UPDATE: Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. has a comment on the paper here: Comments On The Dessler 2011 GRL Paper “Cloud Variations And The Earth’s Energy Budget also, physicist Lubos Motl has an analysis here. The press release from TAMU/Dessler has been pushed to media outlets on Eurekalert, see update below.
UPDATE2: Dessler has made a video on the paper see it here And Steve McIntyre has his take on it with The stone in Trenberth’s shoe
I’ve been given an advance copy, for which I’ve posted excerpts below. This paper appears to have been made ready in record time, with a turnaround from submission to acceptance and publication of about six weeks based on the July 26th publication date of the original Spencer and Braswell paper. We should all be so lucky to have expedited peer review service. PeerEx maybe, something like FedEx? Compare that to the two years it took to get Lindzen and Choi out the door. Or how about the WUWT story: “Science has been sitting on his [Spencer’s] critique of Dessler’s paper for months”.
If anyone needs a clear, concise, and irrefutable example of how peer review in climate science is biased for the consensus and against skeptics, this is it.
I’m sure some thorough examination will determine if the maxim “haste makes waste” applies here for Dessler’s turbo treatise.
Cloud variations and the Earth’s energy budget
A.E. Dessler
Dept. of Atmospheric Sciences
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX
Abstract: The question of whether clouds are the cause of surface temperature changes, rather than acting as a feedback in response to those temperature changes, is explored using data obtained between 2000 and 2010. An energy budget calculation shows that the energy trapped by clouds accounts for little of the observed climate variations. And observations of the lagged response of top-of-atmosphere (TOA) energy fluxes to surface temperature variations are not evidence that clouds are causing climate change.
Introduction
The usual way to think about clouds in the climate system is that they are a feedback — as the climate warms, clouds change in response and either amplify (positive cloud feedback) or ameliorate (negative cloud feedback) the initial change [e.g., Stephens, 2005]. In recent papers, Lindzen and Choi [2011, hereafter LC11] and Spencer and Braswell [2011, hereafter SB11] have argued that reality is reversed: clouds are the cause of, and not a feedback on, changes in surface temperature. If this claim is correct, then significant revisions to climate science may be required.
…
Conclusions
These calculations show that clouds did not cause significant climate change over the last decade (over the decades or centuries relevant for long-term climate change, on the other hand, clouds can indeed cause significant warming). Rather, the evolution of the surface and atmosphere during ENSO variations are dominated by oceanic heat transport. This means in turn that regressions of TOA fluxes vs. ΔTs can be used to accurately estimate climate sensitivity or the magnitude of climate feedbacks. In addition, observations presented by LC11 and SB11 are not in fundamental disagreement with mainstream climate models, nor do they provide evidence that clouds are causing climate change. Suggestions that significant revisions to mainstream climate science are required are therefore not supported.
Acknowledgments: This work was supported by NSF grant AGS-1012665 to Texas A&M University. I thank A. Evan, J. Fasullo, D. Murphy, K. Trenberth, M. Zelinka, and A.J. Dessler for useful comments.
h/t to Marc Hendrickx
=============================================================
UPDATE: Here is the press release from Texas A&M via Eurekalert:
Texas A&M prof says study shows that clouds don’t cause climate change
COLLEGE STATION, Sept. 6, 2011 — Clouds only amplify climate change, says a Texas A&M University professor in a study that rebuts recent claims that clouds are actually the root cause of climate change.
Andrew Dessler, a Texas A&M atmospheric sciences professor considered one of the nation’s experts on climate variations, says decades of data support the mainstream and long-held view that clouds are primarily acting as a so-called “feedback” that amplifies warming from human activity. His work is published today in the American Geophysical Union’s peer-reviewed journal Geophysical Research Letters.
Dessler studied El Niño and La Niña cycles over the past 10 years and calculated the Earth’s “energy budget” over this time. El Nino and La Nina are cyclical events, roughly every five years, when waters in the central Pacific Ocean tend to get warmer or colder. These changes have a huge impact on much of the world’s weather systems for months or even years.
Dessler found that clouds played a very small role in initiating these climate variations — in agreement, he says, with mainstream climate science and in direct opposition to some previous claims.
“The bottom line is that clouds have not replaced humans as the cause of the recent warming the Earth is experiencing,” Dessler says.
Texas is currently in one of the worst droughts in the state’s history, and most scientists believe it is a direct result of La Niña conditions that have lingered in the Pacific Ocean for many months.
Dessler adds, “Over a century, however, clouds can indeed play an important role amplifying climate change.”
“I hope my analysis puts an end to this claim that clouds are causing climate change,” he adds.
