Guest essay By Roger A. Pielke Sr.
My son and Kevin Trenberth did an interview for Colorado Public Radio on February 17th. The entire interview is worth listening to, but here I want to comment on a specific statement that Kevin made that is scientifically inaccurate.
The entire interview (well worth listening too) is titled
Is climate change causing extreme weather? Experts disagree – click the listen button at http://www.cpr.org/news/story/climate-change-causing-extreme-weather-experts-disagree for the interview
In the discussion on added heat during droughts that is due to the increase of atmospheric CO2, Kevin Trenberth said
“You can add up how much of that heat there is and over a six month period it’s equivalent to running a very small microwave over every square foot at full power for about ½ hour”.
The interviewer [Ryan Warner] seemed to be impressed by this analog. The analog of a microwave is an effective image, but it is scientifically wrong for several reasons. Public Radio listeners and Mr. Warner were misled by this analog.
· First, the reduction of long wave radiation emitted to Space due to the added CO2 occurs over the six month time period, not in a short duration burst. Clearly, a short ½ burst of such heat would have a very different effect than when this heat is distributed across a six month time period.
· Second, the effect of long wave radiative flux divergence on surface temperatures from added CO2 (or other greenhouse gas including water vapor) is much larger at night. This is because during daylight, most of the time, vertical turbulent mixing dominates. The atmospheric boundary layer is typically much deeper during the daytime, so that added heat from the increase of CO2 is distributed through a much deeper depth. While the effect on nighttime minimum temperatures can be significant as we showed in our paper
McNider, R.T., G.J. Steeneveld, B. Holtslag, R. Pielke Sr, S. Mackaro, A. Pour Biazar, J.T. Walters, U.S. Nair, and J.R. Christy, 2012: Response and sensitivity of the nocturnal boundary layer over land to added longwave radiative forcing. J. Geophys. Res., 117, D14106, doi:10.1029/2012JD017578. Copyright (2012) American Geophysical Union. http://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/r-371.pdf
the effect on daytime maximum temperatures (and thus on increasing the heat stress in a drought) will be much less. Kevin did not properly inform the audience how the added heat would be processed differently during the day and night.
· Third, we examined this issue for a seasonal time scale in our paper
Eastman, J.L., M.B. Coughenour, and R.A. Pielke, 2001: The effects of CO2 and landscape change using a coupled plant and meteorological model. Global Change Biology, 7, 797-815 http://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/r-229.pdf
We concluded based on our model sensitivity runs that the radiative forcing effect of doubled atmospheric concentrations of CO2 on regional temperatures over a growing season are minimal (e.g. see Tables 8 and 9). This is especially true for daytime temperatures. Indeed, the biogeochemical effect on the regional weather from added CO2[which Kevin did not mention] was a much larger effect, as was land use change.
The ½ hour of added heat from the microwave forcing that Kevin presented, when properly input over the entire growing season would only result in a trivial effect on maximum temperature (ie. The hottest part of the day)!
Thus, while added CO2 and other human and natural climate forcings certainly can have an effect on large scale circulation features which could exacerbate droughts and fires, the analogy to a microwave that Kevin presented to convince the audience regarding the importance of added surface heating from the radiative effect of the increase of atmospheric CO2 is scientifically incorrect.
Indeed, when we perform model sensitivity experiments, we find that biogeochemical effect of added CO2 on plants (and the feedback to weather) and of land use change are much larger effects on this time and spatial scale.
By looking out past the end of my nose, I see the Earth has not warmed in spite of ever increasing CO2. No correlation, none. The Earth’s atmosphere is quite stable. Given it’s recovery from anything that disturbs it, volcanos, ENSO.Solar ejecta etc.
Empirical observation and measurement is all that is believable anymore.
TRUST NO ONE.
Anyway, since climate is always changing, the question “is climate change responsible” is a bogus one. To some extent, climate change is always going to be responsible, since it always has been. What they really mean of course, is “to what extent are humans responsible”? They’re still searching for that ever-elusive “human fingerprint”.
“Is climate change causing extreme weather? Experts disagree”
Use of plural “experts” is incorrect.
I found only one expert quoting observation and one desparate activist making up conjectural nonsense.
Professor Lindzen is old now but there used to be a series of videos where he explained what Kevin Trenberth’s actual graph interpretation talents are.
