuel use, 17.3% “biological” (deforestation, decay of biomass, etc), and 2.8% “other” (includes cement production and natural gas flaring). The remaining GHG percentages were not CO2. As fossil fuel burning is the overwhelmingly majority source of anthropogenic CO2, this indicates a major revision in just four years of our understanding of how much of it the oceans have absorbed over hundreds of years, indicating the oceans have really absorbed only about half of what was previously thought to have been absorbed.
Indeed, it is clearly worse than we thought, as the oceans have clearly absorbed far less CO2 than was thought yet ended up far more acidic than was thought!
Please try to use more current references that properly convey just how much more alarmingly catastrophic the consequences of inaction have become according to the latest peer-reviewed (by PhD’s!) Climate Science™.
Ocean to atmosphere to space
Indeed, that is the basic heat flow cycle of the Earth’s climate.
Atmospheric warming can be caused either by more heat retention in the atmosphere (climate warming), or more heat release from the oceans (climate cooling).
Thus, atmospheric temperature changes alone are not evidence either for or against climate warming or cooling.
Brian: “But I never really paid attention to Global Warming until this spring… But the big Tornado outbreaks this spring was a real eye opener.”
If you’d like to understand more about what caused those, read these by Dr. Spencer:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2011/04/more-tornadoes-from-global-warming-thats-a-joke-right/
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2011/05/the-tornado-pacific-decadal-oscillation-connection/
The trend for strong tornado activity has actually been down over the last 50 years. This year was a terrible anomaly.
First, I suppose if the the graphs had scales to match the last 10 million years or even since the onset of the more recent glaciation all the hot air over small recent temperature fluxing would seem ridiculous, as it seems to me at least. Would we then be discussing some other minutia?
Second, many have been on the planet long enough to have endured many such heat events that occur in the midwest and southeast. What esle is new??
Third, what is so hard about understanding the UHI, Urban Heat Island affect. Additionally, as the urbanization grows, so does the heat island. You live on asphalt, need I say more???
Fourth, so all the drama queens who blame me, my parents, and grand parents for fabricated changes in climate change their story as often as the sun sets. The alarmists said the planet is heading for another ice event, then,suddenly from the great minds of darkness came the CO2, turning the planet into global weather chaos, but mind you, that is now, and a different form of CO2. Is there a one of them who has been spot on for the last 40 years????
The only expertise I see in them and their tunnel visioned following is the ability to be puppet to puppeteer.
Joe Bastardi says:
August 1, 2011 at 4:30 pm
Forecast: Global temps fall to -.25 c ( .15 cooler than drop last year) for Jan-March. AMO goes neutral to cold, giving up first cold pdo/amo couplet since 70s.
Forecast entered, so lets see how good I do ( note: forecasted drop to normal last year for start of this year) BTW most climate models are seeing the drop, the most impressive is frontier research center!
———
Joe, i do like the fact that you at put it all out there…right or wrong. I respect that.
I have a number of methods for disabusing the gullible of their Global Warming notions.
Some are ‘thought experiments’ – some are ‘experiments’.
I use this one to put into perspective the temperature DATA that is so regularly and rigorously quoted by both sides in the dispute.
I take my Warmist and we discuss Global Temperatures.
Then I show him my 200 dollar digital thermometer which measures to an accuracy of .1 degrees C. (I explain that its absolute calibration is not necessary for our experiment)
I take the instrument to nearest fridge quickly place the probe say in the vegetable section, close the door and wait. After 15 minutes or so we take a reading.
Next we quickly move the probe to the top of the fridge.
We repeat the same process at 3 or four different positions inside the fridge and guess what!
WITH THE DOOR CLOSED AND THE COMPRESSOR RUNNING YOU CAN TAKE MULTIPLE TEMPERATURE READINGS….INSIDE A FRIDGE.
(If any wit suggests I need a new fridge or thermometer I will suggest they try the experiment themselves…because replicateability is at the core of all proper science!)
The earth is radiatively coupled with space, water vapour is constantly on the move through wind and convection…the temperature at 300hPa is minus -30C over the equator and minus -60C over the poles. On a daily basis ocean currents shunt massive amounts of energy across the surface of the ocean not to mention cold and warm upwelling. On a yearly basis one polar region is cast into double digit deep freeze mode.
Ice cap, sea ice, tundra, plain, mountain, forest, coast and desert, hundreds of thousands of micro and not so micro climates all obeying their own geo-physical imperatives…a bewildering combination of local conditions all sharing the same atmosphere.
They could string all the supercomputers in the world together, run their finest models and they still wouldn’t be able to tell you what was happening in a fortnight’s time. There’s a ‘horizon’ chaos imposes on our predictions.
To speak about Global Temperature as a quantifiable number or even a useful idea is in my humble opinion verging on pseudo science. File with Carbon Footprint
I took two courses in Statistical, and Research analysis, plus did my own research and have published. Both graduate level courses, and my experiences as a researcher, imbued me with a skeptical mind and critical eye toward published research and scientific articles. I am amazed at the low level of understanding presented here as evidenced by links provided that, once critically reviewed, are far less than the poster touts them to be. Shame on you.
Tilo:
“Tilo Reber says:
August 1, 2011 at 1:21 pm
The UAH numbers are diverging strongly from the RSS numbers.”
####
how do you figure that? The error on your trends is large. The difference between the trends is small.
Here is an exercise: Do a statistical test and see if the difference between the datasets is non zero. statistically
You can bet on the temperature anomaly in 2019 here: https://www.intrade.com/v4/markets/contract/?contractId=707799
And here: https://www.intrade.com/v4/markets/contract/?contractId=707800
La guy says: August 1, 2011 at 1:02 pm “Smokey – explain away the change in ocean PH without our CO2 emissions.
La guy, given that a definition of pH (in water, let’s say) is the negative logarithm of the hydrogen ion activity, would you care to provide evidence that ocean pH has indeed changed during a period in which CO2 emissions are known? For a start, you should look at the whole ocean, but deeper parts have very sparse sampling. What is a common pH near deep ocean floors? Do you know the difference between activity and concentration? How much do you know?
Werner Brozek-The different groups different measures behave differently for a number of reasons. The first is that they measure different things: While GISS is supposed to measure temperature variations near the Earth’s surface, UAH and other satellite groups try to measure temperatures integrated through a large layer of the atmosphere. The second reason, as Roy notes, is that on month to month timescales there is a lot of variability in how heat moves from the surface out to space. The third reasons is on annual timescales, variations at the surface are amplified in the bulk of the lower troposphere. The last difference, the only one that suggests an inconsistency between these different datasets, is the relationship between the long term trends. Logically, one might expect that the lower troposphere is more variable, it should warm more than the surface, the reality is that it has apparently warmed slightly less. This goes against climate model expectations as well. This difference leads many (especially warmers) to conclude (against all evidence to the contrary!) that the satellite data must be wrong. If you ask me it is probably a problem with the surface data, which implies a problem for the models as well, since the modelers like to brag about their success “backcasting” the temperature trend at the surface. I have analyzed this here:
http://devoidofnulls.wordpress.com/2011/07/16/relating_lower_tropospheric_temperature_variations_to_the_surfac/
@La Guy
La Guy and RGates have returned to the hue and cry about “ocean acidification”. Even appealing to the “highest rate of acidification in (x) years.”
If you go back a few more years you will notice that corals – those canaries of the oceans that we are taught will be the first to dissolve like Alka Seltsas – actually evolved during the Cambrian and Ordovician eras during which atmospheric CO2 levels were 2000-5000. Corals and other calcareous marine organisms – sessile and otherwise – both evolved and flourished during this period.
If you are willing to think about this fact (a big IF), does it not strike you as, in any way, odd?
I guess you could take refuge in the “rate of change” of CO2 (and rely on a very unsafe assumption that this translates into ocean pH change), rther than the absolute values. But this looks very like Gatesian desperation.
steven mosher;
Since you brought up the physics… well then, let’s discuss the physics.
CO2 is logarithmic. So, over the last century, CO2 levels have increased by 100 ppm. The result has been negligible. Being logarithmic, it CO2 increases by another 100 ppm, the effect will be exactly 1/2 of the last 100 ppm. In other words, 1/2 of negligible. The next 100 ppm after that…1/4 of negligible. But let;s put aside for a moment the KNOWN physics that shows that additional CO2 is pretty much meaningless, and put Dr Spencer’s results in perspective.
1. Temperature is an indirect measure of energy flow.
2. The formula is W/m2=5.67*10^-8*T^4 where T is in degrees K.
3. Dr Spencer’s results show that the NH and the tropics have DECREASED in terms of T.
4. The SH has INCREASED in terms of T to result in an “average” that is higher.
5. But….
6. Since w/m2 varies with T to the power of FOUR
7. And it is currently WINTER in the SH
8. We can conclude that the temperature record converted to w/m2 shows a cooling trend on average, not a warming trend.
The watts/m2 change in the NH and the tropics is much larger per degree than that of the SH because it takes a LOT of change at hot temperatures to get a 1 degree change and much less to get a 1 degree change at cold temperatures, Since it is summer and therefor HOT in the NH, and hot by definition in the tropics, and it is winter and therefore COLD in the SH, the “cooling” in the NH and tropics in w/m2 outweigh’s the “warming” in the SH by several times.
I’d be very interested in understanding what drives those fluctuations of course, but it is hard to do research when all you can find are articles screaming bloody murder about how much CO2 is going to boil the planet unless we stop producing any right away. Even though the KNOWN PHYSICS TO WHICH YOU REFER makes it clear that any additional CO2 is pretty much meaningless.
“timetochooseagain says:
August 1, 2011 at 8:02 pm”
Thank you very much! Could I ask two more questions of you?
When comparing the AQUA ch05 for July 2010 with July 2011, I would say the 2011 value was about 0.18 lower on the average. However the values quoted for these two months were 0.42 and 0.37 or only 0.05 lower. I was under the impression AQUA ch05 was to be at least a rough guide to guess what is happening but it does not even seem close. Is there any reason you know of?
