Guest post by John Kehr
With two completed months of the year there is starting to be discussion of how 2013 is shaping up for the annual anomaly. Several comments around the web have caught my attention as they demonstrate a basic misunderstanding of how the Earth’s climate is behaving. This is one of those articles that may seem OCD, but this one misunderstanding is what allows warmists to get away with as much as they do when it comes to climate.
I am going to pick on Anthony Watts and Roy Spencer for this one. The article in question was the one where Roy Spencer provided an update of the UAH anomaly. Here is a screen shot of the article.
From March 4th, 2013
The title states that there was a big drop in surface temperature in the month of February from ~ 0.5 to 0.2 °C. This is correct for the anomaly, but it has nothing to do with the Earth’s temperature. The reality is the Earth warmed up, but the anomaly dropped.
Let me explain. January is the coldest month of the year for the planet as a whole. Depending on the source, the average temperature is between 12.0 and 12.5 °C for the month. February is on average 0.18 °C warmer than January, also source dependent. Here is what the basic generic behavior of the Earth is on an annual basis.
Illustration 1: Annual Temperature of the Earth and the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. The average temperature of the Earth is different for each month of the year.
This is based on the average from the 1900-1990 data and I have used this extensively as the baseline behavior for the Earth today. Anomaly has no place on this chart because this shows the actual temperature of the Earth and each hemisphere. How the seasons affect the global average is readily apparent. To me it also shows how many factors can influence the global anomaly. January and February are perfect examples of this.
If I switch to Weatherbell I can show some cool graphics that they produce.
Here is January and February of 2013 from their site.
Notice that the Earth is about 0.25 °C warmer in February, but since it was closer to average the anomaly was much less. Climate scientists hate it when people show real temperature because it is impossible to see much warming when you look at the seasonal changes in the actual temperature.
Now for something interesting. In January the anomaly in the Arctic was well above average. By simple physics that meant the Arctic was losing energy to space at a much higher rate than average. Normally the Arctic is losing energy at a rate of 163 W/m^2. In January of 2013 it was losing energy at a rate of 173 W/m^2. That 6% increase in rate of energy loss meant that the Arctic ended up with a negative anomaly in February. The dramatic change in Arctic anomaly played a big role in the drop of the global anomaly in February.
The rate of energy loss is a self-correcting mechanism. Physics don’t allow it to operate in any other way. As a whole the Earth lost ~ 4 W/m^2 more than average over the entire surface in the month of January. Data for February is not yet available, but it will be close to average because the anomaly was closer to average. The higher rate of energy loss in January resulted in a more average February. That is how the climate operates.
Finally I have to get a dig in at CO2. In January of 2013 it was 395 ppm and in 1985 it was 50 points lower at 345 ppm. So despite the fact that CO2 was higher, the Earth was losing energy at a higher rate to space. CO2 was not blocking the energy from escaping despite all the claims that increased CO2 prevents heat from escaping the Earth. The Earth 30 years later was losing a significantly larger amount of energy to space than it was in the past.
Steven Mosher says:
March 6, 2013 at 10:05 pm
“2. C02 along with other gases ( including water vapor) SLOW the rate at which the earth loses
energy to space.”
Not precisely. You have to be careful how you characterize this, because it is a non-equilibrium system and dynamically evolving. But, insight can be gained by considering a system which is in equilibrium, and then undergoes a change of state. Hypothetically, if the system is in equilibrium with a particular concentration of CO2, and you add an additional amount then, under certain constraints, the rate of energy loss decreases. But, only temporarily before a new equilibrium is established. For an equilibrium to exist, rate-in must equal rate-out, and any net slowing can only be temporary.
“5. Radiating from a colder height means the loss rate is lower.”
This makes no sense. A photon of energy emitted from a CO2 molecule is a photon of energy emitted from a CO2 molecule – it has the same energy regardless of where it is released. You can attempt to argue that the blackbody radiation from the mass of CO2 is reduced, but that is at best 2nd order. The 1st order dynamic is radiation coming from the surface being absorbed and re-radiated. And, since the height of the surface does not change, the amount of radiation being absorbed and re-radiated does not change on this basis alone.
