Support for the saturated greenhouse effect leaves the likelihood of AGW tipping points in the cold

Looking at that chart of relative humidity, there appears to be a step change circa 1970. A precursor to the Great Pacific Climate Shift?

definitely a post to bookmark and roll out as evidence that AGW theory does not stand up to scrutiny

Will read the paper later today, but have to admit there’s something I don’t see, and that’s the disappearance of water vapor feedback.
While it’s true that relative humidity is going down by 0.5% per decade, specific humidity is still going up. So, it seems like there will still be water vapor feedback, just not as much as if SPECIFIC humidity were going down.

Sorry, totally blew the second paragraph of previous comment.
While it’s true that relative humidity is going down by 0.5% per decade, specific humidity is still going up. So, it seems like there will still be water vapor feedback, not the disapperance we’d see if SPECIFIC humidity were going down.

Just one last comment … you might ask why I don’t have tabulated figures in a scientific way… the reason is that Google are known to be (have been?) strongly pro-warming and any kind of statistics were likely to be affected by the spin they wanted to put on the figures rather than anything meaningful. That is why e.g. when you search for “global warming”, it will appear that the web is overwhelmingly behind google’s own view on the subject.
Indeed, any attempt to show the decline in support for global warming in the google stats, was likely to result in a change in those stats. Stats can be manipulated, but what is far more difficult to manipulate is the enthusiasm of the source articles for a subject.
And in my judgement, the enthusiasm of pro-warmists is now rock bottom. A few may be going through the actions because that is their job, or their reputations have been hung in this noose. But those with a choice, have found something better.

Interestingly, today’s Frankfurter Algemeine carries a lengthy article claiming that solar radiation variations are “irrelevant and constant, that CO2 and water vapour are the only things that matter and IPCC 2007 got everything right …
I’d love to send them an email saying “B*ll*cks” but sadly my written German wouldn’t say it effectively, and they don’t have an email address for responses to this …

Nice article, shame that is is bogus and obsolete, because there is no greenhouse effect. It is simply impossible according to the laws of thermodynamics.
As RW Woods has shown and recently repeated.
http://www.biocab.org/Wood_Experiment_Repeated.html
For more info read Hans SChreuders excellent website
http://www.ilovemycarbondioxide.com/
and read the Sky Dragon Slayers book.
The greenhouse effect from back radiation, the biggest urban myth of our time.

Oh, and how do we know that there is not some other cause of the drop in water vapur measurements. Increased urbanisation for example over the USA or air travel (high stmosphere effects), or changes in solar activity.
Or is it a measurement artifact much like UHI for temperatures…..

Not a model in sight. Simply observations. How refreshing.

I just want to tell Willis that we experienced his thunderstorm theory of cooling today. It wasn’t a particularly hot day, but the clouds were building and towering magnificently. As I took the washing off the line I was hit by a squall. Moments later the rain came.
My daughter lives maybe two kilometres from me as the crow flies. She recorded 60 milimetres of rain plus heavy hail (pea sized). From the same storm I recorded 17 milimetres with a bit of hail. And yes, Anthony, we had both emptied our rain gauges in the morning.
So I had to provide cardigans for the family, even though February is generally the hottest month of the year in the you-beaut-land-of-Oz. The storm-deposited ice really cooled things down.

I have known about logarithmic saturation of greenhouse effect since the end of 1990s, when information about it was widely publicized by Steven Milloy’s site, JunkScience.com, and other skeptic sites. At that time I didn’t even know about the existence of WUWT.
WUWT is an excellent source of information, better than JunkScience, in my opinion, and it is good to find out that scientific papers supporting this fact are being published.
But why is it necessary to emphasize Mr. Eschenbach’s copying and posting of the graph in 2006? He didn’t develop the theory, he didn’t develop the graph, he was not the first (or the second, or the hundredth) to bring attention to it. Since when it’s always “Willis this and Willis that”? Makes me feel queasy.

“If a positive water vapor feedback response existed in the climate system, you’d expect both the specific and relative humidity to increase with time. It didn’t. This ends up putting the kibosh on the idea of tipping points, and a lack of positive water vapor feedback pretty much takes all the scare out of CO2 induced climate change.”
Actually, I think you’d expect the relative humidity to stay constant.
That sudden and dramatic drop in relative humidity in 1970 is fascinating. I wonder if it is world wide?
Since 1970, relative humidity seems to be gradually increasing. But that would be cherry picking…
[Reply: Relative humidity has been decreasing. ~dbs, mod.]

From The Hockey Shtick, word of a new paper that supports Miskolczi’s theory of saturated greenhouse effect. We’ve seen this before, in the form of this graph.
————-
The MODTRAN graph is classic green house gas theory and the saturation effect is well understood in that framework. It has nothing to do with Miskolczi’s hypothesis which is poorly supported.

Statistically significant warming trends affecting the Midwestern U.S., Canadian prairies and the western Arctic are evident in winter and to a lesser extent in spring
———–
This claim of a warming trend is curious since it is generally accepted, especially here, that across the continental USA there has been minimal warming trend.

