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.
Here – I’ll answer for B(alls) A(nonymous):
. . . . “There’s a post to be proud of.”
.
Dessler did not submit their paper to the journal that published Spencer’s paper “Remote Sensing” as that would have provide an opportunity for Spencer to appropriately refute and address any legitimate criticisms.
Ironically, the sun is moving towards the deepest cyclic minimum in at least 150 years. There is quite an event from the standpoint of solar physicists.
http://www.space.com/11960-fading-sunspots-slower-solar-activity-solar-cycle.html
…the new studies were announced today (June 14) at the annual meeting of the solar physics division of the American Astronomical Society, which is being held this week at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.
“This is highly unusual and unexpected,” said Frank Hill, associate director of the National Solar Observatory’s Solar Synoptic Network. “But the fact that three completely different views of the sun point in the same direction is a powerful indicator that the sunspot cycle may be going into hibernation.” ….
…astronomers examined an east-west zonal wind flow inside the sun, called torsional oscillation. The latitude of this jet stream matches the new sunspot formation in each cycle, and models successfully predicted the late onset of the current Cycle 24.
“We expected to see the start of the zonal flow for Cycle 25 by now, but we see no sign of it,” Hill said. “This indicates that the start of Cycle 25 may be delayed to 2021 or 2022, or may not happen at all.”
With more than 13 years of sunspot data collected at the McMath-Pierce Telescope at Kitt Peak in Arizona, Matt Penn and William Livingston observed that the average magnetic field strength declined significantly during Cycle 23 and now into Cycle 24. Consequently, sunspot temperatures have risen, they observed.
If the trend continues, the sun’s magnetic field strength will drop below a certain threshold and sunspots will largely disappear; the field no longer will be strong enough to overcome such convective forces on the solar surface.
In a separate study, Richard Altrock, manager of the Air Force’s coronal research program at NSO’s facility in New Mexico, examined the sun’s corona and observed a slowdown of the magnetic activity’s usual “rush to the poles.”
“Cycle 24 started out late and slow and may not be strong enough to create a rush to the poles, indicating we’ll see a very weak solar maximum in 2013, if at all,” Altrock said. “If the rush to the poles fails to complete, this creates a tremendous dilemma for the theorists, as it would mean that Cycle 23’s magnetic field will not completely disappear from the polar regions. … No one knows what the sun will do in that case.”
We will if Svensmark and Tinsley are correct and if paleo record is a guide to the future we will have a chance to see if an increase in planetary cloud does or does not result in planetary cooling.
http://scholar.google.com/url?sa=U&q=http://www.gg.rhbnc.ac.uk/elias/teaching/VanGeel.pdf
“A number of those Holocene climate cooling phases… most likely of a global nature (eg Magney, 1993; van Geel et al, 1996; Alley et al 1997; Stager & Mayewski, 1997) … the cooling phases seem to be part of a millennial-scale climatic cycle operating independent of the glacial-interglacial cycles (which are) forced (perhaps paced) by orbit variations.”
“… we show here evidence that the variation in solar activity is a cause for the millennial scale climate change.”
Last 40 kyrs
Figure 2 in paper. (From data last 40 kyrs)… “conclude that solar forcing of climate, as indicated by high BE10 values, coincided with cold phases of Dansgaar-Oeschger events as shown in O16 records”
Recent Solar Event
“Maunder Minimum (1645-1715) “…coincides with one of the coldest phases of the Little Ice Age… (van Geel et al 1998b)
Periodicity
“Mayewski et al (1997) showed a 1450 yr periodicity in C14 … from tree rings and …from glaciochemicial series (NaCl & Dust) from the GISP2 ice core … believed to reflect changes in polar atmospheric circulation..”
Dennis Wingo says:
September 6, 2011 at 6:21 pm
I did the solar panel experiment. You are right on the money. I did it in Central Florida because I was wondering why my fancy solar heated shower ran cold December and January. Part of the answer is the angle of sunlight but part of the answer is clouds.
Dessler writes in his paper “These calculations show that clouds did not cause significant climate change over the last decade”
Ironically as there has been little change in global temperatures this decade, AGWers would expect natural variation to be nullifying the effect of the ever increasing CO2 forcing. If its not clouds thats done that, then I’m interested to hear what they’re proposing has done it…
Headline. “Warmist paper turnaround: 6 weeks. Skeptics: 2 years”
Eight words, far easier to grasp for the casual reader.
Nick Stokes writes “JGR is normally fast. ”
The only way the Dessler paper could possibly have produced his paper in that time is if it was largely pre-written. Two options spring to mind here. Either its highly likely that it doesn’t actually address the S&B points in any great depth and instead is of the form “no it isn’t, here’s what I think” or Dessler had access to pre-published copies of the S&B paper.
