From NASA Goddard, Jim Hansen reports on his balance problem:
Earth’s Energy Budget Remained Out of Balance Despite Unusually Low Solar Activity
A new NASA study underscores the fact that greenhouse gases generated by human activity — not changes in solar activity — are the primary force driving global warming.
The study offers an updated calculation of the Earth’s energy imbalance, the difference between the amount of solar energy absorbed by Earth’s surface and the amount returned to space as heat. The researchers’ calculations show that, despite unusually low solar activity between 2005 and 2010, the planet continued to absorb more energy than it returned to space.
James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City, led the research. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics published the study last December.
Total solar irradiance, the amount of energy produced by the sun that reaches the top of each square meter of the Earth’s atmosphere, typically declines by about a tenth of a percent during cyclical lulls in solar activity caused by shifts in the sun’s magnetic field. Usually solar minimums occur about every eleven years and last a year or so, but the most recent minimum persisted more than two years longer than normal, making it the longest minimum recorded during the satellite era.
Pinpointing the magnitude of Earth’s energy imbalance is fundamental to climate science because it offers a direct measure of the state of the climate. Energy imbalance calculations also serve as the foundation for projections of future climate change. If the imbalance is positive and more energy enters the system than exits, Earth grows warmer. If the imbalance is negative, the planet grows cooler.
Hansen’s team concluded that Earth has absorbed more than half a watt more solar energy per square meter than it let off throughout the six year study period. The calculated value of the imbalance (0.58 watts of excess energy per square meter) is more than twice as much as the reduction in the amount of solar energy supplied to the planet between maximum and minimum solar activity (0.25 watts per square meter).
“The fact that we still see a positive imbalance despite the prolonged solar minimum isn’t a surprise given what we’ve learned about the climate system, but it’s worth noting because this provides unequivocal evidence that the sun is not the dominant driver of global warming,” Hansen said.
According to calculations conducted by Hansen and his colleagues, the 0.58 watts per square meter imbalance implies that carbon dioxide levels need to be reduced to about 350 parts per million to restore the energy budget to equilibrium. The most recent measurements show that carbon dioxide levels are currently 392 parts per million and scientists expect that concentration to continue to rise in the future.
Climate scientists have been refining calculations of the Earth’s energy imbalance for many years, but this newest estimate is an improvement over previous attempts because the scientists had access to better measurements of ocean temperature than researchers have had in the past.
The improved measurements came from free-floating instruments that directly monitor the temperature, pressure and salinity of the upper ocean to a depth of 2,000 meters (6,560 feet). The network of instruments, known collectively as Argo, has grown dramatically in recent years since researchers first began deploying the floats a decade ago. Today, more than 3,400 Argo floats actively take measurements and provide data to the public, mostly within 24 hours.
Hansen’s analysis of the information collected by Argo, along with other ground-based and satellite data, show the upper ocean has absorbed 71 percent of the excess energy and the Southern Ocean, where there are few Argo floats, has absorbed 12 percent. The abyssal zone of the ocean, between about 3,000 and 6,000 meters (9,800 and 20,000 feet) below the surface, absorbed five percent, while ice absorbed eight percent and land four percent.
The updated energy imbalance calculation has important implications for climate modeling. Its value, which is slightly lower than previous estimates, suggests that most climate models overestimate how readily heat mixes deeply into the ocean and significantly underestimates the cooling effect of small airborne particles called aerosols, which along with greenhouse gases and solar irradiance are critical factors in energy imbalance calculations.
“Climate models simulate observed changes in global temperatures quite accurately, so if the models mix heat into the deep ocean too aggressively, it follows that they underestimate the magnitude of the aerosol cooling effect,” Hansen said.
Aerosols, which can either warm or cool the atmosphere depending on their composition and how they interact with clouds, are thought to have a net cooling effect. But estimates of their overall impact on climate are quite uncertain given how difficult it is to measure the distribution of the particles on a broad scale. The new study suggests that the overall cooling effect from aerosols could be about twice as strong as current climate models suggest, largely because few models account for how the particles affect clouds.
A chart shows the global reach of the network of Argo floats. (Credit: Argo Project Office)
“Unfortunately, aerosols remain poorly measured from space,” said Michael Mishchenko, a scientist also based at GISS and the project scientist for Glory, a satellite mission designed to measure aerosols in unprecedented detail that was lost after a launch failure in early 2011. “We must have a much better understanding of the global distribution of detailed aerosol properties in order to perfect calculations of Earth’s energy imbalance,” said Mishchenko.
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i’m just an interested bystander and am hoping someone will explain how all those floats stay in position.
“Climate models simulate observed changes in global temperatures quite accurately…”
Since when? The models haven’t been able to make verifiable predictions yet.
