Spencer on Lindzen and Choi climate feedback paper

Does anybody here have a good understanding of how this study compares with the similar (and earlier) study of Ferenc Miskolczi?
see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ykgg9m-7FK4

(1) I am not completely comfortable with their averaging of the satellite data, (2) I get such different results for feedback parameters than they got
I know it’s a big thing to expect, but I hope to see both Richard Lindzen and Yong-Sang Choi here to first give their reasons, and then discuss them with Roy Spencer.
I would expect it would be a congenial interchange.

I too hope that Dr’s Lindzen and Choi will discuss their findings with Dr. Spencer on this blog. I would pay for admission to read the thoughts of these honest and brilliant scientists on this important subject.

He meant in the sense that the slope corresponds inversely to the feedback, so the parameter (slope) has the opposite sign.
A system which responds to warming by slowing infrared cooling further is essentially the climatological equivalent of a divide by zero error. The “no feedback” situation is in fact one in which the normal behavior between radiation and temperature occurs, namely that hotter bodies emit more IR. In more typical terms, this would in fact be called a “negative” feedback. See here:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2009/04/when-is-positive-feedback-really-negative-feedback/

RE evanmjones (19:27:51) :
“Cheez, that ERBE sat. looks like something out of Jules Verne.”
I reckon those two big plates on the top are actually the FLUX CAPACITOR.

theduke said: vincit omnia veritas.
If it does, it takes its sweet time. Meanwhile, vincit prope omnis veritatem.

I predict that McIntyre will find the Lindzen and Choi paper one of the most quietly disturbing papers he has ever read.

bugs,
your predictions are usually wrong. I feel better already!!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Found the reference. So AMIP is included as an integral part in CMIP.
http://www-pcmdi.llnl.gov/projects/model_intercomparison.php
“AMIP – Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project
AMIP is a standard experimental protocol for global atmospheric general circulation models (AGCMs). It provides a community-based infrastructure in support of climate model diagnosis, validation, intercomparison, documentation and data access. This framework enables a diverse community of scientists to analyze AGCMs in a systematic fashion, a process which serves to facilitate model improvement. Virtually the entire international climate modeling community has participated in this project since its inception in 1990.
CMIP – Coupled Model Intercomparison Project
The Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) studies output from coupled ocean-atmosphere general circulation models that also include interactive sea ice. These models allow the simulated climate to adjust to changes in climate forcing, such as increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. CMIP began in 1995 by collecting output from model “control runs” in which climate forcing is held constant. Later versions of CMIP have collected output from an idealized scenario of global warming, with atmospheric CO2 increasing at the rate of 1% per year until it doubles at about Year 70. CMIP output is available for study by approved diagnostic sub-projects. The WCRP CMIP3 multi-model dataset archived at PCMDI, which includes realistic scenarios for both past and present climate forcing, is the latest and most ambitious phase of the project. The research based on this dataset has provided much of the new material underlying the IPCC 4th Assessment Report.”
http://www-pcmdi.llnl.gov/projects/amip/index.php
“AMIP is now an integral part of CMIP
AMIP-style simulations are routinely performed at many climate and NWP centers during model development in order to evaluate atmospheric model performance and identify errors. The systematic intercomparison of atmospheric model components is currently being coordinated under the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP), which includes AMIP simulations as an integral part.”

If I understood it well, coupled model (CMIP) says with increasing surface temperature, there is more IR being emitted out. Lindzen AMIP model shows the opposite – that with the rising surface temperature, the atmosphere (probably because of thickening with water vapor as a secondary positive feedback) blocks the outgoing radiation much more, that it even decreases in time.
Dr Spencer also says that CMIP´s calculated increase of outgoing radiation is not that far from observed reality, while the outgoing IR is a bit higher.

Just to be sure that people don’t oversimplify this debate and don’t consider Spencer or myself traitors. 😉
Lindzen and Choi are using some results of RealClimate’s Ray Pierrehumbert concerning the tropics – he also seems to claim that for zero feedback, the change in the energy flows per degree of warming is close to zero over there.
Richard had to deal with some difficult non-climate stuff but chances are that he will try to convince us in a more detailed text rechecking their points to appear later.

Dr Spencer
I would say in a situation like this, where your results and those of Prof. Lindzen are apparently different, you can either both be fascinated as to why or you can mouth off about each other in public!
To me, it appears that the issue the two of you are addressing is critical in determining how a system returns to equilibrium and hence what the longer-term implications might be.
It also highlights the multiplicity of data sets being collected, the multiplicity of computer models being used and the incomplete understanding of how they all might be brought together.
What I will say is this:
I would make a hunch that given small deviations from equilibrium, the system will tend, usually, to return to equilibrium.
The key question which arises is what causes the deviations to continue to larger magnitudes and what conditions must exist for a new stable state to develop at temperatures considerably different from the older one.
On the understanding of those issues will enlightenment come concerning the nature of 20th/21st century ‘warming’.
A prelude to a long-term warmer steady state?
A prelude to a long-term descent into the next ice age?
Or yet another oscillation cycle around the equilibrium of the past 10,000 years??
The Copenhagen suggestion implies they believe no. 1, although how they have ruled out No. 2 is unclear to me.
Your results might suggest No. 3 is closer to the mark…..
Have the politicians done the calculations on the decision-tree, since it appears to me that No. 3 costs little but No. 1 costs much.
I’d have thought that if No. 3 were 66% plus, then ‘DO NOTHING’ would be irrrefutable.
Does anyone have any evidence-based statistics to point to what the scenario likelihoods are now?

This appears to be an appropriate thread to throw on a link to Trenberth and Fasullo (2009) “Global warming due to increasing absorbed solar radiation.”
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Trenberth/2009GL037527.pdf
Abstract:
“Global climate models used in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) are examined for the top-of-atmosphere radiation changes as carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases build up from 1950 to 2100. There is an increase in net radiation absorbed, but not in ways commonly assumed. While there is a large increase in the greenhouse effect from increasing greenhouse gases and water vapor (as a feedback), this is offset to a large degree by a decreasing greenhouse effect from reducing cloud cover and increasing radiative emissions from higher temperatures. Instead the main warming from an energy budget standpoint comes from increases in absorbed solar radiation that stem directly from the decreasing cloud amounts. These findings underscore the need to ascertain the credibility of the model changes, especially insofar as changes in clouds are concerned.”
Interesting.

Correction, the climate models are using 0.3C per watt/metre^2 in the short-term but are using 0.75C per watt/metre^2 as a long-term equilibrium solution. Even in the short-term response, the models are 3 times too high.

As someone mentioned, Monckton made a definate reference to this paper in his presentation, with a prediction that history would show this was when the AGW hypothesis was falsified. I wondered at the time if Monckton was being a bit premature; issues of this complexity take years to resolve. Now, it seems that the good Lord may have just painted a big bullseye on his forehead for any warmist to take a shot at. Never try and politicise science.

Taking a step back, this is a testament to the complexity of the overall system, and our growing understanding of how feedback systems with hundreds or thousands of players are actually chaotic: one cannot accurately predict an end-state by knowing the beginning state.
To wit:
AGW proponents claim that not only is there correlation, but there is also causality.
AGW skeptics tend to claim that while there may be correlation, there is no causality.
And now we are gettting to the point where we realize that not only is there no *simple* causality, but there are also no simple corrrelations. Feedback systems are highly complex, and often chaotic. We are far from having enough data to drill down even a strong correlation between any pieces of earth data (the solar link may well be more identifiable, since there is probably no real feedback from the earth to the sun).
Finding causality between only a few pieces of a highly complex feedback system is a fool’s errand.
It would not surprise me at all that in the end, we will discover that accurate predictive modeling is out of the question; we can no more simulate *and predict* the global climate than we can the location and velocity of a single electron in a hydrogen atom. And if you think about it, it is not a farfetched analogy.

Wonder what the jet stream was doing during the study period. Since it circles the globe in both hemispheres, picks up (or not) evaporated moisture from the oceans and carries atmospheric conditions over land and sea, any cyclical patterns to it would have huge affects all around the globe.

Roy Spencer (05:27:56)
Roy, are you aware that Lord Monckton has claimed in his recent interview on the Fox News Glenn Beck show that Lindzen and Choi’s ERBE results prove that the climate models have got climate sensitivity wrong by a factor of SIX!
Thank you for conducring some ‘real science’ and for practicing the scientific method and for casting some doubt on this claim as this is what science should be all about namely that one should attempt always to falsify not confirm a previous result when conducting science. If in attempting to falsify a claim you fail and the claim stands up then the claim has some credence until of course the next attempt at falsification proves successful.
In this case your work appears to concluded that Lindzen and Choi are not comparing apples (ERBE data) with apples (CMIP) but rather apples (ERBE data)with oranges (AMIP). Having said that though and having researched the history of coupled ocean-atmosphere climate models somewhat I’m not convinced that thay have any utility other than as ‘sensitivity study tools’. Their value even as ‘sensitivity study tools’ is however strongly determined both the data fed into them and the parameterised equations coded into them and the numerically methods they use. The validity of all three of these facets of the models in predicting future climate are questionable in my opinion. In my opinion data like ERBE’s (provided it hasn’t be adjusted out of all recognition like the instrumental temperature record) will always trump modelling.
KevinUK

Richard M (07:02:12) : I believe it could be argued that the paper indicates that the interpretation of the models has been wrong. Regardless, it’s an interesting paper.

I am getting increasingly irritated at the use of the term “the authors found”, when referring to observing the output of models. While grammatically correct, it leaves the reader with the impression that someone made an observation of the real world, and not some Playstation version of nature. I would rather see something like “the models suggest”.
Besides, it’s been my experience that a person “finds” what they are searching for, whether it be Indian arrowheads or hockey sticks.

