Who Are You Going To Believe – The Government Climate Scientists or The Data?
By Dr David M.W. Evans (republished here with permission, PDF link below)
We check the main predictions of the climate models against the best and latest data. Fortunately the climate models got all their major predictions wrong. Why? Every serious skeptical scientist has been consistently saying essentially the same thing for over 20 years, yet most people have never heard the message – here it is, put simply enough for any lay reader willing to pay attention.
What the Government Climate Scientists Say
Figure 1: The climate models. If the CO2 level doubles (as it is on course to do by about 2070 to 2100), the climate models estimate the temperature increase due to that extra CO2 will be about 1.1°C × 3 = 3.3°C.i
The direct effect of CO2 is well-established physics, based on laboratory results, and known for over a century.ii
Feedbacks are due to the ways the Earth reacts to the direct warming effect of the CO2. The threefold amplification by feedbacks is based on the assumption, or guess, made around 1980, that more warming due to CO2 will cause more evaporation from the oceans and that this extra water vapor will in turn lead to even more heat trapping because water vapor is the main greenhouse gas. And extra heat will cause even more evaporation, and so on. This amplification is built into all the climate models.iii The amount of amplification is estimated by assuming that nearly all the industrial-age warming is due to our CO2.
The government climate scientists and the media often tell us about the direct effect of the CO2, but rarely admit that two thirds of their projected temperature increases are due to amplification by feedbacks.
What the Skeptics Say
Figure 2: The skeptic’s view. If the CO2 level doubles, skeptics estimates that the temperature increase due to that extra CO2 will be about 1.1°C × 0.5 ≈ 0.6°C.iv
The serious skeptical scientists have always agreed with the government climate scientists about the direct effect of CO2. The argument is entirely about the feedbacks.
The feedbacks dampen or reduce the direct effect of the extra CO2, cutting it roughly in half.v The main feedbacks involve evaporation, water vapor, and clouds. In particular, water vapor condenses into clouds, so extra water vapor due to the direct warming effect of extra CO2 will cause extra clouds, which reflect sunlight back out to space and cool the earth, thereby reducing the overall warming.
There are literally thousands of feedbacks, each of which either reinforces or opposes the direct warming effect of the extra CO2. Almost every long-lived system is governed by net feedback that dampens its response to a perturbation. If a system instead reacts to a perturbation by amplifying it, the system is likely to reach a tipping point and become unstable (like the electronic squeal that erupts when a microphone gets too close to its speakers). The earth’s climate is long-lived and stable— it has never gone into runaway greenhouse, unlike Venus — which strongly suggests that the feedbacks dampen temperature perturbations such as that from extra CO2.
What the Data Says
The climate models have been essentially the same for 30 years now, maintaining roughly the same sensitivity to extra CO2even while they got more detailed with more computer power.
- How well have the climate models predicted the temperature?
- Does the data better support the climate models or the skeptic’s view?
Air Temperatures
One of the earliest and most important predictions was presented to the US Congress in 1988 by Dr James Hansen, the “father of global warming”:
Figure 3: Hansen’s predictionsvi to the US Congress in 1988, compared to the subsequent temperatures as measured by NASA satellitesvii.
Hansen’s climate model clearly exaggerated future temperature rises.
In particular, his climate model predicted that if human CO2 emissions were cut back drastically starting in 1988, such that by year 2000 the CO2 level was not rising at all, we would get his scenario C. But in reality the temperature did not even rise this much, even though our CO2 emissions strongly increased – which suggests that the climate models greatly overestimate the effect of CO2 emissions.
A more considered prediction by the climate models was made in 1990 in the IPCC’s First Assessment Report:viii
Figure 4: Predictions of the IPCC’s First Assessment Report in 1990, compared to the subsequent temperatures as measured by NASA satellites.
It’s 20 years now, and the average rate of increase in reality is below the lowest trend in the range predicted by the IPCC.
Ocean Temperatures
The oceans hold the vast bulk of the heat in the climate system. We’ve only been measuring ocean temperature properly since mid-2003, when the Argo system became operational.ix,x In Argo, a buoy duck dives down to a depth of 2,000 meters, measures temperatures as it very slowly ascends, then radios the results back to headquarters via satellite. Over three thousand Argo buoys constantly patrol all the oceans of the world.
Figure 5: Climate model predictionsxi of ocean temperature, versus the measurements by Argoxii. The unit of the vertical axis is 1022 Joules (about 0.01°C).
The ocean temperature has been basically flat since we started measuring it properly, and not warming as quickly as the climate models predict.
Atmospheric Hotspot
The climate models predict a particular pattern of atmospheric warming during periods of global warming; the most prominent change they predict is a warming in the tropics about 10 km up, the “hotspot”.
The hotspot is the sign of the amplification in their theory (see Figure 1). The theory says the hotspot is caused by extra evaporation, and by extra water vapor pushing the warmer wetter lower troposphere up into volume previously occupied by cool dry air. The presence of a hotspot would indicate amplification is occurring, and vice versa.
