UPDATE: Annan now suggests the IPCC “is in a bit of a pickle”, see below.
UPDATE2: Title has been changed to reflect Annan’s new essay, suggesting lying for political purposes inside the IPCC. Also added some updates about Aldrin et al and other notes for accuracy. See below.
Readers may recall there has been a bit of a hullabaloo at Andrew Revkin’s Dot Earth of the New York Times over the press release I first carried at WUWT, saying that I had “seized on it”.
Purveyors of climate doubt have seized on a news release from the Research Council of Norway with this provocative title: “Global warming less extreme than feared?”
I beg to differ with Andy’s characterization, as I simply repeated the press release verbatim without any embellishments. My only contribution was the title: Yet another study shows lower climate sensitivity. It turns out to the surprise of many that the subject of the press release was not peer reviewed, but based on previous cumulative work by the Norwegian Research Council. That revelation set Andy off again, in a good way with this: When Publicity Precedes Peer Review in Climate Science (Part One), and I followed up with this story demonstrating a lack of and a need for standards in climate science press releases by the worlds largest purveyor of Science PR, Eurekalert: Eurekalert’s lack of press release standards – a systemic problem with science and the media
It turns out that all of this discussion was tremendously fortuitous.
Surprisingly, although the press release was not about a new peer reviewed paper (Update: it appears to be a rehash and translation of a release about Aldrin et al from October), it has caused at least one scientist to consider it. Last night I was cc’d an exceptional email from Andrew Revkin forwarding an email (Update: Andy says of a comment from Dot Earth) quoting climate scientist James Annan, who one could call a member of the “hockey team” based on his strong past opinions related to AGW and paleoclimatology.
Andrew Revkin published the email today at the NYT Dot Earth blog as a comment in that thread, so now I am free to reproduce it here where I was not last night.
Below is the comment left by Andy, quoting Annan’s email, bolding added:
The climate scientist James Annan sent these thoughts by email:
‘Well, the press release is a bit strange, because it sounds like it is talking about the Aldrin et al paper which was published some time ago, to no great fanfare. I don’t know if they have a further update to that.
Anyway, there have now been several recent papers showing much the same – numerous factors including: the increase in positive forcing (CO2 and the recent work on black carbon), decrease in estimated negative forcing (aerosols), combined with the stubborn refusal of the planet to warm as had been predicted over the last decade, all makes a high climate sensitivity increasingly untenable. A value (slightly) under 2 is certainly looking a whole lot more plausible than anything above 4.5.’
And this is what many have been saying now and for some time, that the climate sensitivity has been overestimated. Kudos to Annan for realizing the likelihood of a lower climate sensitivity.
The leader of the “hockey team”, Dr. Michael Mann will likely pan it, but that’s “Mikey, he hates everything”. I do wonder though, if he’ll start calling James Annan a “denier” as he has done in other instances where some scientist suggests a lower climate sensitivity?
UPDATE: over at Annans’ blog, now there is this new essay expounding on the issue titled: A sensitive matter, and this paragraph in it caught my eye because it speaks to a recent “leak” done here at WUWT:
But the point stands, that the IPCC’s sensitivity estimate cannot readily be reconciled with forcing estimates and observational data. All the recent literature that approaches the question from this angle comes up with similar answers, including the papers I mentioned above. By failing to meet this problem head-on, the IPCC authors now find themselves in a bit of a pickle. I expect them to brazen it out, on the grounds that they are the experts and are quite capable of squaring the circle before breakfast if need be. But in doing so, they risk being seen as not so much summarising scientific progress, but obstructing it.
Readers may recall this now famous graph from the IPCC leak, animated and annotated by Dr. Ira Glickstein in this essay here:
Yes, the IPCC is “in a bit of a pickle” to say the least, since as Annan said in his comment/email to Revkin:
…combined with the stubborn refusal of the planet to warm as had been predicted over the last decade, all makes a high climate sensitivity increasingly untenable.
UPDATE 2: Annan also speaks about lying as a political motivator within the IPCC, I’ve repeated this extraordinary paragraph in full. Bold mine.