One thing I’d like to point out, or, at least share as a personal observation…..we have here people in essentially the same camp tugging in different directions over the same data.
What I think is extraordinary is that this is something I don’t see in the pro-AGW camps. Why is this so important?
Pro-AGW’ers never seem to question each other’s work, never contradict each other, and in so doing, never really allow the truth.

kim (09:55:14) :
“Bob Tisdale @ 4:45:58
So with the cooling phase now, are there more clouds? That would make the increasing CO2 no longer correlated so not causative. Unless the effect changed, and I wouldn’t put it past the ability of this climate system to be that changeable. Perish the thought, which is immortal.”
Reply: It’s not just the amount of cloud that matters. It’s also important to know the type of cloud, it’s thickness, it’s altitude and colour e.t.c. All these factors effect how a given cloud will mediate climate, in conjunction with what’s happening with the other mechanisms it is related to.
Wheels within wheels. No easy answers I’m afraid – but it would be no fun if it was easy.

kim (09:55:14) :
So with the cooling phase now, are there more clouds?
http://www.climate4you.com/images/HadCRUT3%20and%20TropicalCloudCoverISCCP.gif

A more relevant link than the wiki is
http://www-pcmdi.llnl.gov/projects/amip/index.php
where it says that:
“AMIP is now an integral part of CMIP
AMIP-style simulations are routinely performed at many climate and NWP centers during model development in order to evaluate atmospheric model performance and identify errors. The systematic intercomparison of atmospheric model components is currently being coordinated under the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP), which includes AMIP simulations as an integral part.”

“”” Kevin Kilty (20:20:48) :
Dr. Spencer,
You said
“the real climate system cannot have a net negative feedback parameter and still be stable”
I think you meant net positive feedback. “””
Well that is not a true statement either. A net positive feedback CAN be quite stable; and there are many examples of such.
Take the simple Drum brakes that they used to have on cars; before the days of disc brakes. The earlier types of drum brake systems, had two brake shoes which had one end located by a pin attached to the frame of the brake assembly. At the other end of the two shoes, a single hydraulic cylinedr and piston acted to push the two shoes apart, while the other ends were held in place. This pushed the shous outwards to contact the brake drum. Now one of the shoes had the stop pin “ahead” of the moving end, as far as the direction of rotation. This is called a “leading” shoe. When the leading shoe contacts the drum, the friction developed adds to the force pushing the shoe harder against the drum, so a stronger braking torque is generated for a given pedal force. A perfect example of a positive and quite stable feedback system.
Now the other shoe in this simple system has the pin end behind the moving end, in the normal rotation direction; so it is called a “trailing” shoe; and in this case the friction developed between teh shoe and the drum, acts in the opposite direction to “unwrap” the shoe from the drum, and thereby diminish the net friction. this is an example of negative feedback.
Now someone realized that the positive feedback of the leading shoe assisted the driver in applying the brakes with a lower pedal pressure, so they invented a system where the two shoes were linked by a floating pin. and the brake piston moved the floating end of the pair, while the other end was locked by the fixed pin. This gave a “two leading shoe” design which gave much more braking torque than the single leading/trailing shoe design.
But then they discovered a problem. the brake pad material on the shoes had a coefficient of friction which diminished at higher temperatures, and in some cases the resin binder of the pad meaterial would melt and form a shiny layer on the surface of the shoes, with a greatly reduced friction.
With a two leading shoe design where the total braking force depended on the self wrapping feedback, the result of this temperature effect was a serious brake fade, and loss of breaking effect whent he brakes goit hot.
That is one of the problems with positive feedback; the overall gain variability is increased by positive feedback; the system is noisier.
The solution for quality cars was to reverse the system, and make the braking system a two trailing shoe designe; with negative feedback for both shoes. Now the feedback due to the trailing shoes led to self unwrapping, and if the coefficient of friction decreased due to temperature, the unwrtapping feedback effect was diminished so the net force holding the shoes against the drum increased, and the effect of the diminished friction was reduced. The negative feedback of the two trailing shoe designs resulted in a substantial improvement in the brake fade characteristics. The penalty of course was a higher brake pedal force requirement; so additional servo boosters were added to the system to diminish the required pedal pressures.
Of course modern disc brakes have no feedback mechanical effects so the brake fade problem is largely a thing of the past.
Then of course there is the superregenerative receiver, where positive feedback is used to increase the gain of a radiao receiver amplifier. As in the brake case, the presence of positive feedback increases the noise in the system, making the gain less stable; but still not unstable.
The requirement for stability of a feedback amplifier is once again a criterion due to Nyquist. The quantity 1 + AB in Dr Roy’s first post on feedback is known as the Loop gain. The Nyquist criterion for stability is that the complex plane plot of 1+AB from zero to infinite frequency, must not encircle the point -1,0 in that complex plane diagram.
Single pole amplifiers are unconditionally stable, as they can only produce 900 degrees of phase shift at a point where the magnitude of the loop gain is zero, so the locus of the loop gain never crosses the negative real axis at all; or the negative imaginary axis either. A two pole amplifier can produce 180 degrees of phase shift but only at zero magnitude of the loop gain, and the negative real axis is never crossed by the loop gain locus.
With three poles, the phase shift can get to 270 degrees, so both the negative imaginary, and the negative real axes are crossed by the loop gain locus. In some cases the real negative axis is crossed between the origin, and the -1.0 point so the amplifier is stable. In other cases it crosses outboard of the -1,0 point so the amplifier is unstable (oscillator).
A third possibility is for the loop gain locaus to cross the negative real axis beyond the -1 point, but then recross the negative real axis still outside the -1 point, and proceed back to the origin still with a negative imaginary value. This is caalled conditional stability; and it will oscillate and become unstable, if the forward gain is reduced, which will eventually result in the -1,0 point getting encircled by the loop gain locus.
So in the climate system; you could have an overall positive feedback (who knows) but that does not mean that any runaway condition can or will occur. That depends on the loop gain of the feedback system and the root locus plot over all frequencies.
Well climate folks don’t even include time in their feedback circuits, so there is no way they can know whether they are unstable or not.
And I repeat that standard feedback theory assumes that the forward gain block (A) is strictly unidirectional. It is highly unlikely that anything in the climate system that could be compared as an analog of (A), is a simple unidirectional process.
Now this doesn’t mean that feedback analysis cannot be performed on such a system; it just means that the usual simplefied results of ordinary feedback analysis are no longer valid; and the full bidirectional network equations have to be solved fully allowing for the bidirectionality of both the blocks (A) and (B). This complexit will also inevitably get involved in both thdriving point impedance at the signal end, and the load impedance at the output of the fedback system.
I defyt amybody to speculate what those spource and load impedances are; or even what they consist of in the global climate system.
Maybe Peter Humbug has a full bidirectional feedback model of the climate including driving point and load impedances; but I doubt it.
The water cycle has some of the properties of an automobile charging system including the Voltage Regulator. At low charge rates temperatures and water vapor content) there is a positive feedback gain increase; but then whent he temperature gets up to a certain value the “Voltage regulator” kicks in, in the form of formation of precipitation containing clouds; which give a strong negative feedback curtailment of the temperature rise; by stopping solar radiation from reaching the surface, and further raising the temperature.
Only water serves this function in earth’s atmosphere; and that regulated “Voltage” where the warming is terminated; is simply a property of the physical properties of water.

George E. Smith (15:48:54) :
“Of course modern disc brakes have no feedback mechanical effects so the brake fade problem is largely a thing of the past.”
What an excellent and detailed (yet understandable) post. Many thanks.
However can I add another angle to the comment quoted?
It is undoubtedly true that disk brakes are hugely better than drum brakes for out and out performence and temperature handling. However there are other factors that can impact the overall result, an obvious one being the additional complexity of providing a full proof handbrake function for a disk based system. Much easier using a drum brake.
On the plus side they are less prone to the negative braking effects of water immersion.
But braking systems have moved on as people have realised other potential uses for wheel speed control in the computer age and so new challenges have been established that many people are not aware of. Under normal use conditions most people will remain entirely unaware of them all of the time. But run something like an Electronic Stability Control system up to its limits and the situation changes.
Whilst a normal vehicle with equal suspension and tyre pressures will apply a balanced brake force (as per a designed loading split front/rear) to all wheels at the same time the ESC system will apply irregular forces to independent wheels on an as required basis. Normally this is not a problem since applications are light and/or short and are well within the heat dissipation capabilities of the system.
The ESC systems are invariable instituted as part of an ABS setup. Whilst ABS will, in most situations, stop a wheel from locking (more than momentarily) it does mean that people can be sucked in to using their brakes more than normal and more harshly than normal in some situations. If a brake locks the disk/pad are no longer in conflict and heat generation ceases at that point and transfers to the tyre/road surface. (In concept).
If the brake does not lock the disk/pad will continue to generate heat. Thus with heavy use of an ABS system the rate of heat creation could be higher than a non-ABS system and whilst the wheels will not lock (usually), fade can still occur although one may not notice it in the same way since it is masked by the ‘feel’ of the ABS system
It would be unusual to experience this during normal road driving but on a closed track at speed or perhaps an Alpine mountain pass at quite ‘normal’ speeds, the potential for the system to become ‘unstable’ through overheating is quite readily apparent – mainly because it likely works so well that you don’t even think there might be a problem.
Now add in ESC. On a straight road the chances are it is doing nothing at all. At speed on unstraight roads it may be doing a little but you won’t feel it. At speed on a closed track, twisting road or Alpine Pass the chances are it will be working quite hard – much harder than you realise. All that handling ability and stability is not just a great suspension setup, excellent tyres and a fantastic driver – its the braking system being used by the ESC system to keep thing under control.
If you are heavy braking as well the brakes and pads will become progressively hotter. Indeed on a twisty road even if you think you have slowed to ‘cool’ the brakes the chances are that the ESC system has taken on some extra work and you are not actually achieving what you thought you were achieving in terms of brake cooling. There will be brake fade – your first warning may be a burning smell and/or smoke as the pads get very warm indeed. If you are really perceptive (or very short – LOL) you may previously have noticed that the distance you need to push the brake pedal has increased somewhat and that even with it pressed hard against the bulkhead things are still rushing past outside …
Hidden feedbacks you see. There is more to the system than meets the eye.
On the other hand if you have a competition car, usually without any of these driver aids, you may have the opposite problem. Tyre pressures and brake temperatures often rely on a lot of heat build up above ambient for their efficiency. If you don’t work the tyres and they lose heat and so pressure, so surface grip suffers. Don’t use the brakes and the temperatures drop and braking effect suffers. They need heat to work in much the same way that we need heat to survive and thrive. Varying temperatures will have other, often unpredictable, effects on the performance of the car as interpreted by the driver (and maybe any passengers!)
Now let us for an example assume that the only criteria we have for cars is that they must satisfy both regular use (but with the odd traverse of mountain passes from time to time) and high speed competition. We ignore all other design inputs (making assumptions about basic functionality being adequate) and focus solely on the brakes, averaging the results from the extremes of use.
How meaningful would the the model for the global average car actually be and how well could the performance of its brakes, with the ‘expected basic functionality feedbacks’ built in, be assessed against all requirements? After all we are only talking about a bit of heat transfer variability from time to time in what is, most commonly, a fairly stable environment according to usage type.
My guess is that both usage types would still experience brake fade with the global car. For different reasons of course.
Footnote.
I have had all four sets of pads on my car (pads and disks almost new at the time) smoking mightily after a few miles of spirited driving (on a closed track). The world did not end and they recovered what seems to be full performance a few miles of use later. It’s amazing how things survive extremes and stabilise about ‘the norm’ given a chance.

