UPDATE: Former California State climatologist Jim Goodridge presents some data that suggests that ocean temperature may be an equal or greater driving force behind Los Angeles Temperature increases, see graph below.
Source: NASA JPL
UPDATE: Sea surface temperature anomaly versus Los Angeles air temperature:
Source: Former California State climatologist Jim Goodridge – click for larger image
Perhaps the adjuster should adjust the adjustments a bit. This press release from NASA Jet Propulsion Lab says that most of the increase in temperature has to do with ubanization:
[NASA’s JPL Bill] Patzert says global warming due to increasing greenhouse gases is responsible for some of the overall heating observed in Los Angeles and the rest of California. Most of the increase in heat days and length of heat waves, however, is due to a phenomenon called the “urban heat island effect.”
Heat island-induced heat waves are a growing concern for urban and suburban dwellers worldwide. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, studies around the world have shown that this effect makes urban areas from 2 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit (1 to 6 degrees Celsius) warmer than their surrounding rural areas.
Patzert says this effect is steadily warming Southern California, though more modestly than some larger urban areas around the world. “Dramatic urbanization has resulted in an extreme makeover for Southern California, with more homes, lawns, shopping centers, traffic, freeways and agriculture, all absorbing and retaining solar radiation, making our megalopolis warmer,” Patzert said.
Then there’s station siting issues, like this station on a rooftop of a fire station in Santa, Ana, CA. Note the air conditioner units all around.
Santa Ana Station looking North. Click for a larger image
The temperature record from that station, courtesy the Orange County Register:
And my complete write-up on it is available here
Here is the scientifc paper by Patzert, Ladochy, and Tamrazian which is cited by the NASA JPL press release.
JPL: ONE
GISS: ZERO
Regarding the CO2 discussions, I am still awaiting the AIRS measurements, whereat CO2 is NOT well mixed and the whole cherade of AGWM is demonstrably unsuopportable.
Thanks, Dee. Pretty complex stuff.
Dee: Just noticed your use of Hadley SST in a comparative graph with CO2. Be aware of a step change (rise) in the HADSST data, after the 97/98 El Nino, that doesn’t occur in any other data set.
From the NASA JPL website at http://climate.jpl.nasa.gov/solutions/
” It is not NASA’s role to develop solutions or public policies related to global climate change. Instead, the agency’s mission is to provide the scientific data needed to understand climate change and to evaluate the impact of efforts to control it. ”
Too bad Jim Hansen doesn’t understand this NASA policy.
[…] I was going to post something along those lines tonight but I just noticed JPL kind of beat me to it (via Watts Up With That?). […]
John Nicklin, no offense intended, but I have to agree with Lucy Skywalker: click
There appears to be almost no correlation [R^2 = .07] between increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature.
I must give kudos to Lucy Skywalker‘s site: click
Ms Skywalker has put together a very interesting site with numerous graphs [which I love; I’m a big believer in visual aids].
Alarmists will tie themselves in knots attempting to refute her very credible climate information.
Thanks, Lucy.
Folks,
Great to see WFT being used so intensively!
Here’s another way of looking at the CO2/Temperature relationship which I quote in the examples:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/isolate:60/mean:12/scale:0.2/plot/hadcrut3vgl/isolate:60/mean:12/from:1958
The “isolate:60/mean:12” trick focusses on signals between 1 and 5 years. You could do the same thing with Fourier but you have to work around the large end-to-end change in the CO2 signal by detrending which makes things messy.
However, beware of ascribing too much meaning to this. The variation in CO2 here is pretty tiny compared to even the annual variation (which is probably caused by the same factor, AIUI), never mind the overall slope:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/isolate:60/mean:12/plot/esrl-co2/offset:-350
It is also an indication of a (small) positive feedback…
Best wishes
Paul
I just want to emphasise this point a bit further, if I may, because I’ve seen a few sites using similar graphs to try to show that temperature change causes all the CO2 change rather than the other way round, and I think this is an over-extension of what is being shown here.
