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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Jenn Oates says:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/08/16/new-paper-from-lindzen-and-choi-implies-that-the-models-are-exaggerating-climate-sensitivity/#comment-722016
Good for you! I like that.
teach the children well not to make the same mistakes that the climate scientists made:
What the IPCC did, is look at the problem from the wrong end. It is the worst mistake any scientist can make. They assumed that global warming is caused by an increase in GHG’s (even though not everybody agreed with this at the time) and then made allocations (forcings) largely based on the observed global warming since 1750 versus the increase of the gases noted since 1750. This is where the 3.7 W/m2 for CO2 that this paper starts off with comes from.
It is not based on any real physical measurements. There are no real test results. Nobody here can show me how it was measured.
The problem now is that none of the IPCC “profs” ever seem to have realised that in the case of CO2, it also causes cooling, both radiative (by re-radiation in the near IR and IR 0-5 um – where the sun also emits) and biologically. Plants and trees need both warmth and CO2 to grow. This warmth is extracted from the earth and the atmosphere.
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/the-greenhouse-effect-and-the-principle-of-re-radiation-11-Aug-2011
Nobody here can tell us exactly what the net effect is of the increase in CO2, warming or cooling because they have not tested it.
Strangely enough, if I look carefully at a number of individual results, and I want to find out why some places are getting cooler and some places are getting warmer,
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/henrys-pool-table-on-global-warming
it appears that another very strange paradox becomes apparent. This is the latest finding that I have stumbled upon. As forestation and greenery increases it appears that more heat gets trapped. It seems it is the increase in the trees and plants that does it……A recent Helsinki study showed that out of 70 countries checked, 45 reported more greenery.
So in the end, I am saying that man “behaving bad” was probably that we planted too much greenery. We wanted too much crops and heaven around us.
I don’t know yet how are we going to tell the greenies that global warming was their own fault.
@Bernie McCune at 11:44 am
Thanks Bernie. I found the machine via Bing. It seems to be very finely tuned to report ZERO W/m^2 of incoming SWR. My guess is a NIP is being used comercially on this site:
http://www.milfordweather.org.uk/solar.php
Septic Matthew says:
August 17, 2011 at 9:28 pm
But it’s not a “feedback mechanism”, Matthew. It is a control mechanism involving a series of regime shifts. These don’t involve changes in feedback. They involve replacing one circulation system with another system, a new system with different components entirely … that’s not a feedback as I understand feedback.
Whatever you call it, my point is that the climate is not free to take up any value, there are preferred states.
Regarding writing it up, did that already, it was peer-reviewed and published in Energy and Environment a year or so ago.
You ask for “quantitation of the processes.” I’ve described the processes in “It’s Not About Feedback.” I’ve discussed supporting numeric evidence in “The Tao That Can Be Spoken“. I also looked at some quantities regarding albedo changes in “The Thermostat Hypothesis“.
So the process continues. It’s early days, I’ve been a lone voice crying “thermostat” in the wilderness, I don’t have graduate students, and I have a day job. But at least people are starting to discuss the question about the underlying paradigm describing climate. Linear, or thermostatic?
w.
Nick Kellingley says:
August 17, 2011 at 8:14 pm
“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.”
I did not see anyone say this paper means global warming does not exisit at all. However, the iimplication is that the claim of “catostrophic” attached to AGW is false. In fact the mild warming, in conjuction with the known benefits of CO2 is likely very beneficial.
R. Gates,
The main feedbacks are probably water vapour and clouds and the tropics are the most important region for both.
You are mixing up feedbacks with temperature differences, which may be larger in the arctic, but this is not what the paper is about.
Willis:
You repeatedly say;
“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.”
I have often said the climate system seems to behave as though it had chaotic strange attractors such that it has prefered states. This would explain several observations:
e.g. the near constant bi-stability (similar temperatures in glacial and interglacial periods) while the thermal input from the Sun has increased by more than 20% over the last 2.5 billion years, the ability of the Milankovitch Cycles to induce transition between glacial and interglacial states, etc.
It seems we have similar views and you say you are a “heretic”. I share your heresy because I am not convinced that a basic assumption of the AGW-hypothesis is true..
That basic assumption (used in the climate models) is that change to climate is driven by change to radiative forcing. And it is very important to recognise that this assumption has not been demonstrated to be correct. Indeed, it is quite possible that there is no force or process causing climate to vary. I explain this as follows.
