Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the bureaucratic agency which appropriated the role of arbiter of things climatic, has advanced a theory for the lack of warming since the turn of the century, viz:
The observed reduction in warming trend over the period 1998–2012 as compared to the period 1951–2012, is due in roughly equal measure to a cooling contribution from internal variability and a reduced trend in radiative forcing (medium confidence). The reduced trend in radiative forcing is primarily due to volcanic eruptions and the downward phase of the current solar cycle. However, there is low confidence in quantifying the role of changes in radiative forcing in causing this reduced warming trend.
So I thought I’d look at the CERES dataset, and see what it has to say. I started with the surface temperature question. CERES contains a calculated surface dataset that covers twelve years. But in the process, I got surprised by the results of a calculation that for some reason I’d never done before. You know how the IPCC says that if the CO2 doubles, the earth will warm up by 3°C? Here was the question that somehow I’d never asked myself … how many watts/m2 will the surface downwelling radiation (longwave + shortwave) have to increase by, if the surface temperature rises by 3°C?
Now, you’d think that you could just use the Stefan-Boltzmann equation to figure out how many more upwelling watts would be represented by a global surface temperature rise of 3°C. Even that number was a surprise to me … 16.8 watts per square metre.
Figure 1. Blue line shows the anomaly in total downwelling surface radiation, longwave plus shortwave, in the CERES dataset, March 2000 to September 2012. Red line shows the trend in the downwelling radiation, which is 0.01 W/m2 per decade. Gray area shows the 95% confidence interval of the trend. Black line shows the expected effect of the increase in CO2 over the period, calculated at 21 W/m2 per doubling. CO2 data are from NOAA. Trend of the expected CO2 change in total downwelling surface radiation is 1.6 W/m2 per decade. CO2 data from NOAA.
But as they say on TV, wait, there’s more. The problem is, the surface loses energy in three ways—as radiation, as sensible heat, and as the latent heat of evapotranspiration. The energy loss from the surface by radiation (per CERES) is ~ 400 watts per square metre (W/m2), and the loss by sensible and latent heat is ~ 100 W/m2, or a quarter of the radiation loss.
Now, the sensible and latent heat loss is a parasitic loss, which means a loss in a heat engine that costs efficiency. And as any engineer can testify, parasitic losses are proportional to temperature, and as the operating temperatures rise, parasitic losses rise faster and faster. In addition, the 100 W/m2 is the global average, but these losses are disproportionately centered at the hot end of the system. At that end, they are rising as some power factor of the increasing temperature.
But let’s be real generous, and ignore all that. For the purpose of this analysis, we’ll swallow the whopper that a 3° temperature rise wouldn’t drive evaporation through the roof, and we’ll assume that the parasitic sensible and latent heat losses from the surface stay at a quarter of the radiation losses.
This means, of course, that instead of the increase of 16.8 W/m2 in downwelling radiation that we calculated above, we need 25% more downwelling radiation to account for the parasitic losses from the surface. (As I said, the true percentage of parasitic losses would be more than that, likely much more, but we’ll use a quarter for purposes of conservative estimation.)
And what that means is that if the IPCC claim of three degrees of global warming per doubling of CO2 is true, when the top-of-atmosphere radiation goes up by a doubling of CO2, an additional TOA 3.7 watts per metre squared, the surface downwelling radiation needs to go up by no less than 21 W/m2 per doubling. And although I was surprised by the size of the number, to me was very good news, because it meant that if it were there, it should be large enough to be quite visible in the CERES data. So I took a look … and Figure 1 above shows what I found.
The red line shows the trend over the ~ 13 years of the record … which is 0.01 W/m2 per decade, statistically no different from zero.
The black line, on the other hand, is the change in downwelling radiation expected from the change in CO2 from 2000 to 2012, calculated at 21 W/m2 per doubling of CO2. As you might imagine because of its steady increase, there is little difference between the CO2 data and the CO2 trendline, so I’ve left it off. For the same reason, there is virtually no error in the trend in downwelling radiation expected from CO2. The result is an expected increase in downwelling surface radiation of no less than 1.6 ± 0.007 W/m2 per decade. Over the period of the CERES data, it totals almost 2 W/m2, which in terms of the precision of the individual CERES datasets should certainly be visible.
