Over at Dr. Roger Pielke Sr’s website there’s a takedown in Physics Letters A of dogmatic eco-activist and “Skeptical Science” cohort Dana Nuccitelli, along with the rest of the SkS crew, regarding their (now failed) recent rebuttal to Douglas et al Ocean heat content and Earthʼs radiation imbalance. II. Relation to climate shifts
I loved this part:
In sum, we show that the criticism of our results (change of slope in the implied FTOA at the climate shift of 2001–2002) by Nuccitelli et al. is unwarranted because they used different data of less temporal resolution. A more careful analysis of this data shows, in fact, consistency and not conflict with our results.
Please visit and read for yourself here
Pwned.
Of note, our old friend John Cook is a co-author on the Nuccitelli et al. article.
What a paper chase. I still know nothing about this without paying grifters $31.50 for someone else’s work.
WUWT -> Pielke -> Phy Lett A -> hand in pocket.
Reblogged this on Climate Ponderings.
Interesting list of authors: Nuccitelli, Way, Painting, Church and Cook
Nuccitelli Cooks the data Painting Way for global warming Church.
The first Douglass and Knox paper, Ocean heat content and Earth’s radiation imbalance. II. Relation to climate shifts, can be found here:
http://www.pas.rochester.edu/~douglass/papers/PLA_21192_proofs_plusFigs1_2.pdf
“P. Solar says:
November 12, 2012 at 8:44 am
What a paper chase. I still know nothing about this without paying grifters $31.50 for someone else’s work.
WUWT -> Pielke -> Phy Lett A -> hand in pocket.”
grifters? You actually talk to and pay the manbearpig,AKA Al Gore?
On a side note,it is sad that Pielke Sr. had to close down comments.And the cAGW cohorts say we are not playing fair?
Justthinkin says: “On a side note,it is sad that Pielke Sr. had to close down comments.And the cAGW cohorts say we are not playing fair?” Actually, he closed down comments because his replies were too time consuming. IIRC, most of the questions were from those with similar beliefs to his. I do miss his extraordinarily meaningful dialog.
Justthinkin: it is sad that Pielke Sr. had to close down comments.
No, comments were never open and never are. I can understand why.
plazaeme says:
November 12, 2012 at 9:02 am
The first Douglass and Knox paper, Ocean heat content and Earth’s radiation imbalance. II. Relation to climate shifts, can be found here:
http://www.pas.rochester.edu/~douglass/papers/PLA_21192_proofs_plusFigs1_2.pdf
Thanks.
“The implied radiation imbalance between these dates,
in the direction of ocean heat loss, was −0.03 ± 0.06 W/m2 , with a possible systematic error of
[−0.00, +0.09] W/m2 .”
Uncertainty twice a the magnitude of the result (without systematic errors included).
The main result of this paper is : no result is possible from this data.
Fine, let’s leave it at that. That is a significant result in view of some claims being made on the basis of OHC.
The folks at SkS don’t like it when you ask them what evidence there is that the deep ocean is heating up when there is no evidence in the Argo data that it is occurring. Ask them if they have a thermometer down there measuring it or if they’re simply guessing.
Guaranteed comment deletion. Haha.
“and that the current global flux imbalance is consistent with continued anthropogenic climate change” .
No bias here…SKS has no shame.
Dale says: “The folks at SkS don’t like it when you ask them what evidence there is that the deep ocean is heating up when there is no evidence in the Argo data that it is occurring.”
Yup. SkS overlooks the fact that the NODC has to tweak the ARGO data in order for it to show warming.
CoRev says: “I do miss his extraordinarily meaningful dialog.”
I’ll second that. As a lurker at his former blog, I learned a lot from Roger Sr. Still do.
Bob Tisdale says: “SkS overlooks the fact that the NODC has to tweak the ARGO data in order for it to show warming.”
How do you know that the NODC tweaks the ARGO data to show warming?
SkS area just ‘Real Climate’ want to be’s, stuck between sucking up to ‘the Team ‘ and actual wanting to promote themselves as equal to ‘the Team’ there going get put in their place by ‘daddy Mann ‘ sooner of later . Something every one else can look forward to.
Kristian says:
November 12, 2012 at 11:31 am
Couldn’t be anything to do with the fact they pull buoys that show cooling but not those that show warming?
Unless they can show a systemic bias towards drifting to cooling, (bad design?) then why assume only those are wrong?
DaveE.
Bob Tisdale,
Is the “tweaking” by NODC based on GRACE?
David A. Evans says:
November 12, 2012 at 12:49 pm
Unless they can show a systemic bias towards drifting to cooling, (bad design?) then why assume only those are wrong?
The systematic bias is toward warming, because the Argo floats drift on the surface about 10% of the time. Which means over time they will drift away from areas of cold upwelling and toward areas of warm downwelling. The wind will also introduce a bias, probably warming also. Due to wind causing surface mixing and hence warmer subsurface waters.
These biases have never been quantified.
David A. Evans says: “Couldn’t be anything to do with the fact they pull buoys that show cooling but not those that show warming?”
Again, is this known to be done systematically? Is this practice documented somewhere?
In the aggregate they show cooling. The first person in charge reported the truth and organization people told him cull the cold ones only until there was as much warming as originally had been shown cooling… roughly. They told him cull till he saw warming so he culled till the apparent warmth was the amount it had been cool. At least that’s what he said when he went public and explained why he was forced to pull the report, cull cool buoys and re-submit his record to the public.