The GISS data at
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt
shows an increase from 0.45 to 0.50 from January to June of 2011 or a 0.05 increase.
The HADCRUT data at
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/hadcrut3gl.txt
shows an increase from 0.206 to 0.426 from January to June of 2011 or a 0.22 increase. Does this difference of 0.17 seem high since they are presumably measuring the same thing? Thank you in advance!
If the atmospheric temperature goes up by 0,37 degree – atmosphere will expand INSTANTLY, by 370m. up – will intercept extra coldnes to counteract, in 3,5 seconds – in a jiffy that extra coldness will fall somewher = equalizes. Atmospheric temperature doesn’t go up and down as a yo-yo. Extra heat in the atmosphere is not acumulative. Heat /coldness change places; that is not GLOBAL warming or cooling. Misleading data that destroys people and economy will become ilegal soon; hopefuyly retrospective. CO2 is only 260-400 parts per million; oxygen and nitrogen are 998999 parts per million, they regulate the temperature, not the climatologist. They think they do, big suprises for them on http://www.stefanmitich.com.au and in my book. Misleading doesn’t change the truth. The sooner climatologist comprahend that they have being exposed WITH REAL PROOFS, the less damages they will make = people will be more lenient on them – when the time for ”truth and reconciliation” arive; as soon as the public knows about my proofs..
Australia must be the odd man out in the southern hem. We’ve had a cold winter here.
Don’t know about those SH figures. I am freezing here (South Africa). We even had a lot of snow, which is unusual for here. I heard the Aussies also complaining about the cold.
In Holland they had their wettest (and coolest) summer yet.
Those here believing that disastrous global warming is upon us, can I have the increase in maxima, means and minima from the area where you live for the past 35 years, please?
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/henrys-pool-table-on-global-warming
The global temperature record represents an average over the entire surface of the planet. The temperatures we experience locally and in short periods can fluctuate significantly due to predictable cyclical events (night and day, summer and winter) and hard-to-predict wind and precipitation patterns.
How come the science related by you guys on here never sees the light of day in mainstream media? Why aren’t politicians prepared to take on the issue and say that the science is divided? I find it extremely difficult to determine who to accept primarily because whenever the 2 sides are in a forum the debate soon descends into personal abuse, as the comments on this post show. This only makes it harder to try and understand the science. It seems to me that all any individual can do is try to understand the science but there is no easy way of seeing the competing interpretations, by respectable scientists, of, what I assume is, the same science lined up against each other.
The debate is frustrating.
Second post I have read where the first comment is from the warmist flock.
When someone can convincingl explain how the past three intergalacials peaked at higher temps than this one, and why if we are prolonging the intergalacial that is a bad thing, then I may “believe”.
I did not expect the upturn of the past few months. It doesn’t make sense to me. The La Nina has relaxed, but there is no El Nino. The sun is more active, but still is quieter than usual. There have been some decent volcanic eruptions. I see no reason for the upturn to be so steep, and am not inclined to see CO2 as the cause, (for various reasons. Gates will include denial.)
One flaw in my thinking may be that I tend to look for immediate responces, immediate reaction to actions. Much in nature happens, however, in the manner of a wave.
When you are walking down a very foggy beach, how do you know a really big wave is coming, when you can’t see it? Is it not because the water draws back farther than usual?
This upturn may just be the “water-drawing -back” before the “big wave” of a large downturn.
Another from Australia, this time in Canberra. April thru July has been extraordinarily cold. We have had lows of -6C overnight during July with daytime temperatures struggling to get to 10C.
This is the coldest winter since our return here from Sydney. An anecdotal note comes from an old lady who told me a few weeks ago that she cannot remember a winter that has been this cold.
There has been record snowfall in the Snow Mountains. We have been experiencing those snow flurries which are discernible on the car windscreen, but we have not seen the other kind of snow flurries that we experienced a few years ago and again back in the 1980s.
I have a suspicion that Canberra experienced temperatures this cold during the early 1970s.
Temperature is a totally incorrect metric to use anyway.
So the Antarctic is apparently 30°F warmer than usual… So what?
As the air there is virtually dry, it will take next to no energy to heat.
The areas which are cooler, being more humid have lost huge amounts of energy!
DaveE.
I think the warm summer is turning you yanks cranky.
Meanwhile here in the UK it is a seasonally avearge 24 today here in Norwich, but in Inverness today it is going to be a max of 13 degrees celcius.
So is it warming or cooling? And the wind got up last night while I was out doing some night sailing, so perhaps that’s a sign of global warming as well.
Get a grip!
Well June and most of July were bitter in Toowoomba. The last week has been great.
As for “more greenhouse gases cause more warming” we’ve seen about 100ppm in extra CO2. There’s 10,000 to 40,000 ppm water so total has gone up by 0.25 to 1%. I doubt we can measure atmospheric water that well as you need to sample in 4 dimensions(area, altitude and time).
Big deal.
Should we not expect global temperatures in the NH summer to be going up? Temperature differences between summer and winter are much greater in the NH because of greater land area.
By the way the UAH site seems not to show the running graphs any more which gave current month data as well as comparison with earlier years. Are they available elsewhere?
pardon? southern hemispheres are showing warming….you’ve got be kidding.
This measuring the global temp is a farce!
Yep.
Temps are on the way up. The Bear can feel it. Here. Right now. In Sydney.
And it’s definitely the global warming stuff, resulting from our sinful ways.
We are utterly doomed and we deserve it. The Bear can think of no other possible explanation, so carbon emissions and the inherent evil of capitalism must be the cause.
Oh, hang on a minute.
Sorry, it’s been so focking cold in Sydney, I had forgot to turn the heater down.
Robert Sheldon
The debate is frustrating.
Henry@Robert
It is so because unfortunately many people’s jobs depend on the incorrect science that has been promoted in the past few decades. Namely, that an increase of only 0.01% carbon dioxide can change the global temperature…. In fact, some people here in the green industry are so anti-me that I am scared to use my full name.
I am reasonably good in chemistry and stats and I was able to figure out the truth.
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/more-carbon-dioxide-is-ok-ok
I did a random sample of weather stations all over the world to see what actually happened.
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/henrys-pool-table-on-global-warming
I would think that anybody with a bit of statistics backround can do this?
davidmhoffer says:
August 1, 2011 at 9:07 pm
“…it takes a LOT of change at hot temperatures to get a 1 degree change and much less to get a 1 degree change at cold temperatures…”
David, could you explain this further? I have taken people at their word when they state this concept, (Joe Bastardi uses it,) however when I repeat it during discussions with Alarmists I get soundly rebuked, and I’m told a degree is a degree, whether you are up at a hundred or down at zero. With great authority they state that the same amount of heat raises a thermometer one degree. Are they talking about some different measure? Am I involved in some case of comparing apples to oranges?
I know this discussion will occur again, while comparing a “blue” area at the equator to a “red” area up at the poles. I’d like to equip myself with greater understanding. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Smokey says repeatedly:
“there is no verifiable, testable evidence, per the scientific method, showing any anthropogenic effects”
I’m not quite sure what you mean by this. At some level, you could argue that since there is only one world, and there is no way yo go back 100 years and “turn off” the CO2 production, then there is no way to “test” anything about the climate. That is a pretty useless view, so I assume that is not what you mean.
How about a simple hypothesis “Temperatures are related to anthropogenic CO2 changes.”
There is a clear, well established green house effect that should be related to temperature, so theory supports this hypothesis.
Then we can try a statistical test — a linear regression of Temp (from HADCRUT) vs CO2 (from Mauna Loa). The CO2 data goes back to 1959, so we will use 1959 – 2010 and see what the results are (using Minitab).
In anyone’s book, p = 0.000 constitutes “evidence” of a relationship.
Now there are lots of other test, lots of other factors, lots of other ways of looking at things, but I can’t see how you can claim there is evidence.
I say this practically every month when the UAH resulkts come out, they bear no relationship to the real world we are experiencing.
They show the SH as being above normal when most of the SH is below normal temeratures as measured by thermometers and human skin.
Steven Mosher: “how do you figure that?”
It’s what my lying eyes tell me when I look at the chart. I see a divergence of almost .1C since 98. Plus the people from RSS tell us that their divergence of the mid troposphere is even much larger with UAH. Plus Spencer admits that RSS and UAH are diverging. Plus there have been errors found in one dataset or the other when the divergence was even smaller.
Mosher: “Do a statistical test and see if the difference between the datasets is non zero. statistically”
Do the test yourself; I don’t care about what statistics considers the difference? The divergence is plain as day and statistics can consider it whatever it wants. I’m willing to bet you a twenty that one or the other of the satellites finds and error in the next couple of years. My guess is that it will be UAH, since it’s trend changed so much in just 18 months.
Anyway, your position is that there is no statistical difference between UAH and RSS when UAH is warming and RSS is cooling; and yet you consider it significant that UAH shows warming – what nonsense.
Tim Folkerts, Smokey clearly does not need any help. He’s the master at debunking CAGW believers’ arguments.
However, what you just wrote at August 2, 2011 at 6:03 am merely establishes a correlation. Nice job! Correlation is not the same as causation. If you want an equally strong correlation, try plotting out the annual sales of computers versus the rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration since 1959. That will yield a pretty strong correlation, also.
Is there any evidence that CO2 is the cause of measured temperature increase?
However, we DO have direct evidence that CO2 does NOT cause temperature to increase. In fact, rising CO2 occurred while temperatures decreased, from 1940 to approximately 1975. We also have direct evidence that temperatures increased from about 1910 to 1940, while CO2 concentrations were hardly changed.
To paraphrase the classic line from the movie “Jaws,” — You’re gonna need a better argument.
Concerning the “clear, established green house effect that should be related to temperature”, it happens not to exist.
(What does exist is a straightforward degassing of warmer waters which dumps more CO2 into the air from the oceans.)
