Dr. Richard Lindzen writes to me with news of this significant new paper saying “It has taken almost 2 years to get this out. “. Part of that problem appears to be hostile reviewers in earlier submissions to JGR, something we’ve seen recently with other skeptical papers, such as O’Donnell’s rebuttal to Steig et al (Antarctica is warming) where Steig himself inappropriately served as a reviewer, and a hostile one at that.
Hostile reviewers aside, the paper will now be published in an upcoming issue of the Asia-Pacific Journal of Atmospheric Sciences and I am honored to be able to be able to present it here. The authors state that:
“We have corrected the approach of Lindzen and Choi (2009), based on all the criticisms made of the earlier work (Chung et al., 2010; Murphy, 2010; Trenberth et al., 2010).”
…
The present paper responds to the criticism, and corrects the earlier approach where appropriate. The earlier results are not significantly altered, and we show why these results differ from what others like Trenberth et al. (2010), and Dessler (2010) obtain.
So, while that may satisfy some critics, given the hostility shown to the idea that there is a low sensitivity to forcings, I’m sure a whole new crop of critics will spring up for this paper. The response to this paper in AGW proponent circles, like the feedback posited for Earth’s climate system, will surely be negative. Let the games begin.
Some highlights:
However, warming from a doubling of CO2 would only be about 1°C (based on simple calculations where the radiation altitude and the Planck temperature depend on wavelength in accordance with the attenuation coefficients of wellmixed CO2 molecules; a doubling of any concentration in ppmv produces the same warming because of the logarithmic dependence of CO2’s absorption on the amount of CO2) (IPCC, 2007).
…
This modest warming is much less than current climate models suggest for a doubling of CO2. Models predict warming of from 1.5°C to 5°C and even more for a doubling of CO2
…
As a result, the climate sensitivity for a doubling of CO2 is estimated to be 0.7 K (with the confidence interval 0.5K – 1.3 K at 99% levels). This observational result shows that model sensitivities indicated by the IPCC AR4 are likely greater than than the possibilities estimated from the observations.
…
Our analysis of the data only demands relative instrumental stability over short periods, and is largely independent of long term drift.
Willis Eschenbach will no doubt find some interesting things in this paper, as it speaks of some of the same regulation mechanisms in the tropics as Willis has opined on here at WUWT. Here’s the Abstract and Conclusion, a link to the full paper follows:
==============================================================
On the Observational Determination of Climate Sensitivity and Its Implications
Richard S. Lindzen1 and Yong-Sang Choi2
1Program in Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, U. S. A.
2Department of Environmental Science and Engineering, Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Korea
Asia-Pacific J. Atmos. Sci., 47(4), 377-390, 2011 DOI:10.1007/s13143-011-0023-x
Abstract:
We estimate climate sensitivity from observations, using the deseasonalized fluctuations in sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and the concurrent fluctuations in the top-of-atmosphere (TOA) outgoing radiation from the ERBE (1985-1999) and CERES (2000-2008) satellite instruments. Distinct periods of warming and cooling in the SSTs were used to evaluate feedbacks. An earlier study (Lindzen and Choi, 2009) was subject to significant criticisms. The present paper is an expansion of the earlier paper where the various criticisms are taken into account. The present analysis accounts for the 72 day precession period for the ERBE satellite in a more appropriate manner than in the earlier paper. We develop a method to distinguish noise in the outgoing radiation as well as radiation changes that are forcing SST changes from those radiation changes that constitute feedbacks to changes in SST. We demonstrate that our new method does moderately well in distinguishing positive from negative feedbacks and in quantifying negative feedbacks. In contrast, we show that simple regression methods used by several existing papers generally exaggerate positive feedbacks and even show positive feedbacks when actual feedbacks are negative. We argue that feedbacks are largely concentrated in the tropics, and the tropical feedbacks can be adjusted to account for their impact on the globe as a whole. Indeed, we show that including all CERES data (not just from the tropics) leads to results similar to what are obtained for the tropics alone – though with more noise. We again find that the outgoing radiation resulting from SST fluctuations exceeds the zerofeedback response thus implying negative feedback. In contrast to
this, the calculated TOA outgoing radiation fluxes from 11 atmospheric models forced by the observed SST are less than the zerofeedback response, consistent with the positive feedbacks that characterize these models. The results imply that the models are
exaggerating climate sensitivity.
