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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Victor Venema:
The quote from the paper (“The results of Figures 1 and 4 have not been subjected to detailed global or regional trend analyses, which will be a topic for a forthcoming paper”.) does not say that they have “not even tried to compute it”, but rather that they have not completed a “detailed” analysis. The fact that that it will “be a topic for a forthcoming paper” indicates to me that they have done enough to proceed with a planned paper on the subject. As far as difficulty goes, other areas of study (e.g. sea level) also involve the use of multiple satellites and manage to come up with trends and error bounds so your caveat might be taken with a grain of salt.
Your quote of the Trenberth citation is also misguided. The Trenberth paper was written in 2005 about an earlier version of the data set. Seven years have gone by with further additional data and newer processing methodology. The very next paragraph after your quoted section states:
The whole point of the current paper is to discuss what “improvements” have been made to allow the dataset to be used for other purposes. Figure 4c from the paper shows a global time series for TPW (total precipitable water) extending over the time period spanned by the dataset so the authors seem to think that the data can be used for that purpose.
http://statpad.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/fig4c_tpw.jpg
How are you using the term “significant” here (“highly meaningful”, “difference from zero unlikely due to random variation”)? If there is neither an increasing or decreasing trend, you don’t get “statistically significant trends” whether the time period is longer or not. You can find upper and lower bounds for the possible size of the trend when the random variation of the data is taken into account and these bounds will become smaller asn the time period covered increases.
Yes, specific humidity should follow the temperature which is supposed to increase as CO2 levels increase but that is another question…
Someone correct me if I’m wrong but here is what I can gather so far.
1) No statistically significant increase in temperature for 16 years despite continued co2 rise.
2) No hotspot found after decades 30 years of satellite measurements.
3) No increase in water vapour after “the hottest decade on the record”.
If all 3 are correct observations then how long must this continue for AGW ‘theory’ to be declared FALSIFIED?
References:
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2011/2011JD016263.shtml
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/11/28/1210514109
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/12/14/the-real-ipcc-ar5-draft-bombshell-plus-a-poll/
I would imagine right now that the IPCC ring masters are not happy that the audience is seeing their training methods exposed. We can now see that they are torturing the science to perform to their tune…
Ken Gregory says: “This further confirms that CO2, to a large extent, replaces water vapour as a greenhouse gas in the upper atmosphere.”
In other words, Miskolczi got it right.
Now can we take the EPA to court and have their CO2 finding nullified.
Be sure and check out his observations page!
http://www.forrestmims.org/sciencedata.html
Including this series:
osopolitico says:
> Are CO2 concentrations dependent upon altitude?
That depends on the range of altitudes. Up to about 100 kilometres, the atmosphere is essentially homogenous. It is possible to discern a slight gradient of CO2 concentration in some regions of the world, but in many others, it is fairly flat. This is based on the measurements by airborne instruments (up to abut 20 km) and solar occultation spectra above that. There is no significant fractionation of gases by molecular weight in the convective layer of the atmosphere (that’s why it is called “homosphere”). Further up, in the heterosphere, the fractionation is significant, but it is a very high-energy layer mostly populated by atomic gases at low density.
It is possible that a strong CO2 gradient exists within the first few metres above the surface, where it is produced and consumed, but the data on that are not as massive. Google for “microscale meteorology” to get an idea of what is currently known about atmospheric composition near the surface.
Ken Gregory: “This further confirms that CO2, to a large extent, replaces water vapour as a greenhouse gas in the upper atmosphere.”
Due to increases of CO2 in the upper Troposphere and Stratosphere one should expect increased radiation to space and subsequent cooling. As a result of that cooling more water vapor will condense out of the air and fall to the surface. This should lower the concentration at the higher altitudes.
Seems logical that the water vapor content would not increase as claimed and the models that produce a hot spot must not model the physics properly.
Do we stop measuring WV because we have models?
http://i48.tinypic.com/2qlfnzn.jpg
Dear RomanM, the first quote about the inhomogeneity problems of satellite data is indeed about the heritage version as the quote also states. Prof Prof. Tom Vonder Haar and colleagues have worked to reduce the inhomogeneities in their dataset, but they still only claim for the new dataset that it can be used to study variability from year to year or smaller time scales:
RomanM: “The fact that that it will “be a topic for a forthcoming paper” indicates to me that they have done enough to proceed with a planned paper on the subject. ”
To me it indicates that the reviewer wanted them to write something about the trends and that they did not want to do so. Then you diplomatically write you will do so later. Even if the dataset were homogeneous, the estimated trend will have a very large uncertainty as the dataset is so short. This likely no one would like to use the dataset for this purpose. The problems with the homogeneity of the dataset furthermore means that it will be a lot of work to do so. I expect they will put their efforts in more productive studies, but as long as I do not have to do it, would welcome such a paper.