The consequence of the Miskolczi theory is that additions of ‘greenhouse gases’ such as CO2 to the atmosphere will not lead to an increase in the ‘greenhouse effect’ or increase in global temperature.
———
If the M. Hypothesis is mediated by temperature, would another consequence be that changes in solar insolation would also not produce a change in global temperature?

All of this continues to be done in the (unrecognized) context of a general, and very basic, scientific incompetence, on the part of all concerned. Climate science is founded upon false theory, whose unwarranted acceptance into science has mis-educated at least one whole generation of scientists. Not only is there no greenhouse effect at all, of increasing atmospheric temperature with increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide, but the radiative transfer theory, which theoretically implies the greenhouse effect, is also clearly false (very obviously, showing that there is no carbon dioxide “greenhouse” warming negates the theory that predicts such warming). The radiative theory is not only wrong to assume the Earth’s surface to be a blackbody, but wrong to assume each differential layer of the atmosphere radiates thermally as a “graybody” (as local emissivity times Planck/blackbody distribution function). These false assumptions necessarily make the calculated radiation the EFFECT of a strict, set temperature distribution (which is physically provided by the hydrostatic lapse rate structure of the atmosphere, as given in the empirical Standard Atmosphere), not the CAUSE of temperature variations. Basically, the radiative transfer theory of the atmosphere does not address the thermodynamics of the atmosphere, but, it appears to me, is just a “light extinction model” (which merely tracks the light removed from, and added to, a highly directional beam of light in traversing a nearly-transparent medium, and does not provide any real insight into the thermodynamic effect of the light, and indeed naively fails to distinguish between a directed beam and omnidirectional thermal radiation). So the naive use of that theory (as shown in the “modtrans results” graphs presented in the article here) is worthless. Everyone needs to re-educate themselves on the fundamental warming of the atmosphere, responsible for the temperature-versus-pressure structure of the Standard Atmosphere (which, note, is a fundamentally stable thermodynamic state, not subject to “runaway climate” at all). Climate science cannot go forward without the fundamental correction provided by the Venus/Earth comparison I have done, and which should have been done, and generally accepted, 20 years ago–if there had been any competent scientists to do it.

I have said it before and I say it again:
Me and my green friends want 1200 ppm to be comfortable.
Burn, baby, burn.

“The consequence of the Miskolczi theory is that additions of ‘greenhouse gases’ such as CO2 to the atmosphere will not lead to an increase in the ‘greenhouse effect’ or increase in global temperature.”
That would actually fit quite wonderfully to Beenstock & Reingewertz’ econometric analysis of the possible causation of temperature by CO2 concentrations (which they were able to rule out). Oh, and it should make lukewarmers rethink their position…

LazyTeenager says:
February 8, 2012 at 4:57 am
“My first expectation would be that relative humidity would be calculated via the physics from first principles. ”
You really swallowed that Gavin Schmidt line hook, line and sinker, did ya? Google “Convection Parameterization” for some interesting insights into the world of climate and weather models.

Of course there is no “tipping point” induced by CO2–otherwise, the earth’s atmosphere would be filled with most of the ocean’s H2O in response to our ancient world when the CO2 content was 10 times what we currently have. That’s why “climate scientists” have to ignore climate change in the past.
One would think “Epic Fail” Michael Mann, supposedly a “geologist”, would know that. But then, telling the truth in “climate science” doesn’t garner copious grants and favoritism from the UN, now does it?

Harry_Dale_Huffman:
You say we need to reeducate ourselves on your “Fundamental Warming of the Atmosphere” hypothesis which claims the Sun mostly just warms the atmosphere (with its near IR radiation) rather than warming the surface (with both near IR and SW radiation) which then warms the atmosphere. (When using “near IR” I refer to that which is higher frequency than any LW IR emitted by the surface.) Fewer still will absorb in the visible spectrum.
Your argument on your website sounds convincing, but I stumble on some points. Relatively few molecules in Earth’s atmosphere are going to absorb Solar infra-red. Spectroscopy does show pockets due to absorption in that part of the spectrum, but by no means all of the IR appears to be absorbed. That which is absorbed by, for example, a carbon dioxide molecule, will not necessarily be shared with O2 and N2, but can be quickly re-emitted and thus go to space just like reflection. Now we do know the Sun warms the surface and we feel the hot sand in the Sun, but not so hot sand in the shade.
We also know the first few meters of the atmosphere are usually a little cooler than the surface, though not much. So the surface is warming the atmosphere by diffusion, not vice versa. There would not be close thermal equilibrium if this were not so.
Then there is evaporation of oceans to form clouds and rain. Where does that energy come from if it wasn’t the result of the Sun warming the oceans? What I cannot accept is any concept of radiation from a cooler atmosphere warming a warmer surface.
So how does any energy get into the surface if none is coming directly from the Sun? We know not all the light is absorbed, or we couldn’t see. We know not all the UV is absorbed or we wouldn’t get sunburnt. Just what percentage of solar insolation did you say is doing all this warming?

More and more science is convincing more and more people, especially the scientifically minded, that AGW/[CAGW]/or_whatever_it_is_called_now, has failed miserably. Time has proven the models(pseudo-science) wrong. Scientific research is debunking the CO2=global warming theory. Meanwhile, 100 Tory backbenchers (UK parliament) have rebelled against Cameron on the wind turbines scam, a German ex-green scientists has turned cold and wrote a book debunking AGW……….
IMHO, the AGW thing is imploding, fast.