I think this comes about from the nature of the CO2 curve:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/plot/esrl-co2/trend
It’s clearly an almost linear increase of 1.4ppm/yr (actually slightly faster than linear, as can be seen in comparison with the linear trend), with an annual signal of about 8-10 ppm overlaid. If you arrange to remove both of those you can see what’s left:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/detrend:70/mean:12
The bowl shape comes from the increase in rate of change over time (=economic growth, if you accept this is human generated). Apart from that, all you have is some short-term (1-5) year variation at around 2ppm magnitude. If you compare that to a (somewhat bastardised) temperature curve:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/detrend:70/mean:12/from:1979/plot/wti/mean:12/scale:10/offset:312
you can see that it correlates very well with the well-known temperature peaks and troughs, with a slight lag from temperature to CO2, as a number of people have pointed out here and elsewhere.
But what have we shown here? Only that the small 1-5 year, 2ppm variation is plausibly created by temperature changes (ocean outgassing, for example). We haven’t said anything about either the annual cycle (which could be temperature, or plant growth etc.), nor, more importantly the huge long-term linear increase.
In fact, the graph above comes close to disproving that the long-term CO2 change has been caused by temperature change. Look at the past decade of static temperature that we are all so familiar with. Yet the CO2 carries on regardless. Some have claimed that this disproves the CO2->temperature causation (though I doubt it), but it cuts both ways. Certainly if temperature were the only effect on CO2, and there is such a good correlation at 1-5 years timescales in the small scale, wouldn’t you expect to see it in decadal timescales at the large scale too?
It’s the relentless linearity which makes this look like a man-made signal to me, when compared to the messy, cyclical temperature signal.
The simplest explanation which fits the facts is that
a) We are pumping significant amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, slightly faster than linear growth, and this is not reaching equilibrium with the oceans in this timescale.
b) CO2 greenhouse effect is causing very long term temperature rise (although possibly not all of it).
c) There is a pile of noise and variation at up to decadal timescale overlaid on top of this.
I know this is the standard theory, so won’t be popular here, but I’ve no reason to doubt this part. What I’m more interested in is how much of the temperature rise is CO2 generated, whether there are other multidecadal temperature cycles, and whether on top of this fairly simple equation there is positive or negative feedback.
The CO2 outgassing we’ve shown here is a small positive feedback – are there other worse ones, as Hansen thinks, or will negative feedbacks (Iris effect?) dampen the effect? This could be the difference between 1.3K/century and 6K/century, which is all that really matters, in my view.
Well woodfortrees needs to look at longer time scales of history, before declaring that he can see any correlation with recent history.
The Vostok Ice core data for example which Al Gore makes a big deal about in his movie and his book (p66/67) show CO2 and temperature data over the past 650,000 years. Notice that while the CO2 plot in Gore’s book has an actual scale, the temperature plot has no temperature scale. The scale in fact was empirically adjusted so that the temperature ups and downs matched the CO2 ups and downs in rough amplitude so that the two curves look similar (which Gore points out in his movie). OK fair enough to scale the temperature to get two similar curves. But one also has complete freedom to set the origin of the arbitrary temperature scale; and if Gore had done that, the two graphs would have overlapped on each other so that one could accurately see whether the CO2 rises and falls preceed the Temperature rises and falls or the other way round.
So you have to conclude that Gore is either too stupid to realize that or that he does realize it and is a plain crook, so he separated the two curves to maker it harder to see the true time relationship. Any 8th grade science student would have overlapped the two graphs so that the only useful information; the relative timing of events could be discerned.
No matter, the picture in Gore’s book clearly shows that the temperature rises BEFORE the CO2 rises, and the temperature falls BEFORE the CO2 falls, and moreover the CO2 falls slower than the temperature falls (longer decay time constant)
Well of course the people who have the raw core data have already mentioned this time lag, and shown that the two curves give the highest correlation for a time delay of 800 years for the temperature curve.