It’s long but if you go toward the end few minutes of one of those, when he shows the CERES graphs, year after year, and the changes are miniscule, and you realize Kevin Trenberth is the person who said that to him, the graphs looked like catastrophic unstoppable global warming
you’ll understand all you need to, about Kevin Trenberth’s pseudo science talents.
Another thing: google ”early keil-trenberth energy budget.” Hit ”search images” an hit enter.
Look all through the hundreds and hundreds of sites showing it,
and then look at the mathematics of how much energy is coming back from the atmosphere, to the earth. It is more, than the earth is giving to the atmosphere in the first place.
That is Kevin Trenberth.
Once again the effect from natural cycles vastly outweighs the virtually indiscernible effect from CO2. There is zero point trying to reduce CO2 emissions when the temperatures produced by a natural cyclic shift are many, many times greater than CO2 forcings.
It might be good if Pielke Jr. would read Robert Brown’s rebuttal (abve) for tips on how to reply to Trenberth’s alarmism in a real “debate”. Far from a debate, this is merely a cordial interview of two AGW subscribers, with Ryan Warner in his usual role as impressionable interlocutor (Huh! Wow!), in which both Pielke or Trenberth riff independently on the weather without actually addresses his opponent. Those familiar with Pielke Jr.’s message will wait patiently through his careful, articulate demurrals of global warming alarmism to hear his special, patented capitulation to the CAGW message: CO2 is, in fact, linked to drought, fire and flood, poses a “long-term” menace to humanity which necessitates that we “alter our entire energy economy” over decades… what he calls the “generational challenge” of CO2.. Missing are clear-cut statements classifying MOST of Trenberth’s arguments as what they are CAGW hype. With all due respect for the Pielke name, I have long ago come to view Jr’s views as a poor substitute for what is actually needed in a real debate with CAGW: complete refutation of the CO2 danger meme, and more of a Bjorn Lomborg – style redefinition of the terms of the argument, creating a shift from “feel good” policies (of Kyoto) to “do good” actions.
http://eesc.columbia.edu/courses/v1003/readings/Lomborg%20articles.pdf
Yes, Lomborg half-heartedly sips from the CO2 punch bowl as well. I nevertheless credit him for constructing an entire, self-sustaining and humane alternative paradigm for government spending to deal with extremes in weather, rather than CO2 “mitigation”. That his work stirs such antipathy from Pielke I find bizarre and disingenuous.
It cannot be repeated often enough that the precautionary principle has more to do with smart building and positive assessment of ways to spend our money than revamping our energy economy.
Thanks for the post, Dr. Pilkey, and for the rebuttal from rgbatDuke.
Had he simply said the earth surface gets about 241 w/m2 and this effect would raise it to 241.15 w/m2, the audience would have gone…huh? That’s almost nothing! Hence the analogy that only indirectly quantifies the issue, but leaves the uniformed reader with an impression of an effect out of proportion to reality.
, an increase of 1.8 degrees Kelvin. However, one does not expect the temperature to vary linearly, one naively/crudely expects it to vary according to the fourth power:
, an increase of a whopping 0.4 degrees Kelvin. The point being, even a small increase in temperature produces a large increase in radiant luminosity according to Stefan-Boltzmann. This is, happily enough roughly 1 F.
with a highly variable solar driver, the precise way they fluctuate and where they fluctuate makes a significant difference on the non-flat Earth. So, maybe one picks an emissivity, albedo, SW absorptivity and LW absorptivity out of a hat, tweak the latter to produce an all other things equal increase of 1.5 W/m^2 in one term of the model, and see what the steady state associated with the differential change is. A lot more work, and I’ll bet that the answer is within a factor of 2 (3 at most) of the naive estimate because at the end of the day the important terms (in the absence of transport, clouds, and all the complexity) have that inescapable fourth power.
Not quite. The 0.15 is watts/square foot. It’s more like 1.5 W/m^2. So the change is from 241 W/m^2 to 242.5 W/m^2.
IF equilibrium planetary temperature varied linearly with insolation, we could form a ratio:
Solving for
If one takes the fourth root of both sides:
or
Humans are barely sensitive to 1 F temperature changes with their skin, at least in certain ranges. My wife (a physician) can pick up a 1 F fever by touch. Less experienced people usually cannot.
