What stratospheric hotspot?

Wow.Just wow.In my next life I’m coming back as a weatherman or politician.The only 2 professions where you can lie through your teeth 100% of the time,and still keep your job.

[it is impossible fully distinguish natural variability from anthropogenic]….
…but we can tell you within a 1/100th of a degree

Now this has my attention! I have always said that the sign of global warming would be a cooling upper stratosphere.. as that would imply expansion below that level and warming! So this is an interesting paper to me and one that I think can gain traction. However it still does not answer the question: is it man made? And we are going to get our answer soon enough given the change in the PDO and AMO would imply tropospheric cooling and warming above again ( reversal of the cooling) . But we have to let the OBJECTIVE TEST PLAY OUT! It is about half way done now.. Satellite temps from the warmer ocean era, but we must let the cooling cycle play out. either way draconian drivel from the people pushing this really have nothing to do with the actual science. But this is a paper I have always wondered was not done by the side pushing it.. perhaps because the people that buy into are not motivated by such things
My only criticism is that if they are going to say this.. and have me say, yes you have a point!, then they must say, so do you, we have to watch the next 20-30 years. After all most weather is below to above.. the source regions are where there is the most heat and that is the tropical ocean
Why do I think I am the one that is saying you have a point and they will simply say
fuggedabout it

I can see how a reduction in O3 would decrease stratospheric temperatures, but I don’t see how increased greenhouse gases would do so.
From your HockeySchtick Link:
“Cooling due to the greenhouse effect
The second effect is more complicated. Greenhouse gases (CO2, O3, CFC) absorb infra-red radiation from the surface of the Earth and trap the heat in the troposphere. If this absorption is really strong, the greenhouse gas blocks most of the outgoing infra-red radiation close to the Earth’s surface. This means that only a small amount of outgoing infra-red radiation reaches carbon dioxide in the upper troposphere and the lower stratosphere. ”
This explanation as given doesn’t make much sense. If greenhouse gas absorption is really strong, it may INITIALLY block most of the outgoing infra-red radiation, but ultimately the gas will have to re-radiate as much as it blocks.

Not “then”, I meant when.

First we had “the oceans ate my global warming” ie forget surface temps, let’s go into the deep sea, when global warming stopped. Now this. It is a predictable fingerprint of moving goalposts.

@ Claude Harvey –
We can only assert that the models are right because they are wrong after we have passed the law to find out what’s in it.

Move the goalposts? What? You KNOW those round things are a safety feature! Think of the children!
You can’t possibly believe WE would EVER use that hitch to change the game!
That would be beneath us! We are not crooks! You are just too uneducated to understand! It’s for your own good!
Money? What money? Look! Over there! Squirrel!
(Need I add sarc?)

Though it’s hard to see on the charts it looks like the Stratospheric cooling stopped in the 21st century about the time the warming stopped in the lower layers.

Anthony – might be useful if one of our excellent “folks who know” would provide a simple discussion/primer on how the stratosphere and troposphere interact and react … in particular educate folks that the stratosphere typically reacts opposite to the troposphere … if the troposhere is warming, the stratosphere is cooling & vice versa …

It is quite amazing that there are literaly hundreds of hypotheses (guesses) as to why there has been an interruption in global warming, yet there can only be one reason for global warming to exist in the first place.

Barry,
“Though it’s hard to see on the charts it looks like the Stratospheric cooling stopped in the 21st century about the time the warming stopped in the lower layers.”
I looked at that.
The RAOB data is a lot nosier ( as we would expect with it’s smaller coverage and reduced resolution ) but the MSU data sets seem to indicate the continued cooling.
http://climatewatcher.webs.com/HotSpot_Pause.png
The effect of stratospheric cooling is to slightly reduce RF at the tropopause.

Alan McIntire says:
August 4, 2014 at 8:49 am
“This explanation as given doesn’t make much sense. If greenhouse gas absorption is really strong, it may INITIALLY block most of the outgoing infra-red radiation, but ultimately the gas will have to re-radiate as much as it blocks.”
How has Alan not nailed the point. If you claim that high concentrations of CO2 in the troposphere block radiation and, thereby, cool the stratosphere then you violate the fundamental assumption that radiation in equals radiation out. Or you have to invoke some explanation that does not belong to radiation theory.

Could this cooling be the result of more efficient thunderstorms that result in less water vapor being transported to the stratosphere. The so called “Iris Effect”, predicted by Dr. Lindzen.

To me, the absence of the “hot spot” is an even more devastating blow to the theory of AGW than even the pause. The hot spot is indeed a clear signature that CO2 can cause warming. Its absence is very telling.
Warmists sometimes respond that AGW is not the only thing that can cause the hotspot. While this is true, they are confusing the logic. Although the presence of the hotspot does not prove AGW, its absence pretty well disproves it.

“Still, keep trying folks: hatred of AGW theory seems to be a very powerful inducement for people to come up with multifarious and mutually contradictory alternative climate theories.”
Lots of irrationality to go around, including those who misuse radiative forcing to exaggerate climate effects and further ulterior motives.

The implication here is that the troposphere grabs most of the incoming energy robbing the stratosphere of its share cooling it down with the assumption seeming to be that CO2 is causing that. A heat trapping troposphere might explain why the stratosphere is cooling down but that says nothing about why the troposphere is trapping heat, much less that CO2 is causing it, much much less that it’s the anthropogenic CO2 that’s doing it. We already knew the troposphere has warmed up so what does this study contribute to our understanding? And why does it have anything to do with all the models being completely wrong about the hotspot?

“the evidence indicating persistent cooling over the 1952-2012 period (60 years) would seem to undermine this idea. ”
Well, the overall stratospheric cooling trend is clearly evident and consistent with radiative forcing estimates.
However, ‘persistent’ is probably not an apt adjective to describe the stratospheric cooling.
For the ten years before El Chichon, there is a strat warming trend.
For the years between El Chichon’s resolution and Pinatubo, there is a strat warming trend.
For the years since Pinatubo, there is cooling in the upper strat and no change in the lower strat.
By no means does that preclude CO2, but most of the cooling is actually observed as a step function from before to after volcano eruption:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qBLJ6MR2dtk/TdUpDF5VdsI/AAAAAAAAADo/cDQqeUogo_Y/s1600/StratCoolingPlot_2011.png

Steve,
Better fingerprint of what, Steve? More CO2 or anthropogenic global warming?
Lying by context is still lying!

