Little Feedback on Climate Feedbacks in the City by the Bay
by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
The Fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) here in San Francisco this week is amazing for it’s sheer size: many thousands of Earth scientists presenting talks and posters on just about every Earth science subject imaginable.
Today was my chance (PDF of presentation) to try to convince other scientists who work on the critical issue of feedbacks in the climate system that some fundamental mistakes have been made that have misled climate researchers into believing that the climate system is quite sensitive to our greenhouse gas emissions. A tough sell in only 14 minutes.
It was standing room only…close to 300 scientists by my estimate. There were only a couple of objections to my presentation…rather weak ones. Afterward I had a number of people comment favorably about the ‘different’ way I was looking at the problem.
And while that should be comforting, it is also disturbing. Since when in science did the issue of ‘causation’ become a foreign concept? When did the direction of causation between two correlated variables (in my case, clouds and temperature) become no longer important?
If temperature and clouds vary together in ‘sort of’ the same way in satellite observations as they do in climate models, then the models are considered to be ‘validated’. But my message, which might not have come across as clearly as it should have due to time constraints, was that such agreement does NOT validate the models when it comes to feedback, and feedbacks are what will determine how much of an impact humans have on the climate system.
Andrew Lacis, who works climate modeling with Jim Hansen, came up and said he agreed with me that, in general, the feedback problem is more difficult than people have been assuming. In a talk after mine, Graeme Stephens gave me a backhanded compliment when he agreed with at least my basic message that the way in which we assume the climate system functions (in my terms, what-causes-what to happen) IS important to how we then deduce how sensitive the climate is to such things as our carbon dioxide emissions.
The three organizers of the session were very gracious to invite me, since they knew my views are controversial. One of the three was Andrew Dessler, who works in water vapor feedback. I had never met Andy before, and he’s a super nice guy. They all agreed that there needs to be more debate on the subject.
But most of the talks presented followed the recipe that has become all too common in recent years: analyze the output of climate models that predict substantial global warming, and simply assume the models are somewhere near correct.
There seems to be great reluctance to consider the possibility that these computerized prophets of doom, which have required so many scientists and so much money and so many years to develop, could be wrong. I come along with an extremely simple climate model that explains the behavior of the satellite data in details that are beyond even what has been done with the complex climate models…and then the more complex models are STILL believed because…well…they’re more complex.
Besides, since my simple model would predict very little manmade global warming, it must be wrong. After all, we know that manmade global warming is a huge problem. All of the experts agree on that. Just ask Al Gore and the mainstream news media.
Interesting post. given that you often identified as one of the prominent ‘skeptic’ scientists I’ve always wondered how you (and others) are treated in private/professional setting especially given the vitriol that can be found so quarters. Also what proportion of climate/earth scientists are motivated in their work by their own environmental politics or basic scientific curiosity.
It’s interesting you mention Dessler, I ended up on one of his papers yesterday after reading the posting about the AIRS data on WUWT.
The paper is Dessler, A. E., Z. Zhang, and P. Yang (2008), Water-vapor climate feedback inferred from climate fluctuations, 2003’2008, Geophys. Res. Lett., 35, L20704, doi:10.1029/2008GL035333.
and as you mention it’s focus is feedbacks between water vapour and temp. I felt he was mixing cause and effect with this work. Identifying anomalies in temp caused by ENSO and then doing analysis of the temp/vapour relation ship. He comes with a conclusion of positive feedback between temp and vapour (the common sense conclusion) but seems to forget that it is ENSO (changes in ocean and atmosphere currents) that is driving this process rather than temperature per se.
Tallbloke (15:37:00)
Research follows the money and most is involved in looking at UVB penetration into seawater. The Spectral distribution of solar energy at sea level was reported to be 3% for UV, 44% for visible and 53% for IR. Sea water albedo at low to mid latitudes was reported to be 0.06.
An interesting report by Ohlmann, et al. http://www.icess.ucsb.edu/~davey/MyPapers/Ohlmann_etal_JClimate_1996.pdf claims that the amount of energy in the deeply penetrating spectral wavebands (relative to total solar energy) can be at least 14% larger under clouds!. They claim that clouds shift energy into the blue green spectrum that penetrates to greater depth. By eyeballing some charts it seems to me that 520nm has the greatest depth penetration.
Steve Short (16:16:09), those comments were interesting, most research is involved in the physics and not the biological/chemistry of seawater.
The upper limit for solar penetration I have seem is 50m, my understanding was that it was a lot less.
Keith Minto (17:36:01) :
“Steve Short (16:16:09), those comments were interesting, most research is involved in the physics and not the biological/chemistry of seawater.