Now, is this naive fourth root scaling likely to be a good estimate? Probably not — this isn’t only about ideal Stefan-Boltzmann — portions of the BB spectrum are blocked, there is heat transport laterally and vertically, the albedo and strongly coupled moisture content have a complex regional covariance with temperature — but at that point we are stuck doing a proper full-spectrum full transport coupled nonlinear fluid dynamics computation at a sufficiently fine spatiotemporal granularity, integrating over the entire planetary state for decades into the future because once one gets past the zeroth-order naive arguments, all arguments are “naive” until you can actually demonstrably solve the nonlinear coupled variably driven Navier-Stokes problem. At the moment, we cannot, and when we try we find that the future “climate” the models predict is enormously sensitive to initial conditions and not at all “deterministic” or “inevitable”. Then, we cannot even be certain we have the coarse grained physics content of the current attempts right. If anything, performing a hypothesis test on the best efforts of the GCMs in CMIP5 suggests that it is very probable that we do not have them right.
But I personally sort of like the 0.4 C estimate. One could probably do better with a single slab “flat” model (still analytically solvable, I think, so still “an estimate”) but then, what does one use for all of the assumptions — emissivity and albedo are hardly constant, and since we’re talking about the space-time integral of radiative flux that scales like
Now, if there were only direct evidentiary support for the 1.5 Watts/m^2 asserted as the extra forcing (with or without the asserted extra factor of 2-3 from water vapor feedback, ignoring aerosols, clouds and so on). The Beers-Lambert arguments are plausible, but also so chock full of assumptions that they might as well be swiss cheese, and to the best of my knowledge there is no direct e.g. Satellite measurement of CO_2 linked changes in mean emissivity renormalized for “everything”. Unsurprising, given that one is trying to measure a global average to within a small fraction of a percent with virtually zero “global” baseline before the 70’s.
rgb
This story about Kevin Trenberth “misrepresenting climate science” seems to be a recurring theme with him. This reminds me of the debacle with Trenberth and Chris Landsea that occurred almost a decade ago regarding the link between global warming and hurricanes. It’s old news, but it never hurts to refresh our memory as to the credibility, or lack thereof, of “the team”. [I will be referring to some Climategate email texts (###.txt). You can use the following “Climategate FOIA Grepper” to read the texts. Just click on the numbered text on the left side to read the complete email: http://www.ecowho.com/foia.php?search=landsea%5D.
On October 21, 2004, Trenberth participated in a news conference at the Center for Health and Global Environment, Harvard Medical School entitled, “Experts to warn global warming likely to continue spurring more outbreaks of intense hurricane activity”. Chris Landsea, then at NOAA, was one of the worlds leading expert on hurricanes and had helped write the section on observations of hurricane activity for both the Second and Third IPCC Assessment Reports. He was slated to perform the same function for the then upcoming AR4 report. Landsea warned Trenberth prior to and also the day of the news conference that the current scientific understanding was that there was little to no link between global warming and hurricanes. [See 0890.txt]
This is a verbatim transcript of the news conference (October 21) with Trenberth caught “bending the truth”, to put it mildly:
__________________________________________________
Abhi Raghunathan, Naples Daily News: Hi, this is Abhi Raghunathan at the Naples Daily News in Florida. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, has publicly stated that global warming and climate change have had insignificant to no impact on this year’s hurricane season. Were they one of the groups you were referring to earlier when you said that some of the quotes you read in papers came from those with limited perspective?
McCarthy: This is Jim McCarthy. I presume you’re directing that to me. No, I’m not aware of the NOAA statement. Kevin referred earlier to a publication that has been influential in the kind of discussion we’re having right now which came from NOAA scientists, but I was referring to pieces that had come my way, largely op-ed pieces in newspapers throughout the East Coast, where either from the direct effect or the aftermath of these recent storms these opinions have been voiced. Kevin, you might want to comment on the NOAA piece if you’re familiar with it. I’m not.
Trenberth: I have not been aware of any official NOAA statement on this position one way or another.
_________________________________________
Even the dumb*** reporter knew what the NOAA position was concerning global warming and hurricanes.
