Satellites show no global warming for 17 years 5 months

jones says:
February 6, 2014 at 6:44 pm
Is that the same as saying the warmest 17 years on record have occurred in the last 17 years?
It is more or less true, but there are exceptions. 2000, with an anomaly of 0.092 is 18th and 2008, with an anomaly of 0.046, is 24th.
But on the other hand, 1987, with an anomaly of 0.099 is 17th and 1995, with an anomaly of 0.159, is 13th.

Then for encores, is it perhaps possible, or just wishful thinking, that fitting some circle and getting a smaller RMS deviation, than this FLAT trend line, would be indicative of the circle being the better fit; or is that just some BS I might have stepped on ??
Anyhow my eye says it curves down, just like my eyebrows.
Eyes are notorious for their abilities to find trends where none exists. You could easily test it in Excel with a second order fit.

Michael B. Combs says:
February 6, 2014 at 7:44 pm
Dear Skunk,
Can you find out who is responsible for the “color commentary” on your trip. I could not find it. National Geographic is in with both (all) feet regarding CAGW but the “expert” on board may be someone such as a retired university instructor. Some such are less strident than others but likely will follow the program if they want to get another paid vacation.
Please do report back.

“””””…..Gail Combs says:
February 7, 2014 at 6:22 am
Kathy says: @ February 7, 2014 at 6:05 am
17 years and 5 months is an odd interval.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Kathy, go back and read Richard Courtney’s explanation of why the analysis starts in the present and goes back in time until the data says there is warming.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/02/06/satellites-show-no-global-warming-for-17-years-5-months/#comment-1561052…..”””””
Trust a farmer to be thinking straight.
Viscount Monckton, introduced us to this extended period of essentially zero slope, some time before it was even 17 years, as others had suggested 17 years as a minimum interval to be climatically significant.
Since then, Christopher has updated his extraction monthly starting as Gail says from the point in time where growth last showed up statistically, and has continued to do so.
I think that is a lot of work to go to, although I’m sure he has it automated, so he only needs to update the data set, as the numbers come in; and presumably at some future month, he will be able to say that a definite drop or a definite increase has appeared on the scene.
Besides those numbers like 17 years, and five months, are pure artifacts of our archaic time system.
Perhaps if Lord Christopher, would switch over to “star dates”, instead of earth years and months; then the texting nerds, might understand the numbers don’t really count that much it is the total elapsed time that matters.

per Mike Mellor.
“””””…..Anthony please stop accommodating Chris Monckton. There is one tiny part of the world stuck in a time warp where ancestral titles still mean something. The rest of the world is a democracy and we couldn’t give a rat’s about the man’s claims to superiority and nobility. …..”””””
Well Mike, I don’t know what planet YOU live on, but on the one I live on, democracies are rather rare.
For example, I live in a Country, a quite large one, that is a Republic; NOT a Democracy. And each of its several States, is Guaranteed by its Constitution, that they shall have a Republican form of government. Now I suppose they could themselves choose to amend their own State Constitutions, to convert to a Democracy; which is really a polite word for Anarchy.
But only a minority of the worlds people live in a democracy, or even enjoy ANY kind of self rule at all.
Dictatorships and oligarchys are far more common.
You sound like you live in a place, where nothing at all means anything to anybody. Why do you even have a name ? Surely a simple number perhaps in the range of 1 up to seven billion, should suffice to distinguish YOU from all the milling crowds on this earth.
For that matter; throw in the animals as well, and enumerate them too.
Or do you somehow feel that YOU deserve to be elevated above mere animals, as some kind of special case, of evolutionary superiority.
Certainly, intelligence has so far not proven to have any better survival characteristics, than simply being big and mean, and ugly. That suited the dinosaurs for about 140 million years or so, while intelligence maybe has lasted for 100,000 years, and doesn’t look like it will last much longer.
If your only criticism of Viscount Monckton’s statistical analysis of the RSS data set, is that he happened by accident, to inherit a Hereditary title; usually reserved for persons who have demonstrated high achievement, and service, then you perhaps would find it more comfortable for you somewhere else.
It is said that the Emperor Napoleon, crowned himself; couldn’t wait for the Pope I guess. I think maybe the same thing has happened in America, by the sound of things.
Christopher Monckton at least, was not a party to his becoming a Hereditary Viscount; it fell upon him, so to speak.
Perhaps you might read some history. Even on Wikipedia, it is possible to learn some interesting history.
Your comment says more about you, than it does about Christopher Monckton of Brenchley.

WD

You can see that easily here. The regions of near zero trend are marked in brown. You can click for details. It gives CI’s (85%) and t-statistics.
Wow, way cool, Nick! It takes a few minutes to figure out the triangle graphic, but once you do it is remarkably informative. Makes cherrypicking easier than ever before (just kidding, kinda, maybe:-)!
But yeah, it reduces searching for neutral to cooling trend times to a glance (and also redisplays the stretches of strong warming and cooling in an interesting way).
rgb