Conclusion:
We have corrected the approach of Lindzen and Choi (2009), based on all the criticisms made of the earlier work (Chung et al., 2010; Murphy, 2010; Trenberth et al., 2010). First of all, to improve the statistical significance of the results, we supplemented ERBE data with CERES data, filtered out data noise with 3-month smoothing, objectively chose the intervals based on the smoothed data, and provided confidence intervals for all sensitivity estimates. These constraints helped us to more accurately obtain climate feedback factors than with the original use of monthly data. Next, our new formulas for climate feedback
and sensitivity reflect sharing of tropical feedback with the globe, so that the tropical region is now properly identified as an open system. Last, the feedback factors inferred from the atmospheric models are more consistent with IPCC-defined climate sensitivity
than those from the coupled models. This is because, in the presence of cloud-induced radiative changes altering SST, the climate feedback estimates by the present approach tends to be inaccurate. With all corrections, the conclusion still appears to be
that all current models seem to exaggerate climate sensitivity (some greatly). Moreover, we have shown why studies using simple regressions of ΔFlux on ΔSST serve poorly to determine feedbacks.
To respond to the criticism of our emphasis on the tropical domain (Murphy, 2010; Trenberth et al., 2010), we analyzed the complete record of CERES for the globe (Dessler, 2010) (Note that ERBE data is not available for the high latitudes since the field-of-view is between 60oS and 60oN). As seen in the previous section, the use of the global CERES record leads to a result that is basically similar to that from the tropical data in this
study. The global CERES record, however, contains more noise than the tropical record.
This result lends support to the argument that the water vapor feedback is primarily restricted to the tropics, and there are reasons to suppose that this is also the case for cloud feedbacks. Although, in principle, climate feedbacks may arise from any
latitude, there are substantive reasons for supposing that they are, indeed, concentrated mostly in the tropics. The most prominent model feedback is that due to water vapor, where it is commonly noted that models behave roughly as though relative humidity
were fixed. Pierrehumbert (2009) examined outgoing radiation as a function of surface temperature theoretically for atmospheres with constant relative humidity. His results are shown in Fig. 13.
Specific humidity is low in the extratropics, while it is high in the tropics. We see that for extratropical conditions, outgoing radiation closely approximates the Planck black body radiation (leading to small feedback). However, for tropical conditions, increases in outgoing radiation are suppressed, implying substantial positive feedback. There are also reasons to suppose that cloud feedbacks are largely confined to the tropics. In the
extratropics, clouds are mostly stratiform clouds that are associated with ascending air while descending regions are cloudfree. Ascent and descent are largely determined by the large scale wave motions that dominate the meteorology of the extratropics, and for these waves, we expect approximately 50% cloud cover regardless of temperature (though details may depend on temperature). On the other hand, in the tropics, upper level clouds, at least, are mostly determined by detrainment from cumulonimbus towers, and cloud coverage is observed to depend significantly on temperature (Rondanelli and Lindzen, 2008).
As noted by LCH01, with feedbacks restricted to the tropics, their contribution to global sensitivity results from sharing the feedback fluxes with the extratropics. This led to inclusion of the sharing factor c in Eq. (6). The choice of a larger factor c leads to
a smaller contribution of tropical feedback to global sensitivity, but the effect on the climate sensitivity estimated from the observation is minor. For example, with c = 3, climate sensitivity from the observation and the models is 0.8 K and a higher value
(between 1.3 K and 6.4 K), respectively. With c = 1.5, global equilibrium sensitivity from the observation and the models is 0.6 K and any value higher than 1.6 K, respectively. Note that, as in LCH01, we are not discounting the possibility of feedbacks in the extratropics, but rather we are focusing on the tropical contribution to global feedbacks. Note that, when the dynamical heat transports toward the extratropics are taken into account, the overestimation of tropical feedback by GCMs may lead to even greater overestimation of climate sensitivity (Bates, 2011).