Check out the comments and main article here:
http://theendofthemystery.blogspot.com/2010/11/venus-no-greenhouse-effect.html?showComment=1309701737932#c2996401267831418580
which demonstrates that the presence and concentrations of CO2 have zero differential effect on temperatures comparing Earth and Venus.
Awkward, that.
Werner Brozek-Roy had been advising people to look only at the Channel 5 data and the sea surface temps, because they were coming from AQUA, while the other channels were coming from NOAA-15. It appears AQUA channels for other layers are now available. I suspect that over fairly short periods the channel 5 values will vary a little differently than the weighted product using multiple AQUA channels. It’s worth noting that UAH relies on AQUA in recent years to produce the stable “backbone” with no long term biases. They are using other satellites with drift to supplement the information from AQUA and so AQUA alone won’t give the exact month to month values. But AQUA constrains the relatively long term variations in recent years. Also, although AQUA is not requiring drift adjustment, satellites require other bias corrections to produce accurate anomalies which, I assume, influence AQUA like other satellites (for instance there is an “instrument body effect” where the satellite itself’s temperature can change from time to time) Obviously the corrections to the data cause concern as to the adequacy of the methods to do so. Extensive comparison with weather balloon results by John Christy suggests that UAH’s bias correction methods and technique for stitching the different satellites together over time produces a reliable long term trend and inter-annual variability.
Tim Folkerts:
At August 2, 2011 at 6:03 am you assert:
“In anyone’s book, p = 0.000 constitutes “evidence” of a relationship.”
No! It does not!
It merely proves they correlate. Many things correlate but have no relationship.
Correlation does NOT indicate causation, but absence of correlation disproves causation.
Try again.
Richard
Paul H: “By the way the UAH site seems not to show the running graphs any more which gave current month data as well as comparison with earlier years. Are they available elsewhere?”
I’m not 100% on this; but I think the problem was that the running graphs were unadjusted and there was too much problem with satellite drift, calibration, etc. You can still look at AQUA 5 because it has station keeping (they fire satellite thrusters to keep the orbit from drifting).
Steve Mosher: “GHGs cause the earth to be warmer than it would be naturally. But you will always find people who refuse to accept the physics we used to defend this great country.”
Holy cow. GHGs are natural and you have no clue what “would be naturally” even is. I have said this to you many times: The problem is you keep refusing to take a geology course. Your “physics” don’t cut it on a planetary scale and you’d understand that if you took the class. Studying Earth’s processes is GEOLOGY. You are skipping years and years of education and field work while pretending to be expert on such things. You are disregarding huge amounts of information from a huge branch of science. You don’t know what you are talking about at all. The Earth as a matter of fact has been warmer then now in its recent past without all your “unnatural GHG’s” belief or mumbo jumbo.
The temperature record covers .0000035% of the Earths temperature history. Making statements about variations in that short record as though they actually have meaning is ludicrous. That’s like using the last 68 seconds of the average humans’ life as an assessment of the whole life.
Tim Folkerts says:
There is a clear, well established green house effect (caused by the CO2) that should be related to temperature, so theory supports this hypothesis.
Henry@Tim
That is not so clear cut.
To start off with, I found Svante Arrhenius’ formula completely wrong and since then I could not find any correctly conducted experiments (tests & measurements) that would somehow prove to me that the warming properties of CO2 (by trapping earth’s radiation between the wavelengths 14-15 um) are greater than its cooling properties (by deflecting sunlight at various wavelengths between 0 – 5 um).
For proof that CO2 is (also) cooling the atmosphere by re-radiating sunshine, see here:
http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/0004-637X/644/1/551/64090.web.pdf?request-id=76e1a830-4451-4c80-aa58-4728c1d646ec
(follow the green line fig 6 bottom and see this few peaks turn up in fig. 6 top – besides those noted in fig.6 there are even more absorptions 0-5 um, namely in the UV and between 4-5))
Even more disconcerting to me was finding that pupils at school and college are shown experiments with 100% carbon dioxide (representing earth’s atmosphere of only 0.04% or 380 ppms CO2!) and a light bulb as an energy source (representing the sun!). Obviously such crude experimentation can only lead to incorrect results and completely incorrect conclusions…e.g. what about the IR and near IR absorptions of CO2 and the UV absorptions of CO2 that have only been discovered recently and that also deflect sunlight?
I also found untruths in Al Gore’s story (An Inconvenient Truth). A lot of CO2 is dissolved in cold water and comes out when the oceans get warmer. Any chemistry student knows that the first smoke from the (warmed) water in a kettle is the CO2 being released. So, quite a number of scientists have reported that the increases of CO2 in the atmosphere in the past lagged the warming periods by quite a few hundred years. e.g. see here:http://joannenova.com.au/global-warming/ice-core-graph/
Cause and effect, get it? Smoking causes cancer but cancer does not cause smoking. But Al made it look from the past that our CO2 output must be the cause of global warming.
Just to put the carbon dioxide content into the right perspective: it has increased by about 0.01% in the past 50 years from ca. 0.03% to 0.04%. This compares with an average of about 21% for oxygen and 0,5 – 1,2 % for water vapor in the air. In fact, nobody knows exactly how much water vapor is floating around in the whole of the atmosphere at any given time. Most scientists do agree that water vapor (=humidity) is a much stronger green house gas than carbon dioxide… (if indeed carbon dioxide is a green house gas, which, like I said before, has yet to be proven to me). According to some sources water vapor accounts for at least 95% of the greenhouse effect. It is also logical for me to suspect that as a result of human activities relating to flying (including rocket fuel H2/ O2) , driving, burning, bathing, cooking, boiling, countless cooling processes (including that for nuclear energy), erection of dams and pools containing very shallow waters, for hydro energy, irrigation, consumption and recreation, etc. etc., a lot more water vapor than carbon dioxide is put up in the air.
For instance, I observed that in my 50m2 pool, 2500 liters of water evaporated in one week (no leaks, no swimming/splashing, no discharge, no clouds!). Compare this to the 40 liters of patrol I use in a month….Although references on this subject are scarce, I did find someone who also had it figured out : http://www.theresilientearth.com/?q=content/its-water-vapor-stupid
Another problem that I picked up are the overlaps of the absorption of water vapor and oxygen in the 14-15 um band where CO2 also absorbs. Oxygen has a very weak absorption at 14-15 but its percentage is high, and this could well account for a very large portion of earth’s missing 14-15 radiation. Obviously with much higher percentages of O2 and H20 in the air, a small deviation in the applied compensation formulae may lead to enormous errors. In fact, I can antipicate that it must be near impossible to do any (theoretical, mathematical) calculations without messing up something here or there. For example, take the fact that we cannot even be sure of the exact water vapor content in the atmosphere, e.g. if we missed 0.01% water vapor? Most references I could find did not even mention or acknowledge that oxygen is a weak greenhouse gas….. (no compensation?!!)
Everybody knows that CO2 stimulates growth and greenery. It is afterall the “breath” for plants and trees and plays a distinctive role in the process of photo-synthesis. An interesting observation I made here in Africa is the cooling that you feel at dawn when you enter a forest. You can clearly feel the freshness in the forest coming from the bottom up. Greenery and forests absorb heat from its surroundings which it needs for growth. Hence, the reason why there is no growth of forests in winter or at higher altitudes and latitudes. There is also new evidence of earth having become quite a bit greener during the past 40 years or so. So in addition to the radiative cooling caused by CO2 I now also found another part of the CO2 that causes cooling and not warming……These observations of the need of plants for carbon dioxide and warmth for growth, led me on a path to thinking: carbon dioxide and global warming is not so bad. …
My question on the CO2 is: what is the net effect of the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere? Is it cooling or warming or is it simply that the warming is canceled out by the cooling? Either way, all the facts that I could find or that are presented to (me) us on the issue of the increase in carbon dioxide are still all assumptions based on mathematical approximations. I could not find any results of any real physical tests on the exact warming and cooling properties of each of the CO2, O2 and H2O. What the IPCC did, is look at the problem from the wrong end. They assumed that global warming is caused by an increase in CO2 (even though not everybody agreed with this at the time) and made an allocation (forcing) largely based on the observed global warming since 1750 versus the increase of the gas noted since 1750. None of the IPCC “profs” ever seem to have realised that CO2 also causes cooling…..it appears that this was simply forgotten or ignored.
Global warming caused by CO2 therefore comes down to a belief system: you just have to have “faith”. There is no real proof. It is all in the mind of man behaving badly. The applied logic is simply: “let us have a planet, let us add some CO2 and let us see if the temperature went up. It did. So that must be it”. My question is: how could this type of logic have passed the desks of so many scientists without them having raised one single flag? The only answer that I can give to this question, is: money…..A whole “green” industry has been built up in the last 2 decades on the assumption that carbon dioxide is bad….
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/more-carbon-dioxide-is-ok-ok
timetochooseagain: “It’s worth noting that UAH relies on AQUA in recent years to produce the stable “backbone” with no long term biases.”
The RSS people say that they use AQUA now as well. But still there is a divergence. The UAH people seem to think that the RSS drift model is not correct for the non AQUA satellites. I’m not sure what their evidence is. Right now RSS is closer to HadCrut3 than UAH. Just eyeballing the data, in the past it looks like UAH had an amplified swing around the trend that was caused by El Nino and La Nina cycles. But the swing was more or less balanced and proportional to the size of the events. But in the last 2 ENSO events, 1 El Nino and 1 La Nina, it wasn’t balanced at all. The reaction to El Nino was very strong and the reaction to La Nina was short and small – not in proportion to the ENSO events themselves. When you compare that to the HadCrut3 reaction to those 2 ENSO events, it was more balanced. Keeping in mind that the satellite reaction to ENSO is expected to be larger than that of ground instruments, the long term effect should still not produce a different trend.
Henry P: “For instance, I observed that in my 50m2 pool, 2500 liters of water evaporated in one week (no leaks, no swimming/splashing, no discharge, no clouds!).”
