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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I reproduced the graph of figure 1 and got an exact match. The best fit line has a slope of 0.139 C/decade.
My comment of January 14, 2014 at 12:31 pm said the caption to figure 1, which says “Red line shows the trend in the downwelling radiation, which is 0.01 W/m2 per decade” suggests it should be 0.10 W/m2/decade, but it actually is 0.14 W/m2/decade.
Willis has compared the downward radiation trend (0.14 W/m2/decade) to an estimated downward radiation trend that would give a 3 C temperature rise per double CO2, but that is not the appropriate comparison. The IPCC’s estimate of 3 C/ 2X CO2 is the equilibrium climate sensitivity, which means you double the CO2 then wait a thousand years for the oceans to reach temperature equilibrium. But the graph shows only the transient response, so the appropriate comparison is to the climate model’s transient response. The AR5 table 9.5 shows the transient climate response is 1.8 C for double CO2 as shown:
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/CanESM/Table9.5_AR5.jpg
Willis correctly says a 3 Celsius temperature increase requires an increase in upward surface radiation of 16.8 W/m2, then makes a rough estimate that this would require an increase of downward radiation of at least 21 W/m2. While this is a very rough estimate, I agree the data does not agree with the model forecasts.
The CERES group also makes a estimate of upward longwave radiation from the surface, which we can convert to surface temperatures and compare to HadCRUT. The satellite only measures TOA radiation. Upward radiation is computed from “radiative transfer code’ and humidity data, so it might not be very accurate. See that comparison:
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/CERES/CERES&HadCRUT.jpg
The surface temperature trends for March 2000 to September 2012 are:
CERES 0.081 C/decade
HadCRUT3 0.035 C/decade
HadCRUT4 0.079 C/decade
A better comparison is to show the trends in the actual greenhouse effect, which is the temperature difference between the surface temperatures and the CERES top-of-atmosphere effective radiating temperatures calculated directly from CERES OLR data. Most natural climate change, and non GHG human caused climate change will not affect this calculation.
I calculated transient climate response based on CERES and HadCRUT data in my article “CERES Satellite and Climate Sensitivity” here:
http://www.friendsofscience.org/index.php?id=483
The abstract is
Oops, wrong unit in the second sentence in my last comment. Should be “The best fit line has a slope of 0.139 W/m2/decade.
Willis, and Robert,
Anthony has politely suggested that I could continue to post at WUWT if I keep things cool.
In the interest of that, this should be my last comment on this thread.
Firstly Willis, my apology for derailing your thread. I suspect you feel the same way about me as I feel about “Trick”.
Robert,
I feel that much of your response to my experiments was due in part to the fact that I had not provided the context in which they were conducted. As I have indicated to Anthony, I have nothing to do with P.S.I or “Slayers”. Some of my experiments, just like his and Dr. Spencers, were designed specifically to combat their claims on blogs. The physical confirmation of Willis “steel greenhouse” is a case in point.
This was also what the two gas columns with differing heights of cooling was about. It was simply a physical demonstration of what Dr. Spencer says about the role of radiative cooling at altitude in atmospheric circulation. But it also demonstrates that for a non-radiative atmosphere, heating and cooling at disparate locations at the surface may not result in the bulk of the atmosphere being at surface Tav.
The “Maxwells” demon thing? My fault again for lack of context. It’s just two tubes with one uninsulated end with a circulation fan across it. One tube with this surface up, the other down. One is tilted 5 degrees to reduce the Rayleigh number for the internal gas. You stick them in a fridge, and the cooling rates differ greatly. It’s just a “night inversion layer” in a box, not Maxwells demon 😉
I’d best skip the whole LWIR over water thing, except to say no heat lamps. Too much SWIR.
As to the last experiment design (not conducted), I got it wrong. I was obsessing about getting a dark LWIR free sky over the sample. Expensive balloons or liquid nitrogen are not needed. I just need to cool a SW transparent LWIR opaque glass panel over the sun portal. I’m snowed under with work, but I will get back to you when I have had time to run it.
I will leave this thread to the discussion of CERES data for which it was intended.
