Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
At the end of my last post , I said that the climate seems to be an inherently stable system. The graphic below shows ~2,000 climate simulations run by climateprediction.net. Unlike the other modelers, whose failures end up on the cutting room floor, they’ve shown all of the runs … including the runs that ran right off of the rails.
Figure 1. Climate simulation runs from climateprediction,net.
Notice that many of the runs go badly wrong, either cooking the planet at some 8°C (14°F) hotter than at present, or spiraling down into an ice-covered unreality. To me this is a perfect example of the basic misunderstanding of how the climate works. People think that the global temperature is free to take up any temperature at all, and that if the forcing changes, the temperature must change. But it is not free to go off of the rails. Instead, the global temperature is an inherently stable system.
Now, what does it require for a natural heat engine like the global climate to be inherently stable? The general way that humans control heat engines like say an automobile engine is by controlling the “throttle”, which in an automobile is what the gas pedal connects to. The throttle decrease or increases the amount of fuel that is entering the engine. To be stable, you need some system that opens or closes the throttle based on some criterion.
In the climate system, of course, the throttle is the variable albedo of the earth. The “albedo” of an object is a number from 0.0 to 1.0 that measures the fraction of solar radiation that is reflected from the surface of the object. It’s usually given as a fraction, although I prefer it as a percentage (0% to 100%). The albedo of the earth is about 0.29, meaning 29% of the sunlight is reflected back to space.
As I showed in my last post, the albedo generally decreases with temperature … up to around 26°C or so. Above that the albedo rises rapidly. As a result, in much of the tropics when the ocean warms the albedo increases, rapidly cutting back on the incoming solar energy.
In such a system, when the earth is cooler than the equilibrium temperature, the solar input goes up, increasing the temperature. And conversely, when the earth is warmer than the equilibrium temperature, the solar input goes down, and the earth cools back to the equilibrium temperature.
In the comments to my last post, someone asked how the increase in albedo worked out on a daily basis. To answer that, I need to take a bit of a diversion.
I got interested in climate in the late nineties. Most folks I read wanted to understand why the earth’s temperature had changed over the 20th century. I had a very different question—I wanted to know why the earth’s temperature had changed so little over the 20th century (a variation of ± 0.3°C). Since the earth’s temperature is about 290 Kelvin, that’s a variation of plus or minus a tenth of a percent or so. As someone who has dealt with regulated engines, to me that was astounding long-term stability. Over the 20th century we had droughts, the clouds came and went, we had volcanoes, times of lots of hurricanes, times of few hurricanes … and the temperature went nowhere. Plus or minus a tenth of a percent.
At the time I started tackling the problem of climate stability, I was living in Fiji. At first, I spent a whole lot of time searching for the reason that there was such long-term stability. I tried to identify and understand any processes acting on multi-decadal time scales. I thought about the ebb and flow of CO2, about how the CO2 makes the rain acidic and dissolves the mountains over millennia. I thought about the purported barycentric solar cycles. I thought about the multidecadal oscillations.
No joy.
In the evenings after work I’d walk and think, think and walk. I picked up and discarded dozens of possibilities. I can’t tell you how far I walked thinking about long-term, slow compensatory systems that could keep the earth on track for a century and more.
Then one day I had a curious thought. I thought, if there were a system that kept each day within a certain temperature range, it would keep that week within that same temperature range, and it would keep that year within that temperature range, and that decade, and century, and millennium … like a fool, I’d been looking at entirely the wrong end of the time spectrum. I needed to look at minutes and hours, not decades and centuries.
This changed the entire direction of my research overnight. I started looking for processes that would regulate the temperatures on a daily basis … and since I was living in Fiji, I didn’t have far to look. I started to think that the action of the tropical cumulus clouds and in particular the thunderstorms were the real actors in the climate pageant.