If the amount of CO2 increases then, up to a certain point, there are more interceptions of outbound surface photons and, at first glance, this should act to increase the equilibrium temperature of the Earth (more on how that happens in a moment). But, there are countervailing effects as well.
For example, beyond a particular optical depth, there is a point of diminishing returns and, indeed, a point of reversal at which the effect of an increase in the depth of the bulk CO2 layer must necessarily lead to cooling. If the mean altitude of the layer does not change more than the original depth of the layer, then there will be a smaller ratio of surface area radiating back to the planet to surface area radiating to space, and this can result in relative cooling. I realized this while commenting on Willis Eschenbach’s “Steel Greenhouse” thought experiment here.
Whether we are near a particular such point of diminshing returns or not, I do not know. But, I do know that the increase in CO2 over the past century has not produced any divergence in the pre-existing trend + ~60 year cycle evident in the temperature data. So, I do know that countervailing effects necessarily exist which are essentially canceling out the expected warming from added CO2.
“1. C02 does not prevent heat from escape the earth.”
That is, in fact, the greenhouse theory in a nutshell. CO2 prevents escape within particular bands, so the temperature of the surface has to increase until radiation in other bands reestablishes equilibrium with incoming solar radiation.
That is to say, OLR should decrease, while radiation in other bands increases so that equilibrium can be reestablished with a higher surface temperature.
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rgbatduke,
Your posts, for me, have not only an excellent learning potential. They also provide a guide for integrating the bits and pieces of climate science into a working adaptive context. Please continue participation in Anthony’s open and well moderated venue.
You have provided some food for those who argue that more CO2 can only cause increased surface temps. They are, perhaps, making the error of assuming a simplistic change in a single phenomena (CO2 conc) must only have a given simplistic net effect in a highly complex, non-linear and continuously dynamically agitated system (Total Earth-Atmospheric System).
With your comment I mix in that Lindzen has noted a problematic inconsistency between tropospheric temp data, global average surface data and the observed absence of GHE theory’s surface temperature amplification prediction. That is known as the CO2 Hotspot Paradox. So I suggest the idea of an alarming AGW from CO2 does not warrant even a rather moderate scientific weight wrt certainty.
John
I’d like to hear more about the energy loss rate to space, and more on by-hemisphere basis.
Can you graph a loss-rate/year?
And an explanation, again…..
Oh, great idea. Let’s stop removing the average annual cycle from the data. That way, those who believe in global warming can point to the 6 months of the year when temperatures are usually rising. And those who don’t believe in global warming can point to the other 6 months when temperatures are usually falling. Everyone will be happy…during their half a year anyway.
If only we climate scientists knew about annual cycles before this was just explained to us.
BobW in NC says:
March 7, 2013 at 7:42 am
Steve Mosher, rgb, et al:
CO2… this trace gas comprises ~395 ppm or 0.0395% of the atmosphere, and human activity is responsible for an estimated 3% to 4% (IPCC AR4 data I was directed to was 2.9%; don’t have that link, sorry) , or a total of ~12 ppm or 0.00012%. So, 96% to 97% of CO2 entering the atmosphere we have no control over.
I think we look a bit closer at your numbers we’ll find a flaw with your logic. If it’s true that only about 3% of atmospheric CO2 is human on origin then it must be because the rest has been re-absorbed by the biosphere as part of the carbon cycle. Thus a greater proportion of the ‘ natural’ CO2 remains resident in the atmosphere. It doesn’t really matter what the source of the CO2 is. The fact remains that adding ~7 Gt of carbon to the atmosphere each year by fossil fuel burning is resulting in a net increase of atmospheric CO2.