Note for the avoidance of any doubt I am not quoting directly from the unquotable IPCC draft, but only repeating my own comment on it. However, those who have read the second draft of Chapter 12 will realise why I previously said I thought the report was improved 🙂 Of course there is no guarantee as to what will remain in the final report, which for all the talk of extensive reviews, is not even seen by the proletariat, let alone opened to their comments, prior to its final publication. The paper I refer to as a “small private opinion poll” is of course the Zickfeld et al PNAS paper. The list of pollees in the Zickfeld paper are largely the self-same people responsible for the largely bogus analyses that I’ve criticised over recent years, and which even if they were valid then, are certainly outdated now. Interestingly, one of them stated quite openly in a meeting I attended a few years ago that he deliberately lied in these sort of elicitation exercises (i.e. exaggerating the probability of high sensitivity) in order to help motivate political action. Of course, there may be others who lie in the other direction, which is why it seems bizarre that the IPCC appeared to rely so heavily on this paper to justify their choice, rather than relying on published quantitative analyses of observational data. Since the IPCC can no longer defend their old analyses in any meaningful manner, it seems they have to resort to an unsupported “this is what we think, because we asked our pals”. It’s essentially the Lindzen strategy in reverse: having firmly wedded themselves to their politically convenient long tail of high values, their response to new evidence is little more than sticking their fingers in their ears and singing “la la la I can’t hear you”.
Oh dear oh dear oh dear…
Joel: You know how to read. Please stop pretending you don’t, to support your argument. When reading, you read an entire sentence to determine its meaning. If you do so, you’ll realise that what I was suggesting as an example of how they could have phrased their criterion to mean what you wanted it to mean, makes perfect sense. It is a grammatically correct way for them to have expressed what you seem to wish they had expressed (only they didn’t write it).
You know that this is true, because I know you can read. This is evidenced by the fact that you respond to people when they address you with the written word. Hence you know that I’m right in what I’m saying, and your continued attempts to somehow escape from this situation are making you seem dishonest.
Bill Illis says:
Wow…Bill. The climate scientists never thought of that? Really? I’m dumbfounded.
Can, I ask you, how do you think they calculate how much the planet will heat up in response to a forcing if they don’t take into account that its emissions will increase as it heats up? In that case, what would stop it from just heating up forever?
Joel Shore (with increasing desperation) tries to pretend that sentences can’t be constructed like the example I showed him.
richardscourtney says:
What I said was: “Richard and Monckton would just claim that the scientists are altering their criterion in retrospect.” If you agree that we can ask the authors what they meant and if they say that they meant what I said then you would respect that and no longer make your false claims about what they said, then by all means, I would be most happy to give you an obsequious apology!! [But, I’m not holding my breath!]
richardscourtney says:
(1) No they wrote “The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more”. Just quoting part of it is just sophistry on your part.
(2) They are not meaningless. The actual realization of the global temperature has a certain trend. The 95% confidence interval gives us some idea of what sort of underlying trend that is given that the actual trend has both signal and noise. However, that does not mean that we cannot say what the actual trend is anymore than it is “meaningless” for me to say that I flipped a coin 10 times and got 7 heads.
(1) As in “When the black line descends below the red horizontal line at 1.0 on the vertical axis, people sometimes say that the Higgs Boson has been ruled out at 95% confidence level at this mass”? ( http://blog.vixra.org/2011/12/13/the-higgs-boson-live-from-cern/ ) Or, are you talking about a different “rule(d) out”?
(2) Do you care to enlighten us as to how the authors of the paper were able to state something that is inherently statistical with 100% certainty?
Are you hoping the friendly audience here won’t notice that you are avoiding addressing the actual points that I have made here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/01/encouraging-admission-of-lower-climate-sensitivity-by-a-hockey-team-scientist/#comment-1215586 Although I can understand your reticence to actual address them.
Graham W says:
The question is not whether they can be constructed in this way. The question is whether climate scientists are required to put parenthetical expressions before what they modify because if they put them after what they modify, people are free to misinterpret them as modifying the things AFTER the parenthetical expression if it best suits their purposes.
This just shows what scientists are up against when people are actively trying to misinterpret and distort what they have said. It is rather comical.
Inger E (norah4you)
That is the period after we humans started to use aerosoler effecting the Ozone layer. At first the ‘hole’ got wider and then after global forbidding of usage they are growing towards ‘normal’.