I stand by my contention that the debate is no longer about “how much Co2 warms the atmosphere”. It has now moved on to “whether or not Co2 warms the atmosphere”.

This bit:
“What’s more, in this new paper there appears to be some evidence for a negative climate feedback, in the form of slightly lowered relative humidity trend, which makes climate sensitivity lower.”
______
Let’s take it that this “trend” is actually there. Why would relative humidity go down? Because temperatures have gone up! It is the total amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, that matters, as it is the total actual numbers of molecules of water vapor in the atmosphere that will determine the total net greenhouse effect from those molecules. Global atmospheric water vapor has increased over the time period- thus there are more water molecules present.
And then this bit:
“If a positive water vapor feedback response existed in the climate system, you’d expect both the specific and relative humidity to increase with time. It didn’t. This ends up putting the kibosh on the idea of tipping points, and a lack of positive water vapor feedback pretty much takes all the scare out of CO2 induced climate change.”
____
The notion of tipping points isn’t at all related to the logarithmic saturation effect of CO2 in the atmosphere, nor its effect specifically on increase water vapor as a positive feedback effect. Tipping points of course come from the notion of pushing a non-linear chaotic system such as the climate into a new state, such that it seeks a new attractor. One must look at the whole system to see how just a little nudge can cause a big change– this is the essence of Chaos. Simple plotting the well-known and obvious logarithmic saturation effect on a graph proves nothing about the existenc of tipping points that could exist through the interaction of any certain level of CO2 concentration with various other elements of the system. One obvious one is the interaction of just slight temperature increases caused by increases in CO2 with the cryosphere. The cyrosphere is sensitive to these slight increases, and certainly then changes in the cryosphere (i.e. Ice caps, sea ice, glaciers) can have a ripple effect to other parts of the climate system.
Bottom line: to suggest that the radiational saturation effect of CO2 in any way suggests that tipping points can’t exist in the climate system is wrong thinking, and misses the entire understanding of the complexity non-linear chaotic systems. Certainly tipping points do exist in the system, ice core data proves it (i.e. the Younger Dryas event and many others), and a seemingly small nudge to the system can cause these tipping points.

If there’s one parameter that siting a weather station at a water treatment plant will influence more than temperature, this is it. But, if the siting quality was better early in the period, as usual, the effect would be the opposite of a decrease, thus a larger than found decrease in RH is possible, all else being equal.
-or-
This is an expected result if the stations are of the roof top and runway variety. (I think…)
Any notion as to the station quality of in situ data used in this?
Call me consistently skeptical, if you will. I’d like to know more before simply granting this one potentially undue credibility.

I don’t understand how specific humidity (absolute humidity) can be increasing at 6.5% per deg C rise and yet RH can decrease consistently over the time period. What goes up must come down as precipitation (increased RH). I do understand how there can be localized RH anomallies but doesn’t RH eventually have to normalize to increasing absolute measurements (barring any drastic change in pressure, over the 1 deg rise)?
I refer to a paper submitted to the IPCC in 2007, by Dr. Frank Wentz, director of Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) in Santa Rosa, Calif. It was an exhaustive analysis of the data from Special Sensor Microwave Imagers on Earth-observation satellites, over a 20 year period of actual warming (1986 and 2005). Note: These were measured values NOT modeled ones.
Also note that the IPCC and the “team” actively suppressed this data initially because it contradicted their increased desertification meme. It took awhile to work it into a new meme. GK

GKarst– that is a very fair question and I’d love to hear a response from AW.

@R. Gates,
“Bottom line: to suggest that the radiational saturation effect of CO2 in any way suggests that tipping points can’t exist in the climate system is wrong thinking”
IF this paper is correct, then there are no “tipping” points from rising CO2, which is the main premise of CAGW (or whatever the nom du jour is). IF CO2 is saturated, or close to saturated, it cannot significanly add to warming. You’ll also be able to stop the mantra of “CO2 vs. low solar output.” I don’t think ice core data does not prove tipping points. It does prove climate can change fast in either direction (although it appears we warm faster than we cool).

G. Karst says:
February 8, 2012 at 8:09 am
“I don’t understand how specific humidity (absolute humidity) can be increasing at 6.5% per deg C rise and yet RH can decrease consistently over the time period.”
I would guess that it’s because the atmosphere has warmed slightly, and warmer air can hold a lot more water (eg saturation pressure increases from .0234 bar to .0249 bar by about 6% in heating from 20°C to 21°C)

This is — to the extent that it is eventually verified and found to be predictive (and assuming no problems surface in the theory) — an example of the best of skeptical climate science, and one that appeals directly to the intuition of most scientists as to what to reasonably expect. I mentally established a saturating curve like that five minutes after I learned about the greenhouse effect and the assertion of “catastrophic” positive feedback (which would make the second derivative in the curve positive instead of negative or flat), at least in the second figure. Not the slope, the curvature. It is simply unreasonable to think that a stable system that has resisted “melting down” for a few billion years doesn’t have numerous negative feedback loops with overall negative feedback, and of course the raw physics of gas radiation predicts saturation at or near the tropopause. The only thing that can significantly alter the GHE with CO_2 concentration is lifting and cooling the tropopause, but there is all sorts of atmospheric dynamics — such as the stratosphere — that oppose that, not to mention the ability of the overall system of heat transfer to re-organize to get of heat more efficiently as the ground or ocean temperatures warm a bit.
rgb

