This is how Slashdot breaks the news from Forbes article: “New NASA Data Blow Gaping Hole In Global Warming Alarmism”. When it hits Slashdot, you know it has gone viral.
New NASA Data Casts Doubt On Global Warming Models
from the but-scientists-love-models dept.
bonch writes:
“Satellite data from NASA covering 2000 through 2011 cast doubt on current computer models predicting global warming, according to a new study. The data shows that much less heat is retained by carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere than is assumed in current models. ‘There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans,’ said Dr. Roy Spencer, a co-author of the study and research scientist at the University of Alabama.”
Note: the press release about the study is somewhat less over the top.
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“Brian, if you wish to make such statements about the “qualifacations” of higher authorities, I am willing to bet they wished you could spell that word correctly.”
I think he meant to write “quackifications”.
Thunderstorm “tower heat sinks” shunt heat into space.
@MarkG
“That is what I’ve always considered one of the simplest and most damning rebuttals to AGW alarmism: if these positive feedbacks are as bad as they make out, how come we’re here? If a tiny increase in CO2 would cause catastrophic temperature rises through positive feedback from water vapor, life should have been wiped out long ago.”
Everyone on the AGW side considers CO2 a classic pollution problem, i.e. pollution causes environmental degredation. But CO2 is a natural gas that belongs in the atmosphere and the biosphere couldn’t do without. AGW is not a classic pollution case, but it hinges entirely on the positive feedback that forcings are thought to have. And what everyone seems to forget is for a runaway greenhouse effect to happen instability should be a natural state of our atmosphere.
Now, tell me how an inherently unstable atmospheric system of a planet with a chaotic ever changing albedo can be unstable and yet still produce a nice smooth flatline as the hockeystick graph. The very smoothness of the line that is considered by main stream science as proof that we are in an unprecedented warming period may as well be considered the very proof that the climate is stable.
You can not have the cake and eat it.
@Kelvin Potter Vaughan
That is not how the greenhouse effect works. The effect may best be understood by painting your central heating radiator black.You’ll find it looses energy far fastier and while the wife might disapprove of the gloomy look of the room you’ll find real noticable difference in the energy bill.
CO2 may be a small amount of the atmosphere, paint is also a small fraction of the entire radiator. Yet it’s effect is noticable by changing the infrared colour of the atmosphere.
Fox News has it:
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/07/29/data-cooling-on-global-warming/
It’s gone totally viral. The world + dog now knows. Dr. Roy Spencer has the floor.
@izen
“The energy content of the ocean is large, but not limitless, the transfer to the atmosphere is part of the equator to pole movement of thermal energy. ”
Of course the energy content per 1 C of the ocean is not limitless. It is at least a factor 3 higher than the atmosphere though. Now, unless you think we have centuries of fossil fuel bonanza left this will be a buffer enough to dampen effects for centuries.
KNMI (hardly the Heartland institute, wouldn’t you say) recently had a study explaining that current lull in warming was due to.. higher reflection as well as higher heat leakage to deep ocean.
http://www.knmi.nl/cms/content/99686/verdwenen_warmte_in_oceaan_gevonden (Dutch language. Sorry)
Philip Plait of Bad Astronomy blog fame puts his foot into the attack against Dr. Roy Spencer’s new paper. I chastise Philip Plait for the use of unprofessional ad hominem personal attacks and get viciously counter attacked. Par for the course. You might be interested. If you wish you might indicate your support for higher standards of conduct between professional scientists in the Google+ comments or the blog article. Thanks.
https://plus.google.com/108952536790629690817/posts/MGqXjz6xicG
Note at the conclusion of this abstract which is the paper we are talking about the author says I DON’T KNOW. The facts remain. The glassier ARE melting.
Abstract: The sensitivity of the climate system to an imposed radiative imbalance remains
the largest source of uncertainty in projections of future anthropogenic climate change.
Here we present further evidence that this uncertainty from an observational perspective is
largely due to the masking of the radiative feedback signal by internal radiative forcing,
probably due to natural cloud variations. That these internal radiative forcings exist and
likely corrupt feedback diagnosis is demonstrated with lag regression analysis of satellite
and coupled climate model data, interpreted with a simple forcing-feedback model. While
the satellite-based metrics for the period 2000–2010 depart substantially in the direction of
lower climate sensitivity from those similarly computed from coupled climate models, we
find that, with traditional methods, it is not possible to accurately quantify this discrepancy
in terms of the feedbacks which determine climate sensitivity. It is concluded that
atmospheric feedback diagnosis of the climate system remains an unsolved problem, due
primarily to the inability to distinguish between radiative forcing and radiative feedback in
satellite radiative budget observations.
@- Richard S Courtney says:
July 29, 2011 at 10:36 am
“Clearly, you have not read the paper or you have reading difficulties. Personally, I suspect both.”
I had already read the paper when you first posted, that’s why my shorter version was accurate.