Hi Norah
Let me try and help you a bit. It looks to me you just started doing some research. If you want to look at how temperatures were in the past, you can look at these graphs. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/09/hockey-stick-observed-in-noaa-ice-core-data/
Thanks HenryP,
guess you haven’t been told that I have had access to correct temperatures and levels almost all my 63 year old life….. I grow up with them due to my father’s work. He was one of the four first to work full time with problems in water and air, chemical biological as well as temperature related problems(from 1954). I participated myself from I was 9 years old up to mid 1970’s as my father’s assistant in studies he made on spare time, for that’s what it took, in order to establish what then was called water and air quality as well as pollution. In order to do that temperature (on ground level, 1 m and 3 meter up as well on when ground was water up and down) had to be correct measured. Not only that the Ph-levels in all water had to be written down on all biological as well as chemical samples at samplings.
All samples for southern Sweden were analysed at a laboratory in Norrköping. Since the studies started before Sweden had an official laboratory to perform the quality tests and analysis, the laboratory was a private one. Anyhow, back 1995 I was asked to convey the results my father and other persons had from 1957 up to mid 1980’s to those so called experts who were to study on University level among other things such questions we are discussing. Correct figures as well as analysereports. I say so called experts. I don’t give a dime nor a nickel for those here. Reason? I was told that it was easier (?) calculating using interpolation and/or other methods than using correct figures…….. If you start with non-correct figures the results aren’t correct.
For oxon-hole problematic my father rised the question I am trying to explain why it’s necessary to look closer at the outflow from Earth after 1992-94. My father and others dicussed the question back in 74/75. Long before the problem was on the agenda around the world. A few years later I organized a weekend-conferenze in subject ‘Humanecology’ in Denmark. (I had participated in bring Humanecology to Sweden and introducing it as a subject for higher studies). Ph.Lic Björn Gillberg, a wellknown Swedish Environmental debater, was one of the lecturer. He and I had a long discussion over the problematic to establish if the expected changes in temperature on Earth due to different types of polution as well the changes in CO2 that Svante Arrhenius had calculated as a natural changes to be.
Thus I had to go back studying:
Arrhenius Svante, Naturens värmehushållning : Föredrag, Stockholm Norstedts 1896
Arrhenius Svante, Les atmosphères des planèts. : Conférence faite le 8 mars 1911.; Paris 1911
Arrhenius Svante, Klimatets växlingar i historisk tid, Stockholm 1915
Arrhenius Svante, Uber den Einfluss des atmosphärischen Kohlensäure-gehalts auf die Temperatur der Erdoberfläche. Stockholm, 1896. Bihang till K. Sv.Vet. akad. handl. Bd. 22: Afd.1: no 1.
Arrhenius Svante, Uber die Wärmaebsorption durch Kohlensäuer und ihren Einfluss auf die Temperatur der Erdoberfläche. Stockholm 1901 Vet. Akad. K. Sv., Öfversigt af förhandlingar. 58(1901): No 1: [4].
For me as a Systemprogrammer (my first exam) who studied Mathematic and Mathematical Statistic that was essential information to learn by heart and also analysing. At that time I was active Liberal.
When my best friend from High School started studying at Chalmers (he became Ph.D Theoretical Physic) I borrowed all books I could. One of my problems always been that I have a hunger to learn in order to understand. Thus I also had and still have the opportunity to discuss what I learnt so I don’t misinterpret or do other mistakes. One of my favorite during later years is String theory. I am not comfortable with Edward Witten’s Second Super String theory. When “placing” the types (I, IIA, IIB, HO och HE) together I feel it’s being squished in same way that some young girls are said to force their fot into to small shoes. Somethings missing and that something I spend some of my time resting (due to ache – artros) trying to find.
You and everyone else almost on a daily level use search programs which still have the same base as I wrote when I sold the first search program back in 1980. Only sold it for usage in Libraries and for such types of searching. Got very well paid back then.
Henry@Inger E (norah4you)
Sorry, I posted that first part before I had finished. Anyway, the ice core data give a good representation and first made me begin to doubt the influence of man made greenhouse gases (GHG’s). Namely if an increase in CO2 was the cause, one would expect to see a slowing of cooling in the atmosphere, ie. rising minima pushing up means. You must try to understand this here:
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2011/08/11/the-greenhouse-effect-and-the-principle-of-re-radiation-11-aug-2011/
If you can understand that lesson you are OK and you are on your way……the warming effect by GHG’s is caused by a slowing in cooling down.