So … does Figure 1 falsify the CO2 hypothesis? Not yet, we’ve got a ways to go, but it is an interesting finding. First, we need to look at the two explanations postulated by the good folks at the IPCC that I quoted at the head of the post—volcanoes and solar variations. And the amount that we are looking to explain is a missing increase of 1.6 W/m2 per decade.
Their first explanation was solar. Since the downwelling surface radiation has not increased as expected, perhaps there’s been a decrease in the incoming TOA solar radiation. This would offset a warming from CO2. Here’s that data:
Figure 2. Trend in TOA Solar Radiation, 2000-2012. Red line shows trend, a decrease of – 0.15 W/m2 per decade.
So the IPCC is right about the solar. And from having to explain 1.6 W/m2, we’ve explained 0.15 W/m2 of it which leaves 1.45 W/m2 of missing warming.
Next, volcanoes. The IPCC says that the effect of volcanoes over the period was to cut down the amount of sunshine hitting the surface, reducing the total downwelling radiation.
The reduced trend in radiative forcing is primarily due to volcanic eruptions …
Here are the anomalies in that regard:
Figure 3. Action of volcanoes in reducing surface solar radiation. This measures the anomaly in downwelling solar at the surface minus the anomaly in downwelling solar at the TOA. The trend in the transmission is a warming of +0.34 W/m2 per decade.
Bad news for the IPCC hypothesis. Rather than volcanoes counteracting the expected warming and decreasing the atmospheric transmission of sunshine over the period of record, we had a trend of increasing amounts of sunlight making it to the surface. The trend of this increase was 0.34 W/m2 per decade. Kinda blows holes in their theory about volcanoes, but all we can do is follow the data …
And as a result, instead of having to explain a missing warming of 1.6 – 0.15 = 1.45 W/m2 per decade, we now have to add the 0.34 W/m2 to the missing warming, and that gets us up to 1.8 W/m2 in missing warming. So rather than explaining things, overall the IPCC explanation just makes things worse …
Anyhow, that’s how it goes to date. If the IPCC theory about 3°C surface warming from a doubling of CO2 is true, we need to either a) come up with something else in the CERES data to explain the missing CO2 warming of 1.6 W/m2 per decade, b) back off on the IPCC climate sensitivity by a factor of about ten … or my perennial favorite, toss out the idea of “climate sensitivity” entirely and recognize that at equilibrium, temperature isn’t a simple function of TOA forcings because the climate system has emergent phenomena which respond and react to counteract the TOA changes.
The big problem that I see for the hypothesis that GHGs rule the temperature is that over the period of the CERES data, we should have seen a shift of almost two watts in the downwelling total radiation … but I find no such thing in the dataset. So I throw this question out to the climate science community at large.
Where in the CERES data is the missing warming? There is no trend (0.01 W/m2 per decade) in the surface downwelling radiation. The IPCC says that over the period, CO2 should have increased the downwelling surface radiation by ~ 2 W/m2. SO … if the IPCC hypothesis is correct, what is countering the expected increase of ~ 2 W/m2 in the downwelling surface radiation due to the increase in CO2 over the 2000-2012 time period?
Solar explains perhaps 10% of it, but the volcanoes push it the other way … so why can’t I find the two watts per square metre of expected CO2 warming in the CERES dataset?
w.
NOTES
USUAL REQUEST: If you disagree with something that I or someone else said, please QUOTE THE EXACT WORDS YOU DISAGREE WITH. Then, and only then, let us know what you disagree with. I can defend my own words. I cannot defend your interpretation of my words.
DATA AND CODE: I’ve put the data and code used to produce the graphs and calculations online. There are three code files: CERES Setup.R, CERES Functions.R, and the code for this post, CO2 and CERES.R. In addition, there are two datafiles, one for the CERES TOA files, and the other for the CERES surface files, entitled CERES 13 year (230 Mbytes), and CERES 13 year surface (112 Mbytes). I think that the data is turnkey, just pull up the CO
All of them need to be in the same folder, because the CO2 and CERES.R file calls the setup file, which loads the data files and the function file. If you’ve downloaded the CERES 13 year file, it is unchanged, no need to reload. Open the CERES Setup.R file to see the names of all of the datafiles loaded, and open the CERES Functions.R file for functions and constants.
