Pielke Sr: No Climate Heating In “The Pipeline”

Henry Phipps (12:19:48) :
“Thanks to my Grampa, and thanks to my grandson.”
Loved it. Thank you.

Let me see if I have this right now.
Something disturbs the energy balance, and throws the system out of whack (well it’s never in a state of equilibrium anyway), so the surface and atmosphere start to warm, and the warmign surface evaporates more water, and the warming water outgases more CO2, so the atmsopheric water and CO2 start changing, and meanwhile the temperature is still moving from where it was to some new value, and while that is going on the oceans keep outgassing more CO2 and the water keeps evaporating; and so on, and so forth until finally the temperatures get to where they were going,a nd the extra evaporation gets to where it was going, asnd the ougassed CO2 gets to where it was going; so finally you have a new temperature, and a new atmospheric water content, and a new atmospheric CO2 content; so you can write all these numbers down in a table, and when the temperature decides to change again, all those things will again readjust to some nbew values, which you can add to the tables. In this way you can build up a table of water temperatures, and atmospheric temperatures, and relative humidities and water vapor content, and CO2 content; all of which oyu can find in things like “Steam Tables” in the handbook of Chemistry and Physics (CRC Press).
But nowhere in those books of tables do they describe any of this as “FEEDBACK” (sorry about the caps foinavon). They are simply tables of values of related variables in physical systemns; and they don’t have anything to do with any amplification process followed by feedback of some calibrated portion of the amplified output back into the signal input port of this system; and most of all they don’t take into account the fact that all amplifying systems involve time delay which translates to phase shifts in the frequency domain, and can result in oscillation behavior in any physical system that actually has real feedback.
Well you can read all about feedback in “Vaccuum Tube Amplifiers.” by Valley and Wallman, volume 18 of the Radiation Laboratory MIT series of textbooks (Cambridge Mass) 1940-1945. Anything you want to know about feedback is in there; and what climate “scientists are calling “Feedback” simply is not feedback at all; it is merely the time changing values of some related system variables re-adjusting to new values as a result of some system change. With the often very large delays in earth system responses to changes in temperature and such; if there was any significant “Feedback” going on; they would be oscillating their fool heads off.
Lenz’s Law, Le Chatelier’s Principle, photodiode self absorption in LEDs, etc are all examples of physical systems which readjust themselves to try and oppose any external change applied to the system. In electric motors, the rotating armature acts as a generator to produce a “back EMF” which opposes most of the applied terminal Voltage, and thereby reduces the current flowing which limits the speed the motor can get up to.
High efficiency LEDs always act as photodiodes as well, to internally re-absorb the photons generated by the current flowing, therby generating a counter current which stops the applied Voltage from generating any more photons, thus limiting the light ouput. More efficient optical extraction of the generated photons, leads to a lowering of the photodiode generated reverse current,a nd so allows for more light generation.
It is a general principle that physical systems react in such a way as to oppose the effect of external applied perturbations, and try to stop those changes from happening.
The earth’s ocean/atmosphere/cloud sytem is no different, and it simply reacts to any external disturbance, whether solar, or GHG, or volcanic activity, to simply alter the balance of water vapor, versus water clouds in the system to keep the temperature within a limited range. It isd larhgely unaffected by any human intervention.
George

Raven (13:12:30) :

foinavon,
Pielke has actually calculated the number of joules that would have to be accumulating in the ocean in order to be consistent with the IPCC claims of CO2 sensitivity. The difference between the expected and actual accumulation is so large that it casts signicant doubts on the IPCC claims.

