New global water vapor findings contradict second draft of IPCC Assessment Report 5 (AR5)
Guest post by Forrest M. Mims III
I was an “expert reviewer” for the first and second order drafts of the 2013 Intergovernmental Report on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Report 5 (AR5). The names and reviews of all the reviewers will be posted online when the final report is released. Meanwhile, reviewers are required to not publish the draft report. However, the entire second draft report was leaked on December 13, 2012, without IPCC permission and has subsequently received wide publicity.
My review mainly concerns the role of water vapor, a key component of global climate models. A special concern is that a new paper on a major global water vapor study (NVAP-M) needs to be cited in the final draft of AR5.
This study shows no up or down trend in global water vapor, a finding of major significance that differs with studies cited in AR5. Climate modelers assume that water vapor, the principle greenhouse gas, will increase with carbon dioxide, but the NVAP-M study shows this has not occurred. Carbon dioxide has continued to increase, but global water vapor has not. Today (December 14, 2012) I asked a prominent climate scientist if I should release my review early in view of the release of the entire second draft report.
He suggested that I do so, and links to the official IPCC spreadsheet version and a Word version of my review are now posted near the top of my homepage at www.forrestmims.org.
The official IPCC spreadsheet version of my review is here. A Word version is here.
A PDF version (prepared by Anthony from the Word version) is here: Mims_IPCC_AR5_SOD_Review
A relevant passage from the AR5 review by Mimms (added by Anthony):
The obvious concern to this reviewer, who has measured total column water vapor for 22.5 years, is the absence of any mention of the 2012 NVAP-M paper. This paper concludes,
“Therefore, at this time, we can neither prove nor disprove a robust trend in the global water vapor data.”
Non-specialist readers must be made aware of this finding and that it is at odds with some earlier papers. Many cited papers in AR5 have yet to be published, but the first NVAP-M paper was published earlier this year (after the FOD reviews) and is definitely worthy of citation: Thomas H. Vonder Haar, Janice L. Bytheway and John M. Forsythe. Weather and climate analyses using improved global water vapor observations. GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 39, L15802, 6 PP., 2012. doi:10.1029/2012GL052094.
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Cross post from the original thread, an open letter to Bill McKibben:
Bill McKibben,
Given that AR5 completely reverses the position of the IPCC on drought, hurricanes and floods, are you prepared to retract your article from earlier this year titled “The New Normal”? Are you prepared to admit that your alarmism was not founded on science after all? Will you, as the ethical journalist you claim to be, not only admit your folly, but publicly call out the IPCC and their minions for misleading you until now with claims that were increasingly ludicrous in face of the facts?
Will you apologize Bill? Will you say you are sorry Bill for ridiculing those of us who pointed out that a warming world should have less severe weather, not more? That the laws of physics could not produce any other result?
Faced with facts which falsify his argument, a fool argues anyway.
A man steps up, admits his error, and learns from his mistakes.
A coward slinks away in silence.
The IPCC has ceased playing the fool in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary (on these matters at least).
What Bill, will you do now?
steven mosher says:
December 14, 2012 at 6:31 pm
“simple many papers have been submitted and ACCEPTED but not published yet. So the papers are sent around to reviwers if you want them. The authors have to write the most up to date summary. If the paper misses the final date, then they have to decide what to do for the final draft.”
Most of these papers are of course made to measure for the conclusions the IPCC wants to promote. And as they are all made to promote the same IPCC report, they can even refer each other in a cyclical way. The Jesus paper comes to mind. It’s a great way to invent claims out of whole cloth and further the advance of CO2AGW pseudoscience to world domination.
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2008/8/11/caspar-and-the-jesus-paper.html
Regarding feedbacks. I recall Roy Spencer’s finding showing that the ranges of radiative flux’s have been mostly somewhat negative to slightly positive. That is, the warmer the earth gets, the more heat radiates out of the troposphere. Water Vapor is known to play many roles, and the latent heat of vaporization or condensation exchanges energy in many different places on our planet… often times it rises high in the sky and releases it’s energy there… where it escapes our planet.
Sorry, I must correct what I wrote. This makes little sense “been mostly somewhat negative to slightly positive.” It should have been “somewhat moderately negative to slightly positive.”
daveburton says: Moreover, that calculation does not take into account negative feedbacks from increased evaporation: increased water-cycle cooling, and perhaps increased cloudiness, so that 65% is really an upper bound. The real-world amplification of CO2′s warming by H2O is almost certainly less than that.
So, we see that it is all theoretical physics, not well understood and somewhat misapplied, with very little foundation in real-world observations. What thin soup the faithful have for sustenance.
Propaganda works wonders. The nazis showed us how it’s done.
The jig is up……
daveburton says: Moreover, that calculation does not take into account negative feedbacks from increased evaporation: increased water-cycle cooling, and perhaps increased cloudiness, so that 65% is really an upper bound. The real-world amplification of CO2′s warming by H2O is almost certainly less than that.
