Paper finds a decrease of IR radiation from greenhouse gases over past 14 years, contradicts expected increase – cloudiness blamed for difference.
A paper published in the Journal of Climate finds from 800,000 observations a significant decrease in longwave infrared radiation from increasing greenhouse gases over the 14 year period 1996-2010 in the US Great Plains. CO2 levels increased ~7% over this period and according to AGW theory, downwelling IR should have instead increased over this period.
According to the authors,
“The AERI data record demonstrates that the downwelling infrared radiance is decreasing over this 14-yr period in the winter, summer, and autumn seasons but it is increasing in the spring; these trends are statistically significant and are primarily due to long-term change in the cloudiness above the site.”
The findings contradict the main tenet of AGW theory which states increasing greenhouse gases including the primary greenhouse gas water vapor and clouds will cause an increase of downwelling longwave infrared “back-radiation.”
The paper also finds a negative trend in precipitable water vapor, as do other global datasets, again the opposite of predictions of AGW theory that warming allegedly from CO2 will increase precipitable water vapor in the atmosphere to allegedly amplify warming by 3-5 times. Is the unexpected decrease in water vapor the cause of the decrease in downwelling IR?
Global datasets also show an increase of outgoing longwave IR radiation to space from greenhouse gases over the past 62 years, again in contradiction to the predictions of AGW theory.
Gero, P. Jonathan, David D. Turner, 2011: Long-Term Trends in Downwelling Spectral Infrared Radiance over the U.S. Southern Great Plains. J. Climate, 24, 4831–4843.
doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/2011JCLI4210.1
Long-Term Trends in Downwelling Spectral Infrared Radiance over the U.S. Southern Great Plains
P. Jonathan Gero
Space Science and Engineering Center, University of Wisconsin—Madison, Madison, Wisconsin
David D. Turner
NOAA/National Severe Storms Laboratory, Norman, Oklahoma, and Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of Wisconsin—Madison, Madison, Wisconsin
Abstract
A trend analysis was applied to a 14-yr time series of downwelling spectral infrared radiance observations from the Atmospheric Emitted Radiance Interferometer (AERI) located at the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Program (ARM) site in the U.S. Southern Great Plains. The highly accurate calibration of the AERI instrument, performed every 10 min, ensures that any statistically significant trend in the observed data over this time can be attributed to changes in the atmospheric properties and composition, and not to changes in the sensitivity or responsivity of the instrument. The measured infrared spectra, numbering more than 800 000, were classified as clear-sky, thin cloud, and thick cloud scenes using a neural network method. The AERI data record demonstrates that the downwelling infrared radiance is decreasing over this 14-yr period in the winter, summer, and autumn seasons but it is increasing in the spring; these trends are statistically significant and are primarily due to long-term change in the cloudiness above the site. The AERI data also show many statistically significant trends on annual, seasonal, and diurnal time scales, with different trend signatures identified in the separate scene classifications. Given the decadal time span of the dataset, effects from natural variability should be considered in drawing broader conclusions. Nevertheless, this dataset has high value owing to the ability to infer possible mechanisms for any trends from the observations themselves and to test the performance of climate models.
via the Hockeyschtick with thanks
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Nick –
Why are you quoting AR4? Isn’t AR5 current? What does it say?
It would seem that Gerlich and Tscheuschner the chaps who falsified the AGW hypothesis by examining the heat transfer were right all along.
Nick Stokes says:
August 5, 2014 at 7:27 pm
Still waiting for a single shred of evidence in support of the hypothesis that man-made CO2 is the primary driver of warming since 1950 or another date of your choosing.
Thanks.
Nick, ENSO processes also affect us globally with fairly typical and opposite patterns regionally, and that create 30 to 60+ year oscillations. Are you saying that the tiny, tiny fraction of anthropogenic CO2 took over these extremely powerful ENSO processes? Kicked it to the curb? Became king of the hill? By what possible mechanism could it do that? Are you going to play the “amplification” card that solar enthusiasts love to use? If you do play that card, why is the Earth not cooperating? And if you say because ENSO processes tagged back in, I will snort my evening tea all over my puter screen.