My actual analysis of the results of 47 weather stations showed an increasing trend in the speed of warming of maxima, pushing up the mean. average temperature. The ratio maxima : means: mminima was 7:3:1. So, this first finding was exactly the opposite of what I had expected to find if there were case to be made for man made global warming (AGW).
I subsequently determined the speed of warming in degrees C or K/ annum versus time. And that is where this graph comes from.
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2012/10/02/best-sine-wave-fit-for-the-drop-in-global-maximum-temperatures/
I give myself a few years error either way, but, looking at energy-in (MAXIMA), my results seem to suggest that
1) global warming started around 1951 (when ozone started decreasing, both NH and SH)
2) global cooling started in 1995 (when ozone started increasing again, both NH and SH)
If we add 44 years to the 1994 we are in 2039 to observe the end of cooling.
But like I said, there could a few years error there.
Now, Trenberth (you will find out that we refer a lot to this guy) determined that of all that is being back radiated (back radiation to space =cooling), ozone accounts for about 25%. However, I think he forgot that not only ozone is manufactured from the sun’s E-UV but also a number of other HxOx and NOx compounds as well, and….. I suspect that they also back radiate, if there is more……
So, in conclusion, I think I have found a neat explanation for the 88 Gleissberg solar/weather cycle, namely it is the opening and closing of the ozone & others’ hole every 44 years so we always have 44 years of warming and 44 years of cooling – looking at energy-in. Remember energy-in is not exactly the same as energy-out =earth average temp. There maybe some plus or – minus lags, depending on quite a number of “earthly” factors.
So, it seems to me the idea that it was the CFC’s (or aerosols) destroying the ozone layer was also a red herring or it is an effect that is so small that it is probably completely inconsequential on the grand scale of earth’s climate. I found the same with the increase in carbon dioxide.
There really is little or no AGW …
Joel: What’s comical to everyone else is the way you keep trying to wriggle out of it. There is nowhere else for them to put that bracketed phrase, in that sentence, for it to apply to zero trends and only zero trends. It’s also (though this isn’t necessary to understand to be sure of how to read the sentence) more logical for the bracketed phrase to apply to the “zero trends” since “95% levels” are most typically associated with trends rather than numbers of times simulations come up with certain results.
It’s clear from the correct and only interpretation of the statement that 15-year or more periods of zero trends at the 95% level didn’t happen in the simulations.
COMEDY ALERT: PEOPLE WHO DON’T WANT A LAUGH SHOULD NOT READ THIS.
joeldshore:
I am replying to your farcical post at February 3, 2013 at 8:11 pm.
At February 3, 2013 at 2:10 pm YOU wrote
Please note this, Shore, YOU WROTE THAT, NOT ME.
At February 3, 2013 at 3:35 pm, I wrote to you and I quoted your words verbatim: I explained how and why those words from you are nonsensical. Your words which I quoted verbatim were
I repeat, those are YOUR WORDS, SHORE, quoted verbatim.
And I continued saying
But at February 3, 2013 at 8:11 pm you have replied saying
The words I addressed are YOURS which I quoted verbatim.
THE “SOPHISTRY” IS YOURS, NOT MINE!
Furthermore, you complain, “Just quoting part of it is just sophistry on your part” when YOU have only quoted “part of it”. In my post of which you say that, I quoted the entire sentence and explained why you don’t like it where I said
You are desperately trying to talk about anything except that discrepancy.
Shore, you are making as big a fool of yourself on this thread as you did on the other one.
You can continue to try to pretend the NOAA criterion says other than it does. But your irrational ravings are getting you nowhere.
You have now reached the stage of calling your own words “sophistry” and pretending they were said by somebody else. It is time for you to stop.
Richard
joeldshore says:
February 3, 2013 at 5:58 pm
Can, I ask you, how do you think they calculate how much the planet will heat up in response to a forcing if they don’t take into account that its emissions will increase as it heats up? In that case, what would stop it from just heating up forever?