What renders the all-too-facile radiative algebra that permeates much of
“climate science” grossly unrealistic is the failure to recognize that
there is no such thing as mass-less, timeless real-world thermodynamics!
The spatio-temporal average intensity of back-radiation fails to tell us
what the energy content of the atmosphere is at any time. Just like
temperature, it is an intensive, non-conservative, local metric, whose value
depends strongly on the altitude of observation. And with altitude comes
strong decrease in mass-density due to atmospheric pressure. Thus there is
an adiabatic decrease in temperature for a given mass of air with constant
energy content as it expands when convected aloft.
The supply of solar energy, of course, is governed by the diurnal insolation
cycle. At its noon peak in the tropics, the intensity is well in excess of
1000 W/m^2 at the surface. Heating of the near-surface air typically begins
at sunrise and, with a time lag of a few hours, the near-surface air
temperature follows. From the afternoon peak, temperature typically drops
until dawn; the back-radiation, however, remains nearly constant! This
tells us that a) back-radiation does not simply reflect surface temperature
and b)late afternoon cooling is due mostly to the efficacy of moist
convection. Despite the constancy of back-radiation, which indeed reduces
radiative losses, complete thermodynamic equilibrium of the complex
system is never achieved.
It has been long recognized in bona fide meteorology that the atmosphere is
not simply a gray body governed by the S-B equation. Nor can that
relationship between temperature and power density, which applies strictly
to blackbody cavity radiation, be applied blindly to a surface that
evaporates. Despite its appeal in academic circles, the radiative
greenhouse paradigm is incapable of realistically accounting for the
variations of earthly temperatures.
rgbatduke says:
January 15, 2014 at 3:51 pm
“Dear me indeed. First of all, we are talking about Mr. Sun, are we not? IIRC its surface temperature is roughly 6000K.”
Is it? Is the Sun’s surface really no hotter than the inside of our planet Earth?
“…if you put your hand ten centimeters away from a 100 Watt light bulb, your hand will warm up. If you turn on a second bulb next to the first one, your hand will warm up more. If you turn on a five 100 watt bulbs and manage to crowd them together so that you have 100 watts ten centimeters away from your hand, you will not leave your hand there for long.”
And if you switch them all off you will still feel heat radiating out from them – an incandescent lightbulb produces around 5% visible light and 95% heat which is the invisible longwave infrared.
Please see my NASA quote, we cannot feel near infrared as heat – no matter how many remote controls we direct on our hands..
Visible light and near infrared are not thermal energies, thermal means “of heat” and contrary to AGW memespeak which claims this refers to the ‘source’, i.e. the Sun, so that it can pretend that ‘visible and other shortwave are thermal’, in traditional science, see my NASA quote, it refers to the longwave invisible infrared, usually simply called heat. It is called thermal to differentiate between it and shortwave infrared which is not thermal, which is classed as Reflective not Thermal. We’ve come a long way since Herschel’s first crude measurements..
..though it seems AGW is determined to destroy that through general education.
That is why you will still see references to “heat and light from the Sun” because these are different categories and one is not the other in empirically extremely well understood traditional science, but now AGW claims visible light from the Sun is heat and that we get no heat from the Sun..
http://tes.asu.edu/MARS_SURVEYOR/MGSTES/TIR_description.html
“What is Thermal Infrared Energy?
“Light and Heat
“Thermal IR energy is more commonly known as “heat”. Everyone is familiar with heat because of our sense of touch. But what exactly is heat? Heat is a form of light invisible to our eyes, but detectable with our skin. Visible light is part of a large spectrum of energy that includes other familiar electromagnetic energy regions: microwaves, radio waves, ultraviolet, and X-rays all are forms of light that we can not see. The colors of a rainbow form a continuous spectrum of light in the visible wavelength region as does the “light” in the other regions. Infrared light occurs at wavelengths just below red light, hence the name, infra- (below) red. Near-infrared is the “color” of the heating coil on an electric stove just before it glows red. The thermal (or mid-) infrared colors are found at even longer wavelengths.”
