Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
James Hansen has taken time off between being arrested to produce another in the list of his publications. It’s called “Earth’s Energy Imbalance and Implications“. This one is listed as “submitted” …
Normally these days I prefer to only deal with scientific papers, which of course leaves activist pleadings like Hansen’s stuff off the list. But in this case I’ll make an exception. Here’s my sole reason for bringing this up. Hansen’s paper says the following (emphasis mine):
The precision achieved by the most advanced generation of radiation budget satellites is indicated by the planetary energy imbalance measured by the ongoing CERES (Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System) instrument (Loeb et al., 2009), which finds a measured 5-year-mean imbalance of 6.5 W/m2 (Loeb et al., 2009). Because this result is implausible, instrumentation calibration factors were introduced to reduce the imbalance to the imbalance suggested by climate models, 0.85 W/m2 (Loeb et al., 2009).
I bring it up because it is climate science at its finest. Since the observations were not of the expected range, rather than figure out why the results might be wrong, they just twisted the dials to “reduce the imbalance to the imbalance suggested by climate models.”
And curiously, the “imbalance suggested by climate models”, of some 0.85 W/m2, was actually from Hansen’s previous paper. That earlier paper of his, by coincidence called “Earth’s energy imbalance: Confirmation and implications“, gave that 0.85 W/m2 figure as a result from Hansen’s own GISS climate model … but all this incestuous back-slapping is probably just another coincidence.
Of course, you know what all this means. Soon, the modelers will be claiming that the CERES satellite results verify that the GISS and other climate models are accurately duplicating observations …
You can see why Hansen’s “science” gets left off my list of things to read.
w.
PS—Upon further research I find that according to Loeb et al., 2009, they didn’t just tweak the dials on the CERES observations to get the answer they wanted, as I had foolishly stated above.
No, they didn’t do that at all. Instead, they used…
an objective constrainment algorithm to adjust SW and LW TOA fluxes within their range of uncertainty to remove the inconsistency between average global net TOA flux and heat storage in the earth–atmosphere system.
I’ll sleep better tonight knowing that it wasn’t just twisting dials, they actually used an objective constrainment algorithm to adjust their Procrustean Bed …
UPDATE: Some commenters have noted that my article implies that Hansen used those CERES satellite results in the study in question. Hansen did not use them, stating correctly that the uncertainties were too great for his purposes. —w.
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Hansen just did another “Hansen” paper.
A Hansen: Scientific paper based on conjecture.
It’s pretty incredible how many WUWT readers — including WUWT guest author Willis Eschenbach himself? — have still not grasped that Dave’s description is the exact opposite of what Hansen and his coauthors have done.
Hansen and his coauthors carefully criticized and excluded the inadequately calibrated satellite data, and none of their conclusions depend upon this data … anyone who doubts this need only read Hansen’s article.
For this reason, it’s totally unclear what Willis Eschenbach (and dozens of other WUWT commenters) are protesting.
So perhaps this WUWT thread should be preserved, as a case study in how unfounded skeptical hysteria can inadvertently arise and spread?
We [Hansen et al.] predict that:
Y = 4 + X = 10
Observational data suggests that:
X = 12
But,
4 + 12 =/= 10
Therefore, we [Hansen et al.] insert constrainment algorithm:
X = 12 * 0.5
So that,
4 + (12 * 0.5) = 10
That’s a great picture.
Looking at the details I discovered the name of the officer holding Hanson.
His name is Green. Don’t you love it?
Hanson against the Officier.
I am fighting for the survival of the planet.
Are you Green?
Officer: Yes, I am Green, do you have a problem with that.
Now put your hands on your back so I can cuff you.
So the sat data is now adjusted to the models. That’s an entirely logic decision because if you adjust the models to the sat data you will lose that rising curve in your graphs.
Hanson will continue to undermine climate data until the last coal train leaves the station and the last coal mine is closed.
O.T In the mean time E. M. Smith has put up a post about Australia temperatures.
He read some articles stating the now have the coldest summer on record.
Gisstemp tells another story.
A curiosity in Australia
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2011/12/21/a-curiousity-in-australia/
A physicist says:
December 21, 2011 at 8:48 am
“Hansen and his coauthors carefully criticized and excluded the inadequately calibrated satellite data, and none of their conclusions depend upon this data … “
Whoosh, right over your head.
