I’m sure WUWT readers will recall this excellent guest post at WUWT just over one year ago:
Now published in E&E Volume 21, Number 4 / August 2010
The thunderstorm thermostat hypothesis: How clouds and thunderstorms control the Earth’s temperature
Authors
Willis Eschenbach
Abstract
The Thunderstorm Thermostat Hypothesis is the hypothesis that tropical clouds and thunderstorms actively regulate the temperature of the earth. This keeps the earth at an equilibrium temperature regardless of changes in the forcings. Several kinds of evidence are presented to establish and elucidate the Thermostat Hypothesis-historical temperature stability of the Earth, theoretical considerations, satellite photos, and a description of the equilibrium mechanism.
See it here, PDF is available (£18.00 worthwhile to support E&E in my opinion). Or, read the WUWT version here:
The thermostat has been turned down in tropical Peru:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-10749124
Darkinbad the Brightdayler says:
July 24, 2010 at 2:20 pm
“[…]Why?[…]”
Because we still exist. HTH.
Good to hear you’re still out there Willis.
I was concerned the “warmists” might have kidnapped you, and forced you to torture the climate data, even further.
Congrats.
PS The Judith Curry comment, which admirably sums up the “Hockey Stick Illusion’s” central points, can be located by clicking on Page “3” at the bottom of the first page you get to, then dragging the slider about down 1/3 of the page. Here’s the link again to the first page:
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2010/7/22/tamino-on-the-hockey-stick-illusion.html#comments
Oops, make that page 4, not page 3, in my post just above:
Brilliant. It made perfect sense to me. That certainly sounds like negative feedback or even better a governor is likely. I suppose the distinction between a governor and pure negative feedback if I understand correctly is that the governor will maintain the temperature in a range of 3 percent in your example and negative feedback would just reduce the magnitude of the warming. It should increase if the forcing increases. We seem to be at a warm point so any significant warming should be resisted by the governor if I understand correctly.
Many aspects of these ideas would be very threatening to those that rely doomsday scenarios. Even questioning how the thunderstorms are not positive feedback is going to be threatening. It seems obvious by your showing how the clouds follow the sun that the idea of thunderstorms causing the heat is foolish. The ideas used in the climate models seem counterintuitive and even contrived. I can’t make logical sense out of it. What you said makes logical sense and seems obvious after it is explained.
americansun says:
July 24, 2010 at 1:16 pm
> [snip] to ‘tips and notes’ please. 😉 RT-mod
I wish people wouldn’t try to make the first comment be some OT comment to get their comment in the “sun”. RT, thank you for snipping.
Americansun, the URL you provide, http://americansun.wordpress.com is dysfunctional. Please use a real link in the future.
Convection is the most obvious stabilizing mechanism, and the one most overlooked in the alarmosphere.
Bravozulu says:
July 24, 2010 at 5:02 pm
“[…]temperature in a range of 3 percent in your example and negative feedback would just reduce the magnitude of the warming.”
No; strong enough negative feedback could completely offset an input force. But simple negative feedback has no hysteresis; a governor as proposed by Willis kicks in after a threshold is reached, brings down the variable until a lower threshold is reached and stops there. The hysteresis is the interval between these two thresholds.
R Gates
You are always quick to question anyone who shows that manmade global warming is wrong. But you never question the PIOMAS graph. No. Instead you come up with all kinds of poor arguments to defend it. This shows everything about you.
Good work, Willis.
best part: global albedo animation
worst part: not counting the calories, enthalpy of phase changes
missing part: condensation (and subsequent precipitation) lowers volume/pressure & draws up more
I’m glad to see this thread. I hope Willis is able to chime in a time or two. I got engaged in a discussion of skeptic theories on Lucia’s Blackboard last week and when challenged to show a skeptic theory which has scientific merit I remembered something I’d read by Willis and went looking. It was the Thermostat Hypothesis, of course, so I read his posts here and the lightbulb turned on so that now I’ve internalized the argument. Then yesterday someone linked Willis’ speech above and now here’s an entire new thread.
Frankly, whether others have come up with similar theories before or Willis is the first, this is a potential game-ender for team CAGW. They’d better come up with a good counter and soon. And one which isn’t just hand-waving, either. Frankly I don’t think they can as it’s seemed obvious to me from the beginning that there must be a mechanism to keep the climate within bounds.
The fellow I was arguing with was complaining about the theory not being able to account for entering or exiting ice ages, but I think that’s a solvable problem and really less of a problem for the thermostat hypothesis than it is for CAGW.
The Thermostat Hypothesis made sense to me when I first read it on WUWT. It would seem to work during glaciations and interglacials. So what causes the switch between glaciations and interglacials?
Dang it! I forgot. I’m very pleased to see this published, Willis. Congratulations!
Bravo, Willis.
I’ve thought a lot about this hypothesis since you first presented it here, and I have to liken it to the first papers encircling plate tectonics (e.g. the magnetic stripes on the sea floor, the increasing ages of rocks measured away from the mid-ocean rifts, and so on) – that is, identifying the signature of a global, long-lived process run principally by heat transfer (or density differences caused by heat content). In other words, seminal work.