We have been measuring atmospheric temperatures with weather balloons since the 1960s. Millions of weather balloons have built up a good picture of atmospheric temperatures over the last few decades, including the warming period from the late 70’s to the late 90’s. This important and pivotal data was not released publicly by the climate establishment until 2006, and then in an obscure place.xiii Here it is:
Figure 6: On the left is the data collected by millions of weather balloons.xiv On the right is what the climate models say was happening.xv The theory (as per the climate models) is incompatible with the observations. In both diagrams the horizontal axis shows latitude, and the right vertical axis shows height in kilometers.
In reality there was no hotspot, not even a small one. So in reality there is no amplification – the amplification shown in Figure 1 does not exist.xvi
Outgoing Radiation
The climate models predict that when the surface of the earth warms, less heat is radiated from the earth into space (on a weekly or monthly time scale). This is because, according to the theory, the warmer surface causes more evaporation and thus there is more heat-trapping water vapor. This is the heat-trapping mechanism that is responsible for the assumed amplification in Figure 1.
Satellites have been measuring the radiation emitted from the earth for the last two decades. A major study has linked the changes in temperature on the earth’s surface with the changes in the outgoing radiation. Here are the results:
Figure 7: Outgoing radiation from earth (vertical axis) against sea surface temperature (horizontal), as measured by the ERBE satellites (upper left graph) and as “predicted” by 11 climate models (the other graphs).xvii Notice that the slope of the graphs for the climate models are opposite to the slope of the graph for the observed data.
This shows that in reality the earth gives off more heat when its surface is warmer. This is the opposite of what the climate models predict. This shows that the climate models trap heat too aggressively, and that their assumed amplification shown in Figure 1 does not exist.
Conclusions
All the data here is impeccably sourced—satellites, Argo, and weather balloons.xviii
The air and ocean temperature data shows that the climate models overestimate temperature rises. The climate establishment suggest that cooling due to undetected aerosols might be responsible for the failure of the models to date, but this excuse is wearing thin—it continues not to warm as much as they said it would, or in the way they said it would. On the other hand, the rise in air temperature has been greater than the skeptics say could be due to CO2. The skeptic’s excuse is that the rise is mainly due to other forces – and they point out that the world has been in a fairly steady warming trend of 0.5°C per century since 1680 (with alternating ~30 year periods of warming and mild cooling) where as the vast bulk of all human CO2 emissions have been after 1945.
We’ve checked all the main predictions of the climate models against the best data:
The climate models get them all wrong. The missing hotspot and outgoing radiation data both, independently, prove that the amplification in the climate models is not present. Without the amplification, the climate model temperature predictions would be cut by at least two thirds, which would explain why they overestimated the recent air and ocean temperature increases.
Therefore:
- The climate models are fundamentally flawed. Their assumed threefold amplification by feedbacks does not in fact exist.
- The climate models overestimate temperature rises due to CO2 by at least a factor of three.
The skeptical view is compatible with the data.
Some Political Points
The data presented here is impeccably sourced, very relevant, publicly available, and from our best instruments. Yet it never appears in the mainstream media – have you ever seen anything like any of the figures here in the mainstream media? That alone tells you that the “debate” is about politics and power, and not about science or truth.
This is an unusual political issue, because there is a right and a wrong answer and everyone will know which it is eventually. People are going ahead and emitting CO2 anyway, so we are doing the experiment: either the world heats up by several degrees by 2050, or it doesn’t.
Notice that the skeptics agree with the government climate scientists about the direct effect of CO2; they just disagree just about the feedbacks. The climate debate is all about the feedbacks; everything else is merely a sideshow. Yet hardly anyone knows that. The government climate scientists and the mainstream media have framed the debate in terms of the direct effect of CO2 and sideshows such as arctic ice, bad weather, or psychology. They almost never mention the feedbacks. Why is that? Who has the power to make that happen?
About the Author
Dr David M.W. Evans consulted full-time for the Australian Greenhouse Office (now the Department of Climate Change) from 1999 to 2005, and part-time 2008 to 2010, modeling Australia’s carbon in plants, debris, mulch, soils, and forestry and agricultural products. Evans is a mathematician and engineer, with six university degrees including a PhD from Stanford University in electrical engineering. The area of human endeavor with the most experience and sophistication in dealing with feedbacks and analyzing complex systems is electrical engineering, and the most crucial and disputed aspects of understanding the climate system are the feedbacks. The evidence supporting the idea that CO2 emissions were the main cause of global warming reversed itself from 1998 to 2006, causing Evans to move from being a warmist to a skeptic.
Inquiries to david.evans@sciencespeak.com.
Republished on www.wattsupwiththat.com
This document is also available as a PDF file here: TheSkepticsCase
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References
i More generally, if the CO2 level is x (in parts per million) then the climate models estimate the temperature increase due to the extra CO2 over the pre-industrial level of 280 ppm as 4.33 ln(x / 280). For example, this model attributes a temperature rise of 4.33 ln(392/280) = 1.46°C to the increase from pre-industrial to the current CO2 level of 392 ppm.
ii The direct effect of CO2 is the same for each doubling of the CO2 level (that is, logarithmic). Calculations of the increased surface temperature due to of a doubling of the CO2 level vary from 1.0°C to 1.2°C. In this document we use the midpoint value 1.1°C; which value you use does not affect the arguments made here.