I could see the daily tropical cycle unfolding most days. Clear at dawn. Then cumulus clouds form usually before noon. Thunderstorms in the afternoon, sometimes lasting into evening or night. However, I was still at a great disadvantage. I didn’t understand how the control worked. The problem was that even in the tropics you have seasons, and not every day is the same. Plus there’s day and night, it was all so complex I couldn’t see how the control was effected. I wanted some point of view where I didn’t have to deal with all of that day/night, seasons stuff.
Then one day I realized that there was a point of view which freed me from all of those problems. This was the point of view of the sun. You see, from the sun’s point of view it’s always daytime—from the sun’s point of view, there is no night. And there are no seasons—underneath the sun, it’s always eternal summer.
So to investigate the cumulus and the thunderstorms from the sun’s point of view, I used the satellite local-noon-time images from the GOES-West weather satellite. I averaged the photos over an entire year, to show the average cloudiness of the Pacific. Figure 2 shows that result:
Figure 2. Average of one year of GOES-West weather satellite images taken at satellite local noon. The Intertropical Convergence Zone is the bright band in the yellow rectangle. Local time on earth is shown by black lines on the image. Time values are shown at the bottom of the attached graph. Red line on graph is solar forcing anomaly (in watts per square meter) in the area outlined in yellow. Black line is albedo value in the area outlined in yellow.
Looking from the point of view of the sun does a very curious thing—it trades time coordinates for space coordinates. For example, in the photo above, it is always local noon at the point directly under the sun. Noon is not a time. It is the vertical line running up the middle of the picture. Sunrise is always at the left edge of the view from the sun, and the left half of the picture is the time before noon. Sunset is always at the right edge of the view from the sun, and afternoon is the right half of the picture. We’ve put spatial coordinates in place of temporal coordinates.
From this, you can see that the onset of cumulus clouds is at about 10:30. This is shown by the increase in albedo (black line at picture bottom). By 11:30 there is a fully developed cumulus field. This shift in albedo changes the reflected sunlight by about 60 W/m2. And that field of clouds persists all through the afternoon (right side of the picture above).
And most important, from the sun’s point of view I could finally understand how the albedo control is actually effected—via variations in the timing of the onset of the cumulus and thunderstorm regimes. What happens is that if the Pacific is warmer than usual, the cumulus clouds and thunderstorms shift to the left in the image above by emerging earlier in the day. This, of course, reflects more of the sunlight. And if the Pacific is cooler than usual, the clouds and thunderstorms shift to the right, emerging later in the day or not at all, and thus exposing more of the area to the stronger sunlight of the mornings. The clouds act like a reflective window screen that covers more or less of the day, depending on the temperature.
Now, from this hypothesis we can advance some testable predictions. First, albedo should be positively correlated with temperature in the tropical Pacific. This is confirmed by my previous post. Next, we should be able to detect the effect of the variations in cloud onset on the daily temperature record … which hopefully will be the subject of my next post.
Finally, while the cumulus and the thunderstorms control the throttle by regulating the amount of energy entering the system, there are a variety of other temperature regulating phenomena as well. What all of these have in common is that they are “emergent” phenomena. These are phenomena that emerge spontaneously, but only when conditions are right. In the climate system, these phenomena typically emerge only when a certain temperature threshold is surpassed.
In the tropical daytime system, once a certain temperature threshold is reached the cumulus clouds start to form. But often, the reduction in incoming sunlight is not enough to stop the daily warming. If the surface continues to warm, at some higher temperature threshold thunderstorms form. And if the surface warms even more and a third temperature threshold is surpassed, yet another phenomena will emerge—the thunderstorms will line up shoulder to shoulder in long serried rows, with canyons of clear descending air between them.
Thunderstorms are natural refrigeration cycle air-conditioning machines. They use the same familiar evaporation/condensation cycle used in your air conditioner. But they do something your air conditioner can’t do. They only form exactly when and where you need them. When there is a hot spot in the afternoon on a tropical ocean, a thunderstorm soon forms right above it and starts cooling the surface back down. Not only that, but the thunderstorm cools the surface down below the starting temperature. This can not only slow but actually reverse a warming trend.
