Guest Post By John R. Christy of the University of Alabama at Huntsville
via Dr. Roger Pielke Sr’s blog: Climate Science
The three warm-color time series are taken from Hansen’s published testimony in June 1988 in which global surface air temperatures were projected under three scenarios by his global climate model.
The red curve follows a scenario (A) of continued emissions growth based on the previous 20 years before 1988 (which turned out to be an underestimate of actual emissions growth.) The orange represents a scenario (B) of fixed emissions at the rate achieved in the 1980s. The yellow curve portrays a scenario (C) in which “a drastic reduction” in GHG emissions is assumed for 1990-2000. The observations are global tropospheric temperatures adjusted to mimic the magnitude of surface temperature variability and trends according to published climate model simulations (i.e. a reduction in satellite anomalies by 0.83.)
After tying all time series to a 1979-83 reference mean, one can see the significant divergence in the results. (Notes: 1. observed 2010 is Jan-Jul only; 2.) tropospheric temperatures are used as the comparison metric due to many uncertainties and biases in the surface temperature record, i.e. Klotzbach et al. 2009, 2010 ; 3.) both models and observations included the 1982 eruption of El Chichon while B and C scenarios included a volcano in the mid 1990s – not too different from Mt. Pinatubo.)
The result suggests the old NASA GCM was considerably more sensitive to GHGs than is the real atmosphere since (a) the model was forced with lower GHG concentrations than actually occurred and (b) still gave a result that was significantly warmer than observations.
Nick Stokes @ur momisugly August 14, 2010 at 2:49 pm said:
“Nonsense. Of course regular temp is used in modelling and analysis. But you need anomalies to calculate a meaningful global surface temp average, and hence global trend.”
Why do you need anomalies? I think the argument goes that surface temperatures vary greatly with position but somehow anomalies don’t. They are magical in that they vary smoothly. Why can we assume this smoothness? And what thermodynamic principal permits us to take a surface integral of anomalies – is that surface integral meaningful? At what level is surface integral evaluated – does it matter?
The reason I ask these questions is that people take the global surface temperature anomaly “index” and assume it has something to do with heat transfer or thermodynamics in the atmosphere when clearly it doesn’t…
@Sexton
” We didn’t pass any laws based on Christy’s erroneous judgment.”
Good we agree that Christy was erroneous and others had to clean up his analysis of the UAH satellite data, in (was it?) 2004.
We did, however, fail to pass laws, in part because of Spencer and Christy’s botched analysis of microwave sounding units, which they used to impune Hansen’s thermometers. Now Spencer and Christy are on board that the earth is heating, but Christy is still hammering Hansen. It is an infantile behavior. The climate models have moved on since 1988. Why doesn’t Christy? I know, I’ll take the MSU analysis Christy used in 2000 and use that to estimate post 2000 surface temps from the post 2000 MSU raw data and compare to the results of the current UAH analysis of post 2000 temps. How ‘skillful’ would Christy appear to be then?
Science moves on over the course of decades. It is not about “counting coup.”
Are you, Sexton, in disagreement with Spencer and Christy about whether the Earth is now warming? If you think it is warming, what is causing it? If humans were a cause, would it make sense for governments to pass laws to mitigate and accommodate the effects?
What is Christy currently asserting the temperature will be in 2060? It would be good to have rational estimates; will it be hotter or colder than this year? Does he claim that there is no way to make a reasonable estimate? Is the Earth’s temp just a random walk?
Anomalies:
According to Spencer satellite temperatures may have an error of up to half a degree Celsius, but that error would stay the same. And UAH is not synchronized to ground data.
But changes of temperature are exact to within an error of 0.01 °C. Thus one can compare anomalies.
Joel Shore says:
August 14, 2010 at 3:16 pm
“[…]However, for those of us who don’t like people freeloading off of us by using fossil fuel energy irresponsibly (e.g., driving Hummers on their city commute to work) because they can offload the consequences onto the rest of us, that is not a good thing. […]”
Hummer drivers get fuel for free in the U.S.?
Joel, you should really up the ante re the “offloading the consequences on the rest of us”; don’t stop with punishing Hummer drivers. You need to get all combustion engines outlawed if you want to achieve what you think is necessary. Concentrate citizens near their place of work and force them to bicycle to work. Every car driver is a criminal according to your logic.
DirkH says:
It is not about punishing people and outlawing things. It is about internalizing the externalized costs so that people make choices based on those costs rather than offloading the costs on everybody else. It is about the assumptions under which markets produce the most efficient outcome and when those assumptions fail. It is basic market economics…Look up “externalities” in any intro economics textbook or on the web.
