Blink comparator of GISS USA temperature anomaly – h/t to Zapruder
The last time I checked, the earth does not retroactively change it’s near surface temperature.
True, all data sets go through some corrections, such as the recent change RSS made to improve the quality of the satellite record which consists of a number of satellite spliced together. However, in the case of the near surface temperature record, we have many long period stations than span the majority of the time period shown above, and they have already been adjusted for TOBS, SHAP, FILNET etc by NOAA prior to being distributed for use by organizations like GISS. These adjustments add mostly a positive bias.
In the recent data replication fiasco, GISS blames NOAA for providing flawed data rather than their failure to catch the repeated data from September to October. In that case they are correct that the issue arose with NOAA, but in business when you are the supplier of a product, most savvy businessmen take a “the buck stops here” approach when it comes to correcting a product flaw, rather than blaming the supplier. GISS provides a product for public consumption worldwide, so it seems to me that they should pony up to taking responsibility for errors that appear in their own product.
In the case above, what could be the explanation for the product changing?
Wondering Aloud (08:01:01) said:
“I am beginning to wonder if there is any such thing as a CO2 forcing much less one that can be quantified in watts/square meter.”
Is water vapour a greenhouse gas? Is there such a thing as a water-vapour forcing? Can water-vapour forcing be quantified?
If we can calculate the forcing for water vapour, then we can calculate the forcing for CO2.
Mike Bryant:
“Reflected energy can in any case not make the emitter of the original energy warmer; if it could, we’d be able to make energy from thin air.”
Your earlier point about the variability of opinions among skeptics of global warming is a good one. I did want to point out, however, that your assumption here is that the original “source” of the reflected radaition is itself not being warmed by another object.
To illustrate this point, consider a thermos into which coffee is poured at 80 C after which you seal the thermos. Thermoses are designed to include reflective material on the inside to take the radiated energy from the liquid and reflect it back. This makes the thermos more efficient at retaining heat than one without the reflective liner. In this simple scenario, you would be correct in asserting that the reflected energy cannot raise the temperature of the coffee above its initial state of 80 C.
Now assume that you have some high-tech thermos that substitutes the reflective material with a battery-operated heating element, which adds a small amount of heat to the liquid in the thermos, such that coffee poured in it will reach a steady-state temperature with respect to ambient outside the thermos at, again, 80 C. This occurs irrespective of the initial temperature of the coffee. If coffee at 70 C is poured in, the heating element will, over time, cause the coffee to hit its equilibrium temperature where the heat in from the heating element is exactly balanced by the heat lost to ambient through the thermos walls. If coffee is poured in at 90 C, it will similarly cool to the steady-state temperature.
Finally, add a reflective coating to that high-tech thermos. You will find that the reflective coating will indeed cause the steady-state temperature to rise to something above 80 C.
It is this latter circumstance that is analogous (loosely) to the Earth’s climate system. When clouds roll in overnight, the effect is to raise temperatures with respect to what the temps otherwise would have been. This is because, absent the clouds, the radiated energy from the surface would simply escape to space. Does this process cause temperatures to go up in the darkness? Absolutely not. But in the daytime, when the sun is heating the surface, greenhouse gasses elevate the temperatures beyond that which would have occurred absent the greenhouse gasses. Pumping more into the atmosphere should cause temperatures to increase over time, because it will take longer for the surface to shed that radiation into space.
The source of the Earth’s temperature is the sun, and the only mechanism the Earth (inclusive of the atmoshpere) has to shed that energy is through radiation. Convection and conduction aren’t operative where one side of the boundary is a vacuum. The temperature of the Earth at which energy in = energy out is governed broadly by the Stephen Boltzmann equation, if I remember the name of the equation correctly, which assumes a perfect black body in thermal equilibrium with itself. Neither condition is true with respect to th Earth, meaning that the equilibrium temperature of the Earth will be higher (less efficient at discarding energy) than that given by the equation. Adding CO2 means that the Earth becomes even less “in thermal equilibrium with itself”, becomes less efficient at discarding the energy received from the sun, and in response, raises its temperatures.
Where those temperatures occur, and their magnitude, is very much a live issue, but I have to disagree with you in that temperatures do have to rise.
kurt,
I agree with your post above. I was merely showing a comparison of solar irradiance and warming [if those solar vs GISS charts I posted were what you were referring to].