Re AMIP vs. CMIP: AMIP is not part of CMIP, but it is used to validate it. Here is a comment I left on a recent board:
CMIP and AMIP agree closely in their fundamental predictions. If you remove the positive feedback from the AMIP, they will diverge considerably.
In this paper, the authors state of the CMIP models:

The paper then discusses “two recently developed coupled models that do not use flux adjustment.” I read that as, the CMIP models were tweaked specifically to bring them closer in line to the AMIP results, i.e., the AMIP models were used as “truth” models to validate the CMIP. It follows that if the AMIP models are buggered, so are the CMIP models, yes?
The CMIP typically diverges from AMIP. To bring them in line, researchers use fudge factors. Or, they find a CMIP which agrees with AMIP. Therefore, the veracity of AMIP is fundamental.

“A net positive feedback CAN be quite stable; and there are many examples of such.”
Only when stabilized by a more potent negative feedback. Your brake pad example has an overriding negative feedback in the ablation of the asbestos pads, which prevents ever increasing pressure. Or, if the pads cannot ablate fast enough, the wheel locks, at which point the positive feedback has driven you to the boundary of the state space.
A positive feedback within an overall negative feedback loop is not unstable, but it does amplify the response and bring the system closer to the boundary of instability.
Consider a very simple heuristic CO2 model. Let the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere be quantified by X. Assume there is a forcing function pushing CO2 into the air, call it U. At the same time, CO2 is being taken out by processes on the ground, and suppose the rate that they take it out is proportional to the amount in the air with a proportionality constant K > 0. The differential equation is then
Xdot = -K*X + U
The -K*X term is a negative feedback. In the steady state, with U constant, X approaches XSS = U/K.
Suppose there is another process with adds CO2 into the air proportional to the amount already there, with proportionality constant eps > 0. The differential equation becomes
Xdot = -K*X + eps*X + U = -(K-eps)*X + U
As long as K > eps, the system is stable. But, the steady state value of X is XSS = U/(K-eps), i.e., the sensitivity XSS/U is increased by a factor K/(K-eps).
If eps happened to be negative, the sensitivity would have decreased. That is what the Lindzen paper is all about. A positive feedback would amplify the temperature, while a negative one would attenuate it. Lindzen says this crucial feedback, which is positive in all the AIMP models, and begets the increased sensitivity upon which the dire prognostications are based, is, in fact, observationally negative.

I don’t understand either the Lindzen paper or Spencer’s alternative. Here’s my rudementary understanding of thew way things should work from a basic physics perspective. If you can explain how the analysis of the satellite data and the climate system should differ from this, please let me know how and why.
Take the theoretical example of a planet irradiated by a sun and encircled by an imaginary device that measures all radiant energy (black body energy or whatever you want to call it) leaving said planet. Let’s say there is a certain rate of energy absorbed by the planet (actually a sum of energy made by the planet in the form of geothermal energy, plus radiant energy from the sun absorbed by the planet), expressed in watts. Let’s call that number of watts W in. Let’s say that W in is constant over a given interval of time. Now let’s designate the amount of black body irradiation leaving the planet as W out. Let’s start off with the planet very cool, emitting relatively little black body irradiation, such that W out < W in. My understanding of physics, the planet and its atmosphere will gradually warm, this increasing the black body radiation emitted by the planet, until W out approaches and becomes exactly equal to W in. That's the steady state, when the outgoing black body radiation is exactly equal to the incoming radiation absorbed by the planet plus the geothermal energy, W (a measure of power). W out = W in.
Now let's introduce a greenhouse gas into the atmosphere of this hypothetical planet, leaving the input W in the same. What should happen? Well, initially, the amount of black body radiation emitted by the planet should decrease due to the greenhouse gas blocking some of the outgoing black body radiation, such that W out < W in. However, because W out < W in, the planet should gradually warm. How much should it warm? Well, the surface should warm, resulting in more black body radiation leaving the surface, until conditions are met such that, even when some of this radiation is blocked by the greenhouse gas, the total amount of black body radiation leaving the planet once again equals W in. So once again, W out = W in.
So here is the part I don't understand. You have a satellite that is ostensibly measuring black body radiation leaving a planet. It is essentially measuring W out. How can this satellite detect the temperature influence of a greenhouse gas? You may introduce a greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. This will block some of the block body energy leaving the planet; initially the detected W out will decrease, but only for so long as it takes for the surface to warm to compensate for absorbance of the greenhouse case, until W out once again = W in.
So from my perspective as a physicist, a satellite measuring outgoing black body radiation from a planet may see changes in outgoing intensity only under the following conditions:
A) Changes in solar irradiance, resulting in changes in W in.
B) Changes in albedo of the planet, resulting in changes in W in.
C) Changes in the geothermal energy production of the planet, resulting in changes in W in.
D) Changes in the directionality of the flux of energy W out flowing from different parts of the planet (e.g. more proportion of outgoing black body irradiation leaving the equator vs. the poles if the satellite only measures at the equator).
However, a change in greenhouse gases should be completely undetectable to a satellite measuring black body irradiation, even if the surface temperature of the earth beneath the atmosphere changes. And if it is completely insensitive to one greenhouse gas (e.g. CO2), then it will also be completely insensitive to other greenhouse gases (e.g. water vapor, the basis for proposed high climate sensitivities).
What am I not understanding about this discussion?

Bart (19:57:04) :
“Re AMIP vs. CMIP: AMIP is not part of CMIP, but it is used to validate it. Here is a comment I left on a recent board:
CMIP and AMIP agree closely in their fundamental predictions. If you remove the positive feedback from the AMIP, they will diverge considerably.
In this paper, the authors state of the CMIP models:
These coupled climate models have exhibited a problem not evident in the behavior of atmospheric GCMs run with prescribed SSTs and sea ice. Errors in fluxes of heat, momentum and water across the ocean-atmosphere interface can lead to “climate drift” away from observations. Nonphysical, ad hoc flux adjustments were initially regarded as necessary to correct the problem”
The modellers would certain have you believe that ‘flux adjustments’ are no longer required in their latest models BUT who is to say exactly what other ‘adjustments’ they have done to their models in order to keep stable on multi-centennial simulations?
For me, this is just ‘fluff’ and as Steve McIntyre would put it ‘moving the pea under the thimble’ i.e they;ve just swapped in a better numerical method for a lousey numerical method. The fact is the GCMs are full of parameterised equations which can be ‘tweaked’ to produce any desired result and changes to some of these parameters can have dramatic effects on their predictions (or should that be projections?). For example have a look at this link
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2564
From AR4 Chapter 8
“In many climate models, details in the representation of clouds can substantially affect the model estimates of cloud feedback and climate sensitivity (e.g., Senior and Mitchell, 1993; Le Treut et al., 1994; Yao and Del Genio, 2002; Zhang, 2004; Stainforth et al., 2005; Yokohata et al., 2005). Moreover, the spread of climate sensitivity estimates among current models arises primarily from inter-model differences in cloud feedbacks (Colman, 2003a; Soden and Held, 2006; Webb et al., 2006; Section 8.6.2, Figure 8.14). Therefore, cloud feedbacks remain the largest source of uncertainty in climate sensitivity estimates.
”
Yet the science is supposed to be settled to the extent that in December we will sign up to the Copenhagen Climate Change Treaty and transfer up to 2% of our GDP annually to developing countries in compensation for the ‘climate damage’ we have done to them? NOT!
KevinUK

Okay, just me being dumb again. But it seems to me that a satellite that measures outgoing black body irradiation from earth, provided its measurements are that of a steady state system (big if), should only be able to detect climate feedback changes originating from changes in albedo (e.g. clouds). It will not detect any changes in outgoing black body irradiation arising from greenhouse-type effects (e.g. CO2, water vapor, maybe also clouds) – because at least in the steady state, there are none.

Julian (23:56:40) :
I suppose the ERBE scatter plot, that shows Delta(radiationflow) versus delta(SeaSurfaceTemperature) is part of your
Julian (23:46:09) :
Now let’s introduce a greenhouse gas into the atmosphere of this hypothetical planet, leaving the input W in the same. What should happen? Well, initially, the amount of black body radiation emitted by the planet should decrease due to the greenhouse gas blocking some of the outgoing black body radiation, such that W out < W in. However, because W out < W in, the planet should gradually warm. How much should it warm? Well, the surface should warm, resulting in more black body radiation leaving the surface, until conditions are met such that, even when some of this radiation is blocked by the greenhouse gas, the total amount of black body radiation leaving the planet once again equals W in. So once again, W out = W in.
i.e. the transient part until the new equilibrium is reached, that energy has to leave and is what is being measured. That is why Spencer is picking on the short feedback and long feedback issue, a time issue, but before the new equilibrium is reached. Things do not happen instantaneously and give rise to the deltaXXX plotted. These quantities are drastically different for the AMIP protocol following model runs than for the ERBE data, and thus the models are exposed as giving wrong results and therefore should be scrapped..
If as Bart says the CMIP protocol runs are dependent on the AMIP protocol, all models are then exposed as wrong despite what Spencer is talking about above.
quote from Bart (19:57:04) :
Re AMIP vs. CMIP: AMIP is not part of CMIP, but it is used to validate it.
……..
CMIP and AMIP agree closely in their fundamental predictions. If you remove the positive feedback from the AMIP, they will diverge considerably.
……..
The CMIP typically diverges from AMIP. To bring them in line, researchers use fudge factors. Or, they find a CMIP which agrees with AMIP. Therefore, the veracity of AMIP is fundamental.