Temperature and Energy are two different things. I do not see how you can say there was greater heat loss just by looking at temperatures. The reason I say this is because the heat in water vapor dwarfs that in the dry air column. And we can have a tremendous dump of energy to space due to pacific storms hitting the west coast, but this usually means very mild weather for the plains, due to lee high pressure, driving the US temp anomaly up.
Energy loss rate to space is equal to what it is coming in. It can only not be equal when the planet is either heating up, or cooling down – and cooling down would imply that it was previously heated by some additional input of energy relative to what it currently had, because that is the only way to actually get a higher temperature – you need to absorb more energy (and CO2 doesn’t change that). Actual temperature oscillations on the Earth, heating up and cooling down, are caused by changes in the amount of energy being absorbed. Internal redistribution of energy can never cause a global temperature increase…for any substance in the universe.
So then with the bi-hemispherical reality of night and day, you have day heating up (emitting less energy than absorbed) and night cooling down (emitting more energy than absorbed). These balance out to equal the total energy absorbed over 24 hours, in terms of energy, which is a fundamental physical unit, but not in terms of kinetic temperature because the kinetic temperature is measured locally and so any kinetic temperature measurement is completely arbitrary and meaningless, in terms of global energy balance. The radiative energy output is equal to the radiative energy input and indicates an equivalent blackbody temperature of -18C, and this is what exists and is all fine and well. Kinetic temperature measurements will never correspond to that number because there is “no place” that a radiative -18C blackbody equivalent should correspond to and nor could that “place” be predicted — the entire ensemble of ocean surface + land surface (over two distinct hemispheres vertically and horizontally) plus the 3rd dimension of atmospheric altitude with its natural variation in kinetic temperature make the determination of an average kinetic temperature a physically meaningless concept. Kinetic temperature is a local measurement, not a global one. The global average kinetic temperature near the surface is arbitrary and physically non-existent in real-time – only sometimes might the local temperature pass through the average, and, in any case, the average temperature “near the ground” is an arbitrary location “place” to measure temperature and in no way should it be expected to equate to the blackbody temperature. The only valid global “temperature” is that indicated by the total output radiative energy, which as we know, is equal to the incoming energy, with an equivalent radiative temperature of -18C. There is no such thing as a global average kinetic temperature, *unless* that temperature IS known to be equal in all locations of an object; this obviously isn’t true for the Earth.
This is the best text I have on weather, energy, and climate. Recommend it highly. If you do not have it, you are missing out.
http://www.amazon.com/Dynamic-Analysis-Weather-Climate-Perturbations/dp/3642046797
From slide 14: http://www.aos.wisc.edu/~aos121br/radn/radn/sld014.htm
My points here are that this SIMPLE model assumes the CO2 represented by the a point ERL model is at one uniform temperature. If you “raise the ERL”, you effectively raise the CO2 cloud represented by that level, cooling part of it, and warming other parts. Most of the mass of the radiating portion is in the Stratosphere which doesn’t decrease in temperature and parts increase in temperature. So, again, looking at the miles-thick CO2 radiating portion of the atmosphere, simplified by a ERL point “centroid”, how much of that cloud drops in temp, how much remains constant, how much rises in temp? (See slide 13).
How much are you really raising the ERL? In feet per 10 ppm CO2? What is the average temperature change of that CO2 cloud across miles of upper troposphere and Stratosphere into space?
Not to get lost in the detail. My main point is that the heat flow at the ERL is not permanently reduced by new CO2.
“Earth surface + troposphere warms untill outgoing radiation from ERL balances incoming”
It is temporary, and if we look at the Land Surface + atmosphere estimate, the balance is restored quickly indeed. Night and Day plus seasons will swamp Ocean issues.
Sorry I didn’t get a chance to join the discussion earlier. I can’t respond to everything, but some general themes I can.
The temperature of the Earth determines the rate of energy loss to space as I have discussed here:
Temperature Dependence of the Earth’s Outgoing Energy
OLR data is once again available
I have lots of hemispheric analysis I have not posted, but I could do that in the future.
The Greenhouse Effect is discussed more here. It is not the GHE itself that is problematic, just the cause of the GHE that I argue about.
