Dr. Roy W. Spencer replies to “Tamino”‘s latest angry missive. As one commenter in my email list put it:
It is absolutely hilarious that Tamino’s lengthy, time-consuming, chest-puffing critique can be so comprehensively dismissed in a mere two sentences.
Here is what Dr. Spencer posted on his web page:
October 8, 2008: A Brief Comment on “Spencer’s Folly”
For anyone who has stumbled across a rather condescending critique of our latest research on feedback by someone who calls himself “Tamino”, I can only say that Tamino could have saved himself a lot of trouble if he would have noticed that all of my feedback work addresses TIME-VARYING radiative forcing (as occurs during natural climate variability), not CONSTANT radiative forcing (as is approximately the case with global warming). Tamino’s analytical solution does not exist in the time-varying case, and so his holier-than-thou critique is irrelevant to what I have presented.
Here is the original Spencer essay in PDF form, hosted on Roger Pielke’s website.
On the other hand, here is a recently published paper on climate sensitivity (PDF) that says the opposite. I’ll let the reader decide how well it defines the climate sensitivity, but I would note that since it uses GISTEMP data, which has a number of data problems that we’ve uncovered, for example here and here, the sensitivity may be overrated due to inflated trends in the GISTEMP database.
In the meantime, if you feel like supporting Dr. Spencer’s work, head on down to Barnes and Noble and get his latest book:
Spencer’s new book “Climate Confusion” is
now available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
(See book covers, and first page of each chapter.)
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Joel and Gavin, in Taminos analysis he uses a constant forcing factor F which is not a function of t or T which is NOT a time varying radiative forcing. You cant treat F as a constant and incrementally change it’s constant value and call it time varying. So Spencer is correct in his assertion.
“Thus your complaint seems to reflect more on your own lack of understanding rather than Tamino’s.”
This is a false argument, ‘steady’ cannot occur. PaulM was according Tammy more respect than you.
DR (09:20:54) The oceans are not only shivering but shrinking; Kevin Trenberth inadvertently blurted the truth out to an NPR reporter late last winter when he wondered if the extra ‘pipeline’ heat had been radiated back out to space. How stupid does he think his audience is?
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Come on Kim, you know how stupid they think everyone is already, why ask? 🙂
This has been an interesting discussion. Let’s see.
Samples of near surface air as a proxy for land, and samples of water surfaces through engine inlets in shipping lanes as a proxy for water. Combined into a mean over the globe and compared to 1961-1990 as an anomaly. Then charted as a trend covering varied methods of deriving the samples, in a variety of locations, using various methods of combiniing the data. And this is your energy levels of the planet. Uh, okay.
So we look at the above compared to computer simulations of a complex and dynamic system of infinite time-space variables. Computer simulations. Like running through a maze trying to get away from ghosts while eating fruit.
Or on the other hand, we can look at modern satellite readings of oxygen brightness at 4 levels of the atmosphere.
Hey, did anyone know the troposphere is trending up in its satellite anomaly? It couldn’t be from 7 billion people and their cities and farms and billion motor vehicles. And we all know the hydrosphere has no interaction with the atmosphere. Water doesn’t change phase, there is no albedo, there is no lapse rate. Temperatures don’t vary continuously over the atmosphere on X Y and Z axes. The oceans don’t store heat.
It must be carbon dioxide. Run everyone, the anomaly is up .06 per decade since the late 1800s! Turn off your A/C units, unplug your TV, stop driving your car!!! Please, before it’s too late; think of the children!
Mike Bryant
sorry a bit slow
GISS AND MAKE UP
Let’s not forget…
Dr. Roy Spencer, PhD in Meteorology
Dr. James Hansen, PhD in Astrophysics
Dr. Gavin Schmidt, PhD in Applied Mathematics
What makes the latter two “experts” in climatology? Hansen and Schmidt are like the Mel Kiper of the NFL draft – if you keep telling everyone you are an “expert”, then eventually some people will believe that you are.
