Left to Right: Dr. Gavin Schmidt (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), Dr. Paul Knappenberger (President of the Adler Planetarium and Astronomy Museum), Dr. Wally Broecker (Columbia University), and Dr. Ray Pierrehumbert (University of Chicago) pose for a photo after the first of the Global Climate Change forum. Forum I was held at the Adler Planetarium.
From Roger Pielke Jr.’s blog.
Two Decades of No Warming, Consistent With . . .
Over at Real Climate they are busy giving climate skeptics reason to cheer:
We hypothesize that the established pre-1998 trend is the true forced warming signal, and that the climate system effectively overshot this signal in response to the 1997/98 El Niño. This overshoot is in the process of radiatively dissipating, and the climate will return to its earlier defined, greenhouse gas-forced warming signal. If this hypothesis is correct, the era of consistent record-breaking global mean temperatures will not resume until roughly 2020.
Imagine, twenty-two or more years (1998 to ~2020) of no new global temperature record. What would that do to the debate?
Real Climate does say something very smart in the piece (emphasis added):
Nature (with hopefully some constructive input from humans) will decide the global warming question based upon climate sensitivity, net radiative forcing, and oceanic storage of heat, not on the type of multi-decadal time scale variability we are discussing here. However, this apparent impulsive behavior explicitly highlights the fact that humanity is poking a complex, nonlinear system with GHG forcing – and that there are no guarantees to how the climate may respond.
As I’ve argued many times, uncertainty is a far batter reason for justifying action than overhyped claims to certainty, or worse, claims that any possible behavior of the climate system is somehow “consistent with” expectations. Policy makers and the public can handle uncertainty, its the nonsense they have trouble with.
There are some things in physics that are givens like; the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.
Heat travels to cold and NEVER cold to heat. Its the exchange of molecular kinetic energy which transfers the heat to cold. Sea water is more dense than air and hence the transfer is more efficent from water to air. The evaporation of water molecules from the surface of water cools the water because heat energy is removed. If you pump this evaporation the cooling is deeper and quicker. Extra heating is a form of pumping etc etc etc.
Jim (10:54:57) :
I’ve been intending to do this simple computation, but have not gotten around to it, but we know the heat capacity of water is much greater than that of air at STP. Now multipy the heat capacity of water times the grams of water in the ocean and compare that to the same number for air. Air won’t be a significant force WRT to heat or heating effect if I’m thinking correctly.
The whole of the atmosphere has the same heat capacity as the top 8 feet of the ocean. The heat stored in the ocean from the sun goes down to 3000 feet, more in some places, less in the tropics.
Pierrehumbug took a swipe at Roy Spencer for using the correct thermocline depth in his simple model he used to demonstrate cloud forcing. Whichever planet Pierrehumbug models, it apparantly has a thermocline depth of 50 metres.
No wonder they don’t get it right when they do sums..
“Thermal inertia is real. It is called specific heat.”
Not my understanding at scales greater than quantum.
When I said “interia”, I was alluding to a second order differential equation in temperature. The quadratic is necessary for at least one complex conjugate pair of poles which would tranform into underdamped/oscillatory response in time.
I haven’t heard of thermal dynamics in excess of the first derivative of temperature (analogous to force=mass*accelleartion). Is there a known physical process to support this?
the climate system effectively overshot this signal in response to the 1997/98 El Niño. This overshoot is in the process of radiatively dissipating, and the climate will return to its earlier defined, greenhouse gas-forced warming signal.
Is it me, or does this come awfully close to ascribing sentience to climate?
Nature…will decide the global warming question
That answers that, doesn’t it?
To be true, you would have to draw a trendline under some number of years prior to 1997/98 and extend it out to the future and find that we are still above that rising trendline, returning at some undefined rate to this line of increase, whereupon temperatures will resume their predicted increase. Are we slowly dropping back to meet that rising trend? We don’t appear to be. We appear to have dropped below it.
If the climate doesn’t warm for a period of over 20 years, then the period of non-warming will approach the earlier period of warming. Is it climate yet? And if they look sad, it’s probably because their careers depend on AGW being right. What a disaster it would be for them if it isn’t.
How impertinent of it. But it is good to know that even a climate system is inclined to err – makes it seem so much more human.
The two guys on the right look like Mad Scientists. Actually, Dr. Broecker looks like me, or at least dresses the same way and seems about the same age; but I’m not a scientist.
The guy on the far right, Dr. Ray Pierrehumbert, looks like the prospector from the movie Blazing Saddles. Or, if you watched MST3K, the prospector from the Final Sacrifice movie parody. Every time I look at him, I think of those movies and then start to think of Yosemite Sam.
Bad construction of my last sentence: “I haven’t heard of thermal dynamics in excess of the first derivative of temperature (analogous to force=mass*accelleartion)”
The point I wanted to make is that the higher order derivative would be analogous to F=m.a (not that the first derivative would be).
Ujagoff:
You ” thought the climate did what the computer models told it to do.”