OH dear, more straight line science. When will these guys get beyond “trend” fitting everything.
Let’s look at TLS ( temp of lower stratosphere ) without a straight line to guide the eye and mind:
Let’s also drop the broken climate models , that will not tell us anything useful.
Observational data:
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=902
Yes signal to noise is a lot better in stratosphere and we can see straight away what is causing the cooling. Volcanoes.
0.5K drop after each event.
Whether this is changes in ozone, which is reckoned to be reduced after Mt P. or whatever process that removes the volcanic aerosols also removes anthropogenic pollution, the cause of the changes seems to be clearly attributable to punctual events, not a long term CO2 driven decline.

@gregfreemyer: Thanks! I had thought it had been something like this. Others prior to your post were getting at this answer as well, though not directly.
To everyone else: Please avoid bad physics and knee-jerk reactions. This entire climate science issue is badly politicized – a fact beyond dispute – but please don’t contribute to it immediately based just upon paper titles. The central real science issues are these:
1) What is the water vapor feedback as a forcing response to the small heating that occurs directly as a result of increased CO2? If it exists, it would be a powerful amplifier, but also imply a highly unstable climate system that should respond to any warming (hence why did the earth’s temp not “run-away” during the warmer period of the Holocene Maximum?). Given the importance of this and other highly nonlinear reactions to forcing, we truthfully do not fully know how this works and are highly unlikely to model it correctly at present knowledge levels. This should be the proper skeptical position as none of this is in dispute, and claims of certainty as to how these forcings interact is clearly junk science at present.
2) How much of warming during the 20th century is “real”, versus how much was thermometer-adjustment errors and thermometer siting/land-use-change issues?
3) What would be the present “global temperature” (a terrible and hard to define metric for atmosphere/ocean heat content) absent forcing driven by increased CO2 levels? A related question is what amount of the increased CO2 levels is directly attributable to the sum of all anthropogenic effects (emissions, land use changes, etc)? Is it even possible to know this without being a deity that could create a replicate earth complete with no humans?

@Bill H. says:
August 4, 2014 at 9:49 am
Bill,
It’s a simple matter that the AGW theory says there should be a hotspot in the mid-troposphere and there ain’t. This observation means the AGW theory is invalid because the observation doesn’t match the results.
In lieu of snarky comments, I’ll wait for a theory which agrees with observations.

Next we need to look at TOA changes in reflected SW and compare to TLS.
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=955
There’s one of those fingerprints again.
Less SW getting scattered back into space means more making it into the climate system. It’s not heating the stratosphere ( since it’s cooling ) so it must be making it into the lower climate system.
That is a least one factor that caused ‘global warming’ between 1980 and 2000: the OMG years.

gregfreemyer says:
August 4, 2014 at 10:05 am
“GregL says:
August 4, 2014 at 8:57 am
Agreed, per the radiative transfer properties there are 4 mechanisms of concern:
– Absorption of photons by GHGs in the appropriate frequency range. The result is an excited GHG molecule
– Spontaneous emission of photons by excited GHG molecules
– Molecular collisions which can excite a GHG molecule a small percentage of the time
– Molecular collisions with will de-excite an excited GHG molecule almost 100% of the time
In dense air (near the surface), GHG molecules tend to absorb photons then that excitation energy is converted to kinetic energy by a collision before it is spontaneously re-emitted. Thus the theory call for localized warming as the kinetic energy increases.
In less dense air (the stratosphere), GHG molecules will still experience millions or hundreds of millions of collisions per second (instead of billions). Some small percentage of those will excite the GHG molecule. Since the air is less dense there is enough time between collisions for spontaneous photon emission to de-excite the GHG molecule. Half of those photons will move away from Earth and into space. The end result is a net cooling.
Thus the radiative transfer model predicts warming at low elevation and cooling at high elevation.”
Notice that you have introduced a claim that does not belong to radiation theory alone. You appeal to the relative density of the air. There is not a lot of water vapor in the stratosphere. There is a huge amount of water vapor in the troposphere. So, your explanation appeals to factors that fall outside of radiation theory. Radiation theory alone does not imply that radiation passing through a dense cloud of CO2 will cool the area above it that is less densely populated with CO2.
The important point here is that the good reputation of radiation theory cannot be used to support the claim that high concentrations of CO2 in the troposphere cool the stratosphere. Some other claim must be added. Maybe a claim about relative concentrations of water vapor. Your rather generic claim is about the relative density of air at various heights.

Climate Weenie says:
August 4, 2014 at 10:27 am
“Which part is a myth? and why?”
Lots of myths…
First being that its evidence of global warming.
Second being that it can even be used as relevant information.
As you yourself say the model that is correct has nothing to do with global warming. Just because the model is correct doesn’t much of anything in the debate…. It kind of like saying that a model showing the reduction of water in a lake proves global warming because some other models shows that global warming would reduce the lake level. All the time however someone’s just letting water out of the spillway.
This paper is nothing but a post facto excuse to try to shift the goal posts so that once again well known natural effect = doom.

Joe Born,
No cooling results due to CO2 increasing the stratospheres ability to radiate heat absorbed by the O3.
As I have said were it not for the presence of significant O3 in the stratosphere CO2s absorptive properties would dominate its radiative properties all the way to the top of the atmosphere warming it to the very tippy top.

