Candid Comments From Climate Scientists
By Dr. Roger Pielke Sr.
There is a news release by Paul Voosen on Greenwire titled
Provoked scientists try to explain lag in global warming (Tuesday, October 25, 2011)
There are some interesting quotes from climate scientists in this article that highlight a large degree of uncertainty with respect to the climate system, and the human role in it, even among scientists closely involved with the IPCC reports. The long article focuses on the question
‘Why, despite steadily accumulating greenhouse gases, did the rise of the planet’s temperature stall for the past decade?”
Interesting quotes and text {rearranged to order the persons’ quoted; I highly recommend reading the entire article include [highlight added]:
From John Barnes [Barnes’s specialty is measuring stratospheric aerosols].
“If you look at the last decade of global temperature, it’s not increasing,” Barnes said. “There’s a lot of scatter to it. But the [climate] models go up. And that has to be explained. Why didn’t we warm up?”
Barnes has kept a lonely watch for 20 years [at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii]. Driving the winding, pothole-strewn road to this government-run lab, he has spent evening after evening waiting for the big one. His specialty is measuring stratospheric aerosols, reflective particles caused by volcanoes that are known to temporarily cool the planet. Only the most violent volcanic eruptions are able to loft emissions above the clouds, scientists thought, and so Barnes, after building the laser, waited for his time.
To this day, there hasn’t been a major volcanic eruption since 1991, when Mount Pinatubo scorched the Philippines, causing the Earth to cool by about a half degree for several years. But Barnes diligently monitored this radio silence, identifying the background level of particles in the stratosphere. And then, sitting in his prefab lab four years ago, not far from where Charles Keeling first made his historic measure of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, Barnes saw something odd in his aerosol records.
Barnes laments the boggling complexity of separating all the small forcings on the climate. It makes Charles Keeling’s careful work identifying rising CO2 levels seem downright simple.
“It’s really subtle,” he said. “It’s hard to track how much is going into the oceans, because the oceans are soaking up some of the heat. And in a lot of places the measurements just aren’t accurate enough. We do have satellites that can measure the energy budget, but there’s still assumptions there. There’s assumptions about the oceans, because we don’t have a whole lot of measurements in the ocean.”
From Jean-Paul Vernier
Five years ago, a balloon released over Saharan sands changed Jean-Paul Vernier’s life.
Climbing above the baked sand of Niger, the balloon, rigged to catch aerosols, the melange of natural and man-made particles suspended in the atmosphere, soared above the clouds and into the stratosphere. There, Vernier expected to find clear skies; after all, there had been no eruption like Pinatubo for more than a decade. But he was wrong. Twelve miles up, the balloon discovered a lode of aerosols.
Vernier had found one slice of the trend identified by Barnes at Mauna Loa in Hawaii. It was astonishing. Where could these heat-reflecting aerosols be originating? Vernier was unsure, but Barnes and his team hazarded a guess when announcing their finding. It was, they suggested, a rapidly increasing activity in China that has drawn plenty of alarm.
A French scientist who moved to NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia to study aerosols, Vernier, like Barnes, turned toward a laser to understand these rogue sulfates. But rather than using a laser lashed to the ground, he used a laser in space.
The same year as the Niger balloon campaign, NASA had launched a laser-equipped satellite aimed at observing aerosols among the clouds. Vernier and his peers suspected, with enough algorithmic ingenuity, that they could get the laser, CALIPSO, to speak clearly about the stratosphere. The avalanche of data streaming out of the satellite was chaotic — too noisy for Barnes’ taste, when he took a look — but several years on, Vernier had gotten a hold of it. He had found an answer.
Mostly, the aerosols didn’t seem to be China’s fault.
From Kevin Trenberth
The hiatus [in warming] was not unexpected. Variability in the climate can suppress rising temperatures temporarily, though before this decade scientists were uncertain how long such pauses could last. In any case, one decade is not long enough to say anything about human effects on climate; as one forthcoming paper lays out, 17 years is required.
For some scientists, chalking the hiatus up to the planet’s natural variability was enough. Temperatures would soon rise again, driven up inexorably by the ever-thickening blanket thrown on the atmosphere by greenhouse gases. People would forget about it.