Gosh, an energy balance of 0.58 watts per meter sure doesn’t seem like much.
But rational skepticism always wants to get a better feel for the numbers.
Natural Question: Over what time span does a sustained energy imbalance of 0.58 watts per meter supply enough excess energy to melt all of the ice-caps on earth, and thus raise ocean heights by two hundred feet? Is that ice-melting time span most nearly:
(A) one year, or
(B) one thousand years, or
(B) one million years?
I’ll post my own answer this evening (to give people a chance to check the numbers for themselves), so for now here is a hint as to the results: the prediction by James Hansen and his colleagues of an coming acceleration in sea-level rise rates is not thermodynamically crazy.
More broadly, it is not rational for skeptics to underestimate the scientific foresight of James Hansen and his colleagues: their thirty-year predictions from 1981 in ‘Climate Impact of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide’ are looking pretty solid right now.
Hansen go back and do the observations again, unless this was a model prediction in which case retire gracefully.
Is NASA now the world’s MET office? I have a feeling that they are following both the money and the politics.
I have a garden and it is absorbing huge quantities of both CO2 and calories or BTU’s or watts, in fact the entire continent of Australia has been sucking in calories. Our biomass has grown beyond belief in the last two years, Trenberths missing heat is stored in biomass in the paddocks, fat on the lambs and grain in the silos. Not to mention the huge growth in our forests and the explosion in wild life. Dear Mr Trenberth if what is occurring is a problem for you, for us in Oz our country looks like the garden of Eden and we are more than pleased.
Solid. Yes. Now flush.
So if I take a glass tube and fill it with 100% CO2 then it will become so unable to release heat that it will be as hot as the sun by noon.
I love this story. Hansen clearly doesn’t understand the greenhouse effect at all. Its about the rate of flow of heat energy, not the actual magnitude of an (impossible) heat energy imbalance.
I figured it out.
It is the increase in greenery, caused by more warmth and more CO2 and human activities, (i.e. people wanting more crops, trees and gardens), that could trap some heat, causing some contributory warming, on top of the natural warming.
Namely, I did pick up a few interesting results:
if you cut forests, like they did in the south of Argentina, you will find COOLING.
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/de-forestation-causes-cooling
I have also been able to establish that the opposite, i.e. planting of trees and/or more natural vegetation, does cause WARMING, like I found in Grootfontein (Namibia), in the “Kgalagadi Basin”, referred to in this report here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/24/the-earths-biosphere-is-booming-data-suggests-that-co2-is-the-cause-part-2/
I think it was the warming not interrupted by wars in the years before the turn of 19th century (mostly because man did not have seriously destructive weapons) that could account for the red areas in the graph here, and that caused a natural increase of greening…
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/orssengo3.png
The blue areas in the above graph were caused after the general destruction of – and the total absence of care for – the natural environment during and after the 2nd world war, due to the whole of mankind basically going into survival mode and having to live from whatever they could cut. The profiliation of atomic weapons and the testing of these after the war, could also be a cause of great destruction to the greenery and the natural environment (i.e. destruction due to unwanted radiation such has been reported from the islands in the Great Pacific)
I might even be able to find a correlation coefficient between the leaf area index (LAI ) and warming if I could get hold of those three Liu’s who wrote the paper that I quoted above. ( I need the actual figures for the LAI)
So there is your 0.58 watts. My thanks to Mr.Hansen for working that one out for me.
More CO2 is OK, ok?
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/more-carbon-dioxide-is-ok-ok
If my memory is correct the solar irradiance satellite data is based on several different instruments over time and has been stitched together. There is some disagreement on whether the last couple of minimums should have been held constant or if there was some increase in the irradiance. Looks like Hansen chose the stays constant version. Also it is interesting to note the variations in the amount a irradiance drops in the beginning proxy portion of the data, if we get rid of all the sat data he could have a much cleaner looking graph.
NASA can “underscore” their garbage as much as they like, but they would be more convincing by a country mile if they (and all warmists) used correct physics in the first place.
Any radiation from a cooler atmosphere heading for the surface (at some angle in practice) has absolutely no effect on the surface. It does not get converted to thermal energy and so cannot affect the rate of thermal energy leaving the surface. It is merely immediately radiated out again with the same frequency and intensity, never having been converted to thermal energy. How could it possibly affect radiation coming out at different angles from other molecules? When you shine two torches towards each other, but not directly – just so the beams cross – they have no effect on each other’s beams. This I suggest would be a close analogy if backradiation even exists – there are solid reasons why “measuring” techniques may not be measuring backradiation at all, but just making deductions about its intensity from temperatures calculated from frequencies. They don’t measure a warming effect.
The surface does not need to radiate at all to lose heat – it can do so by diffusion, conduction, convection, evaporation and chemical processes. The surface does not act like a blackbody because it is not surrounded by a vacuum or insulated from losses by these other means.