The climate system is seeking an equilibrium that it never achieves. The Earth obtains radiant energy from the Sun and radiates that energy back to space. The energy input to the system (from the Sun) may be constant (although some doubt that), but the rotation of the Earth and its orbit around the Sun ensure that the energy input/output is never in perfect equilbrium.
The climate system is an intermediary in the process of returning (most of) the energy to space (some energy is radiated from the Earth’s surface back to space). And the Northern and Southern hemispheres have different coverage by oceans. Therefore, as the year progresses the modulation of the energy input/output of the system varies. Hence, the system is always seeking equilibrium but never achieves it.
Such a varying system could be expected to exhibit oscillatory behaviour, and it does. Mean global temperature rises by 3.8 deg.C from June to January and falls by 3.8 deg. C from January to June each year.
Importantly, the length of some oscillations could be harmonic effects which, therefore, have periodicity of several years. Of course, such harmonic oscillation would be a process that – at least in principle – is capable of evaluation.
However, there may be no process because the climate is a chaotic system. Therefore, the observed oscillations (ENSO, NAO, etc.) could be observation of the system seeking its chaotic attractor(s) in response to its seeking equilibrium in a changing situation.
Your ‘homeostatic mechanisms ‘ may be the mechanisms of this ‘attractor seeking’.
The significant point is the heresy; viz. consideration of the fact that the assumption that change to climate is driven by change to radiative forcing is unproved and may be wrong. I am a heretic, too.
Richard
Henry@richard
that was a good post. But now, how do you explain the observed warming?
It is about 0.012C/annum – but it is apparently not globally everywhere the same
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/henrys-pool-table-on-global-warming
I observed cooling where there was de-forestation
and warming where there was forestation
Never mind everybody else here and just assuming I am right,
namely that such a relationship exists between forestation and warming,
then what mechanism do you propose for the warming?
Is it the trapped moisture in the woods or is it somehow the increase in “greenery” that sends a little bit less radiation back into space?
HenryP:
At August 18, 2011 at 2:17 am you ask (I think) me:
“But now, how do you explain the observed warming?
It is about 0.012C/annum – but it is apparently not globally everywhere the same
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/henrys-pool-table-on-global-warming
I observed cooling where there was de-forestation
and warming where there was forestation
Never mind everybody else here and just assuming I am right,
namely that such a relationship exists between forestation and warming,
then what mechanism do you propose for the warming?
Is it the trapped moisture in the woods or is it somehow the increase in “greenery” that sends a little bit less radiation back into space?”
Firstly, Pielke snr has done much work on the effect on temperature of land use changes. He knows much, much more about this than me, so I suggest you refer to his publications on that subject.
Secondly, and importantly, I could give several possible hypotheses for “the warming”, but that would be a demonstration of false confience. The true answer is, “I don’t know”.
What I will say is that “warming” is certainly not global: HadCRUT3 shows 30% of the globe is cooling (see http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/08/04/analysing-the-complete-hadcrut-yields-some-surprising-results/ ).
So, there are many possible reasons for trends of temperature changes at different localities. You suggest land use changes, others will say ocean current changes, others will say variations to the jet stream, etc.. And all such suggestions are probably ‘true’ to some degree for some locations.
As I said, I have been saying for a long time (more than a decade) that climate behaviour seems to be consistent with the global climate being a chaotic system with two main strange attractors. And, as I said in my above post at August 18, 2011 at 1:41 am, this hypothesis explains some observations that are not explained by the hypothesis that global temperature changes are governed by radiative forcing.
So, to me, the work of Willis Eschenbach is important. If his idea of ‘homeostatic mechanisms’ is correct then it fits with my hypothesis of the climate system seeking (but never achieving) its strange attractors, and his work has potential to determine the limits to global climate change around the attractor the system is seeking at present.
Clearly, this response is not the set of answers to your questions which you wanted from me. But this is the best response that I can make. Sorry.
