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.
4th oops — I’ve changed “There’s no hurry” to “It’s unsafe to hurry”. Here’s the last version:
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.
It’s unsafe to 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.
Keith Minto,
You can forget IR having any penetration into the ocean. Even Red goes away quickly. Having clouds overhead significantly increases the IR coming down rather than decreasing it overall as the clouds may block solar IR but they have their own longer wave IR to emit.
There has been some effort made by some to harp on the skin effect with claims that it blocks or reduces heat flow. What is really going on with that is the fact that at the surface, there is insufficient heat flowing in to maintain a higher temperature and that it is losing too much heat by evaporation and radiation. The give away to that is that in conduction and convection, the heat flow quantity down lower depends upon the temperature differential down lower and nowhere else. If the skin warms up some, that cannot affect the flow of heat down below the skin unless it affects the temperatures down below as well. If the warmer skin could warm the area immediately below it, then it could reduce the flow of heat from lower down. But then, there wouldn’t be a skin effect. Heat flow in conduction is modeled just like current flow in electric circuits where there is a thermal resistance, a heat flow ‘current’ and a temperature (voltage equivalent) difference. Where there is a temperature difference (like voltage) it’s because of a resistance to the flow of heat (electric current) and the heat (current) is restricted more at that point than elsewhere. What’s happening to the skin is that it is getting rid of more heat than is coming in when it is at a higher temperature so it cannot by conservation of energy maintain that temperature.
I’ve done a lot of work on the IR and ocean skin issue here:
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=4245
Good work Roy.
This feedback cannot be strongly positive and is most likely moderately negative.
Otherwise, we would not be having this conversation.
And we know that CO2 lags temperature at all time scales.
So warmists say that “the future causes the past”.
Don’t shake their religion too hard Roy – they are only being polite on the surface.
What causes looping is phase lag. And, the lag appears on the flux, i.e., temperature drives flux, not the other way around (counter-clockwise loop). E.g., suppose temperature is
T = A*cos(omega*t)
Then the flux is
F = B*cos(omega*t – phi)
The phase plot is counterclockwise if phi > 0, which indicates F lags T.
Thus, the data are consistent with a rise in temperature creating an increase in radiative flux at some time later, which could be due to a dominant negative cloud feedback, which increases outward radiated flux.
Forgot the other half…
Thus, the data are consistent with a rise in temperature creating an increase in radiative flux at some time later, which could be due to a dominant negative cloud feedback, which increases outward radiated flux, rather than a dominant positive water vapor feedback which would decrease radiated flux.
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Steve Short (16:16:09) :
One might also note that roughly analogous effects occur over large forested areas. Rises in SST and PAR lead to spurts of leaf or needle growth, increased ET and increased emissions directly into the air of volatile isoprenes etc i.e. biogenic CCNs. This is why forest create clouds and rain. This particularly occurs where there is a high forest biomass and also essentially contiguous forest cover right up oceanic coasts for reason I don’t have space to elaborate here (e.g. good Russian paper last year mentioned in New Scientist).
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Steve – I am with you on the biological factors in climate. It should be discussed and explored more. People tend to focus only on the pure physics of climate. For example, a dark fungus with long hyphae, long enough to gather nutrients from the ice or the underlying soil, could trigger an exit from an ice age.
I used to live near the Smokey Mountains. They are “smoky” due to the volatile organics of which you speak. I never made the connection that these trees are actually creating their own rain. Fascinating.
I was at the AGU on Thursday and there were a LOT of great posters and papers there, most of them showed the MWP and the Holocene optimum and not a hockey stick in sight!
There was an excellent explaination of how the hockeystick may have come about, either around here or over at CA a while back. It’s simply picking enough random data sets whose last several entries ‘reflect the instrument record’ (as presumed) regardless of whether that instrument record reflects the actual conditions present at the tree’s location (or other proxy’s location). That way, all the results come out to reinforce and show the hockey stick blade but all the other data points average out to a flat line. Whether or not it’s possible to really get a measure of the temperature record has nothing to do with the selection process of this approach. It’s the flatline that’s the dead give away that one has random noise outside the selection area.
“There was an excellent explanation of how the hockeystick may have come about, …. It’s simply picking enough random data sets whose last several entries ‘reflect the instrument record’ (as presumed) regardless of whether that instrument record reflects the actual conditions ….”
No tricky, no sticky.
Jim Clarke (06:30:55) :
Glad to here that Andrew Dressler is “a super nice guy”. I recall his blogs from a few years ago often had the same tone and quality of some of the crutape letters. In other words, he was sarcastic and dismissive of anyone suggesting that increasing CO2 was not a dire emergency.
It may well be that he is becoming more open minded, but if I were you, Dr. Spencer, I would watch your back…just in case.
Which points up something that I think is a not unexpected fall out of the UEA CRU doc dump. A moral reawakening in science. Not perfection by any means but certainly a tightening up of the ship.
Oops — “sticky” has a meaning already! Change to:
No trickee, no stickee.
Only a matter of time before the U.N. starts sending around those Black G-Wagons and people start walking into soft, slow, bullets……….watch out for the Danes!!!! There‘s only 6 million of them, but they’re all bad asses. 🙂
That said, I did some control theory studies in university for my degree in electrical engineering. I have a tough time believing in positive feedback anything for a device that has worked fairly well for 50 million years or so. Positive feedback is unstable, and with no driving input what so ever, it explodes (typically). So I started reading chapter 13 of Judth Curry’s thermo text (one of the links on Climate Audit article JC review of Lindzen & Choi 09). Sure enough, right there on page 6, Find the parameters using the simulations……
I am confused. I hope this was meant only to illuminate a method for finding loop and forward path parameters, and not to Imply that the simulation models are to be used to determine these parameters. Using the simulation models will only result in providing the parameters that were originally programmed into models.
Or am I missing something….
I absolutely agree, beware of models and simulations, they are frequently wrong. Given we can’t even do a fair job at a statistical analysis of the earth’s temperature, I wouldn’t place any faith in the models what so ever.