And as Steven Mosher recommended to me, use RStudio as your portal into R, much the best I’ve found.
CERES Data: The top-of atmosphere CERES data is measured by the satellites. On the other hand, the CERES surface data is calculated from the TOA CERES data, plus data from the MODIS and GOES satellites. The calculated surface data is energy balanced, meaning that the surface flows sum up to the TOA flows.
I’ve run my own version of ground truthing on the CERES surface data by comparing it to the surface temperature data I was using previously. Differences were small overall, and both sets shows the same small details and fluctuations.
Is this how I’d like to do the analysis? Not at all. I’d rather that everything were measured … but this is the best we have, and the various climate scientists involved have used all of the available observational data from a variety of satellites to determine the various values, and have ground truthed the surface data in a variety of ways. So until we have better data, the CERES datasets are the closest we have to actual measurements … and as near as I can tell they show no sign of the claimed 2 W/m2 increase in downwelling radiation that we are assured is going on over the period of record.
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@ur momisugly John Marshall, who said: “What is ”sensible heat”? No such animal when I did physics or thermodynamics.”
Funny, when I took physics in high school and chemical engineering at university, there were “sensible heat” and “latent heat” with clear definitions. Google “latent heat” and you will find lots of information.
IanM
I believe that many of you are mistaken about Galileo.
His offense (and it was truly offensive) was his using Italian rather than Latin in the writing of his Dialogue concerning the two chief world systems, and his use of the arguments of the Pope set forth as the responses of Simplicio (one of the members of the dialogue).
Galileo’s challenge to authority was simple: he challenged a slavishly literal reading of the book of Joshua with what he thought was evidence. Willis has done much the same, challenging the prevailing orthodoxy with data.
Are we simply to accept what is written, or can we challenge Authority? Galileo had already conclusively demonstraed that Aristotle was wrong about the paths of objects through the air. He even made money with his trajectory tables.
Unfortunately for Galileo, he lacked evidence which was immediately accessible, that evidence being the Foucault Pendulum (230 years too late). I leave out the aberration of light, which is not directly visible to human senses (you need a telescope and setting circles). And Galileo had an abrasive temperament, which led him to provide gratuitous digs at his former friend, the Pope.
At least Willis has evidence on his side.
scarletmacaw says: “When there was a massive decrease in reflected SW after the glaciers receded, there had to be a corresponding increase in LW.”
There was also a corresponding increase of photosynthesis spreading across the globe with SW energy going into the sequester of carbon and production of free oxygen.
Thanks Willis. Interesting article, please keep up the good work.
Where in the CERES data is the missing warming?
Nowhere. I don’t think CERES can measure the imaginary.
You can play with the reanalysis data at http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/cgi-bin/data/timeseries/timeseries1.pl. and come to similar conclusions. As you and others have discussed, it is the processes that are occuring in tropical thunderclouds that is controlling the rate of energy loss to space. I think those processes are controlling the atmospheric concentration and distribution of CO2 as well.
The answer is obviously variability in our star’s magnetic field. It’s so obvious it hurts. I’d wager the Warmist’s tunes will change with the first major tropical volcanic eruption to reach the stratosphere during this waning of the magnetic field. We just came close, http://www.volcano.si.edu/volcano.cfm?vn=261080
And here is an excellent read for those that have not seen it:
NATURAL CLIMATE VARIABILITY DURING THE HOLOCENE
V A Dergachev1 • O M Raspopov2 • F Damblon3 • H Jungner4 • G I Zaitseva5
Konrad says:
January 14, 2014 at 2:40 am
Citation? I see no one but you claiming that for some reason, S-B equations become invalid when applied to a moving fluid in a gravity field. What are you basing your claim on?
w.