I think that this is an important observation, Henry. I want to mention that when I was flying over Kansas and Idaho I noticed hundreds of miles of circular agricultural fields. And I obviously saw only a fraction of what there was. I have to think that there are tens of thousands of square miles of these kinds of fields. The circular patterns are caused by sprinkler systems where there is a water source at the center and where a long extension on wheels carries a set of sprinklers around that center point. I have never seen a study that showed how much water is added to the air using this type of agriculture. I have to believe that it is significant.
Caleb says:
August 2, 2011 at 3:49 am
davidmhoffer says:
August 1, 2011 at 9:07 pm
“…it takes a LOT of change at hot temperatures to get a 1 degree change and much less to get a 1 degree change at cold temperatures…”
David, could you explain this further? I have taken people at their word when they state this concept, (Joe Bastardi uses it,) however when I repeat it during discussions with Alarmists I get soundly rebuked, and I’m told a degree is a degree, whether you are up at a hundred or down at zero. With great authority they state that the same amount of heat raises a thermometer one degree. Are they talking about some different measure? Am I involved in some case of comparing apples to oranges?
If they say “a degree is a degree” when you talk about differences in degree change, then they are employing the classic Alarmist ploys of misdirection and/or red herring. I think it has to do with negative feedbacks kicking in more and more, a concept the Warmistas either studiously ignore or are woeful ignorant of.
Henry@Tilo
I have also thought about all those thousands and thousands of sprinkler systems.
not only for farming but for private gardens & golf courses & and what not as well.
I admit: I am one of them using that.
They must put a lot of moisture in the air. Much more than the CO2.
My question is: how come is everyone picking on the extra CO2?
@ author
The first thing I usually point out is that I absolutely do not deny that the globe is warming. I am not sure about the human contribution to that warming.
So unless you actually do deny a historical global warming, you can happily report on any warming there is, there is no contradiction in that. 🙂
What not= botanical gardens,
for instance.
Henry@Tilo& TimFolkerts
Sorry I forgot to say that a random sample of analyses of results from weather stations by myself does not support the theory that global warming is caused by GHG’s,
In fact not even our extra water vapor seems to matter much
Sorry.
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/henrys-pool-table-on-global-warming
“God gave Noah the rainbow sign.
No more water, the fire next time.”
How many of you know where that couplet is from?
Warming is coming. It’s upon us. Be scared, very scared.
I predict that we will have over twice as many record highs as record lows, at least twice as many. Be scared. Oh, we’ve had 300 years of gradual inconsistent, warming since the beginning of the instrumental temperature record around 1700. Oh, we already have twice as many record highs as record lows. Let’s see. With a 300 year warming trend already, new record high temps are often only a few tenths of degree higher, but new record lows are often degrees lower. So be scared. We will have many, many record high temps and far fewer record low temps, and the alarmists and the journalists and the politicians will tell us to be scared, that we don’t understand the consensus science. It will happen, I tell you. Be scared, very scared. Oh, and CO2 levels are rising. OMG, and temperatures are rising. CATASTOPHE. WE ARE DOOMED.
Nothing to worry about. Just regular cycle if you look out of history.
Dear Doug
Cast your burden (scare,fear) onto Jesus, for He cares for you (Quote from?)
And if you want to be one of those who are saved
through faith by grace (Quote from?)
then always remember to follow the truth
because He is the Truth (Quote from?)
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/henrys-pool-table-on-global-warming
jim hogg says:
August 1, 2011 at 1:04 pm
Pity about the “read and write yet” insult! The guy’s surely entitled to his opinion. Fundamentally most of the comments on here are nothing more than opinion, as we don’t know what the future holds. And as we don’t know what the Earth’s climate trend (it’s always varied before, right?) would have been without our presence/contribution (if any), how do we know if we’re making a difference or not? I’m just a wee bit sceptical that anyone on here, or on the planet, has an answer to either part of that question that is more than conjecture – possibly very sophisticated conjecture, but conjecture just the same.
Firstly, he made a number of spelling mistakes and secondly he has quite clearly not be able to read much scientific literature. That’s not an insult it’s a statement of fact.
Robert Sheldon S.C. says:
August 2, 2011 at 12:21 am
If you want to find side you are thinking incorrectly. Bishop Hill did a survey recently on the qualifications of his readers, seek the site and read. Secondly, real scientists don’t need to exaggerate to expalin their science. Quiet, precise science and maths with a mixture of humble “I don’t know” is usually a good indicator of honest scientific endeavour.
Other than that, read, read, read.
Tilo Reber says:
August 2, 2011 at 8:20 am
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Agricultural sprinkler irrigations systems lose 5 to 10% of the applied water to evaporation depending on the sprinkler type and atmospheric conditions.
I notice that the BBC (as in ‘Points West’ earlier this evening) are trying to brainwash people here in the UK into believing we are having a heatwave, by describing the present weather as ‘scorching’ (eh?…at c. 26C!). Yes, it is nicely warm, but hardly temperatures in the 30s or worse. It is still cool at night, needing the odd blanket or two. Do you think this is a deliberate attempt to convince people that AGW is actually happening?
I know from various offspring DownUnder that they have had a very chilly, wet winter. Where actually is the warming going on in the SH?
Parts of the USA are having a real scorcher of a summer, but what about the rest of the country, not to mention the rest of the NH?
That graph looks to me like things are headed downward in temperature, big time, too. I mean, the oceans are cooling in July, something just tells me this is a beginning to a new, and deeper drop than already happened with the La Nina of 2010. I could be wrong though…. the science is definitely NOT settled 🙂
Was the 1930’s heat and dry spell due to CO2 ? The dirty 30’s referred to a decade of hot dry temperatures, was this due to CO2 ? If anyone is attributing this hot weather to CO2 please explain the 1930’s.
USA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_temperature_extremes
Canada
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extreme_temperatures_in_Canada
Robert Sheldon S.C. says:
August 2, 2011 at 12:21 am
“How come the science related by you guys on here never sees the light of day in mainstream media?”
Mainstream media survives by shifting units and is never interested in non-alarming news so by and large they will side with the alarmists, no matter in which area. To cover their behinds, they do publish a skeptic piece once a year when they’re not Der Spiegel or the BBC.
In other words: From the media, always expect alarm.
@ HenryP
August 2, 2011 at 7:30 am
[“Global warming caused by CO2 therefore comes down to a belief system: you just have to have “faith”. There is no real proof. It is all in the mind of man behaving badly. The applied logic is simply: “let us have a planet, let us add some CO2 and let us see if the temperature went up. It did. So that must be it”. My question is: how could this type of logic have passed the desks of so many scientists without them having raised one single flag? The only answer that I can give to this question, is: money…..A whole “green” industry has been built up in the last 2 decades on the assumption that carbon dioxide is bad….”]
HenryP.
That is one of the most enlightened and telling pieces of prose I have witnessed in the ‘global warming’ debate. Kudos.
It is also the reason why warmists and lukewarmists will always refuse to answer a query for proof or evidence of the ‘science’ upon which their dogma is based. The assumption that a trace gas can contribute significantly to the Greenhouse Effect is all they have.
Regards,
AB
I knew I was going to get a slew of “correlation is not causation”. That is quite true.
But there is also the simple fact that theory predicts GHGs should warm the world (and more GHGs should produce more warming). And there is a second simple fact that the earth is indeed warmer than it should be from simple radiation balance without GHGs. Computer sales or # of pirates or the stock market have neither of these properties.
Correlation by itself is weak. Theory by itself is weak. Theory supported correlation is a scientific relationship.
You can argue that other factors like sunspots have an effect.
You can argue how much other factors like water vapor provide positive or negative feedback.
But that does not change the fact the the stated hypothesis is statistically and theoretically clear.
Take one of Smokey’s favorite hypotheses — that more CO2 makes plants grow better.
* There is theoretical reason to believe that.
* There are statistical studies to show that.
It IS a scientifically verified hypothesis. The experiments can be a bit better controlled than global warming, but in principle, CO2 –> higher temperatures and CO2 –> better plant growth are equally “scientific” and pretty much equally supported.
“The assumption that a trace gas can contribute significantly to the Greenhouse Effect is all they have.”
NO!
It is no “assumption — it is a theory supported by facts. Trace gases not only CAN contribute to the Greenhouse effect — they ARE the greenhouse effect! They keep the earth significantly warmer than it would be without those trace gases. I disagree with Smokey about a number of things, but even he admits that CO2 (and CH4 and H2O) help warm the earth. It is just a question of how much warming (and then the extent of the effect of that warming on the world).
Now, some extremist certainly overplay the extent of the warming and the extent of the damage. But ignoring the science of the greenhouse effect will not turn it into “an assumption”.
Hey Henry P,
I’m not scared about being saved or not when the real threat is CAGW! Anyway, I follow Jesus’ teachings away from all that Christian orthodoxy. You better head over to Lucia’s Blackboard and get educated by an atheist. I’m too skeptical to be an atheist, but just for the moment, pretty cyncical about the faith all you warmists and alarmists have in your climate models despite ignorance of the variables, and on your Christ and how the church ignored so much of Jesus’ teachings and twisted so much of the rest. If the certitude in religious beliefs is the poster child for confirmation bias and selective reading of evidence, then climate science has become its twin sister. It’s said that no (climate) models are accurate, but some some (climate) models are useful. Useful, you bet, for demostrating confirmation bias. When was the last time an alarmist or warmist had anything good to say about a model that didn’t support his, her, their bias? Yes, an honest scientist and an honest religionist would say more times than not, “I don’t know.”
Certitudo absurdus.
Thank you again “timetochooseagain”
“Caleb says:
August 2, 2011 at 3:49 am
davidmhoffer says:
August 1, 2011 at 9:07 pm
“…it takes a LOT of change at hot temperatures to get a 1 degree change and much less to get a 1 degree change at cold temperatures…”
David, could you explain this further?”