And if there are two hot spots you get two thunderstorms, and so on … do you see why I argue against the entire concept of “climate sensitivity”? When you add additional forcing to such a system, you don’t just get additional hot spots.
You also get additional thunderstorms working their marvels of refrigerational physics, so there is little surface temperature change.
It’s one AM, big moon a few days past full. Think I’ll go back outside, I heard a fox barking outside around moonrise. Best to all, moon over your shoulder, more to come,
w.
The Perennial Request: If you disagree with someone, please have the courtesy to quote the exact, precise words that you disagree with. That way we can all understand your objection.
Further Reading:
I love thought experiments. They allow us to understand complex systems that don’t fit into the laboratory. They have been an invaluable tool in the scientific inventory for centuries. Here’s my thought experiment for today. Imagine a room. In a room dirt collects, as you might imagine. In my household…
Air Conditioning Nairobi, Refrigerating The Planet
I’ve mentioned before that a thunderstorm functions as a natural refrigeration system. I’d like to explain in a bit more detail what I mean by that. However, let me start by explaining my credentials as regards my knowledge of refrigeration. The simplest explanation of my refrigeration credentials is that I…
In a recent post, I described how the El Nino/La Nina alteration operates as a giant pump. Whenever the Pacific Ocean gets too warm across its surface, the Nino/Nina pump kicks in and removes the warm water from the Pacific, pumping it first west and thence poleward. I also wrote…
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“….There’s relief all around that the culprit’s been caught;
So Mother Nature’s not as innocent as we had all thought.
Seems that she’s been doing her thing for billions of years,
And has just been hiding behind those man made fears…..”
From Mother Nature Arrested http://wp.me/p3KQlH-qH
And that lucky ole sun, got nothing to do, but roll around heaven all day..
Outstanding insight. Yet so simple.
Well albedo is only half of it (a most important part.) What positively identifies “albedo” is that the outgoing albedo spectrum essentially matching the incoming solar spectrum. (yes I know that some earth surface features are not uniform spectral reflectance over the solar spectrum range).
But all that variable cloud cover which is the bulk of albedo, also implies a considerable variation in atmospheric water vapor, and water vapor is a significant absorber of incoming solar spectrum energy beginning at about 700 nm wavelength.
That absorption is NOT a part of albedo, but it is spectrum shifted to the LWIR region, where at least half of it escapes to space as IR, and the rest is NOT transported to the deep oceans as is solar spectrum energy.
But the bottom line situation is that the very same negative feedback regulation that Willis describes here is equally applicable to the long wave shifted portion of the driving solar energy. CO2 also has a small but not insignificant absorption of incoming solar spectrum energy, so CO2 also creates a direct negative feedback to the driving signal; the incoming solar energy.
Any solar spectrum energy that is captured by ANY GHG molecule, including ozone, becomes a part of the negative feedback regulation of earth’s stable climate.
In my view, pretty much all of this “forcing” stuff is rather meaningless, when compared to the direct effect on solar energy reaching earth’s surface.
Also it isn’t possible to monitor surface energy losses to clouds from outer space. Well you can meter the “reflected” part which is actually refractively scattered. But satellites can’t tell you how much additional is absorbed by the clouds, and never reaches the ground as solar spectrum energy.
The Wentz et al paper; “How Much More Rain will Global Warming Bring” from SCIENCE around July 13 2007 to me is the definitive statement on how cloud negative feedback climate temperature regulation works. It seems that the effect is about 7% increase in solar energy loss, for a 1 deg C increase in global Temperature.
That is a simply huge negative feedback.
No Wentz doesn’t mention the clouds; perhaps too obvious. They just talk about the increase in atmospheric water. How do you get rid of atmospheric water without clouds ??
Clouds also cause strong self negative feedback.
Data over the oceans show on clear days that sea surface temperature rises about 3 C from early morning to about 2:00 PM. Depending on fast air humidity can rise towards constant relative humidity, this will cause evaporation to increase about 20% to 40% compared to a cloudy day. This temperature rise includes the offsets from surface cooling from evaporation and seawater mixing (cooler, denser saltier water drops). Keep in mind that incoming solar at the surface can be up to about 1000 Wm-2 at low latitudes.
