Notes on the February Global Temperature Anomaly

“Physics don’t allow it to operate in any other way.”
Ahem. Correct me if I’m wrong, but “physics” as plural?

Very Nice John !
I have visited your website (the Inconvenient Sceptic) only a few times in the past, but I sure may do it more often. The above info is very good – look at the actual temperatures, along with the anomaly. It gives a better picture.
And your last paragraph is really something. So why would the earth be losing more heat now (in January) than 30 years ago ( I also assume it was January)? Maybe clouds? Maybe atmospheric flows that might be affected, by maybe, say – a change in solar activity? ( . . calllng Leif now . . ! ) , that although total irradiance may not change much, does the spectrum change ?( . .I recall seeing that UV changes quite a bit . . .). And what might those effects be?
Not saying that is the ‘final answer’ – but shouldn’t that be looked into more . . ?

First water vapor and now temperature. WHEN is the lame stream media going to take note of these DATA based findings and start asking the Michael Mann’s and Jimbo Hansen’s of the world the tough questions?
[snip]

Truly not trying to be snarky, but you lost me at:
“Depending on the source, the average temperature is between 12.0 and 12.5 °C for the month.”
Was it really? We know this as a fact?

Yep, use of anomalies causes confusion. That is reason enough to get rid of them. But there is another important reason. Use of anomalies hides the actual data – thermometer readings. Taking a thermometer reading is an act of reaching into the environment and withdrawing a fact from it. To convert a thermometer reading to an anomaly you have to compare the thermometer reading to an average reading – you have to hide the fact behind a human contrivance. So much for empirical science.

The title states that there was a big drop in surface temperature in the month of February from ~ 0.5 to 0.2 °C.  This is correct for the anomaly, but it has nothing to do with the Earth’s temperature.  The reality is the Earth warmed up, but the anomaly dropped.
February is on average 0.18 °C warmer than January
Notice that the Earth is  about 0.25 °C warmer in February
You lost me. Is February on the average 0.18 warmer or 0.25 warmer than January? And note that the anomaly dropped by about 0.3. So according to my math, February was either 0.12 colder or 0.05 colder than January, yet you say: “ The reality is the Earth warmed up”. What am I missing?

…And to gild the lily on the topic of Earth’s heat budget, it will be lowest at the orbital equinox in October and highest at the opposite equinox in April, *regardless of the atmospheric heat latency*. We see the equivalent effect with the tilt-dependent Arctic ice caps which max out in March, not the December solstice — the orbital perehilion-apehelion schedule happens to follow one month after the Arctic ice caps — maximum heat budget 1 month after the max Arctic ice (without causal link). Until the comprehensive planetary temperature record shows that heat budget, it will be incomplete.

Does not a warmer Earth lose heat at a greater rate than a cooler Earth, all other factors being equal? Well, yes – it does. But energy is lost only by the atmosphere. Nothing here tells us if we had a net accumulation of energy or a net loss of energy to the Earth system. It really annoys me that we don’t speak of global climate in terms of energy balance, but of atmospheric temperature. But that does not tell us if other features of the planet are accumulating or shedding energy.
If you are an alarmist you should be happy to know that warm air is a good thing because that heat heads to space. Double good if that heat has come from the ocean. negative balance of energy. Yet we can expect endless complaints of a warming planet. N0 – that is a cooling planet! Hot air – radiant energy to space. Good! It cannot ping pong around the atmosphere for ever. It has to leave. It cannot be helped. If you have a nuclear reactor on a space craft that needs to shed excess heat the fastest way to do that without adding area/weight is to allow the radiators to get very hot.

I’m lost on this one too. If the average temp in January is 12.5 C and the anomaly is +0.5 C that brings it to 13 degrees C for the month. If February is 0.18 C warmer on average than January then the average is 12.68.C Add in the anomaly of 0.18 C and you get an average of 12.88 C. I understand that the anomaly is above the average but it seems to me the Earth actually cooled down from January.

I’m probably missing the point so correct me if I’m wrong. In the simplest case, let’s say all temperature anomalies for all of dates on the chart are zero. Can I not conclude that the chart shows a “steady” surface temperature with no warming and cooling? Or do I have to caution that there is seasonal warming and cooling not reflected on the chart?

The earth would not be radiating extra energy at the top of the atmosphere if GHG were the cause of the warming. This can only be caused by an increase in shortwave reaching the surface or by the loss of heat from the oceans. Strangely the 5% decrease in cloud cover in the mid 90s was responsible for most of the observed change in temp, which is why the OLR went up. Considering there are only 4 main factors in the energy dynamics of the earth ( energy source, absorption, storage and loss) its amazing the obvious changes in cloud cover have been completely ignored by so called climate scientist.

Stephen Mosher, thank you for the useful explanation on how CO2 influences heat loss in the atmosphere, it was, clear straightforward and easily understood. And thanks for posting on WUWT.

If Steve Mosher gets wrong how a thermos flask works. -note the silver has nothing to do with anything…… it works by a vacume and insulation, and can keep drinks cold and hot…….
Which is physics at its most basic, everything else he wrote in that paragraph becomes meaningless.

When I get to the bit that says “Anomaly has no place on this chart because this shows the actual temperature of the Earth and each hemisphere” I am forewarned that what follows is not going to be very scientific. There are good reasons for using anomalies. The author seems unaware of them.

“Climate scientists hate it when people show real temperature because it is impossible to see much warming…”.

Do they and is it? No one knows the actual temperature of the Earth , but here we have a graph (provenance unknown) purporting to show it? Where did those absolute measurements come from?

So despite the fact that CO2 was higher, the Earth was losing energy at a higher rate to space. CO2 was not blocking the energy from escaping despite all the claims that increased CO2 prevents heat from escaping the Earth

Oh dear, that is really bad. CO2 does not block energy escaping to space. In fact, at higher altitudes CO2 provides a mechanism for radiation to escape to space. There is good correlation between those who don’t believe in the greenhouse effect and those who don’t understand it.

Can we measure the ERL and has it increased in altitude with an increase in CO2?
Has the rate of OLWR been calculated and does it show a decrease?
With a higher and colder ERL shouldn’t there be a coresponding decrease in OLWR?
Looking for some brass tacks…

Oops, previous comment was addressed to Steven Mosher.

“Use of anomalies hides the actual data – thermometer readings” – Theo Goodwin (March 6 at 8:58 pm)
Am I correct in assuming that the global monthly temperature anomaly is still determined according to the method developed in the early 1990s by Phil Jones at East Anglia Climate Research Unit?
According to that method, groups of measuring stations are selected (not randomly) for each element of a 5° x 5° global geographic grid. The surface air temperature (SAT) anomaly for each measuring station is the difference between the monthly mean of daily mean SATs for a calendar month from an historical mean calculated for the same calendar months over a 30-year designated period at that measuring station. The calculated monthly mean is a mean of the selected calendar month means for the designated period. Measuring stations have at least 20 years of base period values or estimates of those values (based on nearby sites).
Station temperature anomaly values are then averaged over all stations within each 5° x 5° grid element and larger scale (and global) anomaly estimates are calculated as a weighted average (the cosine of the grid element latitude) of all grid elements with available data.
If so, then the SAT anomaly is more artifact than statistic.