So now if you want to find global warming, look at the stratosphere, not at that troposphere whose temperature tells you if there is warming or not. And that stratospheric cooling, they think, started 51 years ago. Has it occurred to them that such changes in the earth environment demand that a causative agent be present? If there is no causative agent to start up that cooling 51 years ago we will have to decide that we are dealing with an uncaused phenomenon. That is something entirely knew to science though apparently accepted willingly by so-called “climate” scientists who wrote this article. They are of course on the trail of carbon dioxide which is their ultimate boogey-man, the root cause of global warming according to their doctrine. As I have said before, CO2 is incapable of warming the atmosphere. This warming tale started with Hansen’s announcement to the Senate in 1988 that he personally had discovered the greenhouse effect. His argument was that there had been hundred years of warming that culminated at the warmest point ever recorded in 1988. The probability of this happening by chance was only one percent so this warming could not happen by chance and had to be caused by the greenhouse effect. The problem with this argument is that thirty of these hundred years are demonstrably not greenhouse warming. You just can’t use a non-greenhouse warming to prove that the greenhouse effect exists. Nevertheless, he and IPCC have been claiming that it does exist for 26 years and getting away with it because there was no way to check it. Fortunately for us, global warming stopped 17 years ago and there has been no warming of any kind since then. At the same time, carbon dioxide has been steadily increasing without causing any of that greenhouse warming used to justify the existence of IPCC. Naturally they don’t like it and point to the fact that the Arrhenius greenhouse theory still predicts warming. That of course is true, and sufficient proof of warming to such true believers. But if a theory predicts warming for 17 years and nothing happens you are justified in tossing that theory into the waste basket of history. This leaves the warmist case without any theoretical support. Fortunately there is another greenhouse theory called Miskolczi greenhouse theory (MGT) that can handle this situation. It came out in 2007 but you don’t know about it because the warmists have successfully suppressed any mention of it. It predicts exactly what we see: there is no warming while carbon dioxide keeps going up. According to MGT carbon dioxide and water vapor, the two major greenhouse gases, establish a joint optimum absorption window in the IR which they control. Arrhenius cannot do that because it is limited to carbon dioxide alone. The optical thickness of this absorption window in the IR is 1.87, determined by Miskolczi from first principles. If you now add carbon dioxide to atmosphere it will start to absorb in the IR just as the Arrhenius theory says. But this will increase the optical thickness. And as soon as it begins, water vapor will start to diminish, rain out, and the original optical thickness is restored. The introduced carbon dioxide will of course keep absorbing but it cannot cause greenhouse warming because the removal of water vapor just balances out the warming capacity that carbon dioxide otherwise would have. It does not prevent absorption, ot simply prevents absorption from warming the atmosphere. The result is a horizontal temperature curve showing no warming while atmospheric carbon dioxide increases, just as we have now. This has several consequences. One of them is that a runaway greenhouse warming that Hansen has been babbling about is quite impossible. This explains why very high carbon dioxide in geologic history did not cause any runaway greenhouse effect. Hansen was also wrong on his Venus analogy because he was ignorant of Venusian geology but that is another story. A more mundane result is that the presence of these mixed GHGs prevents the occurrence of the enhanced greenhouse effect here on earth. It follows from this that AGW is nothing more than a pseudo-scientific fantasy, indulged in by over-eager climate scientists anxious to prove that the greenhouse effect is real.

Steven Mosher says: “Stratospheric cooling is the better fingerprint.”
A central argument of the Enhanced Greenhouse Effect (remember that?) is the atmosphere warms the surface as a result of radiative physics. Basic radiative physics says the WARMING (delta T) above the surface must be greater than the WARMING at the surface (upper case to stress WARMING does not mean WARMER).
This prediction was confirmed in AR4, and the above hotspot pattern is just as it appears in AR4. AR4 also went to the length to show different patterns due to different “forcings” and made it pretty clear that only CO2 was behind the predicted hotspot.
Different researchers used terms like “vertical amplification” or “scaling factor” for the expected difference in delta-T between surface and atmosphere. Delta-T parts of the atmosphere were predicted to be 1.4 to 1.6 times delta T at the surface. This can be seen in the predicted hotspot pattern when the scale is included, and AR4 expressed the scale in degC per decade (therefore WARMING).
If it is asserted that surface temperature was “forced” up by (say) 0.7 degC over recent decades due to an Enhanced Greenhouse Effect, there is an onus to demonstrate cause and effect. The Enhanced Greenhouse Effect demands that regions of the atmosphere must have delta-T in excess of 1 degC for the same period for the above surface warming.
If this cannot be demonstrated, the hotspot hypothesis is falsified by data. The Enhanced Greenhouse Effect would also be falsified the extent it rests on the physics encapsulated in the hotspot prediction.
The Enhanced Greenhouse Effect never claimed that surface warming would be CAUSED (emphasis) by atmospheric cooling. The basic physics would be completely wrong. Stratospheric cooling therefore cannot be a better indicator of the Enhanced Greenhouse Effect.
The Tropospheric Hotspot has become the Tropospheric Hot Potato. Enjoy the spectacle as the fur starts to fly.

Climate Weenie,
“An atmosphere with no O3 is also a myth.”
Your obtuseness is astounding. Its a hypothetical designed to isolate the greenhouse gas effect.

Zerefos et al:
Crooks and Gray, 2005; Austin et al., 2009). It is well known that significant transient warming events occurred in the stratosphere following the volcanic eruptions of Agung (March 1963), El Chichón (April 1982) and Mount Pinatubo (June 1991), and these can substantially influence
temperature trend estimates (especially if the volcanic events occur near either end of the time series in question). The common approach in order to avoid a significant influence on
trend results is to omit data for 2 years following each eruption in the regression analysis. In order to investigate the role played by stratospheric aerosols, we include terms to account
for the influence of stratospheric aerosol variability, using the Stratospheric Aerosol Optical Depth (Sato et al., 1993) as an index in the regression model.
>>>
Well if they are only modelling the volcanic effect as a temporary warming and think they can avoid the periods affected by avoiding two years after the eruptions, their model fitting will be severely wrong.
The other problem is they are fairly arbitrarily throwing in a bunch of possible “natural” forcing into a multivariate regression. This kind of thing can be done on any data but whether the result is just a spurious ‘best fit’ is another questions.
This fundamentally assumes a direct correlation with no lag , ie almost instantaneous equilibration. That is nonsense:
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=884
The result will be spurious attribution due to false correlations. For example the volcanic event occur at roughly 10y intervals and approximately correspond to SSN peak activity.
the post eruption cooling cannot correlate to AOD they used so what will that be falsely attributed to.
There is just so much that is wrong with their methods it’s hard to know where to start.