@R. Gates,
“Bottom line: to suggest that the radiational saturation effect of CO2 in any way suggests that tipping points can’t exist in the climate system is wrong thinking”
You are, of course, right, as we know that glaciations have begun and ended very quickly. Whether this happened due to a climate tipping point or through an outside influence (Milankovic cycles? Cosmic influences? Volcanoes?) is not known by now. But while we have examples of quick onset of glaciation, we don’t have examples of quick onset of, let’s call it “Hothouse Earth” phases. This does not prove that it isn’t possible. But it reduces the likelihood of it happening.
And when relative humidity drops while CO2 rises, this works against the postulated positive water vapor feedback of the IPCC, so it should reduce the risk; and if we are supposed to buy insurance against the CAGW risk, we should now renegotiate the premium.
Also, just to repeat this: positive water vapor feedback should, if it is possible, be possible on regional scales. So, before the entire globe heats up in a giant feedback loop, we should be able to watch small localized outbreaks of positive water vapor feedback – say, in the tropics, at noon.
It hasn’t been observed by now. And I doubt that it will start in the Tundra.

@Doug Cotton
You are very confused about so-called back radiation. There is nothing a warmer object does that stops a cooler object from radiating. There is no spooky action at a distance telling the cooler object to stop throwing off photons in the direction of a wamer object. Photons flow in both directions. There is simply more of them coming off the warmer object. Energy transfer is thus the net of an unequal bidirectional flow. The cooler object doesn’t increase the temperature of the warmer but it reduces the net rate. In effect we have three considerations. A warm surface, a cooler gas, a very cold cosmos. The cooler gas, so long as it is able to absorb photons emitted from the warmer surface, acts to insulate the warmer surface from the frigid cold of the cosmos. The actual mechanism by which this happens is that a portion of the photons moving away from the warm surface are absorbed by the cooler gas which very quickly re-radiates those photons. The crux is that the gas absorbs photons arriving from below but re-re-radiates them equally in all directions. Those photons emitted downward reduce the net flow of radiation and the effect is a slower rate of cooling.
This is basic physics and contesting it puts one in the scientifically illiterate and/or crank category. If one is comfortable in that place it’s a big group but the average IQ in it is below 100 if you get my drift.

Bill Illis says:
February 8, 2012 at 8:55 am
Wentz has done a few of these studies, do you have a link to the one you are referring to.

They found that over the two decades(0.4°C), both factors (precipitation and atmos. water vapor) increased by between 1.1% and 1.2% – or roughly 6.5% for each degree of warming.
Journal reference: Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.1140746).
That is all the information, I have in my notes. I am sure you can find more.
I say forget relative humidity. Think of the global atmosphere as storage vessel for water, as you put more water into the atmosphere, the vessel overflows and rain falls to ground. If you increase the temperature you increase the storage capacity, but it quickly fills to overflow again. It only produces a baffle effect.
Water, truly is a miracle substance. One of it’s characteristics that makes it so, is it’s amazing heat capacity (both sensible and latent). This makes it an incredible heat transport mechanism.
Direct solar heating is greatest at the equator. If we increase the water content (absolute humidity), that water will absorb more heat. This water is then transported, via clouds and humidity to other parts of the globe. The more absolute humidity, the greater the effect. This means, more equatorial heat moves into the temperate and polar regions. This is what I mean by homogeneous effects. The equator remains equatorial and the temperate zones less temperate. As delta temps decrease, so does severe weather patterns decrease. We truly become more homogeneous, climate wise. Increased cloud cover also dramatically affects albedo. This is the beauty of a water vapor driven climate. It self regulates.
All of this depends on a warming climate. If we are in fact cooling… then all bets are off. We must then pull out our “ice age” (tiny, little, big) scenarios.
I used to assume, we were indeed warming, however, recent decadal trends have reduced my certainty to a coin flip. I hope we are, because the cooling alternate is not so kind. GK

@R. Gates,
“Bottom line: to suggest that the radiational saturation effect of CO2 in any way suggests that tipping points can’t exist in the climate system is wrong thinking”
So once again Mr Gates. Please explain how ancient earth (500 million years ago, and 120 million years ago) atmosphere did not go over any tipping point when the atmospheric CO2 levels were 6-20 times the present levels. The laws of physics did not change over this time period so either the feedbacks are in fact negative or what?