Events since that paper was published, including a continuing absence of warming, have tended to confirm the likelihood that sensitivity is low and that, therefore, there will be little warming this century. That is one reason why the IPCC has cut by almost half its prediction of warming over the next 30 years. The trolls are now out of line even with the IPCC.
Mr. Monckton, while I agree with most of your statements and understand your need to present a sane political position that is necessarily slightly overstated in order to counter the complete lack of objectivity and obvious scientific pandering the counter position, I would put it very slightly differently. The continuing absence of warming does not confirm low sensitivity (although it does as you note tend in that direction. What it does is allow us to fairly conclusively reject GCMs that predict (in my opinion, absurdly) high climate sensitivity and get them out of the ARn reports! To put it bluntly, any GCM that has predicted a mean warming of 0.5C higher than what has been observed over the last 20 years is almost certainly badly broken. So why are models in this general category still in AR5? Because they permit one to draw deliberately misleading pictures for policy makers in the SPM (e.g. figure 1.4) while still being able to make the lofty claim of scientific neutrality. Whether or not one “averages” the GCMs (an utterly meaningless abuse of the mathematical science of statistical analysis to produce a “mean prediction” that supposedly should have more weight than the individual GCMs that actually are not in terrible agreement with observation) the human eye and mind perceives the envelope of model results and by its nature averages it to produce a curve with extrapolated sensitivity in between none and the 5+C of the hottest running failed models.
The climate scientists that write the report can apparently do little better than the human eye, but dress up an indefensible statistical claim with indefensible assertions of “confidence”. Precisely what is the statistical basis of their “confidence”?
At the moment, the most accurate way of stating affairs is that the observational data does not support the claims for high sensitivity because it suffices to fairly conclusively reject the GCMs that predict it with a high degree of confidence. It substantially weakens the claims for intermediate (2-3 C) sensitivity — models that produce median sensitivity in this range probably do have more than 5% overlap in their Monte Carlo runs with observation, but not much more — they are models that should indeed be slated for rejection should the neutral trend continue. The data doesn’t really substantially constrain the models that produce comparatively low climate sensitivity (0-2C) — those models produce runs that are actually cooler than the present in reasonable abundance as well as those that are warmer. I wish that I had time to sort out CMIP5 models one at a time — I think it would be very revealing to apply a reasonable rejection criterion and write an alternative summary for policy makers from the same data, but with the statistical analysis done correctly and in a defensible way, backed up by a statistical report (not really a scientific report) laid out in detail. I think such a report could be placed head to head in competition with the official one and would convince even a lot of climate scientists that the AR SPMs are dangerously overblown and risk destroying the reputation and future of climate science itself as time passes.
I do not feel confident in personally even estimating the future climate sensitivity by year 2100 within any range that would be particularly useful. The data tells us that >3C is unlikely at this point, but not so unlikely as to be impossible. The data probably also suffices to exclude negative climate sensitivity, which is physically implausible anyway. However, the real problem here is that none of the GCMs are correctly capturing the split between GHG-forced warming, natural feedbacks, and natural variation where the latter is (again IMO) a much, much greater factor than AR’s SPM “confidently” states. Again, this is something that I think that even a lot of the climate scientists that have in the past made egregious claims about CO_2 forced warming are starting to face — they know the models are failing and really, they aren’t stupid, only misled by their own perhaps too-strong prior beliefs about linearized feedbacks against a flat natural background.
Michael Mann is not without a share of blame for this — he did the entire discipline of climate science a serious disservice when he “erased” all of the natural variation of the climate over the last 1000 years in the infamous hockey stick graph. If one weights the hockey stick strongly as a prior belief, the conditioned analysis of everything changes. It takes time and confounding data to overcome the bias this represents.
But to the extent that a nonlinear chaotic strongly couple system can be “split” into natural variation (utterly unpredictable within current models, not even particularly well representable) plus GHG+feedback forcing, a larger contribution from natural variation comes at the strict expense of a smaller contribution from GHGs. The problem is that I don’t think anybody has a defensible way to decompose climate variation on any climactically relevant timescale in this way. At the moment, natural variability could easily end up being a larger factor than GHG forcing plus feedbacks and we could all be actively misled about the future in either direction, because we cannot even begin to predict if natural variation will further warm the climate (independent of GHGs) or cool it (independent of GHGs) or what will happen when what would have been a warming or cooling trend> interacts nonlinearly with GHG forcing variation.
It is worth remembering that the climate has a known cold-cycle instability, and we do not, actually, have any clue as to what triggers it to produce cyclic glaciation, or when those factors align to make cold-cycle instability critical. A glance at the climate record of the Pliestocene in general and the Holocene in particular suggests that if anything, the geological time scale evolution of the climate is one of cooling towards the transition point to the next round of glaciation, which really would be something to panic over. So in spite of the fact that GHG-linked climate sensitivity is very likely to be (as you say) in the ballpark of perhaps 1-2 C averaged over and ensemble of possible unpredictable natural futures, the variation of those futures alone is likely commensurate. We could have anything from cooling over the whole next century (due to natural cooling that might have been much greater if it were not for CO_2) to double the warming that CO_2 might have produced if nothing else changed if natural warming adds to CO_2 in some way.
I suspect that we are roughly 20 to 30 years away from having the data alone needed to build successful climate models that can represent the natural vs forced split accurately. This isn’t an arbitrary number of years — we need a time span of accurate, satellite-based observations that includes at least one whole cycle of the PDO, and hopefully will include the phase transition in e.g. the NAO and other multidecadal cycles, as these cycles are strongly correlated with past climate shifts, have periods that are generally not integer multiples of each other and hence can constructively or destructively interfere in their effects. We simply don’t have any useful measurements of things like the jet stream in all of the different phase combinations, and variations of the jet stream or Hadley circulation patterns have large and “immediate” effects on the climate, not to mention the pattern of weather. We are also waiting for enough decades of ARGO data (ideally with a steadily increasing number of fixed and floating buoys, as the coverage is still far too sparse for 70% of the Earth’s surface), enough decades of satellite-based GRACE data and correctly adjusted SLR data — basically we are barely ENTERING the era where we might get accurate measurements in many dimensions needed to constrain the climate models to where they work.
If they can work at all at their current granularity. This all by itself is a serious issue. Climate models are literally blind to all sorts of short spatial wavelength phenomena, both horizontally and vertically. They perforce attempt to dynamically evolve with some sort of “average” over the short wavelength behavior, but in a highly nonlinear system with substantial feedbacks it is very difficult indeed to “renormalize” the dynamics to a macroscopic scale in such a way that it will reproduce even on average the time evolution of finer-grained trajectories. As Pielke, Sr. just presented on another thread (with admirable support from the literature) GCMs are failing badly outside of their glaring failure in global average temperature — they fail to accurately reproduce the climate at any length or time scale, getting countless things wrong and only a comparatively few things right. They have basically no skill out to a decade, and as we can see they have no skill (so far) out to nearly two decades in global average temperature. GCM defenders are reduced to claiming that they will only have skill out at 30 years or more, but while this might be true, it is obviously an easily doubtful assertion.
It appears that climate skeptics are at long last getting something of a hearing, motivated by the observation that they might be right after all and it wouldn’t do politically to appear overtly biased against the side that ends up being right after wasting a few hundreds of billions of dollars and diverting the energy of an entire civilization down the rabbit hole for two decades at the expense of solving the world’s real problems. It would be extremely wise to assemble a correctly done counteranalysis of the GCM data (which is, fortunately, freely available) and use that analysis to reject the failed models and thereby quantitatively moderate the egregious predictions and “confidence” assertions of AR5’s SPM.
rgb