Theo Goodwin says:
August 4, 2014 at 10:44 am
gregfreemyer says:
August 4, 2014 at 10:05 am
===================================
===================================
Notice that you have introduced a claim that does not belong to radiation theory alone. You appeal to the relative density of the air. There is not a lot of water vapor in the stratosphere. There is a huge amount of water vapor in the troposphere. So, your explanation appeals to factors that fall outside of radiation theory. Radiation theory alone does not imply that radiation passing through a dense cloud of CO2 will cool the area above it that is less densely populated with CO2.
The important point here is that the good reputation of radiation theory cannot be used to support the claim that high concentrations of CO2 in the troposphere cool the stratosphere. Some other claim must be added. Maybe a claim about relative concentrations of water vapor. Your rather generic claim is about the relative density of air at various heights.
===================================
Note: I may have misused the term density. You may be taking it as grams per volume. I meant it as molecules per volume.
My claim has zero to do with water vapor. It has purely to do with the density (number of molecules per volume) of all molecules in the stratosphere versus the density of all molecules in the lower troposphere. I should also have said it has to do with the speed of the molecules, and possibly the average momentum of the molecules, thus the temperature would also need to be taken into account.
Regardless, the likelihood of a collision exciting a GHG molecule in a GHG molecule / random molecule collision has little to do with the presence of water vapor in the neighborhood.
Similarly, the likelihood that an excited GHG molecule has time to spontaneously emit before being involved in a subsequent collision has nothing specific to do with water vapor being in the neighborhood. A collision with any molecule will do the job just fine.
The basic issue is that per the radiative theory a GHG can:
– convert photons to kinetic energy (heat the atmosphere)
– convert kinetic energy to photons (cool the atmosphere)
– absorb and re-emit photons (slow down the transfer of energy)
All 3 of those processes are going on simultaneously and you have to perform a statistical mechanics analysis of the molecules and photons to figure out what will happen with different situations.
My statement is that the statistical mechanics analysis when applied to the stratosphere will show that CO2 acts to cool the stratosphere and that an increasing density ( CO2 molecules per volume) or increasing density (CO2 molecules per million molecules) will result in a greater cooling and thus a cooler stratosphere.
The stratosphere should cool to the point that the lower temperature causes less of the special collisions that excite CO2 molecules and thus equilibrium is achieved.
To the best of my knowledge, water vapor has nothing to do with the above.
It is further my opinion that the above is well agreed physics and neither warmers nor most sceptics should take issue with it.

Climate Weenie,
Its very much of use. You simply don’t get it. The hypothetical allows us to see how CO2’s long wave absorptive properties should effect the stratosphere. CO2s long wave absorptive properties AKA greenhouse gas effect should warm the stratosphere not cool it. However, due the presence of O3 absorbing shortwave radiation CO2s radiative properties dominate and cool the stratosphere.
I know you think you have an argument but you don’t.

Mike Maguire,
“Stratospheric cooling is consistent with greenhouse gas warming by some theories:”
In the same sense plant fertilization is consistent with greenhouse gas warming by some theories i. CO2 causes both but the two aren’t physically related. They are different physical phenomenon caused by increased CO2.

The simple fact of the matter is that the addition of any molecule be it CO2 or water vapor that makes the stratosphere more dense will cool the stratosphere because of an increase in molecular collisions with O3 that has been excited by absorbing shortwave radiation.
In a practical sense all CO2 does in the stratosphere is serve as a radiator for O3.

Yesterday, before this study came out, the tropical hotspot was the official global warming fingerprint.
Today, after this paper, a cooling stratosphere is the official global warming fingerprint.
See? Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum had nothing that these guys don’t have. It is called climatespeak.

Tom T says:
August 4, 2014 at 11:49 am
CO2s long wave absorptive properties AKA greenhouse gas effect should warm the stratosphere not cool it. However, due the presence of O3 absorbing shortwave radiation CO2s radiative properties dominate and cool the stratosphere.
==========
Not quite sure what you are saying:
O3 has absorption/emission bands of 600-800 and 950-1200 wavelengths/cm
CO2 has 540-800, 850-1250, and 2100-2400 wavelengths/cm
Clearly there is significant overlap except in the 2100-2400 band (the shortwave band).
Why do you state that in the stratosphere CO2’s 540-800 and 850-1250 bands are warming bands, but the 2100-2400 band is a cooling band?
Note that I’m not arguing, I’ve just not been exposed to that statement before. I will repeat that to figure out if a individual band is a warming or cooling band requires a statistical mechanics analysis, but I can easily see where the bands could give opposite results for the same environment.

gregfreemyer,
The dominate mode of energy transfer in the stratosphere between CO2 and O3 its molecular transfer that dominates. O3 molecules excited by short wave radiation from the sun collide with CO2. The CO2 then radiates this absorbed kinetic energy out to space.
In the stratosphere CO2 just serves as a radiator for O3.

The stratosphere cooled whilst the sun was active then stopped cooling around 2000 and may now be warming.
Since the change in trend coincided with the decline in solar activity it seems that an active sun cools the stratosphere and warms the troposphere whilst a quiet sun does the opposite.

Wayne Delbeke says:
August 4, 2014 at 12:04 pm
gregfreemyer says:
Regardless, the likelihood of a collision exciting a GHG molecule in a GHG molecule / random molecule collision has little to do with the presence of water vapor in the neighbourhood.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
It’s a long time since I took Physics but if Water Vapour is the major Green House Gas, why is it excluded as a GHG above? Why wouldn’t a collision between any GHG – CO2 or CH4 or H2O molecule have an effect? I am sure this has been discussed before, but give me an idea of why it has to be some “chosen” gas. Thanks.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Let me rephrase explicitly for CO2.
If one has a volume of air in the stratosphere with 0% humidity, CO2 will act as a cooling agent.
If one has a volume of air in the stratosphere with 100% humidity, CO2 will act as a cooling agent.
The presence of absence of water vapor has no impact on CO2’s interaction with photons and the molecules that compose the stratosphere. Any molecule colliding with CO2 can excite it, but with very low odds. Any molecule colliding with an excited CO2 molecule will with almost 100% certainty de-excite it.
To the best of my knowledge, CO2 has no magical chemical interaction with H2O that affects either the excitation or de-excitation process.