This emphasizes the importance of the tropical domain itself. Our analysis of the data only demands relative instrumental stability over short periods, and is largely independent of long term drift. Concerning the different sampling from the ERBE and CERES instruments, Murphy et al. (2009) repeated the Forster and Gregory (2006) analysis for the CERES and found very different values than those from the ERBE. However, in this
study, the addition of CERES data to the ERBE data does little to change the results for ΔFlux/ΔSST – except that its value is raised a little (as is also true when only CERES data is used.). This may be because these previous simple regression approaches include
the distortion of feedback processes by equilibration. In distinguishing a precise feedback from the data, the simple regression method is dependent on the data period, while our method is not. The simple regression result in Fig. 7 is worse if the model
integration time is longer (probably due to the greater impact of increasing radiative forcing).
Our study also suggests that, in current coupled atmosphereocean models, the atmosphere and ocean are too weakly coupled since thermal coupling is inversely proportional to sensitivity (Lindzen and Giannitsis, 1998). It has been noted by Newman et al. (2009) that coupling is crucial to the simulation of phenomena like El Niño. Thus, corrections of the sensitivity of current climate models might well improve the behavior of coupled
models, and should be encouraged. It should be noted that there have been independent tests that also suggest sensitivities less than predicted by current models. These tests are based on the response to sequences of volcanic eruptions (Lindzen and Giannitsis, 1998), on the vertical structure of observed versus modeled temperature increase (Douglass, 2007; Lindzen, 2007), on ocean heating (Schwartz, 2007; Schwartz, 2008), and on
satellite observations (Spencer and Braswell, 2010). Most claims of greater sensitivity are based on the models that we have just shown can be highly misleading on this matter. There have also been attempts to infer sensitivity from paleoclimate data (Hansen
et al., 1993), but these are not really tests since the forcing is essentially unknown given major uncertainties in clouds, dust loading and other factors. Finally, we have shown that the attempts to obtain feedbacks from simple regressions of satellite measured outgoing radiation on SST are inappropriate.
One final point needs to be made. Low sensitivity of global mean temperature anomaly to global scale forcing does not imply that major climate change cannot occur. The earth has, of course, experienced major cool periods such as those associated with ice ages and warm periods such as the Eocene (Crowley and North, 1991). As noted, however, in Lindzen (1993), these episodes were primarily associated with changes in the equatorto-
pole temperature difference and spatially heterogeneous forcing. Changes in global mean temperature were simply the residue of such changes and not the cause.
==============================================================
Dr. Lindzen has the full paper on his personal website here:
http://www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/236-Lindzen-Choi-2011.pdf
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I JUST talked about this today, in my discussion about the scientific method and how scientific illiteracy and bad science can lead to extremely damaging (not to mention expensive) social policy. I even recommended WUWT, putting the URL on the board for students who care to go beyond what they hear on CNN. I’m not even diplomatic any more–MY students at least will have heard what is really going on, and hopefully stop bringing me weekly science articles about AGW and how it’s going to ruin the planet.
Takes a lot to ruin a planet, turns out. 🙂
“DCA says:
August 17, 2011 at 6:23 am
Gavin Schmidt has been saying lately that the paleo data are more important than the recent observations. Now we know why.
How would one respond to his assertion?”
With regard to the glacial to interglacial sensitivity, one can’t equate the positive feedback effect of melting ice from that of leaving maximum ice to that of minimum ice where the climate is now. There just isn’t much ice left, and what is left would be very hard to melt, as most of is located at high latitudes around the poles which are mostly dark 6 months out the year with way below yearly average freezing temperatures. A lot of the ice is thousands of feet above sea level too where the air is significantly colder. Unless you wait a few 10s of millions of years for plate tectonics to move Antarctica and Greenland to lower latitudes (if they are even moving in that direction), no significant amount of ice is going to melt from a measly 0.5-1 C rise in temperature. Furthermore, the high sensitivity from glacial to interglacial is largely driven by the change in the orbit relative to the Sun, which changes the distribution of the incoming solar energy in the system dramatically. This combined with positive feedback effect of melting surface ice is enough to overcome the net negative feedback and cause the 5-6 C rise. But we are very nearing the end of this interglacial period, so if anything the orbit has already flipped back in the direction of glaciation and cooling.