I will try taking a stab at this. Warm air can hold much more water vapor than cold air, and the specific heat capacity of water vapor is about double that of air, so there could be a small effect here. However I think the major difference is due to phase changes of ice to water and water to vapor. Take a look at how the temperature spikes up and down like a yo-yo when well below freezing, but stays very constant when it gets above freezing. It is almost as if huge brakes are being applied once the freezing point is reached. See
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
No doubt, similar things happen near large bodies of water. If the temperature were to try to go much above the water temperature, much of the extra heat would go into evaporating more water instead of raising the temperature.
In rare cases where there is fog in the air at 100 F versus -40 F, it is obvious that there are much more tiny liquid water droplets that would evaporate at 100 F than at -40 F so in this scenario, it would also take much more heat to go from 100 to 101 than from -40 to -39.
Brian says:
August 1, 2011 at 4:03 pm
Jeremy says:
August 1, 2011 at 1:58 pm
Down here in GA it was already hitting in the mid-90′s in June when the average temps are supposed to be in the mid to upper 80′s. Now it’s due to reach the upper 90′s and lower 100′s in the next few days.
CO2 causin’ this heatwave is it? So, instead of a ‘typical’ type of a heatwave hitting your area at the peak of the summer warming curve such as is the case this week, you blame CO2? Huh, that’s interesting. I’m a meteorologist and never considered it in my temperature forecasts today. Oh well, carry on….
Caleb;
I’d love to expand on the issue but I haven’t the time, and it isn’t a simple explanation unless you have some background in physics already. And you need a whiteboard to go through it logically.
That said, if you search for Stefan’s Law or Stefan Boltzman Law, you’ll find articles that get you going. The Wikipedia one is actually pretty good. There’s plenty of confusion because we report temperature in “degrees” but we talk about the effects of additional CO2 in terms of watts/m2 per CO2 doubling. So first, we can’t compare degrees directly with w/m2. Second, we can’t compare additional amounts of CO2 without considering the starting point (280 ppm for example) and the amont we’re adding from that point. In essence, every time you hear someone quote some end result, there are three different factors that go into coming up with that calculation, and none of them mean the same thing at any given point of comparison. I’ll try and give you some quick examples of how each unto itself is fairly simple, but collected into a single statement they are very complex.
CO2 is logarithmic, which is why you will always see, even the IPCC, quoting the effects of CO2 in terms of w/m2 per doubling of CO2. Note, they do NOT quote degrees per CO2 doubling except as an average, and that will become plain as to why further along this explanation. Let’s stick with 3.7 w/m2 per CO2 doubling for now. That simply means that if we accept 280 ppm as “normal”, then doubling that amount would result in the earth retaining an extra 3.7 w/m2 as a result. But what does that mean in terms of where we are now, and versus the amount of CO2 that can be attributed to human activity?
280 x 2 = 560 ppm = 3/7 w/m2
That’s fine, but context is everything. We’re currently at around 390 ppm, with supposedly 110 ppm due to human activity. For easy figuring, let’s use 380 and 100 to illustrate.
280 + 100 ppm = 380 ppm
280 x 2 = 560 (doubling)
280 ppm = 0.5 of 560
380 ppm = 0.68 of 560
or…
100/560 = 17.9% of the amount needed to “double” the CO2 concentration
But let’s consider +100 ppm from where we are now, which is 380.
380 + 100 ppm = 480
380 x 2 = 760
380 ppm = 0.5 of 760
480 ppm = 0.63 of 760
or….
100/760 = 13.2% of the amount needed to double the CO2 concentration.
In other words, the more CO2 is in the atmosphere inthe first place, the LESS difference adding another 100 doubling ppm makes. If doubling from 280 to 560 means +3.7 w/m2, then double the watts per m2 (7.4 w/m2) would mean quadruple the amount of CO2, or 4 x 280 = 1160 ppm! So if the IPCC is correct, that CO2 adds 3.7 w/m2, and ALSO that this equates to an AVERAGE of +1 degrees, then to get to +2 degrees, would mean 1,120 ppm of CO2. It took over a century to get from 280 to 380! +2 degrees would be another 7 centuries! Of course they start talking about feedbacks at this point which is a whole different discussion.
But let’s move on to the relationship between “w/m2” and “degrees”. According to the known physics, which is used by engineers every day to make millions of calculations to design everything from curling irons to jet engines, any given “ideal black body” radiates a certain number of w/m2 at a certain temperature. Now there’s no such thing as a “perfect” black body, but the earth is close enough to allow the calculations to be illustrative. The Stefan Boltzman Law is actually the formula to do the calculation. For those not familiar with what ^-8 means, I’ll type it out in words:
w/m2 = 5.67 times 10 the power of -8 times T to the power of 4.
where T is in degrees Kelvin (degrees C +273)
or
P (w/m2) = 5.67*10^-8*T^4
It doesn’t take much figuring to realize that if you start at 273 K, it takes a lot LESS watts to raise the temperature by one degree than if you start at 300 K.
In other words, it isn’t as simple as +100 ppm = X degrees.
+100 ppm….starting from where? what % of doubling does +100 represent based on what the starting point is? Then convert that to degrees. again, starting from where? From -40 C? You’ll get a pretty big change in degrees for CO2 doubling if you start at -40 C. Start at +40 C, and you will get a much smaller number.
If you’ve followed along so gfar, you can see the complexity of the question. What does CO2 doubling = +3.7 w/m2 = +1 degrees actually mean? Pretty much nothing.
But again, if you’ve followed along so far, you should be able to do the math yourself. In Dr Spencer’s intro, he mentions that the NH (which is in summer = hot) and the tropics (which = hot) have cooled, but the SH (which is in winter = cold) has “warmed” enough to raise the global “average”. That means what in terms of CO2 warming the earth?
Nothing.
If we were to break down Dr Spencer’s data into a gridded temperature set like GISS and HadCrut, we’d be able to turn the “degrees” for each grid point into w/m2. Given the relative area of the NH + tropics, and that they are “hot”, a cooling of (for example) 1 degree would represent a LARGER drop in w/m2 bye several times that of the increase in w/m2 from the smaller area and colder SH.
Hope that helps. If nothing else, search for well laid out articles on Stefan Boltzmann Law and also on CO2 being logarithmic. Once you’ve got the math straight, coming to the logical conclusions isn’t very hard.
Of course when you try and explain it to hardcore warmists, you’ll get retorts like “but the polar bears are going extinct!” or “the glaciers are melting!” or any other anecdotal retort they can come up with to avoid talking about…the physics. If they did, this debate would have been over long before it started.
Tim Folkerts:
At August 2, 2011 at 2:55 pm you write:
“I knew I was going to get a slew of “correlation is not causation”. That is quite true.”
OK, so you admit that you wasted space on this thread with bollocks that you knew to be bollocks.
Why would anybody do that unless they are just another troll?
Richard
GixxerBoy says
——-
Massive snow falls, best ski season in ages but bitterly, bitterly cold. Seems like a lot of Aus was the same – cf Pat above – I haven’t checked the rest of Australian states.
——-
Overall the winter in the southern states has been cold, but there have been isolated days that have broken temperature records for this time of year.
I am predicting, given La Nina is finished, a warm tail to Winter and a hot summer. When El Niño comes back records will be smashed and smashed and smashed.
Tim Folkerts,
“And there is a second simple fact that the earth is indeed warmer than it should be from simple radiation balance without GHGs.”
Where is your evidence to support that statement? At what temperature do you believe the Earth should be?
I suspect that any support for that statement is purely from IPCC models that do not account for clouds, nor ocean flows, nor several other things.
The simple fact is that there was a LIttle Ice Age. CO2 was not involved.
There was a Medieval Warm Period. CO2 was not involved. And a Roman Warm Period, again, no CO2 involved.
There was a warming out of the Little Ice Age. CO2 was not involved.
Sunspots, however, appear to play a massive role in both warming and cooling periods. It may very well be that ocean cycles, especially when they coincide, produce temperature effects.
The physics is not on your side. Trying to control the Earth’s average temperature by adjusting CO2 in the atmosphere is like trying to regulate a car’s speed by raising or lowering the power antenna while it is moving at 50 miles per hour. It may have an effect, in theory, but it will make zero difference in practice.
henry@ Doug
I am here to put things right, aren’t I?
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/more-carbon-dioxide-is-ok-ok
henry@Arthur
Thx!.
henry@David, Tim, & others
I am watching with some amusement the discussion here as I realised again that most people here and indeed on most other blogs don’t understand the chemistry principle of absorption and susequent re-radiation. In fact very few people do understand it because if they did they would have raised the alarm bells ringing long time ago. But they all got stuck at Tyndall and Svante A. …
They know that CO2 “absorbs” in the 14-15 um. Most people think that what it means is that the molecules absorbs photons here which then subsequently get transferred as heat to neighbouring molecules. Then is absorbs again, and so on…
Although this may happen up to a certain saturation point, that is not what is causing the heat entrapment.
The best way to experience re-radiation is to stand in a moist dark forest just before dawn. Note that water vapor also absorbs in the visible region of the spectrum. So as the first light of sun hits on the water vapor around you can see the light coming from every direction. Left, right, bottom up, top down. You can see this for yourself until of course the sun’s light becomes too bright in the darkness for you to observe the re-radiated light from the water vapor.
What happens is this: in the wavelengths areas where absorption takes place, the molecule becomes like a little mirror, the strength of which depends on the amount of absorption taking place inside the molecule. Because the molecule is like a perfect sphere, 62,5% of a certain amount of light is send back in the direction where it came from. This is the warming or cooling effect of gas hit by radiation.
If people would understand this principle, they would not singularly identify GHG’s by pointing at the areas in the 5-15 um region (where earth emits pre-dominantly) but they would also look in the area 0-5 um (where the sun emits pre-dominantly) for possible cooling effects.
So what everyone should be doing is looking at the whole spectrum of the molecule 0-20 um. Unless you come to me with a balance sheet of how much cooling and how much warming is caused by a gas, we don’t actually know whether a substance is a GHG or not.
All that we can say now is that we don’t know what the net effect is of an increase in CO2 in the atmosphere…..