————————————————
As far as I can tell, the only climate scientist who has ever talked about it is Trenberth who fixed the IPCC forcing chart for them by including a massive negative radiative feedback term in it (bigger than the positive feedbacks). He called it mysterious (the net imbalance term at the bottom is now 0.5 W/m2.
http://img638.imageshack.us/img638/8098/trenberthnetradiation.jpg
And then Church and White go through it here except they still find half of the energy still missing as a residua here. (I note Skeptical Science and Nuccitelli 2012 may great hay out of distorting what this paper was talking about).
http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/church_2011.jpg
http://igitur-archive.library.uu.nl/phys/2012-0229-200953/2011GL048794.pdf
And I keep their main chart, up-to-date here since pro-AGW people can only focus on the tiny energy accumulating and forget that 72% of it is actually missing/merely being emitted back to space at a faster rate than expected.
http://s14.postimage.org/r6gfdd9sx/Earth_s_Energy_Balance_Dec_12.png
http://s2.postimage.org/rbla65gvd/Fixed_Sk_S_Chart_Where_GW_Going_Dec_12.png
I’m just saying, maybe the science needs to start talking about increased OLR to space and/or start recognizing that it is much bigger than historically assumed in the theory (as silent as the theory is about the issue in public).
David Hoffer
thank you for raising the issue of averaging anomalies from very cold regimes with anomalies from very warm regimes – something that I have always found a bit bizarre. The other thing that amazes me is that a change in the mean can be caused by a number of differing factors – rising/falling highs, rising/falling lows both diurnally and seasonally. Is this how science is done?
Graham W says:
Putting it after “zero trends” rather than after “rule out” would be a start. Would it still be a little ambiguous? Yeah…but at least you would have an argument that they put it in a place where it is reasonable to read it as applying to zero trends. However, if they wanted to say what you think they wanted to say, what they should do is write a sentence like this: “The simulations rule out trends that are statistically-indistinguishable from zero at the 95% confidence level for 15 years or more.”
Furthermore, they should have actually added enough discussion so that one could plausibly understand how they got from what they described doing to their conclusion. (Right now, the discussion makes it quite clear how they got from what they describe to what I believe their conclusion to be but it is completely unclear how they got from what they describe to what you and Richard believe their conclusion to be. In fact, neither of you has even been able to come up with any sort of plausible argument for this.)
This is just idle assertion on your part…and an extremely incorrect assertion at that. A standard way that statistics is used to test a theory is to say, “Given the result that I have obtained, what is the probability that I could have gotten this result if Theory X were true?” That is done by computing the distribution of results you get if Theory X were true and comparing the result that you did get to that distribution in order to see how compatible or incompatible that result is with the theory.
Bill Illis says:
The Planck response is ALWAYS considered. If it weren’t, the answer to the question of climate sensitivity would be easy: the no-feedback sensitivity is infinite; if the net feedbacks are negative then you get a finite response and if they are positive, you got a runaway.
In most cases, climate scientists don’t call the Planck response a feedback because it is considered in the zeroth-order calculation, that is, they use it to compute the no-feedback sensitivity. However, a few consider it as a negative feedback, such as Dennis Hartmann in this book “Global Physical Climatology”. (And, under that interpretation, the argument is no longer whether net feedbacks are negative or positive…Everyone agrees that they are negative, but rather whether the net feedbacks are more negative or less negative than the Planck feedback alone.) Either way of doing things, of course, gives the same result.
The claim that climate scientists are not considering this is about the most bizarre statement I have ever seen from someone who claims to be at all conversant in the science.
davidmhoffer says:
You made an error, which I unfortunately did not notice and thus repeated myself in responding to you, in conflating NASA and NOAA. The climate report is from NOAA, not NASA. Completely different federal agencies.
Regardless, I find it strange that you expect that someone who has occasionally participated here is obliged to find, among the thousands of threads here, all errors that are made that have some relation to the agency that he works for (if it were true that he did work for NOAA, which he doesn’t) and hence that you are entitled to assume that if he hasn’t corrected something that appeared in a thread that, to my knowledge, he never even participated in, then you are entitled to assume that the claims made in that thread are correct.
