This is an interesting paper from our good friend Dr. John Christy of UAH and D. H. Douglas. In it, a bold claim is made about the likelihood that the atmosphere no longer shows the characteristic of CO2 radiative forcing, and that the effect apparently peaked around 1998. Here is figure 1 from the paper:
From the paper: “The global values of ΔT in Figure 1 show for the period Jan 1979 to Jan 2008 that the anomalies reached a maximum in 1998 which has not been exceeded by later values.”
Here is how the abstract reads:
“The global atmospheric temperature anomalies of Earth reached a maximum in 1998 which has not been exceeded during the subsequent 10 years. The global anomalies are calculated from the average of climate effects occurring in the tropical and the extratropical latitude bands. El Nino/La Nina effects in the tropical band are shown to explain the 1998 maximum while variations in the background of the global anomalies largely come from climate effects in the northern extratropics. These effects do not have the signature associated with CO2 climate forcing. However, the data show a small underlying positive trend that is consistent with CO2 climate forcing with no-feedback.”
You can read the paper and the link below. which provides a new perspective on the role of CO2 as a radiative climate forcing.
Douglass, D.H., and J.R. Christy, 2008: Limits on CO2 Climate Forcing from Recent Temperature Data of Earth.
I’m sure this will raise the ire of a number of people, but at the same time, what else have we to explain the nearly flat response in global temperature in the last 10 years?
h/t Dr. Roger Pielke, Sr.
I don’t understand this picture. I thought Polar bears were skinny, starving and unable to find any ice.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/00979/winner_979826i.jpg
Mary H says
The rise is fairly constant at 3.3mm a year, this is a 50% increase in rate compared to the 2oth century.
Hansen in his comments to the UK court says
Sea level is now increasing at a rate of about 3cm per decade……This rate of sea level rise is about twice as large as the rate in the twentieth century
Which is right?
Chris H,
Is there any more information to go with that graph? I note that the legend describes the plots as “yearly estimates”
The AMO went stongly positive in the late ’90s affected the LST of surrounding regions, including Europe and the PDO was still positive at that time as well. Overlay AMO, PDO(or ENSO) and the temperature record, one can definitely see cause and effect.
I do not really understand this paper.
The authors use an ansatz for their DELTA T (eq. 2) consisting of a term linear in time with constant k and a term proportionate to el nino (the term k1*elnino3.4) and a third term taking care of AOD, i.e. mainly of recent volcanic eruptions. Then they determine k = 0.06 K/decade, which is close to the ‘bare’ CO2 effect of 0.07 K/decade.
Is the conclusion that any positive feedback to the ‘bare’ CO2 effect is inconsistent with the analysis?
Is a further conclusion that the total temperature increase over the last 50 years of 0.3 Celsius is too small to account fort the IPCC claim?
Finally, ENSO is an ‘oscillation’, which should imply that there is no time trend. However, the ENSO data are related to an averaging from 1950 to 1993, and do show a (positive) time trend. Al least this holds for the multivariate data set taken out of Klaus Wolter’s website. Is this time trend properly considered?
Luis
Be careful about the “Delusional and Blind” comments you might just as easily be looking in the mirror. Ten year trends mean absolutely nothing yet they point to a 20 year trend as if it were proof 1979-1998 is all AGW proponents can really hang their hat on.
It is pretty clear from what Anthony has done here that any trend that uses the USHCN is simply “noise”. Sticking satellite data onto supposed surface data doesn’t make the surface data magically and retroactively any better while each “correction” of the historic record makes it less likely to be accurate.
Now that I’ve been over critical on to the question I meant to ask…
It seems to me a major problem has long been with assuming this coefficient for feedback effect was greater than 1. If it isn’t there is no chance that CO2 can be a significant problem, indeed most of the warming ever possible would have already occured. Am I wrong is there any evidence to suggest that the feedback really is positive? The IPCC explains their large values for this but they seem to be really doubtful if not already clearly disproven.
“a bold claim is made about the liklihood that the atmosphere no longer shows the characteristic of CO2 radiative forcing, and that the effect apparently peaked around 1998”
Did you read the same paper I did? I read it, in it’s entirety, and found no such claim.
They merely looked at satellite data and arrived at a value for CO2 climate sensitivity for the period of measurement. They note that the value is close to the theoretical CO2 sensitivity, with no feedback. Thus they conclude that over the period of measurement, the observed temperature rise was consistent with expected CO2 forcing with no feedback. Though they observed that temperature peaked in 1998, nowhere in the paper can I find anything to support the idea that the atmosphere “no longer shows the characteristic of CO2 radiative forcing”.