A scienceofdoom post from 2010 has some good quotes that might expalin it better.
http://scienceofdoom.com/2010/04/18/stratospheric-cooling/
The great Ramanathan in his 1998 review paper Trace-Gas Greenhouse Effect and Global Warming (thanks to Gary Thompson of American Thinker for recommending this paper) says this:
“As we mentioned earlier, in our explanation of the greenhouse effect, OLR reduces (with an increase in CO2) because of the decrease in temperature with altitude.
In the stratosphere, however, temperature increases with altitude and as a result the cooling to space is larger than the absorption from layers below. This is the fundamental reason for the CO2 induced cooling.”
In Ramaswamy (2001):
“For carbon dioxide the main 15-um band is saturated over quite short distances. Hence the upwelling radiation reaching the lower stratosphere originates from the cold upper troposphere. When the CO2 concentration is increased, the increase in absorbed radiation is quite small and the effect of the increased emission dominates, leading to a cooling at all heights in the stratosphere.”

gregfreemyer says:
August 4, 2014 at 11:28 am
Water vapor was offered as just a practical example. As long as the atmosphere holds something other than CO2 there will be something like water vapor that has to be taken into account. Radiation theory, the mathematical equations, applied to an atmosphere of CO2 alone could not yield the result that a higher density of CO2 molecules could result in the cooling of less dense CO2 molecules at a higher level. Therefore, radiation theory alone cannot yield that result for our actual atmosphere. Something else must be added; something like water vapor. For the last time, some natural science that exists apart from radiation theory must be used to get the result that you claim for radiation theory.

Theo Goodwin said:
“For the last time, some natural science that exists apart from radiation theory must be used to get the result that you claim for radiation theory.”
Correct.
The Gas Laws plus adiabatic warming on convective descent do the job nicely.

Thus less CME’S when sun is inactive more ozone warmer stratosphere above 45 km.
Volcanic activity (lack of it) also playing a role in the stratospheric temp. trend.

Look at the 23-38km band in the 60S-60N graph here:
http://www.acd.ucar.edu/Research/Highlight/stratosphere.shtml
The commentary says:” The time series are punctuated by transient warming events associated with the large volcanic eruptions of El Chichon (1982) and Mt. Pinatubo (1991), which persist for approximately two years.”
Note the fact that after the two volcanoes the temp drops TWICE as much as it rises.
Look at the 37-52km band: all it does is drop !
“The overall cooling ranges from ~-0.5 K/decade in the lower stratosphere (~20 km), to over -1K/decade in the upper stratosphere (40-50 km). These values can be compared with warming in the lower atmosphere (troposphere) over the same period of order 0.1-0.2 K/decade. The time series in Fig. 1 show that the stratospheric changes are not monotonic, but more step-like in nature; note that stratospheric temperatures have been relatively constant over the recent decade 1995-2005. ”
-0.5 K/decade in the lower stratosphere and there were how many eruptions per decade? So another way to express that would be -0.5 K / eruption.
Their equivalence of 0.1-0.2 K/decade ( or per eruption ) is basically what I found here:
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=988
The reference paper for that page is well worth a look:
http://www.acd.ucar.edu/~randel/2008JD010421.pdf
“… MSU channel 4 data suggest the Antarctic stratosphere has not cooled appreciably since the middle 1990s. Temperature trends in the Arctic stratosphere are not significant during the winter and spring months for two reasons: (1) the Arctic stratosphere is characterized by substantial interannual variability during the cold season (Figure 13), which complicates the detection of trends; and (2) the cooling of the springtime Arctic apparent during the 1990s has not
persisted during the most recent decade. ”
So neither Arctic nor Antarctic has seen any cooling since 2000. Plateaux galore!
Oddly, despite having explicitly noted that the changes are step changes with no trend, they spend most of the paper talking about and evaluating non-existent “trends”.
Though they don’t say it in so many words, it seems that this team has a least recognised what this implies: that there is a rise of 0.1-0.2K in each decade that is directly attributable to volcanic activity. If we are to play straight line games this means 0.1 to 0.2K/decade of warming in the lower climate system as a result of the major eruptions.
Now that is precisely the “unprecedented” warming that got everyone shitting themselves at the end of the last century.
That is precisely the “unprecedented” acceleration in warming that has been basis of exponential extrapolations leading to ridiculous “as much as 6 deg C” claims and broken models.
It is the spurious attribution of these changes to AGW that is the source of the whole problem.

”
Joseph Bastardi says:
August 4, 2014 at 8:44 am
Now this has my attention! I have always said that the sign of global warming would be a cooling upper stratosphere.. as that would imply expansion below that level and warming! So this is an interesting paper to me and one that I think can gain traction. However it still does not answer the question: is it man made? And we are going to get our answer soon enough given the change in the PDO and AMO would imply tropospheric cooling and warming above again ( reversal of the cooling)
…
”
That stratospheric hotspot BS has always had me perplexed. It probably means that their computer models are just flat out in gross error. What is going on and is going to happen is conservation of energy. When there is increased ghgs in the air at some level – in a shell, there will be x increase in the absorbed energy due to the extra gas absorption. In simple terms of Stefan’s law, there will also be an increase in emissivity (epsilon) causing an increase in radiation from that shell. The increased radiation will be outward and the same amount of increase will be downward, essentially leading to a 2x sized increase in radiation away from that shell unless the T drops and because of conservation of energy – it must drop in T until it reaches a balance in that shell.
It would again seem only logical that the increase in IR radiation in the lower atmosphere will have to result in increased water cycle activity for most of the Earth’s surface as the IR is not going to penetrate into the oceans and a regulating effect from cloud cover is going kick in to trim down the visible light that has some ocean penetration.