The upper limit for solar penetration I have seem is 50m, my understanding was that it was a lot less.”
Thanks Keith. If interested, please see a post of mine on Nichel Modeling some time back:
http://landshape.org/enm/oceanic-cayanobacteria-in-the-modern-global-cycle/
(I’m not responsible for the misspelling in the URL 😉
Here are a few satellite derived plots.
Nothe that CHLT was removed a few months ago and the complete series renamed sea surface temperature. Strange!
It is probably worth reminding some on here that the energy of sunlight entering the ocean is being absorbed from the surface downwards – the energy in the sunlight decreases as the depth increases. The greatest penetration depth is where the last of this energy gets transfered to the water. The penetration depth is not a point where all the energy in the sunlight, striking the surface, suddenly gets transfered to the water in a single block!!
Just throwing this out there, OT. I saw the report of the most recent underwater volcano. Do we have even a close/accurate count of underwater volcanoes? How can we understand how CO2 interfaces with warming when we can’t have an accurate count of undersea activity and the amount of CO2 being added to the ocean at depth? Another component to consider when trying calculating how much CO2 the ocean will absorb from the atmosphere.
You guys always get me thinking 🙂
Steve Short (19:01:46) :
Steve,I don’t want to stray too far off topic but have bookmarked the URL, and will read more thoroughly later. James Lovelock uses DMS in his cloud formation concept but I don’t think he quantifies its effect. Wonder how the Phytoplankton are doing in the continual iron rich dust storms we are having in SE Australia ?
You have hit upon an under-explored area of study in the CO2 cycle.
Fred H. Haynie (15:17:15) :
George E. Smith (14:37:30)
‘Bear in mind, in the Weather is not climate vein; that when you talk about more clouds bringing more cooling; you are talking about an increase in average cloud coverage, over climate time scales; last night’s weather does’t matter much.’
We don’t live in a black box and true last night’s weather does’t matter much. But what would happen if wind patterns change a little and Yuma received more moist air from Baja and Shreveport started getting more dry air out of the northwest. Day by day, week by week, year by year, their climate condition for their area would change. Some times, I think people forget, we don’t live in a calm atmosphere. It is violent. Always changing. Co2 has very, very, very little to do with it.
Keith Minto (17:36:01) :
Here’s one suggestion:
http://www.science-class.net/Lessons/Ocean/CharacteristicsOcean.pdf
Less than 50% energy left at 1 meter
20% at 10 meters
0.5% at 100 meters
But this doesn’t matter much since temperature is quite uniform through the mixed layer, which is from a few to several tens of meters.
Just throwing this out there, OT. I saw the report of the most recent underwater volcano. Do we have even a close/accurate count of underwater volcanoes?
The team’s “heat in the pipeline” has been found.
”
Keith Mento
An interesting report by Ohlmann, et al. http://www.icess.ucsb.edu/~davey/MyPapers/Ohlmann_etal_JClimate_1996.pdf claims that the amount of energy in the deeply penetrating spectral wavebands (relative to total solar energy) can be at least 14% larger under clouds!. They claim that clouds shift energy into the blue green spectrum that penetrates to greater depth. By eyeballing some charts it seems to me that 520nm has the greatest depth penetration.
Steve Short (16:16:09), those comments were interesting, most research is involved in the physics and not the biological/chemistry of seawater.
The upper limit for solar penetration I have seem is 50m, my understanding was that it was a lot less.
”
Admittedly the paper was quite muddled there but it doesn’t say that clouds can shift power from one wavelength to another. What it appears to be trying to say by the mention of ‘greater attenuation’ is that the solar spectrum hitting the surface after some or all has gone through clouds has been attenuated more strongly outside the deep penetrating band so that what is left has a greater fractional amount of the deep penetrating wavelengths. Think along the lines of a crude bandpass filter where in the passband (of blue green penetrating light) only 10% of the original sunlight was lost while outside this area, 24% was lost, thus enhancing the fraction of blue green by 24% relative to the total even though there is a 10% loss in the blue green as well. Note the numbers 10% and 24% are mine for the example but the number 14% is from the paper and from your post.
Also, clouds toss in more problems than selective attenuation as they discuss in the paper where the diffuse light source is probably going to attenuate things further as the ocean albedo is highly dependent upon angle of incidence and as the angle of incidence gets further from the zenith, that albedo can really start to rise. However, the surface area over which the incoming light is spread also starts to rise which reduces the power density as well. While the authors discuss some of these factors, they also state they do not take all of them into account in their analysis.
Another curiosity of the paper was the use of D/Dt rather than d/dt to represent a time derivative. I’ve never seen that before as D is rather universally accepted as a derivative while d is the differential and d/dt is the differential expression of the derivative. Fortunately, they did clarify the meaning there.