Believe these robots or your lying eyes; google-earth the 5 Molasses Keys (hint there are only 2 left from the rising Caribbean Sea) just off the 7-mile bridge, flooded during the same 17.5 years!

Sir Chris February 8, 2014 at 3:50 am
“I need note only that “Village Idiot”, though it says it regards itself as “clever””
No. I commented that you had attempted a “clever smear” with your comment:
“The “Idiot” – unless it is paid very well by those who spend so much time and money trying to discredit anyone who does not unquestioningly accept every daft tenet of the New Religion..”
——————————–
You write:
“I need note only that “Village Idiot”, though it says it regards itself as “clever”, was unable to refute a single one of my answers with any scientific argument.”
I’m just airing my views which you have counted. I think other Village residents can draw their own conclusions, though for reasons best known to yourself, you may prefer a protracted slanging match.
———————-
Just one point. You say: “there will be little warming this century.” That’s a bit vague. Care to put even an approximate figure on it, what with you being so good at all those Statistics 101, math an’ all. 0.05 per decade? 0.1 per decade? Can you tell us (in laymans terms) how you reach that estimate or is it mere apriorism (look it up. You misused the term on me above).

Monckton of Brenchley says:
February 8, 2014 at 2:10 pm
Are you saying socialists cannot be scientists? Your true colours are coming out!

The Contributions of JBJ
#1 – That regression is statistically pointless!
#2 – Look at this graph http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/temp/vostok/graphics/tempplot5.gif
I don’t think it would be too difficult to find a date which shows there has been no warming for the last 300,000+ years!
#3 – “In the meantime, the “Idiot” should be more circumspect in future when attempting to sneer about matters of which it has little understanding.”
And your scientific credentials are what???
#4 – So what are your scientific credentials then??? You didn’t answer my question!
#5 – Are you saying socialists cannot be scientists? Your true colours are coming out!
=====
That’s everything JBJ ‘contributed’ in this forum.

Monckton of Brenchley said February 8, 2014 at 2:10 pm:
“The sneakily pseudonymous “JBJ” asks what my scientific credentials are. Only a Socialist would ask such a question.”
In as much as the issue of “credentials” comes up here from time to time (too often!) I have a couple times posted my favorite quote on the issue, from Noam Chomsky, who many would consider to be a socialist I believe! So do you mind one counter-example? Here is what Chomsky said:
“Generally speaking, it seems fair to say that the richer the intellectual substance of a field, the less there is a concern for credentials, and the greater is the concern for content.”

Solar models show that this period would be about the same temperature, or slightly cooler see: http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/news/2012ScienceMeeting/docs/presentations/S2-03_Scafetta_SORCE.pdf Until people are really understanding the basis of the cycles then you can’t take chances with global warming. In this case it is better err on the side caution.

