Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
The CERES dataset contains three main parts—downwelling solar radiation, upwelling solar radiation, and upwelling longwave radiation. With the exception of leap-year variations, the solar dataset does not change from year to year over a few decades at least. It is fixed by unchanging physical laws.
The upwelling longwave radiation and the reflected solar radiation, on the other hand, are under no such restrictions. This gives us the opportunity to see distinguish between my hypothesis that the system responds in such a way as to counteract changes in forcing, and the consensus view that the system responds to changes in forcing by changing the surface temperature.
In the consensus view, the system works as follows. At equilibrium, what is emitted by the earth has to equal the incoming radiation, 340 watts per metre squared (W/m2). Of this, about 100 W/m2 are reflected solar shortwave radiation (which I’ll call “SW” for “shortwave”), and 240 W/m2 of which are upwelling longwave (thermal infrared) radiation (which I’ll call “LW”).
In the consensus view, the system works as follows. When the GHGs increase, the TOA upwelling longwave (LW) radiation decreases because more LW is absorbed. In response, the entire system warms until the longwave gets back to its previous value, 240 W/m2. That plus the 100 W/m2 of reflected solar shortwave radiation (SR) equals the incoming 340 W/m2, and so the equilibrium is restored.
In my view, on the other hand, the system works as follows. When the GHGs increase, the TOA upwelling longwave radiation decreases because more is absorbed. In response, the albedo increases proportionately, increases the SR. This counteracts the decrease in upwelling LW, and leaves the surface temperature unchanged. This is a great simplification, but sufficient for this discussion. Figure 1 shows the difference between the two views, my view and the consensus view.
Figure 1. What happens as a result of increased absorption of longwave (LW) by greenhouse gases (GHGs), in the consensus view and in my view. “SW” is reflected solar (shortwave) radiation, LW is upwelling longwave radiation, and “surface” is upwelling longwave radiation from the surface.
So what should we expect to find if we look at a map of the correlation (gridcell by gridcell) between SW and LW? Will the correlation be generally negative, as my view suggests, a situation where when the SW goes up the LW goes down?
Or will it be positive, both going either up or down at the same time? Or will the two be somewhat disconnected from each other, with low correlation in either direction, as is suggested by the consensus view? I ask because I was surprised by what I found.
The figure below shows the answer to the question regarding the correlation of the SW and the LW …
Figure 2. Correlation of the month-by-month gridcell values of reflected solar shortwave radiation, and thermal longwave radiation. The dark blue line outlines areas with strong negative correlation (more negative than – 0.5). These are areas where an increase in one kind of upwelling radiation is counteracted by a proportionate decrease in the other kind of upwelling radiation.
How about that? There are only a few tiny areas where the correlation is positive. Everywhere else the correlation is negative, and over much of the tropics and the northern hemisphere the correlation is more negative than – 0.5.
Note that in much of the critical tropical regions, increases in LW are strongly counteracted by decreases in SW, and vice versa.
Let me repeat an earlier comment and graphic in this regard. The amounts of reflected solar (100 W/m2) and upwelling longwave (240 W/m2) are quite different. Despite that, however, the variations in SW and LW are quite similar, both globally and in each hemisphere individually.
Figure 3. Variations in the global monthly area-weighted averages of LW and SW after the removal of the seasonal signal.
This close correspondence in the size of the response supports the idea that the two are reacting to each other.
Anyhow, that’s today’s news from CERES … the longwave and the reflected shortwave is strongly negatively correlated, and averages -0.65 globally. This strongly supports my theory that the earth has a strong active thermoregulation system which functions in part by adjusting the albedo (through the regulation of daily tropical cloud onset time) to maintain the earth within a narrow (± 0.3°C over the 20th century) temperature range.
w.
As with my last post, the code for this post is available as a separate file, which calls on both the associated files (data and functions). The code for this post itself only contains a grand total of seven lines …
Data (in R format, 220 megabytes)
I wish someone would address Tim Groves’ comment of 1/7/14 11:41pm. I too see it as just logic that CO2 would block incoming LW just exactly as it blocks “upwelling” LW. Please advise?
Willis:
You say: “So I fear to say, the “critical factor” as you call it is not the amount of sunlight intercepted by dust.”
I cited insolation-reducing dust only as an example of a factor aloft. Although it does reduce daytime surface temperatures when encountered, nowhere did I refer to it as a CRITICAL factor on any climatic time-scale.