The increased water vapor on clear days will later cause more clouds. This will reduce the fraction of hours with sunshine, evaporation and the cloud cover. This is negative feedback on the cloud cover fraction. So while it appears that clouds can act like a thermostat to control temperatures, since more warming from any cause increases water vapor then clouds, they also regulate themselves regarding the fraction of cloud cover, now at about 60%.
“””””……
Richard Petschauer
June 4, 2015 at 8:07 pm
Clouds also cause strong self negative feedback. ……”””””
I must be going daft. I’d swear I just said that, in plain English.
I guess I need a class in remedial English.
That outgoing radiation spectrum has the spectral fingerprint of the GHG gases. The radiation is attenuated in relation to the gas concentrations in the atmosphere. This means that the GHG’s in fact play a significant role in trapping the radiation, and adding GHG’s to the atmosphere intensifies the process.
Janne,
CO2 blocks the outgoing 15u wavelength but that translates into faster convective overturning so that the blocked energy returns to the surface beneath the adjacent descending convective column and can be radiated to space at all available wavelengths.
The convective adjustment removes the blockage.
The surface doesn’t need to warm because faster upward convection cools the surface exactly as much as faster downward convection warms it.
The rate of convective overturning simply increases until stability is regained despite the blocking of outward IR by GHGs.
Now you can argue that faster convective overturning manifests as a climate change even if the surface gets no warmer but the effect from GHGs is miniscule and would never be distinguishable from natural variability caused by sun and oceans.
Don’t go telling Kevin Trenberth about your theory Willis. He believes that the entire earth is equally bathed in solar energy day and night.
The idea that half of the earth’s surface is receiving solar energy constantly, and roughly it only varies annually with the length of the sun -earth vector, seems lost on so many people. Actually it is slightly more than half of the earth surface because the earth atmosphere is a graded index refractive medium, so the apparent sun is above the horizon for about 181-182 out of the 360 degree circumference.
I really like the way your mind works. Your story reminds me of what I heard about Darwin who break a problem by walking in a circle round his garden thinking. Every time he passed a particular point in his garden he would put a stone down, in this way he knew how long he had been thinking.
Thinking and understanding seem to me passive experiences. You feed the brain ideas and data and let it happen, then a solution emerges from all that thinking. You never really know how the brain is doing its thinking, or what the results will be, or how they came to you. But you know the problems and if you give the problems to the brain it will solve them.
There is a story of sexing hatchling chicks in Japan in the 1940s. It is almost impossible to tell the difference between hen chicks and cockerel chicks, but with training everyone can do it. What you do is sit looking at hatchling’s backsides putting the ones that might be cockerels in one box and hens in the other, the expert sit by you telling you when you are right and when you are wrong. After a while you know which are male and which are female, but neither the expert of the student knows how the did it, only the brain does in some mysterious way. They have special schools for people to learn to separate cockerel hatchlings from hen hatchlings.
I like this concept of looking at it from the point of view of a day and from the point of view of the sun which drawing a line of clouds as it circles the globe, it intuitively looks like a very simple solution to a very complex matter. It seems to say “Willis you are right”, and you seeing right from wrong, undergo confirmation and rejection, this is perhaps amongst the most important feature of a person who knows how to think right. The AGW crowd do not know about confirmation and rejection, they just do not know how thinking is dome
I grew up spending a lot of time in the woods. Like with the sexing of chickens, I noticed that over time I was able to see motionless creatures in dense brush that others could not see. It seems you can train your brain to recognize certain patterns over time without actually being told or “trained” to do it. Often we “see patterns” but don’t understand them. But some people find the reasons and usefulness of patterns. This is one of the reasons I am impressed by Bob Tisdale, Willis Eschenbach, and Joe Bastardi. They see patterns and explain them well.