October 28th finds Trenberth trying to shop around for a Japaneses scientist to provide the hurricane/global warming link he so desperately wants. [1219.txt]
On November 5th, 2004, Landsea sends a scathing email [0890.txt] to a host of people, including R. Pachauri himself, with a CC to Trenberth. He concludes the email as follows:
” I did try to caution both Dr. Trenberth and Dr. Linda Mearns before the media event (email included below) and provided a summary of the consensus within the hurricane research community. Dr. Mearns decided not to participate in the panel perhaps as a result of my email correspondence. I sincerely wish Dr. Trenberth had made the same decision. Dr. Trenberth wrote back to me that he hoped that this press conference would not “go out of control”. I would suggest that it was out of control the minute that he and his fellow panel members decided to forego the peer review scientific process and abuse science in pursuit of a political agenda.”
And finally on December 8, 2004 Landsea responds (slaps him silly, really) [1150.txt] to Pachauri’s email, and tenders his resignation from the “scientifically unsound” IPCC process.
Nuff said.
richardscourtney says:
February 20, 2014 at 4:34 am
DirkH:
At February 20, 2014 at 4:28 am you ask
Can we call Trenberth a troll now?
No.
Trolls attempt to prevent discussion of a subject by deflecting a thread onto something else.
Trenberth, his statements, and his ‘science’ are the subject of this thread. And he has done nothing to deflect consideration of the subject of the thread.
That looks like a deliberate strawman of a deflection from what DirkH said.
Trenberth like Mann is all in on ‘the cause ‘ and with good reason for its made a second rate ‘scientists’ into ‘big man’ with more research funding then they can spend, while like Mann he knows when ‘the cause ‘ falls he will find it hard to get a job teaching at a 3rd rate high school .
So while reversing the the very idea of the null hypothesises becasue your argument is so weak , may seem a bit extreme and anti-science to most people , to those like Trenberth who have so very much to lose , it may be a desperate but still logically approach to take.
Stephen Richards:
Your post at February 20, 2014 at 11:33 am makes no sense.
It seems to be a deliberate flaming and says in total
Bollocks! There is no strawman and I provides a direct answer (i.e. “No”) with explanation of that answer.
If you want to troll by flaming you must do much, much better than that.
Richard
Thank you Dr. Roger Pielke Sr.
This article is clear and precise.
I love the credentialing.
Trenberth isn’t just a normal scientist, he’s a distinguished one who has won a Nobel Peace Prize.
Pielke recently proclaimed himself a denier in front of Congress.
Peej says:
February 20, 2014 at 5:50 am
I will admit my understanding of physics is a little sketchy but I don’t believe the analogy is good at all. I think the intent is for people to think “oooh, microwave ovens make things hot….” However, what happens when you put a stone in a microwave oven? Does it get hot? Nope; at least not as much as the equivalent mass of water does.
For some, perhaps completely misguided reason, I’d always conceived of microwaves as an oscillating electric potential (with its corresponding magnetic component). There is no energy transferred unless that potential does some work. The reason a microwave oven heats up water is because that potential can do some work on those (bipolar) water molecules, increasing their kinetic energy.
So, if that is indeed the case (and perhaps there’s someone here who is better educated than I who might gently correct me if it is not), the assumption in the analogy is that the potential is converted completely to heat at the rated power of the combined ovens, which it clearly would not be. It might come close* if Dr. Trenberth were speaking of microwaving water or some other molecule that would react to the electric/magnetic potential, but he did not specify, so the analogy is non-physical.
* How close, I have not tried to estimate, but I doubt if a microwave oven can heat water at a rate equivalent to its full rated power — I would think that the oven is rated at the power it draws from the external electricity supply, and there might be some loss in converting that to microwaves, but don’t really know.
I’m constantly mindful of the impression the comments section gives to non-partisan or new visitors to the blog.
Sadly, I fear we haven’t done well today.
A lot of comments have been confused and unscientific. In itself that’s okay; Anthony’s openess to allowing the expression of all points of view is one of the strengths of WUWT. But the freedom to express all ideas, including those that are actually nonsense, obliges us to speak out against nonsense. The marketplace of ideas in which truth will win out because its true, only works if people speak out against wrong ideas.
Otherwise, silence gives the appearance of assent.
Which appearance will give a casual visitor the reasonable impression that we’re almost all of us a bunch of crackpots. So let’s not do that.
Of course there’s always the possibility that we’re the one in the wrong, so it pays us to keep our words sweet- we may have to eat them.
Part of civility in debate is to never assail our opponent’s motives. The obvious fact is that we can only infer them. Ascribing malice to others says much more about our character than theirs. We can of course critique their behaviour, as in Trenberth’s misrepresenting the IPCC hurricane data to the point where Landsea had to resign.