Richard
Matt says: August 17, 2011 at 3:28 pm
Matt, Whilst you’re right that Hockey Schtick is confusing forcing with sensitivity, I think you’ll have difficulty establishing that the 5.33 constant is a measured value.If fact the provenance of the formula itself is difficult to track down. ‘ΔQ= 6.333 ln (C/C_0) ‘ appears in the First IPPC report, on page 52, and here the constant is 6.33, not 5.35. The formula is cited as having been derived from Wigley, 1987. Steve McIntyre over at Climate Audit has tried to track this down but concludes “Once more there’s rather a dead end. Wigley 1987 simply stated his results, rather than deriving them”
http://climateaudit.org/2008/01/11/more-on-functional-forms-wigley-1987/
Wigley says “On theoretical grounds it can be shown that the relationship between radiative forcing change at the top of the troposphere and concentration change is linear at low concentrations, square root at intermediate values and logarithmic at higher concentrations. Because of this, the results of detailed radiative transfer calculations for the various trace gases give a linear concentration dependence for CFCs, square root for CH4 and N2) and logarithmic for CO2…..For CO2 over the range 250 ppmv to 600 ppmv, the Kiehl-Dickinson model gives a change in radiative forcing ΔQ, resulting from a concentration change from C_0 to C which can be described by: CO2: ΔQ= 6.333 ln (C/C_0) ” So, if it is based on anything, it is based on a model.
The constant changes from 6.33 to 5.35 in the Third Assessment Report, No cogent reason is given for this change expect that “The already well established and simple functional forms of the expressions used in IPCC (1990), and their excellent agreement with explicit radiative transfer calculations, are strong bases for their continued usage, albeit with revised values of the constants”. Note that ‘very well established’ means no more than it has been around for along time and, after modifying the constant, it now gives excellent agreement with ‘calculations’ – not with empirical measurements.
It seems strange to me that when you try to unravel all these circular cross-references in the IPCC reports you find it is all built on sand.
Steve McIntyre said, in January 2008 “As an innocent bystander to the climate debates a couple of years ago, I presumed that IPCC would provide a clear exposition of how doubled CO2 actually leads to 2.5-3 deg C….Having re-raised the issue in the context of AR4, Judith Curry has said that this sort of issue is not covered in AR4 since it’s baby food. She’s referred us back to the early IPCC reports without providing specific page references”. http://climateaudit.org/2008/01/04/ipcc-on-radiative-forcing-1-ar11990/
R Gates says “.. 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), ”
Do you have a link to anything that supports this contention?
The feedback factor might be higher, but it is operating on lower amounts of insolation.
Richard, thanks!
You are right. “Global” warming does not exist. We just average everything out and then we call it the global average. My finding is also that there was no warming in the SH even though maxima rose the same there as everywhere else. In my opinion that is because there is only a comparatively small amount of landmass in the SH.
Which brought me back to thinking that the warming there in the NH must be caused by more greenery. It cannot be the CO2 because if it were, the warming should be equal NH and SH. (Namely, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is everwhere about the same).
Remember that places like Las Vegas and Johanesburg had no natural rivers so it used to be desert or semi desert. But now, everywhere where man comes, it goes greener.
Remember me when everyone has finally figured out who to blame for the “global warming”.
It was the “greenies” with all their ideas about tree planting and making beautiful green gardens.
Jeeweez, I am actually one of them….
Regards.
Henry
Willis E. says “But it’s not a “feedback mechanism”, ……. It is a control mechanism involving a series of regime shifts. These don’t involve changes in feedback. They involve replacing one circulation system with another system, a new system with different components entirely … that’s not a feedback as I understand feedback. ”
It depends upon what sort of level you are looking at it. Even highly nonlinear systems can often be usefully analyzed as linear or piecewise linear systems. This is even more true when looking at aggregate behavior averaged over time and averaged over area.
An analogy (valid, hopefully) would be a house where one room is controlled by a thermostat. On a short term basis, and looking only at that room, the system doesn’t look linear. But if I look at the whole house, and averaging over a period of several hours, then the system does indeed look linear. If the outside is temperature X, then the average house temp will stabilize at an average of Y. If I add or subtract a few degrees to the outside temperature, the average house temperature will respond in a nearly linear fashion.
——————————————-
It is very likely that a significant component of the negative feedback Lindzen and Choi detect in the ERBE/CERES data is due to the thermostat mechanism you have discussed.
Today’s climate models don’t have the fine spatial and temporal resolution needed to model clouds very well. Unfortunately, it appears that the models don’t even get the average behavior correct in terms of relationship to changes in ocean temperature to outgoing radiation. ( by “average behavior” I mean averaged over several days to weeks, averaged over all tropical oceans).