iii The IPCC, in their last Assessment Report in 2007, project a temperature increase for a doubling of CO2 (called the climate sensitivity) in the range 2.0°C to 4.5°C. The central point of their model estimates is 3.3°C, which is 3.0 times the direct CO2 effect of 1.1°C, so we simply say their amplification is threefold. To be more precise, each climate model has a slightly different effective amplification, but they are generally around 3.0.
iv More generally, if the CO2 level is x (in parts per million) then skeptics estimate the temperature increase due to the extra CO2 over the pre-industrial level of 280 ppm as 0.72 ln(x / 280). For example, skeptics attribute a temperature rise of 0.72 ln(392/280) = 0.24°C to the increase from pre-industrial to the current CO2 level of 392 ppm.
v The effect of feedbacks is hard to pin down with empirical evidence because there are more forces affecting the temperature than just changes in CO2 level, but seems to be multiplication by something between 0.25 and 0.9. We have used 0.5 here for simplicity.
vi Hansen’s predictions were made in Hansen et al, Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol 93 No D8 (20 Aug 1988) Fig 3a Page 9347: pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1988/1988_Hansen_etal.pdf. In the graph here, Hansen’s three scenarios are graphed to start from the same point in mid-1987 – we are only interested in changes (anomalies).
vii The earth’s temperature shown here is as measured by the NASA satellites that have been measuring the earth’s temperature since 1979, managed at the University of Alabama Hunstville (UAH). Satellites measure the temperature 24/7 over broad swathes of land and ocean, across the whole world except the poles. While satellites had some initial calibration problems, those have long since been fully fixed to everyone’s satisfaction. Satellites are mankind’s most reliable, extensive, and unbiased method for measuring the earth’s air temperature temperatures since 1979. This is an impeccable source of data, and you can download the data yourself from vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt (save it as .txt file then open it in Microsoft Excel; the numbers in the “Globe” column are the changes in MSU Global Monthly Mean Lower Troposphere Temperatures in °C).
viii IPCC First Assessment Report, 1990, page xxii (www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/far/wg_I/ipcc_far_wg_I_full_report.pdf) in the Policymakers Summary, Figure 8 and surrounding text, for the business-as-usual scenario (which is what in fact occurred, there being no significant controls or decrease in the rate of increase of emissions to date). “Under the IPCC Business-as-Usual (Scenario A) emissions of greenhouse gases, the average rate of increase of global mean temperature during the next century is estimated to be about 0.3°C per decade (with an uncertainty range of 0.2°C to 0.5°C).”
ix http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/marine/observations/gathering_data/argo.html
x Ocean temperature measurements before Argo are nearly worthless. Before Argo, ocean temperature was measured with buckets or with bathythermographs (XBTs) — which are expendable probes lowered into the water, transmitting temperature and pressure data back along a pair of thin wires. Nearly all measurements were from ships along the main commercial shipping lanes, so geographical coverage of the world’s oceans was poor—for example the huge southern oceans were not monitored. XBTs do not go as deep as Argo floats, and their data is much less precise and much less accurate (for one thing, they move too quickly through the water to come to thermal equilibrium with the water they are trying to measure).
xi The climate models project ocean heat content increasing at about 0.7 × 10^22 Joules per year. See Hansen et al, 2005: Earth’s energy imbalance: Confirmation and implications. Science, 308, 1431-1435, page 1432 (pubs.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi?id=ha00110y), where the increase in ocean heat content per square meter of surface, in the upper 750m, according to typical models, is 6.0 Watt·year/m2 per year, which converts to 0.7 × 10^22 Joules per year for the entire ocean as explained at bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2011/06/14/giss-ohc-model-trends-one-question-answered-another-uncovered/.
xii The ocean heat content down to 700m as measured by Argo is now available; you can download it from ftp://ftp.nodc.noaa.gov/pub/data.nodc/woa/DATA_ANALYSIS/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/DATA/basin/3month/ohc_levitus_climdash_seasonal.csv. The numbers are the changes in average heat for the three months, in units of 10^22 Joules, seasonally adjusted. The Argo system started in mid-2003, so we started the data at 2003-6.
xiii The weather balloon data showing the atmospheric warming pattern was finally released in 2006, in the US Climate Change Science Program, 2006, part E of Figure 5.7, on page 116 (www.climatescience.gov/Library/sap/sap1-1/finalreport/sap1-1-final-chap5.pdf).
There is no other data for this period, and we cannot collect more data on atmospheric warming during global warming until global warming resumes. This is the only data there is. Btw, isn’t this an obscure place to release such important and pivotal data – you don’t suppose they are trying to hide something, do you?
xv Any climate model, for example, IPCC Assessment Report 4, 2007, Chapter 9, page 675, which is also on the web at http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch9s9-2-2.html (Figure 9.1 parts c and f). There was little warming 1959 – 1977, so the commonly available 1959 – 1999 simulations work as well.
xvi So the multiplier in the second box in Figures 1 and 2 is at most 1.0.
xvii Lindzen and Choi 2009, Geophysical Research Letters Vol. 36: http://www.drroyspencer.com/Lindzen-and-Choi-GRL-2009.pdf. The paper was corrected after some criticism, coming to essentially the same result again in 2011: www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/236-Lindzen-Choi-2011.pdf.
xviii In particular, we have not quoted results from land thermometers, or from sparse sampling by buckets and XBT’s at sea. Land thermometers are notoriously susceptible to localized effects – see Is the Western Climate Establishment Corrupt? by the same author: jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/corruption/climate-corruption.pdf.