Julian,
Some of your questions arise, I believe, because you are not clearly distinguishing between the surface of the planet and the top of atmosphere (TOA) where the emissions are being measured here. While it may be legitimate to assume in some models that the planetary surface acts as a blackbody, or more accurately a greybody, radiator, one cannot treat the TOA as one.
If one goes back to the original Kiel and Trenbarth paper to calculate radiative forcing from GHGs, it is clear that they EXPECTED to see a reduction in outgoing radiative emissions in the CO2 bands if atmospheric CO2 increased. This is not compatible with blackbody or greybody radiative behaviour at TOA. If you go to this site:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/How-do-we-know-CO2-is-causing-warming.html you will also see some slightly dubious but probably valid empirical evidence supporting a reduction in radiative flux in the CO2 bands at top of atmosphere over a timeframe (taken from Harries in a series of accessible post-2001 papers) as CO2 has increased.
What I am saying therefore is that while your inferences about greybody behaviour at the surface may be correct, the results being considered here are not “blackbody” nor even “greybody” radiation. They are look instead at the emitted spectrum from the Earth’s surface after it has been filtered and “processed” by Earth’s atmosphere as well as those wavelengths reflected by Earth’s albedo. The variation in these emissions therefore does become a function of: variation in GHGs, changes in albedo and feedback effects on flux induced over different periods of time by the different impacts of changesin temperatures. I hope this helps.

how it became applied to explain a sophisticated paramenter like the earth -well, its probably due to NASA. I’ve always thought that NASA’s grasp of earth science and even physics were dense and incredible. Incidentally, the planet cools through low frequency infrared radiation (below the wavelength absorbed by “greenhouse gasses”); and therefore greenhouse gasses do not reduce the rate of cool-down. Its only through introducing physics used in engineering that the system is contrived otherwise. They just don’t apply.

This letter to Congress, March 2009 explains it fairly well
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/reprint/markey_and_barton_letter.pdf
Lindzen’s analyses are widely quoted therein

on th eSteffan Bolzzman: someone calculated with this that the human emits 500wm/2. Calorimeters and remote sensors detect 85w/m2
500 w/m2 is the required energy to boil sunflower oil

Bill Illis (06:14:37)
it could be calculated according to temperatures. The troposhere loses 6C for every kilometre. At the top of the troposphere, typical temperatures are -60C, varying on season, and equator/pole. At this point c02 has 5% of its peak efficiency, so absorbs at the shoulders where it competes in the same wavelengths as nitrogen and oxygen. There are millions of times more 02 and N2 molecules in the upper troposhere than c02 molecules.
the greenhouse effect takes place at the 1st 15 metres from ground level.
The period of time a molecule like c02 holds heat is a trillionth of a second before it transmits to other molecules with which it thermalises, such as 02 and N2

cba (06:53:37) :
first off Bill – did you ever get the last info I posted for you back on the 350 co2 thread last week???
No, sorry I didn’t see it until now. I checked back a few times but I guess I lost track of the thread. Sorry.
Let’s continue the discussion there, but give me till later tonight to go through it in more detail

George E. Smith (23:08:51) : “Sorry; but I don’t agree…The system will only be unstable when the Nyquist condition says it is unstable…
That is the very definition of dominant positive feedback.
That condition can occur in “negative feedback” systems, because the propagation delays in ….
Then, the negative feedback has become ‘positive feedback’. Why? Because a transport lag can be modeled as a network with right half plane zeros. When you put in a negative feedback, the open loop poles necessarily are attracted to the open loop zeros. If the gain is too high, the poles go over into the right half plane. The feedback becomes self-reinforcing, i.e., an induced positive feedback.
I did not say a more powerful negative feedback will always stabilize a plant. I said it is necessary. But, it is not sufficient. The general rule is, when you have a right half plane pole, for stability, your negative feedback has to be ‘faster’ than the unstable pole. But, it has to be ‘slower’ than any right half plane zero, or ate least some (it only takes one) closed loop poles will migrate into the right half plane.
I’ve actually thought this effect could be used to vet some of the climate models and possibly disqualify some, if anyone involved has the know-how to derive the zero dynamics. Non-minimum phase (right half plane for a linear system) zero dynamics constrain the magnitude of negative feedbacks which would yield a stable system. If we take it as given that the Earth climate is autonomously stable, then any unforced model which became unstable in the presence of known feedbacks would be inadmissible. An instability might be very long term, and so not be observable in a practical time domain simulation.

Thanks, KevinUK. I truly believe clouds are the ultimate factor in all of this. But, nobody really knows clouds, at all.

“The general rule is, when you have a right half plane pole, for stability, your negative feedback has to be ‘faster’ than the unstable pole. But, it has to be ’slower’ than any right half plane zero…”
More generally, it has to be bracketed by the two. Most non-minimum phase systems I deal with are of the former type.

I tried to put my head around this but I can’t. I must be too dumb. Which is just as well, because I don’t understand how a bunch of crapped up computer models can come up with a realistic estimate of climate sensitivity either.

cba (22:24:39)
“Above 4 deg C, warmer water is lower density than colder so it rises.
…
All you’ve got to convey heat down into the oceans from IR at the surface is conduction and whatever convection might actually move low density water down – in opposition to its tendency to rise.”
If I remember rightly from my undergratuate physical oceanography (Southampton Univ) water at depths below 2-3 km is always at 4 deg C, it is thermodynamically fixed at that temp due to pressure, not heat exchange. Since this temp indeed is where water (idiosyncratically) has its density maximum, it would require too much energy to change the temperature and thus lift the whole water column. (If by contrast 0 deg C – the melting point – was the density maximum, like with most other liquids, then we would have a frozen bottom to the oceans and no deep circulation.)
I believe the most important mechanism of taking water down – and the heat that the water has down with it – is downwelling at cold locations: an important example is the Norwegian sea. Major downwelling at the Norwegian sea drives a southward deep current; the North Atlantic drift is a surface current going the opposite direction, perhaps in a compensatory manner.
However downwelled water at the Norwegian sea will be colder than 4 deg C. Relative to the 4 deg C deep water, downwelled water from the surface brings down cold (so to speak) not heat. So the interesting question is – when this water reaches the bottom and attains the forced temperature of 4 deg C, where does the energy come from to raise it to that temperature? Does gravitational pressure effectively heat the water?

Phlogiston (01:57:22) :
cba (22:24:39)
“Above 4 deg C, warmer water is lower density than colder so it rises.”
Water also has the unusual property of to start expanding below 4C and contracting above 4C as its polarities of molecules attract with greater force. Its usually thought this happens at the interface between liquid and solid

Philogiston,
Sounds about like what I recall hearing/reading. Of course by the time one reaches a km down, one has no relevent visible light energy reaching there to heat up things and by the time one jumped in the water, their feet were a long long way below where IR can reach directly. For the far northern (or far southern) climes, one does have the case of turnover going on but this is not the area where one gets much solar energy power from.
Concerning your interesting question, the gravity potential energy should convert to some heat as one drops a chunk of water down deeper and and there is some also some energy from an increase in pressure as water is not perfectly incompressible. It is a fairly good insulator. FInally, one has geothermal energy coming in from below. While small compare to radiative values, the ocean is only dealing with conductive and convective modes of heat transfer.
P Wilson,
I was using the 4 deg C as the example – which is valid for fresh whater but like the freezing point, it is slightly different for salt water, which is denser than fresh as well so it adds complexity that may be very important in some situations but can obscure the basic concepts as well in understanding.
Concerning the life factor and energy conservation, there certainly is some effect as life absorbs energy and generally converts it to chemical storage of some sort – either that or uses it and it ultimately converts to heat. Life, even though it’s responsible for 21% oxygen in the atmosphere, is still a tiny fraction of energy balance in terms of absorption and generally, it’s not permanent on the moderate term, except perhaps for rock formation. A tree absorbs energy and makes wood. A fire will release that energy again. Decay will ultimately release the energy again. And on the long term, I bet even the rock – calcium carbonate built – up by life absorbing energy is going back into the subduction zones and will be cooked back into its original constituents giving back its energy.

cba:
(1) I don’t understand your whole point about the LW radiation not penetrating. Indeed, the skin layer plays the important role of reducing the transfer of the heat that is absorbed from the SW radiation back out into the atmosphere. See further discussion here: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/09/why-greenhouse-gases-heat-the-ocean/
(2) You seem to be waving your hands around a lot talking about seasonal changes and what that has to say about the time constant for heating the oceans and then you go off on a big tangent about the relative radiation received by the two hemispheres and their climate, but it seems to me you are generating more “heat” than “light”. In particular, if you really believe that this shows anything significantly wrong with the time constants derived for long-term warming of the climate system, then you ought to be able to point to some definite issues, e.g., you could point to demonstrations that the climate models that forecast this timescale for response to the long-term warming aren’t able to correctly simulate the seasonal cycle or the relative temperatures of the two hemispheres. If that were the case, then we might really have something interesting to talk about, but to me your arguments now just seem like a lawyer bringing up all sorts of superfluous issues and questions in an attempt to distract the jury from the fact that his client was caught red-handed with the murder weapon.

“”” Joel Shore (10:23:19) :
” But, my point simply is that making a statement like, “The atmosphere will reach equilibrium in days to weeks, if not hours – proven by the existence of seasons with warm and cold weather” is really way too simplistic. “””
Say Joel,
Why don’t you give me a shout, next time you obseve; or even hear about the atmosphere being in “equilibrium.”
That I gotta see !

Phil. (05:34:50)
“You’ve described freshwater, saltwater has its maximum density at the freezing point.”
You’re right, I stand corrected. Seawater (35 p/th) does not have a density minimum at 4 C but actually subzero. But sea ice floats. So close to or at freezing there must be expansion. I looked up some references – there is in fact small adaiabatic warming of water when it descends to kilometer depths due to slight compression.