Seeing that CO2 also causes cooling by taking part in the life cycle (plants and trees need warmth and CO2 to grow), I think the total net effect might be zero, or there abouts.
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/more-carbon-dioxide-is-ok-ok
Caleb,
I remembered writing this up for a discussion with someone a while back and was able to dig it up. These are exactly what you get of you apply the laws of known physics correctly, and this illustrates nicely why temperature is a lousy measurement of what CO2 does… or does not do.
Let’s consider an earth with just two grid points. I shall call them Zone 1 and Zone 2. Let’s say Zone1 is pretty cold and Zone2 is pretty warm. From Stefan Boltzman Law we can set a temperature for each zone, and then calculate the w/m2 each zone would radiate:
Zone 1 233K 167.1 w/m2
Zone 2 313K 544.2 w/m2
“Average” temperature = 273K
“Average” w/m2 = 355.7
Our pretend earth experiences “climate change”. Zone 1 gets an extra 3.7 w/m2 more than before, and Zone 2 (of equal area of course) gets the exact amount less or -3.7 w/m2. Logic says that the earth as a whole should average out to the same exact temperature as before. But IT DOESN”T BECAUSE W/M2 AND DEGREES ARE NOT DIRECTLY LINKED:
Zone 1 234.3K 170.8 w/m2
Zone 2 312.5 540.7 w/m2
“Average” temperature = 273.37K
“Average” w/m2 = 355.7
Temperature anomaly = 0.37 degreesK
W/m2 anomaly = 0.00000000
See the problem? The net change in w/m2 “on average” is 0. But the “average” temperature is +0.37 degrees! If you monkey a bit with the numbers you can show a DECREASE in net w/m2 and still have an INCREASE in temperature anomaly. And vice versa.
And one of the oddest thoughts ever crossed my mind some time ago. Dr Spencer’s satellite data is derived from sensors that measure w/m2 from a given spot on the earth’s surface. SB-Law is then applied to calculate the temperature of that spot in degrees. Then everyone gets into an argument about how many degrees can be attributed to how much CO2. Except that the CO2 known physics measures the effects in w/m2…
So…we’re arguing about how many w/m2 CO2 does or does not add to the earth’s energy balance. Up in space we have a few billion dollars worth of satellite equipment measuring w/m2 across most of the earth’s surface. All we need do is average the w/m2 and compare to the theoretical increase in w/m2 attributed to CO2 (including feedbacks). That would be pretty simple would it not? But is that what we do?
No. We take the w/m2 which could be directly correlated to GHG theory, and convert it to degrees. Which mean one thing in terms of energy balance at high temps, and a completely different thing at low temps. In other words, useless.
If Dr Spencer were to publish the average w/m2 that the satellite is measuring, it would give a completely different picture than converting to degrees and then averaging them. And I’m betting that in this specific instance, the combined cooling of the NH and tropics would add up to more than the warming of the SH.
If we’re all in a tizzy about CO2 changing the energy balance by a certain number of w/m2, then why in heck don’t we measure, average, and report…w/m2? Its what the satellite is measuring and it is what the argument is about. How many degrees that results in is a function of what temperature you start at, so averaging the SH in winter with the NH in summer is just silly.
How about it Dr Spencer? Can you give us…just the WATTS? The one’s going UP? Perhaps WITH an average? THAT is the question! WATTS UP WITH THAT.
oh how lame, but I couldn’t resist.
Seriously. billions in satellite equipment…measuring w/m2….against a physics theory measured in w/m2….so convert to temperature instead. LOL.
Even if partly out of context with respect to the post’s subject, there should be many more comments regarding the physics of CO2 in the atmosphere, and it’s theoretical effects on temperature. Isn’t this the single most important issue in climate science?
We should all know where science stands at the moment in this respect. All scientists, media, governments, and public. Show us! Spread the science!
davidmhoffer:
For more than a decade I have been proclaiming the need for consideration of the ‘temperature distribution effect’ you mention in your post at August 2, 2011 at 11:56 pm. Indeed, I have argued it here on WUWT.
As you say, a shift in weather systems or the positions of warm SST can – of themseves – provide a change to mean global temperature.
The following paragraphs were one of my (ignored by the IPCC) review comments for the IPCC AR4:
Page 1-24 Chapter 1 Section 1.5.11 Line 32
“For accuracy, replace the words “create a” with “contribute to” because the statement in the draft very wrongly suggests that the radiative contribution to the Earth’s greenhouse effect alone “creates” the Earth’s greenhouse effect. But the radiative component of Earth’s greenhouse effect is not its only component. For example, two other components of the greenhouse effect are its convective and evaporative components, and they would continue to provide the Earth with a greenhouse effect if all gases with radiative properties were removed from the atmosphere.
The convective component increases mean global temperature by transfer of heat from the hottest regions to cooler ones. Radiation from the Sun heats the Earth’s day side and most heats the equator on the day side. It does not heat the Earth’s night side and does not heat the poles in winter. So, air in contact with the day-side surface is (on average) heated by conduction especially near the equator. The heated air rises by convection, and circulation cells move that heat polewards (and nightwards) where the surface is (on average) heated by conduction from the air. But the thermal energy radiated by a surface is proportional to the fourth power of the surface temperature. Hence, the cooling of the day-side especially near the equator (i.e. the hottest surface) much reduces the thermal heat loss from the planet and, therefore, the average temperature of the planet must rise to maintain thermal equilibrium
(i.e. [solar heat absorbed by the planet ] = [ heat radiated from the planet ] ).
The evaporative component of the greenhouse effect works in the same way as the convective component but more efficiently because water absorbs much heat as latent heat when it evapourates. Heat is transported from the hotter surface regions as latent heat of evaporation.
Both these mechanisms raise the mean global temperature and reduce the range of surface temperatures over the planet (e.g. the temperature rises hundreds of degrees within an hour of dawn on the Moon, but nowhere on Earth experiences such large temperature variations and such large temperature differences do not exist between points on the Earth).
Both the evaporative and the convective components of the greenhouse effect would continue to operate if water were not a radiative greenhouse gas. And nowhere on Earth has large day to night temperature variations (as on the Moon) which indicates they are at least as important to climate as the radiative component of the greenhouse effect. Also, polar regions are net radiation emitters because they obtain almost all their heat from ocean currents and winds.”
Richard
TheWonderer:
Your post at August 3, 2011 at 2:11 am says;
“Even if partly out of context with respect to the post’s subject, there should be many more comments regarding the physics of CO2 in the atmosphere, and it’s theoretical effects on temperature. Isn’t this the single most important issue in climate science?
We should all know where science stands at the moment in this respect. All scientists, media, governments, and public. Show us! Spread the science!”
Wih respect, I think you are on the wrong thread of WUWT. And I think you would be interested to read – perhaps to contribute to – the current thread at
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/08/02/aerosol-sat-observations-and-climate-models-differ-by-a-factor-of-three-to-six/
That thread provides an article about a recent paper by Penner et al. followed by several comments. The article is very difficult to read but the implications of the findings of Penner at al. are explained in the thread by several posts.
These explanatory posts include those from
myself at August 2, 2011 at 6:46 am and August 2, 2011 at 8:52 am
Matt G at August 2, 2011 at 1:15 pm
D. J. Hawkins at August 2, 2011 at 2:59 pm
I hope this helps.
Richard
Steve Mosher: “GHGs cause the earth to be warmer than it would be naturally. But you will always find people who refuse to accept the physics we used to defend this great country.”
That’s SIMPLETON physics. The LEAP from the radiative properties of CO2 (and H2O) to the atmosheric CO2 (and H2O) warming effect is bad science. Very bad. There are many things happening in the atmosphere (convection, evaporation…).
Hey Henry P and the dueling models crowd,
Some (children of all ages) play with models airplanes or trains and pretend they are the real thing. Some children of all ages play with climate models and pretend they are the real thing!
The empirical record- the temperature record- is the real thing and climate models based on the rather poor understanding of all the variables including radiation physics and especially feedbacks is silly self-deception by both sides in the dueling model debates. Yes, it would be desirable if we understood climate well enough to have useful models. If that were true, there wouldn’t be these silly “my model is better than your model” debates. I know plenty about CO2 and plenty about models from genetics and from economic fundamental and technical analysis.
We don’t need more multi-variable models. We need much simpler two or three variable, testable hypotheses- granted, not easily done in climate science- before useful models can be developed. If such simple testable hypotheses are not possible, then we just have to wait a long time to see what how the global temperature responds to the increasing CO2 and the other variables that drive climate. We may never be able to sort it all out. It’s certainly worth trying- with modesty and humility.
Care to “make it interesting”?:
https://www.intrade.com/v4/markets/contract/?contractId=743901
Richard S Courtney says: August 2, 2011 at 9:42 pm
“OK, so you admit that you wasted space on this thread with bollocks that you knew to be bollocks.
Why would anybody do that unless they are just another troll?”
And you are apparently admitting that you have not read and/or understood what I wrote. So why are you wasting space on this thread by replying?
I specifically said that there is correlation AND a theoretical expectation of correlation.
* Correlating warming with pirates or computer sales would be “bollocks” (although rather humorous) since there is no reasonable connection with temperature.
* Correlating warming with CO2 would be reasonable, since there IS a reasonable connection.
henry@ Doug&David
I am not against models provided that the science that gives the basics for the models is sound or known to be sound and proven in various ways.
e.g. we can use models to predict the arrival of comets or the revolution time of a planet around the sun because we know Newton’s laws work here.
The problem I have is that Arrhenius law of GHG causing warming did not work for CO2 because he did not see what I am seeing happening.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/08/01/july-uah-global-temperature-up-slightly/#comment-711115
We can measure radiation specific only to CO2 bouncing back from the moon, – so it went sun-earth-moon-earth, which means that it (the CO2) also has a cooling effect. If nobody has worked out what the net effect is of the radiative cooling and -warming of CO2 , how can I or anyone else be expected to trust any model? I know where the supposed “laws” come from. It comes from the IPCC.But what the IPCC did, is look at the problem from the wrong end. It is the worst mistake any scientist can make. They assumed that global warming is caused by an increase in CO2 (even though not everybody agreed with this at the time) and made an allocation (forcing) largely based on the observed global warming since 1750 versus the increase of the gas noted since 1750. This is where David’s figures come from. None of the IPCC “profs” ever seem to have realised that CO2 also causes cooling, in two completely different ways…..it appears that this was simply forgotten or ignored.