Unless you think that –
S&B
“Finally, since much of the temperature variability during 2000–2010 was due to ENSO [9], we
conclude that ENSO-related temperature variations are partly radiatively forced. We hypothesize that changes in the coupled ocean-atmosphere circulation during the El Niño and La Niña phases of ENSO cause differing changes in cloud cover, which then modulate the radiative balance of the climate system. …
What this might (or might not) imply regarding the ultimate causes of the El Niño and La Niña
phenomena is not relevant to our central point, though: that the presence of time varying radiative forcing in satellite radiative flux measurements corrupts the diagnosis of radiative feedback”.
is not summarized by my version ?
@- Crispin in Waterloo says:
July 29, 2011 at 9:33 am
“LWIR does not heat the oceans. CO2 can’t heat oceans because there is no mechanism for it. The original idea was it heats the air and the air was assumed somehow to heat the oceans.
If you warm the air, it heats the top millimeter of water which immediately evaporates more. The ocean does not get warmer.”
I KNOW LWIR does not heat the oceans, I have never claimed it did and specifically stated it does not.
But it does have an impact, things would not be exactly the same if there was NO LWIR.
You are claiming that because it promoted evaporation it transfers energy into the atmosphere in the form of water vapor and increased convection. Perhaps you would conclude that the presence of CO2 INCREASES the cooling of the oceans?
@- Pamela Gray says:
July 29, 2011 at 9:18 am
“Izen, you are demonstrating a severe deficit in oceanic science. The ocean is constantly evaporating at the surface tension layer. Whatever warming occurs through LW radiation is thus constantly being evaporated off. …
It is far more likely that it is being radiated out to space. Strong radiative cooling is a known and mathematically defensible mechanism.”
Is the radiative cooling from this increased water vapor at lower temperature (given the wet adiabatic lapse rate) than the ocean surface better at radiating LWIR to space than the ocean surface?
Slashdot has a counter article that was just put up. http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/07/29/1844224/Followup-Anti-Global-Warming-Story-Itself-Flawed
POSITIVE FEEDBACK
A system with positive feedback can be stable, unstable or conditionally stable. In fact, positive feedback may be added to a system to improve gain or speed.
Depending on what kind of system you are working with, you may evaluate system stability using one of several techniques. Control systems are often evaluated using ‘root locus criteria’. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_locus
The requirement for positive feedback does not invalidate agw by itself. OTOH, those who tell us that there is positive feedback have a duty tell us why they feel that the system is stable.
The usual explanation about the feedback is that it isn’t linear and that there is a tipping point at which we will get runaway warming. The trouble with that is that it has been warmer in the past and we didn’t hit the aforementioned tipping point. I think that is why they had to eradicate the Medieval Warm Period. Junk piled on crap piled on complete garbage. Bah. (smoke emerges from my ears)
@- commieBob says:
July 29, 2011 at 1:50 pm
“The requirement for positive feedback does not invalidate agw by itself. OTOH, those who tell us that there is positive feedback have a duty tell us why they feel that the system is stable.”
Because along with the (measured) positive feedback from the increased humidity with temperature is a very large, non-linear NEGATIVE feedback inherent in the relation between temperature and energy emissions.
E=T^4
Looking around the Internet it says a lot about the AGW pushers when all they can say in retaliation is a combination of:
– personal attacks
– “he was wrong in the past so he’s wrong now”
– ignoring completely the satellite data (regardless of the interpretation) that shows more heat is leaving than expected
– using VERY unreliable opinions from “mates” (Trenberth) to discredit the paper (in the guile of personal attacks)
End of the day, I don’t care if he’s a creationist, I don’t care if he believes in ID, I don’t care if his funding was “questionable”, all I want to know is what the satellite says and how it changes our interpretation of the models.
Izen:
Wriggle all you like, but your so-called “shorter version” of the Spencer & Braswell paper is a complete misrepresentation of what that paper says.
My post at 5.50 am provided you with a direct quote from the paper which refutes your assertion.
Please take a course in reading comprehension then read the paper again.
Richard
There is only one way to determine the Earth’s energy balance and settle this problem. It’s to orbit a sensitive bolometer – that is an all wavelength radiation detector – at such a distance that it can image a whole hemisphere. Then by applying the Stephan-Boltzmann Law, the total radiation and its variability over long periods, as well as the diurnal and seasonal ones, can be found. That is in fact the ONLY way of taking the planet’s temperature; any other method comes with the question – where do you put the thermometer?
@- Richard S Courtney says:
July 29, 2011 at 3:36 pm
“My post at 5.50 am provided you with a direct quote from the paper which refutes your assertion.”
The first sentence of that direct quote was –
“Central to the difficulty of feedback diagnosis is the very different time-dependent relationships which exist between forcing and temperature, versus between feedback and temperature. ”
The context of this, from the paper, is that because what the satellite observes is the combination of the two relationships. As is made clear in Fig4, page 9 and in the following text –
“Diagnosis of feedback cannot easily be made in such situations, because the radiative forcing decorrelates the co-variations between temperature and radiative flux. For example, no matter what feedback is specified when the simple model is only radiatively forced, the regression coefficient at zero time lag for a sufficiently long model simulation is always near-zero.”
So my shorter version –
“We could not match ten years of real world data with significant ENSO events with model data that makes the assumption that over longer timescales the ENSO effect is neutral.”