So if you go back 800 years from the present, to see what causes the Mauna Loa CO2 to be rising now; you see it put you right in the middle of the mediaeval warm period from 1000 to 1400 AD. And that 800 year delay can be explained, by the time to turn over the ocean and bring up cold CO2 bearing waters from the ocean depths; where the CO2 is constantly pumped to because of the ocean temperature falling with depth, and the increased solubility of CO2 in colder water. So surface CO2 is continuously pumped into the deeper colder waters by the segregation coefficient effect due to the temperature gradient.
The Mauna Loa CO2 data is misleading, because at the North Pole, the peak to peak annual CO2 cycle due to plant growth is about 18 ppm in amplitide, whereas it is only 6 ppm at ML. And that 18 ppm drop in CO2 at the north pole happens in just 5 months.
So any claim of a 200 year time scale to remove CO2 from the atmosphere is plain nonsense.
As for the asphalt heat island effect; it is true that the black asphalt absorbs solar spectrum radiation more efficiently and so gets hotter than ordinary natural surfaces; BUT it is also true that those much hotter asphalt surfaces radiate much more efficiently than ordinary natural surfaces; and that radiative loss goes as the fourth power of the absolute temperature. More importantly; the peak radiant emittance increases as the fifth power of the temperature, and because of the Wien displacement, the hotter asphalt surface radiates at a peak wavelength shorter than the 10.1 micron peak that corresponds to the mean global temperature of about 15 C.
So not only does the spectral pak radiant emittance increase as the fifth power of T, but it shifts further away from the 15 micron CO2 absorption resonance, so the effect of CO2 is considerably reduced by the heat island effect. These hotter heat islands actually cool the earth more than other regions do.
Where the error is made, is that the measurmeent of temperature in one of these heat islands is erroneously applied to large areas outside the heat island so the global warming effect is incorrectly accounted for. It is a problem of failure to sample the global temperature map correctly, in accordance with the Nyquist sampling theorem. The result is that computed global mean temperatures are largely nonsense; besides being of no scientific significance whatsoever; because the relation between temperature and heat flow is grossly non linear, and very dependent on local terrain and local thermal processes. There simply is no point in averaging the temperature of all points on earth, which can simultaneously stretch from about +60 C in the hottest desert or heat island surfaces, down to nearly -90 C at places like Vostok in the antarctic winter night.
These places have different temperaturesw because they are supposed to, so why average them to get the temperature of no particular place at no particular time.
George,
That’s interesting… I knew about the 800 year temp->CO2 lag in geological time, of course, but I hadn’t thought about applying it to current time.
Out of interest, do the numbers for CO2 sensitivity stack up? i.e., if you look at the relationship in geological time, and assuming a top end of the MWP warming of 1K, is this enough to cause a 100ppm CO2 rise now? My understanding was that the geological CO2 changes were of a similar magnitude but the warming was much greater (8K?) – but I don’t have the figures to hand.
It seems to me quite possible that there are three separate layers of effect here, working at different timescales and magnitude, and in alternating directions:
1) A short term (3-9 months) effect of temperature on CO2 from surface water outgassing
2) A medium-term (30+ year) effect of CO2 on temperature from “greenhouse effect”
3) A long term (800 year) effect of temperature on CO2 from deep ocean outgassing
Even if (3) turns out to be significant, it doesn’t mean (2) isn’t operating, and in fact it could provide a large positive feedback which could tend to ‘lock in’ some of the short term changes (hysteresis?). But it does go to the question of CO2 residence time, as you say. I just doubt that (3) is sufficient to explain all the modern CO2 rise.
Paul
OK, I finally found a graph with a sensible scale!
http://www.grida.no/publications/vg/climate/page/3057.aspx
From this it looks like a 1K change could account for no more than 20ppm, even being generous. So there’s at least another 80ppm of CO2 kicking around which presumably must be anthropogenic and isn’t disappearing back into the oceans.
[…] outstanding website Watts Up With That has weblogged (see) on an interesting new paper on the urban heat […]
[…] outstanding website Watts Up With That has weblogged (see) on an interesting new paper on the urban heat […]
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Interestingly, this was on CNN last week….