A C Osborn says:
January 14, 2014 at 2:49 am
Absolute nonsense. As far as I know, this analysis is quite unlike Konrad has ever done, and it is in no way derivable from his experiment. And in fact, Konrad holds that the entire CERES dataset is worthless because according to the great Konrad, you can’t use Stefan-Boltzmann equation on air or water … and that’s exactly what the CERES calculations do.
So how on earth are my results even vaguely related to Konrad’s nonsense? He actually believes that the ocean is kept from freezing solely by the ~ 160 W/m2 of downwelling solar, while it is losing ~ 400 W/m2 through radiation and sensible/latent heat loss … and that’s industrial strength foolishness.
Sorry, but Konrad’ ideas about the world of radiation are not accepted by any serious scientist that I know of.
w.
@Ian L McQueen: you solve the problem by introducing enthalpy, including the systems internal energy and thermodynamic potential. The latter, a state function, is set by gravity etc and if that does not change can be ignored in terms of the capability of the system to do thermodynamic work.
Willis
The 3 deg C rise is at equillibrium which is not reached in a decade so your 2 W/m2 rise in fig.1 is too high. Guessing 2/3 would be close.
Willis Eschenbach says: January 14, 2014 at 8:54 am
Willis, you either intentionally or unintentionally misunderstood what I was trying to say, “the same basic results” ie that warming by CO2 as described by the IPCC either, is not currently taking place or if it is, that the loss of that warming has not been explained by the Climate Scientists.
I have already said Quote “Willis, you are correct that Konrad has not done the same work as you have here, which is very good and is so important it needs confirming.”
ie your work needs confirming because it is new.
richard verney says:
January 14, 2014 at 3:21 am
Jeez, not you too. RUN THE DANG NUMBERS, Richard. If longwave can’t provide energy to the ocean as you and Konrad and others claim, there is nowhere near enough solar energy, even in the tropics, to keep the ocean from freezing. Heck, I’ll run the numbers for you. Here is the surface radiation balance without longwave radiation.
Notice that the tropical ocean, far from having the excess that you imagine is being exported to the poles, actually has a deficit of about -60 W/m2 if LW can’t heat the ocean. So your theory runs aground on the reef of facts.
I can’t say this enough, folks. If you have some theory about how the climate is working, RUN THE NUMBERS! Do the math, even if it is just a back-of-the-envelope calculation, to see if your ideas hold water before releasing them on the poor unsuspecting webizens.
w.
John Marshall says:
January 14, 2014 at 3:26 am
GIYF …
So unless you went to school before 1839 …
w.
Robbo says:
January 14, 2014 at 4:24 am
Sure. The S-B equation relates the temperature of a body and the thermal infrared (longwave) that it radiates. The equation is:
Radiation (watts/m2) = 5.67e-8 * emissivity * Temperature (kelvin)4
Now, emissivity is on the order of 1.0 for the surface of the planet. So it is usually taken as 1 for these kinds of analyses. As Geiger says in his incomparable tome “The Climate Near The Ground”,
This lets us convert one direction or the other, through the equations
Radiation = 5.67e-8 * Temperature4
and
Temperature = ( Radiation / 5.67e-8 ) 1/4
The CERES surface upwelling longwave radiation dataset has a global (area-weighted) average of 400 W/m2. The formula says that this is equivalent to 16.6°C.
I then applied that same formula to the individual gridcell radiation values to give me gridcell temperature. Then I added 3° to this surface temperature dataset everywhere, and used the inverse formula to convert back to watts/m2.
Finally, I averaged the resulting warmer surface upwelling longwave, and that gave me 416.8 W/m2 for my warmer surface.
w.
Willis Eschenbach says: January 14, 2014 at 9:09 am “RUN THE NUMBERS! Do the math”
Whose Theory of how the Atmosphere works would that be exactly?
With or Without the heat generated by Atmospheric Pressure?
izen says:
January 14, 2014 at 4:26 am
If you want to argue with Stefan-Boltzmann, I fear I can’t help you … I know that Konrad also thinks that S-B equations can’t be applied to the atmosphere and surface of the planet.