I still can’t get over the lecture from Steve Mosher on physics, only for him to get how the silver lining on a simple Thermos flask works wrong.
P.S. Thermos flasks work due to them being a bottle within a bottle. There is a vacuum between the inner and outer layer as heat can’t travel though a vacuum. This is what keeps the liquid at a constant temperature, cold….. or warm. The silver lining is just additional really to this. Its not what keeps the liquid warm at all.
God help us all if this is the level of physics that’s in climate science.

In the middle of Australia in march it can be 40C in the water bag, Then the sun goes down, a flat horizon for ever with no clouds. The sun switches off like a light, then the temperature plummets close to zero within the hour. The long hot day becomes bloody cold this heat does not find refuge in the oceans, it does what all hot air does it goes up and the cold air comes down. In the desert one welcomes the sun in the morning until about midday, then you curse it. In the desert averages and anomalies are about as useful as an empty water bottle.

Hmmmmm says:
March 7, 2013 at 2:32 am
I still can’t get over the lecture from Steve Mosher on physics, only for him to get how the silver lining on a simple Thermos flask works wrong.
P.S. Thermos flasks work due to them being a bottle within a bottle. There is a vacuum between the inner and outer layer as heat can’t travel though a vacuum. This is what keeps the liquid at a constant temperature, cold….. or warm. The silver lining is just additional really to this. Its not what keeps the liquid warm at all.
God help us all if this is the level of physics that’s in climate science.

The silver lining prevents heat loss by radiation. This is basic engineering. The difference between engineering and science is that engineering is not at all speculative. When you run the equations for a system’s energy balance, they work and you can confirm that they work. Generally, arguing with basic engineering principles is a losing proposition.

Steven Mosher says:
March 6, 2013 at 10:05 pm
“Slowing the cooling, is referred to as warming.”
That is akin to politicians saying that reducing a budget increase is a spending cut.

@ Hmmmmm
you are incorrect. the insulation you speak of blocks CONDUCTIVE heat transfer, which, admittedly is a majority of the heat transfer in the case of a thermos. the silver lining blocks RADIATION heat transfer, which is the relevant mode in the case of the Earth to space, hence his comparison.

John Finn says:
March 7, 2013 at 4:58 am
Further to my earlier post. While a ‘lack of falling OLR’ doesn’t invalidate the CO2 effect, it might raise questions about the claimed lag in temperature rise.
Basically this could provide a reasonable argument for low(er) climate sensitivity.

@Steven Mosher: “Think of C02 and other greenhouse gases as a leaky radiation screen. eventually the radiation escapes, but at a slower rate than it would otherwise.” The keyword here is “otherwise”. Another way of putting it is, “all other things being equal”.
The complicating factor here is that in a highly dynamic system, “all other things being equal” simply doesn’t happen. The fact that all other things are not equal doesn’t prove or guarantee that the other things that change will cancel out effects of increased CO2. But the naive assumption that because CO2 has a certain property means that introducing it into a complex system will result in that exact effect on the entire system.
You can obviously duck the issue by asking me to prove what else changes and how it might counteract CO2’s more-heat-in-a-box effect. Obviously I cannot prove it. Climate Scientists have left enormous areas of effect (sun, clouds, soot) barely touched after decades of infatuation with CO2, so how exactly could I possibly step into cash-and-attention-starved areas of Climate Science and do what the establishment with its enormous resources has not done?
That, of course, doesn’t prove my point. You can’t duck my point by throwing the burden on me, but neither can I duck the issue by insisting that because things are unknown or because things are not equal, the results I prefer must be true. But the bottom line is this “More CO2 means heat retained longer than otherwise” needs to acknowledge that the “otherwise” is a huge assumption that’s obviously risky when speaking of an entire planet.