The most striking thing about the Warmist case, which didn’t not occur to me before is that the model which incorporates 3x temperature increase for every octave increase in atmospheric CO2, is a positive feedback system. Is it my mistake, or am I correct that no such thing could exist in nature? Otherwise, the planet would have burned up long ago in geologic time.
Just an observation.
@Nason Yes you are exactly correct. If positive feedback from water vapor was true then we would not be here discussing it. Life on Earth would have long ago been extinguished.
There is geological evidence that liquid oceans have existed on Earth for 4.5 billion years. The sun has brightened 30% over the last 4 billion years and current average solar radiation is 342 watts/m2. Assuming a slow linear increase of solar radiation with time gives a net forcing of 0.02 watts/m2 every 1 million years. The calculation for the temperature response to this forcing using any positive or even zero value of feedback leads to the oceans boiling away long ago. The only consistent picture is a net negative climate feedback for water.
I have published in my website, Observatorio ARVAL, most of this excellent article. The English version is at http://www.oarval.org/ClimateChangeBW.htm and “El Caso de los Escépticos”, the Spanish version, is at http://www.oarval.org/CambioClimaBW.htm
Nason says:
February 28, 2012 at 3:50 pm
Alas, it is not so simple. The idea is that it is a positive feedback mechanism embedded in a stronger negative feedback loop. Radiation of heat energy out with quartic temperature, in particular, is very strong negative feedback. Internal positive feedback like that tends to amplify, rather than destabilize, the output.
A lot of people new to the debate often make the same mistake. I did. The AGW advocates are not quite so incompetent, though, as to make such an obvious mistake. It is a good idea to search for more information before you believe you have found an elementary error that would bring the house of cards tumbling down with a symbolic puff of air.
The argument against overall positive feedback of the water vapor/cloud/.etc. subsystem is not that interval positive feedback cannot exist, but that the empirical evidence demonstrates that the feedback is, in fact, overall negative.
Smokey says:
February 28, 2012 at 11:41 am
But there is no empirical evidence that “carbon” is causing any measurable rise in temperature, which has not been rising for ≈15 years now, while CO2 has been rising steadily.
______
9 of the 10 warmest years on instrument record have occurred since 2000. 2011 was the warmest year during which a La Nina was taking place. The ocean heat content, being the largest reservoir of energy stored in the Earth system and as measured down to 2000m, rose twice as much in the past 10 years than in the previous 20. The approximately 10 x 10^22 Joules stored in the ocean down to 2000 meters over the past 10 years dwarfs the troposphere’s potential storage by many factors. For anyone to take a single (and rather weak) metric of tropospheric temperature over a short-time spane (which represents a miniscule part of Earth’s energy storage) and make any claim as to what has been happening overall in Earth’s energy budget is absurd–completely absurd.
The overall rise in energy in Earth’s system over the past 40 years has been extremely consistent with the rise in greenhouse gas concentrations. The fact that tropospheric temperatures are far more subject to natural variability due to their low thermal inertia has absolutely no bearing on whether or not increasing greenhouse gases tip the Earth energy system into an accumulation mode. They do, and the most broad metric by which we can gauge this tip to accumulation of energy (ocean heat content) displays this quite readily. The fact that over longer time scales the troposphere and cryosphere are also displaying the effects of this energy accumulation is simply strong confirmatory evidence.
“”””” Agile Aspect says:
February 28, 2012 at 12:14 am
George E. Smith; says:
February 27, 2012 at 12:10 pm
Consequently RADIATION is NOT a process for transporting “heat”.
Conduction and Convection are the two mechanisms for the transport of “heat”; RADIATION is a means of transport of “”””” ENERGY “””””.
;———————————————————————————————————————–
Both statements are false.
Thermal radiation is heat or energy. And all thermal radiation is electromagnetic radiation.
Conduction and convection are bulk transfers of thermal radiation. It doesn’t matter if it’s a gas, a liquid or a solid – if the electron density of the atoms or molecules changes, it will radiate as long as the matter is above absolute zero “”””
I’m not even going to waste my time commenting on such inane drivel.
I have a rule about getting between suicidal people and the cliff they are racing to jump off.
So be my guest; go ahead and jump; the world will be a lot safer without such ignorance running loose.
R. Gates says:
February 28, 2012 at 4:34 pm
“…9 of the 10 warmest years on instrument record have occurred since 2000.”
This is getting monotonous. That meme was DOA from the first time it was uttered. If that is the best you can do, you need to go back to the minors. Even a grade schooler would know that a quantity at a plateau would tend to be higher than those before it. It means precisely nothing beyond that the global average temperature metric has stagnated for the last 15 years.
R. Gates says:
For anyone to take a single (and rather weak) metric of tropospheric temperature over a short-time spane (which represents a miniscule part of Earth’s energy storage) and make any claim as to what has been happening overall in Earth’s energy budget is absurd–completely absurd.
