Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Well, after my brief digression to some other topics, I’ve finally been able to get back to the reason that I got the CERES albedo and radiation data in the first place. This was to look at the relationship between the top of atmosphere (TOA) radiation imbalance and the surface temperature. Recall that the IPCC says that a change in the TOA radiation of 3.7 W/m2 from a doubling of CO2 will lead to a 3°C ± 1.5°C temperature increase. This 3°C per doubling is called the “climate sensitivity”, and its value is an open question.
Figure 1, on the other hand, shows my results regarding the same question of the climate sensitivity. These reveal nothing like a 3°C temperature rise from a doubling of CO2:
Figure 1. Gridcell-by-gridcell linear trends of the change in surface temperature (∆T) given the change in TOA radiation (∆F). Note that the surface temperature data is gridded on a 5°x5° gridcell, while the CERES TOA radiation data is on a 1°x1° gridcell basis. Graph includes a two-month lag between change in forcing and the change in temperature.
There are a variety of interesting aspects to this particular graph. Let me start by describing how I constructed it.
I began by taking the gridded HadCRUT3 temperature data for the period of the CERES study, Jan 2001 to Oct 2005. The HadCRUT data is on a 5°x5° gridcell, so I first expanded that to 1°x1° gridcells. Then I took the first differences (∆T) by subtracting each month from the succeeding month, to get the monthly change in temperature (∆T) in each gridcell.
Then I compared that ∆T dataset to the change in TOA radiation (∆F), which was constructed from the CERES TOA data. For each gridcell, I took the linear trend of the temperature changes ∆T with respect to ∆F.
Of course, the climate sensitivity results from this procedure are in units of temperature change per forcing change, which is °C per watt/square metre. To convert it to change in temperature per doubling of CO2, I multiplied the results by 3.7 W/m2 per doubling of CO2.
Finally, I needed to adjust for the lag in the system. I did this in two ways. First, I selected the lag which gave the largest temperature change, which was a two month lag. These are the results shown in Figure 1. However, this is a cyclical record of the annual fluctuations, so the equilibrium sensitivity will be underestimated. Per the insights gained from my last analysis, “Time Lags in the Climate System“, the time lag is related to the size of the reduction in temperature swing. A 1-2 month lag in the system indicates a reduction in fluctuation of about 50%. So for my final adjustment, I doubled the indicated climate sensitivity. The results of this are the values shown in Figure 1.
Now, I have long argued, solely from first principles, that climate sensitivity is a non-linear function of temperature. I have said that the sensitivity was greater when it is colder, and that it is smaller when it is warmer. I have held that this relationship was non-linear, with a kink at the temperature range for tropical thunderstorm formation. Finally, I have also argued that in some places in the tropics the climate sensitivity is actually negative, due to the action of tropical clouds and thunderstorms.
To test these claims, I plotted the sensitivity for each gridcell shown in Figure 1 against the annual average temperature for that same gridcell. The results are shown in Figure 2. As far as I know, this is the first observational evidence that shows the actual relationship between climate sensitivity and temperature, and it supports all of my contentions about that relationship.
Figure 2. Scatterplot of gridcell climate sensitivity versus gridcell temperature. Colors indicate the latitude, with red at the tropics, yellow in the temperate zones, and blue at the poles. Gray dashed line shows the linear trend, indicating that the climate sensitivity varies generally as -0.009 * temperature + 0.32 (p-value < 1e-16).
There are some important things about this plot. First, it strongly supports my claim that the climate sensitivity varies inversely with the temperature. Next, it shows that a number of areas of the tropics actually do have negative climate sensitivity. Finally, it shows that the relationship is non-linear with a kink at around the temperature for the formation of tropical thunderstorms. This is important corroborative evidence for my hypothesis that the tropical clouds and thunderstorms act as governors of the tropical temperature and are the source of the negative climate sensitivity.
Let me close by railing a bit against the pernicious nature of averages. Consider Figure 2. Normally, far too many climate scientists would take an average of that data, and come up with some number as the average climate sensitivity. But that number is meaningless, and worse, it gives the impression that the sensitivity is a fixed number. It is nothing of the sort. Not only is it not fixed, it is far, far from linear, and it goes negative at times. It is a dynamic response to changing conditions, not some fixed value.
As a result, when we average it, we come away with entirely the wrong impression of what is happening in that most complex of phenomena, the climate system. While averaging is often useful, it conceals as much as it reveals, and it can lead one to badly erroneous conclusions. That is why so many of my graphs and charts show thousands of individual points, as in Figure 2. Only by seeing the whole picture can we hope to understand the system.