“”” Phlogiston (14:55:18) :
Phil. (05:34:50)
“You’ve described freshwater, saltwater has its maximum density at the freezing point.”
You’re right, I stand corrected. Seawater (35 p/th) does not have a density minimum at 4 C but actually subzero. But sea ice floats. So close to or at freezing there must be expansion. I looked up some references – there is in fact small adaiabatic warming of water when it descends to kilometer depths due to slight compression. “””
The data I have says that salt water freezes at its point of maximum density for about 2.47% salinity. Sea water averages about 3.5% salinity, so seawater has a positive temperature coefficient of expansion always above its freezing point; and the problem with the freezing, is that the segregation coefficient ejects the salt on freezing so that the frozen sea ice is still pretty much fresh water (with inclusions of salt laden brines) In any case the isea ice is less dense that the surface waters, and the waters below have a positive coefficient of expansion; so there always is a positive convection density gradient in sea water; meaning that warmer waters want to rise, and colder waters sink.
Another problem is that at greater depths the sheer water pressure depresses the freezing temperature; so the water never freezes other than at the surface. The “lake turnover effect” is a phenomenon of fresh water lakes only; because of the 4 deg C temperature of maximum density OF FRESH WATER.
Engineers actually have to build stuff that works in a real world setting; so what may happen inside a computer simulation is of little use if it doesn’t properly model the real world.
For me it has been very beneficial to work as an engineer, as a Physicist, rather than an EE of ME or such; because I can always go back to the bare metal, and work with the physical fundamentals.
So I can start with a slab of Silicon (or Gallium Arsenide for that matter) and I can design the doping processes to create the various semiconducting layers; then I can design the active and passive circuit elements; and figure out how to build them out of the process layers; and then I can also do the detailed circuit design; specially in the analog world (digital circuit design is trivial ( at the circuit design level; not the logic design level)).
While I can and have done digital or mixed signal circuit design, I draw the line at programming any of that stuff. I never could come to grips with Smith’s first law of programming; “Before doing anything; it is always necessary to first do something else; no matter where you start.”
That is why Micro$oft Windows is the world’s largest computer virus; constructed of layer upon layer of bandaid’s du Jour.
I find too many people who write software never ever use it themselves.
Try taking some relatively ordinary process spec, and follow it to the letter; meaning; “Do what I tell you to do, when I tell you to do it; and do nothing at all (except continue to breathe) that I do not specifically tell you to do.”
In other words; assume nothing that you are not specifically told to do, is required to run the process.
Very few process specs following this rule, result in carrying out the process they were written for. In the end; operators make assumptions that they need to do things that are not specified. That’s great so long as you still have that operator; but try running the process; without that operator and see what happens to your product.

One must deal in concepts other than pure textbook equilibrium. For instance a star is said to be in radiative equilibrium because it’s not collapsing or blowing up or even oscillating or fundamentally changing to any degree. Despite this, fusion is going on, hydrogen to helium (actual process is not important to this discussion), energy is flowing outward by radiative in some layers and by pure convection in other layers until it escapes into space. On the flip side, the material is attracted towards the center and it is a fluid which would/will collapse were it not for the injection of more energy inside. For a star like the Sun, this keeps up in a fairly stable fashion for several billion years. There is a temperature gradient starting around 16 million kelvins in the interior and by the time one reaches what we see every day, the photosphere, it’s down to around 6000 kelvins. It’s clearly not in thermal equilibrium yet it is in what is termed radiative equilibrium.
Joel shore, you say you’re a physicist (although some of your arguments have reminded me of the term ‘activist lawyer’ more so than the term ‘physicist’ at times as well). I am perplexed that you refer to some of my comments as handwaving when I’m attempting to convey things that a physicist should be able to grasp quite readily when laid out properly. I’m usually pretty good at laying things out in an understandable fashion and am concerned that perhaps I didn’t succeed in this effort.
The skin effect is simply the fact that the ‘skin’ has conducted/convected/evaporated/radiated off every bit of energy it can receive from below (and above) and that the temperature had to drop for energy to balance. It’s cooler condition also means that there is a greater delta temperature which results in an increase in conduction of heat to the layer.
The SW is going to penetrate, to a very limited amount below the region an amateur diver can go. Most will be absorbed much higher and only SW will penetrate down. It doesn’t take long before even the visible reds are missing. No IR is going anywhere and no IR / temperature effect on the ‘skin’ is going to have any measureable direct effect upon the incoming SW. The only significant effect is going to be more IR creating more evaporation creating more rising parcels of moist atmosphere that are likely to turn into clouds which will block massive amounts of incoming SW when present.
You’ve mentioned something about NH SH examples with Dec. 21 that didn’t make much sense as to what you’re driving at. Let’s put it more into a context and have you try it again. Peak solar occurs around June and minimum solar occurs around December. The difference from our orbital eccentricity is about 90 W/m^2 peak to peak and it looks rather much like a sine wave. Why don’t you ascertain the average solar incoming for NH and SH summers and try your arguments again. Despite NH summer time having an average power that is less than the SH’s average power incoming, the NH is slightly warmer in summer than the SH is in summer. The other factor is what is the fraction of NH land mass versus ocean surface and what is the fraction of SH land mass versus ocean surface? The answer should be telling about the effect of oceans and their storage versus continents with a particular lack of storage and convection.
phlogistan,
thanks for looking up the ref. it’s nice to get validated on theory sometimes.

cba says:

Joel shore, you say you’re a physicist (although some of your arguments have reminded me of the term ‘activist lawyer’ more so than the term ‘physicist’ at times as well).

Whatever. It would be helpful to know what your background is. I had earlier guessed you were in the atmospheric sciences but not climate science, although your description of stellar processes got me thinking astrophysics?

No IR is going anywhere and no IR / temperature effect on the ’skin’ is going to have any measureable direct effect upon the incoming SW. The only significant effect is going to be more IR creating more evaporation creating more rising parcels of moist atmosphere that are likely to turn into clouds which will block massive amounts of incoming SW when present.

Well, what do you make of the experiment described in this RealClimate post: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/09/why-greenhouse-gases-heat-the-ocean/ ? I am trying to understand your hypothesis. Here’s what it seems to be to me, correct me if I am wrong: There are large fluxes of SW and LW energy impinging on the surface. You seem to be positing that if the LW energy increases a little bit, then the result will (or may?) be very different than if the SW energy increases a little bit. I.e., the longwave increase will all go into evaporating moisture and producing more clouds and lowering albedo.
My question is what evidence you have to back up this hypothesis? Is there any support for it in the current literature? As far as I understand it, the general belief has been that the cloud feedback is mainly sensitive to the change in temperature, not the nature of the radiation that has increased.
Also, it is far from obvious that an increase in temperature would cause an increase in cloudiness since the atmosphere both warms (so the saturation vapor pressure increases) and moistens. In fact, the current climate models generally tend to predict an overall DECREASE in cloudiness as the climate warms, which causes both an increase in the escape of LW radiation from the atmosphere into space and an increase in SW radiation to the surface. In fact, although it varies from model-to-model, this tends to occur to a degree that by 2100 that there is very little net change in LW radiation and most of the change in radiative heat balance is provided by a change in SW radiation ( http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Trenberth/2009GL037527.pdf ) Of course, there is a fair bit of uncertainty in this due to the uncertainty in the cloud parametrizations.

The other factor is what is the fraction of NH land mass versus ocean surface and what is the fraction of SH land mass versus ocean surface?
The answer should be telling about the effect of oceans and their storage versus continents with a particular lack of storage and convection.

I agree…I think it tells us that the oceans have a large thermal inertia.

In 2009 (July) NOAA said ocean surface heated a lot, and the air heated a little. How can the air be heating the oceans when the ocean surface heats more than the air? its something of an impossibility.
The AGW consensus are moving the argument to oceans, hitherto overlooked, as the air temps failed to materialise, although that is going to be even more difficult to justify, and bring forth greater contradictions.

That Realclimate ocean skin theory is a bit of a hobby horse of mine because I see it as the only hope that the AGW theory has of overcoming the problem of getting air to warm oceans.
Given that the oceans control air temperatures they really do have to demonstrate warming oceans in order to maintain any credibility.
In effect the Realclimate theory relies on Fourier’s Law but ignores the much more powerful contrary effect of increased evaporation.
I have done my best to analyse the issues here:
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=4245
and if I have made any serious error I would like to know.

“The thing is that greenhouse gases absorb incoming solar energy at several wavelengths of the solar spectrum but only radiate it out again in the infrared.
Consequently increased greenhouse gases intercept some of the solar energy that would otherwise reach the ocean surface and penetrate it to add to ocean energy content.”
Water vapour absorbs some incoming solar radiation where it coincides with its wavelengths, and c02 absorbs some IR at 2.7 and 4. It is the LW that is seen as important for ghg’s – 4-10 and 13-70 microns for water vapour, although water vapour spans the whole range from 0.9 microns to 70 microns in the wavelength.
For the purposes of Atospheric temps however, it is the longwave that climatology thinks is the important factor