Robert Brown says:
February 8, 2012 at 9:25 am
“Once you look at the actual graphs, and take the time to understand what they mean, the question is no longer “Does CO_2 play a role in warming the surface of the Earth”. Of course it does. You can see it, in almost precisely the same way that you could see where your house was losing energy via radiation by a means of an IR photograph. The more of your house that is losing heat from a cold outer surface rather than the warm interior, the warmer your house is. A well insulated house is cold on the outside; snow doesn’t melt on its roof. A poorly insulated house has a warmer roof.”
A teachable moment? Good luck!
I finished making a very well insulated structure cut into a hillside a year or two ago. The roof is almost flat (1:14 slope) covered with white mineral roofing. It begins at grade on the uphill side and is 10 feet above grade on the downhill side and faces roughly NW so doesn’t get much sun on the single external wall. It’s better than R-30 insulation on the roof. On dry clear nights it will be covered with frost at sunrise with outside air temperature not having fallen below 40F all night long and air temperature inside the structure a constant 72F. This is in sub-tropical south Texas where year-round ground temperature a feet deep is a perfect 72F which inspired the project (I wanted to see how little heating and air conditioning I could get away with without resorting to expensive construction materials). The result was fantastic. Heating/cooling cost is under $0.50 per square foot annually and even then in the winter it’s little more than using a few incandescent light bulbs left on 24/7 to kill two birds (lighting and heating) with one stone. A dehumidifier is required during the cooler months when the air conditioners aren’t kicking on at all.
So not only does “snow” not tend to melt on a well insulated roof it will form frost on it even when air temperature is far above freezing. This was an object lesson for me in the power of radiative cooling on dry clear nights although I hadn’t quite forgotten many camping trips to the high desert at Joshua Tree National Monument in the 1970’s and 1980’s outside Palm Springs where you’d roast by day and freeze by night.
Good luck trying to teach the rudiments of why these phenomenon happen when your students aren’t paying through the nose to hear you talk. I’ve had no luck at it. As Yogi Berra said “You can observe a lot by just looking.” Most people see without actually looking, it seems.

G. Karst says:
February 8, 2012 at 9:33 am
Outstanding.

R. Gates says:
February 8, 2012 at 7:32 am
Maybe the debate has move on to this new area of discussion leaving behind the woefully uninformed, or willfully ignorant.
There, fixed it for you.

Joules Verne says:
February 8, 2012 at 9:13 am
Are you absolutely sure that IR has the same properties of a photon?

Ged says:
“The fact RH has gone down is the same as saying the planet’s air is getting dryer.”
____
Again, all that really matters in regards to the greenhouse effect from water vapor is the total number of water vapor molecules in the atmosphere. RH might certainly be correlated (or not, depending on temperature) but it doesn’t tell you what you really want to know. How many molecules of water vapor are in the atmosphere now, versus 50, or 150 years ago?

RobW says:
February 8, 2012 at 9:43 am
@R. Gates,
“Bottom line: to suggest that the radiational saturation effect of CO2 in any way suggests that tipping points can’t exist in the climate system is wrong thinking”
So once again Mr Gates. Please explain how ancient earth (500 million years ago, and 120 million years ago) atmosphere did not go over any tipping point when the atmospheric CO2 levels were 6-20 times the present levels. The laws of physics did not change over this time period so either the feedbacks are in fact negative or what?
_____
I think you are equating “tipping point” with run-away greenhouse. There are many tipping points in any chaotic system, each one with the potential of sending the climate toward an attractor, or new center of oscillation. These potential attractors will change over time based on the whole nature of the system (i.e. strength of the solar output, location of continents, greenhouse gas concentrations, level of volcanic activity, location of the solar system in the galaxy, etc.). It might be the case that there is no attractor close by now, or any time in Earth’s distant past where a run-away greenhouse Earth is possible. But this really isn’t the issue related to whether or not adding CO2 (in a geologically rapid manner) as humans have done could tip the climate system toward some new (i.e. very non-Holocene like) attractor. This attractor could be beneficial, or not, for the human species. Our large brains and ability to adapt might easily overcome a new climate, or not.
The essential point is that in no way does the radiational logarithmic nature of CO2 saturation imply any certainty that some “tipping point” can’t be crossed by the climate system as CO2 saturation rises. Tipping points are inherent in every non-linear chaotic system, and the climate is not immune.

Russ in Houston says:
February 8, 2012 at 11:38 am
Joules Verne says:
February 8, 2012 at 9:13 am
“Are you absolutely sure that IR has the same properties of a photon?”
At the scale of individual CO2 molecules, you bet.

The water vapour feedback is determined in the upper atmosphere at about the 400 mbar level or 8 km altitude, mainly over the tropic. This is the location of the predicted but missing tropical troposphere “hot-spot” that has been widely discussed.
If you want to know how increasing CO2 affects water vapour at this level, you need a plot of water vapour specific humidity versus CO2. See:
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/FOS%20Essay/Climate_Change_Science.html#Water_vapour
Please look at the 8th plot labeled “Specific Humidity at 400 mbar vs CO2 – Tropics Annual Data 1960 – 2011”. The blue curve shows declining specific humidity with an coefficient of determination R2 = 0.713. (The 13-month filtered monthly plot has R2 = 0.719) The high R2 factors show that the data correlates very well with the linear trend. The annual data and the 13-month filter removes the seasonal signal. This confirms that to a large degree, CO2 replaces water vapour in the upper atmosphere, just where it has the greatest effect on out-going radiation.
Compare this to the next graph, labeled “Specific Humidity at 400 mbar vs Temperature – Tropics Annual Data 1960 – 2011”. The climate models assume that water vapour changes only in response to a temperature change. If this were true, this graph should show a very strong correlation of increasing humidity with temperature. The graph is a phase space plot of the data points connected in time sequence. Over short time periods, especially over a season, an increase in temperature causes an increase in specific humidity. The annual data shows linear striations increasing from bottom left to top right, confirming that higher temperatures relate to higher specific humidity over short time intervals. But the overall trend is down, proving that specific humidity is responding to factors other than temperature. This graph which tests the climate model assumption has a very poor correlation of 0.014, and the trend is declining rather than climate model assumption of increasing with temperature. The climate model assumptions are wrong!
To see how this relates to climate sensitivity, see:
http://www.friendsofscience.org/index.php?id=533
Ken Gregory