Konrad says:
January 15, 2014 at 5:14 pm
Thanks, Konrad, I take off my hat to you. Yours is the action of a gentleman, and I say that in all seriousness.
Best regards, and please continue with your experiments. Real world data is always valuable, whether I might understand it at the time or not.
w.
rgbatduke says, January 15, 2014 at 3:51 pm:
“Dear me indeed. First of all, we are talking about Mr. Sun, are we not? IIRC its surface temperature is roughly 6000K. I think I can safely say that this is not an issue. On the other hand, if you take an ordinary magnifying glass and use it to increase the incoming solar flux at a point, say, on the surface of your hand, I think you will rapidly agree that there is plenty of room in between the temperature of the sun and the temperature of your skin for your skin to warm. Or even burn right up. Similar considerations hold for things like the filaments of infra-red heat lamps, by the way. We’re not talking about water that is already superheated to 1200 K or whatever the filament temperature is. We’re talking about liquid water, a before condition that is at ambient temperatures and an after condition with a substantial downward radiative flux coming from a much hotter source.”
I wonder, why are you replying to my comment to Willis and not my comment to you? Might it be because by going directly to my follow-up it’s easier to ignore the original context?
Here’s what I said: “Welcome to the fantastic world of ‘climate physics’, where instantaneous fluxes are simply added together to make larger fluxes and thus directly create higher temperatures. How is the Earth’s surface warmed beyond the level that the mean solar flux according to the S-B equation can manage to maintain? We just add an extra flux down, a much larger one than the solar one at that, and voilà, we have a larger ‘total’ flux coming in and thus get a higher temperature. The instantaneous radiative flux coming from the Sun is on average about 165 W/m^2. This corresponds to a BB source temperature of -41 C. The alleged instantaneous radiative flux coming down from the atmosphere is on average about 345 W/m^2. This corresponds to a BB source temperature of +6 C. Still, put together, these two sources manage to heat the receiving surface to beyond the potential temperature of both. How is that possible? In the magical world of ‘climate physics’ you just add instantaneous fluxes together to create a larger one: (165+345=) 510 W/m^2 >> +35 C, woops, too high, but no problem, we simply subtract the convective losses before all the radiation from above is absorbed: (510-112=) 398 W/m^2 >> +16 C.
How neat isn’t this? Stefan-Boltzmann all the way. No storage of energy needed. Only instantaneous fluxes.
But where is the energy behind the 345 W/m^2 flux down from the atmosphere coming from? The input energy to the system is from the solar flux only. And this is never in the instantaneous flux scenario being restricted from freely leaving the surface again as soon as it’s absorbed to give a Stefan-Boltzmann surface BB emission temperature.
Note, this is NOT a matter of storing energy (thermal mass). This is simply all about sending instantaneous fluxes back and forth, adding them together to make them larger.”
The solar flux does not represent 6000 degrees at the surface of the Earth, Roger. And you know that. The very hypothesis of the radiative GHE is based on the premise that it isn’t. It’s allegedly too cold to heat the Earth’s surface to 288K by itself.
So apparently it’s hot when you need it to be and cold when you don’t.
A flux of 165 W/m^2 would represent a BB at 232K (-41 C). A flux of 345 W/m^2 would represent a BB at 279K (+6 C). Still, you put those two instantaneous fluxes together, subtract the convective losses and expect the surface to end up at a temperature exactly corresponding to the Stefan-Boltzmann equation, higher than both its effective radiative sources.
In the following comment I also said: “According to your [Roger Brown’s] logic, it’s OK for one and the same batch of energy to be shed from the surface as energy loss based on a certain temperature, to then go into warming the cooler atmosphere upon absorption to a slightly lower temperature and then next being sent back down again from this temperature to do some more warming of the already warmer surface, the very source that ejected it as thermal loss in the first place.
I would call that ‘super-conservation of energy’ …
It’s the second round of heating for one packet of energy that violates the laws of thermodynamics.”