I suspect that most radiation actually starts in the atmosphere, not the surface. But then I also suspect that any backradiation is extremely small compared with upward radiation, because I do not believe radiation has an equal probability of going towards warmer areas than towards cooler areas due to the higher energy of molecules “blocking” it in the warmer direction. If there are numerous captures and re-emissions, then even a slightly higher probability than 50% will, in the limit, ensure the vast majority heads for cooler regions. There are no experiments to my knowledge which demonstrate backradiation warming something, or slowing its rate of cooling.
But whatever happens, the end result (if any gets to the surface) as far as energy and rates of cooling are concerned is just the same as if it had been reflected by a mirror. A mirror neither warms nor cools more slowly when it reflects IR radiation.- it, like the surface, is not affected at all because the radiating energy is never converted to thermal energy. You can only add and subtract like things such as thermal energy. Radiation does not cancel out other radiation as there are different angles involved for a start. The transfer of all thermal energy is in one direction, and the reason it only takes place in one direction is because only the cooler body “receives” it and converts it back to thermal energy.
Hopefully this will help all to understand why an atmospheric greenhouse effect resulting from radiation is a physical impossibility.
Mickey Reno says:
January 31, 2012 at 11:55 pm
[quote] Juraj V. says: I do not believe even Argo. It is still run by NASA.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/OceanCooling/
All sensors with supposed cooling bias have been deleted from the dataset, because.. because it can’t be so that it is cooling.[/quote]
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I was dumbfounded when I read that article.
If it turns out that this AGW theory is nothing more than natural variability measured on a decadal or centenial scale, then criminal charges should be pursued against anyone caught adjusting data including adjusting data to better fit with model projections.
This type of fudging of the divergence problem is completely unacceptable and an affront to science.
The whole thing might be more believable if temperatures were actually rising to match his direct forcing and the hidden forcing.
Solar irradiance, however, is not the answer since it has NOT gone down. SORCE TIM has recently measured TSI just as high as its highest readings from 2003 (the 2003 value would have been on the downslope of the last solar cycle but it was still close to the peak). So the newer non-degraded satellites have TSI near the top of Hansen’s chart shown above.
Being a top climate scientist, I’m assuming he already knew that. So this is another attempt at propaganda, trying to explain the lack of warming predicted by his theory.
Hiding, Sun, Aerosols, burglars. He keeps trying out different excuses.
“Today, more than 3,400 Argo floats actively take measurements and provide data to the public, mostly within 24 hours.”
WOW !!
Why doesn’t that apply to ALL OF THE DATA !!!
People are dying of the cold in central Europe. More missing heat!
I thought insolation was the determining factor not TSI.
44.common sense says:
“…TSI is just not a good measure of how all the different solar component outputs change, and how these different solat componenets effect the earth’s climate and weather…so therfore proves little at all in the debate imo…”
Exactly. If they’re using the SORCE data, they (NASA) has discovered that while the TSI may not vary much, parts of the spectrum can vary wildly. They’ve been looking at SORCE data since 2003.
“…Some of the variations that SIM (Solar Irradiance Monitor) has measured in the last few years do not mesh with what most scientists expected. Climatologists have generally thought that the various part of the spectrum would vary in lockstep with changes in total solar irradiance.
However, SIM suggests that ultraviolet irradiance fell far more than expected between 2004 and 2007 — by ten times as much as the total irradiance did — while irradiance in certain visible and infrared wavelengths surprisingly increased, even as solar activity wound down overall.
The steep decrease in the ultraviolet, coupled with the increase in the visible and infrared, does even out to about the same total irradiance change as measured by the TIM (Total Solar Irradiance Monitor) during that period, according to the SIM measurements.
The stratosphere absorbs most of the shorter wavelengths of ultraviolet light, but some of the longest ultraviolet rays (UV-A), as well as much of the visible and infrared portions of the spectrum, directly heat Earth’s lower atmosphere and can have a significant impact on the climate…”
From here: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/solarcycle-sorce.html
So they need to go back and track SPECTRAL changes, and see if the 0.58 watts of excess energy per square meter is still there.
Doug Cotton says:
February 1, 2012 at 4:33 am
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Doug
A good post.
It is central to the entire GHE theory to know precisely what we are measuring when we point an IR meter up at the sky and precisely what work that ‘signal’ or ‘heat’ or ‘energy’ can in reality perform. I have made this point many times to Willis, and recently he suggested that it appears that I deny the existence of DLWIR.
I do not deny the existence of a signal, but what that signal really is, and what effect it has in terms of doing real work or even in delaying/hindering the rate of cooling from the warmer surface to the cooler atmosphere is in my opinion a moot point, and one that requires experimental testing before we can even begin to get some proper understanding of it.