A) The data are still based on models and have no empirical confirmation
B) The results are in conflict with empirical data, ergo something isn’t right, and patching over the discrepancy is just guessing
Clear, now?
Anyone noticed the name of the copper that’s arresting Hansen !!
The lord moves in wondrous ways …
A physicist says:
December 21, 2011 at 8:48 am
“It’s pretty incredible how many WUWT readers — including WUWT guest author Willis Eschenbach himself? — have still not grasped that Dave’s description is the exact opposite of what Hansen and his coauthors have done.”
Hansen and Schmidt have created their own conflation of model runs and measurements to arrive at the preconceived notion of an energy imbalance years ago.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1110252
They constantly go on building layers on this house of cards by citing themselves. It’s pretty incredible that you pretend not to know this. Physicist and all.
I look forward to the day when Hansen, Karl, Trenberth, Mann, Schmidt, Santer and their fellow travelers are brought to justice…
Holy crap, good eye you got there! Never noticed it myself.
I don’t know if God plays dice, but he sure has one helluva sense of humor.
@A physicist
I know you’ve claimed to be a scientist, but it’s getting harder to believe that. Your posts are amusing.
The issue is this: the satellite measurements say the energy imbalance is 6.2 w/m^2. Hansen and the paper before him are, instead of investigating this as a scientist should, saying “we won’t believe this because COMPUTER MODELS say it should be 0.82 w/m^2, so we will adjust or ignore the OBSERVATIONAL, EXPERIMENTAL data”.
That’s the problem. Willis is completely right. It doesn’t matter if Hansen used the adjusted data or not, the fact the experimental, observational data is ignored or adjusted at all to fit -models- (which are preconceived notions put into computer code) is ridiculous, and completely unscientific.
The satellites are the only true data we have. Instead of trying to understand them, we should ignore them? And the sentence you and Nick keep quoting is about -the range of the error of the observations after adjustment-. This is something I will give Hansen credit for, that he is unbelieving that he error range of the measurements would go down a whole order of magnitude after adjustment with this algorithm from the 2009 paper. That is, indeed, mathematically impossible.
But that is ALL that sentence from the paper is talking about. The fact adjustments actually happened is unscientific. The fact they aren’t investigating what the satellites are telling us is unscientific. If the observations are wrong, we need to know why, and if we know why and by how much, we can actually, scientifically, adjust the output to get the real observation (correction factor), instead of trying to constrain things to our ideas via models. That last part is not science.
Hansen , “Al Baby”, CRU Team: There are no words to express the deepest gratitude skeptics have for you .
You have contributed like none else for the dismantling of all the efforts of your bosses.They will surely take this into proper account.
I sure hope Hansen is not involved in animal husbandry.
Ged says:
December 21, 2011 at 9:57 am
Excellent post! “A physicist” is the worst kind of troll. He is neither physicist nor scientist. What you write to him clearly shows that he has no respect for empirical evidence and no understanding of its role in science.
DirkH, your assertion is wholly incorrect with regard to the facts.
A search of the Inspec database for scientific articles whose abstracts include “climate AND energy AND balance” finds 1,836 articles. A prominent early reference is Heinrich Flohn’s “Unintended and planned climatic changes” in Verhandlungen der Deutschen Physikalischen Gesellschaft (1971):
It appears that Prof. Flohn (along with many others) foresaw all the main themes of Hansen’s research … forty years ago! 🙂
So although Hansen and his coauthors cited more than 100 articles, I have to fault them for not citing Flohn’s early (seminal) analysis. If anything, James Hansen and his colleagues are late-comers to a vigorous scientific party that is now entering its fifth decade.
As anyone can verify for themselves, needless to say. 🙂
What Hansen and friends are well on the way to achieving is turning science into just another government cost center. They have succeeded in doing that with medical care, unless SCOTUS stops them, and now they are on the way to succeeding with academia. If they succeed then decisions about scientific or academic projects and funding will be made to serve the needs of the people who make up the administration at any given time. (One unforeseen outcome of this is that tenure for professors will disappear.) That means the death of the most important of Enlightenment Ideals. All of this is truly disheartening to those of us who support Enlightenment Ideals. We are watching a coup by homegrown Leninists.