“Second, you aren’t even getting the physics right for the two 100 C heaters. Let’s imagine you have just one such heater, and instead of specifying the temperature of the heater, as that is rarely what is constant, let’s specify the power being delivered to the heater — say, 100 Watts. The heater will then heat to a temperature such that incoming power being delivered as joule heating, V^2/R for some resistive filament with a constant voltage delivered across it is precisely balanced by power lost through all channels. If we imagine that the heater is isolated and in a vacuum and a perfect blackbody emitter (all of which can easily be made approximately true by taking an ordinary 100W bulb, painting it black, and putting it in a vacuum chamber suspended by a thin conducting wire delivering the voltage) we can even predict the temperature of the bulb if it has a simple geometry.”
And so on and so forth. Blah-blah. Dr. Brown, you’re completely circumventing the issue here. This is all about an object absorbing two smaller fluxes and as a result end up giving off a flux larger than any of them. Why not then just surround a warm object with a million cool objects and watch the warmer one literally melt from the immense ‘total’ flux it receives? Because that would be ridiculous. The solar and the atmospheric flux are coming from the same area of the sky. That’s the only reason you feel you could add them. But the problem is, the sun is the energy source of the surface and the surface in turn is the energy source of the atmosphere. Energy is transferred only from the sun to the earth’s surface. Between the surface and the atmosphere, the energy transfer is up. There is no point adding something that cannot heat the surface. Your downward radiative flux isn’t a heat flux, like the solar flux. The radiative (and convective) heat flux between surface and atmosphere goes … up. There is nothing to add.
“Precisely the same thing happens for a passive absorber heated by the power source — as it heats, it radiates back along the direction it is being heated from, and the source temperature increases, (…)”
So the energy being radiated back from the passive absorber to its power source makes the source hotter directly by increasing its internal energy. Wow! Just, wow! Such an energy transfer with such a direct result is called a ‘heat transfer’. Radiation also has to follow the thermodynamic laws. Energy from a cooler object can never make a warmer object even warmer. You do not restrict cooling, Roger. You’re increasing the heating directly by adding back energy that’s already spent warming the passive absorber. The energy going out from the source is never restricted. It radiates out freely. So that’s not how it gets hotter. The only way it’s getting hotter is from absorbing the ‘back radiated’ energy coming from a cooler object already made warmer by that same energy. You seriously do not see how you blatantly violate both the 1st and the 2nd laws of thermodynamics here?
“(…) although (usually) not by very much.”
Why do you think that is, Dr. Brown? According to theory (your logic and arithmetic) their temperature should increase a lot. Because you misinterpret the small heating you get as ‘back radiation’ heating when it is in fact caused by convective suppression (reduced temp gradients).
“You also need to think about how stupid a lot of your remarks sound, as many of them are contradicted by ordinary experience or common sense.”
Ditto, buddy.
“When describing the Earth, we aren’t talking about passive heat transfer between constant temperature reservoirs. We are talking about an open system. A complex open system. No, it cannot be trivially reduced to silly conclusions associated with non-sequitor statements about passive systems.”
Yes, Roger. The Sun is the only energy source from above. You want to reduce the exchange to instantaneous fluxes and set the temperatures by those, completely ignoring how real objects actually do heat, through their thermal mass.
Curt says:
January 15, 2014 at 2:25 pm, Kristian says: January 15, 2014 at 12:52 am:
“You said in a previous post, “Sensors only ever detect heat.” I replied directly that this assertion was wrong, that many sensors detect radiation by converting it directly into electric current (not thermalizing it), and mentioned that I had even designed sensors like this. You accused me of redirection. Huh?”
Curt, I’m not going to continue engaging with someone who debates at this level. You know full well that we discussed radiative energy transfer between objects at different temperatures – heat transfer. What I said was that all instrument sensors specifically trying to measure such radiation only detect the heat, not the two individual conceptual opposite fluxes making up the ‘net’. The instruments has to calculate those from the detected heat and the sensor temperature (pyrgeometers). If the sensor is supercooled (like in interferometers), then it will of course detect directly the radiation from the atmosphere … as heat. From this you go: ‘HAHA! Look, there are sensors that do not detect heat!’ That is nothing but a meaningless and irrelevant diversion from the subject.