For more information about Dessler’s research, go to http://goo.gl/zFJmt
About Research at Texas A&M University:
As one of the world’s leading research institutions, Texas A&M is in the vanguard in making significant contributions to the storehouse of knowledge, including that of science and technology. Research conducted at Texas A&M represents an annual investment of more than $630 million, which ranks third nationally for universities without a medical school, and underwrites approximately 3,500 sponsored projects. That research creates new knowledge that provides basic, fundamental and applied contributions resulting in many cases in economic benefits to the state, nation and world.
This one reminds me of the Schneider drivel wherein he claimed it was too difficult to use thermometers, so he wrote a program on his laptop deriving temperature…. from windspeed… MORE ACCURATELY than ALL OTHER MEANS on EARTH.
Of course he was too stupid and corrupt to recognize the MANY, MANY, INSTA-FAILs built into his ludicrous folly,
as is this clown.
Seriously, if you don’t think such LOONBARK has been published before by Climate Scam Professionals, go look up the “The Answer Is Blowing In the Wind” paper by Steven Schneider.
The man who wrote this paper took ONE HUNDRED FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS to WRITE it.
And he expects to not wind up indicted.
Pfft.
No such time travel is required. The earth is a globe, a sphere. Hence evaporation and condensation are happening on the earth at the same time. Cloud formation and cloud destruction are happening at the same time. Clouds insulating a cold area at night and cloud heat transport in a sunny day are occurring in different places on the earth at the same time pretty much nonstop. The question is to which degree and what is the net energy flow. It’s always beer-o-clock somewhere, so no time-travel is required.
From wikipedia:
The word empirical denotes information gained by means of observation or experiments.[1] Empirical data is data produced by an experiment or observation.
From dictionary.com:
–adjective
1. derived from or guided by experience or experiment.
2. depending upon experience or observation alone, without using scientific method or theory, especially as in medicine.
3. provable or verifiable by experience or experiment.
Please show me one experiment or observation that proves that human-released carbon dioxide will change the earth’s temperature in some catastrophic way. Any experiment will do. Any observation will do. No models are allowed, those are not experiments, they are not observations of reality. Absent of such an experiment or observation, am I not completely free to doubt this hypothesis?
“What exactly is the Warmist advantage of publishing the Dessler paper in GRL, as opposed to a direct reply/comment etc to SB11 in Remote Sensing?”
They’re guaranteed to get friendly reviewers and quick publication.
Theo Goodwin says:
September 6, 2011 at 12:28 pm
“In sum, Warmista claims about CO2 concentration and temperature have no connection to observable reality whatsoever.”
Or the connection goes back as far as we can detect….
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2008AGUFMPP41D1486B
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S003101821000115X
And continues more recently –
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2006AGUFMPP24A..01Z
Then there are the match between observable reality and theory with the atmospheres of Venus and Mars. Both require the role of CO2 to explain the observed temperatures and variations.
http://oro.open.ac.uk/16962/
Given this stuff is so easy to look up I can only presume that when you say-
“….CO2 concentration and temperature have no connection to observable reality whatsoever.”
That we either fail to share the same observable reality or differ on the meaning of ‘connection’ ?
You missed a great title here: “Dessler UnDressed”. And like many bodies, some brains are very unappealing when nekked.
Joe,
A highly paid job awaits you as a climate forecaster at the Met.
Your daughter, not so much.
Hang on! They can’t say that surface albedo works one way but cloud albedo doesn’t!
From Hansen et al (2011) Earth’s Energy Imbalance and Implications,
‘Surface albedo is an amplifying feedback, because the amount of solar energy absorbed by Earth increases when ice and snow area decreases.’
If the argument is that the Earth warms due to less snow cover, then the opposite must be true. Now if you can’t apply the same reasoning to cloud cover (which is made from the same stuff) then what’s going on?
Or do only positive feedback loops exist in the AGW Cloud Cuckooland?
Though they do admit to negative forcings, but then it’s only to blame pesky aerosols for reducing clouds positive feedback and that’s why it’s not been so warm lately, except in Texas!
highflight56433 says:
September 6, 2011 at 11:24 am
wrote…
“I hope my analysis puts an end to this claim that clouds are causing climate change,” he adds.
Therefore if the entire planet where cloudless this year, then next year the entire planet is covered 100% in cloud, then there would be no significant change in global temperature between the two years, given all else were to be constant; BUT, Dessler adds, “Over a century, however, clouds can indeed play an important role amplifying climate change.”
…but remember “The bottom line is that clouds have not replaced humans as the cause of the recent warming the Earth is experiencing,” Dessler says. He ust have the AC turn off…suffering from heat stroke. 🙂
—————————-
With all due respect, sir, I believe you have nailed the bottom-line beneath the bottom-line.
Dessler demonstrates he has gone beyond science into the realm of hope and possibility (can indeed) and unfounded complete proof (clouds have not replaced humans as the cause…).