Joel S. – Thank you for the clarification of the satellite temps.
Society does bear some burden (costs) that result from the actions of others. It is unavoidable. But generally, if a real cost is incurred – such as loss of health for example – those costs can at least be compensated for via the courts; so there is a mechanism in most cases to adjust for “distributed” costs. I feel that we as a society should be willing, in general, to suffer some consequences of what is, net-net, a positive improvement in our standard of living and quality of life. But beyond that, the problem with the government assigning external costs to this or that activity is that the government must first understand the true costs of a given activity or technology. Generally, people smart enough to completely understand complex systems do not exist. Therefore, it is better to take a laissez-faire approach and let the courts handle any non-obvious consequences.
To Tangeng:
You asked “What does ‘skillful’ mean?”.
It’s a technical term used by computer modelers. Stripping out a whole bunch of verbiage, a model is considered “skillful” based on how well it predicts. The point is that Hansen’s original models don’t do too well versus the later measurements.
Now, it may be that, as others have pointed out, that Dr. Christy’s method of taking what the satellites actually measure and mapping that to surface temperatures is a little suspect. However, given the documented evidence given elsewhere on this site of the corruption to the surface temperature record from:
poor siting of surface thermometers,
statistically shaky “adjustments” of the surface data,
the admissions of various leading climate scientists made public by the ‘Climategate’ e-mails that they were engaged in something that smacks more of advocacy than science,
it seems that the surface record must be regarded with suspicion, too. So I would claim that Dr. Christy’s use of a simple factor is probably not a reason to write this post off.
Actually, I was just recycling it, although I do come up with puns like that about once a month. The only one that’s caught on widely recently was my pun on the commonly used phrase during the financial crisis, “too big to fail”: My variation was, “too big to jail.”
A few decades ago I also was the first (I think) to come up with “Hype springs eternal.” Here are the most recent ones that have popped into my head:
Crass-section
Scientwist
Bulloney
Silt of the earth
Mockraker
Follywood
Smilie when you say that
Woodoo
Jawsuit
PS: I haven’t googled for those neologisms of mine, so it’s possible that some have been independently invented.
Joel Shore says:
It is wrong to claim that Theon was Hansen’s supervisor in any realistic use of the term. Apparently, Theon was a bureaucrat reasonably high up in the bureaucracy at NASA who had some responsibility for funding of various agencies within NASA, including GISS.
————————-
Honestly, what do you really know about John Theon?
You asseverate that “it is wrong…” blah, blah, blah and then you start your next sentence with “Apparently…” , meaning you went and looked up what somebody had to say about it. Just as I did.
From Wiki:
In the 1960s and 70s, Theon worked at the Goddard Space Flight Center, performing meteorological research.[2]
At NASA from 1982 until he retired in 1994, he was responsible for all the agency’s climate and weather research, including the work of James Hansen, Roy Spencer, Joanne Simpson, and several hundred scientists at NASA field centers and in academia.[1]
He is a fellow of the American Meteorological Society, and an associate fellow of the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics. He was twice awarded the NASA Exceptional Performance Award, and received the Radio Wave Award by the Minister of Posts and Telecommunications of Japan for his contributions to the joint U.S.–Japanese Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission.
James Hansen is “a bureaucrat relatively high up in the bureaucracy… blah, blah, blah.”
Roger Knights: August 15, 2010 at 7:38 pm
PS: I haven’t googled for those neologisms of mine, so it’s possible that some have been independently invented.
So far, you seem to have brag rights, Roger.
Oliver:
Your quotes about Theon (which aren’t from an official Wikipedia page, by the way, but only one specific user’s page) don’t really contradict anything that I said. Theon did have a successful career as a researcher in meteorology, but that essentially ended about 30 years ago, after which he spent 12 years in an administrative role, after which he retired. As near as I can tell, none of his own research was in the area of climate change.
While he is entitled to his opinions, I don’t really see how his administrative role back in the 1980s up to 1994 nor his meteorology research career in the 1960s and 1970s particularly qualifies him to make the pronouncements that he has, so I don’t understand why we are supposed to endow them with so much weight.
As for being a fellow of the AMS and having won two NASA awards and such, well that’s great, but James Hansen is a fellow of AGU and has received many NASA awards…plus, he has received awards from AMS, APS, AGU, and AAAS ( http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/HansenCV_200912.pdf ) and the difference is that Hansen’s are recent and for his work in the particular field that we are talking about.
Joel Shore says:
August 15, 2010 at 5:59 am
It is not about punishing people and outlawing things. It is about internalizing the externalized costs so that people make choices based on those costs rather than offloading the costs on everybody else. It is about the assumptions under which markets produce the most efficient outcome and when those assumptions fail. It is basic market economics…Look up “externalities” in any intro economics textbook or on the web.