The claimed 398 W/m^2 up from the surface and the 345 W/m^2 down from the atmosphere isn’t measured in the sense ‘detected’, Curt. That’s all I’m saying. They are calculated. Inferred. Assumed. Based on a misapplication of the S-B law. That also goes for the CERES instruments. They have the same formulas baked in. All we know from direct physical detection is the mean global radiative heat flux up from the surface at about 50-60 W/m^2 and the average surface temperature, 288-289K.
There is nothing wrong with physics. The problem lies in the way ‘climate science’ has misapplied it to create its version of reality.
With this I also withdraw from this thread. The hostility here is palpable. You do all realise that you act exactly as sectarian on this subject as the alarmists when challenged on their ingrained (C)AGW beliefs? It’s really sad to see …
Willis Eschenbach says, January 15, 2014 at 2:50 pm:
“Kristian says:
January 15, 2014 at 1:55 pm
… And, Willis, you conveniently ignored the rest of my last reply to you …
Yes, and I would do it again. I read a comment until someone makes an egregious error, and I stop there. No point in discussing further until we clear that part up.
In your case, until you understand the basics of thermodynamics, which obviously you don’t, I’m not interested in getting involved in whatever further fantasies flow from your misunderstandings. Once you see the basic, fundamental, introductory textbook errors you’re making, then we’ll get to your further ideas.
Read Curt’s post above, note that he works in the field. Read Dr. Brown’s post above. Note that he teaches in the field. Read my post above, or read a college thermo textbook, I don’t care what you do to break through your lack of knowledge … but until you pull your head out of your fundamental orifice regarding basic thermo concepts, all of your claims will come out sounding muffled and will not smell right, and (as you point out above), folks like me will ignore them.”
Just this one.
Willis, and with that you managed to still avoid addressing any of what I’m pointing at. Just conveniently dismissing it by vague claims of ‘egregious errors’ and ‘you don’t understand anything’ so you don’t have to relate to it. But my comments are still there. And people can read them. And think for themselves. And see that you do not answer them. I know you have your own little playground here with your own little following and feel like a king because of it. Don’t let it go to your head (woops, too late for that).
Your last ‘reply’, Willis, is pure sectarian, authoritarian, concensual BS. Without any substance other than ‘Look, we know more than you, so shut up!’ Just like the alarmists who want to dismiss your ‘further fantasies’ by acting the exact same way: ‘You’re just wrong because you don’t understand anything. Now go away.’
You’re fundamentally wrong Willis. It’s as simple as that. There definitely is an atmospheric warming effect on the earth’s surface. It just isn’t a radiative one …
And again, read up on how real objects actually heat up. You cannot use instantaneous fluxes for the earth’s surface, add them together and put them into the S-B equation to obtain the surface temperature when it has a thermal mass to store absorbed energy in. That’s just fundamentally stupid.
Kristian says:
January 15, 2014 at 11:08 pm
Indeed, and I encourage them to do so, to read and judge for themselves. I said before I ignored all of your further points. I just went back and read them to see what I’d missed … nothing. I’d still ignore it … and I suspect others would as well.
And here I thought that climate was complex …
You also say:
That’s outstanding news.
Naw, if this were an alarmist site, you’d have been censored and silenced long ago. On this site, you just get laughed at. You see, here on WUWT we’re law-abiding folks … and as a result, we don’t pay much attention to guys like you who claim that the climate violates the Law of Thermodynamics.
And yes, we laugh when you say things like that radiometers don’t measure outgoing radiation from a surface but instead they detect the “heat flux” and then they “utilize the S-B equation to calculate a value for an hypothesized one-way outgoing radiative flux”. Dude, that knee-slapper proves beyond doubt that you don’t have a clue about how radiation is measured. Don’t believe me? Ask Curt, he does this for a living … but noooo, instead of learning from him, you abuse him …
And then when you act like we’re the bad guys, just because we don’t buy into your BS, yes, we do get hostile. Sorry, but that’s what happens when you act like that, you get it back in spades. People think karma is some slow-moving force. Actually, it’s more like hitting a golf ball in a tiled bathroom …
However, there’s plenty of sites out there where people will agree with you, and I wish you well wherever you end up. As long as it’s not here.
w.
