While we are marveling at the recent revelation out of Serbia that shows a connection between cosmic rays, clouds and temperature, our own volunteer moderator, Roger (Tallbloke) noticed and collated some comments from Bill Illis which are well worth repeating here. Thanks Rog for catching this while I was otherwise engaged. I repeat his post here, which consists of a WUWT comment, but be sure to bookmark Tallbloke’s Talkshop
Over on the Spencer Good, Bad and Ugly response to Dessler 2011 thread on WUWT, Bill Illis quietly drops this little bombshell:
While we are having no luck finding a good correlation between clouds and temperatures in a feedback sense (the scatters are providing r^2 of 0.02) which indicates there is probably NO cloud feedback either way (and the IPCC calculates that positive cloud feedback might be half of the total feedbacks so that is very clearly in question now) …
There is a very interesting relationship between the Net Cloud Radiation levels and the Total Global Net Radiation as measured by the CERES satellite (which I don’t think anyone has looked yet being busy trying to find the temperature feedbacks).
I’m getting Cloud variability being a very large part of the variability in the total Global Net Radiation Budget – anywhere from 65% to 100% (with R^2 between 0.29 and 0.77).
First the (not really convincing but better) scatter using the CERES data (that Steve McIntyre and Roy Spencer made available).
And then the (much, much better) relationship over time.
And then the versions of the data that Dessler provided (where adjustments where made according to the ERA reanalysis dataset which some think is actually a little more accurate). 100% of Net Radiation governed by Clouds with R^2 at 0.77 .
And then over time, a really tight relationship.
So, do Cloud Variations affect the Earth’s Energy Budget? – the title of Dessler’s new paper – His own data says: holy moley!
Is this supposed to be surprising? Even if the correlation were 100%, it wouldn’t prove anything other than the obvious. And no, it doesn’t come close to refuting Dessler. The point of Dessler is that short-term variation in TOA flux, regardless of the cause (and clouds are obviously a big part of that) don’t contain enough energy to cause short-term changes in oceanic heat content, and by a considerable margin.
It takes a lot of arrows to kill an elephant. But the CACA Cult is getting pretty pin-cushioned by now. It’ll start noticeably wobbling within a year.
Lucy Skywalker says:
September 11, 2011 at 4:56 pm
I trust Bill Illis. What I’ve seen and understood of his science and attitudes impresses me. If Bill says holey moley I think something important is up. But it would be nice for duffers to have it spelled out in simple language. Think of Nigel Calder writing his book on Svensmark.
Is this about radiation to space from cloud tops linked directly to temperature loss below the clouds?? ie unequivocal proof of negative feedback?
And it also seems possible that Bart (at Climate Audit and Tallbloke’s blog esp) has quantified feedback delay to 4.8 years (looks like the delay is due to oceans lag time in accumulating/losing solar heat before flipping state and precipitating different cloud patterns – did I get that right??)
Both Bill Illis’ notes and Bart’s stats work have been adopted at Talboke’s blog. Both need spelling out in simple language, IMHO. Anyone?
I’m working on it. 🙂
I’ll wait until the conversation has evolved further here and at CA and then attempt a write up in everyday language for the original protagonists to criticise and reshape if they can spare the time.
Paul Vaughan is complaining he cannot understand and I think he has a point insofar as he speaks for a lot of us.
Paul was complaining about the lack of metadata. Whether or not Paul understands Bart’s method I don’t know.
Unfortunately, Paul’s unsubstantiated comment doesn’t add anything I can work with. I also think it is discourteous to rebut someone’s work with a one line dismissal without showing any supporting work they can respond to.
Paul Vaughan says:
September 11, 2011 at 8:12 pm
The series in Bill’s plot can’t help but be strongly correlated as they are deterministically related (one is a function of the other!)
Paul, wouldn’t you need to assume the ocean has no independent internal variability (at the decadal timescale the dataset covers) for that to be true? Or is that variability being expressed in the difference between the datasets (along with errors)?
At Tallbloke’s request, I’ve provided some more worthwhile notes over here [ http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2011/09/09/discussion-on-length-of-day-the-changes-in-the-speed-the-earth-spins-at/ ].
I’d be grateful if you could find the time to answer the question I asked on that thread.
Thanks.