John Who: stratospheric cooling does not mean that the troposphere must be warming. That wouldn’t make any (common) sense. It might appear to imply that both couldn’t cool (or warm) at the same time. Further, either way, it does not prove that whichever is happening is being caused by anything we humans are doing.
I agree, but your first comment was silly.

MRM: Stratospheric cooling in the absence of surface warming is the finger print of nothing much to worry about.
There has not been “stratospheric cooling in the absence of surface warming “, there has been both and they were caused by volcanism not AGW..
Randel et al 2009 basically confirms what I have found myself. That paper is 5y old now. Why are we still crapping on about AGW?

On the face of it, Greg Goodman seems right about the dubious statistical methodology in this paper. There certainly are typical warning signs of problems. But the authors invoke a paper by Reinsel et al(2005) as the basis for their statistical analysis. Reinsel was a very competent statistics professor, apparently a specialist in time series and multivariate regression. In that sense anyway, it’s not from the usual half-baked school of climate statistics.

TOm T:
“OMG not this junk again. This all goes back to a bad post by Gavin in 2004 where he incorrectly attributed the physical cause of stratospheric cooling.”
No, Tom, it doesn’t go back to Gavin or anyone else in 2004., Since your post seems to be an attempted rebuttal of mine I would invite you to actually read it. You will see that the “junk” long antedates Gavin, going back to 1967. As for the posts you reference both support my contention that increased concentrations of heat trapping gases (aka greenhouse gases, not necessarily CO2) in the troposphere will warm the troposphere and reduce heat transport up to the stratosphere leading to stratospheric cooling. to quote from the 2nd of your references:
” For instance in the second of the references we read “This implies that there is a level in the atmosphere (called the effective radiating level) that must be at the effective radiating temperature (around 252K). This is around the mid-troposphere ~ 6km. Since increasing GHGs implies an increasing temperature gradient, the temperatures must therefore ‘pivot’ around this (fixed) level. i.e. everything below that level will warm, and everything above that level will cool.”
Note that all this occurs independent of the presence of ozone, so the Schmidt reference you cite in support of your “ozone is required for stratospheric cooling” actually undermines your claims.
You go on to say that the Zerofos et al. paper
” never make the physical connection between the actually greenhouse gas effect and stratospheric cooling.
“Well, Anthony provides us with only a fairly short extract, so you are not in aposition to claim this. Moreover, I think through sentences such as “To what extent are the cooling trends in the lower stratosphere related to human-induced climate change? ” make their aims pretty clear.
“This is called lying by context something that is very common amongst academics because they have the emotional mentality of a 4 year old and cannot grasp that there are forms of lying beyond lies of commission.”
I don’t suppose you have any evidence to support this extraordinary accusation on a very large section of the human race. Have you?

Bill Illis:
Does the effect of volcanoes exclude the effect of CO2?

Bill Illis
“The lower stratosphere does not exhibit a GHG signal. It shows a volcano/Ozone depletion from volcanic sulphates signal (and I am tired of climate scientists not recognizing this)”.
Bill, If you researched a little harder into what climate scientists do recognise of you might be pleasantly surprised. Here is, of all people, Gavin Schmidt recognising just that:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/11/the-sky-is-falling/ . See para 2.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/why-does-the-stratosphere-cool-when-the-troposphere-warms/ See para 7.
Happy reading!!
As for your claim that there is no GHG signal, as Schmidt points out it tends to be masked by the other effects that you mention in thelower stratosphere.
However, it is much clearer in the upper stratosphere as the graphs marked “50-30 hPa” (low pressure means high altitude) in Anthony’s article do indicate
Bill H.
ClimWee,
Hopefully that answers a point you made earlier in response to my article.
I’m going to sign off now and probably not return to wuwt for some time. I’ve enjoyed our alltoo brief correspondence, but the general level of vitriol lurking around this site gets me down too much. Witness Tom T.’s appalling slur on academics as a class (compulsive liars with the emotional development of 4 year olds). Is there something about AGW-phobia that induces such hatred of scholars?
All the best, Bill H

Bill H. says:
August 4, 2014 at 3:41 pm
Bill Illis
“The lower stratosphere does not exhibit a GHG signal. It shows a volcano/Ozone depletion from volcanic sulphates signal (and I am tired of climate scientists not recognizing this)”.
Bill, If you researched a little harder into what climate scientists do recognise of you might be pleasantly surprised. Here is, of all people, Gavin Schmidt recognising just that:
———————-
Oh yeah, he just cleared it all up for those reading RealBogusClimate. NOT.

Bill H.,
Despite your over inflated ego I hadn’t even read your post when I made my first post. I posted as soon as I read the article. I posted comments latter. The fact that you are making a caricature argument doesn’t make you special. It makes you generic.
On to your points first and foremost I have a pdf Manabe and Wetherald, 1967 and your statement that it says
“long wave radiation would increasingly be absorbed in the troposphere with increasing CO2 leading to less long wave radiatiion reaching the stratosphere”
Is flat out wrong. It says nothing of the sort. I don’t know what warmmonger site you read that it but it is either a very ignorant statement or a deliberate lie. All its says is “The larger the mixing ratio of carbon dioxide, the colder is the equilibrium temperature of the stratosphere”. In no way does Manabe and Wetherald, 1967 justify your claim. Maybe your original source wrongly attributed the cause due to the paper being vague.
Now in responding to Illis you re-post the 2004 post from Gavin where he admits that it the information contained therein is wrong!
You will also notice that in the 2006 RC post they don’t say that AGW is cooling the stratosphere only that CO2 is. In other words Gavin knows he was wrong in 2004 but doesn’t like to admit it.
He now simply does the same parsing of words that the authors of the subject of this article do.
“The changes in the figure are related to the cooling seen in the lower stratospheric MSU-4 records (UAH or RSS), but the changes there (~ 15-20 km) are predominantly due to ozone depletion. The higher up one goes, the more important the CO2 related cooling is. It’s interesting to note that significant solar forcing would have exactly the opposite effect (it would cause a warming) – yet another reason to doubt that solar forcing is a significant factor in recent decades. – See more at: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/11/the-sky-is-falling/#sthash.1fbsFWDx.dpuf”
See Gavin no longer mentions trapped IR from the troposphere being responsible. He only makes a vague reference to “CO2 related cooling” and doesn’t really get into what that means. Your mind is left to fill in the blanks.
This is both lying by omission and lying by context. Gavin said CO2. You assumed that meant global warming. But he never said that. He left it up to you to interpret that and he knew you would.
The truth of the matter is that Gavin made his totally false 2004 post quite by ignorance but slapped down the atmospheric physicists he works with and has since pretended like it never happened. WMC actually gave Gavin a subtle jab for this mistake.
“Note: of course the fact that many people couldn’t explain this makes no difference at all to the fact that climate models produce the correct answer: they just integrate the equations, and don’t care about why things happen.”
That was a jab at Gavin.