joel shore,
Rutherford is attributed with having said something like ‘physics is science. all else is stamp collecting’. I suppose you could say I do a bit of science and a bit of stamp collecting. I find that tending to categorize others is usually an indication of an attempt to change the issue or attack the opponent.
BTW, you’ve got albedo backwards. Cloud presence increases albedo and reduces total incoming power, especially the power capable of being deposited deeper in the ocean. Also, even incoming solar has a greater fraction below the visible than in the visible range.
Looking at the experiment, the first thought that came to mind was the not too relevent thought that mathematicians should leave physics to physicists. It was hard to follow and made little sense. And, it doesn’t prove what the author claims.
As an example, radiation is emitted from everything that above absolute 0. In a box of uniform temperature containing an object of same temperature, that radiation is balanced between that emitted by the object and that absorbed by the object. Consequently, nothing is changing concerning heat flow.
The author does determine that the ‘skin’ drops in temperature relative to the 5cm interior as the atmosphere radiates back less. What he fails to present (or perhaps fails to realize) is that as long as there is a difference in temperature between the ‘skin’ and the 5 cm point is that the heat flow from the interior is lower than what the ‘skin’ will radiate/convect/evaporate away. Rather he presumes that the emission will be less if the temperature gradient decreases. It doesn’t work that way. If there were no ‘skin’ effect, the temperature would be higher in the skin and it would radiate at a higher rate and the limitation would be with the surface. Also, the author only considers radiation.
His cloud cover is going to increase LW a bit but it’s going to decrease SW substantially. There’s going to be less heat entering the ocean at depth so less that needs to escape to maintain a balance.
Being the author has some nice fancy equipment and one would expect him to be able to correctly use it, I won’t comment on his measured results. There is though plenty of opportunity for plenty of problems.
Of course his co2 doubling delta forcing is the typical over estimate based upon clear sky tropopause altitude. In reality, it’s closer to 3.5 or 3.6 W/m^2 than to 4.0 and it’s not that meaningful since as you go higher – say to 70km, you find the co2 doubling effect for radiative transfer is closer to 2.6 W/m^2 (assuming fixed temperatures).
Concerning your interpretation of my statements, it’s fairly close. The increase in IR cannot heatup the ocean lower than the surface. It can though heat up the surface as well as evaporate more moisture. The experiment shows that in the data, using his results, the surface was never heated up beyond the 5cm layer. That means no actual heating is occuring from the surface. All one can claim from it is that the flow rate is reduced due to back radiation – but again, because the temperature is not at or above the 5cm below the surface point, the limitation in outgoing power (of all types) is due to the heat flow limitation below.
What claims do you feel need verification or validation? Generally, the scientific method simply requires a hypothesis to be falsified given one solid case of the data refuting it. Considering the state of cloud cover understanding including formation, it’s a bit premature to claim much of anything beyond the way basic physics works.
BTW, you’ll note that the experimental relationship established by that author shows 0.002 K/W/m^2. If the relationship were correct, it’d result in a whopping increase of 0.016 k rise for TWO doublings of CO2. That will result in a radiative increase of 0.09 W/m^2 despite the reception of an additional 8 W/m^2. This 8 W/m^2 is far IR and it isn’t going down into the ocean as radiation and 2nd law says it isn’t going down period. It’s also not radiating away so what do you think that leaves for the ‘disposal’ of this extra power?
while the general concensus of cloud formation is probably temperature, the nature of the radiation concerned may have an effect upon that temperature. Really short uV doesnt make it down through the atmosphere. IR doesn’t penetrate the ocean. Longer uV can ionize as can cosmic rays. Ion trails abound and there is a relationship (original wilson cloud chamber experiment was about cloud formation).
The bit of uncertainty in your cloud formation is more like the ten ton King Kong being called a little monkey. Cloud variation of albedo over the last 30 years is about 10 times greater than the dynamic range of the ipcc’s little uncertainties bar chart for all the forcings. Evidently, the other forcings and uncertainties are so small relative to this that they decided just to truncate it at something that fits within the chart in order for the other forcings to be seen.
you seem to confuse the simple notions of large inertia and large effect. Let’s try a simple electrical analogy. Let’s say you have a 12V power pack composed of D-cells in parallel with a 100AH 12V car battery feeding a 10 Amp headlight. Now let’s add one more item, a 10 k ohm resistor is connecting the car battery to the rest of the circuit. By itself, the D-cells could run this light for perhaps an hour to two hours and with a good connection, the car battery could run it for perhaps ten more hours. How substantial is this car battery reservoir going to be and how long will it keep the light lit? Just to provide the answer here, the car battery won’t discharge for quite a few days but its effect upon light will be so small as not even heat it up to a dull glow.
The moral of the example is that it’s not the size of the reservoir but the flowrate in and out of the reservoir that counts towards its contribution to the rest of the system. Applied to an ocean and climate, it means that the longer the time constant, the less the impact will be while it approaches some sort of equilibrium or constant state.
The fact that the NH has greater land surface and less ocean surface than the SH and achieves a warmer temperature in summer despite a significant increase in solar incoming radiation on average for the SH summer indicates there’s a difference between ocean and land effects. However, the fact that both have seasons that are somewhat comparable means there is not some massive difference brought on by mostly ocean. What’s more, precession does occur and eventually, over several thousand years, the aphelion and perihelion dates are going to swap around such that the NH gets the max during its summer and the SH gets the minimum during its summer. Since this has happened many times in the past and the Earth didn’t burn up totally you can also kiss your notion of high sensitivities goodbye and the proof of that is staring at you in the bathroom mirror early every morning.

cba says:

Didn’t you know? cloud cover is formed because of low moisture content LOL. I guess if they are going to violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics, they might as well trash the water vapor cycle as well.

These claims about violating the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics get rather tiresome. Where are you proposing the conventional theories violate this law?
As for the water vapor cycle, the point is that both temperature and water vapor are increasing as the climate system warms. In fact, both models and observations suggest that they seem to do so in a way that keeps the relative humidity on average roughly constant (although it does increase in some places and decrease in others). Hence, it is not at all obvious in which direction cloudiness will go.
And, if you want to argue that reduced cloudiness with warming is unphysical, then you would also have to take this up with Richard Lindzen, since it is the basis of his “iris hypothesis” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iris_hypothesis ) that warming would lead to a reduction of cirrus clouds (which reduce outgoing LW radiation more than incoming SW radiation) and that this would thus increase the amount of heat escaping to space, providing a negative feedback.

“To conclude, it is perfectly physically consistent to expect that increasing greenhouse gas driven warming will heat the oceans – as indeed is being observed.”
from your referenced article – what is being claimed amounts to colder atmosphere heats warmer water. What’s more, the presumption is present that because there is an extremely minor increase in the skin temperature, that this means the oceans will warm. there’s plenty of other references around as to 2nd law violations.
as for relative humidity staying constant with increase in temperature – that’s a so what. It offers nothing as to suggest a change in the way cloud cover behaves. It does offer something entirely different though.
If one presumes constant relative humidity, one has the problem that the increase in absolute humidity cannot provide anywhere close to the positive feedback being promised from h2o vapor.
Lindzen’s early ideas concerned high level clouds. I believe that his view has changed some with time. I think there is an iris effect and it associated with low level clouds. Those cirrus clouds of the original iris effect are rather high up and the factors involved are quite complex and still not well understood but include factors such as dissipating thunderstorms. Just for the record, Lindzen is an expert on clouds and cloud formation and I am definitely not.
One problem with the more radiation escaping to space is that thick clouds (radiatively speaking) not only substantially block radiation from the surface, they also are composed of particles, ice and water droplets which also radiate a continuum – like a surface. That’s not to say exactly like a surface but then again, continuum emissions from small particles I think is still an active and ongoing area of research. Also, the temperatures are a bit cooler there so the total radiation is not as much – although only about 70% of the surface radiation under clear skies makes it to space. Then again, clear skies radiate around 260-270 w/m^2 and the balance point with current albedo is around 235 w/m^2 so we’d be in real trouble if that 60% + cloud cover radiated much over around 220 w/m^2 anyway.
While ice may have high reflectivity in the visible, both it and liquid water reflectivity plummets as one enters the micron wavelength range.
Since the claim is that cirrus clouds are supposedly quite transparent to visible, making them low albedo, their disappearance should result in increased clear skies and more outgoing radiation. However, despite what Lindzen’s view is, my own view is closer to the surface for the main iris effect. We’ll just have to see how that one plays out.
Also, less cirrus doesn’t necessarily mean less of the ‘averaged’ cloud that provides the overall averaged effect. There’s still plenty of opportunity for that as well.
Concerning again, the notion of relatively fixed rh, it should be obvious that rising temperatures cannot increase the absolute humidity in places where there is no available additional water to become vapor. Hence, one cannot expect a uniform increase. I think though that the important concept to draw from this arena is that CO2 without feedbacks is capable of around 1/2 to 1 deg C rise in temperature for a doubling. If one assumes a 5 deg C rise in temperature due to the co2 doubling and the h2o feedback, one finds that the permissible increase in absolute humidity caused by a 5 deg. C rise is roughly comparable to the same power absorption increase for water vapor as for the CO2 doubling. That leaves one short by 3 degrees C in causality. If one assumes only a 2 deg C rise total, again with the co2 around 1 deg.C, one finds that this rise only increases absolute humidity by a small fraction of the previous amount. Net result is that there is still insufficient feedback to produce a 2 deg C because the water vapor feedback increase is much less than the forcing from a doubling in co2. Consequently, anything resembling catastrophic warming due to water vapor feedback is missing the causality needed for it to occur.

addendum: convection, not radiation. Its believed that overcast nights are warmer because of infrared radiation from earth being held by clouds. In fact, overcast skies means that convection is being limited, whilst on clear nights, convection isn’t limited

p wilson,
P.S.
that was the first time I’ve been to real climate this year. I avoid it as I find their claims about being scientific to be quite nausiating.

I mean something else. I think it is convection holding in heat when cloud cover makes it warmer at night when there is clou cover. Its not much considered as a possibility in the climatologist community, just like oceans were not much considered hitherto -very little radiation leaves the earth. A clear sky gives to heat convection occuring, whilst cloud blocks convection, as overcast nights give stable air layers so it is warmer at the surface. Sure, radiation takes place, though quite negligible.

Smokey,
Repeating posting up plots that are nonsense doesn’t do anything but discredit the arguments of the so-called climate “skeptics” by illustrating how little skepticism you actually have and how the skeptic movement is based on just repeating the some debunked arguments over and over. It makes it easy for the policymakers to ignore you because you are dooming yourself to irrelevancy. It also shows a deep and profound lack of personal responsibility. (Perhaps you would behave more responsibly if you didn’t hid behind a pseudonym, a point that Anthony makes when those who disagree with his point of view use them.)
Your first plot is from radiosonde sensors, for which the long term trends in humidity are simply unreliable due to changes in sensor technology and other problems. The short-term variations in humidity both from radiosondes and satellite data in fact show that the water vapor feedback is operating as expected…and the long-term trends from the satellite data (which also have to be treated with some caution but are better than the radiosonde data) support this too. See http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;310/5749/841 and http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/323/5917/1020
Your other two plots suffer from the problem that they look at temperature trends over short periods of time, conveniently cutting off the data at shorter times as well as the data since 2008. Here in Rochester, it got well into the 60’s the last 2 days and I am quite sure that a plot of temperature over the last week would show not only an upward trend but quite a strong one. Do you think this provides convincing evidence disproving the seasonal cycle theory whereby the temperature trend in Rochester should be negative at this time of year? Furthermore, if it is then cooler in the next few days, is it okay for me to continue to show a plot ending today when I try to convince people that the “seasonal cycle theory” is wrong?

cba says:

Rutherford is attributed with having said something like ‘physics is science. all else is stamp collecting’. I suppose you could say I do a bit of science and a bit of stamp collecting. I find that tending to categorize others is usually an indication of an attempt to change the issue or attack the opponent.

I am just trying to understand where you are coming from. And, as I noted to Smokey, people who use pseudonyms and disagree with Anthony Watts on AGW and post here tend to be given a hard time about using pseudonyms rather than posting under their real name.

BTW, you’ve got albedo backwards. Cloud presence increases albedo and reduces total incoming power, especially the power capable of being deposited deeper in the ocean.

Yeah…I said “lower albedo” when I should have said “raising albedo” in that post that you are referring to.