To enhance Leif’s point, since the Earth is closest to the Sun in January and apogee (farthest away) is in July, it can’t be right that the Earth is coolest in January, regardless of the temperature record. This is a model anyone can understand.
Can’t be right? So all of the instruments we use to measure this are wrong, because your mental model trumps a mere thing like data?
Perhaps — and I’m just throwing this out there, understand — it matters which hemisphere is pointing towards the Sun when perihelion occurs. Perhaps global atmospheric circulation patterns matter. Possibly the state of ocean currents in the world’s oceans have some effect. It’s conceivable that the patterns of humidity and cloud formation and the albedo of the particular surfaces facing the sun and turned away from the Sun in January and their mean height above the ground and what’s going on in deserts vs tropical rain forests vs the central pacific all make a difference. Perhaps even seasonal variations in things like aerosols, particulates, greenhouse gases, and what’s going on in farmers’ fields and surface ocean water as far as plankton and algae blooms have some effect. Perhaps there are non-Markovian lags of 3 to six months built into the system, so that heat absorbed by the ocean during winter’s solar maximum (which thereby fails to heat the surface and LTT atmosphere) tends to be released when it upwells six months later
But no, no, it’s just perihelion and aphelion, where the annual variation in insolation. Granted that they are substantial, causing insolation to vary by as much as 7% maximum to minimum (on a base of 1367 W/m^2 TOA). Granted that because they are substantial — a whopping 50 W/m^2 at TOA from the average, an overall six month variation of 100 W/m^2, an easy two orders of magnitude larger than variation in GHG forcing — and yet the annual average coldest temperature occurs when the direct solar forcing is the highest, it suggests that the nonlinearities and co-factors sketched out above are actually more important than “just” the solar not-so-constant in determining global average temperature.
Secondly, I quite agree that the Earth is radiating heat away into space as well as it ever did, and all can test this hypothesis using your old automobile. Just leave it parked out on the street on a night when the temperature goes some degrees below zero. In the morning you will find that the windshield has frozen over, but the side windows still have only liquid water. This is because the ground is heating the side windows with infrared (IR) radiation, but the windshield is pointing to the sky and does not receive IR, either from the ground nor from the so-called “forcing” in the sky. It radiates its heat into sky & space and freezes. There is no useful “forcing”. So the Earth is radiating its heat into space just the same as it ever did. After the 200th such lesson, I keep my car under cover overnight now.
Clearly your car is a sensitive instrument, sir. I wonder why we even bother making actual measurements all over the world. Think of the money we would save if we just examined cars and metal barbecue grills in people’s back yards to conclude that there is no average variation in the Poynting vector near the surface or at TOA that can, or cannot, be attributed to GHGs. I’m certain that you have never observed that on cloudy nights the likelihood of frost on your car is substantially reduced. Somehow there is so-called “forcing” from those (literally) ice-cold clouds far overhead that affects the cooling rate way down at the level of the nice warm ground. And all without violating any of the laws of thermodynamics!
With all that said, also bear in mind that I am a skeptic, and at this point am largely convinced that the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming hypotheses are probably incorrect. That does not mean that the GHE is not real — it can be directly measured in TOA and BOA spectroscopy so it can hardly not be real — but it means that it is saturated and at this point that nonlinearities in the system feedbacks are much more important determinants of mean temperature, the same nonlinearities that happily make perihelion the coldest month of the year in spite of the Earth in general receiving almost 100 W/m^2 more radiation in January than it does in July. Either way, lacking any convincing theory that can explain the details of the climate record from the last (say) million years in a quantitative and predictive way, we are stuck empirically resolving a signal (if any) from a non-intuitive annual counteroscillation driven by forcing variations two orders of magnitude larger than the supposed atmospheric composition variation at baseline, which is itself somewhat dubious as it is functional on things like stratospheric water vapor content, soot/particulate content, aerosol content, and possibly even subtle variations induced by other solar factors distinct from “just” instantaneous insolation.
The Earth’s climate system is empirically incredibly stable, except where it is not. Where it is not, its instability is as irresistible as an angry rhinoceros — get out of the way because you aren’t going to stop its charge. Where it is, the effects of human activity are light as a feather compared to other factors driving the system. We somehow pretend that we understand the nonlinear system well enough to predict its specific course of the climate in the absence of that feather, to know where the rhino would go if its ass was not being tickled. I respectfully doubt this. The best we can say about the rhino is not where it is going but where it has been, the range over which it has wandered over the last million years.
During that time, it has spent some 80 to 90% of its time as a wooly rhino, an ice rhino, trampling down biological activity all over the globe between a thick layer of ice and killing cold, maintaining global average temperatures some 6 to 10 K lower than they are today, restricting the temperate zone in which life thrives to a comparatively narrow band near the equator. It has spent perhaps 10% of its time as a laid back tropical rhino, basking in the sun of a temperate interglacial Earth with temperatures close to what they are now — in some interglacials a bit warmer, in some a bit cooler. A few percent of the time it has spent relatively rapidly shedding its wooly fur and donning its summer skin bouncing wildly among the temperatures in between these extremes, first up to end the Wisconsin glaciation, then down into the Younger Dryas, then back up into the Holocene proper. Over the last 12,000 years, its has spent some 8000 of them as warm or warmer than it is right now, and actually hit the coldest spot in the entire stretch some three hundred and fifty years ago, when global temperatures fell so much that for a while it looked like the rhino might be growing wooly fur once again.
It has spent zero time as Hansen’s imaginary Fire Rhino, the rhino that strips the globe of its icecaps altogether, boils the oceans, extends the temperate zone to the poles, whatever other wild-eyed claims are made for a rhino that hasn’t been observed since the continents shifted some five million years to kick the Earth into a sustained Ice Age. Because, note well, we are probably near the end of the friendly, laid back tropical rhino, sipping its planter’s punch on the veranda of porches open to air as gentle and warm as a mother’s kiss. We don’t know how to predict even in the most general of terms the day the rhino will start once again to grow fur and trample the world’s breadbaskets beneath its icy feet, any more than we can explain any aspect of why it almost grew fur 400 years ago, and then shed it again.
The climate rhino, you see, is a whimsical, contrary beast. When driven by an extra 100 W/m^2, it responds by getting colder. When insolation drops, it decides to warm things up. When we expect the stratosphere to get wetter, it dries it out. It resists being driven by the elliptical orbit club, but turns towards the gentle touch of the polar reversals of the Sun. It confounds us wherever we look, spooking at the batting of the wings of the fabled Brazilian Butterfly while turning a cynical eye on the pernicious effects of global atmospheric oscillations.
Climate scientists today pretend that we can steer this rhino with a feather, and predict where he will go. Humans who should know better — who should know better on the basis of mere common sense and a glance at the past data — “confidently” predict that the world’s oceans will be five meters higher by the year 2100 as the rhino has become the dreaded and so-far completely mythical Fire Rhino. They do this even as the actual rise in the oceans as the rhino splashes around swimming in the tropical surf are almost two orders of magnitude less, sustained for over 130 years, almost perfectly paralleling the post-LIA rise in temperature over that time. They do it even though at the same time the rhino’s buttocks are tickled with a GHG feather, his nose is being tickled by soot and his eyes are being irritated by aerosols and his skin is being pushed around by global winds and his legs being tugged by ocean currents and somewhere in the rhino’s mechanical mind there is a memory of how warm or cold it was last century, ready at any time to surface to the forefront of whatever it is that makes a climate rhino tick, to make it once again grow wooly fur or breathe fire or maybe, just maybe, continue to loll in the nice comfortable lagoon he now lives in, sipping his Mai Tai and permitting the balmy breezes of not-too-hot and not-too-cold to continue to blow across the planet for a few centuries, or decades, or even just years more.
Do not presume to claim to know the Rhino. He does as he pleases, and laughs at the tickling of a feather just as his thick skin ignores being counterbeaten by a club.
Until the day he doesn’t.
rgb

Is this a pretty typical phenomon? Does heat build in certain areas and the ocean during most of the year, move to the arctic in winter and vent quickly in a month or two?
Does this become common in different ocean and atmosphereic circulation regimes (like when the PDO and AMO are both in negative phases)? I can imaging that heat could build to the point where it’s transered to KE in oceans and atmospher (and things like UV can change patterns in the atmosphere as temperature differences transfer heat and windspeed causes evaptoration) allowing heat to be changed to KE and then transfer from ocean to atmosphere in both sensible and latent heat. Condensation and the outward movement of the heat allows it to escape to space.

@ Mosher Carbon Cult
The “silver lining” in the thermos is thousands of molecules thick and the mass of that layer inhibits IR penetration or transfer. A free roaming three atom gas molecule has no such support network. The OLR absorption lasts for a vibrational billionth of a second per CO2 molecule….is transfered to the adjoining N2O2 gas molecules, which each vibrate for 4 billionths of a second. This converted IR is then KE and travels vertically away from the planet as convective waves. The absorbed OLR photon is emitted as a longer wave length, lower energy IR photon that is incapable of “warming” the still warmer Earth surface, as this energy flow obeys the Laws of Thermodynamics. The “silver lining” to science on this planet is that Truth is self evident….and ignorance is self destructive. Carbon Dioxide molecules merely vibrate as the OLR passes at 186,000 mps. A tuning fork in a concert hall will vibrate to the music….but it does not AMPLIFY the music.

John Kehr writes:
“Normally the Arctic is losing energy at a rate of 163 W/m^2. In January of 2013 it was losing energy at a rate of 173 W/m^2.”
Dr. Svalgarrd writes in reply to the above:
“Because the Earth is closest to the Sun in January it receives more energy from the Sun, so it is understandable that it must also lose more…”
The Arctic is in darkness in January thus it is getting little to zero energy from the sun.

The “silver lining” in the thermos is thousands of molecules thick and the mass of that layer inhibits IR penetration or transfer. A free roaming three atom gas molecule has no such support network. The OLR absorption lasts for a vibrational billionth of a second per CO2 molecule….is transfered to the adjoining N2O2 gas molecules, which each vibrate for 4 billionths of a second. This converted IR is then KE and travels vertically away from the planet as convective waves. The absorbed OLR photon is emitted as a longer wave length, lower energy IR photon that is incapable of “warming” the still warmer Earth surface, as this energy flow obeys the Laws of Thermodynamics. The “silver lining” to science on this planet is that Truth is self evident….and ignorance is self destructive. Carbon Dioxide molecules merely vibrate as the OLR passes at 186,000 mps. A tuning fork in a concert hall will vibrate to the music….but it does not AMPLIFY the music.