Bob B (09:24:19) :
Joel and Gavin, in Taminos analysis he uses a constant forcing factor F which is not a function of t or T which is NOT a time varying radiative forcing. You cant treat F as a constant and incrementally change it’s constant value and call it time varying. So Spencer is correct in his assertion.
I guess he didn’t read the last para of Tamino’s post:
“The characteristic time which is chosen for the model has profound impact on the behavior of the model in response to various forcing functions. But we’ll see much more about that when we look at how Spencer uses this model, in the next post.”
Lucy that reminds me of another kiss that’s not so sweet…
R John says:
This is a pretty weak line of argument. Both Hansen and Schmidt have PhDs in fields that are quite closely allied in terms of the underlying science and analytical techniques are concerned. But, more importantly, both have published a lot of papers in the top peer-reviewed scientific journals in the field…and my guess is that a measure of the citations that these papers have received would also show them to be important contributors to the field. This is a more accepted measure of expertise in a scientific field within the scientific community.
(Note that I am definitely not claiming that ANYONE with a PhD in astrophysics or applied math is qualified to speak about climate science. Clearly, if they haven’t published in the field and aren’t up on the literature, then their knowledge is severely limited. They would tend to have the necessary background to comment on certain narrow issues, say involving mathematical computations or what not…but would not tend to have the broader scope necessary to evaluate arguments within the context of the field and other work in the field. As an example, Al Saperstein who as co-editor of the newsletter of the Forum on Physics and Society [of which I’m a member] read over Monckton’s screed that they published in the newsletter; however, his editorial suggestions did not constitute peer review [by his own admission] because Saperstein, while a PhD physicist, is not particularly up on the climate science field.)
DR says:
It is indeed to his credit that Spencer is submitting his work to credible peer-reviewed scientific journals where it can be read and evaluated and critiqued by fellow scientists…and I applaud him for it. Note, however, that peer review is a rather minimal standard and publication in such a journal does not mean that an article is necessarily correct. It simply means that it is not so clearly wrong, unclear, deceptive, or what-not that one or a few scientific colleagues in the field who reviewed it felt that it was worthy to appear in the literature. (Certain journals also have additional standards regarding the importance and general interest of the work, but this varies from journal to journal.)
And, indeed, the fact that Spencer’s work is appearing in these journals (and that “skeptical” papers with such obvious faults as Douglass et al. have also appeared in these journals) tends to disprove the notion often advanced that the reason that papers skeptical of AGW are so few and far between in the peer reviewed literature is because the field is so politicized by the “pro-AGW” forces that dissenting opinions can’t get published.
Phil, look at Tamino’s math. The forcing function F is a constant. Verbal handwaving is meaningless and Spencer is still correct.
“I would assume that you are talking about the vicious attacks on people like Hansen and Mann, which often go well beyond just pointing out that all scientists have biases that affect their judgement but instead actually essentially accuse these scientists of fraud.”
Considering the time and effort that it has taken Steve McIntyre to get Hansen, Mann, Annan and other members of the hockey team to reveal their data and their sources, and considering that he has still not gotten transparency from them, I would say that fraud is an appropriate word. Considering the refusal of the hockey team to update their data series to the present because they know that they will not agree with the instrumentation record makes fraud an appropriate word. Having Mann reject Lenah Ababneh’s tree ring series and cling to Graybill’s series when Ababneh’s work is more thorough and when Ababneh’s work shows that Graybill’s 20th Century blade is nothing more than a strip bark artifact is another reason to use the word fraud.
Tilo:
So, in other words, you and the crowd at ClimateAudit have set yourself up as judge and jury and are now passing judgement on scientists. And yet, you have yet to get any impartial scientific authority to agree with you on these serious charges. In fact, when the NSF was asked by McIntyre to weigh in on the issue of the release of information to him, they told him in no uncertain terms that Mann was not obligated to release to him the computer code that he was demanding. (I should note that Mann did subsequently release the code…and for his latest paper has archived the data and code online, and although he still complains, even McIntyre admits “they did make a much better effort than others in the field”. What he does not say is that such a complete archiving of data and code is almost unprecedented at least in the areas of the physical sciences that I have worked in.