I agree that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. But as stated, it has such a tiny effect that it can be ignored. And it certainly will not cause runaway global warming and climate catastrophe.
There’s an issue here to which I posed a question on another article, but i don’t think anyone has addressed it. I’m a patent attorney, so aside form having an engineering degree, i don’t have the technical expertise to address it, but perhaps others do.
Many posters suggest that CO2 can’t be important because it’s a trace gas. I don’t find this argument immediately persuasive. That trace gas, after all, is responsible for all plant life on Earth. Having said that, let’s make the assumption that you can quantify the additional radiation captured by a doubling of CO2 (no small accomplishment itself, I know, given the overlap in radiative bands of all GHGs). On that assumption, how do you divide that captured energy amongst the outflux that gets re-radiated, and the outflux that gets transferred kinetically to other gasses. I’m guessing you’ve got at least two differential equations to solve simultaneously, but without some additional parameters known, it’s not possible.
CO2, being but one element of a gas mix, is not going to increase it’s temperature to the level needed to re-radiate the extra watts it receives; much of that energy will be transferred kinetically to the surrounding gas molecules, essentially causing the atmosphere to heat as one. Granted, any incremental increase in the temperature of air will cause all air molecules to radiate at a higher temperature, but by tamping down the temperature increase by spreading it out, the net radiation back to the surface gets diminished because radaition is propotional to the fourth power of temperature.
What I’m thinking is that the primary way that the energy captured by CO2 gets dissipated is not radiation, partly back to the surface, but primarily upwards convention as the kinetic transfer between gas molecules moves the heat rapidly throughout the atmosphere.
Any physicists out there that could explain why I’m all wet? I won’t mind.
kurt,
In your post to Mike Bryant above, you state, “…greenhouse gasses elevate the temperatures beyond that which would have occurred absent the greenhouse gasses. Pumping more into the atmosphere should cause temperatures to increase over time, because it will take longer for the surface to shed that radiation into space.”
OK, that’s true as far as it goes. But the net effect of increasing CO2 is logarithmic, not geometric or even linear. So even doubling the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide would only result in a very small theoretical rise in temperature, since the largest amount of the greenhouse effect caused by atmospheric CO2 has already occurred with the first 20 ppmv concentration.
Adding another 20 ppmv of CO2, or another 40, or 80, will not result in any measurable change in the planet’s temperature, because many other climate forcings overwhelm the tiny effect.
The atmosphere is currently starved of beneficial carbon dioxide. More CO2 would be better for both plants and animals, and any putative warming due to human emissions would be an extremely tiny fraction of one degree C. How that tiny effect could even be measured, much less measured with any accuracy, is problematic.
And that gets us to the central argument: since further increases in CO2 would have a negligible effect, why are otherwise rational people endorsing and attempting to justify the enormous cost of monumentally stupid ideas like carbon [dioxide] sequestration?
Answer: the AGW/CO2 hypothesis is driven by money and politics, not by science.
Once again, there is NO CO2 forcing. CO2 is a trace gas, 0.0365% of our atmosphere.
Governments have spend over 50 billion US dollar to get the proof on the table and what they have come up with is plain lies. There is 0 proof.
1.
The settled science that a greenhouse warms up due to re-radiated light (energy), as set out by Fourier (1824), Tyndall (1861), Arrhenius (1896), NASA (2008), et al., is false.
2.
Considering, therefore, that even inside an actual greenhouse with a barrier of solid glass no such phenomenon as a greenhouse effect occurs, most certainly there can be no greenhouse effect in our turbulent atmosphere.
Energy can not be created from nothing, not even by means of re-radiated infra red. Widely accepted theory has it that more energy is re-radiated to earth than comes from the sun in the first place, amounting to almost an extra two suns. All materials above zero Kelvin radiate energy, yes, but energy does not flow from a cold body to a warm one and cause its temperature to rise. A block of ice in a room does not cause the room to warm up, despite the block of ice radiating its energy into the room. Yet carbon dioxide’s re-radiation of infrared energy warming up planet earth is the preposterous theory hailed by not only the alarmists, but accepted and elaborated by most skeptics as well, with mathematical theorems that do little more than calculate the number of fairies that can dance on a pinhead.