I like Annan’s post, and the comments. He’s great at hedging his language. Some alarmist readers take the tact that skeptics assume that Annan is saying that CS is likely less than 2C when he is saying that CS less than 2C is more likely than CS greater than 4.5C. He’s basically saying that the low CS tail is the fat tail and the high CS tail is much thinner than though when the original CS range was given.
In a follow-up comment, he throws them a bone, saying the 3C expected CS is still perfectly reasonable. He continues on saying that at the time of the original range he set (before all the evidence that the high CS are much less likely), he gave 3C as the central value, but even at that time 2.5C would have been a better central value. 3C was chosen to be politically fashionable.
http://julesandjames.blogspot.com/2013/02/a-sensitive-matter.html?showComment=1359776188980#c4055746020692259831
“Yeah, I should probably have had a tl;dr version, which is that sensitivity is still about 3C.
The discerning reader will already have noted that my previous posts on the matter actually point to a value more likely on the low side of this rather than higher, and were I pressed for a more precise value, 2.5 might have been a better choice even then. But I’d rather be a little conservative than risk being too Pollyanna-ish about it.”
richardscourtney says:
Alas, the main source of comedy is how you are not only desperately avoiding dealing with my substantive points in this post http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/01/encouraging-admission-of-lower-climate-sensitivity-by-a-hockey-team-scientist/#comment-1215586 but are now avoiding this post http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/01/encouraging-admission-of-lower-climate-sensitivity-by-a-hockey-team-scientist/#comment-1215942 where I called your bluff.
Dolphinhead says
The other thing that amazes me is that a change in the mean can be caused by a number of differing factors – rising/falling highs, rising/falling lows both diurnally and seasonally. Is this how science is done?
Henry says
I am not a climate scientist
but I know something about stats and I figured out a few things while investigating climate science. If you are taking a sample of weather stations to tell you something about global trends:
1) make sure your sample is balanced by latitude
2) make sure your sample is balanced by 70/30 @sea /inland
3) you need a sample of at least 40-50 weather stations to give you a reasonable global result
4) avoid anglo saxon weather stations – they exhibit clear fiddling around and ‘re-adjusting” – like the station in Gibraltar that showed no correlation whatsoever with surrounding Spanish stations…
5) longitude does not matter because a) earth turns every 24 hours and b) if you are looking at average yearly maxima, means and minima, the seasonal variation in earth’s position versus the sun is also cancelled out.
6)Avoid weather stations with many missing data. It does not affect the randomness of your sample.
7) if you have a few gaps in the results from weather stations, don’t put in long term averages – which is the normal practice in stats. For example, if you have one particular month missing, from a particular weather station, say November 2005, rather look at the results for November for 2004 and November 2006 and take the average. Fill this in for November 2005. It looks like a simple thing, but if you are looking at temperature trends over time this type of detail is actually quite critical.
Hope this helps you a bit.
As I noted at Bishop Hill, it is worse than we thought….. Annan doesn’t only say a prominent climate scientist admitted to such deceit…. In a previous comment in 2010, Annan was a bit more specific that the person so proud to lie for such ‘expert’ surveys had in fact ‘openly advocated’ such behavior among climate scientists, i.e., had sought to persuade fellow scientists to do the same in order to ‘encourage action’…. such talk at a climate science conference is more than one more person’s admission of ‘Gleickian ethics’ …. AND Annan mentioned that said person is one of the Zickfeld 14:
James Annan, comments June 30 to July 2, 2010
[emphasis added]
….and then Annan also said this in the same comment thread:
[emphasis added]
So yes, Annan thinks the evidence is strong for around 3C of sensitivity, which will seem high to many here, BUT Annan also thinks there is overt deception going on in at least some claims for higher than 3C sensitivity, and knows it from personal testimony from one of the Zickfeld 14.
Not such a good statement for the integrity of Climate Scientists…. (did anyone object to the proposal to lie on such expert surveys?? Annan surely would have mentioned it if such a proposal had been vigorously denounced by others present)
aaron says
The discerning reader will already have noted that my previous posts on the matter actually point to a value more likely on the low side of this rather than higher, and were I pressed for a more precise value, 2.5 might have been a better choice even then. But I’d rather be a little conservative than risk being too Pollyanna-ish about it.
henry says\
I hope the discerning reader will have figured out by now that the value is close to zero.