Henry P says:
“Most people think that what it means is that the molecules absorbs photons here which then subsequently get transferred as heat to neighbouring molecules. Then is absorbs again, and so on…”
That actually sounds pretty close to correct. Of course, the GHG molecules also absorb energy from the surrounding gas and emit IR photons.
“The best way to experience re-radiation is to stand in a moist dark forest just before dawn. Note that water vapor also absorbs in the visible region of the spectrum.”
You can find lots of copies of graphs like this: http://www.meteor.iastate.edu/gccourse/forcing/images/image7.gif
Gaseous water does not absorb significant amounts of visible light. (Nor do any other common atmospheric gases).
“So as the first light of sun hits on the water vapor around you can see the light coming from every direction. “
You seem to be talking about Mei scattering (http://ww2010.atmos.uiuc.edu/%28Gh%29/guides/mtr/opt/mch/sct.rxml) and/or total internal reflection from liquid water droplets. These are completely different phenomena from CO2’s (or even gaseous H2O’s) radiation of IR.
“…they would also look in the area 0-5 um (where the sun emits pre-dominantly) for possible cooling effects. ..”
That sounds like clouds scattering sunlight away from the earth! People do, of course, study this, although there is still much to learn to know how clouds vary over the decades and how that affects earth’s energy balance.
Roger says “The simple fact is that there was a LIttle Ice Age. CO2 was not involved.
There was a Medieval Warm Period. CO2 was not involved. And a Roman Warm Period, again, no CO2 involved.
There was a warming out of the Little Ice Age. CO2 was not involved. ”
That is a ridiculous statement Roger. To say that the Earth’s atmosphere wasn’t involved in the changes that the climate experienced is just inherently wrong.
What he (a different Roger) meant (obviously) was, “a change in the CO2 level was not involved.”
Tim Folkerts:
I see you are still trolling and address your nonsense to me at August 3, 2011 at 8:38 am.
Science tries to find empirical evidence that refutes a hypothesis then amends the hypothesis in the light of any such evidence. Failure to find such evidence is taken as support for the hypothesis.
Pseudoscience assumes anything which does not dispute a hypothesis is evidence that the hypothesis is right. It ignores evience which refutes the hypothesis.
You are wasting space on this thread with pseudoscience.
Report back on when you have amended the AGW-hypothesis such that the amended hypothesis is not refuted by the missing ‘hot spot’, the “missing heat”, the disapearance of “committed warming”, the failure of global temperature to rise over at least the last decade, and etc.
Richard
henry@ Tim
Sorry Tim
you have not yet grasped the concept of absorption and re-radiation.
try going back to read all my posts on this thread.
How about this:
From where I stand in the African sun
I have noticed a considerable difference in the amount of heat on my skin,
from the sun, when the humidity is, say 25%
or when it is, say, 75%.
How would you explain that?
davidmhoffer says:
August 2, 2011 at 6:37 pm
David,
An exceptional post. Thanks very much.
Regards,
AB
@Tim Folkerts
August 2, 2011 at 3:04 pm
[“The assumption that a trace gas can contribute significantly to the Greenhouse Effect is all they have.”
NO!
It is no “assumption — it is a theory supported by facts. Trace gases not only CAN contribute to the Greenhouse effect — they ARE the greenhouse effect! They keep the earth significantly warmer than it would be without those trace gases. I disagree with Smokey about a number of things, but even he admits that CO2 (and CH4 and H2O) help warm the earth. It is just a question of how much warming (and then the extent of the effect of that warming on the world).
Now, some extremist certainly overplay the extent of the warming and the extent of the damage. But ignoring the science of the greenhouse effect will not turn it into “an assumption”.]
Tim,
YES!
Read what I wrote. The key word is ‘significantly’. This is the assumption.
I also suggest you read the excellent posts by davidmhoffer and HenryP.
Yes, individual CO2 molecules can absorb and re-emit radiation in the relevant wavelengths. Yes, there should therefore be a theoretical contribution by CO2 and the other radiative gasses to the Greenhouse Effect. The assumption being made by pro-cAGW commenters is that Arrhenius was correct in a quantitative sense. He predicted a 4 deg C (some say 6) rise in global temperature for a doubling of CO2 (‘climate sensitivity’). You would be hard-pressed to find any ‘warmist’ who would agree with this today, although the IPCC best guess is still 3 deg C. Bear in mind that radiation is not heat – as davidmhoffer so eloquently points out. That does not deter several commenters from confusing the two.
The problem occurs because a ‘theoretical contribution’ somehow magically becomes a ‘catastrophic’ (IPCC description, not mine…) contribution from the warmists. The contribution from CO2 could be 1% (ie insignificant) or – if you live in realclimate (or Kiehl & Trenberth 97) world – 26% for the dry atmosphere, which would definitely be significant. If you say the contribution is 1%, then we are in agreement. If, however, you say 26%, then you need to ask yourself some searching questions:
Firstly, the GE is approximately 33 deg C. You can choose your own number if you disagree. As the global temperature has increased by 0.8 deg C in 160 years since 1850 (the start of accurate data according to the IPCC), then the GE in 1850 was 32.2 deg C (your number less 0.8).
1850: 26% of 32.2 deg C is 8.3 deg C. This with a CO2 level of 280ppm.
2010: 26% of 33 deg C is 8.58 deg C. This with a CO2 level of 392ppm.
How do you explain the fact that a 40% increase in CO2 (let alone all the other radiative gasses) has apparently led to an increase in global temperature of less than 0.8 C? I say less than because the actual portion of the 0.8 C rise due to CO2 is not known! Causation-ists ‘assume’ that all the rise is due to CO2. All we can say is that the 0.8 C rise has happened at the same time as the 40% rise in CO2. It is entirely possible that only 0.28 C is due to CO2 (which would lead to a climate sensitivity of appx 0.7 C). To indulge in saying that all of the rise is due to CO2 is to deny that natural variation exists.
How do you explain this anomaly? Negative feedbacks? Well, in that case Arrhenius was still wrong. Whatever feedbacks occur will negate the effect of CO2 so the catastrophe is averted and we can save lots of money. Thermal inertia lag (or the silly ‘oil tanker’ analogy)? No. There is no evidence or logic for this argument. If the oil tanker takes so long to turn, why is it now turning the other way with the rudder still applied in the original direction?
Basically, Tim, you are going to have to provide some evidence (real-world, not models) or proof that CO2 and the other radiative trace gasses can significantly increase global temperature.
If you can’t, then all the pro-cAGW supporters have is an assumption. Quite simply, the observed data does not support the ‘theory’. The only ‘ignoring’ being done here is by those that have placed belief above objectivity.
By the way, I did not include H2O in my ‘trace gas’ statement, as I was referring to CO2. H2O is by far and away the most dominant and plentiful greenhouse gas, but the only part it plays in the radiative forcing debate is that it can absorb long wave radiation. This makes it able to transfer heat by conduction, not radiation. It is certainly not a trace gas as far as the GE is concerned.
Anyway, I look forward to your evidence that CO2 can significantly contribute to the GE.
Regards,
AB
Roger Knights says “What he (a different Roger) meant (obviously) was, “a change in the CO2 level was not involved.”
That is an incorrect assertion as well;
Speaking of the role of CO2 in past warming/cooling;
“The crucial fact was that a slight warming would cause the level of greenhouse gases to rise slightly. For one thing, warmer oceans would evaporate out more gas. For another, as the vast Arctic tundras warmed up, the bogs would emit more CO2 (and another greenhouse gas, methane, also measured in the ice with a lag behind temperature). The greenhouse effect of these gases would raise the temperature a little more, which would cause more emission of gases, which would… and so forth, hauling the planet step by step into a warm period. Many thousands of years later, the process would reverse when the sunlight falling in key latitudes weakened. Bogs and oceans would absorb greenhouse gases, ice would build up, and the planet would slide back into an ice age. ”
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm#STL
Richard,
You seem to be under the false impression that I (and other people who dabble with the science behind global temperatures) attribute all warming to anthropogenic effects (and specifically to CO2). That is not at all my position. It is logically and scientifically sound to hypothesize that several different factors all contribute to an observed phenomenon (in this case, that CO2, solar cycles, ocean cycles, changes in cosmic rays, etc might all play a role).
I think we both reject the hypothesis: “The level of CO2 is the only factor affecting global temperatures .”
I accept the hypothesis: “The level of CO2 is a factor affecting global temperatures.”
The theory of GHGs and the correlations of Temperature & CO2 both support this hypothesis. Since as you said “science tries to find empirical evidence that refutes a hypothesis” what science can you present that refutes the hypothesis that increasing CO2 is one cause (out of perhaps many causes) that contributes to global warming?
“According to radiative physics and decades of laboratory measurements, increased CO2 in the atmosphere is expected to absorb more infrared radiation as it escapes back out to space. In 1970, NASA launched the IRIS satellite measuring infrared spectra. In 1996, the Japanese Space Agency launched the IMG satellite which recorded similar observations. Both sets of data were compared to discern any changes in outgoing radiation over the 26 year period (Harries 2001). What they found was a drop in outgoing radiation at the wavelength bands that greenhouse gases such as CO2 and methane (CH4) absorb energy. The change in outgoing radiation was consistent with theoretical expectations. Thus the paper found “direct experimental evidence for a significant increase in the Earth’s greenhouse effect”. This result has been confirmed by subsequent papers using data from later satellites (Griggs 2004, Chen 2007).”
http://www.skepticalscience.com/empirical-evidence-for-global-warming.htm
Arfur,
I enjoyed reading your well-expressed opinions. I suspect we are not so so far apart on our views.