Or, you could actually do the arithmetic based on the actual physics. Well, you could if you knew how. Neither the reflective silver lining nor the GHE have anything to do with the mass of the layer — they have everything to do with the optical cross-section of the layer and its optical thickness.
Your analogy concerning tuning forks is especially illuminating. A tuning fork in a concert hall will indeed absorb energy from outgoing sound and re-radiate it. And in fact it re-radiates it more or less isotropically. Which means that some fraction of the energy is de facto reflected back towards the source. Which means that a microphone near the source will register a slightly higher sound intensity than it would if there were no tuning forks, no sources of reflection.
Sometime you might go to your favorite neighborhood music store, as many of them have a special “sound room” for people to use to test instruments. Those rooms often have walls that are lined with soft carpet or special sound-absorbing panels, the moral equivalent of a 3 K blackbody sky. Sounds are all hushed in such a room because sound energy is given off by a source, goes to the wall, and disappears. Contrast this with the same instrument played in the same room but with normal walls, or even with less absorptive walls. A simple microphone will register a higher sound level in a room with non-absorptive boundary conditions than in a room with a partially reflective environment.
CO_2 molecules are no different than those tuning forks. They absorb IR photons incident on them in a highly directional manner and re-radiate the energy in all directions. Some of the energy they absorb is thus directed back towards the source. This increases the energy density of the source volume. One can measure this for light just as one can for sound. But you don’t really care if your own arguments actually make sense, I suspect, and I know from past experience that you are beyond any sort of correction.
In the meantime, though, meditate upon the fact that your own ears — not just a microphone, ears are more than sensitive enough — can detect the difference in local sound intensity when one creates resonance between a pair of tuning forks compared to the intensity observed with just one. And thus I don’t even have to refute you, you refute yourself.
rgb

Mosher says:
“1. C02 does not prevent heat from escape the earth.
2. C02 along with other gases ( including water vapor) SLOW the rate at which the earth loses
energy to space.
How does that work?
1. C02 and other gases are relatively, not completely, opaque to LW radiation. We know this from measurements.
2. Because of this earth radiates energy to space from a point in the atmosphere known as the ERL.
3. Add more GHGs to the atmosphere and you raise the ERL
4. When the ERL is raised, earth radiates from a higher colder place.
5. Radiating from a colder height means the loss rate is lower.
heat is not blocked from escaping. It escapes. But with more GHGs this escape happens from a higher colder location, and consequently it happens less rapidliy than it would otherwise.
Slowing the cooling, is referred to as warming.
The silver lining of a thermos does not warm the coffee. By reflecting radiation it slows the rate of cooling and keeps your coffe warmer than it would have been otherwise.
Think of C02 and other greenhouse gases as a leaky radiation screen. eventually the radiation escapes, but at a slower rate than it would otherwise.
Finally, the temperature data you are showing is the pretty color maps….. That’s a model output.
Just for your information. And Oh, the model used to create those temperatures?
That model agrees with me. It’s physics says c02 causes warming. So, rather funnily you used model temperature data ( NCEP) and the models used to create that data, agree that c02 causes warming.”
1 & 2 seem to be nothing more than semantics in my book. If you are slowing the heat loss, that means you are preventing SOME of the heat loss, so what’s your point? Slowing is somehow different than preventing? Ok…who cares? Would the statement “Stopped 10% of heat from escaping” be inaccurate?
Your description of how the thermos keeps hot things hot is entertaining.
Could you please explain how it keeps cold things cold? I’m still confused on how it knows which is which.
Jim

John Manville says:
March 6, 2013 at 8:22 pm
CO2 is not a “green house” gas. No gas is a green house gas. Its time to stop the charade. Stop using the term Green House in place of a more correct term Glass House.
=============
Agreed. Greenhouses warm by limiting convection. They do not warm by blocking outgoing IR.
Adding GHG to the atmosphere increases the radiation of energy from the atmosphere to space, reducing the temperature of the atmosphere, increasing convection. Without GHG the atmosphere would be warmer than it is, because it would have no way to radiate energy to space. Instead, all energy loss from the atmosphere could only occur via convection with the surface.
Without GHG only the surface could radiate energy to space and the atmosphere would be isothermal with minimal convection. There would be no lapse rate as can be readily demonstrated by the kinetic theory of gas. Instead, the hotter air molecules would rise higher in the atmosphere because the less dense molecules above favor energetic molecules “re-bounding” upwards slightly more than downwards. The less energetic molecule sink with gravity, as does the entire air mass except for the collisions with other molecules.
This statistical advantage balances the conversion of potential energy to kinetic energy as the molecules fall under the influence of gravity. It is only after you add GHG that a lapse rate is seen, which is limited by the force of gravity. No matter how much GHG you add, air cannot fall faster than the rate established by gravity. Energy carried upwards by convection reduces the lapse rate. Adding GHG allows more of this energy to radiated to space without a reduction in the lapse rate, proving increased convection and increased cooling of the surface.

Rgb,
Your rhino analysis is very perceptive and puts climate science into perspective. We can’t change the rhino, but we would like to know what makes him tick.