Willis, while thunderstorms have a thermostatic or regime change type response, I think their effect, can be modeled with reasonable accuracy as a linear system. It appears that as of now, they are left out of the GCMs completely.
Mosh – OK, I would like to buy the whole TCR v ECR from you (although it seems that this raises the whole ‘move the goalposts’ this to a WHOLE new level), but your analogy about the spinning tyres really doesn’t work. When we spin the wheels, we can calculate within a few decimal points where all the energy is going. When we accelerate without spinning the wheels, we can calculate exactly how much energy is needed to overcome the inertia, which is a calculation that we have been able to do lo, these many centuries since Newton. But when we talk about TCR v ECR we suddenly are met with the bother of “Where is all the missing energy?” If the vaunted models really do have the magic formula of how to evolve TCR to ECR, they must know where the energy goes. The only place it can go if TCR is eventually going to become ECR is the oceans. Else it will be out beyond the atmosphere, with no mechanism available by which TCR evolves into ECR. If it is in the oceans, then why are the observations not conclusive in this regard? It seems that the models and the reality are diverging rather than converging. Is the TCR v ECR the only refuge left to the scoundrels? Or am I missing the obvious?
John B says:
August 17, 2011 at 1:14 am
Ursus Augustus says:
August 16, 2011 at 11:54 pm
I think there is a scientific consensus emerging as evidenced by this paper and a number of others over the past few years. That consensus is that CO2 is nowhere near the bogey it has been made out to be, that AGW is actually quite modest.
—————
So, a “consensus” is OK as long as it is critical of the mainstream consensus?
Depends what you mean by “OK.” If you mean is it “OK” to declare a hypothesis is proven beyond all reasonable doubt because of a sought consensus, then no, that’s not “OK.”
If you mean is it ok to simply use the word “consensus” to suggest that one exists – or possibly exists – then of course it is “OK.” I mean, duh!
Suppose that, over the next ten years:
1. Temperatures stay flat or fall.
2. Global greening continues to rise, in step with rising CO2.
Will equity demand that we be paid for the benefit we’ve provided to the atmospheric commons?
Latitude said:
John, you lost me…..
…are you saying that volcanoes, air pollution from China, etc stops global warming….
….and when it starts back up, it just continues the previous trend line?
—————————-
John B says:
August 17, 2011 at 4:15 pm
Is that a trick question?
Large volcanoes like Pinatubo cause cooling due to aerosols for a number of years, but then the effect dies away as the aerosols precipitate out. This is overlaid on the effects of other forcings. Hansen’s scenarios B and C took into account a hypothetical future large eruption, and we actually got Pinatubo. Scenario A assumed no such eruption, which is one reason it is not the relavant scenario. This is all well documented.
====================================================================
John, wouldn’t any cooling from aerosols only mask the warming?
Once the aerosols were gone, wouldn’t the warming jump back up to the previous trend line? and not just start over?
What we see is just the same trend line starting over from a lower level.
Wow temps are taking a freefall see AMSU 600mb (means nothing of course)
Bomber_the_Cat says:
August 18, 2011 at 3:30 am
Matt says: August 17, 2011 at 3:28 pm
Matt, Whilst you’re right that Hockey Schtick is confusing forcing with sensitivity, I think you’ll have difficulty establishing that the 5.33 constant is a measured value.If fact the provenance of the formula itself is difficult to track down. ‘ΔQ= 6.333 ln (C/C_0) ‘ appears in the First IPPC report, on page 52, and here the constant is 6.33, not 5.35. The formula is cited as having been derived from Wigley, 1987. Steve McIntyre over at Climate Audit has tried to track this down but concludes “Once more there’s rather a dead end. Wigley 1987 simply stated his results, rather than deriving them”
The 5.35 constant was, as far as I know, derived by Myhre et al using a number of radiative transfer models. These models are proven in that they are able to reproduce earth’s emission spectra almost exactly.
Most climate scientists ( warmer or sceptic) seem to accept the Myhre formula. Some time ago, I exchanged emails with Jack Barrett, an expert in IR spectroscopy and a moderate ‘sceptic’ since the early 1990s. Jack told me that the Myhre formula agreed with his own calculations.