The accepted carbon dioxide greenhouse theory is thus declared a complete and total scam, as more fully detailed in these papers, amongst many (and I salute all scientists who agree with these papers and will gladly publicise all papers on this subject) :
“Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics”
http://www.tech-know.eu/uploads/Falsification_of_the_Atmospheric_CO2_Greenhouse_Effects.pdf and
“Greenhouse Gas Hypothesis Violates Fundamentals of Physics”
http://freenet-homepage.de/klima/indexe.htm
Hans Schreuder
Ipswich, UK
http://www.ilovemycarbondioxide.com/FAQ.html
http://www.ilovemycarbondioxide.com/carbondioxide.html
“Really new trails are rarely blazed in the great academies.
The confining walls of conformist dogma are too dominating.
To think originally, you must go forth into the wilderness.”
S. Warren Carey
“One definition of insanity is the compulsion
to make the same mistake over and over again
all the while expecting a different and successful outcome.”
Phil Brennan
The changes in climate are due to the activity of the sun and variations in cloud cover.
See the three short video’s: http://gorelied.blogspot.com/2008/11/great-global-warming-swindle-6-part.html
In this video’s the whole case is explained and more…
Smokey:
“But the net effect of increasing CO2 is logarithmic, not geometric or even linear. So even doubling the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide would only result in a very small theoretical rise in temperature, since most of the greenhouse effect caused by atmospheric CO2 has already occurred with the first 20 ppmv concentration.”
I agree in principle with this, but I’m not sure about the numbers thrown out there. It’s certainly a logarithmic response and therefore a linear increase in CO2 contributions have less and less influence. Without knowing the precise values of the constants in the logarithmic equation, though, I’m a little less sure about the rest of your asserion (we need to know what the exponent is of the inverse equation). This wouldn’t necessarily mean that the majority of the existing effect comes in the first 20ppm. Even logarithmic curves tend to infinity, after all. Complicating all of this is the fact that there are other GHGs that absorb in the same bands as CO2, which I would think should even further reduce the effect of a doubling of CO2. This is why I always argue that, from a quantitative standpoint, no one will ever prove or disprove the global warming theory – not in my lifetime anyway, and likely not in my kid’s either (and he’s only 2).
Let me throw one more thing out there. Hansen and others spit out a lot of loose language about there being positive feedback loops in the climate system. I’ve looked at the graphs of temperature reconstructions, and I have to say that on any time scale shorter than the glatiation – intergalciation intervals, I don’t see anything that looks like positive feedback. If I design a circuit with positive feedback, for example, that circuit should alternate between two rails, one high and one low. which we do see in the temperature record in the sense that we have periodic ice ages, and from a geologic standpoint, they seem to appear and disappear (the transition period) relatively quickly.
That’s the way positive feedback is supposed to work. Whatever stored energy the system has that can be drawn upon to reinforce the signal gets used up, and used up quickly, because the positive feedback is on temperature (or voltage), whatever it’s source – feedback on feedback essentially. But once you hit the ice age, or interglacial, the remaining positive feedback reservoir that could increase temperatures is mostly spent, while there should be a huge reservoir available to decrease temperatures when the system eventually falls back below the intermediary threshold.
In short, whatever the initial climate sensitivity is to a doubling of CO2, I just can’t buy off on this positive feedback loop idea that says that temperatures are going to spin out of control once we pass over some “tipping point” that only seems to exists in some scientist’s theoretical model.
Many posters suggest that CO2 can’t be important because it’s a trace gas. I don’t find this argument immediately persuasive. That trace gas, after all, is responsible for all plant life on Earth.
Kurt, that is true. But, during the geological period when life as we know it emerged (algae and such) CO2 was the dominant gas in the atmosphere. It was much much hotter, from both the high CO2 and also from much higher volcanic activity than the present. Eventually, so much of that life spread across the oceans, that its waste byproduct became more dominant in the atmosphere that its food. And that waste became the atmospheres life blood for the animal kingdom – oxygen.
The more relevant curiosity is this – there does not seem to be a pattern in geologic history that can show that a rise in CO2 levels, which has happened before, PRECEDED a rise in temps. There are many studies (iec cores are the best so far) that show CO2 increases lag behind temp increases. I can’t say I’ve seen every study that’s out there, but lets say there are a few that shows CO2 rising first. Even then, it is still a correlation between CO2 and temp increases, and not a causal relationship.