Much of the uncertainty here relates to the extremely short time period under analysis. An analysis of a parameter for a period of 4 years is simply insufficient to establish what’s happening as a long term trend. The acumulation of heat into the oceans in the long term has been in reasonable agreement with expectations from models of the ocean’s response to enhanced greenhouse forcing. But it certainly seems the case that there hasn’t been much additional warming of the oceans (at least the top 700 metres) or the Earth’s surface or troposphere for the last few years.
But the temperature record of the past 30-odd years shows several periods of a few years when warming “stopped” or “reversed” (e.g. see Figure 5 of the blog thread linked just below). we don’t throw out everything we know about radiative physics, the greenhouse effect and energy “budgets”, on the basis of a few years worth of data, especially when we understand some of the contributors to the reduced warming during this period quite well.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/05/ipcc-20th-century-simulations-get-a-boost-from-outdated-solar-forcings/#more-6046
And Josh Willis whose data Pielke used for his analysis of ocean heat accumulation during the past four years highlights that exact point:
“Although the historical record suggests that multiyear periods of little warming (or even cooling) are not unusual, the present analysis confirms this result with unprecedented accuracy.”
Willis JK et al. (2008) Assessing the globally averaged sea level budget on seasonal to interannual timescales. J. Geophys. Res. Oceans 113, C06015

As for your papers on moistening: it is clear that the humidity datasets available are so bad that it is possible to make any number of claims that appear to be compelling if one ignores the data that does not fit one’s conclusions. That is critique applies to skeptics who claim that water vapour feedback is negative. IOW – they don’t really provide much supporting evidence for the models.

Really? The published data shows pretty uniformly that satellite measures of tropospheric water vapour content are largely consistent with models. I would have thought that does provide supporting evidence for the models…..

Well well. Heat “in the pipeline” and radiative imbalance. Published in the prestigious high impact journal Science no less 🙂
Per Hansen et al 2005:
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2005/2005_Hansen_etal_1.pdf

“Our climate model, driven mainly by increasing human-made greenhouse gases and aerosols, among other forcings, calculates that Earth is now absorbing 0.85 +/- 0.15 watts per square meter more energy from the Sun than it is emitting to space. This imbalance is confirmed by precise measurements of increasing ocean heat content over the past 10 years. Implications include (i) the expectation of additional global warming of about 0.6-C without further change of atmospheric composition; (ii) the confirmation of the climate system’s lag in responding to forcings, implying the need for anticipatory actions to avoid any specified level of climate change; and (iii) the likelihood of acceleration of ice sheet disintegration and sea level rise.”
“The observed 1880 to 2003 global warming is 0.6- to 0.7-C (11, 22), which is the full response to nearly 1 W/m2 of forcing. Of the 1.8 W/m2
forcing, 0.85 W/m2 remains, i.e., additional global warming of 0.85  0.67 È 0.6-C is ‘‘in the pipeline’’ and will occur in the future even if atmospheric composition and other climate forcings remain fixed at today’s values(3, 4, 23)

A new sunspot is on the sun right now but it would seem that it’s a SC23 spot!!! Is that confirmed?
REPLY: Due to low latitude, yes. -Anthony

Well stated George, have you got the energy diagram for the process of sea water freezing? The freezing/salting effect has always struck me as very complex, there is a lot of energy removed from the system to go to a highly complex, ordered hydrogen bonded solid ice structured, from a disordered, ironically fractured liquid. The ‘heat’ required for this transition must be huge.

George E smith: thanks for good info as allways.
Mary hinge,
You write: “Sorry Frank, you’ve got it wrong (again).”
You don’t give me an idea what this “Again” is all about, if you wish to mention something that actually relevant speak out openly what it is you are talking about, that would be the least you could do.
Only the loosing side of a debate is tempted to try personal attacks rather than stick to sober science.
Most debators in simple blog entries will make an error now an then, whats your point?? You make errors too (!!) and so what??

Slightly off topic but did anybody else notice the Ap dropped to 1?

Tim Clark (13:39:46) :

Your argument, as I understood it, is CO2 causes heating-heating goes into sink(ocean), but when temps aren’t rising in sync with CO2, (which they aren’t)-heat stored in sink causes sea level rise (which they haven’t since late 2006). My (and apparently Pielke’s) contention is: based on your climate construction, if sea level is static (link above), and sea ice is greater now than two years ago and CO2 is rising, then the ocean must be warmer, or CO2 doesn’t cause warming. So you argument against Pielke boils down to your belief that the ocean temp data is suspect. That makes you a denier in a similar fashion to my disbelief of GassTemp. And about the suns influence, better hope Leif isn’t reading :~).