So have Australian farmers for the last 10 years or so. According to the story below it seems they’ve got sick and tired of being misled:
http://news.brisbanetimes.com.au/breaking-news-national/farmers-lose-faith-in-weather-forecasts-20090714-djci.html
Implications.
“Oceanic cycles may have contributed to mid century cooling” – So their positive phases may have contributed to warming. Therefore the claimed sensitivity of climate to co2 is – FALSIFIED
Thanks ray pierrehumbug, great ad hoc reply to comment on RC.
Bill Illis (12:47:13) : Doing lab experiments on GHG isn’t going to help. The models need to take into account water in all places and in all its roles including clouds. It is hard to see how they can hand-wave the effect of clouds away given the mulitple effects (heat transport to upper atmosphere, albedo, etc). You can’t do that in a lab.
far batter reason
I think you meant “better” not “batter” …
“Regardless, it’s important to note that we are not talking about global cooling, just a pause in warming. ”
Yes, and
“WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.” George Orwell, 1984
Ashby Lynch (12:35:06) : Your statement made me think of something else. In my (limited) understanding of the climate models, they treat the upper atmosphere as the most important “layer” of the atmosphere. The upper atmosphere is very thin. One input to Beer’s law is the concentration of the absorbing entity. The concentration of CO2 per unit volume has to be very low due to the low pressure. If the CO2 molecules in the lower atmosphere are emitting over a broadened molecular band due to the higher pressure, then it seems like getting the photons from same though the upper atmosphere would be like driving a Mack truck through Death Valley. The upper molecules are few and far between and have sharp absorption peaks.
Stephen Wilde (12:45:10) :
EXACTLY!
Model the oceans. Take your average gymnasium, say the one over at the local high school. Fill it with 55 degree salt water up to within one inch of its flat ceiling. You now have a model of the Earth’s oceans and atmosphere, with one exception – the real atmosphere has NO cap (ceiling) over it, which makes it even more of a mismatch to the kinetic capacity of the real oceans. Now turn on the gym’s heating system with it’s 30 air vents it the ceiling and crank it up to – 110 degrees. Leave it on for – well, as long as you want, say a week. Take the temperature of the water – a yard, a meter down from the surface. Right, 55 degrees.
Now remind yourself that the average temp of the oceans, the ground and the atmosphere (a few feet down or up from the surface)- each averaged globally, is with in a degree of each other… as best we can tell and I will have to say, after 50 years of study there are no guarantees to know exactly……..
But hey, I’m no “scientist”, it’s probably just coincidence….
Hey! Don’t forget to turn off that heater. We don’t want to be wasting energy like those computers geeks running all those global climate models….
So not only does AGW cause warming and cooling, it also causes nothing.
It is the true faith-based theory of climate science.
AGW is jsut the latest example of the human appetite for apocalyptic clap trap.
Colin,
It is a garbage paper that is such blatant CYA back tracking as to gag anyone who is not drunk on AGW koolaid.
AGW was, is and will be known in all of history as a popular delusion. It has as little to do with Climate Science as eugenics had to do with Evolution.
“”” Ashby Lynch (12:35:06) :
Interesting thing is that the air can’t heat the water. Even if there is a significant gradient, the difference in the specific heat of air (.001J/(cm3*K)) and water (4.8J/(cm3*K)) dictates that no meaningful amount of heat can be transported from air to water. When the gradient is reversed, however, the air temperature can be affected by water. This is seems important because CO2 can only heat the air, and the air can’t heat the water. Water gets all its heat from the sun. The only effect that CO2 can have on the ocean is some sort of feedback that affects clouds. Again, it seems physically impossible for the direct effects of CO2 to have any measurable affect on the ocean, but the ocean does have an effect on the atmosphere, probably much larger than the direct effect of CO2. Is this accurate? “””
Almost. There’s basically two ways for air (heated by GHG absorption) to heat the oceans. The simplest is by conduction from warmer air to cooler water via the contact at their interface; at the molecular level, more highly agitated molecules of the air, in colliding with slower moving colder water molecules transmit kinetic energy between them. But the big problem that air has, is that when it gets warmer, it expands per the gas laws, and becomes less dense, and so rises, taking its thermal energy with it. So convection which is what the mass transport of the energy containing material (air) is, tends to operate against the conduction mechanism. It is almost universally true that convection always trumps conduction, and the atmospheric upward convection tends to remove the energy to some cooler place, where it eventually can be lost to space.
The other way the air heats the water, is by radiation; thermal radiation along the lines of black body radiation, which varies as the 4th power of the absolute Temperature (Kelvins). Although real materials are never true black bodies, some of them can be very close. At the temperature of the atmosphere shall we say +20 deg C (68F or 293.15K), the intensity of the emitted radiation is not very high; and the emitted spectrum peaks at about 10 microns wavelength; pretty much completely dependent on the Temperature; in fact the Temperature (K) times the spectrum peak wavelength is a constant (Wien’s Displacement Law). That is not a constant of the IPCC “climate sensitivity” kind, that is somewhere between 1.5 and 5 deg C per CO2 doubling; it is a real constant of fundamental Physics, with the value 2.897756 E-3 m.K (+/- 8.4ppm), so at the sun’s surface temperature of a bit under 6000 K, we get about 0.5 micron in the green region for the spectral peak for sunlight. For the earth at around 300K, the wavelength will be 20 times longer, which puts it at about 10 microns as I said.