That being said, this is an excellent “first principles” primer on climate sensitivity. It’s well written and concise. Every step is laid out, thoroughly explained and justified. I guess it takes a physicist to show the climatologists how to do it right.
REPLY: From the paper: “The global values of ΔT in Figure 1 show for the period Jan 1979 to Jan 2008 that the anomalies reached a maximum in 1998 which has not been exceeded by later values.” is what that statement refers to, Anthony
Luis
Why stop at 10 years? Maybe 20 or 30 years isn’t long enough. The sun is on a 22 year cycle, the pdo has a 30 to 50 year cycle. Maybe we just finished the up of a natural cycle and we’re heading back down. Since 1950 (IPCC’s official start of AGW) we’ve had 15 years cooling, 15 years plateau, 20 years warming and 10 years plateau. Start explaining what this “noise” consists of, then tell us how much of it was in that 20 year warming period then you might be able to lay some claim to knowing more than Christy or the rest of us. But for now you’re just hand-waving. The world is full of people who see a rising trend and predict it’ll keep rising. It’s far from clever and it’s why the current housing downturn took so many “experts” by surprise. If any climatologist had predicted this plateau and had given a mechanism for it then we’d definitely listen to them. In fact, most of them said it couldn’t happen, then they denied it was happening, then belatedly they came up with a variety of colorful excuses – noise, aerosols, natural variation and even the sun. That’s not clever either – it’s pure guesswork.
Luis Dias (03:20:12)
“It’s just about perception. Ten years is nothing, not because it does not bode well for warmers, but because the noise of weather makes it possible for one or even two decades go slightly down in temperature, while the big picture is clearly headed upwards.”
Fair enough as a hypothesis, if you will concede that the same holds for warming. After all it is something like one or two decades of warming that set off Hansen on the warming path. Why would not equivalent cooling feedbacks ( high albedo, high evaporation etc) not be accorded the same courtesy of being masked by the noise of the weather? After all we were heading for an ice age in the 1970s according to similar gurus.
Which makes a nonsense of all this bruhaha.
So let’s say the Oceans are storing away some of the global warming increase.
Why would that only be a temporary situation? (Gavin never answered this question when it was put to him recently.)
Surface warms by 0.7C over 130 years, Ocean warms by 0.7C over 130 years. Seems reasonable.
The global warmers “Oceans are causing a lag in temp growth” argument assumes, that in 30 years, the surface will then revert to 1.4C and the Oceans back to 0.0C – that the Oceans will permanently give up their heat at some point in the future – that the Oceans will then permanently cool off and the surface will be permanently warmer.
Obvious logical fallacy.
The Oceans will warm along with the warming at the surface along with the warming of the planet is general. The Oceans may take longer to warm up given there is much more mass to warm up than in the atmosphere but the Oceans do not temporarily store heat away and then suddenly release all of it 30 years from now. The surface and the Oceans are connected to each and there will be an equilibrium of heat transfers between the two.
And 0.7C over 130 years is less than half of what global warming theory predicts. Surface temps should have increased by 1.5C and the Oceans should have warmed by 1.5C if global warming theory was correct.
Christy is right.
I have been aware of the nickname Mary Hinge since schooldays fifty years ago. How can this soubriquet be adopted by somebody who´s wants to be taken seriously?
Patrick Henry,
“I don’t understand this picture. I thought Polar bears were skinny, starving and unable to find any ice.”
The picture has obviously been photoshopped. This actually is a starving polar bear, on land, with no dead seal.
Energy & Environment has a peer reviewed section and a non-peer reviewed section. See a sample copy here: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/mscp/ene/2006/00000017/00000006;jsessionid=3f536l4rqngsr.alice . Note that there is section called “Refereed papers”.
I have had a few papers published in the former portion, and have had to make changes to respond to comments from reviewers (sometimes to my dismay).
In any case, peer review doesn’t guarantee “truth”. Scientists — as well as others — should be able to read and judge for themselves whether a paper or its arguments have merit, regardless of whether it’s peer reviewed or not. If one is unable to do that, then that person is over his head.
Dismissing a paper’s conclusions — or for that matter accepting conclusions because they were published in a peer reviewed venue — is just as bureaucratic and lazy approach to science as providing food stamps to a person because one filled or did not fill the right form.
