Old, but untold. Trenberth treated us to a trick in his Halloween interview with Bill Sweet by changing the sign on his own most famous quote. As Trenberth now tells it:
One cherry-picked message saying we can’t account for current global warming and that this is a travesty went viral and got more than 100,000 hits online.
The email in question actually bemoaned how Trenberth couldn’t account for the LACK of global warming:
The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.
Global warming… LACK of global warming. Hey, what’s the difference?
This is Trenberth’s answer to having his doubts exposed by the ClimateGate leak: just cover them back up. Pretend that the revealing email said the opposite of what it actually said and PROBLEM SOLVED. The guy’s a genius. No wonder he rose to the esteemed lead author position.
Of course he’s not fooling anyone who knows what he actually said. Add that lack of warming does have to do with the state of global warming, and most knowledgeable people will grant Trenberth the benefit of the doubt, but should they? Ignorant people will be fooled, and Trenberth has a habit of misleading the ignorant.
Here is Trenberth in a follow-up interview with Sweet (after Sweet was apparently inundated with comments and email calling Trenberth a liar and castigating Sweet for playing softball—yay WUWT):
Sweet: Can you say something about the widespread belief that solar activity somehow accounts for the temperature changes we’ve seen in recent decades?
Trenberth: That’s easily disproven. It’s nonsense. Since 1979 we’ve had spacecraft measuring total solar irradiance, and there’s been no change—if anything the sun has cooled slightly. There’s nothing in the record that indicates that the sun is responsible for any of the warming in this period.
Trenberth knows full well that “solar activity” refers primarily to solar-magnetic activity, which varies by an order of magnitude over the solar cycle, while total solar irradiance is almost invariant over the solar cycle (which is why it is called the solar constant). Does he really think he can disprove the theory that 20th century warming was caused by solar activity without looking at anything but the least active solar variable?
Again, the knowledgeable will not be fooled, but it is perfectly clear that Trenberth’s intent in this instance is to deceive the ignorant. He is also providing us with an example of what he was talking about in his original IEEE interview when he said:
Scientists almost always have to address problems in their data, exercising judgment about what might be defective and best disregarded.
That pesky data about solar-magnetic activity and earthly temperatures being highly correlated? (“The long term trends in solar data and in northern hemisphere temperatures have a correlation coefficient of about 0.7 – .8 at a 94% – 98% confidence level.”) “Best disregarded.”
And it is easily done. Just change out “solar activity” for the least active solar quantity and, voilà. As easy as replacing “lack of global warming” with “global warming.”
As J.R. Ewing put it, “once you give up integrity, the rest is easy.”
Any other “lumpies”? (Santa must have had anti-CO2 alarmists in mind when he chose coal for the bad. Like crosses for vampires.)
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Will, thanks to your saying :
“In the atmosphere they are mixed. The true effect is that the gas with the lowest specific heat capacity, CO2 @ur momisugly 0.0385% is forced into thermal equilibrium by the gases O2 and N2 @ur momisugly 99%. The result being that in our environment (in the actual real testable world of reality) CO2 takes longer to warm and yet cools faster than both O2 and N2.”
my comment is most assuredly not “semantics and waffle”. Yes, the gases are always moving towards thermal equilibrium. And you would be right if all gases were warmed in the same way. But CO2 is warmed (or, more correctly, receives energy) by longwave radiation which it then transfers to molecules around it. O2 and N2 are not.
Moreover, because the gases are will mixed, one can consider the mix, called air, to have its own specific heat capacity. It’s like if you mix ethanol and water and keep it constantly agitated. Say you’ve warmed it to 50C and then let it cool down. It is NOT applicable to say that the ethanol cools down faster because it has a lower specific heat capacity; they both cool at the same rate because they are well mixed. Like the atmosphere.
Onion says:
“What steps would you go through to set up this experiment then?”
I blame government education for onion’s ignorance of the scientific method.
It is not the job of scientific skeptics to hold the hand of those making conjectures like CO2=CAGW, and try to help them show a cause-and-effect that appear to be wildly overblown. It is those who hypothesize that CO2 is gonna getcha to show how, through empirical experiments.
If you can’t design a testable, replicable hypothesis, then you’re back to making speculative conjectures.
Onion says:
December 25, 2010 at 9:14 am
Personally I can only thing you’d need a second Earth to do the experiment you are thinking of (although I am having to guess what you are thinking).
So gases will not scale, is that your point?
We can’t create scaled down environments in an attempt to demonstrate the greenhouse effect of CO2, is that what you are seriously trying to say?
This is the classic warmist’s cop-out.
I have conducted a simple reproducible experiment which shows that the higher specific heat capacity of O2 and N2 forces CO2 with its lower specific heat capacity, into thermal equilibrium and proves that CO2 is not a “greenhouse gas”.