Statistically significant warming trends affecting the Midwestern U.S., Canadian prairies and the western Arctic are evident in winter and to a lesser extent in spring while statistically significant increases in water vapor pressure occur primarily in summer for some stations in the eastern half of the U.S.
If the warming is in the winter/spring and the WV changes are in the summer, clearly there is no causative relationship. Ie, no evidence for a +ve water vapour feedback.
The only way they can be related is through a common cause and that common cause is likely decreasing aerosols, which would produce both these effects..

Smokey says:
February 8, 2012 at 12:38 pm
Gates says:
“There are many tipping points in any chaotic system, each one with the potential of sending the climate toward an attractor, or new center of oscillation.”
If Gates knew what he was talking about he could call turns in the stock market. If he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, he can post here.
_____
If I could call turns in the market, you wouldn’t want me posting here?
Hmmm…
Calling “turns” in the market is a bit of a fools errand. Best to do what the smart money (i.e. insurance companies and other big investors) do and bet both sides of the market, (a straddle) switching your “long bet” based on the over-bought or over-sold condition in the market. The insurance companies love to sell annuities to you, giving you your measely 5, 6, or 7% returns, while they are betting against you all the time with your money. If the market goes up, they’ve made a tidy return, if the market goes down, they make an absurd return. They dine on fine food and wine, and will gladly give you the table scraps.
The smart money doesn’t try to time turns in the market. They know there will be turns, and they’ll be there to collect on them…all the while, using your money to bet with. A pretty good gig. Those of you in the insurance business–especially the business of selling “annuities” know exactly what I’m talking about. They leverage your money into tidy profits, and could give a wit about “timing the market”.

Robert Brown says: February 8, 2012 at 9:25 am
IR spectra taken by satellites simply let you identify the parts of the spectrum that act as radiative “insulation”, and slow the transmission of heat so that it eventually comes out of the Earth itself from cold matter up high instead of warm matter down low. End of story.
=========
spectral plot of MEASURED IR up and IR down is here:
http://www.patarnott.com/atms749/powerpoint/ch6_GP.ppt
==========
Doug Cotton says: February 8, 2012 at 6:31 am
Then there is evaporation of oceans to form clouds and rain. Where does that energy come from if it wasn’t the result of the Sun warming the oceans? What I cannot accept is any concept of radiation from a cooler atmosphere warming a warmer surface.
==========
Please have a look at these real world documents and then see if you can still say this.
Figure 3 in this document
http://www.patarnott.com/atms749/pdf/LongWaveIrradianceMeas.pdf
shows the measured IR downwards over a few days and nights.
We know the solar output received in the dark is 0
We know that O2 and N2 have very very very little thermal radiation.
So where does all that downward radiation come from (at least 270W/sqm)
It can only be from GHGs.
During the day we receive about 380W/sqm
So the 270W/sqm is additional to the solar irradiance.
Would anyone care to explain where the night time radiation is coming from if GHE is non existent? Note that the nighttime radiation is only 100W/m^2 less than the day (when the sun is beating down!). Since this radiation is positive and hitting earth can you tell me how this does not increase the temperature over what would be present if no GHGs and night time radiation as zero?.
Also have a look at another real world measurement:
Downward longwave irradiance uncertainty under arctic atmospheres: Measurements and modeling
http://www.slf.ch/ueber/mitarbeiter/homepages/marty/publications/Marty2003_IPASRCII_JGR.pdf
Figure 2
sometimes more downwelling radiation at night! Please explain without GHGs.

Ged> For there to be a water vapor feedback, relative humidity must stay the same or raise with temperature.
No. What matters is absolute humidity, not relative. It is the interactions of the photons with the molecules that matter, which depends on the number of said H2O molecules; the photons don’t care about how many there are relative to how many there could be.
The point about sfc vs upper air is a good one. I think the pic that KG provides from the FoS is dodgy; humidity measurements from radiosondes are difficult, and unlikely to be consistent over time (oh, and “The climate models assume that water vapour changes only in response to a temperature change” is wrong, as is apparently any statement about GCMs made by skeptics here :-).
Total column WV over the oceans is shown here: http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch3s3-4-2-1.html Upper troposphere is more complex; see http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch3s3-4-2-2.html but you won’t like it.