His suggestion of conducting a proper statistical analysis based upon the models is interesting. It would be an enormous task. My one fear is that, by the curse of intercomparison, much the same errors are propagated throughout the models, and I am not sure how a statistical analysis of their output would take account of this.
I don’t think it would be that enormous a task. Steve McKintyre has the data here:
http://www.climateaudit.info/data/models/cmip5/GLB/
and the entire point is to NOT compare the models to each other or consider their shared errors, but to take each model, one at a time, and apply the ordinary rules of hypothesis testing to the following null hypothesis:
This GCM is a perfect representation of climate dynamics.
in comparison with the actual time evolution of the climate. Chapter 9 of AR5 is (apparently) morphing over time to partially acknowledge the problem; box 9.2 is an entire apologia in three parts for the “fifteen year” hiatus (their terminology) where it is only 15 years because they terminate the record in 2012. However, the fundamental problem with Chapter 9 is a very simple one. They base all of their predictions and projections and assessments of probable accuracy on two things:
a) The Multimodel Ensemble. Seriously, what are they thinking? Yes, they acknowledge in section 9.2.2.3 that model runs are not iid samples from a distribution. They present many learned papers that address the fact that model runs are not iid samples from a distribution and hence “creates challenges for how best to make quantitative inferences of future climate” (an understatement if there ever was one!). As it is, the multimodel ensemble mean is the next best thing to a completely mean-ingless quantity as exists on Earth. And while they do indeed do a credible job of listing some of the reasons that this is true (the models aren’t independent — they share lineage and hence possible bias, the models don’t all contribute the same number of model runs to the overall result, the models do not all score equally well in the training set validation) while ignoring one of the most important of the others — there is no reason to believe that intermodel errors are a uniformly distributed random variable with a symmetric effect on the mean performance and so there is quite literally zero reason to expect that averaging over models will give a better result than simply using the best model.
In fact, we know perfectly well that the best model will usually outperform the mean performance of an ensemble average of the best model and a bunch of worse models, especially in this precise context. Treating the results of the worse models as noise, one can apply the concepts of information theory and predict the degradation of the information due to the admixture of noise from the inferior models. To give a lovely example in physics, to the extent that Hartree-Fock models usually outperform Hartree models in capturing correlation/exchange energy, averaging ten Hartree models to one Hartree-Fock model simply guarantees a worse performance in a systematic way.
b) Validation on the training set. This is truly inexplicable to me. Forget about things such as figure 9.2c, which (if I understand the figure) indicates in simple graphical form that nobody could possibly miss that the MME mean fails badly to correctly represent the climate — consider figure 9.8a, which basically plots CMIP5 against the actual climate across all of the time span of HADCRUT4. Are they kidding me? The training set period is clearly marked — the agreement even of the meaningless mean within the training set is indifferent at best and the performance of the individual models is for the most part terrible — one only preserve the illusion of good performance by means of the mixing of TRAINING SET FITS which are more or less constrained to give the right interval increase in temperature and hence cannot much deviate in the mean from HADCRUT etc. If one examines the rest of the graph, hindcast performance is much worse than even this. For example, it completely fails on the interval from roughly 1900 to 1940 — it completely misses the first half of the twentieth century, both one model at a time and in meaningless aggregate. No wonder they can state with “confidence” that natural variation is unimportant — they build models that eliminate a completely natural interval of strongly increasing temperatures and replace it with a far-too-smooth, much warmer curve reaching back to 1870 or so and missing most of the interesting bounces in between, claim that the MME mean is validated on the training set (where it is not, not one model at a time, which is the only way a meaningful hypothesis test/validation can be performed) and then assert that because the models didn’t need to use natural variation on the training set it still is unimportant on the future prediction.
Hell, the MME mean failed in the past predictions for a 30-40 year interval — why wouldn’t it fail in the future as well?
The point is that it is really, really easy to fix this. Simply test each model against HADCRUT4! Most of the models have the data from their individual runs available somewhere or the other — the part generated by the perturbed parameter ensembles discussed in 9.2.2.2. This is really the only part that matters. If a given model is used to generate 100 PPE runs, and these runs collectively spend 98% of their time above the actual measured climate across the entire trial period (or fail any one of a number of other elementary tests, such as having approximately the correct autocorrelation time and variance), presto chango, the model has now officially failed a simple hypothesis test with a p-value of 0.02 or less!
When an individual model fails and individual model hypothesis test, the only sane thing to do is to remove it from the MME! I mean jeepers! In figure 9.8a, which is basically the full span version of SPM 1.4 without the last-second adjustment voodoo, one can clearly make out multiple colored threads that spend all of their time above even the MME mean, let alone the actual HADCRUT4 temperature far beneath that mean. One can see that most of the threads are spending all of their time above the actual mean.
How many threads? According to box 9.2: 111 out of 114 realizations, and that is as of 2012, not as of the present. Box 9.2 is basically openly acknowledging safely in a science section where no policy maker will ever find it that CMIP5 is badly broken, we don’t know why, we cannot even narrow the possible reasons why down to only two or three, and the best that we can do is note that the models themselves sometimes one at a time spend 17 year spans too warm so that this doesn’t disprove them!
Come on, this is pure piffle. You can’t have it all ways — ignore the weighting of the models in terms of PPE, ignore their shared lineage and biases, refuse to apply any sort of hypothesis test to the models one at a time before admitting them into the ensemble to be used to make critical decisions regarding the expenditure of the energy of the entire human species for decades into the future, the first such collective expenditure in human history after the end of the cold war and one that diverts that energy away from things like establishing world peace and prosperity in favor of averting a hypothetical disaster, create a MME mean that by itself fails a hypothesis test against the data everywhere outside of the training set where it is constrained not to fail and then claim any sort of statistical high ground or knowledge at all!
This is absolutely shameful. There really is no question about this. What they do is indefensible, and its indefensibility will be obvious to the entire world in another three years no matter what unless they get lucky and warming resumes at a frenetic pace! Which even they recognize is now not likely gonna happen. It could, but it is literally not probable at this point and they know it!
rgb