I’m looking forward to reading the paper in detail.
BA Says:
Whew, that’s a relief. That means Michael Mann isn’t a good scientist, since he makes up stuff all the time about those who criticize his work.
Oh, and if someone makes something up, it doesn’t become a fact.
More ridiculous drivel:
BA says:
September 6, 2011 at 4:25 pm
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.
You might look slightly less ignorant of you bothered to verify for yourself rather than follow the usual lazy “TEAM” approach of mindless regurgitating TEAM vitriol and rhetoric
The paper was published in REMOTE SENSING – the subject quite clearly involves remote sensing, and in fact Spencer is a noted expert in the field.
Regardless of that – had you been bothered to exert ANY effort to educate yourself you would have found this paper was part of one of many special editions at RS:
Remote Sensing in Climate Monitoring and Analysis
The description for this special edition:
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Climate monitoring and analysis is an important task in order to improve the understanding of climate dynamics and climate change. This in turn is a pre-requisite for reliable information bulletins on climate change and for the consultation of decision makers and end-users Remote Sensing is becoming more and more important for this issue for different reasons.
Many regions in the world are characterized by the lack of a dense network of ground based measurements for ECVs.
Some parameters can only be observed from space, or can be observed with a better accuracy from space (e.t top of atmosphere radiation budget)
Remote Sensing provides climate variables with a large regional coverage up to global coverage.
Assimilation of satellite data has largely increased the quality of reanalysis data.
Satellite derived products have the potential to increase the accuracy of gridded climate data sets gained from dense ground based networks.
This special issue is dedicated to compile articles on:
climate monitoring and analysis based on satellite derived essential climate variables.
methods for the retrieval of Essential Climate Variables (ECVs) in climate quality.
methods for the calibration and inter-calibration of satellite radiances.
improvements of methods for the assimilation of satellite data within reanalysis.
methods for data fusion of satellite based variables with reanalysis data and/or in-situ measurements.
climate applications dealing with satellite based climate variables
Dr. Richard Müller
Guest Editor
This paper included a number of other climate related papers:
Posselt, R.; Mueller, R.; Stöckli, R.; Trentmann, J. Spatial and Temporal Homogeneity of Solar Surface Irradiance across Satellite Generations. Remote Sens. 2011, 3(5), 1029-1046; doi:10.3390/rs3051029.
http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/3/5/1029/
Seiz, G.; Foppa, N.; Meier, M.; Paul, F. The Role of Satellite Data Within GCOS Switzerland. Remote Sens. 2011, 3(4), 767-780; doi:10.3390/rs3040767.
http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/3/4/767/
Blanc, P.; Gschwind, B.; Lefèvre, M.; Wald, L. The HelioClim Project: Surface Solar Irradiance Data for Climate Applications. Remote Sens. 2011, 3(2), 343-361; doi:10.3390/rs3020343.
http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/3/2/343/
Kariyeva, J.; van Leeuwen, W. Environmental Drivers of NDVI-Based Vegetation Phenology in Central Asia. Remote Sens. 2011, 3(2), 203-246; doi:10.3390/rs3020203.
http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/3/2/203/
Herman, B.; Brunke, M.; Pielke, R.; Christy, J.; McNider, R. Satellite Global and Hemispheric Lower Tropospheric Temperature Annual Temperature Cycle. Remote Sens. 2010, 2(11), 2561-2570; doi:10.3390/rs2112561.
http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/11/2561/
Christy, J.; Herman, B.; Pielke, R.; Klotzbach, P.; McNider, R.; Hnilo, J.; Spencer, R.; Chase, T.; Douglass, D. What Do Observational Datasets Say about Modeled Tropospheric Temperature Trends since 1979?. Remote Sens. 2010, 2(9), 2148-2169; doi:10.3390/rs2092148.
http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/9/2148/
This is exactly the type publication this paper should be published in. It is also an OPEN ACCESS source unlike GRL behind its paywall.
Please share with the class why you support Desslers response being published as a separate paper instead of as a response to this paper in RS – as is the normal scientific process?
WillR says:
September 6, 2011 at 6:32 pm
“Dessler got an r^2 of what????”
from memory:
~0.15 without regression and a sensitivity of +0.5W/m2
OTOH Spencer got an r^2 of 0.2 with a 120 day regression and a sensitivity of -.9W/m2
Spencer acknowledged that correlation was very poor in Dessler 2010 and Spencer 2011. Spencers point however remains. There IS a stronger correlation with a 4 month regression and the sensitivity swaps polarity. Spencer didn’t claim that clouds are net negative feedback. He said you can’t reliably determine the sensitivity in this manner because his regression analysis yielded a higher (but still poor) correlation with a substantial negative feedback.
