Quote of the week: a howler from the World Meteorological Organization – what warming?

This annoys me for all kinds of reasons, but the lack of intellectual and general integrity actually begins right in the first paragraph of the release.
The fact that CO2 concentrations have passed 400ppm is of absolutely NO “scientific significance” and it does not reinforce anything at all, any more than 399ppm or 398ppm or 400.7ppm or, in due course, 406ppm.
“400” ppm is only interesting if you are the PR executive tasked with spinning the message, and your aim is to create a press release that falsely gives the impression of some threshold having been passed, and the preservation of your own integrity isn’t really an issue…

A) Gawds, does anyone think that perhaps we can leave Nick (and for that matter, Mosher) alone and cease the pointless ad hom? Nick is well educated, generally polite, and has a point of view. Some of his contributions and corrections on list are topical and dead on the money — he’s corrected me on several occasions because I was wrong and if anything I appreciate that. Right or wrong transcend point of view. I’m hoping that in return, I might have made him at least think hard about the correctness of some of his statements. We don’t always agree, but we don’t always disagree either, and he is clearly not incompetent a la the Slayer contingent.
B) Curiously, everybody including Nick seems to be missing the real point of this rather incredible statement. Forget the bit about “causing warming” in an era of neutral to falling temperatures — what they “meant” is obvious enough within the prevailing worldview of missing heat going into oceans or being cancelled by soot or aerosols or the screening of solar radiation by dark matter. The concession that this statement makes is worth the price of the gaffe.
The WMO, ex officio just publicly stated, backed by data, that during the indicated decade, water vapor feedback was at most a paltry 15%.
There, see it now? Let’s do the math:
Nominal direct CO_2 driven warming at 600 ppm is supposedly a sloppy 1 to 1.5 C (some 0.5C of which we have supposedly already realized, as this is relative to the baseline/arbitrary “starting concentration/temperature” at 300 ppm).
Feedback from all other sources is 15% of this. That is, the WMO has just publicly acknowledged that — using the larger of the figures for CO_2 driven warming — we have 1.15 degrees Centigrade of warming to fear as CO_2 goes from the current 400 ppm to a presumed 600 ppm by 2100.
Wow. That’s worth a misstatement about “warming”, isn’t it? And note well, they are in fact hoist on their own petard of they attempt to retract or explain the statement. If they say that there has been only 15% feedback because there has been no warming and indeed a bit of actual cooling, they have to explain why there is any feedback at all when temperatures are neutral to cooling. They also have to explain how temperatures remain neutral to cooling when CO_2 forcing has increased by X, water vapor feedback has inexplicably increased along with it in spite of and along with general cooling! They are caught in a double whammy of inconsistency, giving the kiss of death to the prevailing paradigm of strong positive feedback leading to a total climate sensitivity over 2 C.
In a way, this isn’t surprising; it is only jumping out a little bit ahead of where many current papers are going. Total climate sensitivity is in free fall and will remain that way unless/until the climate resumes aggressive warming, increasingly constrained by Bayesian reasoning that recomputes posterior probabilities given data. At the moment the extreme warmist position is trying hard to hold onto 2.3 C TCS, which would likely be only “weakly” catastrophic in agreement with the majority of the beliefs of climate scientists (who, when polled by George Mason some years ago indicated that they thought that there would be non-catastrophic warming by 2100).
Hell, it’s in agreement with my own POV — I think that there will “probably” be non-catastrophic warming by 2100, although my beliefs are not very strong at the moment because I’m studying the (quantum) details of the greenhouse effect in my copious free time and am not impressed with the quantitative aspects of the argument even before feedback is taken into account. Pressure broadening, for example, appears to be a negative feedback in the early (circa 50’s) treatments of the GHE, because it increases absorptivity in the wings, and the atmosphere (at lower pressure) overhead is transparent in the wings, so that increasing ground level pressure should actually increase cooling by basically squeezing the heat out around the edges of the opaque overhead layers. Also, pressure broadening as a heating or cooling modulation of the GHE appears to be a huge, dominant contribution to the dynamic process — air pressure varies by as much as 5%, with 1% variations possible over hours. Clear sunny high pressure weather centers should actually cool faster both because of generally lower humidity and because the leakage from the wings is substantially augmented, minimizing the effect of direct insolation, but of course cloudy low pressure centers with increased GH trapping from both water vapor and a drawback of the wings and consequent increase in opacity is balanced by the formation of high-albedo clouds, which are an even stronger negative feedback everywhere but the poles. Only in the intermediate zone of medium to low pressure and high humidity (but no clouds) is augmentation of warming likely.
Of course, I’m still working on the quantitative aspects of this — the papers I am reading sadly tend to lack numbers if they are on climate science (probably because they always treat whole bands and we cannot explicitly compute the absorptivity of the atmosphere by the bands of any species, we can only do an approximate computation that is little better than an estimation. Interestingly, pressure broadening is very important to the telecommunications industry, though, and they have papers out there with explicit numbers of the modulation of atmospheric opacity in the microwave spectrum right next to the LWIR, that suggest that this effect is very important indeed. Since they are interested in what happens to comparatively sharp lines (carrier frequencies) their work is of greater use and the computations are a bit more sensible.

CO2 non est quid erat.

Ferdberple:
May 27, 2014 at 7:02 am
can we leave Nick alone?
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If one suspects an adversary is lying, usually there is a better answer found in their incompetence. Such is the nature of things.

Consider this: Those of us old enough to remember Geology in the 1970’s may also recall Imbrie’s assertions that the Earth was trying to go back into a glacial period, and it was only CO2 that was keeping us from doing that. So maybe it really is getting warmer, and just enough to keep us from getting colder. Neat, eh?
Then if the CO2 reductions really work, we should soon see a vast wall of ice looming on the Norther horizon.
Just in case you did not pick up on it at University, the Pleistocene ice ages really sucked.

ferdberple says:
May 27, 2014 at 7:12 am
I have no direct information about which model does what, but have used a simple EBM model (energy balance model) which can be manipulated by giving different effect factors to different forcings. You can halve the sensitivity for CO2 if you reduce the sensitivity for human aerosols, which anyway is overblown and in both cases you can fit the past century, but the result in the 21st century is better with a low sensitivity for CO2/aerosols. See:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/oxford.html
I need to update the graphs beyond 2000, but here what happens for the two sensitivities if you plot them to the year 2100:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/oxford_2100.jpg