How does that basic economic analysis justify the current tax system where 47% of U.S. population don’t pay any “externalities”? Liberals pay for what they want, not what is “efficient”. Don’t attempt to justify your ideology with economics.
Professor Christy,
Thanks for the short post here to review some of the prediction; excuse me, that’s projection history from Dr Hansen.
At WUWT you are likely to raise more discussion than in ANY peer reviewed Journal.
So would you consider giving us a short update on the status of the study of ocean buoy near surface (-1 metre) water and (+3 metre) air temperatures, that you reported on in Jan 2001 in I believe Geophysical Research Letters; wherein you reported not only that the water and air temperatures during that 20 or so year period gave different amounts of warming; but you also reported that they were not even correlated; which to me would mean that all of the previous 100 years or so of oceanic water temperatures; could not be rectified to recover oceanic air temperatures dating back to the beginning of global temperature recording.
It would be nice to know what the data has been showing since 2001, if you have time to fill us in.
Based upon the actual temperatures, we have done better than the proposed “drastic reduction” of GHGs. So if we continue with this “drastic Reduction” then we should be seeing even better results than the blue lines?
New campaign Ad – Drive a car to save the world!
@ur momisugly Joel Shore,
I completely agree that Theon’s opinion, (which he’s fully entitled to express) of Hansen and/or his opinions is a complete red herring, but it was a fish that you had casually cast at and it seemed your line was tangled.
I enjoy your stuff on physics.
Regarding Academia Nuts,
Back in college, Jeremy Rifkin came by to do some class presentations. He took us all outside where we took off our shoes and sat on the grass, then he regaled us with tales of wondrous village life with tight-knit communities (circa the Dark Ages in Europe). His most memorable item, which has stuck with me, was how after a wedding the next day the bed sheets would be hung out for public display so people could tell the bride was a virgin by the blood on the sheets.
…
*shudder*
“”” Frank K. says:
August 14, 2010 at 7:14 pm
Nick Stokes @ur momisugly August 14, 2010 at 2:49 pm said:
“Nonsense. Of course regular temp is used in modelling and analysis. But you need anomalies to calculate a meaningful global surface temp average, and hence global trend.”
Why do you need anomalies? I think the argument goes that surface temperatures vary greatly with position but somehow anomalies don’t. They are magical in that they vary smoothly. Why can we assume this smoothness? And what thermodynamic principal permits us to take a surface integral of anomalies – is that surface integral meaningful? At what level is surface integral evaluated – does it matter?
The reason I ask these questions is that people take the global surface temperature anomaly “index” and assume it has something to do with heat transfer or thermodynamics in the atmosphere when clearly it doesn’t… “””
Well the problem with anomalies is that they compare inadequately sampled spatial and temporal Temperature data to some 1961-1990 baseline that itself is an inadequately sampled data base.
So we don’t have any idea what the true mean global Temperature was at any time during that 1961-1990 base time frame; let alone what the true average was; and since the sampling regimen is inadequate; there is no basis for believing that the anomalies some how tell us how the whole globe is changing temperature.
If the original baseline sampling strategy conformed both temporally, and spatially with the Nyquist sampling criterion; then we would know what the true global average was over that baseline period; but we don’t because the average is corrupted by aliassing noise. And that same aliassing noise corrupts every subsequent computed “average” in a quite unknown manner.
And if the whole earth continued to report zero anomalies; that would still tell us exactly nothing about energy flows in the environment. You have to have Temperature differences to have energy transport certainly in the form of heat and you need real Temperatures to know anything about the radiant energy flows.
Let’s face it; on average nothing happens.
“”” Joel Shore says:
August 14, 2010 at 3:16 pm
James Sexton says:
Here’s why it doesn’t matter if Dr. Christy was as skilled as Hansen in predicting the state of climate 20 years latter. We didn’t pass any laws based on Christy’s erroneous judgment. We passed laws that literally affected the entire world based on Hansen’s erroneous judgment.
………………….
Now, if you don’t like such laws, you might think that delaying laws is not a bad thing. However, for those of us who don’t like people freeloading off of us by using fossil fuel energy irresponsibly. “””
So Joel are we to presume that you don’t ever use any fossil fuels irresponsibly ? Is somebody who goes fishing in other than a sailboat using fossil fuels irresponsibly ?