As an example, radiation is emitted from everything that above absolute 0. In a box of uniform temperature containing an object of same temperature, that radiation is balanced between that emitted by the object and that absorbed by the object. Consequently, nothing is changing concerning heat flow.
The author does determine that the ’skin’ drops in temperature relative to the 5cm interior as the atmosphere radiates back less. What he fails to present (or perhaps fails to realize) is that as long as there is a difference in temperature between the ’skin’ and the 5 cm point is that the heat flow from the interior is lower than what the ’skin’ will radiate/convect/evaporate away. Rather he presumes that the emission will be less if the temperature gradient decreases. It doesn’t work that way. If there were no ’skin’ effect, the temperature would be higher in the skin and it would radiate at a higher rate and the limitation would be with the surface. Also, the author only considers radiation.

No, it seems to be you who are only considering radiation. The author’s point, as illustrated in the flow chart is that the warming of the skin layer reduces conduction of heat from the ocean to the atmosphere through that layer.

The bit of uncertainty in your cloud formation is more like the ten ton King Kong being called a little monkey. Cloud variation of albedo over the last 30 years is about 10 times greater than the dynamic range of the ipcc’s little uncertainties bar chart for all the forcings. Evidently, the other forcings and uncertainties are so small relative to this that they decided just to truncate it at something that fits within the chart in order for the other forcings to be seen.

How do you know what the cloud variation of albedo has been…and are you also considering the change in LW radiation that the clouds produce?

you seem to confuse the simple notions of large inertia and large effect.
…
The moral of the example is that it’s not the size of the reservoir but the flowrate in and out of the reservoir that counts towards its contribution to the rest of the system. Applied to an ocean and climate, it means that the longer the time constant, the less the impact will be while it approaches some sort of equilibrium or constant state.

No…I am not confusing a large inertia with a large effect. The effect is what it is given the radiative forcing produced. The inertia just tells you how long it takes to reach radiative balance. I’m not claiming that the ocean increases the amount of warming; I am claiming that it slows down the warming so it takes a longer period of time to occur (and if you start talking about oscillatory forcings, such as the seasonal forcing, then it can even reduce the effect because the delay in the response of the system means that it never gets into radiative balance).

What’s more, precession does occur and eventually, over several thousand years, the aphelion and perihelion dates are going to swap around such that the NH gets the max during its summer and the SH gets the minimum during its summer. Since this has happened many times in the past and the Earth didn’t burn up totally you can also kiss your notion of high sensitivities goodbye and the proof of that is staring at you in the bathroom mirror early every morning.

Nonsense. If this were the case, then models with high sensitivities would show such problems when one ran them with the sort of insolation variations that you describe. Do you have any evidence whatsoever that this occurs?

The only way a doubling of c02 could lead to an increas of 1/2 to 1C could take place is if c02’s molecular structure changed to increase its bandwidth of absorbtion. This is not a possibility. Regardless of quantity, whether 200ppm or 500ppm, it still absorbs at an optimum 15micron peak, so over its entire shoulders and peak, this is less than 8% of longwave radiation (which, incidentally, is a small fraction of outgoing heat. Most is convection and evaporation). Only 8% or less radiation is available to c02 to be absorbed, and this doesn’t increase with doubling. so: Assuming 33C (neither proven nor falsified) – 33Cx2% outgoing radiationx8%=0.05 for all c02
even if we were to accept the exagerrated claim that 41% radiation leaves earth, the scenario still can’t be justified.
So 33°C X 41% X 8% = 1.08°C — The total heat that CO2 supposedly produces.
however, as maintained above, there is no physical mechanism for c02 causing a water vapour feedback. Water vapour could cause a negligible amount of its own feedback, as it has more absorbtion spectra than c02, although it is a feedback from solar forcing.
In truth though, neither ghg can absorb much LW radiation, as cooling via radiation takes place below the bandwidths available to them, and largely escapes them.
The most potent of the ghg’s – is water vapour, though it doesn’t react with c02 as an amplified product. thats a purely philosophical notion from computer models.
The ocean doesn’t have a skin. It has the same molecular structure as any other layer within its vicinity, and turns over regularly. (being a liquid).
stephen Wilde explained the process well in his link above

George E. Smith (14:23:48) :
“Negative feedback systems subtract from the input signal AT ZERO FREQUENCY; while Positive feedback system add to the input signal AT ZERO FREQUENCY.”
That is a rather arbitrary distinction which would make all Type II stabilizing feedback “positive”. Really, you are more interested in the gain at the crossover frequency.

Smokey (16:42:09) :
Poor Joel. Anything he disagrees with gets hand-waved away like this: “Plots that are nonsense”. In fact, he repeatedly labels cba’s different opinion ‘nonsense’. It’s becoming clear who’s spouting the nonsense.
——————————
Not totally true Smokey. He has other tools besides hand-waving. All, of course, designed to get the new reader to believe that there is still some controversy in the field regarding the now farcical doomsday scenario.
For example:
(1) He also doesn’t respond to certain “unpleasant” comments, such as my remark to his suggestion that the 2006 book on temperature reconstruction proxies is “respected”. Since the Briffa expose, I suggested obliquely that the hard copy of this work is probably about as “respected” as toilet paper right about now.
(2) When lost for data, he also falls back on the “trust me I’m a doctor” approach and suggests that the poster believe “some” or “all of” the models by unnamed “peer-reviewed by their mates” scientists, that are not even referenced, let alone what the inputs are (since he likely doesn’t know himself – or care for that matter).
(3) ….. and then, presumably to try to impress the mentally soft reader, he will also explain how the world as Joel Shore sees it is the only way possible that the world could be, and people who really should know better should see the world exactly as Joel Shore sees it, and he’s totally dumbfounded as to why they don’t.
I kinda like him on here. I suspect that the number of converts he has to his name is, in round numbers, probably a round number. He provides good talking points for other posters, with more knowledge in specific areas, to demolish in public.

P Wilson (14:37:07)
I accept that even the effect of more CO2 over land is in debate but the effect of it over land is nevertheless very different from it’s effect over water and that was the point I was trying to get across.
I felt it prudent not to challenge the so called consensus regarding the effect over land because that would have distracted from the main point.
That said, I am not yet convinced by the suggestions that CO2 does not have a warming effect even over land. Of course it will be largely offset by increased convection, radiation and some evaporation and evapotranspiration but those effects are as nothing compared to the evaporation effect over water.

cba says:

If you want people to stop accusing warmers of theories that violate the 2nd law of thermo, then they need to stop making statements implying that they are promoting theories in violation of the 2nd law. The (lack of) rigor in the statement leaves them open to the charge, regardless of whether the actual mechanism being presumed does or does not violate it.

Frankly, I think this is a poor excuse for putting up bogus arguments. The statements seem to only imply such things to people who want to interpret them in the most critical light. And, if people think that the lack of rigor in the statement is a problem, they could do what Alistair Fraser does ( http://www.ems.psu.edu/~fraser/Bad/BadGreenhouse.html ) and suggest more rigorous pedagogy rather than pretending that they have a substantive disagreement. That what a real scientist would do rather than someone who just sees himself as a lawyer trying to raise doubts about AGW. I know it is always tempting to set up “strawmen” and know them down but such temptation should be resisted.

As for Anthony, he is provided a private email address which carries a bit more information than some blind third party blind address.

Right…and in some cases, he has used that information to say publicly where people using pseudonyms are posting from and has challenged them to drop their pseudonym and post under their real name. You are fortunate enough that you are on the “correct side” as far as he is concerned. When this happens, I hope you will defend the right of people on “my side” of the argument to use pseudonyms if they so desire.
At this point, I am no longer sure what we are even arguing about in regards to the skin temperature and the albedo.

The inertia isn’t just time duration, it’s intensity too. Large inertia with a long time delays have far less effects than does a large inertia with very a short time delay. Do you realize that the Earth’s center is about the same temperature as the Sun’s photosphere? The mass of the Earth is far far larger than the mass of Earth’s oceans. The time to reach equilibrium is in the billions of years and the effect of that additional geothermal power does not on average provide any significant fraction of a degree C of surface temperature rise.

As near as I can figure out what you are saying, I don’t think this is a good analogy. For the case of heat transfer out from the earth’s center, one can calculate that in W/m^2 and find that it is very small. We can also calculate the radiative imbalance due to an increase in greenhouse gases and it is considerably larger…and, in fact, large enough to be important. I don’t see where the thermal inertia provided by the oceans is going to make the response to this radiative imbalance smaller. I think it will just delay the re-establishment of radiative balance.

you’re asking me if I have proof that solar insolation varies by about 90 W/m^2 between aphelion and perihelion?????? Look up the distances and calculate it!

I frankly don’t see how you could interpret me as asking for that. My statement was: “Nonsense. If this were the case, then models with high sensitivities would show such problems when one ran them with the sort of insolation variations that you describe. Do you have any evidence whatsoever that this occurs?” So, what I am contesting is not how much the insolation varies between aphelion and perihelion (although it is worth noting that this insolation needs to be divided by 4 to account for the difference between the earth’s surface area & the cross-section area of the sun’s insolation that it intercepts and then multiplied by 0.7 to account for albedo in order to convert it to an average radiative forcing).
Rather, I am contesting your notion that such variations along with high sensitivity would cause the “Earth [to] burn up totally”. In particular, I am asking you for evidence that climate models that have these “high sensitivities” (which you didn’t precisely define but which I assume means sensitivities in the IPCC likely range of 2 to 4.5 C) show dramatically unphysical effects when the insolation is varied in this way. Basically, you are making a claim that high climate sensitivities are incompatible with the observed behavior under the variations in when aphelion and perihelion occur (relative to the earth’s axial tilt) and I want you to back that claim up.

This is the real issue as regards the ocean skin:
1) The location at which Fourier’s Law applies is dictated by the interplay between forces within the ocean and forces within the air. Without evaporation the location would be at or very near the very topmost molecules of the oceans. With evaporation and radiation it is 1mm down from the surface.
2) Below that point 1mm deep, solar effects and convective effects are dominant. Above that point 1mm deep, evaporative and radiative effects are dominant.
3) What does it take to change the temperature differential at that point 1mm deep if there is extra downwelling IR ?
4 ) Either the warming effect of the IR in the top 10 microns has to change the differential 1mm down or the cooling effect of increased evaporation in the remaining 990 microns of the ocean skin has to change the differential 1mm down.
5) The ocean skin theory requires that the warming of the topmost 10 microns somehow magically leaps across the evaporative cooling effect in the remaining 990 microns to decrease the differential.
6) I say that the warming effect in the top 10 microns has no effect on the differential. Instead the differential is increased by extra IR because it enhances the evaporative cooling of the lower 990 microns of the ocean skin.
That about sums it up.

take into consideration that radiation exitfrom its source is more potent than radiation intercepted by ghg’s – most radiation escapes them.
Its a very big hurdle to argue that an optimum emission of re-radiated energy can return a much smaller amount and have an effect of *imbalance*

Smokey:

You can believe the UN/IPCC all you like, but they have ulterior motives for grossly exaggerating the CO2 situation. Here, you might even learn something: click. And anyone who takes the IPCC at face value is a credulous fool.