Ron de Haan:
“All materials above zero Kelvin radiate energy, yes, but energy does not flow from a cold body to a warm one and cause its temperature to rise.”
I’m not sure what you mean by this. You could be asserting that energy can’t move naturally from a cold object to a warm object (assertion 1), or be stating that even if it does flow from the cooler to the hotter, that it won’t cause the latter’s temperature to rise (assertion 2). Either of these assertions are false.
As noted earlier in a post on another article, heat pumps extract heat from cooler regions and move them to warmer areas. Granted, you have to expend energy to move the heat, but once it gets there, it heats the region into which it gets put. Thus, assertion 2 is plainly false.
Similarly, the idea that heat can’t be moved from a cold body to a warm body is also false. The moon, for example, is much cooler than the Earth, but as you noted, it radiates energy because it’s temperature is above zero K. Certainly you are not suggesting that the Earth has some “smart shield” around it that redirects the radiation from the moon, but lets the sun’s radiation in. And as noted in the preceding paragraph, once the radiation from the moon gets absorbed by the Earth, the Earth’s temperature will rise as a result, with respect to a hypothetical in which the moon didn’t exist.
No one is arguing that energy is being created from nothing. The argument is that the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere determines how efficiently the Earth re-radiates back to space that which it absorbs from the sun. In this analysis, whether or not CO2 is a “trace gas” isn’t immediately relevant. As noted by Smokey, above, the very first increment of CO2 (in other words, the tracest of the trace) had the largest effect of all subsequently sized increments. What kind of logic is it that says that the effect on temperatures of a trace gas can’t be that important because it’s too small, when the efffect on temperature is logarithmic?
Don’t misunderstand me, in that I also believe (strongly so) that the global warming scaremongering is grossly overblown. Don’t even get me started on the futility of trying to predict actual climactic effects of increased temperatures (hurricanes, droughts, etc) . I do, however, think that it is counterproductive to be presenting arguments that are untrue and can be instantly discredited.
Ron de Haan (17:51:50) :
The changes in climate are due to the activity of the sun and variations in cloud cover.
The sun doesn’t vary enough for this and the observed variations of cloud cover and albedo do not match the solar cycle. It is not good strategy to combat AGW with something equally flimsy.
Kurt,
Sorry, those words were not mine. They belong to:
Hans Schreuder
Ipswich, UK
I am a plumber, but even I can see truth when it hits me between the eyes.
Mike the Plumber
It’s all pipes!
Mike the Plumber
Mike Bryant:
“Kurt . . . Sorry, those words were not mine. They belong to Hans Schreuder.”
Sorry. Should have read the post more carefully.
kurt,
Apparently the moon also has a smart shield protecting it form the earth’s radiated energy!
The point you missed, I believe, is that in the absence of a conducting mechanism (ala heat pump) the sum flow of energy will be from a warm body to a cold body, until equilibrium is reached.
Smokey (17:44:02) :
At the current rates of CO2 emissions, some of us will live to see CO2 levels that are double pre-industrial levels. The best estimates for the temperature change associated with that doubling (the CO2 sensitivity) are about 3 degrees C. The estimate for the CO2 sensitivity comes (mostly) from paleoclimate studies, observed climate responses to volcanoes, and climate models.
During the last ice age, global temps were only 5 degrees cooler than today, so 3 degrees is a very big change.
kurt says:
If its effect were exponential, I would be worried ,,,
Also, you have not dealt with the issue that clouds cause immediate cooling, not cooling after some dozens of minutes.
John M (16:53:07) :
That link to RC is not the one that I am looking for. You are right, I am looking for detailed breakdown of the GHG forcings (gas-by-gas), year by year in ppm for each Scenario. I was under the impression that Gavin posted it but I am not finding it at the present time. I believe that trying to recreate Hansen’s inputs is not as reliable as getting the inputs directly.
Say Anthony, the NW is getting some very warm stagnet weather that includes record breakers in Meacham, Oregon (topped at 58 degrees on the 17th which is a record breaker warm day since 1948) during the day. The jet stream seems to be wanting to dip down to the tropics out in the Pacific Ocean before trying to rise back up to the 45th parallel on shore. What is causing the severe dip into warmer areas? Is this like stacked up airplanes? The cold jet stream rise into Arctic cold air and then its dip down over the midwest isn’t moving East so the jet stream behind it is stacking up causing it to fold down into the tropics? What could be causing this stalled and folded jet stream with warm and cold folds?