Sweetheart, the entire AGW house of cards is built upon precisely that.
The whole entrerprise was conceived, developed, sold to the public, “settled” and declared “incontrovertable” based upon global average surface temperature. And yes, that is completely absurd.
As is your mindless repetition of warmist talking points.
And you still owe Typhoon an apology for making an ass of yourself at his expense.
REPLY: As I’ve told Mr. “Gates” he should just walk away. He is indeed making an ass of himself. – Anthony
JJ says:
February 28, 2012 at 5:17 pm
R. Gates says:
For anyone to take a single (and rather weak) metric of tropospheric temperature over a short-time spane (which represents a miniscule part of Earth’s energy storage) and make any claim as to what has been happening overall in Earth’s energy budget is absurd–completely absurd.
Sweetheart, the entire AGW house of cards is built upon precisely that.
______
Oh, the troposphere will warm over the long haul, but it is also subject to more short-term noise from natural variability, allowing for of course, during periods of flattening, for skeptics to make the very most of that variability. Because no climate model can possibly anticipate every little wiggle from natural variability, skeptics will wrongly point out the inaccuracies in the models as a suggestion that AGW is somehow proven as false. But these are two distinct issues. The models are always going to be wrong in one way or another, but that inaccuracy says nothing about whether AGW is a happening. The models have been poor at showing the Arctic sea ice declining as fast as it has. Does this mean that AGW is not happening, or simply that the models have not captured feedback processes? Same with deep ocean warming. The models have consistently not shown as much heat going into the deeper ocean as has actually been measured. Does this mean that AGW is not happening, or simply that the models are not capturing some essential dynamics of heat exchange between atmosphere and ocean?
Anthony said:
As I’ve told Mr. “Gates” he should just walk away. He is indeed making an ass of himself. –
___
This is your house Anthony. If you prefer I no longer post here, I will graciously comply. Perhaps your goal is to drive all we warmists out.
In terms of me making an ass of myself, I would suppose that is my business. I’ve had no one who has been able to intelligently refute my contention related to the bulk of the the warming from excess greenhouse gases going into the deeper ocean. Not sure how stating this point related a major element of Earth’s energy balance makes me an ass, but you are entitled to your opinion in the matter.
REPLY: My goal is to get people like yourself who continuously attack us to man up and put their names to their words. As Dr. Gleick has so aptly demonstrated, there seems to be little integrity anymore on your side of the debate. Here’s your chance to step into the light and argue on your own terms instead of some made up bullshit name. I’ve taken lots of hits personally, professionally, and to my livelihood from people like yourself who don’t even have the courage to put their names behind their own opinions, and I’m growing weary of it. Step into the light my friend, embrace honesty. – Anthony
George E. Smith says:
February 28, 2012 at 4:47 pm
“”””” Agile Aspect says:
February 28, 2012 at 12:14 am
George E. Smith; says:
February 27, 2012 at 12:10 pm
Consequently RADIATION is NOT a process for transporting “heat”.
Conduction and Convection are the two mechanisms for the transport of “heat”; RADIATION is a means of transport of “”””” ENERGY “””””.
;———————————————————————————————————————–
Both statements are false.
Thermal radiation is heat or energy. And all thermal radiation is electromagnetic radiation.
Conduction and convection are bulk transfers of thermal radiation. It doesn’t matter if it’s a gas, a liquid or a solid – if the electron density of the atoms or molecules changes, it will radiate as long as the matter is above absolute zero “”””
I’m not even going to waste my time commenting on such inane drivel.
I have a rule about getting between suicidal people and the cliff they are racing to jump off.
So be my guest; go ahead and jump; the world will be a lot safer without such ignorance running loose.
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You really can’t leave it like that. What you are saying, “Conduction and Convection are the two mechanisms for the transport of “heat”; RADIATION is a means of transport of “”””” ENERGY “”””””
Is completely and utterly contrary to all of traditional teaching about heat transfer, always giving the three ways that heat can be transferred – conduction, convection and radiation.
Where do you get the teaching that radiation is no longer a method of transferring heat?
Anthony,
A few points, and then I will take a self-imposed “time out” from WUWT to reflect a bit more deeply at the points you make.
1) I generally stick to the facts and to the basic science here, and believe I have certainly suffered far more personal insults over the years here than I’ve dished out here on
WUWT– most recently being called an ass.
2) You know who I am in great detail, and when I worked very hard to honestly set up a meeting between you and others in Boulder to meet with Dr. Trenberth face to face, even willing to pick you up at the Denver airport and drive you to Boulder, I was accused by some very paranoid people of some setting some kind “trap”. If that event had taken place, anyone from WUWT would have been able to meet me face to face. I have nothing to hide, but honestly, that level of paranoia when I know I was acting as an honest broker gives me a bit of concern.
3) You say you’ve taken a lot of “hits” from people “like” me, and yet, if you go back and check posts when I refer to this site or to you, I am always very (and honestly) complimentary. I have even told you on the phone what a great service you provide for an honest discussion of the issues. How this is amounts to giving you a “hit”, I can’t possibly imagine. You see, people “like” me are honest, care more about the facts than about the politics, and will even spend our own money to see interesting and meaningful dialog on these issues advanced (i.e. offering to transport you to Boulder on my own dime for example).