Amen rgb. But with that said, why did Watts post this article which is obviously going to feed that ignorance?
Obviously? It wasn’t and still isn’t obvious to me that it feeds ignorance. It points out, correctly, that the Earth is basically at least locally stable as far as climate is concerned, so an extremely warm month loses more heat than an extremely cool month, tending to cause regression to some sort of mean. The mean itself we do not understand particularly well because it wanders all over the place, often in a highly counterintuitive manner, to the point where our ability to predict that mean with GCMs really sucks, as evidenced by the increasing divergence between observed global temperatures and the predicted mean behavior according to various feedback and forcing scenarios (all of which lead to a lot more warming than has been observed). I agree that making any sort of deep well out of the 0.3C drop in the anomaly is just as silly as making a mountain out of the similar rise in the anomaly the previous month, and that even pretending that trends in the N-month smoothed values in temperature is committing the same error on a different scale when we do not understand the dynamics and feedbacks that set the supposed “equilibrium” to which these extremes are regressing, the supposed “climate signal” buried inside the climate noise.
Discussing this hardly feeds ignorance, quite the opposite.
The fact that it causes dragonslayers to come out of their burrow and spout fire is all by itself a way of combating ignorance, as it permits their arguments to be systematically demolished (again). That may have no effect on the individuals in question, any more than you are going to convince a devout Biblical literalist that there never was a world-spanning flood through which all the world’s species were preserved inside a wooden boat the size of a Wal Mart by mere arithmetic and rational argument, but it does lay out the arguments in stark contrast that may well help individuals listening in to decide for themselves, which is hardly feeding ignorance. It is feeding ignorance only if the dragonslayers spout nonsense and nobody replies.
Personally, I’d rather have a discussion with the ignorant than censorship and the exclusion of the ignorant from all civil discourse. The physics students who have the most to learn are the ones who know the least, whose misconceptions are the greatest. If you can reach them — and often they can, at least when their ignorance is not grounded in one of the many sorts of “religious” faith that infects the human species and compromises our ability to think rationally about our Universe — then they can learn more, faster, than a student who is already acing the material. And sometimes students who are merely listening in are helped much more as you explain things so simply that you have a chance of reaching the most ignorant than they might be by a higher level discussion that largely went over their heads.
So hats off to Anthony for minimally censoring the blog, primarily for the civility of the discourse rather than its content. I have left at least one other climate blog because I got tired of the blog owner from stepping in and censoring or commenting on my contributions. I can be wrong as easily as the next person, and have been corrected on THIS blog by a number of people a number of times, but I’d much rather learn from my own mistakes in a public, civil discussion than have them cut off or corrected by the harsh hand of a censor who (in fact) might not know as much as I know, and who in fact might be perpetuating errors themselves by their actions.
The whole point of science is that sound scientific knowledge is the remnants that can least be doubted when we try very hard to doubt all that we can, the parts that — in open and free discussion and consideration of by data and prior knowledge — we end up agreeing are likely to be true given. Scientific consensus does not equal truth, it equals some sort of “best belief, given what we know and can see, so far”, and is (or should be) highly responsive to new data, new arguments, alternative hypotheses, and is (or should be) highly cynical about claims of unquestionable knowledge on the part of any scientist.
So when Lief corrects me concerning solar dynamics, I listen. I don’t take it for granted that he is always right, but he for damn sure has forgotten over the course of a long career more than I ever learned or am learning about the way the sun works. He’s also (refreshingly) usually fairly candid about the probable limits of his own knowledge, the places where his own beliefs are educated guesses that he has some confidence in but that are hardly vox dei truth. When Steven Mosher makes assertions that I’ve made arithmetic errors, well, I do suck at arithmetic, and my back of the envelope computations aren’t always correct as a consequence. But they are correctable. Hell, yesterday I dropped a factor of r while solving a difficult problem that I wrote! with a student, ending up with the wrong units in my own answer, and had to stare at the page for four or five minutes to find the place where I dropped it. In turn, however, when I point out that there is a pretty serious disparity in the claims for “settled science” certainty in the “projections” (not predictions) in climate science and the actual data, well, that’s something that should be taken just as seriously in debate that is just as uncensored and open.
rgb

rgbatduke: Perhaps — and I’m just throwing this out there, understand — it matters which hemisphere is pointing towards the Sun when perihelion occurs. Perhaps global atmospheric circulation patterns matter. Possibly the state of ocean currents in the world’s oceans have some effect.
“Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps” — there’s a song in that.

rgbatduke: Either way, lacking any convincing theory that can explain the details of the climate record from the last (say) million years in a quantitative and predictive way, we are stuck empirically resolving a signal (if any) from a non-intuitive annual counteroscillation driven by forcing variations two orders of magnitude larger than the supposed atmospheric composition variation at baseline, which is itself somewhat dubious as it is functional on things like stratospheric water vapor content, soot/particulate content, aerosol content, and possibly even subtle variations induced by other solar factors distinct from “just” instantaneous insolation.
That’s a pretty good sentence.

@ martingatkins
not sure what you are talking about. heat transfer can definitely occur in a vacuum without mass. its called “radiation heat transfer”. granted there needs to be a physical object around for us to measure its effects but even in absence of an object the heat transfer is still occuring.

“Climate scientists hate it when people show real temperature because it is impossible to see much warming when you look at the seasonal changes in the actual temperature.”
http://junksciencearchive.com/MSU_Temps/NCDCabs1880.html
Dangerous global warming since 1880 courtesy of the NCDC.

Matthew R Marler: “The absorption/emission spectra of the GHGs were discovered by empirical research, not “invented” in any pejorative sense. The models are based on the best available empirical results and modern computational methods. I think the models are inadequate and imprecise, but there is no good reason to dismiss totally the idea that increased CO2 concentrations might result in a warmer Earth surface and lower troposphere.”
Note that I did not say that absorption and emission spectra were invented by models, so, the opening in the above statement is insensible and lacks credibility in its intent. The invented and arbitrary part is in saying that trapping radiation causes an increase in temperature, which is inconsistent with the actual physics of both the Stefan-Boltzmann Law and Planck’s Law. One good reason to dismiss the idea that increased CO2 causes a warmer surface is because 1) it has never been observed in the historical record 2) it hasn’t been observed in the last 15 years 3) it is only a correlated interpretation with no known causative basis, other than the invention which was used to subsequently justify it, of a relatively minor span of data from the 20’th century, and in which all other possible causes were purposely dismissed without exploration.

Stephen Rasey says:
But the heat flow rate is not permanently reduced by an ERL radiating from a higher, colder altitude.
=====
even imagining it’s a band..
It seems if you increase CO2/GHG, that expands the ERL…which would greatly increase surface area
If increasing temps and CO2/GHGs gives it a much greater surface area, exposing it to colder temps (greater difference in temps), etc, which should lose the less cooling faster….
expand ERL, increase surface area, greater difference in temps between the two, etc
Is it possible it’s regulating temps?

Steven Mosher says:
March 6, 2013 at 10:05 pm
“2. C02 along with other gases ( including water vapor) SLOW the rate at which the earth loses
energy to space.”
Not precisely. You have to be careful how you characterize this, because it is a non-equilibrium system and dynamically evolving. But, insight can be gained by considering a system which is in equilibrium, and then undergoes a change of state. Hypothetically, if the system is in equilibrium with a particular concentration of CO2, and you add an additional amount then, under certain constraints, the rate of energy loss decreases. But, only temporarily before a new equilibrium is established. For an equilibrium to exist, rate-in must equal rate-out, and any net slowing can only be temporary.
“5. Radiating from a colder height means the loss rate is lower.”
This makes no sense. A photon of energy emitted from a CO2 molecule is a photon of energy emitted from a CO2 molecule – it has the same energy regardless of where it is released. You can attempt to argue that the blackbody radiation from the mass of CO2 is reduced, but that is at best 2nd order. The 1st order dynamic is radiation coming from the surface being absorbed and re-radiated. And, since the height of the surface does not change, the amount of radiation being absorbed and re-radiated does not change on this basis alone.
If the amount of CO2 increases then, up to a certain point, there are more interceptions of outbound surface photons and, at first glance, this should act to increase the equilibrium temperature of the Earth (more on how that happens in a moment). But, there are countervailing effects as well.
For example, beyond a particular optical depth, there is a point of diminishing returns and, indeed, a point of reversal at which the effect of an increase in the depth of the bulk CO2 layer must necessarily lead to cooling. If the mean altitude of the layer does not change more than the original depth of the layer, then there will be a smaller ratio of surface area radiating back to the planet to surface area radiating to space, and this can result in relative cooling. I realized this while commenting on Willis Eschenbach’s “Steel Greenhouse” thought experiment here.
Whether we are near a particular such point of diminshing returns or not, I do not know. But, I do know that the increase in CO2 over the past century has not produced any divergence in the pre-existing trend + ~60 year cycle evident in the temperature data. So, I do know that countervailing effects necessarily exist which are essentially canceling out the expected warming from added CO2.
“1. C02 does not prevent heat from escape the earth.”
That is, in fact, the greenhouse theory in a nutshell. CO2 prevents escape within particular bands, so the temperature of the surface has to increase until radiation in other bands reestablishes equilibrium with incoming solar radiation.
That is to say, OLR should decrease, while radiation in other bands increases so that equilibrium can be reestablished with a higher surface temperature.