…Actually, it is even worse than just being judge and jury…You are being judge and jury but only listening to the evidence from the prosecutor and not from the defense and then believing that you can still pass judgement!
Joel (19:43:39) Joel, the defense is exercising its right not to incriminate itself. We’d love to hear from it, instead.
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Bob B (18:02:04) :
Phil, look at Tamino’s math. The forcing function F is a constant. Verbal handwaving is meaningless and Spencer is still correct.
Actually he isn’t, the first part of Tamino’s analysis on the same equation is for a constant forcing function with the variable function to follow. Spencer’s analysis of the equation is flawed but it’s not very clear because it’s rather sloppily written (for example what is T?)
I have not followed this closely so cannot really comment on the content.
I can only repeat what I have been saying from the beginning of reading climate papers that one of the main problems is the concept of “forcing” to talk about energy balances. It is a convoluted concept, full of epicycles and it is inevitable that things will go wrong.
I will state once more: radiation is not conserved, energy is conserved. Energy is not a vector, as the word “forcing” falsely implies. Transforming thermodynamic quantities from heat and energy into radiation epicycles is something that still boggles my physicist mind. A whole branch of physics, thermodynamics, has been developed to study heat transfers and energy transfers and it works extremely well from delicate engines to huge factories. No forcings in there.
If a new branch of physics is needed for climatology, that is chaos and complexity theories that are slowly being developed in many fields of physics, chemistry and biology. It would be good for climatologists to dig into that and try and create models ( example Tsonis et all with a neural net model of PDO + ENSO) that include better the extreme non linearity of the solutions of the coupled differential equations that may describe weather and climate.
http://www.uwm.edu/%7Ekravtsov/downloads/GRL-Tsonis.pdf
Anastasios A. Tsonis et al
GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 34, L13705, doi:10.1029/2007GL030288, 2007
OK Phil, let’s wait for the analysis to follow–but in the meantime Spencer’s assertion still stands.
Joel (19:34:03) The effort may be unprecedented but it’s also an unmitigated disaster. Watch Steve try to make sense of that heap of garbage at climateaudit.org
Phil. (21:08:40) So can you bridge the gap? Why isn’t Spencer’s method appropriate, if you think it is, and why don’t temperatures in the real world support the sensitivity estimates of the models? What about the fundamental error in the assumptions, the one-way cause and effect of temperature to clouds, and the neglect of the C&E of clouds causing temperature change? All this relates to the inadequacy of the parameterizations of the convections and the clouds, as the skeptics have been crying about for awhile, now.
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anna v (23:09:30) As you’ve shown me in the past, the heat engine that is the climate regulating system of the earth is a vast analog computer. There can be no modeling at a lesser scale which doesn’t introduce fatal uncertainties.
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Joel (07:05:10), yesterday. Oh my God, now Gavin’s Pussycat is trying to argue that the data is wrong.
So far, Tamino hasn’t responded. Phil. and Hank are cheerleading, but dodging the question.
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Joel (07:05:10) and kim )06:42:44) Actually, Gavin’s P is just echoing you over there. So what is it? Spencer’s methods? His data? Or the models? Where’s the beef?
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kim: The issue that Gavin’s Pussycat and me are talking about over on Tamino’s blog has nothing to do with Spencer’s current work. It is a hijack that Neil Fisher started when he asked why there is no observed “hot spot” as you go up in the tropical troposphere as the models predict.
I am banned from Tamino’s closed mind after I pointed out to him where he was being a cherry picker.
kim says:
I think the problem is most likely with Spencer’s method of analyzing the data. His method looks over very short times and, while he shows that it recovers the correct climate sensitivity for a very simple model where all the feedbacks are assumed to operate instantaneously, it will not do so if the feedbacks operate over any reasonable period of time (as Tamino demonstrates).
Now, Spencer might rightly criticize Tamino’s example for being too simplistic because of its assumption of a constant forcing; however, at the end of the day, I still don’t see how that can get him around the very basic problem that any method that tries to diagnose climate sensitivity from data over very short time periods won’t see the feedbacks that operate over longer timescales.