“The IPCC’s estimate of 3 C/ 2X CO2 is the equilibrium climate sensitivity, which means you double the CO2 then wait a thousand years for the oceans to reach temperature equilibrium… The AR5 table 9.5 shows the transient climate response is 1.8 C for double CO2”
Ken Gregory
I agree with you on using TCR instead of ECS. However, IPCC does not claim 1,000 years to reach equilibrium. If your claim is true, no need to panic if we only get 1.8 C by 2100. We’re already halfway there. IPCC is claiming 3 C isn’t it?
“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?”
Willis
Trenberth says the missing heat is in deep ocean. Plausible but hard to prove empirically. A 1.8 W/m2 forcing can easily disappear in the ocean without a trace. The change in temperature is too small and too deep to measure. If the ocean can sequester heat from the surface, can it also release it in the near future? Warmists call it “heat in the pipeline.”
Anthony
I suggest you ban the Dragon Slayers. Don’t tolerate pseudoscience. Repeating ridiculous claims over and over is counterproductive and a waste of time. If they have a valid point, they should publish it in a peer-review science journal. If accepted, invite them to post their full paper here.
“There definitely is an atmospheric warming effect on the earth’s surface. It just isn’t a radiative one”
Correct.
It is atmospheric mass allowing conduction leading to convection.
Willis’s own thermostat hypothesis points out the importance of convection and notes the stabilising effect of varying the amount of convection.
Since all convection results from conduction rather than radiation Willis cannot reconcile his observations with his current view as to the effects of radiation.
“There definitely is an atmospheric warming effect on the earth’s surface. It just isn’t a radiative one”
Wrong. Increase in air temperature will increase radiative heat transfer according to S-B equation. Except for latent heat where no change in temperature. However, condensation releases latent heat. Or are you saying all that heat went to melting the polar ice?
Thanks for the reply and the ‘Robert Brown’ formula, Willis.
I agree with your 0.36 K for the bias induced by the averaging method not accounting for the daily variation in local temperature at your location.
I’m not sure this is really negligible since this would represent c 30 years of ‘IPCC warming’ at 0.13 C per decade.
However, I was thinking of the annual variation in local temperature. At my location this is approximately 257 K to 297 which, according to the developed S-B based formula for radiation / temperature relationship gives a bias of 2.14 K (= difference between a) temperature corresponding to the average radiation and b)average temperature), and a ‘Robert Brown’ value of 1.031 This surely is worth taking into account.
I guess it is about an IT background which tells me “It is all binary, either known to be wrong or, not (yet) known to be wrong. You can only use what you don’t know to be wrong”
But if local temperature is inhomogeneous with respect to time, it is also inhomogeneous with respect to space. Right outside my door I have three strikingly different types of surface: asphalt roadway and parking spaces, grass, and a river. The surface temps of these three are often quite different, and measuring air temp at 1m above ground does not really capture any of them very well. Nevertheless, they are the radiating bodies, so it is to them that we should be applying S-B. I think this inhomogeneity also needs to be handled with an estimated Robert Brown correction factor. Maybe 1.005 ?
PS I follow your posts quite closely. I especially enjoyed the stories from the South Pacific
“Increase in air temperature will increase radiative heat transfer according to S-B equation”
If the air rises against gravity the air temperature will not increase. Parcels of air must rise against gravity if there is any unevenness in surface heating at all because density variations will inevitably arise at the surface if heating is uneven.
Rising against gravity reduces temperature because the work done against gravity converts kinetic energy (heat) to potential energy (not heat) for a reduction in temperature.
S-B doesn’t apply where mass results in conduction and convection to ‘interfere’ with the radiative flux.
Such ‘interference’ arises from mass, conduction and convection diverting energy away from the radiative exchange for a period of time. Gravitational potential energy does not participate in the radiative flux since it does not manifest itself as heat.
All mass lifting off a surface converts kinetic energy to gravitational potential energy which is then denied to the radiation budget.
The thermostatic mechanism, then, is variations in the power of the convective circulation altering the amount of gravitational potential energy at any given moment so as to keep the radiative exchange in balance.