4) Finally, (even though I was certainly willing to meet face to face with anyone from WUWT who came to Boulder), I honestly don’t see how it matters who I am. This is a forum of ideas isn’t it? Not every person who posts here reveals themselves for multiple personal reasons. But, if you can give a good argument why it matters that I reveal my identity in regards to the ideas that I present here, I am certainly open to listening.
In the meantime, this ass will retreat to his stable for a self-imposed time out, to chew on some hay and consider his options…
REPLY: And the paranoia you speak of was personified in Gleick’s actions, and I have directly suffered for it. As you know, people who have represented themselves to me as “honest” have in fact burned me when given the opportunity.
I’ve never said you were rude, only that you aren’t being honest with yourself and others by hiding behind a facade. I’m here to ask you to step into the light. Show us that at least ONE person on the warming side of the debate has the courage to put his name to his words where they did not before. Thank you for your consideration – Anthony
R. Gates says:
February 28, 2012 at 5:53 pm
” I’ve had no one who has been able to intelligently refute my contention related to the bulk of the the warming from excess greenhouse gases going into the deeper ocean.”
There really is nothing to refute. You have identified no path by which the heat can reach the depths of the ocean without leaving a trace of how it got there. You have done nothing to answer Typhoon’s questions:
You haven’t a leg to stand on, and you appear to know it, as you refuse to engage on this issue, preferring instead to chant market tested mantras which, in this forum, have served only to diminish your credibility.
Basically, R. Gates’ argument for heating of the ocean depths is along the lines of the underpants gnomes’ marketing plan:
1) We have thermohaline circulation from the surface to the depths
2) ?
3) ocean depths warm
Never mind that the THC is established by cooler water sinking at the poles. That’s all worked out somewhere in step #2.
Gates says:
“The overall rise in energy in Earth’s system over the past 40 years has been extremely consistent with the rise in greenhouse gas concentrations… Does this mean that AGW is not happening, or simply that the models are not capturing some essential dynamics of heat exchange between atmosphere and ocean?”
Gates refuses to address my point that there is no difference in the rising trend line since the LIA, from both before and after the industrial revolution and the rise in CO2. The trend line is the same, whether CO2 was low or high. That conclusively deconstructs the endlessly repeated claims of CO2=CAGW. Whatever effect CO2 may have, it is negligible regarding temperature. [Of course, the biosphere is benefitting greatly from the added CO2, and will contiue to do so as CO2 levels rise.]
All of Gates’ speculation is mere conjecture; his opinion. That nasty ol’ heat is hiding just out of reach, as usual. But until we find it, and until it pushes temperatures beyond the parameters of the Holocene, the null hypothesis remains unfalsified, and the alternate hypotheses, CO2=CAGW and CO2=AGW, fail. The spurious and occasional correlation between a short term warming trend like the Modern Warm Period, and the even shorter term rise in harmless CO2, is merely coincidental. If Gates could prove otherwise, he would have by now.
Occam’s Razor states that the simplest explanation is almost always the correct explanation. The simplest explanation is that CO2 is such a minor bit player that it can be disregarded. Its effect, if any, is too small to measure. Natural climate variability is sufficient to explain all global warming and cooling. CO2 has never caused temperature changes in the geologic past. Why would it now?
Nason says:
February 28, 2012 at 3:50 pm
….a positive feedback system. Is it my mistake, or am I correct that no such thing could exist in nature?
I asked a related question a while back on a different thread where I alluded to Le Chatelier’s Principle.
Here is Lord Monckton’s reply to me:
Werner Brozek asks whether the quite small variations in global surface temperature either side of the billion-year mean indicate that “tipping-points” do not exist. In mathematics and physics the term “tipping-point” is really only used by those wanting to make a political point, usually from a climate-extremist position. The old mathematical term of art, still used by many, was “phase-transition”: now we should usually talk of a “bifurcation” in the evolution of the object under consideration. Since the climate object is mathematically-chaotic (IPCC, 2001, para. 14.2.2.2; Giorgi, 2005; Lorenz, 1963), bifurcations will of course occur: indeed any sufficiently rare extreme-weather event may be a bifurcation. We know that very extreme things can suddenly happen in the climate. For instance, at the end of the Younger Dryas cooling period that brought the last Ice Age to an end, temperatures in Antarctica as inferred from variations in the ratios of different isotopes of oxygen in air trapped in layers under the ice, rose by 5 K (9 F) in just three years. “Now, that,” as Ian Plimer likes to say in his lectures, “is climate change!”
But the idea that our very small perturbation in temperature will somehow cause more bifurcations is not warranted by the underlying mathematics of chaos theory. In my own lectures I often illustrate this with a spectacular picture drawn on the Argand plane by a very simple chaotic function, the Mandelbrot fractal function. The starting and ending values for the pixels at top right and bottom left respectively are identical to 12 digits of precision; yet the digits beyond 12 are enough to produce multiple highly-visible bifurcations.
And we know that some forms of extreme weather are likely to become rarer if the world warms. Much – though not all – extreme weather depends not upon absolute temperature but upon differentials in temperature between one altitude or latitude and another. These differentials tend to get smaller as the world warms, so that outside the tropics (and arguably in the tropics too) there will probably be fewer storms.