But for others, this simple answer was a failure. If scientists were going to attribute the stall to natural variability, they faced a burden to explain, in a precise way, how this variation worked. Without evidence, their statements were no better than the unsubstantiated theories circulated by climate skeptics on the Internet.
“It has always bothered me,” said Kevin Trenberth, head of the climate analysis section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. “Natural variability is not a cause. One has to say what aspect of natural variability.”
Until 2003, scientists had a reasonable understanding where the sun’s trapped heat was going; it was reflected in rising sea levels and temperatures. Since then, however, heat in the upper ocean has barely increased and the rate of sea level rise slowed, while data from a satellite monitoring incoming and outgoing heat — the Earth’s energy budget — found that an ever increasing amount of energy should be trapped on the planet. (Some scientists question relying on this satellite data too heavily, since the observed energy must be drastically revised downward, guided by climate models.) Given this budget ostensibly included the solar cycle and aerosols, something was missing.
Where was the heat going? Trenberth repeated the question time and again.
Recently, working with Gerald Meehl and others, Trenberth proposed one answer. In a paper published last month, they put forward a climate model showing that decade-long pauses in temperature rise, and its attendant missing energy, could arise by the heat sinking into the deep, frigid ocean waters, more than 2,000 feet down. The team used a new model, one prepared for the next U.N. climate assessment; unlike past models, it handles the Pacific’s variability well, which ”seems to be important,” Trenberth said.
“In La Niña, the colder sea surface temperatures in the Pacific mean there is less convective action there — fewer tropical storms, etc., and less clouds, but thus more sun,” he said. “The heat goes into the ocean but gets moved around by the ocean currents. So ironically colder conditions lead to more heat being sequestered.”
It is a compelling illustration of how natural variability, at least in this model, could overcome the influence of increasing greenhouse gases for a decade or more, several scientists said. However, according to one prominent researcher — NASA’s Hansen — it’s a search for an answer that doesn’t need to be solved.
That is because, according to Hansen, there is no missing energy.
Trenberth questions whether the Argo measurements are mature enough to tell as definite a story as Hansen lays out. He has seen many discrepancies among analyses of the data, and there are still “issues of missing and erroneous data and calibration,” he said. The Argo floats are valuable, he added, but “they’re not there yet.”
From Susan Solomon
“What’s really been exciting to me about this last 10-year period is that it has made people think about decadal variability much more carefully than they probably have before,” said Susan Solomon, an atmospheric chemist and former lead author of the United Nations’ climate change report, during a recent visit to MIT. “And that’s all good. There is no silver bullet. In this case, it’s four pieces or five pieces of silver buckshot.”
Already Solomon had shown that between 2000 and 2009, the amount of water vapor in the stratosphere declined by about 10 percent. This decline, caused either by natural variability — perhaps related to El Niño — or as a feedback to climate change, likely countered 25 percent of the warming that would have been caused by rising greenhouse gases. (Some scientists have found that estimate to be high.) Now, another dynamic seemed to be playing out above the clouds.
In a paper published this summer, Solomon, Vernier and others brought these discrete facts to their conclusion, estimating that these aerosols caused a cooling trend of 0.07 degrees Celsius over the past decade. Like the water vapor, it was not a single answer, but it was a small player. These are the type of low-grade influences that future climate models will have to incorporate, Livermore’s Santer said.
Solomon was surprised to see Vernier’s work. She remembered the Soufrière eruption, thinking “that one’s never going to make it into the stratosphere.” The received wisdom then quickly changed. ”You can actually see that all these little eruptions, which we thought didn’t matter, were mattering,” she said.
From Jim Hansen
These revelations are prompting the science’s biggest names to change their views.
Indeed, the most important outcome from the energy hunt may be that researchers are chronically underestimating air pollution’s reflective effect, said NASA’s James Hansen, head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
Recent data has forced him to revise his views on how much of the sun’s energy is stored in the oceans, committing the planet to warming. Instead, he says, air pollution from fossil fuel burning, directly and indirectly, has been masking greenhouse warming more than anyone knew.