Willis wrote
January 15, 2014 at 2:41 pm
A C Osborn says:
January 15, 2014 at 2:14 pm
… blah, blah blah …
You gonna apologize for calling me a liar, A C.
Well, I have gone back over our exchange that offended you and caused you to respond with “When a man accuses me of intentionally misunderstanding him, that’s the end of my part of the conversation. I don’t play those games. If you truly think that of me, I have no interest in discussing anything with you.”
I refuse to Apologise , because now I do believe you intentionally misunderstood what I wrote.
It is clear from the tone of your first reply that you had allowed the very Anger that you later accused me of, to cloud your reading ability, so that you did not read what I wrote.
I quote your angry sounding response” 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 ” how on earth are my results even vaguely related to Konrad’s nonsense?”
I assume you were angry because I compared what you had done to what Konrad had done, but the whole point is I did not do that.
I was not comparing the “WORK”, I was comparing the “RESULT” which is that the IPCC Climate Sensitivity and the temperature increase from a doubling of CO2 appears to wrong .
You two are not the only ones to bring the Climate Sensitivity in to question and all by different methods, in no way am I comparing your WORK to theirs either. The work that Ken Gregory has just done, which is based on yours, appears to confirm your findings.
So if you want to construe that as being called a “liar” then touche, because you have accused me of saying something I didn’t, which is one of the things you find most annoying in others.
So End of Discussion with you.
I write this for other readers of the Post, the more I have read about CERES the more I am convinced that you cannot use the values for the kind of fine changes that are required to find a couple of W/m2 change in trend and here is why.
1. They use multiple (4) Satellites of varying ages for the Radiation part of the Calculations, note calculations, not measurements, because there are all sorts of compensations and algorithms used to arrive at the average for the Earths Surface and TOA values. As well as other measurement systems, cloud & albedo, on those satellites they also use measurements from five geostationary satellites readings to obtain those values.
2. The Measurements are not Validated against a “Master”, they are validated against another Satellite’s readings which are also based on Algorithms.
3. The satellites are having to be continually adjusted for Orbit, which must affect the value of the readings the instruments get.
4. I have not found anything on compensating for expansion and contraction of the atmosphere which must also affect the value of the reading obtained.
5. Surface radiation cannot be accurately measured and must be calculated using 2 different Algorithms for different weather conditions.
This all sounds a bit too much like the problems that Roy Spencer and John Christie had with their Satellite values a few years back and also too much like Climate Models to be looking for parts of 2 W/m2.
A C Osborn says:
January 16, 2014 at 11:59 am
A C, I will tell you again in the hope you might get it this time. Perhaps the people you hang out with engage in intentionally misunderstanding each other.
I don’t play games like that, nor do my friends. I don’t pretend to misunderstand someone. It’s not in my lexicon.
If you think I misunderstood you, fine. A simple question would have settled that without any difficulties.
But without having a scrap of information, you’ve accused me of doing it deliberately. You don’t know me. You don’t know anything about my motives or my actions. You’ve never met me, you haven’t a clue about my mental processes.
But despite that, you’ve made an accusation that I’m lying to you about what I understand.
If you think I didn’t read what you wrote, A C … then how can you accuse me of “intentionally misunderstanding” something you believe I’ve never read? That’s a trick even Houdini would have trouble with.
Next, am I angry? As much as this might surprise you, when you falsely accuse an honest man of lying to you without any evidence at all … he just might get angry.
I’m an old-school kind of guy. I’ve lived my life doing my best to follow some of my great-grandfathers sayings that I was raised on. Everyone, including his children, called him “the Captain”. Haven’t always been successful living up to his code, that’s for sure … but what the family called the “Captain’s Code” were a large part of what shaped me. One of the Captain’s sayings was
Now, he was born in 1848, a much rougher time … so despite my grandmother inculcating all of the Captain’s saying in us kid’s heads, and despite her treating lying as a mortal sin, I’ve never killed a man who called me a liar.
But as you might imagine, I think that people who accuse others of lying without firm, concrete evidence in hand are … well, undesirable, and not fit companions.