First step: if Professor Brown is willing, perhaps he would assemble the outline he has given in his various posts above into a clear brief that a competent statistician would understand, and email it to me with an indication of whether he is willing to supervise the project if I can find someone qualified to take it on. The output, presumably, would be a devastating paper for publication not in a climate journal – where the barriers against the truth are formidable – but in a leading journal of statistics.
I would sort of be willing — that is, willing with some caveats. The first problem is my time commitments. Here is a short list of my current activities:
a) Co-teaching introductory mechanics (96 students) in a new experimental format.
b) Co-teaching introductory electricity and magnetism (270 students) in a new but slightly different experimental format.
c) Participating in one “established” startup company doing predictive modelling and other high end statistical work of which I am a co-founder and in which I have a substantial interest. And I use the term participating already with a grain of salt as I’ve been too busy to do more than pay lip service to actual activity on its behalf for months now.
d) Preparing to co-found a brand new startup company providing a key security service for websites as a primary contributor to the core security technology and algorithm. This might or might not involve me writing a patent application over the next month, which I’ve done several times now and is enormously time consuming with its stilted language and need for carefully constrained statements.
e) Finishing/refining the two textbooks, two associated review guides, one novel, and one philosophical work (Axioms) that I am working on, where there is some urgency about the first four items as they are in active use by students at Duke and elsewhere.
f) Supporting at least dieharder, the aforementioned RNG tester. I’m way behind in bugfix requests, but this is the lowest priority task in the list, sadly, in spite of the fact that a lot of people use the tool and more would use it if I ever had the time to add planned improvements, additional tests, and so on that I have in mind.
g) Trying to support a marriage to a woman I love and who works harder than I do (she’s a physician), three sons with two in college and one trying to start a family on a shoestring, and a couple of rascally vagrant dogs, all of whom not unreasonably make demands on my time when I’m not totally committed to one task or another above.
And somewhere in there is writing long posts on WUWT as a hobby of sorts, trying to police the science and make up my own mind about what is properly “known” in climate science, what is sheer speculation and fancy, and what the most ethical course of action is for myself, at least, in the ongoing debate.
You can see my problem, I hope. If all I were divorced and living alone, teaching a single course, basking on the coast living on a substantial income from companies that were no longer starting up, with all of my offspring well-launched I would have already done the work I outlined above, as climate science is indeed my “hobby” to the extent that it generates no income but intrigues me and is clearly one of the more important issues of the day. Happily in some ways, sadly in others, I am not retired and single and free to do whatever I damn well please — yet. So if I’m to supervise anyone in doing the work, they have to be a self-starter and not an idiot when it comes to e.g. using R or other tools to do statistics, finding and downloading data sets, as well as the general ideas underlying Bayesian reasoning and hypothesis testing, at least. I simply don’t have time to teach someone this stuff — it would be faster to do it all myself and I don’t have time to do THAT.
Does this make sense? I’m not trying to wuss out — I am seriously overcommitted in my time well out into the indefinite future barring one of my companies being bought out and transforming me into the idle rich overnight, and I very much doubt that will happen this year in either current case although I do have some hopes for next year and the year after. So my expected time commitment would have to be at most an hour or two a week, maybe, and at that I’d pretty much have to not write on WUWT in the meantime (sigh).
That might be enough. As I said, 9.8a speaks for itself, even without pegging on the last two years to further extend the divergence of the predicted from the realized. But the really interesting possibility is fixing the multimodel “ensemble” by eliminating the cruft through simple statistical analysis and comparison to the real world data. This is to some extent contingent on being able to obtain PPEs per model. I Do Not Know how easy this will be — there is one figure in AR5 that I recall that shows a single collection of PPEs for one of the models, so I’m certain the data is out there for SOME of them, but I’m not at all certain about all. Steve M. probably knows if he doesn’t already archive it.
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I’ve done it all for you in thousands of hours of study and thinking about how the laws of physics apply to planetary atmospheres, surfaces, crusts, mantles and cores.
I’ve put in my own hours, thank you. This is not helpful in the specific context of doing a defensible statistical analysis of CMIP5. Also, I am enormously skeptical about any work that asserts that the DALR is the result of anything but convection in an open system, given that this is how it is properly derived in a treatment of the Navier-Stokes equation, although there are semi-heuristic treatments like the one in Caballero that examine only uplifting or downfalling parcels. The DALR is a dynamic feature of an open, driven fluid systems, not something that is maintained in by gravity functioning as a Maxwell Demon.
Whenever this sort of thing is proposed, I cannot help but connect the dots and conclude that the proposer is seeking some sort of physical mechanism that would permit them to claim that there is no such thing as the greenhouse effect, that surface temperature is maintained “by gravity” in some sort of stationary way. It is often accompanied by the assertion that CO_2 is a cooling gas and other idiocy. I sincerely hope that you are not yet another “dragonslayer” in disguise, as this is the sort of thing that runs rampant amongst them, especially when “distinguished” 19th century physics is invoked (pretending that Gibbs and the entire 20th century progression of stat mech never happened, that quantum mechanics is irrelevant, etc.) and above all, when the laws of thermodynamics are invoked by individuals that clearly do not understand them.
If you are indeed a “physicist”, then surely you understand Maxwell’s Demon, detailed balance, have taken a credible course in statistical mechanics (and several in thermodynamics), have studied graduate-level electrodynamics and quantum theory, have taken courses in partial differential equations, complex variables, advanced calculus, and so on and hence should no better than to invoke gravity as a Demon. If you have done all of these things but somehow missed that part, I suggest that you do a web search or literature search, as I was able to find online derivations presented as parts of ordinary undergrad classes in thermo that covered it without much difficulty — you don’t even need to go back to your textbooks to try to find it (as it might well have been omitted from any given textbook). You might also review the heat equation as you seem to have a serious misunderstanding about the connection between a thermal gradient and heat flow through a homogeneous medium in a non-equilibrium dynamic energy transfer.
If you are in fact a dragonslayer, then to the best of my experience there is little or no hope for you. I have yet to find a single slayer that takes instruction in physics well, or is even willing to openly debate the physics with the use of actual equations and derivations following from clear statements of physical law.
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It was in response to a proposal by Nikolov and Zeller (IIRC) and another person named Jelbring that the DALR was a static feature of true thermal equilibrium in a gravitational field (Jelbring more than N&Z) so that surface temperature strictly depended on fluid pressure. I pointed out in threads on multiple blogs that thermodynamic equilibrium is isothermal, gravitational field or not, and finally wrote a top article demonstrating in a fairly simple way that one could build a perpetual motion machine of the second kind if in fact gravity acted like a Maxwell Demon so that the bottom of an adiabatically insulated fluid column in a gravitational field was warmer than the top in stable thermodynamic equilibrium.
Since then, people periodically revisit it and assert without any actual support that my argument is wrong without ever (of course) being able to prove it or refute it algebraically from some sort of first principles. I’ve had people actually claim that heat flow itself is subject to gravity and flows more easily downhill than uphill (which of course is the absurdity that is at the heart of this, as one way or another that is the consequence of non-isothermal equilibrium).
In actual fact, the DALR is derived by considering the convective motion of approximately adiabatically isolated fluid parcels up and down in a gravitational field, something that only happens if the fluid is being driven by thermal asymmetry into convective flow in an open system that is differentially heated. The heating need not be at the bottom vs cooling at the top, although that is certainly the simplest example; for a planet or moon heating at the equator and cooling at the poles is sufficient to cause a bulk convective transport sufficient to maintain a troposphere with a DALR and a stratosphere. To put it another way, if one placed a heated plate on the ceiling of your well-insulated room on one side and a cold plate on the ceiling of your well insulated room on the other side, the cold plate would increase the density of fluid locally, which would then sink, displacing warmer fluid beneath, and being replaced by fluid from the side while the hot plate would heat air in contact with it, reducing its density and maintaining it at the ceiling. In time a convective roll would develop that sinks on the cold half of the room and rises on the warm half of the room. Of course it would be much simpler to put the hot plate on the ground (as it effectively is on the Earth with its visible-light transparent atmosphere) and the cold plate at the top of the troposphere where the atmosphere radiatively cools in the LWIR, and of course in a real planet one has to still throw in equatorial/polar asymmetry and substantial lateral asymmetry and latent heat and phase transitions in water and even more stuff.
This is all part of the Big Question — how do asymmetrically heated and cooled fluids in open complex systems self-organize to transport the energy? What are the emergent structures, and how do things like their transport efficiency vary with the non-equilibrium state? These are really difficult questions, and cannot be answered with trivial linear models as the self-organized structures themselves are highly nonlinear, highly variable and have their own rules that cannot easily or meaningfully be reduced to the microscopic level. Fluid dynamics in an an open system with the complexity of the Earth is very, very complicated; arguably the most difficult problem in physics. There is nothing shameful in the fact that we cannot yet solve it, although there is something wrong with claiming that we have solved it at a precision sufficient to justify the mortgage of human civilization for the next century on the basis of its predictions when manifestly we have not.
The WUWT article is here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/24/refutation-of-stable-thermal-equilibrium-lapse-rates/
It’s one of the only articles I actually have written for WUWT, although periodically a thread comment gets elevated to become a comment.
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rgbatduke @ February 10, 2014 at 10:16 am
Thank you for the background & context, and the link!
It sounds not that far from having an apparatus in it. With equations.
This might be implemented … cloud chamber, heat pipe, thermocouple/diode, amp … or use them as model-elements.
tc