It was in no “way affected by the nonsensical statements of contrarians,” Hansen said. “These are fundamental matters that the science has always been focused on. The problem has been the absence of [scientific] observations.”
NASA’s Hansen disputes that worry about skeptics drove climate scientists to ignore the sun’s climate influence. His team, he said, has “always included solar forcing based on observations and Judith’s estimates for the period prior to accurate observations.”
“That makes the sun a bit more important, because the solar variability modulates the net planetary energy imbalance,” Hansen said. “But the solar forcing is too small to make the net imbalance negative, i.e., solar variations are not going to cause global cooling.”
“Unfortunately, when we focus on volcanic aerosol forcing, solar forcing and stratospheric water vapor changes, it is a case of looking for our lost keys under the streetlight,” Hansen said. “What we need to look at is the tropospheric aerosol forcing, but it is not under the street light.”
“I suspect that there has been increased aerosols with the surge in coal use over the past half decade or so,” he said. “There is semi-quantitative evidence of that in the regions where it is expected. Unfortunately, the problem is that we are not measuring aerosols well enough to determine their forcing and how it is changing.”
More fundamentally, the Argo probe data has prompted Hansen to revise his understanding of how the climate works in a fundamental way, a change he lays out in a sure-to-be-controversial paper to be published later this year.
For decades, scientists have known that most of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases was going into the ocean, not the atmosphere; as a result, even if emissions stopped tomorrow, they said, the atmosphere would continue to warm as it sought balance with the overheated oceans. In a term Hansen coined, this extra warming would be “in the pipeline,” its effects lingering for years and years. But exactly how much warming would be in the pipeline depended on how efficiently heat mixed down into the oceans.
Hansen now believes he has an answer: All the climate models, compared to the Argo data and a tracer study soon to be released by several NASA peers, exaggerate how efficiently the ocean mixes heat into its recesses. Their unanimity in this efficient mixing could be due to some shared ancestry in their code. Whatever the case, it means that climate models have been overestimating the amount of energy in the climate, seeking to match the surface warming that would occur with efficient oceans. They were solving a problem, Hansen says, that didn’t exist.
At first glance, this could easily sound like good news, if true. But it’s not.
“Less efficient mixing, other things being equal, would mean that there is less warming ‘in the pipeline,’” Hansen said. “But it also implies that the negative aerosol forcing is probably larger than most models assumed. So the Faustian aerosol bargain is probably more of a problem than had been assumed.”
From John Daniel [a researcher at the Earth System Research Lab of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration]
When the record came in 1998, though, scientists faltered. It’s a pattern often seen with high temperatures. They cut out too much nuance, said John Daniel, a researcher at the Earth System Research Lab of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“We make a mistake, anytime the temperature goes up, you imply this is due to global warming,” he said. “If you make a big deal about every time it goes up, it seems like you should make a big deal about every time it goes down.”
From Ben Santer
For a decade, that’s exactly what happened. Skeptics made exaggerated claims about “global cooling,” pointing to 1998. (For one representative example, two years ago columnist George Will referred to 1998 as warming’s “apogee.”) Scientists had to play defense, said Ben Santer, a climate modeler at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
“This no-warming-since-1998 discussion has prompted people to think about the why and try to understand the why,” Santer said. “But it’s also prompted people to correct these incorrect claims.”
“Susan’s stuff is particularly important,” Santer said. “Even if you have the hypothetical perfect model, if you leave out the wrong forcings, you will get the wrong answer.”
From Judith Lean
The answer to the hiatus, according to Judith Lean, is all in the stars. Or rather, one star.
Only recently have climate modelers followed how that 0.1 percent can influence the world’s climate over decade-long spans. (According to best estimates, it gooses temperatures by 0.1 degrees Celsius.) Before then, the sun, to quote the late comedian Rodney Dangerfield, got no respect, according to Lean, a voluble solar scientist working out of the the space science division of the Naval Research Laboratory, a radar-bedecked facility tucked away down in the southwest tail of Washington, D.C.
Climate models failed to reflect the sun’s cyclical influence on the climate and “that has led to a sense that the sun isn’t a player,” Lean said. “And that they have to absolutely prove that it’s not a player.”