I don’t think anyone has risen to William M. Connolley’s bait where at February 8, 2012 at 2:36 am he writes:
“No. The GCMs make no assumption of fixed relative humidity. That is an emergent property, approximately.”
It certainly has been my understanding that RH was assumed fixed for want of any better data. Or if it wasn’t explicitly fixed its value was closely predetermined by other assumptions. Anyone here know better? Have things changed as modelling has progressed?

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Robert Brown says:
February 8, 2012 at 9:25 am
So don’t get hung up on radiation going up or down, convection or conduction, winds or global oscillations, heat going from warmer to cooler or vice versa, or anything like that. Those things may affect the way the GHG-moderated GHE works, but they do not have any bearing on the question of whether it works at all. All that matters for the latter is the picture of the outgoing radiation that actually cools the Earth — and is the only way heat actually leaves the Earth, so you can completely, totally ignore 100% of the details of how heat moves around the Earth’s surface before eventually being radiated away. That picture leaves one with absolutely no doubt that CO_2 in the upper troposphere is part of the “well-insulated roof” (where the water window is part of the “poorly insulated roof” where the entire spectrum is “the roof”) that one way or another slows the flow of input energy out of the troposphere and hence raises the average temperature of the house beneath the roof.
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Good explanation that any engineer should understand. The “back-radiation” aspect is technically correct, but perhaps not intuitive. For me, the “insulation” analogy is much more intuitive.

Joules Verne, Robert Brown; this is an interesting read, the article and the comments included. To Joules point, if you have a wide-mouth Dewar flask (thermos bottle) on a clear night, low humidity, put a few cc’s of water in it, stretch some plastic wrap over the top (polyethylene is best) and set it on a table outside. After a while, the water will freeze solid because the Earth is about 300K and space about 2K. The water in the Dewar becomes essentially an IR detector and reaches some equilibrium with the field of view. Because of water vapor (humidity), Houston stays warmer at night compared to Austin or El Paso.
Regarding the effects of CO2 on warming, the article is correct in that as a GHG, CO2 is nearly saturated, that is to say, more CO2 makes little difference in the effects of the gas. CO2 and water vapor, in the wavelengths that they absorb, also emit. Using a simple NDIR (non-dispersal Infrared) detector with a bandpass filter for CO2 for example (4.26 micron), one can both detect the absorption of the gas in a system and also the emission of the gas. If the gas is warmer than a reference, the signal from the detector goes up which means that the gas is losing heat and perhaps has transferred heat, when the signal goes down it absorbs heat and energy, However, in a system, the heat of the gas is the temperature of the gas times its partial pressure and specific heat. So, perhaps, if there is more CO2 in the upper atmosphere which emits at both 10 microns and 4.26 microns, and since because of the blackbody curve 10 microns is the emission peak of 300K, and since the Earth’s emission peak is also 10 microns, there is a transference of heat from the Earth to the CO2 in the atmosphere, which is then radiated out to space. Warm CO2 will radiate energy out into space and will be a conductor of heat within the system.
Water on the other hand can be a bigger warming gas because it absorbs at many wavelengths at both short and long. Hydrocarbon gases like methane (natural gas) is very dangerous because the atmosphere is not close to being saturated and methane is a efficient absorber of IR. I think it is interesting that Earth, to have survived with life forms for so long, would have a CO2 cycle or mechanism to balance the good v. the harm it can do respecting life. I think water vapor is part of the mechanism.
The anecdote I observed for years now, and since I viewed the graph of water vapor v. relative humidity shows that my observations are in sync with the data, that is, with increasing water vapor and CO2, vegetation growth has been noteworthy in that we have better lawns. I need to prune my orchard more, have better crops, and the general landscape is greener (in New Hampshire) than it was in the late ’60’s when summers were very hot and dry and winters not so much back then. Perhaps with a slight increase in CO2 vegetation growth will sequester carbon as fast as necessary to maintain a healthy balance. I think a study of tree growth in terms of regional volume (which would include stocking) done while taking into the calculation the history of water vapor, rainfall, and total water in the system would be instructive. I think with a slight increase in temperature, water, and CO2 there is much more vegetative growth. Isn’t that what greenhouse managers do? I think in the environment it all balances out or there would be no life on planet Earth presently.

So not only does “snow” not tend to melt on a well insulated roof it will form frost on it even when air temperature is far above freezing. This was an object lesson for me in the power of radiative cooling on dry clear nights although I hadn’t quite forgotten many camping trips to the high desert at Joshua Tree National Monument in the 1970′s and 1980′s outside Palm Springs where you’d roast by day and freeze by night.
Good luck trying to teach the rudiments of why these phenomenon happen when your students aren’t paying through the nose to hear you talk. I’ve had no luck at it. As Yogi Berra said “You can observe a lot by just looking.” Most people see without actually looking, it seems.
One can actually make ice cream at night in the desert, even in the summer, by making your custard and pouring it in a thin layer into a flat pan well-insulated from below, on a very still night with low humidity. The roast by day, freeze by night is nearly standard operating procedure in e.g. the Sahara, where they have 45 degree temperature swings every day.
As for your second remark, I don’t have much luck getting people to learn when what I am teaching fails to coincide with their prior beliefs. Not just on this blog, this is a lifetime observation. I’ve spent — err, really “wasted” — countless hours trying to convince BICCs (Biblically Inerrant Conservative Christians) that the Universe is a bit older than 10,000 years and that we evolved. Trying to explain radiometric dating to them is a real treat, when they are perfectly happy to assert that God just changed the laws of nature so it looks like some rocks are really old and the light of the stars is coming from really far away, but if we really got those laws right we’d get the right answers, namely that the rocks are all antediluvian and perhaps 6000 years old.
Sounds a lot like climate arguments — on both sides. Me, I favor the side(s) supported by the laws of physics the way they are already worked out, until really proven otherwise;-)
rgb