per Fritz.
“””””……Anyhow my eye says it curves down, just like my eyebrows.
Eyes are notorious for their abilities to find trends where none exists. You could easily test it in Excel with a second order fit…….””””””
Eyes (and ears) also have an uncanny ability to see “information” that sometimes defies analytical discovery.
For example, a two year old child can easily distinguish a tree; ANY tree, from a telephone pole (the AT&T “tree”).
Try locating some software on the web (any software) that can do likewise.
Now the rugrat, may get stumped (pun intended) by the Baja desert “boojum tree”, but then lots of humans aren’t sure its a tree, and not maybe a cactus.
But in self defense, I DID query, whether some formal analysis might put numbers, where my eye simply sees a pattern; (even if none really exists) in this case.

rgbatduke 7:37am: “What exactly do you think will happen when you establish a thermal connection between the tops and bottoms of the adiabatic columns you have built?”
Once connected, the two systems are 1 system again, an adiabatic thermal universe of their own. Entropy will increase to the maximum possible value. At that exact point (ideal & exact T(z) determined by relevant Poisson eqn.), heat will stop flowing – thermodynamic equilibrium will once again be achieved isentropic, non-isothermal by a small percent in a gravity field. There is no PPM. 2nd law is observed. See Dr. Bohren’s 1998 text sec. 4.4 for the mathematical proof. The Verkley et. al. 2004 paper we discussed before shows a great, concise mathematical explanation/extension proof using 1st and 2nd law with the calculus required.