But the great Geiger and every other serious climate scientist I know of uses the S-B equations regularly for exactly this type of calculations. So you’ll have to do much better than wave your hand at the ice ages to negate such an S-B based calculation of the change in radiation that occurs from a given change in temperature … this is not complex stuff, izen, these are everyday, well-investigated climate calculations.
w.
Bill Illis says:
January 14, 2014 at 4:33 am
You seem to be missing the point. I looked for the “additional forcing required to raise temperatures by 3.0C” in the CERES dataset and I couldn’t find it.
So the question is not where the majority of this imaginary forcing might come from. We have not yet established that it is even happening, so speculations on its origins are way premature.
w.
richard verney says:
January 14, 2014 at 3:52 am
My article called Radiating The Ocean is here. I stand by every word of it. Neither you, Konrad, nor anyone else has stood up and answered the four challenges I made there. The reader can decide who is right.
Truly, guys, this is not rocket science. It is well-established that a) there is downwelling longwave radiation from the atmosphere, measured all around the world, and b) that radiation contains energy, and c) when that radiation hits an object, it is absorbed by that object. In the world of science, none of those statements are in the least controversial.
You and Konrad and AC Osborn and the others arguing against those well-known facts just make people point and laugh. Unfortunately, you also always want to disrupt any discussion by your single-interest fanaticism. Look, why don’t you guys go start a blog called “Thermal Radiation Is Imaginary”, where you can all agree with each other?
Because you’ll never get any traction here, instead, you just infest every thread with your endless whining on the subject.
You lost. Stefan-Boltzmann won. Get over it.
w.
Willis, you have a very slight problem, you seem to be unable to see that your own latest great piece of work strongly points to the fact that there is something wrong with the current theory that you yourself are using to base the work on.
It has shown that the Earth is not warming according to that current theory and also that the IPCC and Climate Scientists have offered reasons for the Pause that you have just totally disproved.
So is the theory correct, if so why has the temperature paused?
You are so good at explaining your workings, so that even I understood it, please explain why there is no warming despite the rise in CO2.
Willis, isn’t there already a blog for Konrad, et al @ur momisugly
http://www.principia-scientific.org
The warmest molecules of air are just at or just above he surface.
They can both radiate to or conduct to the surface but lets ignore conduction for the moment.
If the warmest molecules are radiating to the surface at their ambient temperature then how can cooler molecules above them also radiate to the surface so as to add to the radiation already reaching the surface from the warmest molecules ?
Isn’t it obvious that ALL the radiation reaching the surface is from those warmest molecules and the colder molecules above them have no additional radiative/ thermal effect whatever. ?
Willis said:
“the tropical ocean, far from having the excess that you imagine is being exported to the poles, actually has a deficit of about -60 W/m2 if LW can’t heat the ocean”
The mass of warm air above the tropical oceans keeps those oceans warm and not DWIR.
It does so via the convective overturning observed in Willis’s very own thermostat hypothesis.
Uplift into thunderheads takes energy away from the surface and converts it into gravitational potential energy
BUT
Descent around thunderheads returns energy to the surface by reconverting gravitational potential energy to kinetic energy again.
That is what cancels the imaginary radiation deficit.
The water cycle is a separate energy transport system superimposed on the basic convective circulation.
And so the cycle goes for as long as there is an atmosphere whether radiative or not and all because of uneven surface heating causing density differentials at the surface which allows movement involving work done first against gravity (uplift /cooling) and then with gravity ( descent / warming).
LW fuels the water cycle, is therefore an accelerant for the system (water vapour being lighter than air) and improves system efficiency so that less convective overturning is required than would be necessary without the water cycle.
.
Willis, you seem to have doubts also, otherwise why did you say this “So … does Figure 1 falsify the CO2 hypothesis? Not yet, we’ve got a ways to go, but it is an interesting finding.”?
So is Climate Sensitivity less than proposed by the IPCC?
Quite correct Willis! And the problem with MANY of the analyses by the “educated” (I say that lightly, and regard you as a GIANT compared to many of them with those fancy pieces of paper)…is that they hark back to Elsasser’s Pivotal 1942 Paper on the Radiation Heat Balance of the Atmosphere. In that assesment, the model is an INFINITE FLAT PLANE. Which removes the IR losses (as you climb upward) OUT of the 4pi steradians and into outer space, which can OCCUR BELOW THE PLANE, because the Earth curves.