My best to all,
w.
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I have elsewhere set out a way of integrating Bob’ Tisdale’s oceanic observations into the overall picture but I’d better not set it out here since it takes us too far off topic.
The synthesis is not easy but the basic premise is simple enough.
The global climate as represented by the position, sizes and intensities of the permanent climate zones is a consequence of the netted out effect of solar and oceanic influences at any given moment.
Other influences contribute but they are far smaller and tend to cancel one another out most of the time.
We can determine current trends by the meridionality or zonality of the mid latitude jets and / or their average latitudinal positions globally.
On that basis if current jetsream behaviour continues we will shortly be cooling.
Willis…is it possible to calculate the non-linear trend and draw a more representative curved line through the data in figure two? The ‘apparent’ non-linear trend would indicate that any additional warming to the warmist waters of the tropics would create a rapidly increasing negative feedback, making a runaway green house effect impossible. If true…there can be no tipping point in global atmospheric warming, as long as most of the planet is covered in water! The water produces an upper limit in surface temperature with the water cycle as the controlling thermostat.
This would pretty much negate the entire climate crisis theory!
Perhaps it explains why it has never happened, even when CO2 was 10 times the current value.
Jim Clarke said:
“I don’t see why average global atmospheric surface pressure would have a significant bearing on sea surface temperatures”
Because it controls the energy cost of a given amount of evaporation by setting the amount of energy required to break the bonds between water molecules. Read the article I linked Willis to.
The relevance to this thread is that it provides a mechanism whereby Willis’s thermostat hypothesis can incorporate the apparent maximum limit for sea surface temperatures.
It is the ultimate negative system response.
Someone notify Mr. Hansen that the crisis over and he can sleep well tonight…or not.
Willis, you left something out if you ever going to get any grant money. It’s called an amplification number. Let me show you how it works. Everyone knows that 2 + 2 = 4,
but we need an answer of 8. Therefore 4 must be amplify by 2 for what ever reason (just make one up). After all we have to “Balance the Books”. LOL
Thanks Willis. I’ve been saying for quite awhile that GHGs have both a warming and cooling effect. In other words, they also work as thermostats. Your analysis fits right into what I have been thinking. At lower temperatures the GHE provides the warming effect. At higher temperatures, the T^4 radiation of atmospheric energy over powers the GHE.
Keep up the good work.
Stephen Wilde says:
June 19, 2012 at 3:33 pm
“Because it controls the energy cost of a given amount of evaporation by setting the amount of energy required to break the bonds between water molecules.”
Yes… I understand that the air pressure plays a role in setting the amount of energy required to break the bonds between water molecules and thus impacts the rate of evaporation. If Willis was attempting to explain everything about the climate, this would be an important addition, but average surface pressure is close to being a constant through a doubling of CO2, so it is not necessary to factor it into his hypothesis for his hypothesis to be correct. Neither is evaporation in general, or tropical thunderstorms or anything else, even though they may not be nearly constant.
All of that is included by default in his hypothesis.
I believe your ideas are likely correct, I just don’t believe they are required to determine climate sensitivity to increasing amounts of atmospheric CO2.
You don’t have to no how your watch works to know what time it is.
I think the issue one has here is that there is cooling in the Tropics over this period.
Now the Tropics are clearly warming much less than other places (the central and eastern Pacific are Zero since the early 1800s) but this particular time period can’t answer the general sensitivity issues since it is cooling here at least. The Tropics are generally forecast to warm 2.5C at the surface and up to 4.0C in the troposphere so I think the time period just doesn’t work.
It does show that the Thunderstorm Hypothesis is in effect however. Maybe the Tropics are just not going to warm at all above 28C. After that level, the heat just goes into evaporation which is then transported up and dumped off in the upper troposphere (where it will get emitted back to space very rapidly, “time” is always an important element in this debate, so far ignored) before it falls back to the surface as “now cooler” rain.
Dolphinhead says: June 19, 2012 at 1:15 pm – The greenhouse effect in the Tropics (including net atmospheric flow of heat energy to colder regions and the poles) is only 23C (122 W/m2) versus 33C (150 W/m2) for the planet as a whole and about 80C (193 W/m2) at the north pole.
Bill, If Willis had the data to do this over a couple of decades, would you believe that his method had merit?
Willis, are natural variations in global climate, like ENSO, PDO and perhaps cosmic rays, variables in your calculations? If not, would they have an impact on the CO2 sensitivity you have calculated?