If you can falsify this experiment, please go ahead. It has been 1 year since I published these experiments and I am still waiting.
I think Stu N and onion are in the midst of an identity crisis.
Will the real onion/Stu N please stand up.
I’m gonna call Troll on this one.
Looks like onion is covering for Stu N because its Christmas Day and Stu N is at home with kids.
I could be mistaken though. It could be that onion is home with the kids and Stu N is the cover man.
Who knows, who cares?
I’m out,
Merry Christmas.
Measure the temperature rise between Co2 in a balloon and Air in a balloon!!!
HAhaha!!!! Is this what it’s all come too?
Haa ha ha ha ha!
Thank you!! I love a good laugh!
That Lean et al. 2000 TSI reconstruction is used too often by too many people. It was a first stab at reconstructing TSI and many sun folks have learned from it and have improved reconstructions. There will more improvements as more is learned. I think that is why there is such a debate on the subject. also don’t confuse solar impact with natural oscillation variation. The PDO shift most likely started the flat temps from around 2000. A prolonged solar minimum will likely have a significant temperature impact, but it will probably take a while to dig it out of the natural variation climate noise.
Just another reminder that the land record has been thoroughly tampered with and not to be trusted:
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2010/09/25/thermometer-magic/
Since this appears to be easily forgotten, it would be nice if all articles regarding or referencing land temperatures contained a disclaimer as a reminder. Maybe a contest……
Will you’re clearly not paying attention to my arguments. Please consider all of the following carefully before you call it semantics and waffle, particularly the part on absorption in the infrared.
Firstly, the earth is surrounded by an atmosphere whose behaviour does not scale. Therefore you cannot create a scale model of the earth+atmosphere. The behaviour of the atmopshere contributes to the 1.5-4.0C estimated sensitivity to doubling Co2 (well, that’s one estimate anyway). If you cannot scale weather in this experiment, for example, then you cannot make the experiment analagous to the real thing. The same goes for the cryosphere/cloud/albedo changes, water vapour, etc etc.
The fact of the matter is that there is no ‘simple experiment’ that proves what climate sensitivity is. It’s not a cop out, it’s just true. However we most certainly do have evidence of a change in the longwave spectrum consistent with changes in radiatively active trace gases. If there is more longwave reaching the surface from the atmosphere, it ain’t gonna cool the surface.
I have actually looked at your website before. I think someone linked to it on scienceofdoom. Let me give you a pointer, look at the y-axes of your infrared absorption plots:
N2’s maximum line strength is about 1e-28 cm/molecule cm-2 (in the near-infrared).
O2’s is about 1e-24 cm/molecule cm-2 (but not in the infrared – that’s about 1e-28 again ).
CO2’s is about 1e-18 cm/molecule cm-2.
That is, in the infrared CO2 absorbs 10 orders of magnitude better than O2 or N2. That’s 10,000,000,000 times better. Think about what that means for the validity of your argument.
Also, I’m not Onion. I’m spartacus.
Re Smokey
December 25, 2010 at 9:58 am :
“I blame government education for onion’s ignorance of the scientific method.
It is not the job of scientific skeptics to hold the hand of those making conjectures like CO2=CAGW, and try to help them show a cause-and-effect that appear to be wildly overblown. It is those who hypothesize that CO2 is gonna getcha to show how, through empirical experiments.”
I was asking Will what experiment he was thinking of. Now you tell me that Will shouldn’t have to tell me. Why not? He must be thinking of something because he said such an experiment “Shouldn’t be too difficult”.
My point is that you can’t do an experiment such as filling a greenhouse with 500ppm CO2 (let alone using a balloon in some way) because that’s nothing like a planet. A greenhouse doesn’t have oceans, it isn’t surrounded by a vacuum.
A simple experiment with IR and a balloon or greenhouse could only demonstrate that CO2 absorbs infrared and that preventing energy loss by infrared causes the underlying body to warm. But that wouldn’t prove how much warming Earth will undergo, because the experiment is too simple (no oceans, no clouds, no anything really).
I assumed you aren’t asking for an experiment showing CO2 absorbs IR. I could be wrong. That’s why I asked Will what experiment he was asking for. I think it’s a legitimate question.
Re Will:
December 25, 2010 at 9:59 am
I guess my post above to Smokey is to you as well, but I have some more things I could have added now that I have read your post too.
“So gases will not scale, is that your point?”
I am saying the earth itself won’t scale. I am thinking of the difficulty of implementing a lapse rate of 5C/km in a greenhouse. Or even the difficulty of representing lines of latitude. Oceans? Clouds? Gases themselves probably could be scaled, but even there I am not certain (390ppm CO2 in a 14km high column of air is a lot of molecules, putting them in a greenhouse would probably require something like 5000ppm ).