However the Urban Heat Island effect is not explained either. Certainly concrete and glass reflect heat and concrete will keep heat and release it at night. I don’t know if any of you like gliding
(the planes not hang gliding) but I was told the thermals over populated areas were different
from open land or forests. I think if I remember rightly, the thermals went higher over open land, than they did over cities. I suspect this means more movement of air that cools.
The AGW alarmists must be feeling the heat, but they are born liars anyway. At least the US of A
hasn’t globally agreed to anything, although in Australia PM ‘Gillardia’ (yes – sounds like a bacteria that gives you a run for your money, if you get my gist’ ) still is saying the US is into carbon trading etc., and cutting carbon emissions. The thing here in Oz, the Greens are trying to silence anti-AGW journalists like Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones by bringing a motion in the Senate
to stop anti-AGW scientific debate reaching the public. If that isn’t a warning sign to anyone with a sense of democratic rights being abused, nothing will..
Tallbloke, thanks.
Yes, I notice that Paul Vaughan is not only incomprehensible himself at times, he is also abrupt with what he regards as others’ incomprehensibility. Real shame because I feel he has a lot to offer. I live in hope that he might learn better manners. I look forward to Bart’s wonders explained to non-stats folk – something between simply stating the conclusion, and following the convolutions of the threads at CA.
Bill said:
” I’’m getting Cloud variability being a very large part of the variability in the total Global Net Radiation Budget – anywhere from 65% to 100% (with R^2 between 0.29 and 0.77).”
Could the cloud variability be linked to the degree of zonality/meridionality in the mid latitude jets and/or changes in the globally averaged latitudinal position of ALL the main cloud bands?
Paul assuredly has much to offer in terms of statistical analysis, and I agree with the general thrust of his argument that the causation of climate variation will be found in Earth’s orientation parameters. The very first post on my blog was crudely attempting to highlight that same hypothesis.
However, as an engineer, I recognise the importance of estimating scale of effects when trying to piece together lines of evidence for causation, and that’s why I think Bart’s analysis of response time between cloud change and temperature change could be important in assisting our understanding of the mechanisms by which and the rates at which the ocean sequesters, transports and releases energy. This, as Paul constantly emphasises, will also require a better approach to the spatio-temporal distribution of energy and the transcending of the reliance on global averages.
davidmhoffer:
re. your post at September 11, 2011 at 10:11 pm:
Excellent. Well said. And it needs repeating again and again and ….
Richard
Philip Bradley says:
“I studied this many years ago and IMO it is because evidence and phenomena are processed by the brain through a representation of the paradigm and if the evidence and phenomena don’t fit the paradigm they are rejected and a basis found for the rejection.”
In a shameless plug, I suggest you might be interested in my article: FM radio an global warming nonsense in which I discuss a possible analogy between Phase Locked loops and … I suppose you could say “paradigms”.
One of they key efficiencies of the PLL, is that it allows the circuitry to zero-in on the expected signal – in effect it says: “the expected signal will be a little different from such a such a frequency, so I will ignore all other signals apart from one which is changing (almost precisely) when I expect to see a change. In effect it filters out all the unnecessary information and creates an internal model which predicts what it expects to “see”.
In that way, it avoids the problem of having to examine all evidence and consider all evidence, instead it looks only for evidence that it expects to have an impact on the model.
In effect, warmists will be much more receptive to a statement like:
CO2 warming will be 10% less than expected and 10% less damaging than anticipated
Than e.g.
CO2 warming will benefit … 10% of the population.
Because the idea that anyone will benefit from warming is so alien to their mental construct of its affect that they will simply reject the idea, but they are more than willing to listen to how much worse it will be, so they already have a sense that it could be “worse … or not so bad” as thought.
Richard S. Courtney, I agree wholeheartedly. But it isn’t getting through to the Australian government. What can we do?
bushbunny:
I am an Engishman and not an Australian so I think it would be hubristic for me to suggest answer(s) to your question. Sorry.
Richard
I think I will buy stock in a nail company. There have been an unbelievable quantity of nails in coffins regarding AGW. Or I might be better off keeping garlic and a silver cross in my pocket. 😉 Thanks everyone for all the effort to get the truth out.
@Scottish Sceptic: How’s this for getting the warmists away from CAGW?