On the surface (no pun), it appears that the paper is a serious attempt at science and not another of those feeding trough CAGW abominations. If they are on track with their ideas and efforts, it might start to explain some of the goings on that does affect weather and climate, in the form of powering ENSO and the like. Whether they can get away with chlorophyl rather than biosphere plankton in their dealings with energy budget is maybe another matter.
One thing it helps show is that there is not going to be factor of increased heating at depth due to some increase in far IR radiation. Whatever IR induced radiation is going to stop at the surface in a microscopically thick layer and go into increased evaporation (my view, not covered in this paper). The other thing it indicates – despite being a bit muddled – is that cloud presence will reduce the total amount of power deposited deeper in the ocean despite their observation that it may not be attenuated as much as the total flux at the surface will be attenuated although the change in average angle of incidence may also alter this by altering the albedo as well so the consequences are not so clear cut as one might initially imagine.
last I heard, they took a small survey of undersea volcanoes in that region of the world and were shocked to find that there were many that were unknown. Extrapolating outward from the small survey region, these people thought there could be thousands of them currently active that have never been observed. Unfortunately, I don’t recall any details about where I saw this, only that there could many thousands spread out around the pacific. Whether that could result in serious amounts of co2 being injected into the deep water or whether it could cause a significant amount of heating in the lower areas when averaged over the oceans are two good questions. The skeptic in me causes me to doubt at least the warming factor as being insignificant and to be doubtful that the co2 injection could have much of an effect either but not enough for me to have an opinion one way or another.
cba (08:25:13):
Two years ago it was reported that over 200,000 new undersea volcanoes have been discovered: click
“”” cba (08:13:13) :
”
Keith Mento
An interesting report by Ohlmann, et al. http://www.icess.ucsb.edu/~davey/MyPapers/Ohlmann_etal_JClimate_1996.pdf claims that the amount of energy in the deeply penetrating spectral wavebands (relative to total solar energy) can be at least 14% larger under clouds!. They claim that clouds shift energy into the blue green spectrum that penetrates to greater depth. By eyeballing some charts it seems to me that 520nm has the greatest depth penetration.
Steve Short (16:16:09), those comments were interesting, most research is involved in the physics and not the biological/chemistry of seawater.
The upper limit for solar penetration I have seem is 50m, my understanding was that it was a lot less. “””
“”” They claim that clouds shift energy into the blue green spectrum that penetrates to greater depth. By eyeballing some charts it seems to me that 520nm has the greatest depth penetration. “””
Now do they by any chance disclose the Physics of this “shift of energy to the blue green part of the spectrum”
They are certainly correct that the blue green part of the spectrum penetrates deepest in the oceans. But what exactly causes the spectrum energy shift ?
It is possibly true that scattering in the clouds eliminates other portions of the spectrum; but what kind of freuency shift could actually increase the total energy in the blue green. Sounds like a sloppy statement to me. What are the Watt’s per square metre in the blue green, before the clouds, and after the clouds ?
As for trapping for 9 months; anything that warms the deeper waters is going to create expansion and a vertically upward convective current. So I would like to see more proof that the thermal energy stays down there for nine months before it can return to the surface. But an interesting paper.
“”” old construction worker (00:29:12) :
Fred H. Haynie (15:17:15) :
George E. Smith (14:37:30)
‘Bear in mind, in the Weather is not climate vein; that when you talk about more clouds bringing more cooling; you are talking about an increase in average cloud coverage, over climate time scales; last night’s weather does’t matter much.’
We don’t live in a black box and true last night’s weather does’t matter much. But what would happen if wind patterns change a little and Yuma received more moist air from Baja and Shreveport started getting more dry air out of the northwest. Day by day, week by week, year by year, their climate condition for their area would change. Some times, I think people forget, we don’t live in a calm atmosphere. It is violent. Always changing. Co2 has very, very, very little to do with it. “””
Well you won’t get any disagreement from me on that score. I was merely pointing out that just because some high clouds at night may slow the evening cooldown, does not negate the fact that the increased cloud cover will block far more solar energy from the surface during daylight hours; so ANY cloud increase ALWAYS causes cooling over time.
The movement of hotter or colder air masses into a region does not negate the simple fact that when a cloud passes in front of the sun, it gets colder in the shadow zone; ALWAYS.
“”” Keith Minto (17:36:01) :
Tallbloke (15:37:00)
Research follows the money and most is involved in looking at UVB penetration into seawater. The Spectral distribution of solar energy at sea level was reported to be 3% for UV, 44% for visible and 53% for IR. Sea water albedo at low to mid latitudes was reported to be 0.06.