We have three measured quantities, energy incident on the earth from the sun (downwelling solar= constant= 340 w/m2) , visible wavelength energy reflected (upwelling solar ), and upwelling LWIR. Since for equilibrium, downwelling solar= upwelling solar + upwelling LWIR, and since downwelling solar is constant, the upwelling components must be negatively correlated; that is when one goes up the other must go down. Not surprising that the data show this.
However, this says nothing about the average surface temperature of the earth or global warming. The greenhouse effect is real—- have you not noticed the temperature of your car when you leave the windows up on a sunny day. I believe, however, the greenhouse effect of increasing CO2 in the atmosphere is insignificant — generally agreed to be only about 1 deg K with a doubling of CO2.
Greg Goodman says: January 8, 2014 at 3:31 pm
“Nick , in what way is SW + LW – SW correlated to SW ?”
By arithmetic. If LW=measured Tot – measured SW, and you correlate LW with SW, you’re measuring how changes in SW match changes in LW. But if SW rises by 1 unit, for whatever reason, , that guarantees a drop component of 1 unit in LW, to which is added a statistical change in Tot. That guaranteed component (via -SW) weighs heavily and artificially in the correlation.
I’ve emphasised that TOT is subjected to a global energy constraint. But even if it weren’t, it’s the arithmetic link between “LW” and SW which makes correlation with SW unwise.
No interest in playing referee here, but I don’t quite understand this. Suppose we measure an aggregate quantity. Total income of humans in various geographic cells. We also measure the total income of women in those same geographic cells in a separate measurement (we can imagine both are measured to reasonable precision by independent sampling). We can then infer the total income of men by subtracting the total income of women from the total income. This measurement/inference is, no doubt, less precise than either the measurement of total income or the measurement of the income of women, but I see no justification for an assertion that the correlation between women’s income and men’s income will be negative as an artifact of the measuring process. Especially when it is not, in fact, uniformly negative on the sample space.
So you’ll have to explain this. Lower precision, sure. But since the total energy per cell is not constrained to any particular value, I’m not sure that I agree with your assertion that there is a necessary, or even probable, anticorrelation.
Non-climate example, please?
rgb
Another excellent article. Thanks Willis! 🙂
Willis’ hypothesis and that also of Bill Illis and others of negative thermal feedback by cloud SW albedo is strongly supported by the negative correlation nicely shown by CERES exactly where it would be expected, i.e. the equatorial oceans.
There are a couple of factors that make me feel that there may be additional LW negative feedback:
1. One classic aspect of AGW theory is that CO2 cools the stratosphere decreasing the LW emission height. But a decreased emission height must also mean an emission height with a higher density of air molecules meaning, in turn, increased LW emission.
2. Turbulence and surface area – this is an argument from geometry. It has been stated upthread that both radiative and convective heat transfer in the atmosphere depend on temperature gradient. They must equally depend on the surface area over which this temperature gradient exists. What is this surface area? Is it just assumed to be 4 pi r sqrd at the emission height? This would be wrong if the surface with gradient (boundary between warm and cold) is complex – folded and crinkly – rather than smooth.
Two things will increase the surface area of the emission surface: (1) increased heat input to the atmosphere from CO2 IR will increase turbulence, increasing the emission surface area; (2) decreasing the emission height to a lower altitude that will also be more turbulent, will also increase the emission surface area.
Thus there may be LW as well as SW negative feedback in response to CO2 atmospheric warming.
Wikipedia:
“…The total amount of energy received at ground level from the sun at the zenith is 1004 watts per square meter, which is composed of 527 watts of infrared radiation, 445 watts of visible light, and 32 watts of ultraviolet radiation. At the top of the atmosphere sunlight is about 30% more intense, with more than three times the fraction of ultraviolet (UV), with most of the extra UV consisting of biologically-damaging shortwave ultraviolet.[3][4][5]…”
You state:
“…the incoming radiation, 340 watts per metre squared (W/m2)…”
Can you explain to an ignorant where the difference comes from?
Greg Goodman says:
January 8, 2014 at 1:17 pm
Phil says: “Each droplet in the cloud will absorb ~100% of the incident light and also scatter an equal amount of the incident light.”
I don’t know what you though you were saying but that is patent nonsense, you can not both absorb and scatter 100% of anything.
Actually you do, it is the Fraunhofer limit of particle size large wrt the wavelength scattering is equal to absorption and the extinction coefficient is equal to 2.0. You should have read the material I referred you to.
Neither have you understood the pdf that you refer me to.