According to Lean, the combination of multiple La Niñas and the solar minimum, bottoming out for an unusually extended time in 2008 from its peak in 2001, are all that’s needed to cancel out the increased warming from rising greenhouse gases. Now that the sun has begun to gain in activity again, Lean suspects that temperatures will rise in parallel as the sun peaks around 2014.
This consistent trend has prompted Lean to take a rare step for a climate scientist: She’s made a short-term prediction. By 2014, she projects global surface temperatures to increase by 0.14 degrees Celsius, she says, driven by human warming and the sun.
From Graeme Stephens
Over the past decade, for the first time, scientists have had access to reliable measures of the ocean’s deep heat, down to 5,000 feet below sea level, through the Argo network, a collection of several thousand robotic probes that, every few days, float up and down through the water column. This led Hansen to conclude that net energy imbalance was, to be briefly technical, 0.6 watts per square meter, rather than more than 1 watt per square meter, as some had argued.
(Recently, the satellite group measuring the energy imbalance has revised its figure, which now sits at 0.6 watts, matching Hansen’s estimate, according to Graeme Stephens, the head of NASA’s Cloudsat mission. It suggests there isn’t a missing energy. Trenberth disagrees with this analysis, and it’s likely to be a question of ongoing debate.)
From Robert Kaufmann
This past summer, Robert Kaufmann, the BU geographer, made waves when he released a modeling study suggesting that the hiatus in warming could be due entirely to El Niño and increased sulfates from China’s coal burning. While the figures Kaufmann used for the study were based on the country’s coal combustion, and not actual emissions — a big point of uncertainty — many scientists saw some truth in his assertions.
From Martin Wild
During the 1980s and ’90s, the rapid decline of air pollution in the United States and Europe dominated the world’s aerosol trends. While those emissions have continued to decline in the West, returns, from a brightening standpoint, have diminished, just as coal combustion ramped up in Asia. It’s not that the world is getting dimmer again; it’s that it’s no longer getting brighter.
“It’s not an obvious overall trend anymore,” said Martin Wild, a lead author of the United Nations’ next climate assessment at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich. But, he added, “it fits quite well with [coal power] generation. For me, it’s quite striking that it seems to fit quite nicely. But it could still be by chance.”
From Daniel Jacobs
Kaufmann’s findings may only be relevant for so long. Since 2006, China has begun to mandate scrubbers for its coal-fired power plants, though it is uncertain how often the scrubbers, even when installed, are operated. But change is coming, said Daniel Jacob, an atmospheric chemist at Harvard University.
“The sulfate sources have been leveling off, because they’ve been starting to put serious emission controls on their power plants,” Jacob said. “It’s interesting. When you look at the future emission scenarios from the [next U.N. climate report], you see SO2 emissions dropping like a rock, even in the coming decades. Because basically China is going to have to do something about its public health problem.”
The end of the article highlights the developing debate among even these scientists.
“….many of the scientists sorting out the warming hiatus disagree with one another – in a chummy, scholarly way. Judith Lean, the solar scientist, finds Kaufmann’s work unpersuasive and unnecessarily critical of China. Kaufmann finds Solomon’s stratosphere studies lacking in evidence. Hansen and Trenberth can’t agree on a budget.
It seems staggering, then, that in a few years’ time a new consensus will form for the next U.N. climate change report. But it will, and lurking beneath it will remain, as always, the churning theories and rivalries, the questions, the grist of scientific life.
So, in the end, can anyone say explicitly what caused the warming hiatus?
“All of these things contribute to the relative muted warming,” Livermore’s Santer said. “The difficultly is figuring out the relative contribution of these things. You can’t do that without systematic modeling and experimentation. I would hope someone will do that.”
Barnes, for his part, would love to separate whether any background aerosols he found tucked away in the stratosphere came from Chinese coal burning. It is difficult to figure out, but he has some hope it could happen.
“Maybe when coal burning triples,” he said, “then we might sort it out.”
These extracts from the Greenwire article illustrate why the climate system is not yet well understood. The science is NOT solved.