Sounds logical. But, this would surely only work with temperatures as is. How come we had “presumably” stable temperatures during thousands of years of ice age, and then warming as the ice ages ended, stable climates like today, then sudden cooling and new ice ages? And on occasion we had temperatures rather warmer than at present – eg +8 degrees over present?
Can the same feedback mechanism keep ice ages cool?
I suspect that the regulator is the difference in albedo of free flowing ice and clear water in an Ice Age. With the regulator being from north to South rather than East to West.
Although Ice Age temperatures wouldn’t be so tightly constrained as now. But we’ve no reason think they were.
That change of 90° would allow for two modes of climate – which is what we have.
But ocean ice is positive feedback for temperature decrease. The colder it is, the more ice shows up, the higher albedo, the lower temperature…
Ice is an almost negligible part of earth albedo.
Remember, albedo is NOT earth’s reflection coefficient; it is the fraction of the incident solar energy that gets reflected back to space.
Ice may have a quite high reflectance (it doesn’t), but who cares if it is all in a region that receives very little incident solar energy ??
Does anybody ever ask themselves why all that ice is there in the first place.
Does lack of incident energy ring a bell ?
And remember, the Gulf Stream and similar currents convey astronomical amounts of heat to the Arctic and the Antarctic, and still that ice persists there.
So the total annual incident solar energy on ice covered ground or water, is pitifully small, which is why the ice is there.
Clouds are on the other hand, are generally in the tropical areas where all of the solar heating of the ocean surface occurs, and where most of the solar albedo reflectance occurs (in the clouds; ocean surface has maybe 3% diffuse reflectance. The normal incidence reflectance of water is 2% and that value persists pretty much out to the Brewster angel which is about 53 degrees from the zenith.
george e. smith June 4, 2015 at 6:11 pm Edit
Say what? That’s not true at all. The earth’s albedo (measured as you say, as reflected energy divided by incident energy) has two peaks—one around the summer solstice, and one around the winter solstice. If you can explain that without using either ice or snow in the explanation, I want to know how.
Me, I know that the explanation is that at the solstices the poles get a goodly amount of sunlight, and at the solstices one or the other of the ice-and-snow-covered poles are pointing more towards the sun. This drives the albedo up, since the snow-covered fraction greatly increases.
Bonus question—what spot (or line) on earth receives the most hours of sunlight every year?
w.
See https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2012/12/15/d-o-ride-my-see-saw-mr-bond/
for some of that. the short answer is Milancovitch cycles of orbital parameters melt the north pole to cause interglacials. During glacials, Gulf Stream goes metastable and then other minor changes can cause warm spikes – stadials.
http://www.geology.um.maine.edu/publications/Jacobson%20et%20al.%202012%20Hg%20in%20L.%20Tulane%20ES%26T%2046%20%2011210-11717%5b1%5d.pdf
Temperatures are not purely stable, but cyclical with bounds. Orbital, solar, and lunar tidal changes cause the cycle pressures inside a negative feedback system pushing toward a norm.
Dudley Horscroft asks a good question. We can not just say that the climate is super stable, except when it isn’t.
The Milankovitch forcing is tiny compared to the CO2 changes that we are causing. So that can not drive climate change. At most it is a pacemaker for unstable oscillations in the climate system.
The sequence of events during a deglaciation is that first Antarctica gets warmer, then global CO2 rises, then the tropics get warmer and the northern ice caps start to melt, then the Arctic temperatures go up. Not at all compatible with the standard Milankovitch theory. Not to mention that Milankovitch can not explain why the cycle takes about 100 kyr.
@Mike M:
Nice fantasy, but you have it all wrong. See:
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2015/03/20/ice-ages-and-the-book-about-milankovitch/
First off, CO2 is irrelevant to the whole process. It does nothing in the troposphere, and radiates heat to space in the stratosphere:
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2015/04/25/one-tenth-bar-short-waves-and-solar-spectral-change/
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2014/06/01/le-chatelier-and-his-principle-vs-the-trouble-with-trenberth/
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2012/12/12/tropopause-rules/
The sequence in “deglaciation” is that the interglacial forms ONLY when the earth is at furthest from the sun (so that the season then is longer by several days as that part of the orbit is slowest) AND the North Pole is pointed toward the sun (so N. Hemisphere summer is longest) AND the tilt is maximized so that insolation is greatest north of 65 degrees. All this is opposite for Antarctica (in fact, Antarctica is irrelevant to interglacials. It NEVER melts as there is so much grounded ice it just can’t.)