Too many people, in my opinion, get blinkered by radiation. Many people think that a BBQ cooks by radiation simply because the hot coals radiate heat. A BBQ cooks by convection and to the extent that one sears a steak by conduction. It does not cook by radiation. That is why you can cook food 9 to 12 inches above the hot coals but not 6 inches from the side of the hot coals. Any IR going sideways is wisped away by convection such that a BBQ does not generate sufficient heat in a sideways direction to cook food.
I have had many arguments with those that post comments about the effectiveness of radiation blankets. In my opinion, these work primarily by cutting down on heat loss through evaporation and convection. If they worked by radiation then in theory they would be as effective (or nearly as effective) if they were made like a large toilet roll say with a 1m or 2m or 3m or 10 m diameter and the person stood inside the roll. However, if they were set up like this, the person would lose heat by evaporation, conduction and convection and any ‘heat’ backradiated would be of no (or little) real effect.
It is really crucial to know what we are measuring and what work it can in reality perform.
The aerosol optical physics in the climate models is wrong. You can prove it just by looking at rain clouds which darken as droplet size increases, the opposite of what is predicted.
There is a second optical process and it accounts for the end of ice ages and much modern warming [Arctic melting, now reversing in its 50-70 year cycle].
The days of these charlatans are over…….
Mickey….good catch! I read that article until I came to this as well:
From NASA’s “Correcting the Cooling” web site, subsection “Smoothing the Bumps”:
In mid-2008, however, a team of scientists led by Catia Domingues and John Church from Australia’s CSIRO, and Peter Gleckler, from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, revised long-term estimates of ocean warming based on the corrected XBT data. Since the revision, says Willis, the bumps in the graph have largely disappeared, which means the observations and the models are in much better agreement. “That makes everyone happier,” Willis says.
I had to stop, and knew everything else in the article was meaningless. Quite like Mann smoothing out the “bumps” of the MWP and LIA.
These guys use simple energy calcs. There are chemical, biological, fluids, thermodynamics, heat transfer, solar, and numerous other variables simultaneously. Their models are flawed and are incapable of catching MOST of this as illustrated by their poor predictive ability the last 10 years. If their models are wrong about the last 10 years, then their models are wrong forever. There is no reason to even listen to them, until they come clean and admit their failures, why they failed and how they have improved their models and how the new changes can at least predict the past with better precision. Until they admit this, there is no reason to listen to them.
Natural Question: Over what time span does a sustained energy imbalance of 0.58 watts per meter supply enough excess energy to melt all of the ice-caps on earth, and thus raise ocean heights by two hundred feet? Is that ice-melting time span most nearly:
(A) one year, or
(B) one thousand years, or
(B) one million years?
No need to wait folks! The answer is 1095 years (approximately). Of course this to assume that there’s any ice left to melt, which with an average surface temperature 15C above the melting point there clearly isn’t. That would explain the absence of 9cm per annum sea level rise.
James Hansen’s Science Brief report does not show how the 0.58 W/m2 was calculated, only “WE FOUND…”. What the report states is:
“…We used other measurements to estimate the energy going into the deeper ocean, into the continents, and into melting of ice worldwide in the period 2005-2010. We found a total Earth energy imbalance of +0.58±0.15 W/m2…”
Then the whole report relies on the calculated number.
Doug Cotton says:
February 1, 2012 at 4:33 am
“The transfer of all thermal energy is in one direction, and the reason it only takes place in one direction is because only the cooler body “receives” it and converts it back to thermal energy.”
and then Richard Verney says:
“A good post.”
Please do not push this tripe on this website. The volume of nonsense that accompanies any attempt at a thermodynamics discussion is enough to put off anybody trying to learn. This disease has infected even PhD level physicists, who develop a selective blind spot as soon as their wallets are involved.
Well, I took some time this morning to actually read the paper (ugh). I encourage everyone to read this tome for themselves here:
http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/11/13421/2011/acp-11-13421-2011.pdf
In particular, notice all of the politically-tinged alarmist language sprinkled liberally throughout, which is totally inappropriate for a scientific journal (but what else is new?). Climate “science” journals apparently have different standards in that regard versus other branches of (real) science.
I want to call everyone’s attention to Figure 7. The left hand side plot is supposedly the modeled global temperature anomaly versus “observations”. What happened to 1998?? The “hottest” year has disappeared! Compare this with the satellite data:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_December_2011.png
As has already been mentioned, the entire paper is primarily an exercise in handwaving and modeling. Even his “Green’s Function” calculation approach is not documented adequately. I’m still trying to figure out what the point of the “Green’s Function” calculation is (maybe someone can educate me on that). But again, as with Model E, proper documentation of numerical methods is not something they take seriously at NASA-GISS.