The thing is that CAGW climate boffins run the GCMs using less well correlated positive feedback which is a classic case of cherry picking every bit as egregious as Michael Mann cherrying picking a few trees that yielded the results he wanted to show.
Great quote Lars P and good pick Benoit Rittaud!
Dave Wendt,
Thanks for the link. Got a copy elsewhere as it turned out. Read it twice. Dessler makes a mistake or two. Spencer and Braswell make a point that seems worthy of consideration. But, to me (a generalist, not Climate Scientist), neither paper alone represents a crystal clear exposition based on incontrovertible facts and logic. That might be due to my ignorance.
I need to give both more thought before deciding win, lose, or draw.
It appears Dessler is not interested in reading scientific papers.
The late 20th century warming correlates with very low overall GCR and with increased solar wind bursts that remove cloud forming ions via the mechanism electroscavenging. There is an observed reduction in planetary cloud cover during the warming period.
http://sait.oat.ts.astro.it/MSAIt760405/PDF/2005MmSAI..76..969G.pdf
http://solar.njit.edu/preprints/palle1264.pdf
(See figure 2. Note low level clouds are reduced by minus 0.065% per year, starting in about 1993.)
Fig. 2 shows the global annual averages of GCR induced ionization in the atmosphere and low cloud amounts for the period July 1983–June 2000 (ionization data is only updated to December 2000). A quick look at the data reveals the good agreement between those two quantities from 1983 to 1994, however, from 1995 to 2000 the correspondence breaks.
On average, for a given cloud cell, about 3–4% of all other cloud cells trend over approximately the past two decades is seen in both the total cloud amount reported by ISCCP (not shown), and the low cloud data (Figs. 2 and 3). A simple linear fit to the yearly low cloud data (Fig. 2) has a slope – 0:065%/yr. If this trend is subtracted from the low cloud data the correlation coefficient rises from 0.49 to 0.75, significant at the 99.5% level.
The dependence of the correlation on latitude suggests that whichever mechanism might be acting to couple the low cloudiness with the solar signal (or GCR) it operates only in certain latitude bands. This could be taken to indicate that the latitudinal variation is controlled by a combination of at least three factors including: (1) the requirement that the clouds were in a liquid state, (2) the known latitudinal variation in cosmic ray flux, and (3) an electroscavenging process operating on liquid clouds (Tinsley and Yu, 2003), dependent on current density changes in the global electric circuit, which have a different latitudinal variation.
Bill Illis says:
September 6, 2011 at 6:09 pm
Perfect. That’s exactly the ratiometric difference between Dessler 2010 and Spencer 2011.
Dessler measured an instant feedback of +0.5W/m2 and Spencer measured a 120 day delayed feedback of -1.0W/m2.
Dessler is measuring instant greenhouse forcing through longwave radiation and Spencer is measuring less ocean heating through cloud reflectance of shortwave radiation. The net is a negative feedback of -0.5W/m2. The problem is climate models are using +0.5W/m2. As Dessler said, if Spencer is correct (and it’s been verified by McIntyre now) then GCMs need to altered to reflect the reality that clouds are negative feedbacks not positive.
“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.”
Not if the system is dynamic, such as happens in cyclical systems. A and B simply change places as the #1 cause of the other, at different times. Neither can be the #1 cause of the other at the same time.
To Tax or not to tax.
Has not one thing to do with clouds other than clouding the issue of tax and spend.
TimTheToolMan says:
September 6, 2011 at 7:37 pm
“or Dessler had access to pre-published copies of the S&B paper.”
It would fit the pattern of Wolfgang’s resignation. He didn’t hold up S&B quite long enough to get Dressler’s paper published at the same time. Why otherwise apologize to Trenberth? What was Trenberh’s connection to Wolfgang and S&B that needed any apology?
This is so far away from the way science should be practiced. It reeks of corruption.
http://geotest.tamu.edu/userfiles/216/Dessler2011.pdf
It is like me saying to you: I know were you live; It is somewhere on earth.
The roads converge…
I’m a little confused by the discussion of “causality” in this thread. According to DIGITAL SIGNAL PROCESSING, by Oppenheim Shafer, 1975, page 11, in discrete-time processing a “system is defined mathematically as a unique transformation or operator that maps an input [discrete-time] sequence x(n) into an output [discrete-time] sequence y(n),” and a “causal system is one for which the changes in the output do not precede changes in the input.” This definition does not imply that the output at index n cannot affect the output at index m for all n and m. It does, however, imply that the output at index n can only affect the outputs at indices m where m>n. By this definition, it is eminently possible that “A” can affect “B” and “B” can affect “B”. The only restriction is that “B events” can only affect subsequent “B events”–i.e., values of “B” at later times.