Chris V: your
At the current rates of CO2 emissions, some of us will live to see CO2 levels that are double pre-industrial levels.
Nope. Unless there is a major breaktrough in longevity medicine.
You are confusing emissions with atmospheric CO2 content.
While emissions are increasing at about 2%/year, atmospheric CO2 is only increasing at about 0.6%/year.
And, you are assuming that all CO2 feedback is positive. Recent work by Lindzen, Christy and Spencer all suggest that CO2 may have a negative feedback component.
That means that at the present rate of atmospheric CO2 increases, we will see a doubling in a little over 100 years.
Richard Sharpe:
“If its effect were exponential, I would be worried.”
The underlying math of a logarithmic response of temperatures to CO2 is that the marginal effect of increasing CO2 gets smaller as CO2 concentration rises. Simply asserting that CO2 can’t have a large greenhouse effect because it is a trace gas is a fallacy. I’m not saying that it doesn’t have an insignificant effect, I’m just saying that you can’t simply assume it based on it’s being a trace gas.
In terms of the cooling effect of clouds, the immediacy of feeling that effect is due to the blocked incoming radiation from the sun, just as it would be if you stepped beneath a large shade tree. I have no idea why someone would posit that greenhouse gasses would cause a delay of dozens of minutes, or even one minute for that matter, for you to stop feeling the heat of the sun shining on you, or for temperatures to begin to drop in the shaded region. Given that the energy input to the surface has been cut suddenly, of course temperatures are going to start to go down instantly. Greenhouse gasses don’t act like a reservoir behind a dam, that is let loose to compensate for a sudden drop in rainfall. They don’t store energy at all. They absorb it and then instantly dissipate it, as efficiently as they are able.
If I have a CPU running 150 watts in a closed computer case, with no air flow, so as to trap in the heat from the CPU in the region surrounding it, it will run hotter than if it were laid out on a table. The fact that the trapped heat raises the temperature of the processor isn’t disproven by someone’s observation that the CPU’s temperature drops instantly when its load is cut to 100 watts. Why would it be?
For readability, I should have swapped the last two paragraphs.
Chris V; Your
So , as the CO2 forcing increased from 1960 to today, what did the temeperature do? It Increased rather significantly.
Not quite right. There was warming until 1998 (or 2001 if you are a fan of GISS)
Are you confusing casuality with causation?
With even more CO2 from 1998 to present, there has been a negative temperature trend for the last decade, and NO WARMING OF THE OCEANS.
It should also be remembered that there was a significant warming from 1900-1940, well before the vast majority of CO2 had been emitted.
Earle Williams (19:29:14) :
“The point you missed, I believe, is that in the absence of a conducting mechanism (ala heat pump) the sum flow of energy will be from a warm body to a cold body, until equilibrium is reached.”
All you are really saying is that the effect of the earth in heating the moon is greater than the effect of the moon in heating the earth. But the moon does heat the Earth, by some small amount. (Both are small amounts, really). Actually, the only point of the heat pump analogy was to show that the house, for example, doesn’t care where the extra heat comes from, it just takes it and warms, even if it does come from a cooler object. The moon example was to illustrate that with radiative heat transfer, cooler objects can transfer heat to warmer ones, because heat outflux is solely dependent on the temperature and material properties of the radiator.
My overall point is that, if you change the equilibrium constraints, such as raising the temperature of the cool sink for the warm object, the temperature of the warm object will rise. This point does not rely on any assertion that the net flow of heat reverses itself. Make the composition of the moon so that it is less reflective (paint it all black), it stores more energy from the sun, radiates more to Earth, and the Earth’s temperture will rise.
Kurt,
“Make the composition of the moon so that it is less reflective (paint it all black), it stores more energy from the sun, radiates more to Earth, and the Earth’s temperture will rise.”
I’d like to see what a physicist would say about that one…
Mike
Kurt,
“Greenhouse gasses don’t act like a reservoir behind a dam, that is let loose to compensate for a sudden drop in rainfall. They don’t store energy at all. They absorb it and then instantly dissipate it, as efficiently as they are able.”
I’ve been in greenhouses, and when a cloud passes overhead, the temperature does not quickly drop. Outside, when a cloud passes overhead there is an immediate drop. So are you saying the greenhouse effect is a misnomer?
Mike