I certainly did I’ve written something similar about 20 times in publications on the subject!
It’s not difficult when it opens with:
“For particles much larger than the wavelength of the incident light, the scattering efficiency approaches 2. That is, a large particle removes from the beam twice the amount of light intercepted by its geometric cross-sectional area. What is the explanation for this paradox?”
One thing I have done in the past is worked on numerical modelling of scattering of E-M radiation by atmospheric aerosols, rain, hail, sleet and slightly melted hail with a liquid surface….. heavy rain light rain, mixed rain with various models of raindrop size distribution, etc, etc. Our results were within 10% of empirically measured results.
But you don’t need professional experience to realise you can’t have your cake and scatter it.
Apparently you do and I guess mine trumps yours.
Robert Clemenzi says:
January 8, 2014 at 1:22 pm
Phil. says:
January 8, 2014 at 7:54 am
“Not correct because the emission by the CO2 is not immediate and is orders of magnitude slower than loss of energy by collisions to surrounding molecules when in the lower troposphere. In that region of the atmosphere CO2 always absorbs more than it emits.”
Whether or not the emission is immediate is not relevant. Over land, it is fairly common for the atmosphere to be warmer than the surface. As a result, when there is a temperature inversion, CO2 emits more IR radiation than it absorbs.
It’s very relevant because the energy absorbed by the CO2 molecule remains in an excited state for long enough for it to be deactivated collisionally and that is the primary mode of energy transfer from the excited molecule in the lower atmosphere. CO2 does not emit more IR radiation than it absorbs.
michael hammer says:
January 8, 2014 at 1:26 pm
—————————————
Michael,
in your 2013 analysis of OLR at Jennifer Marohasy’s site you concluded –
“The last 30 years of NOAA data is not compatible with the theory
of AGW. It would appear that either 30 years of NOAA data is wrong or the theory of AGW
is very severely flawed.”
I would point out that while inconsistent with AGW pseudo science, your analysis is entirely consistent with my claim that adding radiative gases to the atmosphere will not reduce the atmospheres radiative cooling ability and that the net effect of radiative gases in our atmosphere is radiative cooling at all concentrations above 0.0ppm.
1. The net effect of the atmosphere on the oceans is cooling.
2. The only effective cooling mechanism for the atmosphere is LWIR to space from radiative gases.
It really is that simple. AGW is a physical impossibility.
Willis Eschenbach says:
January 8, 2014 at 3:01 pm
Nick Stokes says:
January 8, 2014 at 1:56 pm
Willis Eschenbach says: January 8, 2014 at 10:35 am
“Huh? Typo on your part? You can’t both scatter and absorb 100%.”
Not perfectly expressed, but the idea is right.
Nick, Phil claimed that clouds absorbed and scattered 100% of the light.
No Willis, I said that the droplets in the cloud scattered an equal amount of light to that absorbed, this is a fact. Intuition by the lay man doesn’t always get the right answer, particularly when quantum effects are involved. In fact while Q=2 is true for particles large wrt the wavelength for particles approximately equal to the wavelength it can be as high as 4. The light that is passing close to the drop has no waves downstream to interact with (because of absorption) and is scattered as a result.
Nick seems to be assuming that Total radiation is constant, in which case the correlation of SW with LW would be exactly -1 everywhere and always.
It’s not, because it’s not.
Phil. says:
January 8, 2014 at 5:39 pm
“CO2 does not emit more IR radiation than it absorbs.”
———————————-
Perhaps you might reconsider that claim.
The atmosphere is heated by –
-directly intercepted solar radiation
-intercepted outgoing LWIR from the surface
-surface conduction
-release of latent heat
However there is only one effective cooling mechanism for the atmosphere –
-LWIR to space from radiative gases
From the mid to upper troposphere radiative gases are emitting TWICE the energy to space than both the net flux of IR into the atmosphere and intercepted solar radiation combined.
CO2 is not just emitting to space energy it acquires by intercepting radiation, but also energy it acquires conductively.
Konrad:
You’re taking a simple argument regarding radiative gases a bridge too far. ALL matter above zero Kelvin emits some radiation in the EM spectrum. This includes the nominally “inert” components of air: nitrogen, argon and oxygen. These bulk components are heated from below by conduction and convective eddy diffusion, as well as by molecular collisions with LWIR absorbent components. Adding radiative trace gases or–far more importantly–water vapor to the atmosphere does retard the radiative cooling of the surface by the corresponding back-radiated amount. It is the interplay of all these factors, along with cloud formation and dissipation, that makes the problem far more complex than you allow.
timetochooseagain says: January 8, 2014 at 5:59 pm
“Nick seems to be assuming that Total radiation is constant, in which case the correlation of SW with LW would be exactly -1 everywhere and always.”