So if one wants rational dialogue, one must necessarily abandon formulaic approaches to the “truth”.
Exactly. What prevents it from being peer reviewed after the fact?
With respect to Dr. Svalgaard’s claim that “the Sun is not a major climate driver,” Shaviv, the de la Fuente Marcoses, and Svensmark have established beyond a shadow of a doubt that huge spikes of cosmic rays increased cloud cover on Earth twice, once 2.3 billion years ago and once 700 million years ago, during periods of unusually high star formation in the vicinity of the Milky Way. The stellar baby booms produced frozen seas at the equator and total glaciation of the continents, a condition referred to as Snowball Earth.
Plenty of other historic episodes prove just as convincingly that cosmic rays have regulated clouds and climate on Earth more powerfully than any other single driver. To believe Dr. Svalgaard’s claim that the sun does not influence climate, one has to believe that the solar wind does not vary with sun cycle intensity, as it is the solar wind that protects us, or not, from cosmic rays and their cooling influence.
One has to believe, in short, that the Maunder Minimum was not related to the sun, a very strange proposition.
Tide gauges show no change in the rate of sea level rise over the last century.
http://www.globalwarmingart.com/images/thumb/0/0f/Recent_Sea_Level_Rise.png/700px-Recent_Sea_Level_Rise.png
Interesting. Too bad the paper will likely remain buried in the depths of the Cornell university website. Public perception is going to change only when such papers are published in well-established monthly scientific publications that currently have an unavowed AGW-believer policy.
BTW, I have nor seen/heard a word in mainstream media about the final results of the artic ice-melt season. The general public is still being led to believe that 2008 saw record ice loss.
Old Man Winter (07:46:10) :
With respect to Dr. Svalgaard’s claim that “the Sun is not a major climate driver,” Shaviv, the de la Fuente Marcoses, and Svensmark have established beyond a shadow of a doubt that huge spikes of cosmic rays increased cloud cover on Earth twice, once 2.3 billion years ago and once 700 million years ago, during periods of unusually high star formation in the vicinity of the Milky Way.
First, the “beyond a shadow of a doubt” seems extreme concerning events 2 billion years ago. But, more importantly, if unusually high star formation created huge spikes of cosmic rays [and this is not in doubt], then assuming that cosmic rays influence the climate, the climate changes 2.3 and 0.7 billion years ago were due to the star formation [and resulting supernovae] and not to the Sun.
then one has to believe that the solar wind does not vary with sun cycle intensity, as it is the solar wind that protects us, or not, from cosmic rays and their cooling influence.
The solar wind does vary and does protect us, but the variation is a reduction of only a few percent so the ‘protection’ is just a modulation of the overall cosmic ray intensity.
One has to believe, in short, that the Maunder Minimum was not related to the sun, a very strange proposition.
First, why is that so strange? The coincidence of the cold of the Little Ice Age with the Maunder Minimum of low solar activity must be tempered by the coincidence of the warmth of the Medieval Warm Period with the Oort Minimum of low solar activity.
joshv (06:31:21) :
“a bold claim is made about the liklihood that the atmosphere no longer shows the characteristic of CO2 radiative forcing, and that the effect apparently peaked around 1998″
Did you read the same paper I did? I read it, in it’s entirety, and found no such claim.
REPLY: From the paper: “The global values of ΔT in Figure 1 show for the period Jan 1979 to Jan 2008 that the anomalies reached a maximum in 1998 which has not been exceeded by later values.” is what that statement refers to, Anthony
Sorry, Anthony, but I have to agree with joshv’s criticism. While your quote is accurate, the sentence joshv quoted gives the erroneous impression that the paper found that it was the CO2 radiative forcing that peaked in 1998, rather than the temperature anomalies. The paper specifically considered the radiative forcing to be the linear term that was left over from the tropical anomalies after the ENSO and aerosol indices were accounted for in the regression. A linear forcing obviously can’t have peaked.
Mike McMillan (23:22:20) : Left side of the chart shows degrees Kelvin. Didn’t know Kelvin degrees went below zero.
No, but anomalies measured in degrees Kelvin can go negative. An anomaly is defined as the difference between a signal and a reference value of that signal.
Leif Svalgaard (23:00:14) :
5. Summary
An underlying temperature trend of 0.062±0.010ºK/decade was estimated from data in the tropical latitude band. Corrections to this trend value from solar and aerosols climate forcings are estimated to be a fraction of this value.