Jason Calley says: @ur momisugly June 19, 2012 at 10:57 am
…. Makes me wonder whether the data on radiation is a little wonky, or perhaps the temperature records have been fiddled.
_____________________________
Now how could you ever think that?
http://notrickszone.com/2012/03/01/data-tamperin-giss-caught-red-handed-manipulaing-data-to-produce-arctic-climate-history-revision/
Stephen Wilde says:
i) to extend your thermostat hypothesis beyond the tropics so as to include latitudinal shifting of all the climate zones,
Willis says:
I think that there are thermoregulatory mechanisms operating at a host of scales. Whether one of them is “latitudinal shifting of all the climate zones” is not at all clear to me. I have written here and here about the “widening of the tropics” and the difficulties in measuring it … which of course only increases the difficulties in understanding it.
The Hadley cells are formed by the convective weather in the tropics driving the air upward. The more vigorous the convection the higher the tropopause and larger the cells. The boundary between the Hadley and Ferrel cells is demarcated by the subtropical jet stream, Data on the position and strength of the jet streams is available and this could be linked to the data that Willis has to show that the Hadley cells expand compressing the Ferrel cells when the SSTs are high and contract when SSTs are low allowing the Ferrel cells and the associated jet streams to move equatorward. This would link Stephen’s atmospheric patterns to Willis’ variable atmospheric sensitivity through convective effects.
…formatting fixed. -w.
Tom Barney says: @ur momisugly June 19, 2012 at 1:02 pm
Right on pointy about averages. The average person has one testacle and one ovary.
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I was going to make a comment about averages but I do not think I could top this one.
When you think about it most of the sneaky little lies in CAGW are perpetrated through the use of averages…
Jim Clarke says:
June 19, 2012 at 6:13 pm
Bill, If Willis had the data to do this over a couple of decades, would you believe that his method had merit?
———————-
It would answer ALL the questions.
Maybe I should have posted about that as well, but this methodology is really getting down to THE issue and how the real climate really operates. If one could extend it over into the ERBE data as well, there would be a long enough time-frame so that the climate science community would HAVE to take notice and say “well, we got it … (wrong or right)…” It would be that powerful.
Robert Brown says:
June 19, 2012 at 2:48 pm
As always, Robert, I greatly enjoy and appreciate your contributions.
However, I fear you misunderstand what I am saying. First, the issue I am pointing to is not either feedback nor sensitivity. Instead, it is that the climate is ruled by the constructal law, and as such it is constantly evolving to provide easier access to the currents that flow through it. This response occurs in the form of a whole host of homeostatic mechanisms that tend to keep the global temperature between surprisingly narrow bounds (e.g. ± a third of a degree or so over the last century).
One of these many mechanisms involves tropical clouds and thunderstorms. These are not feedbacks, they are self-organized emergent phenomena. Clouds and thunderstorms are key because, almost alone among natural phenomena, they exhibit “overshoot”—that is to say, they can cool the surface to a lower temperature than was required to initiate cloud or thunderstorm formation. This capability is crucial to the governing of any lagged system … and as we know, the climate is a lagged system. Simple linear feedback cannot govern a lagged system. You need overshoot to do that, to bring it back when it wanders off course.
In any case, I’m under no illusion about the limitations of each of the phenomena that I study. No one of them is sufficient to explain the climate. But the constructal law is sufficient to explain what all of the phenomena are involved in, and to give us a framework, if not for understanding the climate, at least for freeing ourselves of the absurdly simplistic idea that surface temperature is equal to TOA forcing times some constant.
That is why it is important to demonstrate negative climate sensitivity—not to verify my ideas about thunderstorms (although it does that). It is important because the undeniable fact of negative climate sensitivity makes people rethink their basic ideas, their underlying paradigms of climate.
Some people are skeptics, and some are AGW supporters. Me, I’m a revolutionary, I want to turn the whole thing upside-down and move forwards from the absurd linear climate paradigm to a real understanding of climate, one based on the knowledge that the climate is an active, responsive, self-regulating system with nothing linear about it.
w.
I have exactly the same view about averages. It leaves out a lot of internal structure, and moving variations in such structure can overturn or markedly change the value of the average, and is really a reverse form of greedy reductionism, implying the whole doesn’t relate to moving parts.