I look at your Figure 1: the same process that transfers so much heat from the surface to near-space in the equatorial area of earth (Hadley cells) is repeated in more northerly and southerly areas by the Temperate cells (and maybe the mobile polar cells). The earth is rejecting quantities of heat from the sun, and transporting lots of what it accepts back to near-space where it can be got rid of easily.
CO2 has little to do with it; water is the magical ingredient. It’s the elixir of life. Imagine if Venus had oceans of H2O – it would probably be like Fiji year-round (but you’d be built like Shrek to withstand the pressure!).
Willis (and Vukcevic if you’re reading) can you please reconsider putting backgrounds on your graphs and slides? It makes it harder to read. Thanks.
One thing that strikes me is that the Theromostat Hypothesis is based on the tropics. But what happens in the polar areas? It might be that a lot of heat gets sent there in normal circumstances until… until orbital changes overcome it by a series of randomly cold winters which change the albedo which feeds back to the thermostat making it ease off which makes the poles even cooler and so forth. Of course the thermostat is a daily system, but as we know there are long-term systems like the PDO which regulate SSTs and the SST setting at a particular time will interact with the activity of the thermostat. Thus if the SST is higher, it will take less time in the morning before cumulus clouds form, decreasing solar input. But this will also mean there would be fewer thunderstorms, perhaps, and this would keep the SST higher by the next morning. Contrawise, if SSTs start out low, it will take longer for cumulus to form in the morning and there will be more evaporation and then more thunderstorms in the afternoon, cooling the surface resulting in a cool SST by morning. Of course that’s just one guess about how things might happen. Others could be imagined.
Earth has been in one or the other kind of atmospheric equilibrium for milions of years, already. I doubt, that the engines driving the Earth’s climate to one or the other kind of equilibrium will cease to exist, only because some warmists say so. Mother Earth remains to be inherently good to us – because, otherwise, we wouldn’t be here to know.
Congrats Willis.
Love to see a post on the interaction between you and the reviewers, as per Leif recently.
Amino Acids in Meteorites says:
July 24, 2010 at 6:29 pm
R Gates
You are always quick to question anyone who shows that manmade global warming is wrong. But you never question the PIOMAS graph. No. Instead you come up with all kinds of poor arguments to defend it. This shows everything about you
___________________
Wow, that came out of left field. Your bitterness toward those who think the AGW hypothesis is likely correct is overpowering. Good luck with that…
Willis,
I would ask you to clarify what forcings can overpower or overwhelm the ability of thunderstorms to act as a thermostat. Certainly there must be limits to the range of control under your theory.
Great. Latent heat of evaporation is released into the ‘air’ at altitude … can you ‘splain to me how it gets into ‘space’ via air that is a poor black body at best (bearing in mind effective IR emission occurring only from certain molecules like CO2 and H2O)?
(I say that the effect you describe is only secondary at best to thermal IR emission from the surface … now clouds with reflectivity, high albedo is a different story)
.
July 24, 2010 at 8:45 pm
Willis,
I would ask you to clarify what forcings can overpower or overwhelm the ability of thunderstorms to act as a thermostat. Certainly there must be limits to the range of control under your theory.
———————————–
If I may-
As long as this planet has 75% ocean and water in all 3 phases, there is nothing that will alter the equilibrium range which is the temperature range of liquid water.
Storage of energy for overshoot on either end is provided by phase change by ice and by ocean.
Not catastrophic bombardment by meteors, volcanic eruptions, nuclear explosions, nor the breath of babies change that.
Jim….
Where do you think the heat goes when vapor condenses in a cloud? How do you think it is radiated?
Check what you bear in mind.
First, my thanks to all for the kind comments.
Next, R. Gates raises an interesting question:
July 24, 2010 at 8:45 pm
If we imagine a much cooler earth, and then mentally turn the sun up, what we will see is more and more clouds. At some point, the clouds will form thunderstorms, which will prevent the temperature from rising further. This makes for a very stable system.
Now, I would put changes to that system into two groups. First would be forcings that would “overpower or overwhelm” the system. I don’t know what those might be. The earth has seen giant meteor strikes, huge millennium long volcanic eruptions, and a host of other destabilizing events. None of these have caused more than short-term (geologically speaking) changes in the temperature. So I don’t know what it would take to make a long-term change in the temperature.
The second group would be things that might change the equilibrium temperature without overpowering or overwhelming the system. First among these would include anything that would affect cloud formation, type, or color. The obvious candidates would be changes in cosmic rays, and changing levels of various aerosols (both natural and man-made) that modify clouds.
Also in the second group would be anything affecting the average wind speed. I’m not sure what might do that, but I can see the possibility. It appears, for example, that winds were stronger during the ice ages.
Next would be anything affecting evaporation. The most obvious candidate there would be monomolecular surface films from things like ship sinkings, oil leaks, and hydrocarbon smog.
So in answer to your question, R. Gates, I don’t know the answer.