BobW in NC says:
March 7, 2013 at 7:42 am
Steve Mosher, rgb, et al:
CO2… this trace gas comprises ~395 ppm or 0.0395% of the atmosphere, and human activity is responsible for an estimated 3% to 4% (IPCC AR4 data I was directed to was 2.9%; don’t have that link, sorry) , or a total of ~12 ppm or 0.00012%. So, 96% to 97% of CO2 entering the atmosphere we have no control over.
I think we look a bit closer at your numbers we’ll find a flaw with your logic. If it’s true that only about 3% of atmospheric CO2 is human on origin then it must be because the rest has been re-absorbed by the biosphere as part of the carbon cycle. Thus a greater proportion of the ‘ natural’ CO2 remains resident in the atmosphere. It doesn’t really matter what the source of the CO2 is. The fact remains that adding ~7 Gt of carbon to the atmosphere each year by fossil fuel burning is resulting in a net increase of atmospheric CO2.

Energy loss rate to space is equal to what it is coming in. It can only not be equal when the planet is either heating up, or cooling down – and cooling down would imply that it was previously heated by some additional input of energy relative to what it currently had, because that is the only way to actually get a higher temperature – you need to absorb more energy (and CO2 doesn’t change that). Actual temperature oscillations on the Earth, heating up and cooling down, are caused by changes in the amount of energy being absorbed. Internal redistribution of energy can never cause a global temperature increase…for any substance in the universe.
So then with the bi-hemispherical reality of night and day, you have day heating up (emitting less energy than absorbed) and night cooling down (emitting more energy than absorbed). These balance out to equal the total energy absorbed over 24 hours, in terms of energy, which is a fundamental physical unit, but not in terms of kinetic temperature because the kinetic temperature is measured locally and so any kinetic temperature measurement is completely arbitrary and meaningless, in terms of global energy balance. The radiative energy output is equal to the radiative energy input and indicates an equivalent blackbody temperature of -18C, and this is what exists and is all fine and well. Kinetic temperature measurements will never correspond to that number because there is “no place” that a radiative -18C blackbody equivalent should correspond to and nor could that “place” be predicted — the entire ensemble of ocean surface + land surface (over two distinct hemispheres vertically and horizontally) plus the 3rd dimension of atmospheric altitude with its natural variation in kinetic temperature make the determination of an average kinetic temperature a physically meaningless concept. Kinetic temperature is a local measurement, not a global one. The global average kinetic temperature near the surface is arbitrary and physically non-existent in real-time – only sometimes might the local temperature pass through the average, and, in any case, the average temperature “near the ground” is an arbitrary location “place” to measure temperature and in no way should it be expected to equate to the blackbody temperature. The only valid global “temperature” is that indicated by the total output radiative energy, which as we know, is equal to the incoming energy, with an equivalent radiative temperature of -18C. There is no such thing as a global average kinetic temperature, *unless* that temperature IS known to be equal in all locations of an object; this obviously isn’t true for the Earth.

From slide 14: http://www.aos.wisc.edu/~aos121br/radn/radn/sld014.htm

Surface and lower atmosphere cool by infrared radiation to space from upper troposphere (ERL=effective radiating level) such that total CO2 above is fixed)
Increased concentration of atmospheric CO2 raises ERL, reducing outgoing IR, until troposphere has warmed to compensate.
— A Simple Model —
Infrared radiation leaves earth for space from upper troposphere (ERL). Amount increases with temperature at ERL (immediate). Height of ERL is such that total CO2 above it is constant.
Additional CO2 mixes rapidly in troposphere (weeks). ERL rises to where temperature is lower, less outgoing radiation
Earth surface + troposphere warms till outgoing radiation from ERL balances incoming (years to centuries)
but Slide 21 says:
“How long to achieve balance?:
Land Surface and Atmosphere about 1 month.
Ocean surface layers – decades.
Deep Ocean – millenia

My points here are that this SIMPLE model assumes the CO2 represented by the a point ERL model is at one uniform temperature. If you “raise the ERL”, you effectively raise the CO2 cloud represented by that level, cooling part of it, and warming other parts. Most of the mass of the radiating portion is in the Stratosphere which doesn’t decrease in temperature and parts increase in temperature. So, again, looking at the miles-thick CO2 radiating portion of the atmosphere, simplified by a ERL point “centroid”, how much of that cloud drops in temp, how much remains constant, how much rises in temp? (See slide 13).
How much are you really raising the ERL? In feet per 10 ppm CO2? What is the average temperature change of that CO2 cloud across miles of upper troposphere and Stratosphere into space?
Not to get lost in the detail. My main point is that the heat flow at the ERL is not permanently reduced by new CO2.
“Earth surface + troposphere warms untill outgoing radiation from ERL balances incoming”
It is temporary, and if we look at the Land Surface + atmosphere estimate, the balance is restored quickly indeed. Night and Day plus seasons will swamp Ocean issues.

Doug Proctor says:
March 7, 2013 at 11:59 am

I’d like to hear more about the energy loss rate to space, and more on by-hemisphere basis.
Can you graph a loss-rate/year?

Go to this page and read the explanation of what I did, and this page for updated charts.
While it’s based on temp, that is no different that what AGW is based on, and you can turn that into blackbody radiation.

Joseph E. Posma: Note that I did not say that absorption and emission spectra were invented by models,
Indeed, you did not specify what parts of the model were “invented”.

NOTE: Shouldn’t we be giving the effect of our atmosphere on surface temps the name Planetary Atmosphere Effect (PAE) and not the misleading GHE? The CO2 is just one of numerous components of the PAE and CO2 reasonably appears to be a lower order of magnitude component.
John Nielsen-Gammon says so, and I agree. The point is that atmospheric chemistry is complex and multidimensional. Its not even particularly clear that one should stop at “atmosphere” in the case of the Earth, because I somehow suspect that the 70% of the Earth’s surface that is ocean has more than a little effect on its global climate compared to, say, Venus or Mars or Jupiter. Water is really pretty amazing stuff and our atmosphere without ocean underneath would have a completely, totally, incalculably different mean temperature.
rgb

If you take a warm object into your air-conditioned home from outside, the object will cool until its temperature matches the environment of your house. The rate of cooling is constantly slowing as delta T trends to zero. But it will never warm as long as the environmental temperature remains constant.
For about the umptieth time, this is an utterly false analogy. You are not taking the Earth as a passive entity from one place to another. The Earth is actively and regularly heated by the Sun. It cools at a rate that is monotonically related to its mean temperture so that — given some resistance to the flow of heat it warms until a dynamical equilibrium is established, with heat in equaling heat out.
If you change the resistance of the flow of heat between the system and the cold reservoir, the system must warm or cool (for increases or decreases in that resistance, respectively) until dynamic equilibrium is once again established.
Please, then, do not confound modulation of the rate of energy flow in an open system (leading to heating or cooling of that system) with false analogies drawn from passive cooling of unheated objects.
rgb