Bill Innis: http://s11.postimg.org/lxwzon2rn/Volcanoes_and_Lower_Strat_Temps_1978_2014.png
Bill, I’m sure we’ve discussed this graph before and the the trends you draw are bogus, hand drawn lines. The first rising line may be about right because there was a slight bump shortly before Mt P but the 19y upward trend is a figment of your imagination.
Last time you posted that I went back and checked the linear regression over that period and it would take about 400y to recover the 0.5K drop.
If it is ozone depletion I imagine it will recover eventually but there is no sign of that in the last 19y of that data. All you’ve done it pick he lowest point and the recent high and joint the dots.

basicstats says:
On the face of it, Greg Goodman seems right about the dubious statistical methodology in this paper. There certainly are typical warning signs of problems. But the authors invoke a paper by Reinsel et al(2005) as the basis for their statistical analysis. Reinsel was a very competent statistics professor, apparently a specialist in time series and multivariate regression. In that sense anyway, it’s not from the usual half-baked school of climate statistics.
===
It’s a shame that Reinsel paper is paywalled. I’d like to see what and expert at multivariate regression does differently.
The abstract says that he is using AO and AAO + solar so it would seem to be different to the current paper. He also reports a significant difference from 1996 onwards. So it appears he notes it is basically flat since compared to 0.5K/decade ( = 0.5K / eruption ) before that.
What Zerefos et al are doing no better than fitting a bunch of AR1 synthetic data and believing it has physical meaning.
It is clear from their graphs that they are just mangling the data to the point where the clear steps are less evident. Their suggestion that this is AGW and not volcanoes is wilfully misleading in view of the literature already noting the step nature and it’s links to volcanic events (some of which are even cited).
Yet another attempt to explain away inconvenient data.

Tom T,
Well we do seem to agree that Manabe and Wetherall predicted in 1967 that adding CO2 to the atmosphere would lead to stratospheric cooling (specifically diagram 16 on page 250 and the description on page 251), something that you describe as “junk”, when the same claim is made in 2014 by Zerofos et al. and in 2004 by Schmidt. Incidentally, Gavin makes it clear that he corrected the errors in the 2004 Realclimate post, so you are not justified in claiming that it is still in error. I didn’t find Schmidt in any way “vague”.He was as clear as M and W in 1967: increased CO2, whether anthropogenic or not, will, ceteris paribus, give rise to stratospheric cooling. All your conjectures about lying by omission and emotional levels of four year olds seem to be based on the slenderest of evidence and betray a quite scary level of misanthropy.
Since the overwhelming evidence is that the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere is due to human activity then a cooling stratosphere – particularly the upper stratosphere, where possible confounding effects of ozone depletion would be much less – would be expected, and indeed that is what Zerofos et al. have found. Essentially they provide empirical evidence to back up Manabe and Wetherall’s prediction about what will happen if CO2 is added to the atmosphere through human, or for that matter non-human agency.
As for your claims about the contrasting radiative/absorbing properties of CO2 and O3 they are actually pretty similar. Both are greenhouse gases, i.e. they absorb in the longer wave IR and both strongly absorb in the UV, x-ray and gamma ray regions to which they will be exposed in the upper atmosphere It just so happens that the long wave cut off for this is a longer in ozone – about 320 nm compared with CO2 at about 230 nm. as for CO2 being a strong radiator and weak absorber in the absence of ozone you may remember from school physics that strong radiators are also strong absorbers, and vice versa. You might have thought this only applied at the macroscopic level, but it’s a universal rule, applying to single molecules as well. You really need to come up with some references to back up this CO2/O3 model of yours.

Sorry for name error, not “refusal”, simple error. Apologies.
“Sorry, the trend is UP. Yeah UP. The lower strat temps are UP. Start over with the real numbers.”
Bill, how about you provide some “real numbers” instead of “UP”.
I did the calculation and unless you can come up with some valid technical criticism of the way that was done and something a lot better the “UP”, I see not need to “start over”.
m_lin = 0.00130434 +/- 0.005792 (444%)
c = 205.534 +/- 0.06168 (0.03001%)
Statistically indistinguishable from zero. No detectable recovery towards pre-eruption values.
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=955

Stratospheric cooling should not be hyped as “fingerprint” of AGW especially the catastrophic kind. The cooling is predicted by greenhouse effect theory. Who’s denying greenhouse effect? But it doesn’t tell us how much warming is man-made vs. natural. And as already pointed out, stratospheric cooling can also have a natural cause.