“I have conducted a simple reproducible experiment which shows that the higher specific heat capacity of O2 and N2 forces CO2 with its lower specific heat capacity, into thermal equilibrium and proves that CO2 is not a “greenhouse gas”.”
What are the steps to reproduce this experiment?
Onion says:
December 25, 2010 at 11:11 am
“”My point is that you can’t do an experiment such as filling a greenhouse with 500ppm CO2 (let alone using a balloon in some way) because that’s nothing like a planet. A greenhouse doesn’t have oceans, it isn’t surrounded by a vacuum. ”
Where in the AGW conjecture is it stated that it only works on entire planets? Please point me to the according verse.
R.W. Wood disproved the “greenhouse” Earth hypothesis over a century ago. Despite lots of arm-waving by the alarmist contingent, Wood’s experiment has been replicated and confirmed. But feel free to try to falsify it yourself. It’s not that complicated.
Or, you could throw out more conjectures, and blame skeptics for your failing to show any testable, empirical evidence showing the degree of putative global warming caused by the truly minuscule anthropogenic component of CO2 compared with the CO2 emitted naturally.
Finally, if sensitivity were even slightly significant in the scheme of things, temperature would closely track CO2. It doesn’t. The relationship is mostly coincidental.
Smokey,
that argument rests on the simple assumption that the atmosphere actually behaves like a greenhouse. Which is doesn’t – the name just happens to be a bit of a misnomer.
I was highly dissapointed to find that string theory doesn’t talk about actual bits of yarn. And quarks, apparently, aren’t really different colours. I thought I spotted a red one the other day, but I must have been mistaken.
Anyway, Will’s website suffers from the same problem. Build up an entirely unrepresentative picture of what ‘greenhouse theory’ actually means and it’s dead easy to knock it over.
By the way, what do you guys things of Roy Spencer’s fairly recent efforts to convince the ‘skeptical’ community that the greenhouse effect actually does exist?
Re DirkH:
Well the greenhouse effect works because the Earth is surrounded by a vacuum and a lapse rate is needed for it to work (I have have been told this by people more knowledgeable than me/ half understand why).
If you just want evidence that CO2 absorbs infrared and that blocking infrared can increase the temperature of a body emitting it then experiments do exist that can show that. But if you want a scale model experiment of what doubling CO2 would do in Earth’s atmosphere then I am afraid that’s not possible.
Re Smokey:
December 25, 2010 at 11:51 am
“R.W. Wood disproved the “greenhouse” Earth hypothesis over a century ago.”
See my above post, you need a lapse rate for the greenhouse effect to work. His experiment didn’t include one. You need the top of the glass to be cooler (similar to near the top of the atmosphere) so that absorbed radiation from below cannot be emitted at the same intensity. That’s what causes the reduction in outgoing infrared.
The “lack of global warming” that Trenberth spoke about is also known as the problem of the “missing heat”. By Trenberth’s calculations, and by those of numerous others, there should be additional heat (specifically from AGW) somewhere in the earth’s systems. More exactly, Dr. Trenberth has made it quite clear where he and others think this missing heat is– the deeper oceans. His own website makes things quite clear, and I would hope everyone who is honest and wants the other side of the story will go to his site: http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/trenbert.html
Trenberth has been clear from the very beginning that he felt the “missing” heat must have gone into the deeper ocean as it is the only place that it could hide from being measured. The “travesty” was that we had no way of measuring the deeper ocean heat flux on any consistent basis. Very recent measurements and research by other scientists now seems to be confirming Dr. Trenberth’s expectations that the missing heat is in the deeper oceans:
http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2010/12/14/deep-ocean-heat-is-melting-antarctic-ice/
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2010/20100920_oceanwarming.html
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2010JCLI3682.1
The discovery of the Trenberth’s missing heat, if confirmed by even more researchers, should put the “missing heat” travesty to rest once and for all, except of course, for the most imagninative of skeptics.
Anthony says
———–
Trenberth knows full well that “solar activity” refers primarily to solar-magnetic activity, which varies by an order of magnitude over the solar cycle, while total solar irradiance is almost invariant over the solar cycle (which is why it is called the solar constant)
———–
Goody. At long last. I no longer have to call out idiots for claiming the sun’s radiation output variations cause global temperatures to change significantly.
[Anthony didn’t write this story – look at the header -moderator]
R Gates – Yes, “if” is a very large word. Perhaps the missing heat is in a still undiscovered Saddam bunker in Iraq?
In any case, the topic of this post is simple. Trenberth changed the question in order to deceive… which is also known as lying. Liars are liars, and they cannot be trusted, period. And there seems to be too many professional liars among what someone here aptly called the crimatologists.