The net effect of the Gleissberg solar/weather cycle over 88 years is also zero, you know….
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2012/10/02/best-sine-wave-fit-for-the-drop-in-global-maximum-temperatures/
Go figure.
Others, like Trenberth, have to tried to look directly at the incoming and outgoing radiation, but as he has noted, we can’t yet measure these precisely enough to directly measure the radiative imbalance.
C/second, and spectroscopy measures intensity on a granularity of perhaps milliseconds. So I’m wrong, not one part in a billion, less than one part in a trillion, and you’d have to measure it over the entire surface of the Earth to obtain the integrated, full spectrum power based on a full-surface signal at this precision.
, which in some spectral windows goes straight out to space without passing go, in others is absorbed by the optically opaque GHGs so that some of it is scattered back to the ground to act as further “gain” while the rest diffuses out (remaining in local thermal equilibrium with the atmosphere) to be lost from the upper troposphere at a much colder effective temperature than the ground.
We will never be able to measure these precisely enough to measure a radiative imbalance, because there isn’t any to measure, or if you prefer, signal to noise is maybe one part in a billion or even less. ,The Earth is an open thermodynamic system in quasi-equilibrium. On a daily basis inputs almost exactly equal outputs. If you take one whole degree C, spread out over a century (which is fermi estimate order of magnitude the rate of past and current warming), that is 0.1 C/decade, 0.01 C/year, 0.00003 C/day,
So if Trenberth has actually tried to look at incoming versus outgoing radiation to detect radiative imbalance then he’s an idiot who cannot do elementary arithmetic, because he might as well be trying to detect solar tidal forces acting on a thumbtack using his bathroom scale.
What can and has been done is the stuff in Petty’s book. TOA and BOA IR spectra (for the same location and same time) are compared — in the spectra one can clearly see the holes left by greenhouse gases at the TOA looking down, and at the BOA looking up you can equally clearly see the radiation in the spectral holes being scattered/reflected back down towards the ground. The GHE can then be inferred from a fairly complicated analysis of incoming radiation from the sun at the BOA (at a relatively high temperature, largely missing the GHG holes) being absorbed, heating the surface, which radiates according to SB proportional to
The ground is always chasing a shifting dynamic local “equilibrium” where warming and cooling by all channels balances. Radiation comes in, radiation goes out. Warm air flows in, cold air flows in. It rains, it doesn’t rain. On a second by second basis every square centimeter of surface is either receiving a bit more energy than it is losing or vice versa. The entire Earth itself is the only thermometer sensitive enough to measure the change in this, and then only when averaged over space and time on a decadal timescale, maybe. Even on a decadal timescale, even on a century timescale, the signal to noise problem remains. What part is natural variation? What part is a warming signal, but due to macroscopic processes known or unknown, such as variations and phase changes in the decadal oscillations, or the effects of volcanoes, or the variations in atmospheric ionic chemistry due to radiation modulation by the sun, or the variations due to orbital resonance and axial tilt or complex chaotic oceanic feedback loops with thousand year loop times?
The best that can be said is that we can reasonably expect roughly 1 C warming per doubling of CO_2 gas concentration in our atmosphere, an amount that can easily be overwhelmed by the clearly observable noise in the climate system in either direction, or either augmented or cancelled by feedbacks within the system.
IMO, the knee jerk assumption of net feedback for any quasi-stable system is negative. Otherwise the system would exhibit instability in its short term pattern of fluctuations and would be likely to shift, if possible, into a new state where it is negative. The Earth’s climate system is at least bistable, but there is little evidence for tristability with a far warmer stable phase over the entire Pliestocene, and there is good reason to believe that there is no third still warmer locally stable phase possible given the current configuration of the continents, the dynamic oceanic and atmospheric oscillations, and the Earth’s orbital parameters. The fact that the climate sensitivity (basically the feedback response) is plummeting as the current no-warming trend extends and sets fairly strict probable upper bounds on it is further direct evidence for this, although it is not yet conclusive as we don’t have enough decades of good data upon which to base any sound scientific conclusion as to the probable future evolution of the climate beyond the physics-supported null hypothesis.