JPS says:
March 7, 2013 at 10:39 am
@ martingatkins
not sure what you are talking about. heat transfer can definitely occur in a vacuum without mass. its called “radiation heat transfer”. granted there needs to be a physical object around for us to measure its effects but even in absence of an object the heat transfer is still occuring

Bodies that have kinetic energy also radiate in LWR and it is the LWR that carries the energy. Remember I said when a molecule absorbs radiation it tries to almost immediately re-emit that wave length away, In doing so it vibrates or flexes and it is at that moment its component parts have velocity. If it connects with another gas molecule it will lose some of its radiative energy because it has lost it in the collision. So what is happening in the flasks vacuum is the wave is carrying some energy away from the core. It is not heat but it is energy. It only converts to heat when it hits the outer skin of the flask and excites the molecules that make up the outer wall.

philincalifornia says:
March 7, 2013 at 2:29 pm
Are you referring to this?

I believe the AO and the AMO are turning negative. That means the temperatures are going to plummet around the world which will bring another Maunder or Dalton Minimum if were lucky because the Maunder Minimum will be very nasty for the northern hemisphere.

John Manville, Please be quiet. I think you are troll out to make other skeptics look like complete morons. Of course CO2 and water vapor are green house gases. Anthony has run several articles explaining it.

Bart says:
March 7, 2013 at 1:21 pm
John Finn says:
March 7, 2013 at 12:23 pm
Bart
We’ve been over this before – give it a rest.

Latitude says:
March 7, 2013 at 3:29 pm
John Finn says:
March 7, 2013 at 12:23 pm
The fact remains that adding ~7 Gt of carbon to the atmosphere each year by fossil fuel burning is resulting in a net increase of atmospheric CO2
================
When you look at all the reservoirs for carbon, I seriously doubt it…
…just plants (land and aquatic) would swamp that in a heart beat
bacteria would make it all look silly
Then why are CO2 concentrations increasing in the atmosphere? And why is the overall increase roughly proportional to human emissions for every year since 1958 at least.

John Finn says:
March 7, 2013 at 4:00 pm
Then why are CO2 concentrations increasing in the atmosphere?”
This is post hoc ergo propter hoc, a classic logical fallacy. There is no reason to assume they would not have increased absent human inputs.
“And why is the overall increase roughly proportional to human emissions for every year since 1958 at least.”
“Roughly” is the key word here. Some years ago, a lady in Tennesee found a spot of mold in her kitchen which “roughly” looked like Euro-centric depictions of Jesus, and pilgrims came from all around to view it. Was it truly formed by divine intervention?
The happenstance of two slightly quadratic time series being scale similar is not at all an unusual or unlikely occurrence. In fact, it’s just about guaranteed.
But, the two series look nothing like one another on the fine scale of differentials. They do not share anything close to this level of correlation.

Bart says:
March 7, 2013 at 2:54 pm
philincalifornia says:
March 7, 2013 at 2:29 pm
Are you referring to this?
———————————————
Thanks Bart. I somehow missed that, which is strange as I read WUWT daily. Must’ve been on a long plane ride and then some.
It was an independent thought. Realists do have those, as opposed to the “scientists” who can only go “baah baah baah”.

…atmospheric water vapor [not carbon dioxide!] should decrease…

It should be obvious from the data just because the Earth is receiving significantly more solar radiation in January than July and yet the overall T is cooler in January that things are indeed a bit more complex than simple radiative examples. The reason has been covered above is due to the unequal distribution of land mass and ocean. And, again one has the problem that oceans have substantially lower albedo than land so simplistically, Earth should be absorbing more of the incoming solar which is more abundant in January, yet the mean temperature is lower than July. Of course it does make sense when considering evaporative cooling and cloud formation but not before.
Mosh’s malarky about Effective Radiating Level is pure BS, hansen style. First off, they treat the lapse rate as some sort of magical absolute (depending upon h2o vapor content). It is nothing more than conservation of energy in operation, very importantly including convection as well as radiation. What’s more, no level is where all radiation comes from. Much of it leaves the surface and escapes to space. Whereever there is spectral absorption, there is mostly very short path lengths. As one goes up in altitude, the dropping pressure sharpens the peaks – a be assured that there is perfect correlation between the spectral absorption and emissions (as the temperature of the gas approaches that of the original blackbody source- but it cannot due to the fact it is radiating both outward and inward). (note that the spectral emission amount when the level is colder has a net absorption and when warmer, it would have a net emission).
Another factor missed by the Mosh (hansen) explanation is that with trace ghgs, especially when resorting to Stefan’s law, is that if one adds ghgs to increase absorption, then there is an increase in emissivity that increases the amount of radiation originating from that layer and beyond even at the same T for that layer. The only place one can say has an actual BB emission continuum at a given level in the atmosphere is where opaque clouds are present. Also, in reality, the emissivity would be wavelength dependent and very complex, not merely a single number as used in Stefan’s law – an engineering approximation.
Basically, they are creating a total fiction based upon simplifications which are not even physical and then trying to claim that these accurately describe nature. Anyone can see from the first of my post that such simplifications would lead to drastically wrong conclusions about the Jan/Jul temperature differences.

Mario Lento says:
March 8, 2013 at 2:53 am
“If you think k is really constant…”
I assume that is addressed to me. I never said it was a constant. It almost surely is not. But, over finite timelines, it can be approximated as a constant. It holds up pretty well as a single value in the interval 1958-present.
This is elementary, Taylor series based linearization. High school students learn it in their first course in calculus.

Bart says:
March 8, 2013 at 10:30 am
“And, in that interval, we can say unequivocally that temperatures have determined CO2 concentration, and not human inputs.”
Furthermore, we can conclude with equal assurance that CO2 concentration has not influenced globally averaged temperature to any significant degree.

Radiation doesn’t cause itself to heat itself up when it interacts with itself or its own source. QED. Welcome to blackbodies and quantum mechanics. Read up on Planck. Trapping radiation inside a cavity with an active source is *exactly* how blackbodies are created, and it doesn’t heat itself up to infinity, or at all.

JP says:
March 8, 2013 at 6:05 am
John,
I think most of us understand temperature anomalies versus actual temps. As a matter of fact, we could play all kinds of games just by changing the baseline interval (1950-1980 versus 1960-1990 versus 1930-1960). I could take a warm period (1975-2005) and plot my anomalies against that period, and bingo! we have Global Cooling!
Uhh! It doesn’t matter what base period you choose it won’t change the trend. The actual anomalies might be lower in absolute terms but that won’t affect how they relate to previous periods.
Some time ago UAH changed their baseline from 1979-1998 to 1981-2010. While this changed the actual anomaly numbers it had no affect on the warming trend which remained exactly the same at ~0.13 deg per decade.