You have not proved this. I have proved the opposite. Isothermal conditions have unbalanced energy potentials (because of the additional mean gravitational potential energy at the top) and so they are not the state of maximum entropy as described in the Second Law.
So you are saying that if you lift a sealed, adiabatically isolated container of gas up 10 km, its temperature will change according to the lapse rate.
The problem, sir, is obvious.
They are also demonstrably not in the state of maximum entropy. That’s the whole point of connecting the top and bottom of your supposedly maximum entropy fluid by a good conductor of heat. Heat will flow because it is not in maximum entropy — you have a thermal gradient that is just begging to be equilibrated by transferring heat from the higher temperature to the lower temperature, a process that macroscopically, without doubt, increases entropy. You actually have to come up with a glib explanation for why this entropy increase does not occur, since gravity is a conservative force and is net neutral in all energy exchanges from the top of the fluid to the bottom, and the fluid is a conductive medium perfectly capable of moving heat from the bottom to the top.
I just don’t get it. All of this is perfectly obvious. Also, there are numerous books that derive the DALR, which is not a “thermal equilibrium” or “thermodynamic equilibrium” condition either one, it is a condition established by the vertical convective motion of the gas. You cannot just redefine the language of physics to suit yourself, by the way — everybody knows that “thermodynamics” is a misnomer, but everybody also understands perfectly well what it means and that it does not apply to open system dynamics per se, hence the phrase “non-equilibrium thermodynamics”.
If you want to say that planetary atmospheres will generally establish a lapse rate, that is just fine with me. I agree. However that lapse rate is not therma-whatever equilibrium any more than a rod between two thermal reservoirs is in thermal equilibrium. Heat is being actively transported throughout the system, both in the rod and in the planetary atmospheres. If one takes an isolated column of fluid and waits for it to stop moving and equilibrate, therma-whatever equilibrium is isothermal, period, because it is absolutely trivial to show a) any other state is not, in fact, maximum entropy because the transfer of energy from the higher to the lower temperatures increases entropy; b) if one connects the two supposedly equilibrated regions with a heat engine, one has a perpetual motion machine of the second kind, as one might expect since you have violated the second law with your assertion of therma-whatever equilibrium.
The problem with this is that suddenly you aren’t contributing to the discussion at all any more. The DALR has been derived and reasonably well understood for a long time. So are its variations with things like humidity. Its role as one of the legs upon which the greenhouse effect is built is reasonably well understood — the greenhouse effect would produce warming in a pure single layer model, sure, but the real thing in a real atmosphere is vastly more complex because the real atmosphere is not a single layer with ideal properties, it is a complex entity with substantial circulation that maintains a lapse rate that varies substantially with humidity and local conditions, such that the radiative temperature of the top of the troposphere where it becomes transparent to LWIR is much cooler than the surface temperature and is not identical to the temperature that one might expect from a “perfect” single layer model even with the approximately correct mean absorptivities.
I personally generally recommend that people such as yourself consider reading e.g. Caballero’s lecture notes on atmospheric physics available here:
http://people.su.se/~rcaba/index.php?view=teaching
In particular, note his entire chapter 2. This is all pretty straightforward stuff, and note well that it involves moving air parcels — it does not assert, nor would it be correct to assert, that it describes thermodynamic equilibrium. Note well that considering the DALR and scale height in the context of planetary atmospheres is often assigned as homework in atmospheric physics courses. What, exactly, are you contributing to this that isn’t well-known, more correctly derived without all of the assertions of second-law-violating “equilibrium”, derived with consideration of the actual chemistry of the atmosphere in question (e.g. wet air lapse rates)? Would that be “nothing”?
Finally, even Caballero’s treatment isn’t quite “right” — it is semi-heuristic. The proper way to derive the DALR is to consider the Navier-Stokes equation itself. This derivation is in books on the advanced physics of planetary atmospheres, but I failed to bookmark the one I did find online that contained it and so I cannot give you a link. I’m guessing it is in several, however, so if you search I’m sure you will find. Navier-Stokes, of course, is not at all about equilibrium thermodynamics, it is about transport processes, both bulk fluid and heat/energy, usually driven by temperature/pressure differences.
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[DALR = Downward ? ??? Lapse Rate? Longwave Radiation? Mod]