In reply to E.Swanson’s comment: E. Swanson says: August 17, 2011 at 10:50 am
Here we see more confusion from Dr. Lindzen. One big question I’ve not seen him address. If the feedback is negative, that feedback would also work to minimize any cooling due to natural causes. So, Dr. Lindzen, tell us how it was possible for the Ice Ages to begin after the last Interglacial and how was it possible that all those glaciers which buried Eastern Canada and parts of the US as far south as NYC and Boston melted later? Inquiring minds want to know.
A couple of separate threads would be required to discuss the paleoclimatic record. If the planet’s feedback is negative there is a cyclic powerful climate change mechanism that causes the glacial/interglacial cycle and abrupt climate change events that occur throughout the glacial period. Paleoclimatic research has been proceeding in the background separate from AGW controversy.
The paleoclimatic record does not support positive feedback. The interglacial periods end abruptly not gradually or oscillatory. What is required to explain the paleoclimatic record is a massive abrupt climate change mechanism. The appeal to positive feedback does not explain the observations. The climate does not strongly oscillate following a large volcanic eruption which is the response of a system with positive feedback. The planet rapidly recovers to a stable climate after a large volcanic eruption.
The paleoclimatic record has a repeating long term saw tooth change to the planetary climate. The Younger Dryas cooling period for example was a 4C cooling 80% of which occurred in a decade. The Younger Dryas cooling period lasted for a 1000 years. There are small, medium, and very large abrupt climate events in the paleoclimatic record. Cosmogenic isotope changes correlate with the small, medium, and very large abrupt climate changes events. The sun is somehow involved with the serial climate event however the solar event causes the planetary cooling indirectly by changing the geomagnetic field which takes hundreds or thousands of years to recover. (The effect is dependent on the tilt of earth at the time of the solar event, the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit, and the timing of perihelion at the time of the solar event which determines whether the restrike occurs in the northern or southern hemisphere.)
It appears the cyclic long term changes to the climate and the abrupt climate change events such as the Younger Dryas (there is a geomagnetic excursion that correlates with the Younger Dryas event) are caused by abrupt changes to the geomagnetic field. The geomagnetic field specialists have examined clay tiles that were fired over the last 1500 years to find curious abrupt changes of the geomagnetic field that are occurring with a periodicity of roughly 400 years. (Geomagnetic field axis abrupt changes 10 to 15 degrees) Other geomagnetic specialists have found geomagnetic excursions (field strength drops by a factor of 5 to 10 during the excursion) at the termination of each of the last glacial periods by study ocean floor sediments. The very large abrupt geomagnetic field changes are occurring with a period of roughly 12,000 years.
The geomagnetic strength field is reduced by a factor of 5 to 8 during the glacial periods. A reduction in the geomagnetic field causes an increase in planetary clouds which causes the planet to cool. There are cycles of abrupt geomagnetic field changes that correlate with cyclic changes to the planetary climate during the glacial phase.
(See these papers for additional observation evidence to support the hypothesis.)
Are there connections between the Earth’s magnetic and Climate?
We review evidence for correlations which could suggest such (causal or non-causal) connections at various time scales (recent secular variation approx 10–100 yr, historical and archeomagnetic change appox. 100–5000 yr, and excursions and reversals approx. 10^3–10^6 yr), and attempt to suggest mechanisms. Evidence for correlations, which invoke Milankovic forcing in the core, either directly or through changes in ice distribution and moments of inertia of the Earth, is still tenuous. Correlation between decadal changes in amplitude of geomagnetic variations of external origin, solar irradiance and global temperature is stronger. It suggests that solar irradiance could have been a major forcing function of climate until the mid-1980s, when “anomalous” warming becomes apparent. The most intriguing feature may be the recently proposed archeomagnetic jerks, i.e. fairly abrupt (approx. 100 yr long) geomagnetic field variations found at irregular intervals over the past few millennia, using the archeological record from Europe to the Middle East. These seem to correlate with significant climatic events in the eastern North Atlantic region. A proposed mechanism involves variations in the geometry of the geomagnetic field (f.i. tilt of the dipole to lower latitudes), resulting in enhanced cosmic-ray induced nucleation of clouds. No forcing factor, be it changes in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere or changes in cosmic ray flux modulated by solar activity and geomagnetism, or possibly other factors, can at present be neglected or shown to be the overwhelming single driver of climate change in past centuries. Intensive data acquisition is required to further probe indications that the Earth’s and Sun’s magnetic fields may have significant bearing on climate change at certain time scales.