I don’t think that’s quite right. The most recent published analyses indicate that sea levels are still rising. However it seems that there is an increasing mass component to sea level rise (i.e. from land ice melt) and a diminished steric component (ocean expansion due to warming). One possible explanation is that in recent years a significant part of the absorption of “heat” has gone into melting ice, so that increased ocean mass is not accompanied by increased ocean warmth (see papers just below [***]). However we are talking about a very short period of time! It really isn’t worth overinterpreting a few years worth of observations.
Re the sun: I addressed this in my comment to Syl just above. Since everyone here is addressing phenomena occurring over a very short time period (4 years), we have to consider those elements of the climate system (internal and external) that are averaged out to essentially zero in the long term trend. So whereas we don’t consider the solar cycle in relation to the long term trend in the temperature anomaly, we should consider it if we’re interested in what’s happening over a period of a few years. For the last 4 years the solar cycle has been opposing the enhanced greenhouse forcing from raised greenhouse gas levels.
[***]
Cazenave A et al. (2009) Sea level budget over 2003-2008: A reevaluation from GRACE space gravimetry, satellite altimetry and Argo Global Planetary Change 65, 83-88
Willis JK et al. (2008) Assessing the globally averaged sea level budget on seasonal to interannual timescales. J. Geophys. Res. Oceans 113, C06015
http://www.agu.org/journals/jc/jc0806/2007JC004517/

“How dare you paint an opposing scientific view with a religious brush like that! ”
I think maybe people are thinking of the word “religion” here in two different ways. It isn’t meant as any disrespect for religious beliefs, in the way the word “religion” got connected with the “warmers”. What it means is that in religion, certain things are (as they should be) taken for truth as a matter of faith. One does not go around “testing” or “experimenting” with religious beliefs. They are simply taken as a matter of faith.
Now science is a different story. The conclusions MUST be testable and you must be able to reproduce experimental results and the conclusions one comes to with regard to data and the methods used for the analysis of data must also be documented and reproducible.
What we see happening is people taking “warming” as a matter of faith and refuse to accept the data from observation that is counter to their belief. In other words, many people’s conclusions are not based on any observational reality, but in faith that the models are correct. Now believing something to be true without any physical evidence is what has been called “religion”. It isn’t meant to mean that religious people are bad or that religious people “believe in” global warming. It is meant to say that the “belief in” global warming is its own religion. As there is no evidence that the outcome predicted by the models is actually happening, any “belief” that they are correct is simply a matter of faith.
Global warming isn’t something that one should or should no “believe in”. It is something that should or should not be able to be documented and shown to be empirically true or not true.
So far the temperatures are not rising as the models predict. There is no warming of the oceans. There is no great melt of the icecaps. There is no warming higher up in the troposphere. There is no increase in the rate of sea level rise. So what they are talking about is the religion of “global warming” being a belief not based on science but on “faith”. Now one’s religious faith, whatever it is, should be strong and unwavering and not require physical proof. A scientific conclusion that is going to cost us all billions and possibly trillions globally *had better* be provable.
That we are still even debating it is proof that the models are wrong because if they were correct, the changes would have been irrefutable by now rather than unobservable.
And once someone has a belief based on faith rather than physical observation, not argument of logic can dissuade them because they have blinded themselves by simply “believing” no matter what you tell them. In fact, rather than argue the facts, they will tend to attack the deliverer of the message, suppress the message, delete comments, etc. This is because they experience an attack on their “belief” to be an attack on themselves and so they respond by “attacking” back rather than engaging in a logical argument based on fact.
I don’t “believe” or “disbelieve” but I will say that so far I have seen no evidence that convinces me that the models so far accurately predict what is happening in our climate with regard to CO2 and so it is therefore foolish to waste money on mitigation of something that might be of no consequence or might even turn out to be beneficial in the long run.