rgbatduke 7:46am: “Are you mad, sir?”
No, I seldom get mad at confused but inquisitive students that want to improve. I only get mad at my tags that fail, let’s hope these work out. Thanks for your response. This 7:46am response shows you have not yet read up on the basic proofs in the cites I provided. My statements at 9:25am the day before are proven beyond reasonable doubts in the cites I gave using 1st principles and a bit of calculus. There is at least one step in the calculus checking that may need a visit to your math dept. but that is always a good thing to do.
If you want to contribute to developing an understanding of the FLAT 17+ years in near surface and lower troposphere mean global temperature observations in the face of ever increasing infrared-active gas ppm shown in top post, you must first end your confusion and master the basic science (the adiabatic columns). This is easily done by traipsing over to the library and checking out Dr. Bohren’s 1998 text and having the pre-req.s to read thru the proof of my 9:25am statements in sec. 4.4 (don’t just take the word of an anonymous poster on the internet). You will have to re-read it a couple times, it is idealized, exact, concise, you are smart and the work is physically correct so you will eventually come around to writing the right stuff on the basics.
As I would do for any critical, informed student visiting during my office hours, I will give some hints on why you have been marked down on exams and homework assignments in the past. I will not do the fix-up work for you, that is up to you if you want to apply yourself to advancing the science. Here goes; assume you just marched into my office and announced yes, you want to apply yourself to further study.
1) You announce but: “The zeroth law for equilibrium requires detailed balance of energy flow across the boundary of each parcel.”
Dr. Bohren discusses this and shows why you are wrong.
Hint: the zeroth is applicable to three thermodynamic systems. Research assignment: The adiabatic tall column of interest is how many thermodynamic systems? Once the adiabatic two are connected, how many adiabatic systems remain? Come back when you have a cite with your answer about whether zeroth is applicable. You are confused, as Dr. Bohren writes, by conduction in solids. Solid enthalpy is the same as gas enthalpy except a term is assumed to be so small as to be justly ignored in a solid. What term is that exactly? Hint: It cannot be ignored in the study of gas enthalpy in the pursuit of understanding adiabatic thermodynamic equilibrium in a tall m^2 column of standard air.
2) You counter: “If you increase the temperature on the boundary of the bottom parcels, you disequilibrate them…..heat will flow until the entire container…”
Hint: read up on the term “adiabatic”. Return when you can explain that term in your own words and why this statement of yours is irrelevant.
3) You complain I have not read every other book: “I (and every other book on thermodynamics ever published) hold that the temperature difference when heat no longer flows is zero, but even if you want it to be non-zero, it can’t have two or more values as it is a local property of the fluid.”
Again, you were marked down because you confuse conduction (and enthalpy) in solids with conduction (and enthalpy) in fluids and gases and plasmas. This is nothing to be ashamed over, many, if not all, students are in this position entering Dr. Bohren’s classes as he writes and have to be first unlearned of gibberish then re-learned in the right stuff of science.
4) You have to re-ask: “So exactly what temperature difference will constitute thermal equilibrium, the state where there is no heat flow through the fluid?
Dr. Bohren points out in the literature that the T(z) difference in the tall adiabatic column at max. entropy that will constitute thermodynamic equilibrium is the relevant Poisson eqn. (ref. eqn. 4.149 p. 166). If you run the numbers from earth surface to tropopause, find a temperature ( z) difference of a small percent (not constant).
5) You ask: “If one connects two columns with different equilibrium temperatures at the point of connection, heat will flow forever because there is no common state that can be called equilibrium in which no heat flow! If there were, the thermodynamic equilibrium of each gas column would not be unique, would it?”
Hint: Figure out your best answer to 3) above and re-examine these questions. Return during office hours when you have thought this through without confusion.
6) You ask repeatedly as if the answer was not already in the literature: “What is the correct thermal equilibrium of the gas column?”
Hint: This allows me to judge you have not completed the classroom assigned reading assignments. Get back to me when you have answered your own question by digging thru Bohren 1998 sec. 4.4 assigned in class above.
7) You state: “Fortunately, this condition — thermal equilibrium means “at the same temperature” also satisfies all of the laws of thermodynamics. No heat flow in equilibrium? Check. Two reservoirs in equilibrium with a third in equilibrium with each other? Check. First Law? Check. Second Law? Check.”
Hint: Think about when this is actually true. Giving it away hint: Think about when there is no external gravity field applied. Thermodynamic equilibrium at max. entropy with an external gravity field applied is proven in the literature to be not at the same temperature(z). By using fundamental correct, testable, observable-in-the-wild physics, see Bohren 1998 sec. 4.4 including his cites.
8) You conclude: “If its temperature is different — and of course it will be different if there is a stable lapse rate — than heat will flow from the thermometer and the entropy of the entire system will increase, demonstrating that no your system was not at maximum entropy in its previous state.”
Hint: This shows you have attended class, done a little study already. What happened to the adiabatic system max. entropy point as soon as you poked in the thermometers? Think what the (adiabatic) thermometers would show had they been in the system as it came to thermodynamic equilibrium. Think about the Poisson eqn. T(z) 4.149 p. 166 in Bohren 1998. Then let’s have another office hour session chat; this one was fun and allowed me to actually practice the art of teaching. I appreciate that.

“I suggest that this discussion be combined with that on the more recent thread about the models.”
I don’t thing so. You can’t even keep your own ‘comment-spaghetti’ straight. 😉

How many times do I have to repeat, the temperature gradient evolves in all solids, liquids and gases. Thus it evolves in any wire or silver rod, and that stops any perpetual cycle of energy.
Ah, so you are saying the lapse rate is not ? So the lapse rate for all materials is the same?
Because if one has a lapse rate in an fluid in equilibrium, then if one alters the temperature of a surface in contact with it away from that equilibrium temperature, heat will flow and the material cannot come back into equilibrium at that lapse rate.
Once again, it is difficult to explain or understand how you could think that two different temperature profiles could both be “equilibrium” for a confined fluid. Either the temperatures of two neighboring parcels are such that no energy flows between them, or it is not.
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