An interesting report by Ohlmann, et al. http://www.icess.ucsb.edu/~davey/MyPapers/Ohlmann_etal_JClimate_1996.pdf claims that the amount of energy in the deeply penetrating spectral wavebands (relative to total solar energy) can be at least 14% larger under clouds!. They claim that clouds shift energy into the blue green spectrum that penetrates to greater depth. By eyeballing some charts it seems to me that 520nm has the greatest depth penetration.
Steve Short (16:16:09), those comments were interesting, most research is involved in the physics and not the biological/chemistry of seawater.
The upper limit for solar penetration I have seem is 50m, my understanding was that it was a lot less. “””
Don’t know who wrote what above.
From the Infra-Red Handbook (Wolfe & Zissis)
Sea water has its minimum attenuation at about 470 nm (definitely blue) at about 0.0001 Absorption coefficient (cm^-1) That means 470 nm blue light (aka blue LEDs) will be attenuated to 1/e (37%) in 10,000 cm or 100 metres. So the 50 metre limits is way too shallow. Any scuba diver can tell you the surface is still visible easily at 150 ft depth (open ocean water). The absorption coefficient increase to 0.01 at about 770 nm in the deep red, and about 300 nm in the UV, so that would be just one metre penetration to 1/e intensity. Water is most sea opaque at 3.0 microns wavelength in the IR at about 8000 cm^-1, giving a 1.25 micron penetration depth to 1/e, but the general absorption coefficient away from that 3.0 micron max is about 1000 cm^-1 which puts the 1/e depth for most of the IR longer than 2.5 microns at about 10 microns depth.
Sunlight penetrates much deeper in the ocean than many people think.
“”” old construction worker (14:54:22) :
George, as I have said before the only thing worst than being cold and hungry is being WET, cold and hungry. “””
Man! Old CW, have I ever been cold and wet; don’t even remember if I was hungry. back in the late 1950s some Swiss company built a very long ski chair lift on Mt Ruapehu in New Zealand; it was designed to take 40 tons of ice distributed along its more than one mile length. Well it ws built across a historically wet snow region of the mountain, and so during a blizzard it starte icing up, till the weight of the ice on the chairs and the cable was pulling some chairs off the lift. So they decided to run the lift during the storm, so they could keep the cable free of ice, and knock it off the chairs as they came around the bottom. Unfortunately, they had waited too long and they couldn’t start the lift because of all the foot thick ice on the cable. So somebody whacked the cable with a sledge hammer to dislodge the ice; and it all came off at once from a long stretch of cable, and in the rebound the cable jumped off the pulleys; so now they couldn’t run it at all.
So they asked us poor University of Auckland slobs to help them knock ice off the towers to try and stop them collapsin; some of them had been turned into a solid block of ice.
So here I was up there in the blizzard with a small sledge hammer, chipping ice off the bottom of the tower, and then climbing up a notch to work on the next section, holding the frozen tower steel in one gloved hand and swinging a three pound hammer at the ice with the other, and every time a big chunk came down, well it whacked you on your arm or elbow. I think I cleared three towers all together. Together we knocked over 200 tons of ice off just the middle thrid of that chair lift, that had been designed for 40 tons over the whole length. I was soaked to the sking, but fortunately was wearing New zealand unscoured woolens under my parka.
We did eventually get a free days lift pass out of the deal after the storm. That summer they broke the lift into two sections, to make it more maintainable.
While climbing down the mountain backwards in the dark (the sleet was blowing up the slope and cut into ones face, a came withing about six feet of stepping off the top of a 500 fot cliff to nowhere. I thought that those crossed skis in the snow, I just passed was a bit strange, so I stopped and turned around to look down into oblivion. Lucky me!
George E. Smith (11:12:44) :
‘Well you won’t get any disagreement from me on that score. I was merely pointing out that just because some high clouds at night may slow the evening cooldown, does not negate the fact that the increased cloud cover will block far more solar energy from the surface during daylight hours; so ANY cloud increase ALWAYS causes cooling over time.’
I wasn’t disagreeing with you, but sometimes people do not realizes how over time nothing remains the same. The Rocky mountains are getting higher while at the same time Appalachian Range is washing out to sea. In the great lakes area the crust is still up lifting from the Ice Age. Each will have an effect on local climate. The question is how many other parameters must be accounted for just to pin point how hard or where the wind blows.
I would have been more impressed with the “Co2 drives the climate” thing if a young meteorologist looking at weather balloon data and wonder why the upper troposphere was warming than a politician wanting a reason to build nuclear power plants.