And when a slimy little man like you does it and then refuses to apologize, despite not having a scrap of evidence to back his nasty claim?
As you might imagine … I don’t want to have any truck with someone like that at all. Why should I discuss things with a man who publicly calls me a liar without evidence, and then refuses to apologize?
So let me ask you as politely as I can to wriggle off to some other thread, A C. You are certainly not welcome on mine. Slither away and go hang out with people who pretend to misunderstand each other. They won’t find your accusations surprising.
w.
Stephen Wilde says:
January 16, 2014 at 12:39 am
Whaaaaa? Climate is what is called a “radiative-convective” system. I just discussed and linked to my Excel model of said radiation AND convection.
Exactly what is it you think I “cannot reconcile” between the two?
w.
zyz says:
January 16, 2014 at 1:29 am
You are most welcome.
As I said, that is exactly why I prefer to average radiation, rather than averaging temperature. For example, to figure the global temperature average from the CERES data, I first area-average the radiation, and then convert that to temperature. Result, 16.4°C
Going at it the other way, converting the radiation dataset gridcell-by-gridcell to temperatures, and then averaging the temperatures, gives us 15.1°C. In part this difference is from the summer/winter swings you refer to, and in part, it is from the difference equator to poles.
Now, you are right that that is a significantly large difference. But for many things, it doesn’t make much difference. In part this is because the numbers generally discussed are temperature anomalies, rather than absolute temperatures.
You are correct … and again, this is one of the reasons that people use anomalies rather than absolute temperates. The absolute temperatures you mention are different. But if you set out thermometers you’d see that the anomalies are very similar—when it is a hot day on the highway, it’s a hot day on the grass and a hot day on the river.
Much appreciated, I’ll publish some more autobiographical stuff along the way.
w.
Dr. Strangelove says:
January 16, 2014 at 12:05 am
Thanks, Doc, good issue. I’ve shown here that the claimed forcing over the period is only on the order of half a W/m2 …
And I’ve also shown here that the Levitus ocean data is suspect because the quarterly swings in claimed OHC is not visible anywhere in the CERES data. (I and others had argued for some time that such large swings were unphysical, but the CERES data shows that there is no energy available to explain such swings.
As a result, the idea that the “missing heat” is in the ocean is not supported by even the poor ocean data that we have.
Finally, if the heat is actually in the ocean, the warming down to 2000 metres averages less than a tenth of a degree … and the thing is, heat coming out of storage and heat going into storage are very different beasts. Consider a place warmed by a fire … once that fire’s heat is absorbed by the room, it warms the objects in the room up to “room temperature”, call it 70°F (21°C).
Now, suppose the fire goes out. The room is at a lower energy state than the fire was. So no matter how much heat comes out of the wood and other materials that make up the room, it will never reconstitute the heat of the fire. It can not do what the fire did, heat the room itself. The heat in the objects in the room can only warm things that are cooler than the room.
My understanding, however, is that the heat in the ocean is not the claimed heat “in the pipeline” referred to by the AGW folks. I think that they are referring to the fact that once the oceans warm up, they will no longer be absorbing that energy, and so it will go into warming the surface.
Which sounds theoretically possible, but me, I say that assumes that the climate doesn’t respond to changed conditions … but that’s just me.
Regards,
w.
Willis Eschenbach says:
January 16, 2014 at 1:16 pm
Stephen Wilde says:
January 16, 2014 at 12:39 am
Exactly what is it you think I “cannot reconcile” between the two?
Gravity?
“Rising against gravity reduces temperature because the work done against gravity converts kinetic energy (heat) to potential energy (not heat) for a reduction in temperature.”
Before a parcel of air rises, its temperature must be higher than surrounding air. Hence larger volume per unit mass (or lower density) based on Charles’ law. The density difference causes the parcel of air to rise based on Archimedes principle (law of buoyancy). An increase in temperature will already cause the air to radiate more energy based on S-B equation. Note radiation travels at the speed of light while hot air rises slowly (see a hot-air balloon). You have radiative heat transfer before any significant change in potential energy.