http://sciences.blogs.liberation.fr/home/files/Courtillot07EPSL.pdf
http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~rtp1/BardPapers/responseCourtillotEPSL07.pdf
Response to Comment on “Are there connections between Earth’s magnetic field and climate?, Earth Planet. Sci. Lett., 253, 328–339, 2007” by Bard, E., and Delaygue, M., Earth Planet. Sci. Lett., in press, 2007
Also, we wish to recall that evidence of a correlation between archeomagnetic jerks and cooling events (in a region extending from the eastern North Atlantic to the Middle East) now covers a period of 5 millenia and involves 10 events (see f.i. Figure 1 of Gallet and Genevey, 2007). The climatic record uses a combination of results from Bond et al (2001), history of Swiss glaciers (Holzhauser et al, 2005) and historical accounts reviewed by Le Roy Ladurie (2004). Recent high-resolution paleomagnetic records (e.g. Snowball and Sandgren, 2004; St-Onge et al., 2003) and global geomagnetic field modeling (Korte and Constable, 2006) support the idea that part of the centennial-scale fluctuations in 14C production may have been influenced by previously unmodeled rapid dipole field variations. In any case, the relationship between climate, the Sun and the geomagnetic field could be more complex than previously imagined.
Is the geodynamo process intrinsically unstable?
http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/416/
Recent palaeomagnetic studies suggest that excursions of the geomagnetic field, during which the intensity drops suddenly by a factor of 5^10 and the local direction changes dramatically, are more common than previously expected. The `normal’ state of the geomagnetic field, dominated by an axial dipole, seems to be interrupted every 30 to 100 kyr; it may not therefore be as stable as we thought.
Recent studies suggest that the Earth’s magnetic field has fallen dramatically in magnitude and changed direction repeatedly since the last reversal 700 kyr ago (Langereis et al. 1997; Lund et al. 1998). These important results paint a rather different picture of the long-term behaviour of the field from the conventional one of a steady dipole reversing at random intervals: instead, the field appears to spend up to 20 per cent of its time in a weak, non-dipole state (Lund et al. 1998).
DocMartyn says:
August 17, 2011 at 5:51 pm
‘the correct forcing’
If only one had some sort of scientific notation to explain how heat, in its various forms, becomes temperature. …….
=========================================================
Doc, that’s a great idea……. though I used a thermometer, I did something similar…….I just got through posting this comment at Goddard’s…….. in part……..
“I once had a cloud pass overhead on a warm day and noticed the cooling effect. (Strange I know, but it gets weirder!!) I then had a cloud pass overhead on a cool moonlit night. The radiative energy bouncing back and forth from the ground to cloud and back to the ground several times over literally put me in a microwave!!! The snow on the ground started to melt!…… I noted the temp difference was even more than the temp difference of the summer cloud but in the opposite manner!!!
– 😐 ———————— No, not really…….that reality only exists in the minds of climate crazed alarmists. Some supposedly educated pinheads actually believe there is a net increase in temps because of clouds…….it isn’t even close, clouds cool the earth.”
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2011/08/17/summer-is-over-in-the-arctic/#comment-80261
It may be good science, but I bet it doesn’t make us any the less doomed.
John B says:
August 17, 2011 at 5:35 pm (Edit)
In that case I’m not interested. If you have specific objections to specific words in specific papers, quote them, identify them, and state your objections. Saying “pretty much any set of papers” is meaningless.
w.