It is long after warming has been going strongly for a long time that CO2 rises. 800 years later. As a result of the simple physics that warm water holds less gas than cold water. BTW, at the bottom of glacial cold, the CO2 level is so low plants are starving and dying and the global dust rises dramatically:https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2015/05/01/ice-age-glacials-milankovitch-orbital-mechanics-and-a-place-for-dust/
Milankovitch does a reasonably good job of explaining the 100,000 year pace. That is the cycle time for the orbit to become more / less elliptical. ONLY when it has maximum elliptical shape is the summer in the N.H. long enough to melt the north pole.
It would be really helpful to your understanding if you would actually READ what Milankovich said and pay attention. (BTW, the 41,000 vs 100,000 pacing “question” is not all that hard to answer. We have been in a few million year cooling trend, with cycles in it, and many hundred thousands of years ago were warm enough that the 41,000 cycle of one of the Milankovitch parameters warmed the N. Pole enough. Now we are so cold it takes all three lined up including that 100,000 elliptical one.)
And yes, we certainly CAN say that climate is “super stable” inside any orbital configuration and that, given massive changes in insolation and length of summer, it can shift to another stability point. It is stable inside a range inside our present orbital parameters, but as those parameters shift, the ‘set point’ shifts. Notice that we have seasons of winter to summer and back as our orbital parameters change, yet we are stable in that those seasons repeat… (or, more accurately, the equatorial band of stability moves N /S as the orbital parameters change, as does the snow band as does…)
Some of this may be geography as well. When the continents were aligned differently with large shallow seas dominating the tropics, the regulator temperature likely changed. Today we have a large and very deep Pacific Ocean to deal with. I think that the “what is the geography in the tropics?” question is probably the key to that observation.
The deep water salinity and temperature may have had a difference as well. The shallow seas would have had a very large evaporation rate, causing very salty and relatively hot bottom water. Upwelling currents would have been deadly kill zones due to the lack of oxygen in such water. They also would have been distinct hot points. The edges of such a zone would have been pretty rich though as the oxygen levels became high enough to support animal life.
Plate tectonics may partially answer many questions (along with the aforementioned cosmological effects.)
You’re onto something here. Our current climate is likely due to the location of our major land masses forcing warm water to the north. The currents transporting heat make northern Europe habitable. If true what are the implications for past climate?
Owen,
Continental drift can only change the climate on long time scales, not on the short 100 kyr time scale of glacial-interglacial cycles.
There is serious speculation that the onset of pleistocene ice ages beganmwithnthe closing of the Panama isthmus, because the timing is coincident. That forced major changes in ocean circulation.
The comments here are making much of “ice ages”. Well, look at the geological record; we know of glacial deposits in Huronian (~2BYBP), Late Proterozoic, two Paleozoic events, and lately. This is a bit part, not a starring role. Plate tectonics probably is involved, and that connection would make a worthy research study. Some of these occurred when CO2 was much above today’s levels, so that seems to minimize that gas’s role in heating/cooling. More important is the great expanse of time when the earth was hotter, and had much more CO2, and didn’t boil over, go CGW on us. My guess is that Willis’s mechanism has been moderating the T since there was an ocean (i.e. since about 4 BY ago).
@ur momisugly ristvan, throw in the occasional asteroid and there you go (wasn’t there a strike just east of Panama in the Gulf of Mexico? Could that one have closed the two continents?
“When there is a hot spot in the afternoon on a tropical ocean, a thunderstorm soon forms right above it and starts cooling the surface back down. ”
Reminds me of blinking eyes and the iris effect …
yes the iris effect. Lindzen and later Spencer have really already shown this effect to take place. the problems with the theory are not well defined or expressed by either side of the argument (Dessler et al). looking forward to reading more about the possibilities.