That’s the extreme. But short of that, the fact that LW has an arithmetical component of SW is a strong push toward negative correlation. See next.
rgbatduke says: January 8, 2014 at 4:55 pm
“I’m not sure that I agree with your assertion that there is a necessary, or even probable, anticorrelation.
Non-climate example, please?”
Two coins, A and B. Score 1 for heads, 0 for tails. After many simultaneous tosses, you find near zero correlation.
Now correlate A with C=B-A. Correlation coef about -1/sqrt(2). But nothing is physically correlated. It’s just the arithmetic.
@Nick Stokes-
If:
T = S + L
then making a linear model for S based on L if T is constant results, of course, in;
L = -1*S + C where C is a constant
Therefore deviations of the coefficient from -1 are indications that T is not constant.
But it appears to me that Willis’s hypothesis is equivalent to the idea that T should be approximately constant. If T was *so* inconstant as to make the correlation between S and L near zero, this would probably be evidence against Willis’s hypothesis. To the extent that the correlation deviates little from -1 it would tentatively constitute support for Willis’s hypothesis.
If the correlation had been -1 everywhere and always that would have been definitive proof of his hypothesis.
1sky1 says:
January 8, 2014 at 6:46 pm
—————————————————-
I would agree with much of what you have written.
“ALL matter above zero Kelvin emits some radiation in the EM spectrum. This includes the nominally “inert” components of air: nitrogen, argon and oxygen.”
Correct, and more important than most realise. If you remove strongly radiative gases from the atmosphere, air masses at altitude could no longer lose energy, buoyancy and subside. Full convective circulation in the Hadley Ferrel and Polar cell would then stall. The poorly radiative gases stagnated at altitude would then be subject to radiative superheating, just as in the thermosphere.
“These bulk components are heated from below by conduction and convective eddy diffusion, as well as by molecular collisions with LWIR absorbent components.”
You should also add that radiative gases are also absorbing energy by conductive contact with other gases that they then radiate to space .
“Adding radiative trace gases or–far more importantly–water vapour to the atmosphere does retard the radiative cooling of the surface by the corresponding back-radiated amount.”
Only 29% correct. Downwelling LWIR has no real effect over the oceans. Incident LWIR can neither heat nor slow the cooling rate of water that is free to evaporatively cool.
“It is the interplay of all these factors, along with cloud formation and dissipation, that makes the problem far more complex than you allow.”
The problem is far simpler than you would ever believe 😉
Climate pseudo scientists calculated the black body surface Tav for an earth without an atmosphere as -18C then claimed a radiative greenhouse effect would raise this to the observed 15C surface Tav. But the ocean is a fluid body in a gravity field, and SB equations alone cannot derive its temperature profile.
Without an atmosphere our oceans would boil into the vacuum of space. However imagine a force field retaining them in the absence of an atmosphere. Now the ocean can be heated at depth by SW and only cool by outgoing LWIR from the surface. A desert may have a Tav of -18C without an atmosphere, but would this hold true for the oceans? Would they freeze over as climate scientists claim? If you have some “dark money” or a spare “big oil cheque” you can build an experiment to check this claim.
http://i42.tinypic.com/315nbdl.jpg
This experiment prevents evaporative cooling and almost prevents conductive cooling of a water sample heated below the surface by an intermittent high power SW source. LWIR back radiating onto the surface is virtually eliminated.
1sky1,
With a starting temperature of 15C, will the water sample freeze or will it reach around 80C?
If the sample heats to near 80C then AGW is a physical impossibility. The net effect of the atmosphere would then be surface cooling and the only effective cooling mechanism for the atmosphere is radiative gases.
What do you think the water sample will do?
Willis Eschenbach says:
January 8, 2014 at 2:51 pm
The CERES data doesn’t measure total radiation. It only measures gridcell by gridcell radiation. And that data is not constrained in the slightest, as I pointed out.
According to CERES that’s exactly what they do!