Matt & Alan D McIntire:
The IPCC says 1 W/m2 additional forcing raises the global temperature by 0.75°C +/- 0.25°C.
I have also seen this calculated on this site a number times using:
1367 TSI/4= 342 W/m2 ‘average’ solar insolation
‘Average’ Earth temp = 290 K
290/342= 0.85K temperature change per 1 W/m2 change in forcing
Lets take the average of the two and say .8C delta T results from 1 W/m2 delta F
or delta F = 1.2 delta T
If Lindzen is correct that sensitivity is 0.7C per doubling of CO2, the corresponding change in forcing should be
delta F = (1.2)(delta T) = .84 W/m2 = 1.2*ln(2)
thus the “IPCC formula” “should be” approx.
delta F = 1.2*ln(C/Co)
A far cry from the current “IPCC formula” of delta F = 5.35*ln(C/Co)
And a far cry from “the formula” suggested by measurements of a supposed 0.6C change during a period in which CO2 rose by 100 ppm, which would imply the formula should be
delta F = 1.2*0.6 = .72 = 1.03*ln(C/Co)
if one assumes ALL of the 0.6C change in T is due to CO2 with NOTHING at all due to natural variability. Of course, if any of that change was due to natural variability, the “fudge factor” of 1.03 would be even less.
Matt – when you state the “IPCC formula” is directly based on measurements, what measurements specifically are you referring to? Do you have a reference?
“blockade runner” n. (new slang) scientists who get their heretical articles past the peer review hostiles and into publication.
steven mosher says:
August 17, 2011 at 9:53 am
“The ECR or equillibrium climate response is what happens over longer periods of time and includes those processes that take longer to develop, like changes in albedo. The ECR takes hundreds of years. When people talk about sensitivity they are talking about the ECR.
The observation record is too short to a good estimate of the ECR. You get a nice lower bound however.”
If you cannot determine that you have confirmed predictions for a hundred years then you will have no science until a hundred years passes. No confirmed predictions means no science. The people who claim that they have a science of the ECR, whether through empirical observations or models, are deluded. They are doing metaphysics if they are doing anything at all.
JEyon says:
August 17, 2011 at 7:50 pm
‘“blockade runner” n. (new slang) scientists who get their heretical articles past the peer review hostiles and into publication.’
Good one! My hat is off to you.
DocMartyn says:
August 17, 2011 at 5:51 pm
“If only one had some sort of scientific notation to explain how heat, in its various forms, becomes temperature.”
The only way to do it is “in place.” You have to choose something to measure, hopefully a natural process such as La NIna, then you send out researchers to identify the component natural processes that make up La Nina, then you introduce measuring instruments for temperature and the kinds of heat transfer that you think are important. Voila! In a few decades, you will have a scientific understanding of heat transfer in La Nina and temperature measurements as refined as you like for each moment in the history of the relevant natural processes.
What I just described is standard Scientific Method. Junk the supercomputers, unless you need them for data keeping, and get to work in the field.
It’s interesting to note that this paper explicitly states that the impact of global warming appears to be less than previously estimated, yet many are taking this to read that global warming doesn’t exist at all. Scepticism is a healthy pursuit only if those being sceptical can take a position which remains rational.
This paper came up a few months ago when Lindzen complained how he couldn’t get it through even pal review at PNAS. He had chosen some of the reviewers, and still failed there.
The reason it failed was it hadn’t overcome the main objections in the first paper, even though they corrected some data processing quirks and math errors.
They assume that the tropical sensitivity to ocean temperature changes on time scales of months is equal to the global sensitivity to changes in CO2 on the scale of decades. Some believe you can equate these, but most, including his PNAS reviewers, are skeptical that he can extend his results to global climate sensitivity, even if he can say something about tropical oceans and the clouds there associated with El Ninos. I think it would have been publishable if he kept to a more limited scope for his conclusions, but he wanted to go all-out global for some reason. Even Spencer has doubts about whether these approaches can work at all.