As Ernst Mayr put it about the genotype, on much the same principle: “there is a lot of structure in the genotype which is not able to be determined by a purely genetic approach”
Just a note of appreciation for Wills. As a retired aerospace scientist I very much look forward to reading your insightful posts, and greatly admire your ability to locate and analyse such large data sets to test your inspired hypotheses. Thank you for your unique contributions to our understanding of climate.
“one based on the knowledge that the climate is an active, responsive, self-regulating system with nothing linear about it.”
BIG SMILE and THUMBS UP !!!!
Gary W says:
June 19, 2012 at 1:07 pm
Was done years ago by the Late Great John L Daly
http://www.john-daly.com/miniwarm.htm
Plus 5 other ways to calculate sensitivity.
This goes perfectly with the idea that CO2 can act as a heat-to-IR and IR-to-heat converter. During the day, with all of that input of solar energy its IR-to-heat is effectively a wash, zero sum, as it gives away heat and collects heat evenly. However, at night water vapor and CO2 would have no energy input other than the surrounding gases and they would be fed heat and convert it to IR which is then lost to space. So, they help to cool the air after the Sun goes down. That’s why there is a chill in the air so rapidly after sunset.
I still haven’t figured why you’re using that last post’s lag-vs.-attenuation relationship. When I look at the system and assume that the net radiation
at the surface is:
is:
is thermal conductivity and 
is the diffusion constant of your last post. That is, the surface temperature lags surface radiation by 
, i.e.,one-eighth of a cycle, and this seems not to have much to do with your last post’s lag-vs.-attenuation relationship. Now, if the net radiation the surface sees tracks the top-of-the-atmosphere net, the lags you’re seeing may be that 
value, rather than anything in that last post.
the value I get for temperature
where
Let me close by railing a bit against the pernicious nature of averages.
I wholeheartedly endorse that statement. I have read numerous climate studies where the detail would tell us a great deal more than the average(s), but we are only shown the average(s), because the of the assumption that global GHG warming is the cause.
A professor of mine once told me, “If you cannot explain the detail, you cannot explain the whole.”
“I believe your ideas are likely correct, I just don’t believe they are required to determine climate sensitivity to increasing amounts of atmospheric CO2.”
They are, because they reduce the thermal sensitivity to zero or threabouts the only ‘price’ being a miniscule shift in the climate zones.
“All of that is included by default in his hypothesis.”
At present Willis’s thermostat hypothesis is limited to the intensity of the convection along the ITCZ with perhaps a concession that the descending air would then affect the Hadley cells. The other issues are indeed implicit in his hypothesis but he hasn’t gone there yet. He doesn’t yet allocate a role to the sun either, nor to atmospheric pressure which is what sets the amount of energy that the oceans must contain before enough evaporation can occur so that the thermostat fully kicks in.
With respect to Willis’s fine efforts so far I think his hypothesis is only a partial recognition of what goes on.
Willis mentions being a revolutionary. May I make that claim too ?
Willis has shown that climate sensitivity increases with latitude, when measured from TOA.
I’ll suggest that a forcing plays a significant role is this effect. That forcing is low level aerosols and aerosol seeded low level clouds.
Their effect on solar insolation (averaged over the year) is a direct function of latitude. The higher the latitude the greater the effect. And with a disproportionate effect on minimum temperatures (used in HADCRU).
That the worldwide reductions in these aerosols coincides with the satellite era is a coincidence.
Actually Philip I think that cloud amounts have a greater effect the nearer the equator the clouds are because the intensity of the reflected light is greater and that light energy is then no longer available to enter the oceans and contribute to the ENSO energy budget.
However it is true that climate sensitivity increases with latitude (tropical temperatures vary hardly at all) but there is a disjunction on the equatorial side of the mid latitude jets because in fact the poles get colder when the rest of the globe warms and get warmer when the rest of the globe cools.
That is a consequence of more zonal jets during a warming spell isolating the poles from inward flows of warm air.
And I don’t think aerosol seeding is a significant factor. Instead it is the degree of air circulation meridionality or zonality that dictates total global cloudiness and albedo. That zonality or meridionality is the result of a combination of top down solar effects on the polar vortices and bottom up oceanic effects on the size of the Hadley cells which interact in a constant dance.
Willis focuses on the tropical side of things only and I agree with him wholeheartedly so far as he goes.
If I am wrong then no doubt Willis will say so.
Willis’ simple approach is commendable. It does jibe with what some climate scientists say about the poles being more vulnerable to global warming. It also explains why there is no (predicted) tropical hot spot. All-in-all, it makes more sense than the gibberish churned out by so-called scientists – you know, the ones with the PhDs.