Even ignoring the issues with the CERES data (which appears to have been only used for confirmation and not for direct data), the paper has serious issues. Hansen’s goal is to add up all of the total energy increase in the earth, subtract it from the incoming energy from the sun, and find the imbalance. He then declares that this imbalance must be caused entirely by aerosols. There is no consideration of non-aerosol causes such as unexpected albedo changes from land use or changing sources of cloud formation.
It’s a good paper for calculating the unaccounted-for energy, but it’s further conclusions regarding aerosols are piling inferences upon assumptions. That’s not science.
Let me get this straight…..the crystal ball said the number should be 0.85… actual measurement showed it was 6.5, so they just corrected the actual measurement to read 0.85.
Hansen would destroy a bridge if it was not on a map he drew to hide the error.
On digging a little deeper, we find that the main conclusions of the article by Hansen et al. were largely anticipated 30 years ago, by Herman Flohn’s Life on a Warmer Earth: Possible Climatic Consequences of Man-Made Global Warming.
This should ease the mind of skeptics who regard climate change as any kind of recent conspiracy. Because if it is a conspiracy, for sure it’s not a recent one! 🙂
More seriously, Flohn’s 1981 predictions have been well-confirmed by the warming seen to date, and are broadly consistent with Hansen’s more recent predictions. As anyone can check for themselves.
Since we don’t have the flock of satellites, you have to do some plain and fancy footwork to convert the brightness readings to total albedo. Of course, the position of the observation with regards to the location of the sun is one of the largest factors in the conversion, but there are a number of others.
Well, or one could, perhaps, just average and integrate from the moon. The moon swings through its orbit. In the process it samples all angles from nearly oblique reflection to grazing. The intensity of sunlight incident on the earth is well known. The geometry of the reflected light is well known. By simply running such an observatory for a year one could get a very accurate estimate of the total scattering cross-section and hence the albedo.
This is, after all, precisely what is done to measure scattering cross-sections for e.g. nuclear physics. You don’t put the detector at every possible scattering angle — you sample the scattering at discrete angles, usually along one or more planes. From the data one reconstructs the cross-section. It isn’t difficult.
The same thing could be accomplished with equal ease from any satellite in an orbit at (say) 10R_e or more, ideally in an orbit at right angles to the ecliptic with a period that isn’t close to a low-lying rational fraction times a day, so that suitably coarse-grained sampling intervals systematically sample all the different angular windows onto the ocean and land uniformly, over time. Over twenty five years, in a 10R_e orbit, I’d expect to be able to get extremely accurate results for the total scattering cross section (and hence both albedo and night-side radiative loss) in all wavelengths — indeed, accurate enough to easily resolve systematic variations due to e.g. El Nino, cloud cover, and much more.
The point is that the time average and space average together will rapidly trigger the central limit theorem, at which point the mean albedo will be known arbitrarily accurately as sampling time increases. The short time scale noise, if anything, makes this work better! The long period variation, of course, is a potential problem, but any orbit with a period of > 2 days can a) see almost the whole disk of the planet at any instant; b) sample an average with contributions from (almost) every point on earth at least once a day; c) at different angles every two plus days.
Note well that I am NOT talking about sampling from windows onto the surface — the total integrated power from the entire illuminated earth already averages over precisely the irrelevant noise one wants to eliminate.
I’m not claiming that building a sufficiently precise detector is easy, but that’s the hard part, not the geometry or the need for lots of satellites. Given a precise and accurate integrating spectrometer, something capable of measuring the total electromagnetic radiation intensity from cone that includes the entire illuminated Earth from 18R_e or thereabouts, in a polar orbit, the building of a cross-section accurate to 0.1% is a simple matter of time, and not that long a time at that. A few years would almost certainly be enough to permit one to establish the mean within this accuracy, and would let one start to look for e.g. long period systematic variations, such as those one might expect to see associated with the various decadal oscillations and with any GCR-solar-mediated modulation of cloud cover.
rgb
‘a physicist’ says:
“…skeptics who regard climate change as any kind of recent conspiracy.”