The real-world amplification is zip because zip x zip = zip
So we are offered theory incompletely understood, misunderstood, and grossly misapplied and given that, we are to do WHAT? Tax carbon? Build windfarms and exterminate ducks, geese, & wildlife and spend trillions on mitigation, etc.? It is mass psychosis and the global warmers rant and rave because we do not follow them over the edge into the sea.
@ur momisugly Mario Lento
December 14, 2012 at 8:49 pm
Cmon Mario, you have to be a bit simple to believe anything that John Cooke says. For a start his profession is being a cartoonist. His collaboration with the delusional Lewandowsky says it all.
As for your support for climate models being just great in looking at the past I make two points:
1) they can’t model the past – period. We say full stop in Oz.
2) had the geo-centric modellers applied the same level of BS tweakage to their models then they too were great models and Copernicus’ heliocentric hypothesis would never have made it. Galileo would have flunked in a CAGW world. So would Einstein and Feynman – unlike the other Mann.
My caution to fellow skeptics is to avoid the same level of BS that pervades the warmist views.
Perusing the list of authors that includes Coordinating Lead Authors, Lead Authors, Contributing Authors and very critically the list of Review Editors, one notices that despite the apparent diversity of names coming from various countries, there is always in each chapter what I would call a “key person” that can make a final decision for the said chapter. When Trenberth is Review Editor for chapter 14 but not an author, who would imagine that anything in this chapter will not be fought tooth and nail if it does not fit his views?
That is in part why the IPCC does not wish to get these drafts out: they do not want the strings to be seen behind their lovely diversity of authors.
Is this NVAP-M study of water vapor available anywhere yet?
TonyM: I should have put in Did you read that I wrote, with regard to “warming is worse than predicted in the last IPCC report.”? I followed by writing “Aren’t they wearing out that mantra… it’s as if they were predicting an ice age and it didn’t happen.”
You are reading me all wrong. I am a sceptic sir. Do a search for Mario Lento on this page or on Google and you will find that I have spent a great deal of time debunking the warmist’s.
I see a cooling as cycle 24’s peak will be half of cycle 23’s max… can’t wait for cycle 25 when I nearing retirement.
I requested the paper “Weather and climate analyses using improved global water vapor observations” and the data showing the water vapour profile by altitude layers from the authors. I wrote,
On 7/24/2012, I received an email from Janice Bytheway. She explained that she could not provide the paper to me. She also wrote,
This is a strange response because the total water column amount is a sum of the layers, so the data should be readily available.
This is important because line-by-line radiative code shows that a change of water vapour content in an atmospheric layer from the 300 mb to the 400 mb level has 30 times the effect on out-going longwave radiation (OLR) as the same change near the surface. A water vapour increase near the surface would have very little effect on OLR, so very little temperature forcing. Only changes in the upper atmosphere matters.
Forrest Mims III writes,
This refers to the total water column. A small reduction in the upper atmosphere can offset a warming effect of a large increase near the surface. A no-trend in global total column water vapour during the late 20th century warming period implies a declining upper atmosphere water vapour trend.
Janice Bythway presented the following chart at the GEWEX/ESA Due GlobVapour workshop March 8, 2011:
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/FOS%20Essay/NVAP_500-300_WV.jpg
The chart shows a large reduction in water vapour at the 300 mbar to 500 mbar pressure level, from 1995 to 1999, especially in the tropics. This reduction would result in a significant negative water vapour feedback in response to CO2 emissions. Here is a graph of water vapour humidity at 40 mbar in the tropics versus CO2 from NOAA radiosonde data. Note the R2 = 0.71.
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/FOS%20Essay/SH400TropicsVsCO2.jpg
The Solomon et al 2010 paper shows that
The sensitivity to water vapour changes is greatest near the tropopause, where changes are
This further confirms that CO2, to a large extent, replaces water vapour as a greenhouse gas in the upper atmosphere.
The only hotspots in the atmosphere are the ones carrying WIFI signals.
AGW’s head has been lopped off.
The corpse of chicken little is still blundering around.
“Water vapor amplification is an indirect mechanism, which requires warmth. So if there’s no warming (as is the case for the last 15 or so years), because other factors overwhelm the influence of increased CO2, there’s nothing to amplify.”
Fully agree. I don’t see here any disproof of feedback mechanism.
Just a thought, the reason these people are releasing this report is the because of the shabby treatment of real scientists by the IPCC in the past. Thus they are coming out and throwing a big spanner in the works, this will make the politicisation of the final draft fraught with dangers.
The threat of more releases of climategate emails showing past shenanicans would be a concern, thus this report may actually contain some real science, political spin will be overpowered by fact and reason.
“Andrew says:
December 14, 2012 at 5:35 pm
There is no way known to thermodynamics that a cooler object (like the atmosphere) can cause net warming to a hotter object (like the surface of the earth), regardless of any lower-order energy exchanges which may be occurring (like CO2 resonance to terrestrial long wave radiation at about 15 microns).”
Andrew the object doing the warming is the sun. The CO2 theory is that extra CO2 prevents the escape of some heat so there is net warming. Perfectly consistent with Thermodynamics.