Just to reinforce the main point here. It is not the actual forcing, i.e. 3.7 w/m2 per 2xCO2, which is in dispute, it is the temperature response (i.e. climate sensitivity) to that forcing.
Richard Lindzen, Roy Spencer et al believe that climate sensitivity, due to low or negative feedback, is much lower than that claimed by the IPCC (~0.75 deg/w/m2) . Gavin Schmidt et al claim that paleo data suggests a large feedback. Both arguments have merit though, to be fair to the ‘warmers’, it is difficult to explain 5+ deg shifts in temperature during glacial/interglacial periods without the inclusion of a positive feedback factor.
@richard S Courtney
Hey Richard,
Just saw your comment. I am with you on this. Maybe I didn’t succeed in articulating what I was trying to say:
There are some folks who make sweeping critiques aimed at undermining the ability of climatologists to even make direct measurements of sensitivity. Often, that skepticism is *only* directed at the results that they don’t like, and it melts away when they get a number that is convenient to their worldview.
Like you, I disagree with sweeping generalizations that undermine climate science’s claim to objective observational measurements. All I was saying is that the same people who claim direct measurements of sensitivity are *not possible*, should consider that the same critiques would then apply to Lindzen, even if they want to believe his particular result. And, at the end of the day, these sorts of general critiques are over-stated.
Whether or not Lindzen’s measurement is correct depends on the particular details of his methodology and assumptions. It is beyond my expertise to make those judgments. However, I should say that some of the folks posting on this thread have made some very interesting and clearly knowledgable comments on both sides of that discussion.
I am curious as to when and what response Lindzen and Choi’s paper “On the Observational Determination of Climate Sensitivity and Its Implications” will invoke from Realclimate. Any thoughts are predictions?
The observed lack of warming supports Lindzen and Choi’s analysis of satellite data that clearly shows the planet’s response to a forcing change is negative (cloud cover in the tropics increases or decreases to resist the change) as opposed to positive (planet amplifies forcing changes).
1) Keep head in sand and hope no one notices?
2) Criticize the journal for publishing the paper?
3) Phone friends and start campaign to boycott journal.
4) Appeal to the 1000s of other scientists and papers that support extreme AGW without explaining how that statement is relevant to the issue of whether the planet’s response to a change in forcing is negative (atmospheric processes, clouds increase or decrease to resist change) or positive (atmospheric processes amplify the forcing change).
5) Ask journalist friend to publish a non-scientific article in Nature that accuses any independent climate researcher of being paid by big oil or being a Republican. (i.e. Try to change the conversation from the satellite data that clearly supports negative feedback to an us vs them paradigm. i.e. Continue campaign of propaganda under the banner of climate scientists to save the world.
6) Business as usual. Continue to advocate spending trillions of dollars on boondoggle schemes that will have no net benefit to humanity, that will not reduce energy consumption, and that will not protect environment. (i.e. There is a limit to how much governments can spend.)
http://www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/236-Lindzen-Choi-2011.pdf
@ur momisugly Bomber_the_Cat
Hey. Thanks for the thoughts on that. I will have to read up more on that. But to clarify my main points to HockeySchtick (besides the fact that he was confusing forcing with sensitivity and temperature):
Whether or not there are details regarding the exact values for that formula, I don’t think that that is a significant point of contention for Linzen…
I will suggest that the claim made by the IPCC that the forcing equation is “well established” is referring to the logarithmic form of the equation, not the specific value of the constant. The form of that equation (as I’ve argued) *is* well established. Measuring the constant (I think) is more complicated…which is why I wouldn’t be totally surprised if its value changed with time….
Larry Goldberg — “…“Where is all the missing energy?” If the vaunted models really do have the magic formula of how to evolve TCR to ECR, they must know where the energy goes. The only place it can go if TCR is eventually going to become ECR is the oceans. Else it will be out beyond the atmosphere, with no mechanism available by which TCR evolves into ECR.”
As I understand it, the main reason TCR differs from ECS in the intermediate (10 to 100 year) timeframe is due to energy going into the deep ocean.