O.K. Since my scientific reputation is 0, I have nothing to lose by playing devil’s advocate and suggesting how the deep oceans can warm up without much warming being evident at the surface. When I was at school (back when textbooks were written on clay tablets) we were taught that water was at its densest at 4 degrees. This suggests that the deepest bit of the ocean is a layer at that temperature, with water at 3,5,1,2,and 6 degrees arguing about who comes next.
Now suppose that surface water at the 0/1 transition point (near the poles) gets warmed up a bit to 4. When no-one is looking it sneaks around behind the bike-sheds and sinks down to the bottom to make the bottom layer a bit thicker. Would this be noticeable in the upper layers?
R.Gates @ur momisugly February 28, 6:35 pm
You responded to Anthony’s critique with:
Hey R.G., I for one will be disappointed if you take a hiatus, because I was hoping you would respond to two of my enquiries to you thus:
Arctic sea-ice: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/26/the-skeptics-case/#comment-905836
Deep ocean warming: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/26/the-skeptics-case/#comment-907059
I don’t know why you got so upset with being called an ass. Willis Eschenbach has called me various things worse than that, my favourite being gerbil, that being a small rodent not even indiginous to my country. He does that sometimes when critiqued, but it doesn’t upset me, so follow me and take it on the chin. (please).
R Gates
While the advection heat pipe theory is plausible there is no real evidence at this time. The amount of heat claimed disappearing into the depths is much larger than the Mississippi River, something on the order of nearly half or a third of the Gulf Stream current assuming the quantity referenced in the recent Meehle paper. Wouldn’t those Argo floats show where this massive THC disruption is occurring? Why do they use modeled data in their paper if measurements support this conclusion. Perhaps this alleged increased deeper ocean heat is an artifact of improved sampling method as the data stream is short?
“”””” Myrrh says:
February 28, 2012 at 6:18 pm
George E. Smith says:
February 28, 2012 at 4:47 pm
“”””” Agile Aspect says:
February 28, 2012 at 12:14 am
George E. Smith; says:
February 27, 2012 at 12:10 pm
Consequently RADIATION is NOT a process for transporting “heat”.
Is completely and utterly contrary to all of traditional teaching about heat transfer, always giving the three ways that heat can be transferred – conduction, convection and radiation.
Where do you get the teaching that radiation is no longer a method of transferring heat?
Let’s try it this way Myrrh, in the hope that somehow you catch on.
Test #1 I have a photon; maybe many of them. They happen to have a wavelength of 10.6 microns, all of them in this bunch. So that is what we often will call LWIR.
Question: how do I know (or you) whether these photons were emitted by a bottle of ordinary water at some cool Temperature between zero deg C and certainly +15 deg C, or whther they were emitted by some 10.6 micron CO2 Industrial laser ?
Well there’s no way to know, those two sources of 10.6 micron photons emit exactly the same photons, indistinguishable from each other in all of their properties. One of them is a consequence of a molecular energy level transition in CO2, and the other is a result of the Temperature of the bottle of water; and would commonly be called “thermal radiation” (not meaning it is “heat”) but that it is emitted possibly by any material at all perhaps containing NO CO2 or even no C or O.
Test #2 I have a stream of photons, each having a wavelength of 1.0 microns; now you would describe those 1.0 micron photons as “heat”.
I can impinge those 1.0 micron photons onto a photo-diode made out of Gallium Arsenide; literally a solar cell, and I can turn those photons, with almost 100% efficiency, into ELECTRICITY. For narrow band sources, modern photo-diodes have a internal quantum efficiency very close to 100%. Same goes in reverse; the very same junction can turn electricity into photons, with near 100% internal quantum efficiency (one photon per electron). The losses are primarily optical losses due to Total Internal Reflection trapping in the diode medium.
But the point is that those 1.0 micron photons can be near 100% be converted into electrons (crossing the junction)
Now it is well known that heat engines CANNOT convert heat into ANY other form of energy such as electricity for example, with any higher efficiency than the Carnot efficiency 1-Tsnk/Tsrc
So if 1.0 micron photons can be converted virtually 100% into electricity, meaning that the sink Temperature would have to be close to zero (kelvins), which is ridiculous in the photo-diode case, then perhaps there is something wrong with the notion that 1.0 micron photons ARE heat.
Photons of ANY wavelength can be converted into “heat”; that’s the most common outcome, and photons of many wavelengths can be turned into electricity with near 100% efficiency; but not all with the same band gap photodiode. And as I stated above, any photon is emitted by precisely one particle, molecule or atom, and no single particle can have any Temperature assigned to it, so the photon knows nothing of any source Temperature.
Heat requires physical material having a mass so that it can exhibit a mechanical vibratory or other oscillatory energy; which is the measure of the Temperature.
Now I have in my hand, a very well regarded, modern Physics “handbook”, and in this book, they also say that “heat” can be transported by radiation. They even call it “heat radiation”, which gets us back to Test # 1, How does this Physics handbook distinguish the 10.6 micron “heat radiation” from the bottle of cold water, from the 10.6 micron photons emitted as a result of electrons shifting energy levels in a CO2 laser. So it’s a good handbook; but it is also wrong at times. They should have used the term “Thermal Radiation”, and not “heat radiation”
Thermal radiation can be emitted by particles that are at 2.7 Kelvins Temperature, which would not constitute heat in your view (or mine).