I’m going to repost this comment from another thread here, because it is very relevant to this thread.
————————————————————–
This is where the analogy gets interesting. Suppose the dam is infinitely high, but it has two rows of floodgates in it. One, at low level, we will call the CO2 floodgates. One, at higher level, we will call the CH4 floodgates.
The water rises until it starts flowing out of the CO2 floodgate. But, the outflow isn’t enough to establish equilibrium before this row is saturated, so the water keeps on rising. Eventually, it reaches the level of the CH4 floodgates. Here, the water has enough of an outlet that the level stabilizes.
Now, we add more CO2 outlets. To make the analogy fit, let’s assume that we had to raise the level of the CO2 floodgates a bit to fit more in. If the CO2 floodgates had previously been sufficient to allow an equilibrium level to be established, that equilibrium level would be pushed higher.
BUT, since the level previously rose to the CH4 gates, and we put more CO2 gates in below that level which are now able to remove higher volumes of water, the equilibrium level will go down.
I hope maybe this analogy will get a read from some people who did not understand what I was talking about on an earlier thread.
Adding CO2 does not necessarily raise surface temperature, because there are other radiative emitters in the atmosphere which have interacted to create the equilibrium temperature.

I was going to ask whether anybody had mentioned Venus. Apparently somebody did, but that mention didn’t make a lot of sense.
The greenhouse effect does not “saturate”. It’s easy enough to demonstrate theoretically using a grey atmosphere approximation. And otherwise you need a really weird woo theory about Venus.

Bart says: February 10, 2012 at 9:25 am
“Saturation” means the sensitivity to additional amounts tends to zero. Venus actually proves that saturation happens. Despite being 97% CO2, the major greenhouse effect comes from the much smaller concentration of SO2.
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There are 70 atmospheres of pressure broadening the spectral lines of all GHGs on Venus!! “Saturation” will occur later SO2 is one of the GHGs there are many in the venusian atmosphere including H2O at 100ppm

The one critique that I have of the graphs presented above is the use of a linear instead of logarithmic scale on the carbon dioxide concentration factor. Of course David Archibald, in his “The Fate of All Carbon” article indicates that there may not be enough economically recoverable, combustible carbon remaining on Earth to ever bring the carbon dioxide concentration up to 560 ppm–just double the nominal pre-industrial concentration level.
As late as three years ago, many otherwise intelligent people in positions of power believed that there was an urgent need to cut carbon dioxide emissions by eighty percent before 2050 to prevent the destruction of our environment. It looks like resource depletion will eventually do this anyway. I believe we should now be preparing for the gradual loss of fossil or abiotic carbon as a source of energy while we still may have time to make a gentle transition, rather than worrying about a non-existent, super-accelerated, greenhouse effect.

Robert Brown says:
February 13, 2012 at 9:03 am
“Doppler broadening depends on temperature, so this is one degree of feedback removed from the increase in the GHE caused by increased concentration, a second order (but positive feedback) effect.”
There is also a potential negative feedback effect in the fact that a broader distribution is able to radiate energy away at lower wavenumber. That means the surface temperature does not have to be as high to balance the energy radiating away from the planet.
And, there is another negative feedback from higher concentration, and that is that less energy needs to radiate away from higher energy emitters like CH4 in order to achieve balance, so again, the surface temperature does not have to be as high to balance the energy radiating away from the planet.

Robert Brown says:
February 13, 2012 at 10:36 am
I’m with you all the way, there.
“I’m really puzzled by the assertion that feedback from non-CO_2 channels will produce 3-5x as much warming as the CO_2 alone.”
Confirmation bias. There was warming, and they were sure they had the culprit, so they misapplied the logic of a pulp fiction detective:

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Only if you have a full set of potentialities, of course. They’d have been better advised to take heed of another quote from the same source:

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.

@jjthoms…
Regarding your comment on backradiation recorded with pyrgeometers, I have been measuring downward radiation during nighttime and daytime and I can assure you that it is not thermal radiation emitted by the atmosphere. Any dome made with polished aluminum produces the same results. I have found serious deffects on the experiment you refered at
http://www.slf.ch/ueber/mitarbeiter/homepages/marty/publications/Marty2003_IPASRCII_JGR.pdf
In brief, the authors do not specify the conditions of the cloudiness. A cloud cover can produce biased results. Any species of clouds damages the results. The objective of the experiment that you referred was not to measure accurately downward longwave radiation, but the efficiency of pyrgeometers. From their results and my results, the sole conclusion is that pyrgeometers are not useful to measure downward radiation.