Amazing how they contort their responses to be able to insist that the skeptics were’nt right all along.
James Macdonald, MS MIT says:
October 27, 2011 at 12:12 pm
http://www.middlebury.net/op-ed/global-warming-01.html
You maybe interested in this gents info some of what he discusses is on the line of how much can be expected to be absorbed given the two frequencies (4.7 and 15 micro) that CO2 is at. Enjoy.
“… a story as Hansen lays out. He has seen many discrepancies among analyses of the data, and there are still “issues of missing and erroneous data and calibration,”
I presume the corrections to all of these errors will help prove there case, Hansen and company are so invested and committed to their climate model zealotry that everything they say will always be the same, always.
I also love the bit about data from satellites:”(Some scientists question relying on this satellite data too heavily, since the observed energy must be drastically revised downward, guided by climate models.)” Observed energy, in other words undeniable, observed evidence, irrefutable data measured, really, truly. The real world, reality, “REVISED…GUIDED BY CLIMATE MODELS”. Funny, if it weren’t deadly serious.
Climate models are software. Somebody had to write that code. They were all written using the same basic assumptions. In other words, the models work as designed because that was the only way to get the results they expected.
They’re just adding more epicycles to their model.
Maybe they should start again from scratch.
(Some scientists question relying on this satellite data too heavily, since the observed energy must be drastically revised downward, guided by climate models.)
The tail is wagging the dog.
There are two absolutely momentous points that are clear as crystal that must be learned from this article:
1. There is no consensus of scientists on global warming/whatever.
2. The climate models produce so-called “predictions” or “forecasts” that are not in the ball part at all. That is, the recorded data, at least since Hansen’s famous prediction, flatly contradict all the models. (Please note that the other side of the falsification coin is that none of the models can account for the recorded data.)
On the basis of these two momentous points, two programs are absolutely necessary:
1. School children must be deprogrammed and taught that there was no consensus among climate scientists. They must be taught that the information in the article under discussion shows that the hypothesis of a consensus has been proved false by the facts.
2. School children must be deprogrammed and taught that all climate models have proved to be failures as substitutes for physical theory.
Reprimands are necessary for all scientific organizations and scientists who:
1. Claimed that there is such a thing as consensus science and that it determines what is true.
2. Claimed, explicitly or implicitly, that computer models can substitute for physical theory.
The attribution to manmade emitted aerosols would appear misplaced since if it were correct, there would have been global cooling (and not waeming) between the 1960s and 1990s when the developed nations of the West were emitting large quantities of aerosol pollutants prior to the effective introduction of regulations dealing with and limiting emission standards/clean air acts etc.
Back in the 1960s-1990s the West was emitting just as much aerosol pollutants as China is now emitting today. CO2 levels were less in the 1960s-1990s so how come was there global warming? Why did not the aerosol pollutants that the West was emitting not mask the effects of CO2 induced warming?
The argument with respect to manmade aerosol pollutants is inconsistent and does not stand scrutiny with past events such that, in my opinion, there must be some other explanation as to why the warming trend has stalled.
blind Freddy’s intellectually disabled baby brother could tell you that there is a chasm of illogicallity between the climate models and the patently obvious reality. With CO2 being a GHG and a plant untriet ( => plants grow faster, absorb more CO2, emit more water vapour etc), H2O ( as vapour ) being a GHG and ( as droplets) in clouds => a reflector back down of radiant heat and upward of incoming solar energy as well as the odd aerosol floating around helping to form clouds the total response is hardly likely to be simple. And these turkeys have PhD’s etc. Talk about idiot savants.
Dave Springer says:
October 27, 2011 at 10:54 am
Dave,
I do not see that Jim Hansen understands that the effect of LWIR around the 15 micron band is ineffective at slowing the cooling rate of the oceans. Rather, he is claiming that the oceans didn’t absorb as much shortwave due to aerosols. To admit that the effect of LWIR backscattered by CO2 has a far lesser effect over 71% of the Earth’s surface than black body physics would indicate would totally destroy the case for dangerous or catastrophic AGW and thereby his career.