That radiation from the atmospheric air, goes in all directions so only about half of it is directed downwards towards the surface; and if the surface is water, that 10 micron long wave IR is totally absorbed in about the fist 10 microns of the ocean surface. The fact that it is absorbed in such a thin layer, means the surface heating can be significant. Remember that the mass of the atmosphere is about the same as the mass of 34 feet or about 10 metres of water. But confining that radiant energy to only 10 microns, which is only one millionth of that 10 metres of water, means an appreciable sirface heating, and that will result in prompt evaporation from the surface.
It is important to understand that evaporation is a property of the liquid phase; and it doesn’t have anything to do with the temperature of the atmosphere; only the temperature of the water surface; and it is only the more energetic surface molecules out of the Maxwell Boltzmann distributtion of energies, that escape from the surface. this loss of the more eneretic surface molecules lowers the mean molecular velocity remaining, so the surface temperature falls.
Now the temperature of the air, does determine, how much water vapor can remain in the air; but it does not control the evaporation itself.
And each gram of water evaporated takes with it about 545 Calories of “latent heat” energy of evaporation; and that is a massive transport of energy from water to air.
So yes it is very hard to bet on the atmosphere; it is at a big disadvantage, when it comes to heating things; especially the ocean.
Water has the highest specific heat of any known ordinary room temperature liquid (not counting the liquid metals, Mercury and Gallium.)
Now the GHG inspired radiation may not be able to do much for the water temperature; but it probably can significantly heat the lower air layers; but then if you warm the lower air layers, along comes that convection gremlin, and moves that warm air to a higher altitude where it is colder and less dense.
It’s not easy being atmosphere.
George
Stephen Wilde (12:45:10) :You are absolutely right. What I meant when I said “air” was heat over sea (sun’s heat and warmed air during sun’s daylight), because we all know that air has a too low volumetric heat capacity compared to sea water.
If CO2 is driving a radiative imbalance that is consistently adding joules to the “system” year after year with positive feedbacks dominant, how can the 1997/98 “overshoot” be radiatively dissipating over the next few years?
Wouldn’t the heat accumulation simply continue on top of the ‘98 event rather than dissipating?
Radiative dissipation is another way to describe negative feedback – no?
Are they now admitting that sufficient natural negative feedbacks exist that can overcome both the ‘98 event and the continued radiative imbalance?
@ur momisugly D. Caldwell: that is exactly my point….
CO2-concentration is higher than in 1998. The higher CO2 should prevent that radiative dissipation.
Second question: this radiative compensation of overheating is probably not a unique event. What are the changes of another radiative compensation in 2025 ?
We hypothesize that the established pre-1998 trend is the true forced warming signal
‘Hypothesize’ is science-speak for ‘We don’t know’.
The problem is that 90% of the population don’t know this is what it means.
Otherwise, this is a roundabout response to Pielke senior taking RC to task for not facing up to the fact the ocean heat content data isn’t showing any warming.
And while I am on the subject of science-speak, ‘signal’ means data that is indicative but not direct evidence or measurement.
So you could read the statement above as meaning,
‘We don’t know because we don’t have any data.’
Which is true, as the ocean heat content data only goes back 5 years.
Anthony,
I had the honor of working with a dwarf named Mike Flannigan. Mike was a hellofa engineer and a good soul to boot. He poked fun at his stature, but we that worked with him did not, not because we were PC (engineers remember) but because he was so damn good. OK, his nickname was Mikey.
I agree that some vitrol should be aimed at those who attack rather than reason, but physical stature isn’t in the playing field. Mikey helped me to see that.
I’ll shaddup now.
Mike Bentley
I would like for them to describe the factors how the enviironment “overshot” the mark, then what factors will come back into play in 2020. also, I’m looking for information for the period btwn 1998-2020 – what happens here?
I suppose I’m looking for the models that describe all this…..stuff…..but as I know how statistics are so easily skewed/wieghted/adjusted it’s pretty much meaningless. I’m not sure I can infer anything from what on the surafce should be empirical data – but isn’t.
Reminds me of the fights in the Rocky movies. The big champ (Al “Apollo Creed” Gore) steps into the ring with nobody non-contender (Anthony “Rocky” Watts) and gets his clock cleaned.
This is only the fifth round or so. Wait until the twelfth when the have to carry Apollo out on a stretcher.
Meanwhile the bookies are in a panic and headed for the exits.
tallbloke: You wrote, “Not that much heat escaped that year anyway. Look at Bob Tisdale’s OLR graph for the Nino 3.4 area…”
Though the Global OLR dataset doesn’t disagree with your conclusion, NINO3.4 Outgoing Longwave Radiation is not Global Outgoing Longwave Radiation:
http://i29.tinypic.com/2cn85qe.png