But to suit action to words, I must dispute the claims about water not being a greenhouse gas, or the atmosphere not having a day side and night side.
I was wrong to suggest the Sun heats the Earth by about 300C, it is actually 390 degrees centigrade! Take the temperature of the universe [-270C] and the maximum temperature on the Moon’s surface [123C] and the difference is about 390C.
The 90+ degrees of cooling is mostly caused by clouds, oceans and ice/snow. Another example of how water dominates Earth’s climate.
You would think that slight variations in this system could cause temperature changes on the Earth but as we all ‘know’ it can only be due to small variations in a trace gas!
Actually, trying to microvave something that is dry results in very little warming due to lack of water molecules. Try it at home in your microvave oven.
@ur momisugly Leo Morgan @ur momisugly6.33
Looking back at my comment regarding there being no day and night side it does sound a bit weird so let me clear things up What I was trying to say is it is either one or the other, day where the sun is always plugged in to the atmosphere or night on the opposite side. There is a simple experiment you can do , you will need a torch and a ball ,turn off the lights shine the torch at the ball, the side facing the torch is lit up while the opposite side is in darkness. The torch represents the sun and the ball the earth .So regarding the atmosphere there’s only a day side or a night side and the earth rotates inside . I’m shaw you could clear this up much better then me instead of cherry picking
@ur momisugly John B MD
Go to YouTube and type in plasmoid in a microwave oven. What is the physics behind this process is it water vapor or the carbon released by the burning match?
“You can add up how much of that heat there is and over a six month period it’s equivalent to running a very small microwave over every square foot at full power for about ½ hour”.
Okay – do that and come back in six months and describe the effect! Zero.
So, 6 months is about 180 days and 1/2 hour is 1800 seconds, so 10 seconds of microwaving a day. What will be the effect? Pretty much zero. Slight warming for a short time, then it as if it never happened. Try it on a slice of bread in a BIG microwave oven [what is ‘very small’?!]
The above statement also implies that the heating is somehow additive but in reality any warming by CO2 will be gone within hours. The warming will have to start from zero each and every day. [Have you noticed that it is always just after mid-day in climate ‘science’!] If you microwave bread for 30 minutes it will burst in to flames [It was an accident – and it was a garlic loaf – the memory lingers!] but not at 10 seconds a day.
One can understand why so many realise much of climate ‘science’ is antiscientific.
Bruce Cobb says:
February 20, 2014 at 8:21 am
Anyway, since climate is always changing, the question “is climate change responsible” is a bogus one. To some extent, climate change is always going to be responsible, since it always has been. What they really mean of course, is “to what extent are humans responsible”? They’re still searching for that ever-elusive “human fingerprint”.
—————-
The human fingerprint has been found. I found it. And I posted it right here at WUWT because it is the most scientific site I know of. Well, okay, I mostly posted it here because I have easy access to this site.
What is really going on is the destruction of the world’s soils by chemical-based agriculture. As the bugs and earthworms die, their carbon enters the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. This has a mitigating effect on plant growth, The carbon dioxide itself is good, as many here have pointed out.
A day or two ago, the Organic Consumers Association posted an article that says many farmers have recently started switching back to organic growing methods, and away from GMO seeds in particular, because their yields are now higher with these methods. Turns out the fancy seeds did increase yields substantially, but only for a few years and then the insects came back with a vengeance and soils were depleted and so on. As many have pointed out, nature tends to return things to normal.
I found another human footprint in Iain Murray’s 2008 book “The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don’t Want You To Know About–Because They Helped Cause Them,” Chapter Seven, Communism’s Environmental Record: The Aral Sea. This sea used to be one of the world’s largest freshwater bodies, but cotton farming with irrigation has caused the sea to shrink to less than half, and summer temperatures can now be as high as 140F. They used to be moderated by trees.
I found more about water that I haven’t told you about before in one of Sepp Holzer’s books about Permaculture. Permaculture is an organic farming philosphy based on perennials and water management. Holzer’s book “Desert or Paradise” describes improper water management leading to desertification, and how he heals it.
This stuff is Earth-shaking. It matters just as much as Trenberth and James Hansen think, but the actual problem is very different than they imagine and the solutions are utterly different, also. You can begin by burning as much fossil fuel as you can.