I note that the solar forcing is but a fraction [and I assume they mean a small fraction] of the trend, consistent with the notion that the Sun is not a major climate driver.
As I understand the paper, the only place the TSI comes in is part of the ±0.010ºK uncertainty of the trend. They specifically mention the TSI as being slightly negative over the time period.
bushy (04:32:10) :
“So how does La Nina result in a drop in sea level?”
First you have to remember how vast the Pacific Ocean is. The ‘little Girl’ is caused by increased easterly winds, these winds do two things, one is to bring cooler waters from below to the surface which results in a decrease of approx. 2 degreec C from sea surface temperatures. The other effect is evaporation from the increased winds, over such a large area this has a huge cooling effect on the ocean (think about when a breeze hits sweat on your body) and acts like a huge air conditioner. This is what causes a net reduction in ocean temperature
Leif,
Many simple heaters work but adjusting the duty cycle of a fixed voltage pulse. It is possible to increase the temperature by increasing the width of the pulse and decrease it by reducing the width.
Is there any reason why the variations in solar cycle length and amplitude could not act in a similar way and cause heating or cooling? If this mechanism makes sense it would also explain why a largely symmetric signal such seasonal variations in TSI do not cause large temperature swings when the largely asymmetric solar cycle variations in TSI do cause temperature swings.
Anthony — In light of my previous comment, you ought to amend the comment ADDED at 10 am within the comment by Todd (22:44:20) that E&E is not peer reviewed. Thanks.
Old Man Winter (07:46:10) :
“One has to believe, in short, that the Maunder Minimum was not related to the sun, a very strange proposition.”
I thought the ‘Maunder Minimum’ was so called because of a prolonged period of a low number of sunspots as discovered Edward H. Maunder, hence the term ‘Maunder Minimum’. So surely the ‘Maunder Minimum’ has everything to do with the sun?
“REPLY: From the paper: “The global values of ΔT in Figure 1 show for the period Jan 1979 to Jan 2008 that the anomalies reached a maximum in 1998 which has not been exceeded by later values.” is what that statement refers to, Anthony”
You quote above a factual observation about ΔT, this is not a “bold claim … about the liklihood that the atmosphere no longer shows the characteristic of CO2 radiative forcing”. No such claim is made in the paper. Neither is there any support for the idea that the “atmosphere hit max CO2 forcing in 1998” as you say in the title.
@Wondering Aloud:
“ Ten year trends mean absolutely nothing yet they point to a 20 year trend as if it were proof 1979-1998 is all AGW proponents can really hang their hat on.”
So all the AGW proponents really have in their wallet is a 20 year trend? Really? And you dare call yourself a skeptic? Begin with your own assumptions, please. Look I’m not here to defend any theory, I am not in anyone’s payroll. I simply looked at the post, looked at the paper, and analysed the pressupositions. Tamino may be “Hansen’s Bulldog” and he can even believe that is a “good thing”, but still he is right in his post, a ten year trend does not disprove Global Warming, and only if you cherry pick your starting and ending dates you get that trend.
@JamesG
“Why stop at 10 years? Maybe 20 or 30 years isn’t long enough.”
I understand the falsifiability problem, and the guesswork that you talk about. It sure isn’t pretty. But the assumption that the earth is going through a 10 year cooling, therefore, GW is falsified, is also not pretty. Just because you assert that the other guy’s works are faulty, that’s no excuse for the lack of rigor in yours.
@anna
“Fair enough as a hypothesis, if you will concede that the same holds for warming.”
It was not only one decade that set off Hansen’s alarm, it was a theory of greenhouse gases plus a decade of warming. And he did a faulty prediction, but still we clearly see a warming period since 1976. And while many people here assert with great certainty that the last ten years are going downhill, I am yet to see it. It’s only true because there was a giant El Niño in 98 and a very cool 2008. Talk about Cherry-Picking! Give me ten years without an El Niño at the start and an El Niña at the end, and you may persuade me better.
“Which makes a nonsense of all this bruhaha.”
I don’t consider it a nonsense, nor a triviality. It’s very important for us to know exactly what’s going on. To dismiss GW as a fad and call earth as cooling (GW disprooved!) in these terms is not helpful. At all. You people call GW alarmists as pseudo scientists and priests of doom, okay, but don’t blow your position by taking the other extreme, now will you please?