Figure 4 shows the total precipitable water (TPW), what normal people call humidity, for the entire period. Yes, you can estimate a trend from this by eye, but that does not mean that this figure is included so that you can estimate the trend. The caption of Figure 4 reads: “Seasonal and interannual variability from NVAP-M Climate: monthly average TPW for (a) January and (b) July 2009. (c) The global monthly average TPW.” They clearly, and repeatedly, mention that you should use this new dataset for season up to interannual time scales. I cannot help it.
I’ve never understood the extra water vapor feedback due to CO2, specifically why only CO2? Water vapor is far more abundant and a GHG that is roughly four times more powerful than CO2 yet somehow it doesn’t cause more of itself being evaporated into the atmosphere. If anything it should be more effective since its IR bands can penetrate, marginally, deeper into water. One would think that any “feedback” would be saturated by water vapor. None of this makes any kind of scientific sense.
This debate brought to mind Willis Eschenbach’s excellent analysis of the diurnal reponse of the tropical Pacific. I don’t have the link, maybe Willis or someone else will post it. It very clearly demonstrates the feedback mechanism between solar induced warming, clouds, rain and temperatures. A must read and should be published and cited by IPCC!
Bill
Isn’t water vapor predicted to correlate with temperature and not CO2?
As I understand the AGW predictions, additional CO2 creates a mild increase in the radiative forcing. This increased forcing will have a small net increase in the global temperature.That’s all.
Simultaneously, but independent of CO2 levels, that increased temperature will increase the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere. It is this increase in water vapor that creates the increased feedback.
So, wouldn’t it make more sense to try to correlate water vapor to temperature to try to confirm or disprove that aspect?
” pochas says:
December 14, 2012 at 7:48 pm
If the adiabatic lapse rate is responsible for surface temperatures and also for temperatures at each and every altitude, then we would expect the moisture carrying capacity (absolute humidity at saturation) of the atmosphere to be completely specified by the adiabatic temperature profile, except for the areas of dry descending dessicated air in the high pressure regions.”
What many people seem to miss is that 3/4 of the earth’s surface is covered by water. Any increase in water vapor pressure will be primarily driven by sea surface temperatures, not atmospheric temperatures. The majority of any greenhouse warming will go into seawater. All the blah blah about the atmosphere is mostly irrelevant.
For whatever reason, we’re not seeing the vapor pressure over the oceans increase. There are a number of things that could be limiting this. We don’t know.
@Gene: Thanks for the info
Ken Gregory said in part December 14, 2012 at 10:55 pm:
“The Solomon et al 2010 paper shows that Stratospheric water vapor
concentrations decreased by about 10% after the year 2000.” Along with
mentions of upper tropospheric water vapor concentration decreasing.
This asppears to me caused in part by the upper troposphere and
stratosphere being cooled by increase og greenhouse gases other than
water vapor.
Also, I doubt a 10% change in water vapor concentration at the 40 mb
level over the tropics amounts to much anyway. The temperature there
is around -70 C, so water vapor concentration is going to be extremely low.
Replying to: Bill Illis December 15, 2012 at 5:42 am
Thanks for the wonderful graph showing the IPCC AR5 precipitable water vapour hindcast and forecast. I featured your previous version of this graph in the “Water Vapour Feedback” section of my “Climate Change Science” essay:
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/FOS%20Essay/Climate_Change_Science.html#Water_vapour
Please provide a link to the AR5 model precipitable water vapour forecast digital data.
I searched the ESGF Portal for the CMIP5 model water vapour data without success.
http://pcmdi9.llnl.gov/esgf-web-fe/
I asked Dr. Oldenborgh of Climate Explorer to add “precipitable column water vapour” as a variable for the CMIP5 scenario runs. His reply of October 8, 2012:
I would expect greenhouse-gas-caused warming to cause less of an
increase of water vapor than would be predicted by constant lapse rate
and constant relative humidity.
One reason is that increase of greenhouse gases cools the upper
troposphere and the stratosphere.
Another reason is a result I expect of increase of surface-level water
vapor content and temperature: Updrafts moving more heat. To keep
balance between upward and downward heat flow, I expect a smaller
percentage of the atmosphere to have updrafts, and a larger percentage
to have downdrafts. This will reduce average relative humidity, and make
the atmosphere less cloudy since downdrafts are clear. Although this
would make the cloud albedo feedback positive, I don’t expect it to be as
high as was mentioned in AR4.