As usual, ‘a physicist’ is off his rocker. It was Michael Mann who put forth the debunked conjecture that the climate never changed prior to the industrial revolution; no MWP, no LIA. Scientific skeptics have always known that regional climates and global temperatures constantly change. It is the alarmist crowd that denied those facts, and some still do, claiming that the MWP was a local “anomaly” despite mountains of evidence to the contrary.
And anyone who writes about “planned climatic changes” is also off his rocker.
here is the abstract of the flohn paper being flaunted by unemployed troll:
“Abstract:
An IIASA Executive Report based on and IIASA research report by H. Flohn, who has taken a paleoclimatic approach to gaining insights into the implications of global warming produced by he burning of fossil fuels. Using the most reliable radiation models for the relation between carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere and temperature, Flohn selects thresholds of temperature increase, which he then speculates would produce climatic conditions similar to those of earlier periods in the earth’s history.
He establishes a four-part scenario. An increase in the global average surface temperature (GAST) of 1 degree C, which could occur around 2000-2010 at the projected rate of fossil fuel consumption, would correspond to the GAST 1,000 years ago during the early middle ages. Warming of 1.5 degrees C could occur around 2005-2030, mimicking conditions 6000 years ago at the peak of the Holocene period. Warming of 2.5 degrees C is considered possible around 2020-2050, corresponding to the last interglacial period 120,000 years ago. Finally, an increase of the GAST by 4 degrees C could be reached 2040-2080, producing conditions that occurred during the late Tertiary Period from 2.5 to 12 million years ago, a remarkable epoch when the North Pole became ice free while the South Pole remained glaciated. The Executive Report briefly describe what is known and generally assumed about the climate of the earth during each of the four periods.”
love that last paragraph – but no, one can’t say it broadly matches the hansen narrative.
4 scenarios do not a prediction make, much less a confirmed one.
i like to throw soap in the fountain of speciousness…
A physicist says:
December 21, 2011 at 3:36 am
If Nick Stokes is correct and the adjustment makes sense to you, A Physicist, please provide information that backs up that claim. Because I don’t see how the adjustment makes any sense at all, but you and Nick seem to think it does.
Nor do I see how whether Hansen used or didn’t use the CERES data makes any difference. My point was that the adjustment, despite having the Nick Stokes seal of approval, was bogus. Why? Because it was not based on any physical principles. All they did was say “the data is wrong and the models are right, so we’ll adjust the data to match Hansen’s model.”
Hansen had no problem with considering using the data that had been adjusted to fit his model, although in the end he did not do so. You seem to have no problem with the adjusted data.
Me, I think adjusting data by that method is nonsense. I think that if you are really a physicist you are not thinking the situation through, or you would join me in condemning the practice of adjusting data to fit Hansens model, regardless of whether Hansen later used that data or not. How do Hansen’s actions make any difference?
Finally, a) I didn’t say Hansen used the CERES data, and b) the reason Hansen didn’t use the CERES data is not because of the bogus adjustment method. If Hansen had any problems with adjusting data to fit HIS MODEL he sure didn’t mention it …
Therefore, I respectfully suggest that (1) A Physicist read Eschenbach’s article carefully and in its entirety, and that (2) Eschenbach has no reason amend his WUWT post because he made no unfounded criticisms.
w.
MODERATOR- I have a copy of the Loeb paper. I have placed it on Megaupload here:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=XV3EJLKV
but that is probably a no-no so I do not want to post that publicly but if Willis or anyone else would like a copy of the Loeb paper, you could email them that link. I can also email it but the file is over 5 meg (PDF) and many mail systems will not accept attachments that large.
To use the Megaupload link, go to the link and wait for the “free download” counter to expire to 0 and then click “free download”.
Let’s imagine that Officer Green, having apprehended Hansen, proceeded to round up the rest of The Team. Maybe at the same time, renowned computer specialists from Norfolk Plod could gather up all The Team’s computers, software etc etc and the stuff the whole caboodle into a time machine. Then, with 95% confidence they were sent back 70 or so years, to the time when CO2 production ramped up to Warp 2 (ppm/year)
What would the team be saying once they’d re-established themselves in the new (old) time zone?
Presumably, something like they’re saying now – drier, hotter, wetter, colder, more disaster – we all know the story. But, hapless us are stuck in the here and now witnessing these dire predictions from 70 years ago.
How many have come true………………