CO2 cannot warm the planet overall, but can aid the spread of heat from warmer to cooler parts of the planet. As evidenced by the lack of temperature difference between day and night on Venus (96.5% atmospheric CO2), CO2 is not an insulator of heat, but merely a conductor. This could explain why warm parts of the world aren’t warming or are cooling, but cool parts of the world are warming, primarily through higher minimum temperatures in winter and at night.
When this is accepted, we can then get onto how this effect is lost in the noise of natural variation, and how the recording of it by land-based thermometers is exaggerated by UHIE and microsite issues.
commieBob says:
September 11, 2011 at 11:46 am
Sorry for being a doofus but I assume that if I don’t understand something, lots of others are in the same boat.
What precisely is being measured to produce:
1 – Dessler CERES All-Sky Net Radiation
2 – ERA Net Cloud Radiation
When I google for precisely those things, I get no results. Before we get too excited, we should be really clear what we are talking about.
————
A good point to raise since I can’t translate these terms accurately either.
Some misunderstandings above. Apologies. I did not accept my seat on the carrot train. I work overtime 6 to 7 days per week now. Addressing things the way people might like would require at least 20 times more free time (or the kind of freedom I had in the past when I worked in academia). The choice is between issuing a terse alert where I see a problem or an opportunity and not commenting at all. Regards.
Here’s a tip for someone with a tremendous amount of free time:
There appears to be something very seriously wrong the sampling design &/or aggregation criteria upon which the data summaries in Bill’s plots are founded.
Robert of Ottawa says:
September 11, 2011 at 3:52 pm
Let’s see … strong correlation between cloud seeds and GCRs; strong correlation between radiation balance and clouds. Hmm …
———–
corrections: proven cause and effect between cosmic rays and a particular kind of cloud seed. There are many kinds of cloud seed.
Proven cause and effect between radiation balance and clouds; which is only one contribution among many. Clouds at different altitudes can have the opposite effect.
Ian W says
Only the AGW converts believe energy is the same as temperature and all radiated energy follows Stefan Boltzmann.
—————
They don’t believe any such thing. [snip]
Can anyone point to concise material on how the satellite samples? (I suspect serious spatiotemporal aliasing.)
Bill Illis says:
September 10, 2011 at 10:11 amBill Illis says:
September 10, 2011 at 10:11 am
>>
While we are having no luck finding a good correlation between clouds and temperatures in a feedback sense (the scatters are providing r^2 of 0.02) which indicates there is probably NO cloud feedback either way
While we are having no luck finding a good correlation between clouds and temperatures in a feedback sense (the scatters are providing r^2 of 0.02) which indicates there is probably NO cloud feedback either way
>>
Well until climate science manages to climb out of the first grade science class and stops doing completely *invalid* OLS fits to data that have huge noise levels , no correlation and significant error in the independent variable they will find nothing.
This in no way suggests that there is no feedback.
Let me see if I have this correct. You take a quantity x – nearlyconstant and plot it against x and you get a gradient very close to 1.00 and a very high correlation coefficient.
That’s amazing. I am absolutely gobsmacked. It is beyond belief. I can hardly credit my own eyes. I am going to become a skeptic right this minute.
Lucy, though technically based on a correlation, the concepts Bart employed are just basic Fourier theory, not really statistics per se. He is simply doing system identification the way people that do system identification do it (as a start at least.)
Mark
LazyTeenager says:
September 12, 2011 at 5:31 am
“Let me see if I have this correct. You take a quantity x – nearlyconstant and plot it against x and you get a gradient very close to 1.00 and a very high correlation coefficient.
That’s amazing. I am absolutely gobsmacked. It is beyond belief. I can hardly credit my own eyes. I am going to become a skeptic right this minute.”
You didn’t understand it. The fact that the variation in Cloud Net Radiation does not only correlate, but is close to identical to the variation in Total Net Radiation means that THERE IS NO OTHER major influencing factor. Clouds modulate the radiation; little else does.
Comprendre?
Paul Vaughan says:
September 11, 2011 at 8:12 pm
“The series in Bill’s plot can’t help but be strongly correlated as they are deterministically related (one is a function of the other!)
Now, after making time [that wasn’t well spent] to investigate, I’m left wondering what all the fuss was about.”
Two things are important besides the correlation:
There is no significant time lag.
The scale of the two variables IS THE SAME – meaning the cloud-caused radiation anomaly covers practically all the total radiation anomaly.