Modern triple junction triple bandgap solar cells, have achieved broad solar spectrum conversion efficiencies from solar radiant energy to electricity of 43.5%, and researchers in that field (at UC Santa Barbara) believe they can get that up to better than 60%. My bet is they will achieve that within the next 5 years That is for the complete ground level solar spectrum. For individual wavelengths over much of that range, the internal quantum efficiency is near 100% Much of that loss in efficiency is attributable to the inverse of the “Stokes shift”. Absorbing a photon with energy slightly higher than the bandgap energy, results in near 100% photon to electron conversion, but if the photon energy is somewhat higher than the bandgap, the extra energy from that photon manifests itself in the kinetic energy of the resulting electron, which ultimately becomes an Ohmic heat loss. Which is why the multibandgap approach is used, to capture a smaller range of photon energies in any one junction, so as to reduce this reverse Stokes loss.
Heat cannot be converted with near 100% efficiency, into any other energy form; it is the lowest from of energy life.
RoHa @ur momisugly February 28, 8:37 pm
You pose an interesting question RoHa, as I quote in part, that perhaps should be studied;
However there are some complexities that I may not have time to properly think through. But, for instance, within the thermohaline circulation (AKA ocean conveyor belt) the density of water is not just affected by varying temperature, but also by varying salinity, particularly around the bike-sheds. Another thingy; in the area of sea-ice I think the rule of thumb is that the freezing point of the water regionally is about minus 2C.
Again, without doing investigation to confirm my recollections, I recall that the cycle-time for the thermohaline circulation is generally thought to be between 800 – 1000 years. Thus the interval from deployment of a significant distribution of ARGO floats down to 2000m, (at less than ten years), is a bit like discussing what might happen with a newly germinated climbing-fig seedling in the rainforest.
RoHa,
Sorry, but further to my post to you just above, I forgot to add; one thing that puzzles me about the travesty of the missing heat over the past decade or so, is the validity of the claim that the “CO2 heating effect” has somehow changed direction from heating the near surface troposphere and ocean surface to instead heating the depths of the ocean.
Hopefully Joel Shore, Tim Folkerts, or R. Gates or their ilk, can elucidate on this strange thingy, but does it mean that CO2 possesses intelligence and an agenda?
Bob_FJ says:
February 28, 2012 at 10:11 pm
Thank you. You have expressed my question to R Gates much more clearly. I am eagerly awaiting a response.
RoHa says:
February 28, 2012 at 8:37 pm
“When I was at school (back when textbooks were written on clay tablets) we were taught that water was at its densest at 4 degrees.”
That’s fresh water. Salt water keeps getting denser and denser as it cools.
dalyplanet says:
February 28, 2012 at 9:07 pm
“While the advection heat pipe theory is plausible …
Only superficially, but it just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. The THC is set up by cooler and denser water at the surface sinking. You can’t heat up something warmer with something colder. Density is also influenced by salinity, but there is no reason the water should be substantially saltier, and it would have to be A LOT saltier:
And, part of the “pipe” lies at the surface, where the warm water from the tropics flows to the poles, yet there is observationally no warming there.
Furthermore, there is no insulating pipe. The excess heat energy, if it were there, which it isn’t, would leak out all the way down, and rise from below when it got down there and as it got down there, and the effects would be observed at lesser depths. It’s not like this stream is driven by a firehose gushing into still water so rapidly that it doesn’t have time to give up its heat to its surroundings. This is a very slow process.
Bob_FJ says:
February 28, 2012 at 9:50 pm
“… the density of water is not just affected by varying temperature, but also by varying salinity, particularly around the bike-sheds.”
True enough. But, how is the water sinking at the poles going to get saltier? Would increased heat at the surface lead to greater evaporation before the plunge? From, what is it, a fraction of a degree extra temperature? Surely the extra salinity from such a process, were it to occur, would be negligible.
You see, the idea that the THC is carrying greater heat to the depths would require it to sink at the poles carrying greater heat with it. The sinking is dependent on the increased density due to evaporative cooling. When the water gets cool and salty enough, it sinks. So, to carry greater heat down, it must be a lot saltier. How does it get that way?
Anyway, the question is moot, because the surface water isn’t getting warmer, so there’s no extra heat to carry down anyway. The very notion reeks of desperation.
Here’s another wrench in the notion that the THC is carrying extra heat to the depths:
Such a change in circulation due to influx of freshwater is believed to have been the causative factor behind the Younger Dryas.
So, increased salinity allowing warmer water to sink and drive the THC is definitely not an option (not that it was anyway), forestalled by the dreaded retreat of arctic sea ice.
Thus, the water must cool to at least the same level as always in order for it to sink. It simply will not sink until it is cold enough. Thus, the THC cannot be transporting additional heat to the depths even if there were excess heat to be transported, which there isn’t.
Note my wee clarification above.
Sea or other saline solutions get denser all the way down. With pressure changes to freezing point, etc., that’s down to about -2°C at the bottom.