I would contend is a better summary than anything you have presented.
@- Richard Courtney says
“Please take a course in reading comprehension then read the paper again.”
I think both of us are capable of reading, but perhaps you would like to give your summary of what findings you think the S&B paper contains. It might show which of us is capable of comprehension.
I’ll give you a hint, the press release is not a good place to start….
@- Malcolm Miller says:
July 29, 2011 at 3:49 pm
There is only one way to determine the Earth’s energy balance and settle this problem. It’s to orbit a sensitive bolometer …. That is in fact the ONLY way of taking the planet’s temperature; any other method comes with the question – where do you put the thermometer?
On the moon.
commieBob says:
July 29, 2011 at 1:50 pm
I suspect you attribute too much insight to the keepers of the temperature data. Much more likely “they” just didn’t like the bumps that interfered with their virtual world.
I’m sure that had there been any prospect of GHG “tipping points”, conditional or unconditional, being reached within the range of atmospheric compositions and temperatures that would support the carbon based life forms we are familiar with, it would have long since occurred.
If people think this site is blunt then wait until they get a load of slashdot. You get more sides to an argument than a 8 dimensional polyhedron 🙂
I’ve always enjoyed slashdot, sort of like you enjoy the idea of the old wild west where men were men and sheep were nervous. Great to see these things making up the views on what could be considered the original geek site.
I’ve read the mainstream articles and I came to wattsupwiththat to get an informative second opinion. But too bad I got none.
izen says:
All I was doing was correcting a very common misconception, found among the comments here, about positive feedback. Many people, engineers and scientists included, think positive feedback always produces an unstable system. It does not. You can not use it as an argument to dispute agw. What you can do, however, is demand that the warmists justify thinking that the system they postulate is as stable as it is observed to be.
While I’m being pedantic: The equation you cite is technically not a feedback. It is part of the forward response of the overall system equation. For a very simple system consisting of a blackbody with no thermal inertia, energy in equals energy out (the definition of a blackbody) and the equation you cite gives the temperature of the blackbody. It is no more an example of feedback than is Ohm’s law for electricity.
jim says:
July 29, 2011 at 1:12 pm
Note at the conclusion of this abstract which is the paper we are talking about the author says I DON’T KNOW.
That kind of laudable humility is the main reason I respect their work much more than the pablum dispensed by the “consensus” climate community. In my view, given the current abysmal state of “climate science”, anyone who is willing to declare themselves convinced by any of it is either a complete fool or suffering from a profound case of self-delusion.
On a separate point unrelated to your comment, much has been made of Dr. Spencer’s article in defense of ID. Similar ad hom’s have been leveled at Dr. Singer based on his criticism of the science of secondhand smoke. I’ve read both and Dr.Singer is almost entirely correct in his characterizations of the SOSS, which is perhaps one of the few fields of study that is more corrupt than CAGW. Dr. Spencer’s relatively brief piece on ID isn’t something I’d wholeheartedly embrace, but in the end he is not advocating for its inclusion in the educational system, but merely attempting to make the point that questions at the level of First Causes are outside the ability of science to address, which seems intuitively obvious. I’m often amused by those who embrace an atheist belief system and vocally espouse it based on the notion that their choice is much more rational and logical than those who embrace religious belief systems. All that demonstrates is that they don’t understand the question. Those choices are made in an area of mind and thought where as the old song has it “the rules of logic don’t apply”
One more digression before I quit, I promise. If we are meant to disregard the work of everyone who has ever offered a less than mainstream or politically correct opinion about anything, how about we start with old Svante Arrhenius. In addition to his work on CO2, he was a founding figure in the entirely racist field of Eugenics, with a clear trail of philosophical connection to those folks in Germany who did their deadly best to put his execrable theories into action. If exclusion by association is to be the rule, I contend that old Svante ought to be the first with his head on the block along with any who have aligned themselves with him.
peeke
you must be joking, right ?
izen says:
July 29, 2011 at 4:01 am
@- Konrad says:
July 28, 2011 at 10:35 pm
“We know that back scattered LWIR from CO2 cannot heat the oceans accounting 70% of the Earths surface, which invalidates the case for CAGW.”
Could you provide some evidence for this claim? WHY does downwelling LWIR not warm the oceans when it is from CO2 but does when it is from clouds – or are you claiming that cloud cover has no effect on ocean temperature at night?
—————————————————
Clouds (and CO2) at night do not warm the ocean, they slow the rate of cooling. The source of warming is diurnal solar gain. There is no nocturnal solar gain. Insulation does not heat your house, it slows the heat transfer. You heat your house with a furnace.
@- Malcolm Miller says:
July 29, 2011 at 3:49 pm
There is only one way to determine the Earth’s energy balance and settle this problem. It’s to orbit a sensitive bolometer
Wouldn’t even the smallest change in the deep ocean mixing rate invalidate any such reading, as the Earth would no longer be in equilibrium?
Mainstream climate science assumes the Earth is in equilibrium, which is not. This assumption makes the math a lot simpler and what mathematicians like to call “wrong”.