I am very much up in the air as the to the sensitivity of the climate to CO2. I doubt the highest estimates are correct. I even more strongly doubt the sensitivity is zero.
To me, the simplest evidence the GHG’s have some effect on energy balance, and hence on temperature, is this graphic: http://www.skepticalscience.com/images/infrared_spectrum.jpg With no GHG’s the top curve would be smooth and the bottom curve would be basically zero. If people understand the graph, I think they will have to admit to at least SOME effect of GHGs.
The question of “significance” has at least two meanings. There is a very clear statistical significance of temperature to CO2 over the last 60 years (and I am sure over the last 200 years as well, but I have not actually done the calculations). That is a very different question to practical significance. The degree of practical significance attributable to warming depends a lot on who you are. If you live in cold climates, a little warming is probably a good thing for health and agriculture. I personally think many scientists have done a disservice to the science by getting too caught up in the hype (ie becoming “alarmists”).
Bystander says:
What they found was a drop in outgoing radiation at the wavelength bands that greenhouse gases such as CO2 and methane (CH4) absorb energy. The change in outgoing radiation was consistent with theoretical expectations. Thus the paper found “direct experimental evidence for a significant increase in the Earth’s greenhouse effect”. This result has been confirmed by subsequent papers using data from later satellites (Griggs 2004, Chen 2007).”
Henry@ Bystander
1) ABSORB ENERGY?
you have not yet grasped the concept of absorption and re-radiation.
try going back to read all my posts on this thread.
2) How would you know the change in the outgoing radiation was caused by an increase in CO2 and not an increase in H2O or O2/Ozone (that also absorb at 14-15 um)?
3) The study you quote does not tie up that well with my random sample of 15 weather stations from all over the world
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/henrys-pool-table-on-global-warming
Maxima:Means:Minima= 9:3:1
which shows that warming is not caused by an increase in GHG’s
Someone has to be wrong?
4) please go back to skeptical science and ask them specifically why they always delete all my entries there?
Tim Folkerts says:
“There is a very clear statistical significance of temperature to CO2 over the last 60 years…”
Not really: click
Bystander,
I don’t think anyone disputes that CO2 and CH4 have increased and that they will absorb outgoing IR and thereby affect the temperature of the stratosphere.
However the stratosphere cooled quite noticeably in the late 20th century, in my opinion far far beyond the miniscule cooling that could have been provoked by more CO2 or more CH4 on their own.
As it happens the increase in CO2 and CH4 coincided with an active sun, lower global albedo, more solar shortwave energy into the oceans (for CO2 outgassing or reduced absorption) and an energised biosphere so it may well be that increases in CO2 and CH4 were mostly if not all natural anyway.
Now we have greatly increased human emissions but the stratosphere has stopped cooling and may be warming a little. That cannot happen under AGW theory so where does that leave you and the misleadingly named scepticalscience ?
The more likely explanation is that an active sun results in a cooler stratosphere and a less active sun results in a warmer stratosphere. I know that is counter to the established science but it would explain an awful lot including the reason why the jets moved poleward when the sun was more active. To get poleward shifting jets there has to be a cooling of the stratosphere and a rising of the tropopause and the jets moved poleward during the MWP too when the sun was more active and equatorward when the sun was less active during the LIA.
So we have a plausible well evidenced natural explanation for observations with CO2 counting as pretty much irrelevant compared to the natural changes.
The hurdle I need to overcome is as to whether stratospheric temperature changes really are of opposite sign to that normally expected from solar variations.
In that respect I refer to some recent comments by Joanna Haigh who suggested just such a possibility though I accept that we still await confirmation.
To my mind so many puzzling things fit together if that were to be the case that I am reasonably confident.
I see that there is a slight difference between my response to Bystander and that of HenryP.
I do of course accept Henry’s contention that GHGs having absorbed more energy immediately reradiate and by my account the reradiation is then converted to latent heat from more evaporation over the oceans for a zero or near zero effect on equilibrium temperature because the oceans control global air temperatures.
Friends:
Please stop feeding the trolls.
Richard
Richard,
Having read many of your posts here, I hold you in seriously high regard. However, I cannot in all conscience (see how I managed to get the word ‘science’ in there…?) step back from a discussion when Tim is at least appearing to present a balanced argument. So here goes…
Tim,
Unfortunately I’m not so sure we are as close as you imply! But at least we can chat about it…:)
I suspect many people are ‘up in the air’ about climate sensitivity! Unfortunately the sales pitch to Joe Public was not one of moderated thought, but one of absolute surety. If the original claims had been investigated using observed data instead of model output, then maybe we wouldn’t be in the position of continuously downgrading the estimates. I agree the likelihood of a sensitivity of zero is incorrect. What I am not prepared to do is guess!
The skepticalscience graph you showed relates to radiation, not temperature. I’ve already expressed my thoughts on this. Again, it is an assumption to automatically believe the latter is a consequence of the former in any significant sense
As for ‘significance’, you say:
[“The question of “significance” has at least two meanings. There is a very clear statistical significance of temperature to CO2 over the last 60 years (and I am sure over the last 200 years as well, but I have not actually done the calculations). That is a very different question to practical significance. The degree of practical significance attributable to warming depends a lot on who you are. If you live in cold climates, a little warming is probably a good thing for health and agriculture. I personally think many scientists have done a disservice to the science by getting too caught up in the hype (ie becoming “alarmists”).”]
The statistical significance you refer to may be true, but ponder this: The 0.8C rise in temperature seen (HadCRUT) between 1950 and today (60 years) is not unique. Although the data does not go back 200 years, it does go back 160 years. There was a 0.45C rise in about 4 years between 1875 and 1879. Was that due to CO2? Then there was a 0.8C rise from 1965 to 1998. Was that due to CO2? Both were followed by a sharp cooling period. Was that due to CO2? The lack of further warming since 1998 also needs to be investigated. If CO2 was the cause of your 60-year warming period, why has there been no increase in 13 years? You may answer ‘natural variation of some sort’. However, this then leads to an anomaly: How do you know the latest warming is due to CO2 and not the others? If they are all due to CO2 then does that mean natural variation only applies to cooling, not warming?
I was not referring to practical significance in the way you describe. It was a ‘worthy of attention’ description. The IPCC would describe the radiative forcing effect as making a significant difference to the global temperature. A 0.8C rise in global temperature (and not currently increasing) in 160 years which may or may not be due to CO2 does not seem to me to be significant enough to justify the alarmism, vitriol and monetary outlay.
ps, still waiting for the evidence…:)
pps, I wholeheartedly agree with your final sentence!
Regards,
Arfur
Tim,
Errata. In the paragraph on ‘significance’ I stated: “Then there was a 0.8C rise from 1965 to 1998.”
The sentence should have read “Then there was a 0.8C rise from 1910 to 1945.”
Apologies for poor proof reading!
Arfur
Earlier I asked this question:
How about this:
From where I stand in the African sun
I have noticed a considerable difference in the amount of heat on my skin,
from the sun, when the humidity is, say 25%
or when it is, say, 75%.
(all else being kept more or less equal)
How would you explain that?
It appears Tim did not answer my question.
Anybody else who figured it out?
Hint: look at the infra red spectrum of water vapor
Does this UAH graph include temperature data from urban areas? If so, then it is also adding in UHI and as such, isn’t really showing the true warming.
Any way UAH can ‘spot map’ only the rural areas of the globe? I wonder if it’s possible to go through UAH’s satellite data and pick out only the rural areas. This would give (in my opinion) the true temperature record of the earth because you’d get rid of UHI and massage artifacts.
Ocean acidification = panic, don’t just seat there !!! Let me clarify few fats: 1] water is not acidic until the pH gets below seven. 2] needs to bring acidity from 1000 planets equal to earth; to drop from 8,3 to pH7,3 which would be still alkaline. 3] pH7,3 would have being much better environment for fish, coral and everything living in the sea. 4] alkalinity is much more harmful for everything living in the ocean than acidity. 5] carbon doesn’t create acidity, but nitrogen / sulphur does. 6] all the rainforest creeks / rivers are acidic, not CO2. 7] some acidity is essential to wash into the sea and soften the high alkalinity. 8] every year lots of potassium, magnesium, lime, ash get washed into the sea, all those things are increasing alkalinity. 9] lots of chlorine, bleach and products with bleach in it get washed into the sea and are increasing alkalinity above tolerable level. The propaganda is not just wrong on everything, but back to front
What is the name on English for who tells opposite than the truth? Because they are obsessed to mislead for CO2; lots of things that are harmful and can be prevented, are overlooked = they are premeditated crimes. For those real crimes to be exposed, logon http://www.stefanmitich.com.au Pretending of solving imaginary problems to cover up real problems, used to be illegal. By badmouthing CO2, they legalized real crimes in progres to the environment and humanity
July broke or tied nearly 9000 heat records:
http://www.thedaily.com/page/2011/08…ews-july-heat/
http://downloads.thedaily.com/ui-images/2011/08/05/080611-news-july-heat-map-day-v-662w.jpg
http://downloads.thedaily.com/ui-images/2011/08/05/080611-news-july-heat-map-night-v-662w.jpg
No Global Warming going on here….
REPLY: As your brethren are so fond of angrily pointing out, weather is not climate, which you are conflating. You confuse absolute data points with trends… just like all the caterwauling last year over the Russian heat wave from a blocking high. Even NOAA said it had everything to do with weather and was not attributable to global warming.
See http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/07/13/peer-reviewed-paper-2010-russina-heat-wave-mostly-natural/
Your point is therefore, pointless and flaccid. – Anthony
Henry@Brian
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/winters-are-getting-colder-in-pretoria-bring-back-the-global-warming-please
What do you think can we do to bring back the global warming, please?
Warming good. Cooling bad. I hope AGW is correct, despite its flaccid science. cAGW is, of course, utter nonsense, on purely economics grounds.