What would that be? A probable 1 to 1.5 C total warming upon a doubling of CO_2 all things being equal, where we acknowledge that we do not know the climate sensitivity and expect to measure it over the next fifty years of good, satellite supported and ARGO supported observations. So we assume no feedback at all, either sign until we have far more knowledge than we do at this time.
After all, we don’t know whether or not even that “expected warming” will be canceled by even larger natural variations in e.g. albedo, or orbital factors, or solar factors, or other atmospheric chemistry factors. Or augmented. Or augmented by some, diminished by others. The Earth is capable of 8 to 10 C natural variations of temperature as it moves between at least two currently dominant phases in a hysteretic bistable loop, with natural variation of 2-3 C (easily) on a fluctuation timescale of decades to centuries within the locally stable phases themselves. The entire warming post LIA, including “anthropogenic” warming, is only roughly 1/4 to 1/3 the warm phase range of the Holocene, and leaves us solidly on the cold side of the mean Holocene temperature.
The null hypothesis is that we could therefore actually make it over the halfway point towards the warmer side of the temperatures that have dominated the planet for the last 11,000 years, perhaps taking us safely away from the 11,000 year minimum temperatures that the LIA represented, (tied with) the coldest eras of the entire interglacial post the Younger Dryas. Given a reasonable upper bound for the possible — not proven — value of the senstivity we might make it into the upper third of that range. Given a reasonable lower bound, we could still make it to the end of the century no warmer than or even cooler than it is today. And long before the end of the century, the human contribution to CO_2 levels in the atmosphere — levels that are highly debatable, as it is not at all clear that the Bern model is correct — will have substantially diminished, not because of “carbon futures” but because we will have worked out better ways of fueling civilization than burning chemically valuable and comparatively expensive hydrocarbons. LFTR, maybe fusion, solar photovoltaic, maybe something we cannot now imagine or anticipate.
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joeldshore;
You made an error, which I unfortunately did not notice and thus repeated myself in responding to you, in conflating NASA and NOAA. The climate report is from NOAA, not NASA. Completely different federal agencies.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Well if you want to get technical about it, he works for NASA/GISS, is deeply involved with climate modeling, and what I said was that if he wasn’t directly involved he was certainly conversant with the material and could easily have reached out to his colleagues for clarification.
You continue to nit pick rather irrelevant details, and the sentence says what it says, rather plainly in fact.
Dr Brown says
The best that can be said is that we can reasonably expect roughly 1 C warming per doubling of CO_2 gas concentration in our atmosphere,
Henry asks
based on what tests and measurements would that be, exactly?
(seeing as that I doubt it is even zero C)
I have found it hilarious reading Phillip’s and Joel’s attempts at damage control. Do they really believe anyone is going to accept their silly redefinitions?
First of all the context of Annan’s statements was clear when he stated “the stubborn refusal of the planet to warm as had been predicted”. He clearly is stating ne believes the sensitivity is lower than previously thought. Add that to his reference to “lies” and there can be no doubt what he meant. The idea that Joel and Phillip think they can redefine what is all to obvious is an example of their own bias. Why would he make these statements at all if his opinion hasn’t changed? Good grief, are you two complete morons?
It appears these guys cannot accept they may have been wrong. Their self esteem is in disarray. It is very telling from a psychological point of view. They are in full panic mode.
davidmhoffer: At -40, the upward flux from earth surface is about 167 w/m2
At +40, the upward flux from earth surface is about 544 w/m2
So, doubling of CO2 in cold regions/seasons can’t possibly have the same effect in w/m2 as it does in warm regions/seasons because there is a completely different amount of upward flux to work with. But wait.
In the tropics, at sea level, water vapour is as much as 40,000 ppm. In temperate zones less on average and in winter even less and in arctic zones even less and in deserts also less. Water vapour is also a ghg which has an absorption spectrum that overlaps with CO2 (I bet you knew that 😉 ) But ghg’s don’t work just one way. Since the bulk of the CO2 in the atmosphere is ABOVE the layer that has the bulk of the water vapour, downward LW generated by CO2 is in part absorbed and re-radiated back up by the water vapour close to earth surface.
Like you, I have tried to make the claim that changing CO2 and changing temps alter the heat fluxes differently from the way they have been modeled. Do you have references for the assertions above? I would appreciate it if you could supply them.