Sigh …
In a piece called It’s Not About The Feedback, I have discussed how the current climate paradigm is as mechanistic and predictable as balls on a pool table. Unfortunately, Lindzen and Choi take that mechanistic paradigm as their starting point as well, with their Equation 1:
∆T = sensitivity * ∆Q Equation 1
Same old same old, the very equation I had discussed in my cited post. They go on to equation 2, to discuss the effect of feedback on that equation, but for the reasons in my citation, I’ve already parted company with them at equation 1. The climate is not linear and mechanistically predictable, that doesn’t accord with reality.
I think that equation 1 is the result of highly suspect mathematics, and has no physical meaning.
I think, and have given (what I see as) good reasons for thinking, that sensitivity is a function of temperature, particularly in the tropics. When it is cool, sensitivity is high, and vice versa. This does not progress linearly, but shifts abruptly at the crossings of a series of thresholds.
So I fear that much of Lindzen and Choi’s work, while fascinating, is based on an incorrect assumption. This is the assumption of equation 1 as the basic state. I don’t accept that assumption. I say that the thermal stability of the planet, and particularly the tropics, is the result of the dependence of sensitivity on temperature.
Lindzen and Choi are repeating the same mistake as the AGW folks, only from the other side of the aisle. They’re trying to analyze a system of heat-sensing self-generating surface cooling machines that spring up as needed to put the cool-water fire-hose on the local hot spots, as if it were analyzing a system of forces acting on a lever.
Which is why I’m a heretic. I say the underlying paradigm, the root description, the claimed linearity and the magic formula Temperature Equals Sensitivity Times Forcing are an incorrect description of the reality of the climate system.
The reality is that the climate system has preferred states and preferred temperatures as a result of a host of homeostatic mechanisms. Chief among them are thunderstorms, the active part of the Great Hadley Solar Powered Air Conditioning, Water Cooling, Ice Making, and Global Circulation Machine.
Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, and see the Hadley wonders in action. You think that heat only flows from hot areas to cold areas? The Great Hadley Ice Making Machines flip that on its head. They make cold flow instead of heat. And to complete the trick, they make the cold flow from cold areas to hot areas. To do it, they take water vapor from the surface. They condense and freeze out the water in the frigid upper atmosphere. Then they deliver the frozen water back from the icy altitudes to the very surface from which it left … how’s that for a neat trick? They make cold flow from cold to hot … including what might be laughingly termed “Latent Cold”, since it will cool the surface even further to have to melt the ice.
As a result of that and a host of tricks involving cloud albedo and local wind generation and the like, thunderstorms are able to regulate the surface temperature, springing up as necessary, in ever increasing numbers, to cool out any local hot spots or areas.
Nor do thunderstorms resemble feedback. They do not just slow down a temperature increase, like a negative feedback.
Instead, their dual-fuel nature allows them to actually cool the surface down to a temperature below that at which they started. When they kick into existence, the surface gets not just a slowed warming, but a good cooling.
Now, this situation can be analyzed and it can be modeled … but only by admitting that it is a self-regulating, self-organized, threshold-based system, which is regulated inter alia by active temperature-generated independent refrigeration cycle units springing up as needed and chilling out surface hot spots with cold water and cold air. It’s not easy to model, but it can be done.
You can’t model it or analyze it, however, by claiming that it’s like balls on a level pool table. Temperature doesn’t equal some magic number times the forcing, maybe you can believe that if it helps you to sleep, but the real climate is infinitely more complex and ingenious.
So no … equation one, that idea that temperature is some unspecified number times the forcing?
Not so much. I’m a heretic.
w.
[snip – banned]
Right on Willis! : )
This one line from this new paper:
“We argue that feedbacks are largely concentrated in the tropics…”
____
Sorry, wrong answer. They can argue all they want, but as every single global climate model shows both the greatest effects and greatest positive feedbacks to global warming are first and foremost concentrated in the polor regions (and specifically more the Arctic early on), this gives me great pause in accepting the validity of only a 1c temperature increase with a doubling of CO2. A minimum of 3C is more reasonable.
you know Matt, you can only ignore the requests for so long.
and I believe your reference to ‘actual measurements’ refers to the constant 5.35, in an equation you seem to accept as gospel.
so, why don’t you explain the complete development of this number 5.35 and how measurements figured into this numbers calculation and by who, these measurements were done and when ! ?
how many times do I/we have to ask ? ?
or, can someone else fill in for him ?