My opinion is that in the effort to preserve funding, those who have allowed themselves to be hood-winked into a band-wagon mentality cannot help but commit these sorts of egregious inconsistencies. There will be more. The herd-media will over-look the respect your statement deserves.
Trouble is, memory is short. The prognosticators (and their media-enforcers) of “nuclear-winters” ozone-holes, and acid-rains are all but forgotten.
Now that North America slips quickly into a neo-Socialism, the “thought police” are more and more part of the “scientific method”. But there is nothing new under the Sun said a prophet of old.
More recently, Milton, in “Paradise Lost VIII” wrote …
“Or if they list to try
Conjecture, he his fabric of the heavens
Hath left to their disputes, perhaps to move
His laughter at their quaint opinions wide
Hereafter, when they come to model heaven,
And calculate the stars; how they will wield
The mighty frame; how build, unbuild, contrive,
To save appearances; how gird the sphere
With centric and eccentric scribbled o’er,
Cycle and epicycle, orb in orb.”
Leif Svalgaard says: September 6, 2011 at 10:05 am
Oh. Well, just for the record, if I were a journal editor I’d have dispensed with peer review for your paper: you are peerless, after all ;>)
Tell me this is not planned, look at what has happened within the space of four days.
Wagner resigns with a statement rubbishing the Spencer and Braswell paper
Within 24 hours the Guardian and BBC both publish researched articles throwing more dirt at Spencer. (Both were very too fast with their stories which included dirt that would have taken time to assemble, and to my eyes those artricles were part of the a master plan to rubbish Spencer’s paper)
Today a peer reviewed rebuttal paper to Spencer and Braswell that was written and rushed through the peer review process in record time (6 weeks, it took Spencer and Braswell 2 years to get through the peer review process).
:Put this in the context of the climategate email from Phil Jones ““Kevin (Trenberth I presume?) and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
This is confrimation that the climategate emails are an understatement of the lengths these guys will go to corrupt the science in order to get their perverted message across.
Ok, hot day, no clouds, night comes, heat escapes it cools down nicely, everyone sleeps well.
Next day it’s hot, later in the evening clouds come over, you get a warmer, no so pleasant night (as in warm not just humid).
Much later on in the year it gets cooler (probably due to that big yellow thing in the sky not being around as long), clear skies, it cools even more, icy nights.
Next day there’s weak sun, but clouds gather and it stays slightly warmer, no ice that night (oddly we get frosts here on cloudless nights more than cloudy ones, that must be a clue especially if the wind is not coming from across the Atlantic but from the continent).
We also know a fair bit about this in the UK because most of us have been on a beach when those big white Cumulus clouds start blocking the sun out and it chills down considerably, not because of any change in the wind temperature, it’s those damned clouds acting like insulators, not absolute insulators but enough to notice. Now if I can feel both negative and positive feedback actions by clouds why can’t these, so called, geniuses work it out with their damned models?
Now let me get this straight. Clouds don’t cause temperature change; temperature change causes clouds.
At the same time, sulfate aerosols cause enough temperature change (cooling) to offset demon CO2 global warming in the 1960s and (now Chinese) 2000s. But sulfate aerosols don’t do much to the planetary albedo; in fact, they reflect very little, really; we aren’t even sure of the sign of their effect.
But, don’t you see, sulfate aerosols form the nuclei for cloud condensation, and clouds … No, wait …
@- EricH says:
September 6, 2011 at 1:33 pm
Re the below, I suspect izen has never gotten past calculus to elementary differential equations:“–izen says:.
… there is no logical possibility that if A causes B then B also causes A. It would require a causal influence to travel BACK in time.”
Oh dear, you have spotted my weakness, I cannot differentiate an intergral from an interger…! -grin-
@-“nope! consider your classic introductory diffi-Q predator-prey model.
The predator population affects the rate of predation which affects the prey population which in turn affects growth rate of the predator population.”
Lovely, a substantive counter-argument!
And you are right of course, if conditions favor the predator-prey interactions to reach a stable limit cycle in which both populations co-vary within an envelope of values then it DOES become extremely difficult to extricate any meaningful distinction between cause and effect. It is still unidirectional, but is now a rather braided chain…
@-“So over time (going forward only, no sigularities needed!) the predator population affects the prey population and vice versa. Though not a climate scientist (obviously, or I would be denial of this effect… hehe), I believe that this predator/prey model is likely not a bad analogue (grossly simplified) to the interaction between clouds and climate.”
Yes, I like that.
But consider, there is an asymmetry in the predator-prey model. Prey have a primary causal role. Prey can exist without predators, the existence of which is then a feedback on prey numbers. Predators cannot exist without prey, their populations is always a dependent variable of prey numbers however much feedback there is.
Prey=OHC movements
Predators=clouds?
I used to get very upset at the obvious double standard in climate science peer review. Now, I’m just numb to it….