George E. Smith
“”” They claim that clouds shift energy into the blue green spectrum that penetrates to greater depth. By eyeballing some charts it seems to me that 520nm has the greatest depth penetration. “””
This is a misconception by Kieth Minto. As I mentioned, the paper itself is muddled and a bit hard to understand there, but it does appear to claim that it’s merely a wavelength preferred attenuation that leaves more of the original sunlight at these preferred penetrating wavelengths than it leaves of the outsdie of the bandwidth, thus permitting about 14% more of the penetrating radiation to get through than the nonpenetrating radiation BUT that all of these are attenuated going through the clouds. There is no wavelength shift of any of the radiation in the article. That is simply a misunderstanding made by Kieth Minto and probably the fault of the article authors because of their muddled explaination that can permit the misconception.
Solar irradiance clearly provides the power that drives the climate system. Can anyone provide a clear physical explanation of the power-source for all the other right-hand terms in Spencer’s feedback model? There are no op-amps to be found anywhere in the oceans or the atmosphere! The climate system does, however, respond differently to irradiance , depending on its own state (e.g., cloudy or clear). It seems that the concept of “feedback” is being conflated with changes in the state of the system, which should be modeled as a time-varying response characteristic, rather than a feedback loop operating on system output.
The funny thing to me is that the discipline that thinks the most about the sorts of statistical causality questions Dr. Spencer highlights is…economics. Much of econometrics–simultaneous equation models, instrumental variable analysis, search for natural “experiments,” etc.–was developed specifically to address the problems of endogenous regressors and reverse causality. Yet econometricians are treated as outsiders and pests when they try to repair the statistical errors of the climate science orthodoxy (I am thinking more here of the proxy reconstruction literature, but the ignorance problem extends to the issue Dr. Spencer is highlighting.)
The intuition for what Dr. Spencer says is pretty clear: If 1) clouds change for reasons other than temperature and 2) clouds lower the temperature, then the historical record will have lots of periods where small cloud cover and high temperatures are observed together. To then use these correlations to say “When temperature goes up due to CO2 we don’t see big cloud cover, hence negative feedback is small” is thus a fundamental error. The argument ignores that high temperature episodes are selectively sampling from periods when cloud cover is exogenously small. Any economist will grasp this point immediately, but apparently Dr. Spencer’s natural science cohorts find it hard to wrap their heads around.
cba and George E Smith. T
The chart that I ‘eye balled’ was figure 4,a and my 520nm on second sight looks like 490nm, close to the 470nm stated by George. cba I agree that clouds would attenuate and not frequency shift. I guess my interest in this is how much heat is going into the ocean from sunlight and it appears that clouds would decrease IR reaching the ocean. The light penetration issue is interesting but complex,turbidity and backscattering would influence depth penetration and well as light wavelength. The fact that IR penetrates only the surface layer (prior to mixing) is probably the part that interests me and thanks for that info.
Part of the conclusion to the linked article is interesting, “Values for solar penetration computed here for 10deg N,10deg S,140-170E, mean solar flux penetration is 12wm2,a figure 40% less than that produced by Ramanathan”.
Claude Harvey (13:26:48) :
”I share your pain, Dr. Spencer. After I once quit a job in frustration, my colleagues who had never once sided with me in the corporate wars started telling me how they needed me there to “Speak the truth”. Your colleagues’ distracted behavior was likely caused by their hearing their dinner bell chime about that time. The AGW dinner bell actually plays a little song that goes:
“Acting on Spencer’s rant
Will cause you to lose your grant
Going with the flow
Is the smart man’s way to go
Why risk the pain of speaking true
When Spencer’s there to do it for you”
Here’s a version of the above that’s got more swing:
Second Dr. Spencer’s rant?
–There goes my grant.
Speak truth to power?
–Peers will turn sour.
I haven’t the moxie,
Let him be my proxy.
There’s no hurry;
So why not curry?
A turn-with-the-tider,
Outlasts an outsider.
I’m sticking with the paradigm,
Biding my time,
And drawing my dime.
Oops — now I’ve improved the 2nd stanza, thusly:
Speak truth to power?
–My peers will glower.
2nd oops — I’ve improved the last stanza to:
So I’m fine
With the paradigm,
Biding my time,
And drawing my dime.
Here’s the revised version in full:
Second Dr. Spencer’s rant?
–There goes my grant.
Speak truth to power?
–My peers will glower.
I haven’t the moxie,
Let him be my proxy.
There’s no hurry,
So why not curry?
A turn-with-the-tider,
Outlasts an outsider.
Hence I’m fine
With the paradigm,
Biding my time,
And drawing my dime.