Where’s Trenberth’s missing truth?
R. Gates says:
“The discovery of the Trenberth’s missing heat”
Trenberth is looking for a bowling ball(1/2 watt), all anyone has found to date is a golf ball(2/100ths of a watt).
R. Gates says:
December 25, 2010 at 12:29 pm
‘The discovery of the Trenberth’s missing heat, if confirmed’
Philip of Macedon to the Spartans: “You are advised to submit without further delay, for if I bring my army into your land, I will destroy your farms, slay your people, and raze your city.”
The Spartans’ reply: “If.”
He never came, of course.
Stu N says:
🙂
By the way, just as a word of warning about Smokey from someone who has been around here a while: He has probably already been told about the Wood notions not being relevant a thousand times, as it has been explained to him a thousand times why it is incorrect to claim that “the anthropogenic component of CO2” “is truly minuscule” “compared with the CO2 emitted naturally”. Alas, it doesn’t stop him from repeating this nonsense over and over. He is a captive of his own ideological beliefs and emotionally incapable of digesting science that in any way threatens those beliefs.
But, sometimes I figure it is still worth explaining why he is mistaken for the 1001st time just so others here who may be more amenable reason will understand.
If there is heat building in the bottom of the oceans, you would want to rule out the most obvious source, that of El Nino heat. El Nino heat, the kind of heat the builds in the top ocean layers sufficient enough to mix into the deeper layers (though I question deep mixing due to the dynamics of cold layers, etc, ) is absolutely, without question, far far far greater than the minuscule surface skin heat LW radiation would cause.
Well, again this nonsense about “Kevin Trenberth travesty”.
As I exposed in a previous post, the “lack of warming” refer not to global temperatures (that have continue to warm, giving 2010 the hottest year on record) but to cean heat content (OHC).
Most of the energy that accumulates in the planet as a consecuence of the Earth energy imbalance (that Trenberth found, based on datellite data, in 0.9 W/m^2) go into the oceans(more than 80%), and only little go to warming the land, the atmosphere and melting ice and snow. So, this ocean warming should be evident in the oceanic subsurface temperatures.
So, Trenberth was upset after finding that estimates of OHC showed very little warming in the ocean.
Trenberth was referring to this in this email. And that was, for the people that follow the peer-reviewed temperature, absolutely no surprise. That was exposed in a paper called:
“An imperative for climate change planning: tracking Earth’s global energy”
link: http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Trenberth/trenberth.papers/EnergyDiagnostics09final2.pdf
Here is reported a contradiction between the MEASURED (by satellites) energy imbalance of the Earth and the INFERRED OHC incresase based in calculated Thermo-steric SLR. The energy imbalance measured by satellites was much bigger than the inferred heat accumulation in the ocean.
This is the core of the “travesty”. Not a secret (it was published in a paper) and not an admission that “global warming has stopped”. Just a statement that the heat accumulated in the ocean inferred from estimates of thermo-steric sea level rise were inconsistent with satellite measurements of Earth heat imbalance.
It is not so surprising that the two datasets(one measured directly and the other inferred from estimates) were different. The “travesty” is precisely the poor methods avaivable at the moment to track heat accumulation in the Earth system, specially in the oceans (where most of heat accumulates).
Now that problem is improving. This paper:
“Global hydrographic variability patterns during 2003–2008”
poseidon.inogs.it/sire/conferenze/ppt…06…/Argo_von_Schuckmann.ppt
Shows a trend of 0.77±0.11 W/m^2 in the upper 2000 meters of the ocean, that corresponds to 1.01±0.13mm/yr of thermo-steric SLR.This is far better than the previous estimates using only the upper 900 meters of the ocean (a clearly incomplete picture) that showed a flat OHC after 2003.
This help close the energy budget, but is still not enough to account for the 0.9W/m^2 measured by satellites. More heat probably is accumulating below 2000 meters and perhaps there were errors in the ARGO data used by von Shuckmann(underestimating the warming) or in the satellite data (overestimating the energy imbalance).
Attacking Kevin Trenberth as if he was admitting that “global warming has stopped” only shows that the people that make this attacks do not follow the peer-reviewed literature.
R. Gates says:
“Dr. Trenberth has made it quite clear where he and others think this missing heat is– the deeper oceans.”
Your suggesting that the deeper oceans are adsorbing (the make believe) missing heat that Dr. Trenberth cant find and does not understand, even tho the deeper ocean temperatures are below radiative surface temperatures that are NOT being measured.
And bizarrely tho according to you he says; “as it is the only place that it could hide from being measured” How on Earth can he clam to have a global temperature of any thing if he is missing a huge part of it?