“Some time ago UAH changed their baseline from 1979-1998 to 1981-2010. While this changed the actual anomaly numbers it had no affect on the warming trend which remained exactly the same at ~0.13 deg per decade.”
True for UAH. But I wonder about HadCrut? ( Don’t get me wrong, I prefer satellite soundings versus thermometers).And while the trend would be positive (warming) the magnitude in the rise would be less. And if we saw global temperatures stay neutral to slight cooling for a short interval (say 7 months), people would thing we are cooling, when in fact we could still be warming if we used the period 1950-1980 as a baseline. I am not saying we haven’t warmed since 1970. But I long tired of this issue. I think it is interesting, but I tend to take a very, very long view of climate (centennial versus decadal). But, I get your perspective; I could have overstated my point.

lsvalgaard says:
March 6, 2013 at 7:49 pm
Normally the Arctic is losing energy at a rate of 163 W/m^2. In January of 2013 it was losing energy at a rate of 173 W/m^2.
Because the Earth is closest to the Sun in January it receives more energy from the Sun, so it is understandable that it must also lose more…
Leif you either negate the global temperature average, and thus all the temperature calculation of the modern climatology in one sentence (wow cool!) or you have looked too much at anomalies and not to real temperature graph?
Irrelevant to the fact that the Earth is closer to the Sun and receives more energy in January, the Earth radiates energy in line with the absolute temperature it has, not in line with the anomaly or with the energy received.
The years to year variation of “global temperature” is of about 3.5°C – look at the absolute temperature global:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/clip_image0041.jpg
The absolute minimum is exactly January when the Earth is closest to the sun, which means that at that time the Earth is radiating the less.
Now there might be different explanations for this, but these should come from those who calculate the global average temperature and support this concept.
The anomalies are only yearly deviations from this average line.

Steven Mosher says:
March 6, 2013 at 10:05 pm
Finally, the temperature data you are showing is the pretty color maps….. That’s a model output.
Just for your information. And Oh, the model used to create those temperatures?
That model agrees with me. It’s physics says c02 causes warming. So, rather funnily you used model temperature data ( NCEP) and the models used to create that data, agree that c02 causes warming.
Models are only tools. Improper use of tools does not disable the tool itself, but shows the incapacity of the tool user to use the tool.
A tool may be biased in a direction or another but still give good approximation from one step to the next.
Using that tool in incremental analysis over longer steps (periods or time frame) shows the incapacity of the user to understand that small systematic errors, can cause big differences over longer periods.

On 7th March Joe Postma said that ” .. temperature is a function of the frequency distribution of the radiation .. “.
I was led to believe that it was the other way around, i.e. the frequency distribution of e/m radiation from a body is a function of the body’s temperature but i must be wrong. How can a “Slayer” and “Senior Fellow” of blogging group Principia Scientific International possibluy be mistaken? (see Section 3.12 of “Spotlight On Principia Scientific International” http://globalpoliticalshenanigans.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/spotlighton-principia-scientific.html).
Best regards, Pete Ridley

On 7th March Joe Postma said that ” .. temperature is a function of the frequency distribution of the radiation .. “.
I was led to believe that it was the other way around, i.e. the frequency distribution of e/m radiation from a body is a function of the body’s temperature…

Versus:
On 11 March Joe Postma said that “Pete Ridley has apparently never heard of a blackbody spectrum. Or algebra. How can an old man not know algebra? Because he spends his time following people he’s obsessed with.”
Now, let’s see — sarcasm aside — who is right, Pete Ridley or Joe Postma.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_law
To quote from the article:
“Planck’s Law can be written:

Now it is a simple matter of fact that this is the equation that describes blackbody radiation. It is also a simple matter of fact that this relation is indeed the frequency distribution of electromagnetic radiation as a function of temperature.
It would appear that Pete Ridley is not only precisely correct in his assertion that Joe Postma has the nature of a blackbody spectrum precisely backwards, where the frequency distribution is indeed a function of the temperature and where all we learn from any other observed frequency distribution is that its sources are not strictly thermal blackbody sources, but that there is some justification in his continuing sarcastic commentary on the dragonslayers, an organization whose sole purpose appears to be making honest scientific skeptics look like idiots by association.
If Joe ever actually learns how to read a graph (such as this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EffectiveTemperature_300dpi_e.png
which sadly presents spectral intensity as a function of wavelength, not frequency, for Mr. Sun, Joe will learn that the Earth is an open system poised between a hot, large blackbody object (Mr. Sun) and an even larger near-perfect blackbody absorber (outer space at 3K). Joe might then consider not using stupid thermodynamic arguments based on unheated thermal reservoirs to make egregious conclusions about the behavior of a heated, open reservoir like the Earth when its radiative behavior is modulated away from that of a black body by the presence of an interpolant layer of gas that absorbs and re-emits radiation in certain broad bands that lie more or less in the middle of the Earth’s thermal spectrum.
He might then take a glance at Petty’s A First Course in Atmospheric Radiation, look at the measurements top of atmosphere and bottom of atmosphere spectra, and then go away and never, ever make any of the absurd and incorrect assertions about CO_2, water vapor, and other greenhouse gases being incapable of modulating the surface temperature of the heated Earth.
But he won’t do any of these things. He won’t even acknowledge that he was wrong in the conflict up above, in spite of my taking the time to actually laboriously type in the actual equation Planck derived (and yes, that I derived myself when I first took Modern Physics some 40 years ago) that proves him categorically incorrect and guilty himself of all of the ignorance that he ascribes to anyone who disagrees with his absurd contention that “cold gas can never cause a warmed surface, cooled only by radiation, to become warmer”.
rgb

You guys have no clue what you’re talking about.
You take an off-hand remark that has clear meaning in the context of the paragraph, and then single it out to reinterpret it in under another context.
This is what you’re reduced to. It’s called sophistry.
Radiation trapped inside a cavity does not heat up its own source or increase is frequency spectrum and hence its temperature. To deny this is to deny the derivation of quantum mechanics, let alone thermodynamics. Read up on the development of Planck’s Law. Copying it from Wikipedia and writing it here counts for squat.

So you are saying that the equation predicted flat temperatures for the past 15 years? In other words, CO2 drove the temperatures flat from 1998, but upwards before that period?
And downward before that. And upward before that. Hell, you can go back over the last million years and CO_2 is solely responsible for all of the ups and downs.
Isn’t it?
rgb

RBG, The radiation from an ice cube does not warm you up or make you hotter. Please stop denying the origin of quantum theory, and thinking that just because something has a spectrum, it must be heating you up. Stand in front of a mirror and watch nothing happen to your skin temperature. Radiation trapped inside a cavity or returned from the source does not heat the source up some more. Stating the S-B Equation doesn’t change that – Planck’s Law and the S-B Law which comes from it do not say that trapped radiation causes an increase in its own frequency distribution and temperature.

RGB: “you can go back over the last million years and CO_2 is solely responsible for all of the ups and downs.”
There are still people who believe Al Gore? It was *temperature* that was responsible for the ups and downs of CO2. Read Bart’s recent posts up the line. Everyone knows that CO2 lagged temperature for those last million years and therefore CO2 wasn’t cause of anything.