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.
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Dessler: An energy budget calculation shows that the energy trapped by clouds accounts for little of the observed climate variations.
A glaring straw man in the middle of the (very short) abstract. Why the hell bring in the word “trapped”?? Who on earth is talking about energy accumulating INSIDE CLOUDS!? Have these people never heard of albedo?
Dessler: 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.
As Anthony has already posted, the scientific method is now being mangled beyond recognition. Here Dessler starts his “investigation” by announcing what the “reality” is – and all that follows merely serves to force the reader to accept the reality that was already established before the investigation began. This is inquisitorial imposition of articles of blind faith, not remotely a scientific or scholarly process. “An opinion has been established on this point…” – this was a common statement by Government scientists in the Soviet Union.
The AGW team seem not to really comprehend what feedback is. In feedback there is no first and second. It is bidirectional. The characteristics of the feedback or feedbacks operating in the system combine to cause an overall emergent system behaviour that is not necessarily tied to any one component.
The only way out of this mess is for climate research to fully take on board the fact that climate is characterised by nonequilibrium-nonlinear chaotic dynamics, and to understand the role of feedbacks in this context.The system is more than its component parts. At present the AGW team are toying with the term “feedback” without even trying to understand it, merely using it as a rhetorical device to justify an amplified and dominant role for CO2.
I found the following statement in Dessler very surprising:
Thus, the lead- lag relation between TOA flux and ∆Ts tells us nothing about the physics driving ∆Ts.
Radiative imbalance doesn’t affect temperature? Really? That’s his position?
Time to revise what “peer review” really is.
Currently, its a review by a very small number of persons who self-select based upon their willingness to participate and upon the apparently biased choices of non-specialist editors.
Real peer review os opening the idea up to full examination of all peers. This is necessarily a wider audience that simply those willing to pay for a subscription of some publications.
Anything hidden behind a paywall needs to be excluded from the definition of “peer reviewed”.
Especially any research paid for in any part by public funds.
Again, I have to remember being given a 4 pages “Heat Transfer” paper a novel variational technique, to analyse the method…learn to use it, and apply it to a real world problem for my graduate Conduction heat transfer course. It was given out about 6 weeks before my “presentation” report was dues. I walked into the presentation with 40 pages of overhead slides. (I made copies for everyone in the class.) I took OVER the time limit, but the professor was gracious enough to allow that. I had NAILED the mathematics down. Everyone could understand and use that method after I finished presenting. HOWEVER, I did NOT have time to apply it to a problem. That requirement was waived by the professor. Dr. Lee.
He gave a memorable speech about “the constraints of journal publications”, and that the effort I went to to understand a “simple” 4 page paper being TYPICAL.
I therefore wonder just how S&B’s “critics” can so “walk on water”, that they can have their analysis, counter work, and publication time table squeezed in to the time frame alloted.
I would venture to guess that the validity and quality of the work bear some sort of “inverse” relationship to the time of preparation and time to obtain “presentation”.
This key relationship should be kept in mind when reading the S&B critical paper.
This gets worse the closer you look.
∆Focean is actually a function of ∆Ts, with the coupling occurring via the ENSO dynamics: ∆Ts controls the atmospheric circulation, which drives ocean circulation, which determines ∆Focean,
which controls ∆Ts.
So Dessler has discovered what no one has manage to explain so far, what controls ocean currents and their major oscillations. And the big news is…. it’s the AIR that drives the oceans. (Well we all know Coriolis force was a “fictitious force” , right?)
Figure 1. The slope of the regression (W/m2/K) of energy trapped by clouds ∆Rcloud
vs. surface temperature ∆Ts, as a function of the lag between the time series in months.
The guy does not even understand the difference between energy and power . Jees. No wonder he is having trouble with resolving the difference between cause and effect.
He claims to plot “energy trapped by clouds ∆Rcloud” from CERES data but Ceres does not measure “energy trapped by clouds” it is spectral measurements so how is he deriving what he believes to be the effect of clouds. This is totally undocumented.
No seriously. They will live to regret having banged this through peer review without reviewing it. This is laughable. Dessler has just blown any cred anyone may have been prepared to credit his with.
“The system is biased against bad science. So-called “skeptics” produce a lot of bad science, and it’s a good thing that they have difficulty publishing it.”
99.9% if all scientific studies have ultimately been shown to be incorrect or incomplete. This is because every generation of scientists makes the same mistake. We under estimate the size of the unknown.
Scientific studies do not reduce the number of questions in science. Rather, they increase the number of areas needing to be studies. This tells us one simple fact about the physical universe. The number of unknowns is near infinite. The discovery of the atom did not reduce the number of questions in physics. It lead to the discovery of quarks and the question of what lies beneath.
The same will be found to be true for climate science. 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.
On page 8 of Dessler’s paper under the heading “ENSO coupling in the model,” he makes the following statement which appears to be unsupported:
While I understand that is how one could code a model, does anyone know of any experimental or other non-model support for this statement?
Significant revisions to mainstream climate science are not required and should not be supported.