But the empirical evidence that there is no water vapour trend up or down is extremely significant as it would mean that the small warming effect of extra CO2 is not amplified by consequent extra watervapour.
steven mosher says:
December 14, 2012 at 6:31 pm
“many papers have been submitted and ACCEPTED but not published yet. So the papers are sent around to reviewers if you want them. The authors have to write the most up to date summary.”
Come on, it’s not about fashion, it is about science, is it? In a branch of science which is supposed to be settled. Why the rush, why should they be up-to-date then? Instead of going for provably true propositions?
There is nothing magic about peer review. It is a first filter, supposed to remove glaringly obvious flaws only. And it often fails to do even that, otherwise no paper would be retracted later.
In climate science peer review is an especially weak indication of quality, as there was a tremendous political pressure on it for an extended period with very serious attempts to redefine it or to have maverick editors of scientific journals simply fired.
Remember the hockey stick embarrassment? It was shot down, taken into shreds, falsified thoroughly, but only later, not in formal peer review.
Dr. J Haig expert on: Solar irradiance variability and its influence on climate) from Imperial College (I was student there some time ago), London, UK, was quoted in ‘New Scientist’ regarding solar contribution. Instead of commenting in the ‘NS’ column I sent email:
Dr. Haigh
After reading quotes attributed to you in ‘New Scientist’, I take liberty to suggest that the solar contribution to the climate variability may not be fully accounted for.
Link to the article with more detail …………
I also attach Excel file with the relevant calculations.
Please do not hesitate to ask for any additional clarification if required.
Details were also forwarded to your colleague Dr. Leif Svalgaard from Stanford University, who has shown great interest and devoted considerable time and effort in order to disprove validity of the findings.
With best regards
M. Vukcevic
The complete citation from the Geophysical Research Letters article is:
In other words, the cannot say anything about the trend, because they have not even tried to compute it and estimate its uncertainty. Especially estimating the error in the trend will be very difficult as the dataset uses different satellites for different periods of the dataset. This satellite dataset is not made to study trends, its strength is being able to study spatial patterns in humidity. To cite from the paper:
Another import piece of information missing from this post is that this satellite dataset is only 22 years long. This is too short to get statistically significant trends. Also the temperature trend is probably not significant for such a short period. Furthermore specific humidity follows temperature and not CO2 concentrations.
I wish all scientific articles were open to the public. That would make this type of misinformation more difficult.
Ken Gregory, exactly!
Especially when “nearly 50% the total water in the air is between sea level and about 1.5 km above sea level. Less than 6 % of the water is above 5 km, and less than 1% is in the stratosphere, nominally above 12 km”
Referring spefically to Ken Gregory’s comments above, if I understand him correctly, is that the whole process of OLR is altitude dependent. The measurements we see of atmospheric CO2 concentrations are presumably at low altitude, and as we are all aware, those concentrations have been rising. No one disputes this, not even the most degenerate of deniers. But, and again forgive my ignorance as a mechanical engineer dabbling in something outside my area, but aren’t CO2 molecules heavier than those of water vapor, H2O? My question is this: Are CO2 concentrations dependent upon altitude, and wouldn’t those concentrations be much less affected at higher altitudes, and wouldn’t this therefore affect the amount of OLR?
The CAGW bride is in her white dress at the IPCC alter
but the groom, water vapour amplification – has gone fishing.
This paper concludes,
“Therefore, at this time, we can neither prove nor disprove a robust trend in the global water vapor data.”
Non-specialist readers must be made aware of this finding and that it is at odds with some earlier papers.
=============
If the paper can’t “disprove a robust trend” how is it “at odds” with others which presumably do show a definite trend?
Perhaps it needs to be read in full. If it is demonstrating that , using the same evidence it is impossible to show a trend and that previous studies are flawed , that is significant.
Negative results can be just as important as positive results, But this is not, on that one sentence, a negative result , it is a total lack of any result. It is difficult to see how a NON result can be at odds with anything.
If I say I don’t know whether there is a god , that is not “at odds” with someone who believes in GOD.
The first thing I did with the AR5 leak was to look up the water vapour data and studies they were using.
I understood right away what this report was going to be about – data selection and the refusal to use any data which contradicts the global warming mime.
I downloaded the water vapour forecasts that are being used in the IPCC AR5 awhile ago. AR5 has water vapour up by 6.0% already and it is forecast to be 24% higher by the year 2100.
If we look at the actual observational data, however, it is FLAT. The ENSO is really the biggest factor in its variability. Water vapour was only 0.4 kg/m2, 0.4 mms/m2 higher than normal (25 mms/m2) in November 2012 and it is now on the way down to Zero again given its response to the ENSO.
Water Vapour, the ENSO and the IPCC AR5 forecast from 1948 to November 2012.
http://s16.postimage.org/qe1cvc3id/ENSO_WV_IPCC_AR5_Nov2012.png
TonyM~ I agree. Let’s go slowly… and utterly shred the claims by the person who has the final decision on what chapter 7 says about solar influences.