“Each CERES instrument measures filtered radiances in the shortwave (SW; wavelengths between 0.3 and 5 μm), total (TOT; wavelengths between 0.3 and 200 μm), and window (WN; wavelengths between 8 and 12 μm) regions. To correct for the imperfect spectral response of the instrument, the filtered radiances are converted to unfiltered reflected solar, unfiltered emitted terrestrial longwave (LW) and window (WN) radiances (Loeb et al. 2001). Since there is no LW channel on CERES, LW daytime radiances are determined from the difference between the TOT and SW channel radiances.”
The calculation is as Nick pointed out as you can see above.
http://ceres.larc.nasa.gov/documents/cmip5-data/Tech-Note_CERES-EBAF-Surface_L3B_Ed2-7.pdf
Konrad 7:48pm: “Climate pseudo scientists calculated the black body surface Tav for an earth without an atmosphere as -18C.”
Not without an atm.; simply theoretically reduced existing atm. global emissivity from ~0.79 to near 0, water and solid surface emissivity & net solar held steady.
Trick says:
January 8, 2014 at 8:33 pm
————————————–
Trick,
please have a look at the experiment linked give me your clear and direct answer –
http://i42.tinypic.com/315nbdl.jpg
With a starting temperature of 15C –
A. will the water sample freeze?
B. will it reach around 80C?
Can you even answer A or B?
Will it be the usual round of nit picking hand-waving and bafflegab?
Do I need an ISO certified kitchen with brushed stainless German tap-ware to run this one?
You can’t answer because I haven’t properly defined the unicorn/rainbow ratio?
What will be you glorious excuse for being unable/unwilling to answer this time…
“Scientists may be wrong, and often are. But when you think you’ve uncovered a “major error”, something really obvious, well, you should check your facts very carefully before uncapping your electronic pen ”
The irony burns.
Nick Stokes says:
January 8, 2014 at 7:06 pm
I see the problem. You’ve assumed that the measurement creates the reality. In your example, you are assuming that the underlying physical relationship is that the independent variables are variable A, AND THE TOTAL B, with the other variable C=B-A dependent on the other two.
But in the real world, it works the other way around. In the real world if A is one independent variable and C is the other independent variable (as in your example), then the causation runs the other direction. C is not defined as B-A, it has independent physical identity as does the variable A. As a result, rather than C = B-A being the governing equation, the physical reality is that the total B = A + C. In other words, the physical reality is that the total is the sum of the parts.
As a result, the relationship between A and B is not changed by the way it is measured. If the two underlying physical phenomena were 100% correlated before the measurement, they will be 100% correlated after the measurement.
And if they were totally uncorrelated before we started they will be uncorrelated thereafter.
As an example, suppose two people step on a scale together. They weigh 280 pounds. Then we weigh one person and they weigh 160 pounds. From this, we conclude that the other one weighs 120 pounds.
If we do this a thousand times, will we find that the weights of the two people are correlated with a value of -1/sqrt(2)?
Absolutely not. If the peoples weights were correlated before weighing them, they will be correlated after we do the C=B-A calculation to figure both weights.
And if they were not correlated before weighing they won’t be correlated after the measurement.
The key issue is that the total is the mathematical sum of two physical measurements, which may or may not be correlated. The fact that if we know one variable and we know the total we can calculate the value of the other variable does NOT mean that that the two variables are therefore correlated.
w.
Greg Goodman says:
January 8, 2014 at 3:36 pm
” I’m just noting what the formula says.”
the formula says 50%=50% not 100%+100% . What Phil said was confused and wrong. If he had said 50% absorbed and as much scattered, no one would have commented. It would have been correct but irrelevant.
I tried to point out his error in a light-hearted way but he didn’t get it. Too subtle I suppose. Can we drop that now?
No because you’re wrong, in the case referred to above to which I replied, for an absorbent drop all the incident light on the drop is absorbed, additionally an equal amount of light is scattered resulting in twice the incident light being removed from the beam. This is correctly stated in the reference I cited:
“For particles much larger than the wavelength of the incident light, the scattering efficiency approaches 2. That is, a large particle removes from the beam twice the amount of light intercepted by its geometric cross-sectional area. What is the explanation for this paradox?”
The error is yours, do yourself a favor and actually read the material I cited.
As I pointed out in my reply to Willis under conditions of anomalous diffraction the number can be as high as 4 times the incident light.
Konrad 8:44pm: “What will be you glorious excuse for being unable/unwilling to answer this time…”
Not glorious. Just the ordinary CERES observations of LWIR data posted and discussed by Willis show your small experiments don’t resolve for the earth system at large. In the past, I’ve responded with links to papers and texts showing you the physical reasons.