This is so SIGNIFICANT that it REALLY knocks down the effect of the CO2, and in the calcs by one researcher, brings the “beginning to rise” point to over 3000 PPM (that is no mistake, essentially 10 X’s the blessed 280 PPM starting point.)
Your work with the CEREs is BRILLIANT, and I thank you for it.
Robert Brown says:
January 14, 2014 at 6:59 am
Robert, thanks as always for your clear and cogent comments.
A while ago I built a simple radiation-convection model of the climate system in Excel, available here. It is a model of this two-atmospheric-layer system.
It has two atmospheric layers, unlike most simplified models of the climate, because I realized early on that a single-layer atmosphere doesn’t provide enough energy to match the earth’s surface temperature plus parasitic losses (latent and sensible heat). This means that my model is the simplest radiative-convective model possible, which is good, I like what I call “tinker-toy” models, vastly oversimplified and and yet extremely valuable for probing the dynamics of the system.
Anyhow, I bring this up because if you play with the model you’ll find that it is quite sensitive to the absorptivity of the stratosphere … just sayin …
As regards your question, I’ve been thinking about the same thing about the stratosphere, and I think I can use the RSS dataset to do some of what you are talking about … but first, I want to refine this current analysis by developing an equation for the parasitic losses (sensible plus latent heat losses, surface to atmosphere) as a function of temperature.
I can then use that relationship to develop a more accurate estimate of the effect of parasitic losses on the system. In general, when a system is running “as fast as it can”, as all natural heat engines do, the parasitic losses are high, particularly at the hot end of the heat engine.
And finally, understanding the parasitic losses will allow me to determine the true increase in downwelling total radiation necessary to heat the surface by 3°C … I’ve currently estimated it at 21 W/m2 but the final number will be more, perhaps much more.
Best regards, and my thanks as always,
w.
PS—One other thing I want to look at is Ramanathans metric for the greenhouse system. Ramanathan measured what he called the greenhouse effect as being the amount of upwelling surface energy absorbed by the atmosphere on its way out. It makes sense, it directly measures the changes in how much upwelling radiation from the surface is absorbed.
It would reveal (in a blunt-force manner) any atmospheric changes. Hang on, the way I’m set up now, it’s an easy task, viz:
GHEresid=removeseasons(surf_lw_up_all - toa_lw_all) GHEmon=getmonths(GHEresid) df2 <- data.frame(yis=as.vector(co2watts),xis=as.vector((time(CO2resid)))) surftot=anomaly(as.vector(GHEmon)) p1 <- ggplot(data.frame(Surface_Radiation=surftot,Time=as.vector(time(surflwdownmon))), aes(y = Surface_Radiation, x = Time)) p1 + geom_line(color="dark blue") + geom_smooth(method = "lm", se = TRUE, color="red") + # addlinetoplot(df2, varx = "xis", vary = "yis") + geom_line(data=df2, aes(x=xis, y=yis),color="black",size=1.5) + labs(title = expression("Trend in Greenhouse Effect, and Expected CO2 Effect")) + ylab("Upwelling, Surface minus TOA (W/m2)") + theme(axis.text=element_text(size=16,face="bold"), axis.title=element_text(size=16,face="bold"), title=element_text(size=17,face="bold"))with the result
Dang, that’s interesting. Looks like I should have started with that one. At least it’s showing something. But there are still a couple of problems. One is that the expected increase in W/m2 from CO2 to make a 3°C rise per doubling is likely larger than the black line above shows, as noted above.
The larger question is this. We would expect an increase in the greenhouse effect from increasing CO2, that part is basic physics. And we do find that in the CERES data. It looks like the effect of CO2 has been greatly overestimated, but the effect is there.
The odd part is, given that we are seeing the predicted increase in the greenhouse effect in the CERES data (albeit in a much attenuated form) … then why is there no corresponding change in the total downwelling radiation at the surface?
The eternal chase for meaning and understanding goes on … I’ll report back my findings.