Discarding of mainstream climate science is required and should be supported.
Just a question from a simple peon, but if Dessler claims that clouds don’t affect the climate, and clouds are made up of water vapor (a MUCH more effective GHG than anything else), then is he trying to debunk the entire warmie argument that changes in GHG’s affect climate?
I hope someone more knowledgeable in the area can answer.
He only chose to look at 10 years of data?
fail
Recommended reading about clouds:
http://climate4you.com/ClimateAndClouds.htm
Clouds reflect about a quarter of total sunlight reaching the Earth surface.
So now we see the real reason that Wolfgang resigned and apologized to Trenberth. Because he didn’t hold up the S&B paper until after the Dressler paper was published.
Lets make a guess here. Trenberth controls the funding that Wolfgang needs for his own study, so when Trenberth says jump, Wolfgang asks how high. He who controls the funding controls the science.
omnologos says:
September 6, 2011 at 5:16 am
I wonder if this is the first peer-reviewed paper ever written to answer the newsmedia’s interpretation of another peer-reviewed paper? FoxNews has suddenly become scientifically relevant.
Yes, it seems that Fox News is now part of the peer review system. Come to think of it, I guess WUWT is now part of the peer review system.
ΔFocean is actually a function of ΔTs, with the coupling occurring via the ENSO dynamics: ΔTs controls the atmospheric circulation, which drives ocean circulation, which determines ΔFocean, which controls ΔTs.
The idea that atmospheric circulation drives ocean circulation is naive at best. Surface circulation to some extent is drive by the wind, taking into account the effects of land masses. However the deep ocean circulation has nothing to do with the wind. It is regulated almost entirely be the shape of the ocean basins, and the differences in temperature and salinity between the equator and poles.
Do you suppose Dressler got like-minded reviewers to speed this through? I wonder if GRL editor in chief is going to resign because of this.
m says:
September 6, 2011 at 6:43 am
So which is it: “happening or man-made”? Nobody here denies the earth has been warming–but for only the last 50 years or so? I don’t think so. BTW, could you please show us some empirical evidence that this warming is “man-made” (Actually, it is, as opposed to “human-caused”; I hope you can discern the difference.)
Just read the excerpt.
“… not evidence that clouds are CAUSING climate change” strikes me already.
Has such claim been made by anybody?
^ weeks until published? Is there any clearer piece of evidence for bias in ‘manmade global warming’?
Speaking of taking a long time to get published, how long did it take for Henrick Svenmark’s paper to get published? Wasn’t it years?
Of course it is behind a paywall, after S&B11 was downloaded 56K times it was destined for a for a paywall – call it an illustration of economic feedback for physicists.
I keep coming back to Dessler’s conclusion:
Thus, the lead- lag relation between TOA flux and ∆Ts tells us nothing about the physics driving ∆Ts.
If this is his refutation of SB11, then he has also effectively refuted AR4. If radiative imbalance does not affect temperature, then why are we even in this debate?
Six weeks! So they had time to also go through the results from CERN and use the data on cloud formation to come up with a result? Breaking science at its best! No wonder the boss at CERN wanted the scientists to keep closed mouthed!
Bugger, reading everyones comments here I don’t have enough popcorn for this, can you guys wiat a minute while I pop out and get more.
Cheers.
It’s an odd thing , but when it’s cold here in the south, as it has been at times this just past winter, we only seem to get the negative feedback type of clouds, never the positive type that would be most welcome.
Stephen WIlde says
Crucially anything that fails to alter that vertical temperature profile significantly is not going to have a significant effect on clouds either. Hence my doubts about the Svensmark hypothesis.
People should look at this another way.
* Imagine a windless atmosphere with a standard ICAN lapse rate. With a flat calm ocean surface next to a land surface both at the same ‘standard’ temperature to match the lapse rate.
* Water will evaporate into the air from the ocean surface the addition of water vapor to the air reduces the density of the air (Avogadro and molecular weights of H2O vs O2 and N2) so the more humid air will increase in volume and rise.
* Air is drawn in over the land surface to replace the rising humid air which is drier. That dry air then becomes more humid as water vapor from the ocean surface evaporates into it – and that will rise in turn
* This process will generate a land breeze blowing out to sea increasing the rate of evaporation.
As the humid air rises eventually it will reach a point at which the air is saturated due to the temperature lapse rate. If there are cloud condensation nuclei – clouds will form.
* The updraft and the latent heat of evaporation will alter the atmospheric lapse rate as the updraft will have the wet lapse rate.
No heating – no forcings – clouds can form just from normal evaporation causing light breezes.
You can see this cloud formation in early mornings over lakes or in damp forests. It is one of the causes of ‘lake effect snow’.
And Dressler’s claim is that clouds only form in response to heating?
Perhaps it is time for “so called” skeptical scientists to create their own journal and publish their scientific conclusions beyond the interference and bias by warmistas. Such a journal would be read vociferously because the warmistas would need to spend a great deal of time attempting to debunk the articles. That would be good press for the journal.
here is a catchy title: ” The Climate of Reason Journal”