Thanks for another enjoyable & informative lesson.
Once again, thanks, Willis.
Cheers.
During interglacial solar orbital config, it is stable.
During glacial regimes it is more unstable or bistable.
The ocean currents can rearrange easily during glacials causing Dansgaard Oeschger events, for example.
It is still bounded to the upside at our warmth level and to the downside in frozen glacial poles and warm not hot tropics. So metastable with bounds is likely the best description.
Everytime I read Willis’ thoughts on the stabilizing factors of the climate, the “emerging” regulating phenomena, such as cumulus clouds, thunderstorms, lightning… I think: doesn’t all this confirm (part of) the “extreme weather” meme of the alarmist crowd? (Hot spots, or rapidly rising temperatures, causing more or more severe thunderstorms, cyclones etc..)
It doesn’t seem to. I suspect that the reason is that the effects are so powerful that it doesn’t take much change in say the onset time of thunderstorms to counteract a fairly strong forcing. And who would notice if on average tropical thunderstorms formed an hour earlier?
Regards,
w.
So it’s not a question of “more thunderstorms” or “more severe thunderstorms” but simply “earlier thunderstorms”? Right?
But you do say that “if the surface warms even more and a third temperature threshold is surpassed, yet another phenomena will emerge—the thunderstorms will line up shoulder to shoulder in long serried rows, with canyons of clear descending air between them”. That sounds like “severe weather” to me. And if… IF that occurs more frequently…
It is more that for a place in spring you get one level of response, then in summer with longer days and more sun another level is reacher (and on 20, 000 year scales the planet orbit changes and the tilt change, so you get other changes like a frozen north pole) but inside those, the thunder storms still cycle providing their negative feedback.
A Magum Opus Willis.
“And who would notice if on average tropical thunderstorms formed an hour earlier?”
The satellites would, and that can be seen in the imagery. Since we have GOES imagery every 30 minutes now, we should be able to test the imagery for that signal if indeed the ITCZ is creating a higher albedo earlier now than it did 30 years ago.
“who would notice if on average tropical thunderstorms formed an hour earlier?”
Willis Eschenbach?
Take out the word “extreme” and say “not seen by this generation” and the answer is maybe, sort of.
As the ocean heat built up over a 30 year hot half cycle comes out, we get more rain, not seen for about 60 years… soon the oceans will have cooled and the rains will abate. Then we will get cold not seen in 60 years… There is also a 1500 year cycle that pushes things a bit further.
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2015/05/31/texas-rain-and-1500-year-cycles/
So inside those cycles we see the negative feedback stabilizers working and think this is “extreme” when the reality is that we live very short lives with shorter memories.
Btw, we are near the upper bound for warmth so very stable to the upside. Downside is not so constrained until we reach a glacial bottom.
W. is looking more at the daily and seasonal stability, that is as he describes. In century time scales, other things change the basic parameters and we get cycles of change in weather.
Afternoon thunderstorms are not “extreme weather”. And these thunderstorms are not cyclones or hurricanes. They also occur over “ocean” hotspots, specifically in the intertropical convergence zone on days when “rapidly rising temperatures” are normal, common occurrences.
I didn’t say that thunderstorms are “extreme weather”. What I mean is that it is reasonable to think that in a hypothetical “warming climate” , these regulating mechanisms would occur more frequently and that the chances of “extreme events” happening would increase. Sounds plausible to me.
Thank you very much for this Willis, absolutely brilliant analysis.
There must be similar systems working in other latitudes (ours is 55 deg North 1 degree West), but I would guess the main driver of Earth’s climate is in the latitudes that you speak of which is obviously hotter than where we live.
Great post as always! Well reasoned & argued as always! Keep up the good work, Willis.
@ur momisugly rhymeafterrhyme: Very good indeed!