You, I am afraid, is the one who is credulous and who is frankly putty in the hands of those spouting scientific nonsense! The residence time of atmospheric CO2 is not relevant for determining how long an elevation in CO2 levels will last because, while exchanges between the atmosphere, upper ocean, and biosphere are quite fast, what is slow and becomes the rate-limiting step is the mixing of the CO2 down into the deep ocean, which takes on the order of a thousand years or more. So, if you put a new slug of CO2 into the atmosphere, it is only a matter of a few years before the ocean – atmosphere -biosphere system comes to a new steady-state but that steady-state will still have a healthy fraction (somewhere around 40%, if I remember correctly) of the original slug remaining in the atmosphere (with the rest partitioned between the upper ocean and biosphere). And, even the mixing down to the deep ocean doesn’t get rid of all of the elevation; the remainder (~10-15%) has to wait to be absorbed by the even-slower process of weathering of rocks, which will take on the order of 200,000 years. Those who are interested in learning more about this can read David Archer’s post here or, better yet, read his book “The Long Thaw”. Basic textbooks on climate science, such as “Global Warming: The Hard Science” (Chapter 8) by L.D. Danny Harvey also discuss this.
But, hey, if you want to go around claiming that the current elevation of CO2 levels is not due to our burning of fossil fuels, I encourage you to mention this in everything that you ever post or say to a policymaker or scientist because I can almost guarantee you that it will make them decide very rapidly how seriously to treat you comments. You may be able to fool some credulous folks around here but you won’t fool many whose opinion really matters.

joel,
you are right of course concerning the .7 and /4 averaging in addition to the need to convert from peak to peak to average.
as for the world catching fire – won’t happen for a few billion yrs yet but it’s obviously not intended as a literal interpretation but more of a parody of a parody with the extremist warmers like hansen. You’ll note too that my original comment concerning the 2nd law was not directed to you and was also associated with sarcasm. It was also not presented as an argument.
I did note you have not attempted to comment on or refute my last comments concerning the skin, conservation of energy, and the total screwup of that experiment by your author (or at least the failure to provide any of the information that might be somewhat meaningful).
The point of ocean contribution is that due to the low power transfer rate (associated with the long time constant), the contribution in increased temperatures or the net imbalance in temperature will be quite minimal, like that of the geothermal factor.
The radiative change you speak of in regards to imbalance is actually a misconception. The simple conceptual models used say that there’s only one mean temperature for the surface given X solar insolation and Y ghg absorption. Even conceptually and simplistically, it’s not right. Cloud cover enters in as a factor. Taking cloud cover fraction (again with an averaged cloud cover) one has a linear relationship for two lines in a graph of power density versus cloud cover fraction. One line is incoming power reaching the surface which decreases from 235 w/m^2 down to (probably about 10% of that value for total overcast of heavy clouds) and the other line is outgoing power to space based on clear sky surface emission minus atmospheric ghg absorption for clear skies down to totally top of cloud emissions at around 220 K with very little ghg absorption considering it is pretty much at the top of the water bearing area of the atmosphere. Those two lines will interesct somewhere in the vacinity of about 0.62 cloud cover and represent the balance point for radiative power into and out of the Earth system. Note that this can occur without a change in surface averaged temperature. Also note that total clear skies would result in about a 10 deg. C rise in surface temperature to achieve balance.
In reality, this cloud cover fraction must be a function of parameters, such as incoming solar power, along with quite a few pertubational factors, such as potentially cosmic ray intensity. Otherwise, we would not have a rather stable temperature average nor would we have a fairly consistent cloud cover. Unfortunately, some of these factors are almost certainly somewhat chaotic. Whatever the case, one is only going to ascertain this by analysis of the actual system response. Using defective, incomplete, and extremely course models will never cut it. If it is truly chaotic, it will not ever be modeled accurately from what I understand from the chaos experts.

Joel:
Data? Direct calculations based on such data? Empirical evidence? Causative and verified physical mechanism?
all so far is pure rhetoric and notion. At least try and answer the question as to why In 2009 (July) NOAA said ocean surface heated a lot, and the air heated a little. How can the air be heating the oceans when the ocean surface heats more than the air?

Joel says:
“But, hey, if you want to go around claiming that the current elevation of CO2 levels is not due to our burning of fossil fuels, I encourage you to mention this in everything that you ever post or say to a policymaker or scientist because I can almost guarantee you that it will make them decide very rapidly how seriously to treat you comments. You may be able to fool some credulous folks around here but you won’t fool many whose opinion really matters.”
The amount of c02 release by oceans is some 26 times that of man – ther are 1,000GT of c02 at the ocean surface alone, which can be released during warm oceans episodes, whilst that released by soils, decay, vegetation and are some 2,600 GT, although each year , the surface ocean and atmosphere exchange an estimated 90 GT C; vegetation and the atmosphere, 60 GT C; marine biota and the surface ocean, 50 GT C; and the surface ocean and the intermediate and deep oceans, 100 GT C.”
Anthropogenic is some 8GT per year, which is 1% as natural c02 exchanges. Yet c02 is well regulated and increases uniformly each year. If there were no regulating effect of c02 by oceans, which determine how much c02 resides in the atmosphere, then it would vary erratically every year with geo and biological fluxes.

It’s the standard understanding of the physics of the phase changes of water as per all the textbooks that describe evaporation as a net cooling effect and which confirm that infra red radiation does not get deep enough into a body of water in the open air to avoid being removed by increased evaporation.
It’s the AGW proponents who are trying to avoid the known physical laws.
I’ve been asking for real world evidence for 18 months now and zilch so far. Just a bleating appeal to Mr. Minnett’s authority and his unproven and apparently unsupported ocean skin theory.
To go with that theory one has to show that extra infra red, despite producing increased evaporation, manages to reduce the evaporative cooling of the ocean skin.
I really don’t see it. More evaporation must of necessity give stronger evaporative cooling in the ocean skin thus increasing the energy flow upwards, not decreasing it.
Where is the evidence that ANY downwelling IR whether natural or man made provides enough surplus energy 1mm down where it really matters given that it only penetrates to one tenth of that depth.
The truth is that ALL IR goes to accelerating energy from the oceans because it substantially drives the evaporative process and the more of it the faster.
I was reluctant to go that far for over a year but given the lack of evidence to the contrary I currently think it to be so

Stephen Wilde says:

It’s the standard understanding of the physics of the phase changes of water as per all the textbooks that describe evaporation as a net cooling effect and which confirm that infra red radiation does not get deep enough into a body of water in the open air to avoid being removed by increased evaporation.

Can you provide such references? It is obvious that the phase change due to increased evaporation has a net cooling effect when all else is equal. However, all else is not equal when you are increasing the IR radiation. What happens in reality is that some of the energy from increased IR radiation will go into heating the oceans and some will go into increasing evaporation.

I really don’t see it. More evaporation must of necessity give stronger evaporative cooling in the ocean skin thus increasing the energy flow upwards, not decreasing it.

So, are you saying that the way to cool the ocean is to bombard it with more and more IR radiation?

I’ve been asking for real world evidence for 18 months now and zilch so far. Just a bleating appeal to Mr. Minnett’s authority and his unproven and apparently unsupported ocean skin theory.

Wow…What double standards! Minnett provides not only theory but data to back it up. You by contrast just supply the handwaving hypothesis with nothing whatsoever to back it up.

Where is the evidence that ANY downwelling IR whether natural or man made provides enough surplus energy 1mm down where it really matters given that it only penetrates to one tenth of that depth.

As I pointed out in my post of (19:15:56) 9 Nov 2009, even if you restrict yourself to only conduction of heat, you find that there is a lot of heat that can be conducted over small distance scales of order 1mm even for rather modest temperature differences. This is because a modest temperature difference over a small distance is still a large temperature gradient. It is thus likely a very good approximation to assume that the skin layer is at a uniform temperature…and Minnett shows that this temperature is higher (relative to the temperature 5cm below) when more IR radiation is impinging on the ocean surface.

The truth is that ALL IR goes to accelerating energy from the oceans because it substantially drives the evaporative process and the more of it the faster.
I was reluctant to go that far for over a year but given the lack of evidence to the contrary I currently think it to be so

Well, I guess it makes it nice when you serve as judge and jury for the validity of your own hypotheses. I would say that by “lack of evidence to the contrary”, you just mean that you have dismissed any evidence to the contrary. Furthermore, you seem to have mainly presented your notions to a sympathetic audience, with only a few of us (who are not experts in the field) to provide a modicum of balance. If you want to get serious about this, you need to actually submit it to a peer-reviewed journal. Otherwise, you are just grand-standing.
Another big problem with your “theory”, by the way, is that even if most of the energy from increased IR does go into increased evaporation, that energy is released as latent heat when the water condensed, so there is no net transfer of heat out of the atmosphere…only transfer from the surface up into the atmosphere. To the extent that such transfer does cause the upper atmosphere to warm more than the surface and thus provides a negative feedback, it is already included in all of the climate models. (And, of course, the increase in water vapor also provides a positive feedback because water vapor is a greenhouse gas.)

Bart: I should add that your [snip] is without foundation and follows a similar pattern of the echo chamber on the internet, whereby people like McIntyre make mountains out of molehills, basically making claims that pretty much fall apart or a shown to be much less important than they claim them to be under closer scrutiny. Such people are usually, however, careful to avoid any sorts of [snip].
If Roy Spencer and John Christy were on the on the side of the consensus instead of the “skeptic” side, they would have been absolutely pilloried by you folks for all the errors that they made in analyzing the satellite data, which were primarily in the direction of cooling artifacts. These errors, unlike the ones that have been discovered in the work of Mann and others, were enough to significantly change overall conclusions.