One difficulty is that there are several definitions of TCR. The IPCC definition is the sensitivity as measured after CO2 has doubled while rising 1% per year. It takes roughly 70 years to double when increased at this rate. For most models, the TCR is about 50% of the ECS. See AR4 WG1 Chapter 8 table 8.2. http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch8s8-6-2-3.html
An interesting note on table 8.2 is “The ocean heat uptake efficiency (W m–2 °C–1), discussed in Chapter 10, may be roughly estimated as F2x x (TCR–1 – ECS–1), where F2x is the radiative forcing for doubled atmospheric CO2 concentration (see Supplementary Material, Table 8.SM.1)”
As I understand it, this statement is equivalent to saying that the difference between TCR and ECS is primarily ocean heat uptake. If I use the GISS-ER ECS and TCR numbers of 2.7C/doubling and 1.5CF/doubling, and use 3.7 W m–2 °C–1 for F2x, then I calculate that the ocean heat uptake in that model should be around 1.1 W m-2. That doesn’t correspond to the 0.6 to 0.85 W m-2 reported elsewhere, Table 8.1 in the supplementary material lists F2x for GISS-ER as 4.06 W m-2. Using that instead of 3.7 increases the expected ocean heat uptake to 1.2W/m-2.
Am I misreading or misinterpreting AR4 ??
“Willis Eschenbach says:
August 17, 2011 at 12:13 pm
To estimate the ECR you have two choices: paleo and modelling.
The work of myself and others (here and here) have shown that the models are functionally equivalent to a linear response to the forcing with a short (a few years) time constant. So contrary to your claim, the models can tell us nothing about a hundred year response. They are fully equivalent to and give identical results to those calculated by a linear forcing response plus a short time lag.
w.”
Willis is perfectly correct. Climate models are useless as predictive tools for long time scales. The perfect analogy is the game of golf. Say you went back to 30-years after golf first became an established game. You are then asked to build a model to explain why in those 30-years the ball is now landing farther and more centered in the fairway. You start by building a machine with the tools you had then to emulate the human being driving the ball so you can hit 100 balls “consistently” and measure the distance and spread. You tweak your machine’s parameters so that it is consistent with the 100-ball spread at the beginning of golf.
Then how do you explain the increase in distance and narrower spread 30 year’s later? Well, the ball design improved, you change the ball and this gets you closer to the new numbers but not close enough. Then you change the club, that too has changed and you get another increase, again not enough. Now you turn to the machine, improve the accuracy of the machine still not enough, then add more weight (speed to the club head- Forcing for you climate people ) and presto! You’re there. You have a match for 30-years worth of observations. Congratulations.
You conclude that changes in ball and club design, plus the better conditioning and experience of the players accounts for the changes – all correct by the way. One small problem, you are equating the inefficiencies of your golf machine, which you fixed, and the subsequent error spread in the 100 golf balls to the complexity of a human golf swing – oops.
Now comes the big problem. You are asked to predict the distance and spread of the 100 golf balls 100-years into the future. You can extrapolate those three parameters, and those three only, and come up with a number, and you would be wrong. Every time. Why? you could not predict the new materials and computer designs for the golf ball, the graphite shafts and cnc machined, larger, computer designed club heads on the golf club, let alone where humans would be in the practice of the game, their physical competence, etc.
The predictive model is useless because you cannot predict future changes in the system from parameter changes that are unknown to you at the time, that will surely account for more or less distance and spread….
Best,
J.
@ur momisugly Richard111
Of course the NIP instrument reports zero incoming SW radiation at night or with heavy clouds. What I found interesting is that a local university professor told us that the most surface radiation we could expect here was 950 watts/m^2. Probably on average that is true but we have seen over 1000 watts/m^2 on dry Fall days (and once in awhile as much as 1100 w/m^2). One of the solar furnace students I know was working on a problem that required the solar insolation value and attempted to use the measured value (it was higher than 950) for that day and there was a small argument over it.
Bernie
The oceans act like a giant sponge that sucks up the result of any radiative forcing, for a long, long time. The result of our recent expulsion of CO2 gas cannot be apparent yet. If there are any measurable changes, such as in the ’90s, they are not from radiative processes. The only thing that can act on short enough time scales to produce a short cycle temperature change is ocean currents. Bastardi’s graph of temps vs ENSO + AMO illustrates this. My estimate of the time constant for radiative changes is 3500 years. That means that for a step change in radiative forcing, after 3500 years only 62 percent of the ultimate change will be apparent. A 50 year step change in CO2 or a 10 year solar cycle haven’t even got traction yet and may be vanishingly small to start with. My answer to those who think they see a short range temperature signal is: temporary local disequilibrium.