Seasonal Variation of the Greenhouse Effect
The book has far, far more on the cause of the GHE.
For more discussion on the difference between global temperature and anomaly, read here:
2011 Global Temperature and Anomaly
If you have other questions, I have lots of articles over at my site which is of course:
The Inconvenient Skeptic
Doug Proctor says:
March 7, 2013 at 11:59 am
Go to this page and read the explanation of what I did, and this page for updated charts.
While it’s based on temp, that is no different that what AGW is based on, and you can turn that into blackbody radiation.
I know there isn’t enough data to be sure but I notice from Dr Spencer’s graph that after solar maximum years there is a 2,5 year rise in temperatures.
1979 +0.4ºC over 2 years. (Could have been more over 2.5 years.)
1989 +0.7ºC over next 2.5 years
2000 +0.65ºC over next 2.5 years
2011 +0.45ºC so far
Joseph E. Posma: Note that I did not say that absorption and emission spectra were invented by models,
Indeed, you did not specify what parts of the model were “invented”.
John Finn says:
March 7, 2013 at 12:23 pm
“The fact remains that adding ~7 Gt of carbon to the atmosphere each year by fossil fuel burning is resulting in a net increase of atmospheric CO2.”
This is specious reasoning – a throwback to the “mass balance” argument which has been extensively debunked. You are not thinking of this properly as a continuous flow problem with dynamic feedback. CO2 is constantly coming in, and being removed. But, the rate at which it comes in and that at which is goes out are not necessarily the same, and the differential is temperature dependent.
That leads to a model of CO2 in the atmosphere as an affine function of temperature modulating the rate of change, the dynamics of which are captured in the differential equation
dCO2/dt = k*(T – To)
And, lo and behold, when we look at the data, this is exactly the relationship we see.
There is no room for significant human forcing in this relationship – it would excessively skew the observed curvature in the CO2 measurements. Conclusion: human inputs are a small part of gross flows, have little overall effect, and are rapidly sequestered. You do not even have to incorporate them into the model to get a high fidelity estimate of atmospheric CO2 in the last 55 years – all you need is the starting concentration, and the temperature record.
NOTE: Shouldn’t we be giving the effect of our atmosphere on surface temps the name Planetary Atmosphere Effect (PAE) and not the misleading GHE? The CO2 is just one of numerous components of the PAE and CO2 reasonably appears to be a lower order of magnitude component.
John Nielsen-Gammon says so, and I agree. The point is that atmospheric chemistry is complex and multidimensional. Its not even particularly clear that one should stop at “atmosphere” in the case of the Earth, because I somehow suspect that the 70% of the Earth’s surface that is ocean has more than a little effect on its global climate compared to, say, Venus or Mars or Jupiter. Water is really pretty amazing stuff and our atmosphere without ocean underneath would have a completely, totally, incalculably different mean temperature.
rgb
@rgbatduke you spent a lot of words to excuse nonsense. And you did it by spouting nonsense of your own. In your example, the greenhouse gas layer does not create warmth. The warmth is caused by the continual input of heat from a heat source (the sun).
There, fixed that for ya.
I repeat — it is an absolutely trivial exercise in elementary thermodynamics to show that in an open system receiving radiant or otherwise energy from some source and radiating it away to a remote cold reservoir, the interpolation of any sort of radiatively coupled layer will raise that temperature of the system. When you heat a system at a more or less fixed rate, and then slow its cooling, the system warms. If you reduce the rate of heating while keeping the rate/mechanism of cooling the same, you cool it.
The point you seem stubbornly determined to miss is that the Earth receives heat from the Sun (just as the body is heated by burning e.g. sugars). The Earth cools by radiating energy away to a 3 K blackbody “almost perfect absorber”, outer space. If you interrupt the radiative heat flow by any mechanism you like between the constantly warmed body and its cooling cold reservoir, you effectively shift the baseline temperature wherein the input heat is balanced by the outflow to warmer. I won’t even bother with the usual trivial everyday examples like insulating an attic or installing heat-reflective glass windows, because if you use the word “nonsense” in your reply above, you are already obviously incapable of differentiating the similarities and differences between various forms of heat transport between a heated reservoir and a cold reservoir.