My estimate is that the effect of backscattered LWIR over the oceans is around 30% of that over land. This would easily account for Travesty Trenberths’ “missing” heat. I believe that LWIR could have an effect on the rates of cooling both by radiation and conduction but not by evaporation. This leads to a very low climate sensitivity to CO2 increases and no case for action as follows –
Those doing the black body calcs claim around 1 degree of warming for a doubling of CO2 from pre industrial levels* without feedback. However Earth is not a black body. 71% of the surface is ocean.
So divide that 1 degree of warming into two parts. 0.29 degrees for land and 0.71 degrees for oceans.
Now multiply 0.71 by 0.3 to get the realistic effect of backscattered LWIR on water that is free to evaporatively cool. (missing heat Kevin?)
Add this 0.213 degrees back to the 0.29 degrees for land to get 0.503 degrees of warming for a doubling of CO2.
Now multiply that 0.503 degrees by 0.5 to account for negative water vapour feed back, giving 0.2515 degrees of warming for a doubling of CO2. (* ignoring issues such as dodgy pre industrial CO2 levels determined from ice cores with diffusion problems.)
Conclude that 0.2515 degrees of warming will be neither dangerous nor catastrophic.
Further conclude that with a CO2 sensitivity this low there are not enough known or projected fossil fuel reserves to burn to cause dangerous or catastrophic global warming. –
I have confirmed a detectable difference in effectiveness for LWIR for water that is free to evaporativly cool compared to that that only cools due to conduction and radiation with empirical experiment here –
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2011/08/25/konrad-empirical-test-of-ocean-cooling-and-back-radiation-theory/
While I encourage others to try similar experiments with LWIR and water, there is a far simpler test that will illustrate the issue –
Place a probe type digital thermometer in a tin cup full to the brim with water, with fibreglass and foil insulation on the exposed cord. Try heating the water by applying the hot air from a paint striping heat gun to the surface of the water. Now try heating the water by pointing the gun at the side of the cup. Slight agitation of the water below the surface should be introduced by moving the probe to prevent stratification. The results are markedly different. This test does not address LWIR as the heat is only introduced conductively, however it gives an insight to what is wrong with basic AGW theory and why the Earth should not be considered a black body in any climate science.. Essentially AGW equations in the case of the oceans are “pointing the hot air gun at the side of the cup”.
The science is unsettled.
Got to hand it to Trenberth! First, it’s “It’s a travesty we can’t explain the lack of recent warming,” now it’s “The hiatus [in warming] was not unexpected.” What?!?!?!
So now most of these folks are going to the “aerosol’s masked global warming” like they used for the 1960s and 1970s…before that record was eventually flattened-out.
Don’t miss http://judithcurry.com/2011/10/27/candid-comments-from-global-warming-scientists/
(via http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2011/10/27/judy-on-pielke-on-the-mainstream.html)
Smokey says:
October 27, 2011 at 9:05 am
Lord Monckton to appear on Sun TV today 7pm EST.
http://www.sunnewsnetwork.ca/watch-live.html
It is nice to see a growing support for the contention that additional downwelling IR (from warmer air) neither adds significantly to ocean heat content nor significantly reduces the background rate of energy flow from oceans to air.
That really is a critical issue because SST temperatures control atmospheric temperatures globally due to the vastly greater thermal capacity of water as compared to air.
I have been considering that very issue for some time and in particular have closely examined the so called ocean skin effect promulgated via Realclimate as a ‘done deal’ but so far as I know proposed by only one scientist.
The thing is that once one accepts the inability of that IR to affect ocean temperatures AND the power of the oceans in controling air temperatures then logic forces one to certain conclusions that are critical to the entire AGW scenarion (and not favourably).
Full discussion here:
http://www.irishweatheronline.com/news/environment/climate-news/wilde-weather/setting-and-maintaining-of-earth%e2%80%99s-equilibrium-temperature/18931.html
Roughly 2.5 billion years ago a new kind of species appeared on earth that totally transformed climate by ‘unwittingly’ poisoning the atmosphere with a violent oxidizer – free Oxygen. There were likely thousands of species mercilessly killed off by the Johnny come lately oxygen producer which also sucked the CO2 out of the air in massive quantities which likely had an impact on earth’s temperature maybe even triggering Huronian glaciation.