In discrete-time signal process the inputs and outputs are the same “thing”–i.e., numbers. In the posts by commenters in this thread, the discussion involves CO2, man, aerosals, clouds, and climate change and possibly others. It’s not clear to me exactly what the “system” is that commenters say violates or does not violate causality. In addition, it’s not clear to me which of the preceding are (a) “inputs”, (b) “outputs”, or (c) components of the “system”. It does, however, seem reasonable to me that the “climate” (however you want to define it) can affect “clouds” (e.g., a desert climate has fewer clouds than a jungle climate), which treats “climate” as a “system” input and “clouds” as a “system” output. It also seems reasonable that “clouds” can affect “climate” (as people have mentioned, when a cloud passes between the sun and a thermometor, the thermometer reading drops), which treats “clouds” as a “system” input and “climate” as a “system” output. I fear that without clear definitions of (a) the system, (b) the system inputs, (c) the system outputs and (d) the presence or lack of system feedback, any discussion of causality is fruitless.
BA;
I asked if you would declare your identity in support of our position, or if you were just a coward bleating from the shadows. Per your confirmation, we now know that you are the latter.
On the matter of your support for Dessler, since you mentioned that he is a colleague, that is a clue as to who you might be, but it is also a clue as to why you support a paper that debunks itself. You’re kissing up to Dessler for certain. Do you bow and scrape when Trenberth walks into the room? Or quiver in fear?
I surmise that you fear to reveal your identity because if Trenberth saw what a good job you are doing trying to debunk SB11, you’d wind up with the same fate as Wagner. Resigning and apologising.
I can’t spell, never could, never will. If that’s the only hole you can poke in my comment, my SPELLING then you ought to resign right away because Trenberth likely already knows who you are and will throw you to the wolves in a heartbeat, just like he did Wagner. I think you’re pretty safe from the bloggers at WUWT. Its those whom you count as colleagues and friends that are going to hurt you, and hurt you bad. Spelling I suck at. BS detection I excel at.
You stink sir. Come forward, tell the truth, and you might redeem yourself.
fobdangerclose…
Fire for effect.
William says:
September 6, 2011 at 8:07 pm
The late 20th century warming correlates with very low overall GCR
Not at all.
the discussion of causality has been on the level of basic abstract epistemology.
it is true that causality is unidirectional – that’s how come we know time itself and is also the basis of extracting truths from a stream of discrete data.
WHEN A implies B and also B implies A, we call that an IDENTITY.
It is another fundamental epistemological principle that truth exists in context. It is misguided application of epistemology to assert that the ingredients of vaporization are a single variable with no context. If you drop context, you can ‘prove’ anything.
Abstractions necessarily disregard all else but what’s considered. In reality, the context may well determine the truth of falsity of any statement of implication.
Therefore, specify a context and you can have a hope to resolve causality.
“These calculations show that clouds did not cause significant climate change over the last decade.”
Are we to conclude that you DO have calculations that show that man-made CO2 DID cause significant climate change over the last decade?
And if so, how was this accomplished without any warming?
Ferd Berple wrote;
“What will ultimately be shown is the mainstream climate science knows a lot less about the causes of climate change than is currently believed. That the ability to produce accurate climate prediction lies many years in the future, it at all.”
IMHO, “if at all” sums up the whole futility of trying to “model” the climate of a system as complex as the whole Universe/Sun/Earth/Atmosphere system. In engineering we have made very productive use of computer models (after of course inventing the computer in the first place).
One part of the wisdom derived by creating and using computer models for decades is the knowledge of when to apply them and when to ignore them. In the case of non-linear chaotic systems like the weather systems of the Earth, we take a pass.
After many decades successfully reconciling the PREDICTIONS of computer models with the OBSERVED behavior of real engineering creations, I ALWAYS believe MY OWN EYES before I consult the computer.
There are many reasons why we MAY never be able to model the weather (I know weather is not the same thing as climate; “climate is what you expect, weather is what you get”). Included in this is the imprecise knowledge of the initial conditions of the modeled system. Also included in this (although totally ignored by the “climate scientists”) is the ever expanding width of the “error bars” as the model progresses forward in time.
The least of the reasons why we may never be able to model weather one hundred years from now is the speed of the computer calculations. Faster computers just produce the wrong answer more quickly, not much of an improvement at all. Perhaps we should apply the supercomputers from the weather bureaus to let us all get our online Christmas shopping done in a few milliseconds instead of a few hours.
Cheers, Kevin.