Andrew says in part 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).”
The net flow continues to be from warmer to cooler. What happens is if
the cooler object has an increase in ability to absorb radiation from the
warmer object, and an increase in ability to radiate back to the warmer
object, then the warmer object’s temperature increases in order to maintain
its rate of loss of heat to the cooler object. Dr. Roy Spencer has explained
this several times.
Have you ever seen how cloudy nights on average are warmer than clear
nights? The reason is because the clouds absorb thermal radiation and
emit thermal radiation better than clear air does. This works even though
the clouds are usually cooler than the surface.
If heat transfer is not limited to radiation, it is easy to see how heat flow
from a warm object can be changed by changing the nature of its cooler
surroundings. Consider for example, thermal insulation.
Back to radiation: Clouds are thermal insulation. Radiant heat does not
flow well through clouds, because longwave IR photons can’t go far. They
get absorbed, and reradiated heat gets absorbed again nearby unless
there is a nearby cloud surface for escape. The concentration of longwave
IR photons can’t increase enough to make up for that, due to being limited
by the cloud’s temperature.
Greenhouse gases do the same thing, although usually to a lesser extent,
but also do not reflect away incoming solar radiation the way clouds do.
This morning I opened my paper to find this story from the AP Washington DC, “Growing majority says world is warming.” Relaying the latest AP GfK. It stated 4 out of 5 Americans said climate change will be a serious problem for the US if nothing is done about it. This number is up 73%from 2009. It then claims the biggest change in polling is among people who trust scientists only a little or not at all. This was a phone survey between Nov29-Dec3. It seems the Washington DC PR department is hard at work preparing the uninformed for future climate change legislation or more likely EPA authoritarian regulation. Right now the balance between politics and science is greatly askew. I’m thankful to Anthony for this great site and the many scientists more concerned with the truth than fitting in with the so called consensus. I bet 4 out of 5 dentists if polled would agree with me.
Donald L. Klipstein says:
December 15, 2012 at 8:42 am
“To keepbalance between upward and downward heat flow, I expect a smaller
percentage of the atmosphere to have updrafts, and a larger percentage
to have downdrafts.”
Does not conservation of mass require updrafts to equal downdrafts plus precipitation?
A strong solar component is shown here in regards to clouds:
To investigate whether galactic cosmic rays (GCR) may influence cloud cover variations, we analyze cloud cover anomalies from 1900–1987 over the United States. Results of spectral analyses reveal a statistically significant cloud cover signal at the period of 11 years; the coherence between cloud cover and solar variability proxy is 0.7 and statistically significant with 95% confidence. In addition, cloud data derived from the NCAR Climate System Model (CSM) forced with solar irradiance variations show a strong signal at 11 years that is not apparent in cloud data from runs with constant solar input. The cloud cover variations are in phase with the solar cycle and not the GCR
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2001/2000GL012659.shtml
Another component controlled by the sun is shown to affect precipitation here:
COPENHAGEN (AFP) — The earth’s climate has been significantly affected by the planet’s magnetic field, according to a Danish study published Monday that could challenge the notion that human emissions are responsible for global warming.
“Our results show a strong correlation between the strength of the earth’s magnetic field and the amount of precipitation in the tropics,” one of the two Danish geophysicists behind the study, Mads Faurschou Knudsen of the geology department at Aarhus University in western Denmark, told the Videnskab journal.
http://www.viewzone.com/magnetic.weather.html
“tallbloke says:
December 14, 2012 at 11:32 pm
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.”
Well said . . But I would argue it is a turkey, rather than a chicken.
Seems the magnetic component even affects climate in Australia. Just don’t let Mr. Cook know.
Dec. 3, 2008 — The sun’s magnetic field may have a significant impact on weather and climatic parameters in Australia and other countries in the northern and southern hemispheres. According to a study in Geographical Research, the droughts are related to the solar magnetic phases and not the greenhouse effect.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081202081449.htm
We also know that the atmosphere has become much clearer since approx 1990:
In 2005 Wild et al. and Pinker et al. found that the “dimming” trend had reversed since about 1990 [8]. It is likely that at least some of this change, particularly over Europe, is due to decreases in pollution; most governments have done more to reduce aerosols released into the atmosphere that help global dimming instead of reducing CO2 emissions.
The Baseline Surface Radiation Network (BSRN) has been collecting surface measurements. BSRN didn’t get started until the early 1990s and updated the archives. Analysis of recent data reveals the planet’s surface has brightened by about 4 % the past decade. The brightening trend is corroborated by other data, including satellite analyses