So the first sentence of the abstract is a false dichotomy. Lovely.
izen says:
September 6, 2011 at 2:05 pm
I challenged you to replace your analogy with an appropriate counterexample that refers only to CO2 concentrations and temperatures. Are you going to do it?
Do not assign me homework.
Benoît Rittaud says:
September 6, 2011 at 12:25 pm
Lars P says:
September 6, 2011 at 10:43 am
It is not a cloud in the sky cooling Chuck Norris below. The cloud is there because Chuck Norris feels cooler.
Benoit: I vote this one for the Quote of the Week.
I second it.
“DirkH says:
izen says:
September 6, 2011 at 8:14 am
“Causal chains are unidirectional. It is a logical impossibility for A to be the #1 cause of B, AND B to be the #1 cause of A.”
This is wrong; when A causes B and B causes A you have a positive feedback loop”
I have an open fire and some fire bricks. The fire is at 1700 C and the brisks at 15 C. I place firebricks around fire. Fire temperature increases to 2100 and bricks have an average temperature of 200 C.
I have altered the steady state temperature of the fire, but I have not made any change to the chemistry.
Richard C(NZ) says
It’s crazy, in Real World diffuse is added to direct for solar collector calculations and GHG DLR completely omitted – all that free energy going to waste.
———-
That’s interesting. I was unaware that there was a distinction between diffuse solar and downward long wave radiation for thermal flat plate solar collectors. I had assumed that they were one and the same.
The distinction sounds plausible if DLW cannot penetrate the glass front surface. I will have to look into this some more.
Beesaman says:
September 6, 2011 at 2:41 pm
Now if I can feel both negative and positive feedback actions by clouds why can’t these, so called, geniuses work it out with their damned models?
My guess:
If they started using observational data, they’d have to re-do all of those models.
Also, they’d then need to apply proper science as well.
They’d have to change many of their conclusions, too.
This would severely limit their funding however, so I’m not expecting these courses of action from them.
“This means in turn that regressions of TOA fluxes vs. ΔTs can be used to accurately estimate climate sensitivity or the magnitude of climate feedbacks.”
Can someone please translate “accurately estimate” for me?
Sounds like a “decisive perhaps” from a model to me.
Actually, I believe the record time from submission to acceptance is six days, which is the length of time it took Computational Statistics and Data Analysis to “review” Said, Wegman, et.al.(2008) — a paper that (a) purported to refute Mann Bradley & Hughes 1998; (b) has been discovered to be full of plagiarism; and (c) has now been withdrawn by CSDA.
GRL looks positively stately by comparison.
If the cooling that has occurred during the last decade was not affected by cloud cover, what were its determinants? If the warming that occurred during the previous 2 decades was affected by cloud cover, how did this occur and why are the conditions for cloud cover’s affect upon warming temperatures not applicable to recent cooling?
I’m no longer sure which thread to even put this in. The original “breaking news” thread contained a byline saying the score was IPCC 1; Scientific Progress 0. Let’s see where we are after a weekend of activity:
Wolfgang Wagner: resigned as EIC of Remote Sensing out of clear obeisance to Kevin Trenberth. OWN GOAL!
Kevin Trenberth: braggs about getting an apology from Wagner for daring to allow SB11 to be published. OWN GOAL!
A. Dressler: publishes a paper attacking SB11 for claims SB11 never made, based on data that refutes the models he supposedly is defending, and which contradicts ITSELF in the process. OWN GOAL!
A. Dressler: the same paper clearly states that there has been NO WARMING in the LAST TEN YEARS. I can’t award an own goal for that one though because Dressler is strictly “C” team. He only gets the first “own goal” because Trenberth announced that the paper would defend the models.
Michael Mann: Takes legal action to prevent his emails while at UVA from becoming public due to an agreement that UVA voluntarily made to turn them over to the courts. OWN GOAL!
Roy Spencer and ?? Braswell: sparked the whole charade by publishing data showing exactly where the “missing heat” that Trenberth openly admits the models cannot account for has been going, and why. SCORE!
Frankly, I think it more like “the team” 0, Scientific Progress 4.
Watching the Team pulling the ball/puck/steamingpileof dung out of the net only to fire it right back in again has been entertaining.
As a contribution to science, SB11 is transparently weak. That’s why Spencer sent it to an off-topic journal that invited author nomination of reviewers. He understood and exploited a weakness of the peer-review system.
But once it was published for all scientists to see, it fell apart very quickly under scrutiny. Wagner was ashamed that he and his fledgling journal were gamed so successfully by an author with a political agenda that might have been hidden just enough in the paper, but came out so loudly as Spencer spun the story, making claims far beyond what the article had in his blog and press release. Hence Wagner’s resignation.
Other scientists are writing about what they see in the paper. Dessler will not have the last word any more than Spencer did, but watch and see … his analysis will prove much more robust in the harsh light of day.