Do not humans have exactly the SAME ~’right’~ to do whatever we do to the climate that early plant life did to the climate? Our puny addition of CO2 is apparently having no measurable affect, (we’re at the same global temperature we were at 16 years ago),but, even if it did and even if that affect actually was deleterious to anything – WHO is the one to say we are not ‘allowed’ to do it for our own benefit the same way that plants did what they did for their own benefit? If plant life was intelligent would it be ‘guilty’ of the mass extinctions it caused in the course of pursuing its best vector for success at life? Isn’t that exactly the same as what humans are doing? Our life expectancy keeps going up and who would dare say that our use of fossil fuel was not the foundation that made that possible? (Without coal maybe we would have still managed to build a small rail network but then been confronted with a deforested landscape. No electricity, no cars, no airplanes, no internet, etc. – stuck living in the early 1800’s forever along with a lot of horse dung.)
That outlines my fundamental disconnect with the ‘green’ movement making the rest of their lies secondary. They repeatedly extol the virtue of evolution for the ascent of every single species except one – the human species. They hate themselves, hate humanity in general and especially those who are not like them. Me.
r.m.b. says:
October 27, 2011 at 8:56 am
“Has surface tension been thought of.”
Yes. When someone suggests that winds and waves mix the skin layer downward I explain that viscosity (common term for surface tension) is the dominant force in the ocean skin layer (first several microns) where downwelling far infrared is absorbed. In fact during wave mixing the mixing forces begin at the depth of the wave trough. No mechanical mixing occurs above that depth.
richard verney says:
October 27, 2011 at 2:08 pm
Good point, but the main problem and red herring is SO2 has no affect on global temperatures in the lower atmosphere, it needs to be in the stratosphere. There is no evidence of human SO2 reaching the stratosphere and changing the background levels when there are no major volcanic eruptions. This is the hidden excuse what many of these scientists that get it wrong take. (by hidden – something generally no other scientists can see or observe occurring) Thats why the observation you have noticed did not occur before. It was just an excuse to try and cover up desperation of a non-warming period, nothing else to it. (The west was emitting more SO2 before than China recently, eg China during 2005 was emitting ~ 60 percent compared to most of Europe and USA, 1986 (clean air act was implemented well before then)
http://img836.imageshack.us/img836/429/had3vso2vsaot.png
This then leads to cherry picking the cause, where cooling was by any excuse can think of at the time, to be caused by SO2 emissions recently. Yet warming occurred before because of CO2 and not that global SO2 emissions were declining drastically for years after the clean air act. The typical thinking of an CAGW scientist, where one side is cherry picked and other ignored. That whats happens when funding by the government in climate change issues is given to look for only causes in human influences.
Dave Springer;
When someone suggests that winds and waves mix the skin layer downward I explain that…>>>
You’re only partly correct. Mixing is not the whole picture however. When waves form, the surface of the water is no longer uniformly presented to the downwelling IR. Water surface at an angle to the downwelling IR has different absorption characteristics that water at a right angle. The reduced absorption means that areas of water presented to the downwelling IR at a sharp angle also absorb in the first few millimeters, BUT, they absorb a fraction of the energy they otherwise would have. The result is that SOME of the water absorbs SOME of the IR but WITHOUT causing it to evaporate. The increased temperature of the water is then free to heat the water below by conduction as well as mixing. The trough has nothing to do with it.
Further, NOTHING in this world is “instantaneous”. Even in a flat calm sea, downwelling IR cannot instantly evaporate the surface water, so some amount of energy, however small, can be transferred to the water below by conduction. If the evaporation promoted by downwelling IR could move faster than the conduction…
Further, any turbulence results in white froth on the water surface. Again, this white froth interacts with IR differently than does calm smooth water surface.
I first started thinking about these things upon noticing that the old swimming hole gets warmer during a rain storm than normal. My first theory was that the kinetic energy in the rain drops had to be converted to heat when they hit the water surface. That’s partly correct. The problem is that where I live, rain is COLD. The kinetic energy in the rain drops (based on very rough back of the envelope calcs from 20 years ago) couldn’t make up for the much lower temperature of the rain drops themselves. So what was causing the water to become warmer?