Some great examples of deflecting the argument away from the absence of a hotspot, onto stratospheric cooling seen above.
The physics are inescapable. On its own, the cooling of an atmospheric layer cannot be the cause of surface warming. This would be a completely broken argument.
The Enhanced Greenhouse Effect proposition never proposed any such thing. It proposed that CO2-driven radiative forcing (from the atmosphere) would cause warming at the surface. Radiative physics insist that layers in the atmosphere must therefore warm by more than the warming at the surface. And this point was pursued and presented in the literature by people like Ben Santer,
Stratospheric changes may have been anticipated at some stage, but if there was any cooling, it was a secondary issue and never claimed to cause surface warming.
We cannot observe the warming layers as they were predicted. The Enhance Greenhouse Effect is therefore falsified. It’s a dead parrot. A Norwegian Blue as stiff as a bedpost.
It is about as credible as a theory of fairies at the bottom of the garden. It doesn’t matter if leaves can be observed blowing around the bottom of the garden – this is not some kind of secondary observation of fairies. In the same manner, stratospheric cooling cannot be introduced as a secondary indication of warming in other layers (which cannot be directly observed).
As they say: “it’s all over, bar the shouting”

Dr. Strangelove says: “Stratospheric cooling should not be hyped as “fingerprint” of AGW especially the catastrophic kind. The cooling is predicted by greenhouse effect theory. Who’s denying greenhouse effect? ”
Careful Doc, you are confounding two different things.
No one is questioning the radiative properties of CO2 . That does not imply acceptance of any and all of the various things that allegedly “predicted” by “greenhouse theory” ( which is an ever mutable hypothesis, not a theory).
The paper cited here is methodical mess. It claims to remove natural variability, like volcanoes, but clearly does not because the disruption of the two events is still clearly present after their data mangling.
This post 1980 period, which still contains the volcano induced cooling, is then fitted with a linear model and voila! : proof of increased AGW.
The literature they cite , including Randal et al 2009, clearly identifies the step nature of the changes in this period yet they try to regress it using only AOD which can never match the step change since it is at the same level a few years after the events.
They quite knowingly regress against something that does not fit. This guarantees that the drop will remain in the data they claim to have adjusted for natural effects.
If they have failed to account for the nature of the change as described in their own references, it is hard to see this as anything but deliberate malfeasance.

I have another good anology.
Saying that stratospheric cooling and anthropogenic global warming are physically related is like saying tat pissing and drowning a physically related. Same cause, water, but totally different process.

Climate Weenie says, August 4, 2014 at 9:38 am:
“(…) the MSU data sets seem to indicate the continued cooling.
http://climatewatcher.webs.com/HotSpot_Pause.png
The effect of stratospheric cooling is to slightly reduce RF at the tropopause.”
The MSU data sets seem to indicate no such thing. In fact, they show very clearly that there hasn’t been ANY lower stratospheric cooling at all for the last 20 years (since 1994, after the effects of the Pinatubo stratospheric aerosols – destroying tons of O3 – had finally dissipated):
ftp://ftp.ssmi.com/msu/graphics/tls/plots/rss_ts_channel_tls_global_land_and_sea_v03_3.png
During that same time, about a third of the alleged rise in atmospheric CO2 since pre-industrial times occurred (358-398 ppm).
“Stratospheric cooling is a direct result of CO2 calculated from radiative transfer models alone ( the ones we have confidence in ).”
In other words, your ‘radiative transfer models’ (the ones you have such confidence in) failed miserably.

William Astley: The warmists have ignored other explanations for the cooling of the stratosphere and have ignored observations that support the assertion that the majority of the warming in the last 50 years (more than 90%) is due to solar magnetic cycle modulation of planetary clouds, rather than CO2. As low level clouds reflect short wave radiation up into space and as a portion of the short wave radiation is absorbed in the stratosphere by ozone, a reduction in low planetary clouds will cause surface warming and will cause the stratosphere to cool.
I agree that the warmist case is full of holes, and warmists dismiss too casually or don’t consider at all other explanations for a variety of changes of the last centuries and decades. My post was directed toward a particular rather shallow comment.

Stephen Wilde says:
August 4, 2014 at 12:32 pm
“The stratosphere cooled whilst the sun was active then stopped cooling around 2000 and may now be warming.
Since the change in trend coincided with the decline in solar activity it seems that an active sun cools the stratosphere and warms the troposphere whilst a quiet sun does the opposite.”
That is right Stephen, solar activity dominates the cooling and warming of the stratosphere, and for that matter the troposphere via its effect on cloud formation, surface pressure and especially the Polar Jets:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/31/ozone-depletion-trumps-greenhouse-gas-increase-in-jet-stream-shift/
It is all linked to the sites of formation and destruction of ozone that is linked to the level and wavelength of solar UV as the cycles reach peak and decline as well as between solar cycles of differing amplitude. When the Sun is active ozone is destroyed by NO2, hence the famous scare over ozone holes during the late 20th century. Since ozone absorbs LWR emitted from the surface and UV from the Sun its reduction in level in the upper stratosphere causes stratospheric cooling. However the ozone that is formed is found in the lower stratosphere and upper troposphere and likewise absobs LWR and UV radiation warming the upper the troposphere so having an effect on cloud formation. When the Sun is quiet, as now, the reduction in the destruction of ozone from a less active solar wind increases the ozone level in the upper stratosphere and the stratosphere warms.
http://www.space.dtu.dk/upload/institutter/space/forskning/06_projekter/isac/wp501b.pdf
Solar activity Ozone Mes/Strat Ozone Strat /Trop Warming or/Cooling Jets
>45km Stratopause <45km Stratopause Mes/Strat/Trop
High Decreased Increased Cooling/Warming Zonal
Low Increased Decreased Warming/Cooling Meridional
The warming role of CO2 is minimal as it has a low heat capcity compared to ozone with the evidence showing that it has the effect of cooling the stratosphere and thermosphere:
CO2 acts together with NO2 as a huge cooling mechanism for Earth's thermosphere
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2014/03/new-paper-finds-no-effect-of.html
So stratospheric warming and cooling is indeed a good fingerprint of climate change but not of CAGW from anthropgenic emissions of CO2 rather of natural variation due to solar activity. These activities are well stated in articles by Earl Happ:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/author/erlhapp/
http://climatechange1.wordpress.com/2013/08/11/the-turning-point/
Support for the ozone effect is given in a study by Polvani and Solomon:
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2012/2012JD017719.shtml