I have a question (for my betters) in relation to the whole TOA radiation imbalance. Do “we” know for certain that the TOA radiation budget “should” be in balance? Or is there some natural process that “could” cause a natural imbalance? In everything I’ve read it appears no one has actually asked the question.
For example, one thing I can think of is that photosynthesis converts inbound radiation into growth. This radiation is “used up”. Would not the process of photosynthesis cause a TOA radiation imbalance naturally, whilst Earth still maintains a balanced temperature?
So I suppose my question really is, has there been any calculation of naturally occurring inbound radiation sinks that may naturally cause a TOA radiation imbalance that does not cause climate change? And if so, has anyone estimate the amount? And finally, is it possible that this natural imbalance is actually what warmists misunderstand and call “anthropogenic global warming”?
Dale says:
November 12, 2012 at 3:05 pm
So I suppose my question really is, has there been any calculation of naturally occurring inbound radiation sinks that may naturally cause a TOA radiation imbalance that does not cause climate change? And if so, has anyone estimate the amount? And finally, is it possible that this natural imbalance is actually what warmists misunderstand and call “anthropogenic global warming”?
An interesting question.
The ‘sink’ that occurs to me is biomass accumulation/loss. I’d be interested in seeing a quantification of biomass changes. My guess is we have seen net land biomass loss for most of the 20th century, with a change to net land biomass gain over the last couple of decades.
Incorrect. He used to have open comments a few years ago. I posted a few myself. He may have been running a different site back then, but he did allow comments.
Dana Nuccitelli?
This Dana Nuccitelli? The one who bills himself as an “environmental scientist”, and currently works at a private environmental consulting firm (Tetra Tech, Inc., McClellan, CA)?
He has a Bachelor’s Degree in ASTROPHYSICS from the University of California at Berkeley, and a Master’s Degree in physics from the University of California at Davis.
So he’s now on the CAGW believers “A” list. Guess Mann or Hansen were busy…
Kristian says:
November 12, 2012 at 2:14 pm
What I know for certain is that Josh Willis noted that some buoys were reading low and found that suspicious. These buoys were pulled.
It was documented at Pielke Snr’s site and also I think in some news media. I do not recall any being pulled for being warm.
DaveE.
Philip Bradley says:
November 12, 2012 at 5:29 pm
Philip, according to Wikipedia (yes I know referring to it is dangerous) photosynthesis efficiency is between 47,300-71,000 EJ, which equates to ~1.05% photosynthesis efficiency of solar radiation that hits the surface (ie: how much solar energy is converted into sugars). Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency
So a back-of-envelope calculation using Trenberth & Fasullo’s latest energy budget of 161 W/m2 hitting the surface, then global photosynthesis efficiency is ~1.6 W/m2.
If biomass increased, then more solar energy would be removed from the equation. Would this not simulate the proposed TOA imbalance changes put forward by AGW proponents? Maybe not the entire imbalance, but this is just one example of how solar energy can be removed from the equation. I’m sure there are others.
Kristian says: “How do you know that the NODC tweaks the ARGO data to show warming?”
The “raw” UKMO EN3 ocean heat content data is unadjusted data:
http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/figure-1-global.png
The graph is from this post:
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2012/06/02/ukmo-en3-ocean-heat-content-anomaly-data-disappeared-from-the-knmi-climate-explorer-as-suddenly-as-it-appeared/
Regards
DR says: “Is the ‘tweaking’ by NODC based on GRACE?”
No mention of it in Levitus et al (2009):
ftp://ftp.nodc.noaa.gov/pub/data.nodc/woa/PUBLICATIONS/grlheat08.pdf
He must be playing the role of Captain Wrong-way Peter Peachfuzz of Rocky & Bullwinkle fame.
@ Dale says:
November 13, 2012 at 2:38 am
The first law of thermodynamics, is energy cannot be created or destroyed. When energy is tied up in molecular bonds, it dosnt vanish, so when the bonds are broken, that energy is released. (through digestion/rot/fire whichever) So although biomass does lock up a small percentage of the radiation incident on the surface, it is also constantly releasing energy… So a change in total biomass is only going to be a small percentage… of a small percentage… and it will balance in time(and in the larger scheme o things, quickly, of course burial does lock it away, sometimes for a long time… fossil fuels) But these numbers would be utterly inconsequential in the larger scheme o things.
At the moment, the radiation imbalance, is inside the area of uncertainty of the measurements… So, its more a case, of according to the change in atmospheric opacity/ measured change of energy in the system… there should be an imbalance, more than a measured imbalance as such.
I always thought his name was spelled Nutticelli. My bad.
KingOchaos, thanks for the info.
OT – the WUWT ENSO meter is a little behind – showing 0.5 when its almost down to zero.
The approach taken by Douglass and Knox, together with Tsonis and Swanson, to describe phase regime shifts in terms of nonlinear interactions between different ocean oscillations, and then to look for evidence of these shifts in net radiation balance by an integrating signal namely the upper 300m OHC, is a very good example of sound observational, deductive science with a sound theoretical underpinning. This is in stark contrast to the prevalent inductive culture of use of computer simulations as if they were reality and testing spurious hypotheses against spurious models to obtain spurious (but alarmist and media-palatable) conclusions.
“It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness”.