Bystander says:
August 17, 2011 at 8:52 pm
[snip – banned]
Excellent decision.
REPLY: He’d been banned before, this was the previously known troll “moderate republican” who thinks his opinion to be so important he had to sneak back in under another fake name and fake email address, along with a fake cache server connection. But he slipped up in his zeal, so off he goes again. – Anthony
Yes.
Willis Eschenbach says:
August 17, 2011 at 8:44 pm
Excellent work, Willis. I look forward to seeing more from you in the reasonably near future.
Ged wrote this: “Do you feel we know enough about the climate system to calculate the ECR from the TCR? If you think we don’t know enough about climate to do such a straight forward calculation, how can you begin to believe we can ever calculate the ECR?”
Well, we have a case that is intermediate between full and accurate knowledge and complete ignorance. We may be able to estimate the ECR from the TCR as we accumulate more evidence over a long enough time (what looks to me now will require decades at least.) Your braking example is a case where the fundamental constants are known with great accuracy, as is the required mathematical model. For ECR and TCR we have partial knowledge of the required mathematical model (c.f. Willis’ comments on the linearities in the GCM model output in his interchange with Steve Mosher), and inaccurate knowledge of the constants (also called parameters in the mathematical context.)
Willis Eschenbach wrote: “The reality is that the climate system has preferred states and preferred temperatures as a result of a host of homeostatic mechanisms. Chief among them are thunderstorms, the active part of the Great Hadley Solar Powered Air Conditioning, Water Cooling, Ice Making, and Global Circulation Machine.”
If you’d write “feedback mechanisms” instead of “homeostatic mechanisms” I’d say you were onto something. “Homeostatic” is more appropriate for biological organisms that have evolved by a process of random variation and natural selection.
With that out critique of the way, I wish that you would submit this to a peer-reviewed journal, and respond to what reviewers have to say. Without quantitation of the processes that you list in that and the subsequent paragraph, it looks to me like your idea is too vague to be testable.
So, are the positive feedbacks showing up?
No, they are not.
Not onlydo we have missing energy of 0.8 Watts/m2 of direct forcing impact, we are also missing 2.1 Watts/m2 of feedbacks that were supposed to be occuring (I think this has been missed in the debate so far).
We have already added enough GHGs and had other impacts that should, by themselves, have already increased temperatures by about 0.8C.
With that, we should have seen feedbacks (water vapour, positive cloud forcing and Albedo impacts) to raise temperatures another 0.8C.
Water vapour – well we can’t really tell what it is doing except that the naturally varying ENSO mostly controls it. Ice Albedo? well there is some melt in the Arctic but this has not changed the global Albedo number 1 iota (the Arctic sea ice is melt would have had only a tiny, tiny impact anyway). Positive cloud forcing? Well clouds are a negative to start with and the ERBE and CERES satellites do not find any real change at all caused by clouds.
So, temperatures are not increasing even as fast as just the direct Anthropogenic component is supposed to cause, let alone the extra bump that feedbacks are supposed to provide.
From Trenberth, “Negative Radiative Feedback -2.8 Watts/m2” – a mysterious term which covers why the temperature response is less than the direct GHG forcing is supposed to provide and how much the non-existent feedbacks were also supposed to provide.
http://img638.imageshack.us/img638/8098/trenberthnetradiation.jpg
R. Gates says:
August 17, 2011 at 8:56 pm (Edit)
I argue that the control mechanisms, not feedbacks but homeostatic control mechanisms, are largely concentrated in the tropics. Not only that, but I can tell you why they are there. In any heat engine, the first and main control mechanism is the throttle. It controls the incoming fuel/energy entering the hot end of the heat engine.
For the heat engine we call the earths climate, the hot end of the heat engine is the tropics. Controlling the polar albedo would do little to control the global temperature. Controlling the tropical albedo, on the other hand, is the major throttling mechanism for reducing solar energy entering the system.
The throttle is in the tropics because that’s where the energy enters the system, at the hot end of the heat engine.
w.