I suspect that my rough back of the envelope calcs weren’t all that accurate, but the fact of the matter is that turbulent water presents a completely different physics problem in relation to IR than does a simple smooth surface. All sorts of processes come into play, and the notion that IR is not aborbed at all, or even that an insignificant amount is absorbed just doesn’t make sense.
Code
“Is it really so difficult to even consider that the entire premise of rising CO2 causing rising temperatures could be wrong? Really? ”
yes, it’s very difficult. The core of the theory, radiative physics, says that Ghgs ( like C02) will cause warming. To be sure there are other factors that can cause cooling, but if all you do is increase GHGs.. the temperature will go up. If you reject that physics then you will find yourself in a world where you cant explain why radars work the way they work, why IR detectors work the way they work and hundreds of other devices that depend upon radiative physics being right.
The interesting question is why do you get cooling? Think of it this way. If I told you that sticking a 400 hp motor in your car would make it go faster, and you put that motor in your car and it went slower would you doubt that more HP generally leads to faster cars? or would you check other aspects of your car– like take the emergency brake off or fill the tires with air.. put gas in the car..
GHGs are one aspect of what keeps the planet warm. Increase them, and all other things being equal the planet will warm.
The questions are
1. Since other things are never held constant hows the full system work
2. How much warmer and how long will it take
So, no. nobody should doubt the premise that GHGs cause warming, that is, all other things held constant, we know that GHGs lead to a warmer planet not a colder one. Where the uncertainty lies is in what other things change and how. Think of first order effects versus total system performance.
Dave Springer says:
October 27, 2011 at 3:11 pm
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As someone way too stupid to understand any of this.
I ask, do wavy seas absorb more energy, due to their greater surface area than calm seas ?
Indeed, the most important outcome from the energy hunt may be that researchers are chronically underestimating air pollution’s reflective effect, said NASA’s James Hansen, head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
Hansen is right in this statement but then goes on to draw exactly the wrong conclusions.
There has been a large reduction in near ground manmade particulate and aerosol pollution (and hence their reflective effect). Resulting in increased early morning solar insolation and higher daily minimum temperatures.
Approximately half the warming (in the GISS, HadCRUT and now BEST analyses) over the last 60 years is a spurious warming signal from this effect.
These admissions could generate a ‘tipping point’ within the science community regarding CAGW, could they not?
I walk into a room. I notice that I cannot see an elephant in the room. Explanations for this observation include:
1. The room has a complex shape and the elephant is standing in a part of the room that I cannot see.
2. The elephant is invisible.
3. The elephant is in the room most of the time but has slipped out for a toilet break.
4. There is no elephant in the room.
There is a very good reason why global temperatures have stalled and the best way to go about this it to look at what known climate parameters have changed since. Well, when this is consider there are only two variables that have changed since global temperatures become stable. There are both a less active solar cycle and global cloud albedo.
The affect of global cloud albedo on global temperatures seems clear and if this is indeed correct, the expected incease in future albedo will cause global temperatures to decrease. (there are signs this is already happening)
Global cloud cover between the early 1980′s and early 2000′s declined through a period of warming. If the temperature change only affects cloud, then during this same period global cloud levels would have increased, not decreased. Warming temperatures are suppose to increase water vapor and cloud formation, not decrease them.
The observed evidence shows using the satellite data since 1983 that, declining cloud levels caused the temperature to increase with increasing surface solar radiation. Hence, that is the main reason why with no increase in clouds we can determine the chicken or the egg. Since the decline has stopped and become stable, global temperatures have stopped rising.
http://img854.imageshack.us/img854/5246/globaltempvglobalcloudb.png
Global cloud levels have declined by ~5 percent since 1983 until 2001, when they have stabilised since. During this period with a warming planet global cloud levels, should have been expected to increase if the warming caused the global cloud levels to change. Therefore during a warmer planet now they are still less clouds globally than nearly 30 years ago. The reason why global temperatures at least partly warmed up, due to increasing solar radiation reaching the surface.