Excellent as usual
I sometimes wonder if most climate alarmists are people who have lived all their lives in temperate zones, and never spent much time in the tropics, especially in the wet season…
I got that impression early on, perhaps because up here in the tropics we were used to getting know-alls coming up from down south and lecturing us on tropical design, but having no idea about the subject. Funny thing is, they never seemed to come during the hot/humid/wet cyclone/monsoon period. I suspect that a lot of the alarmists spend most of the time indoors, You would think their junkets in exotic places would teach them something, but that doesn’t seem to happen.
Maybe it’s crocaphobia.
Could this explain the surfeit of lukewarm scientists in Georgia and Alamaba?
I recommend readers encourage distribution using Twitter, Google plus, etc.
As I have always said, We live in a big swamp cooler.
It is a water world…
And the equilibrium temperature is 26 C? Good, that’s only 10 deg higher than today. No problem then.
London is forecast to reach 25 C Friday with thunderstorms.
Actually I’m fine with day time high reaching 26C. We got 17C today.
IMO the most important thing is there will be no severe day-time warming in tropics, which takes the burden of ours of protecting Africa from the greenhouse effect. CO2 fertilisation is left, though.
0.11C/decade is all right, it gives enough time to set up some nuclear power.
Bookmarked.
This is the aspect of your work I’ve always found compelling. Thanks for the list of related posts
For those who get up early, construction workers, farmers, etc., the coldest part of the day feels to me to be about an hour or so before sun rise. The warmest part feels to me to be an hour so after high noon.
Here in England, the warmest part of the day is around 16.00 in Summer, sometimes 15.00.
You are in good company using thought experiments to organize your analysis. Einstein famously relied upon them to develop the special theory of relativity.
The question we landlubbers confront is whether a step-wise shift in land temperatures can co-exist within the stabilizing oceanic climate system. The answer one gets probably depends on the time scale chosen.
Eric you are right I will never forget my first day in Singapore late afternoon and the never seen before thunder heads building and then releasing all that energy in a spectacular display that we never see on that scale below Lat 30 S.
Or even above it to the north. Tropical thunder storms are a force not to be toyed with. Try flying between them at night. Quite frightening to say the least.
and definitely do not try to fly through them…
My father was a meteorolgist, and in the late 1940’s he was on RAF met research flights from Negombo in Ceylon to Singapore and back. He said that the trip up the Malacca Strait was terrifying, with thunderstorms rolling down off Malaysia and Sumatra. He was glad when they were clear of Banda Aceh and could head out over the open ocean.
you must have a really big hard drive.
It all depends on the climate being driven by the GHE which is a theory yet to be validated by empirical data. It is not any use claiming that the models prove the theory when the models themselves are “driven” by the very same theory. That is sophistry in the extreme.
Why then did the temp of the WPWP increase more than the global average last century?
http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/iersstv4_130-160E_-10-10N_n_1900:2020a.png
Around 1-2 degrees / century. Catastrophic? The globe has warmed, the globe has cooled. At last we are here to record and marvel.
Maybe they are still recovering from the cooling of the little ice age?
Why do people always assume that increased SST is new heat recently added? Or the reverse, the surface has cooled and we are all going to die because heat has been lost because the sun is dead!!!! Let’s pretend I am a giant (I know…hard to imagine but try). I pick up a deep swimming pool that has quietly sat out in the sun and shake it. Suddenly the surface has cooled. Did I lose heat just then? Then I set it back down in its quiet location but without benefit of the sun to heat it back up again. Miracle!!!! The surface warms again!!!! Now imagine the ocean surface calmly sitting there. The surface is warm. Shake it. The surface is now cool. Let it calm down again, and the surface becomes warm again.
Now, of course there are other variables involved in slight new build up or slight new loss over centennial time scales (such as a recovery from the end of an ice age) as well as daily/seasonal gains and losses, but these issues I have not addressed and I consider them trivial. I only address the mistaken notion that all recent increases must be new heat, not old heat.
Great point Pamela. There is a conveyor belt of ocean currents, so what we see today is a combination of current and past conditions.