Personally, of course, I plan to keep wearing jackets when it is cold outside, because given my baseline metabolism and the outside temperature, slowing heat flow between my skin and the great outdoors maintains my skin at a much more comfortable, warmer temperature. Nor does it matter if the slowing is performed by interrupting convection, conduction, or radiation. All three convey heat from the hot reservoir to the cold one, and slowing rates in any of the three will raise the temperature in the hot reservoir relative to the cold one when the hot reservoir receives a more or less steady inflow of heat.
rgb
If you take a warm object into your air-conditioned home from outside, the object will cool until its temperature matches the environment of your house. The rate of cooling is constantly slowing as delta T trends to zero. But it will never warm as long as the environmental temperature remains constant.
For about the umptieth time, this is an utterly false analogy. You are not taking the Earth as a passive entity from one place to another. The Earth is actively and regularly heated by the Sun. It cools at a rate that is monotonically related to its mean temperture so that — given some resistance to the flow of heat it warms until a dynamical equilibrium is established, with heat in equaling heat out.
If you change the resistance of the flow of heat between the system and the cold reservoir, the system must warm or cool (for increases or decreases in that resistance, respectively) until dynamic equilibrium is once again established.
Please, then, do not confound modulation of the rate of energy flow in an open system (leading to heating or cooling of that system) with false analogies drawn from passive cooling of unheated objects.
rgb
rgbatduke says:
March 7, 2013 at 1:53 pm
Nor does it matter if the slowing is performed by interrupting convection, conduction, or radiation. All three convey heat from the hot reservoir to the cold one, and slowing rates in any of the three will raise the temperature in the hot reservoir relative to the cold one when the hot reservoir receives a more or less steady inflow of heat.
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How ironic it would be if wind turbines caused warming by interrupting convection !!
Bodies that have kinetic energy also radiate in LWR and it is the LWR that carries the energy. Remember I said when a molecule absorbs radiation it tries to almost immediately re-emit that wave length away, In doing so it vibrates or flexes and it is at that moment its component parts have velocity. If it connects with another gas molecule it will lose some of its radiative energy because it has lost it in the collision. So what is happening in the flasks vacuum is the wave is carrying some energy away from the core. It is not heat but it is energy. It only converts to heat when it hits the outer skin of the flask and excites the molecules that make up the outer wall.
Bart says:
March 7, 2013 at 1:21 pm
John Finn says:
March 7, 2013 at 12:23 pm
“The fact remains that adding ~7 Gt of carbon to the atmosphere each year by fossil fuel burning is resulting in a net increase of atmospheric CO2.”
This is specious reasoning – a throwback to the “mass balance” argument which has been extensively debunked.
Actually it hasn’t, you keep putting up a bogus model which has no resemblance to reality, that is not debunking.
philincalifornia says:
March 7, 2013 at 2:29 pm
Are you referring to this?
Interesting..sometimes entertaining and easy for a packaging salesman to lose the plot…except one thing…
They still cannot find the Troposphere hotspot.
I believe the AO and the AMO are turning negative. That means the temperatures are going to plummet around the world which will bring another Maunder or Dalton Minimum if were lucky because the Maunder Minimum will be very nasty for the northern hemisphere.
John Finn says:
March 7, 2013 at 12:23 pm
The fact remains that adding ~7 Gt of carbon to the atmosphere each year by fossil fuel burning is resulting in a net increase of atmospheric CO2
================
When you look at all the reservoirs for carbon, I seriously doubt it…
…just plants (land and aquatic) would swamp that in a heart beat
bacteria would make it all look silly
John Manville, Please be quiet. I think you are troll out to make other skeptics look like complete morons. Of course CO2 and water vapor are green house gases. Anthony has run several articles explaining it.