Who among us is so smart that we are able to judge what is responsible and what is not. Was it responsible for The President to take his family swimming in a Florida Bay and then tell the American people that they were swimming in the Gulf of Mexico; when they were doing no such thing, and the beach they swam at had never had ANY oil Contamination from the Gulf spill. He could have taken his daughter swimming in a Washington DC swimming pool; or maybe the Potomac river; and saved all that fosslil fue on Air Force One.
You should be careful of judging other people’s daily lives; lest yours become the subject of scrutiny to see that you are not doing anything the elites want you to not do.
George E Smith:
I don’t think I have ever tried to claim that I should have a special dispensation so that I don’t have to pay carbon taxes or any higher fossil fuel prices that might result from a cap-and-trade system. The point of correcting externalities is that so everyone is basing their purchasing choices on something that more approximates the true cost…and that includes me. (In the interests of disclosure, I might add that for a number of years when gas prices were low, I actually imposed a 100% gas tax on myself by meticulously keeping track of my gas purchases for the year and then donating that amount of money at the end of the year to an organization working on climate change or other environmental issues.)
I used the example of the person with a Hummer to point out an example of someone who is disproportionately benefiting from having their use of fossil fuels subsidized, but I believe that all of us are having the choices distorted from those that we might make if we paid the full costs at the point-of-sale.
And, I’m not trying to pass moral judgments on other people’s choices; I am trying to correct a problem that exists in the current market system that is distorting the choices that people make (by having us all collectively bear the costs and thus effectively subsidizing those choices).
Tim Clark says:
I don’t understand this comment. Are you saying that 47% of the U.S. citizens don’t pay gas taxes, sales taxes, payroll taxes, property taxes, the portion of corporate taxes that is passed on to consumers (which is presumably most of it), or any other taxes? In fact, some people have argued that carbon taxes or higher energy costs due to cap-and-trade would disproportionately hurt the less-well-off, although I would prefer to try to fix the externalities and then offset any disproportionality by other means.
I think what you are referring to is the percentage that don’t pay federal income taxes (which is, in contrast to payroll, sales, and some other taxes, a tax that is actually progressive rather than regressive). And, the fact that such a small share of the wealthiest Americans pay the majority of the federal income taxes is due in largest part to the fact that they have such a large fraction of the income and to a considerably less extent due to the fact that the federal income tax (as opposed to the other taxes that I mentioned) is in fact somewhat progressive, taking a larger proportion of income from the rich than the poor.
But the equities of tax policy are, in my mind, largely separate from the issue of correcting large externalities in the market that may result in us doing considerable damage to our environment.
If I might externalize a little bit here, I’m wondering who to scowl at the most as I cycle along; the guy in the Hummer taking his grandmother to the hospital, the soccer mom heading to Starbucks in her mini-van, the dude in the Elantra running for a pack of smokes or the Mack trucker with a load of garden tractors.
A few points.
(1) The temperature values in the evolution of the scenarios (A, B, C) will not exactly match Hansen’s pub because I have referenced them to a particular 5-year period (which represents the start of the satellite data.) They are the same values, but just relative to a different reference period, so appear shifted up or down relative to Hansen’s pub.
(2) To do an apples to apples comparison, we could compare the tropospheric values from old model (evidently not available) and satellites (available). To keep the apples to apples comparison valid we can use the model amplification factor (troposphere is 1.2+ times the surface) and either (a) multiple A, B, and C by 1.2 or divide the satellite data by 1.2. Either way, the plot is the same in terms of divergence – we chose to divide the satellite data by 1.2.
(3) NOAA-16 does not impact the trend of UAH (or RSS) data since it is not used as a component in the backbone.
(4) This diagram was made because there was a recent comment that suggested Hansen’s 1988 forecast was accurate.
(5) This is a plot of global trends, not tropical trends (ref. to “hot spot”). Had this been tropical trends, the results would likely be worse since the amplification factor there is about 1.4 (see many pubs on this.)
(6) Through 1994 the satellite trend was slightly negative which prompted our Letter to Nature (Christy and McNider, 1994) to show how Mt. Pinatubo had tilted the trend to the negative, and once that was accounted for (along with El Chichon and ENSOs) the trend was in fact +0.09 C/dec. For the past several years the trend appears to have settled down to +0.14 +/- 0.02 C/dec.
any opinion on Zou’s work?
George E. Smith says:
August 16, 2010 at 10:21 am
Hi George,
Having worked extensively with marine data, I concur with Christy’s view about the lack of correlation between air and sea temperatures. Yes, you get a seasonal cycle in both of them that is reasonably coherent, but at frequencies both lower and higher the lack of coherence is what really stands out. That’s one of the many reasons why I consider all pre-satellite-era land-and-sea temperature anomaly series to be an excercise in data manufacture.