KevinK wrote:
August 5, 2014 at 7:08 pm
>>John, with all due respect, all of the empirical observations are running against the “greenhouse >>gas” HYPOTHESIS. And all of the empirical observations are (so far) running in favor of gravity.
I was going to argue the physics of this. Then I remembered an old adage. I’ll not repeat it here as it is rude.
JE
Andy Krause wrote;
“Contradictory results for a scientist should be endlessly fascinating.”
I admit I am not a scientist (I did stay at at Holiday Inn Express ™ last night, ha ha ha), but as an engineer I have been fascinated how some apparently smart folks have totally convinced themselves that a trivial amount of gases in the atmosphere can “drive”, “control”, “determine”, “force” the temperature of the massive ocean’s into “compliance”. Very interesting phenomenon.
I bet that as a traveling salesman (Ok, old cultural reference) if I showed up at most folks homes a hundred years ago and told them I could sell then a “sugar cube” sized device that would make the water in their bathtub “luxuriously warm” without them having to boil water, they would laugh me off their porch (and probably pull out the shotgun to scare the nutjob away). Yet, we have a whole collection of folks with lots of “education” that are certain that this “sugar cube” sized device exists ???
I bet that with the money they have expended I could have found a unicorn by now (well, at least a “peer reviewed” facsimile of a unicorn).
Yet, they INSIST that the “greenhouse” gases are controlling the temperature, with that logic I think we can all just throw out our furnaces and buy “sugar cubes” (capsules of CO2) to keep us warm…..
I guess in their defense they did read it in a textbook, so it must be TRUE….
Cheers, Kevin.
Steven Mosher says:
August 5, 2014 at 4:52 pm
One site
Now if it was ‘one’ tree, that would be far more credible.
I now see a few people beat me to the ‘one tree’ reply… I wonder what the reply will be?
Mosh and Nick. Thanks for keeping things ‘real’, as they say. The findings are interesting, but by no means do they overthrow the current theory, IMO. Certainly shows that (in some areas, at some times) that other ‘knobs’ certainly play an important–and yes sometimes primary–role along with the GHGs. FWIW, I do appreciate papers like this being posted (whether at time of publishing or later), however, in some cases it seems as though the implications are a bit over hyped. Just my own 2 cents.
OK, OK, let’s admit that Stokes and Mosher are right, this is only one site. We can’t rely on this outcome anymore than if we had temperature data from a single weather station for the same 14 year period. Would anyone argue that it would be representative of the entire globe?
But that said, there’s a couple of interesting questions that ought to be asked:
1. According to their web site http://www.arm.gov/instruments/instrument.php?id=aeri there are more of these instruments out there. Alaska has one, there are three in the western Pacific (one of which is in Australia) and some mobile units currently located in places like Germany, China, India and Brazil (among others). So the obvious question is what does the data from the whole bunch say?
2. While Stokes may be correct in quoting AR4 as having projected reduced precipitation for this site, it also projected increased temps for the planet over that time period which didn’t happen. So the reduced precipitation cannot be the feedback from a process that never happened, can it?
3. What did AR4 project for temps in this region, and what happened to actual temps in this region? With a marked decrease in downward LW, one would expect cooler temps, unless the planet acting as a heat pump (which is does) delivered enough extra energy to compensate. Given that the earth has NOT warmed, that becomes problematic to explain as this would imply cooling in the tropics (which pump heat to the mid lats), would it not?
Mosher writes “One site.”
YAD0601. One Tree.
The Mosher / Stokes response is that this is one site and a main tenet of CAGW is not affected. It would be interesting to see whether local weather stations show an increase or decrease in temperature over the same period. As we know, there is an on-going controversy regarding down-trending raw temperature readings in the US versus adjusted temperature readings on the rise.
Leigh says:
August 5, 2014 at 8:00 pm
Hilarious.
Or an upside down data set from a single lake in Finland.
I’m waiting for the cloud panic now – CO2 causes clouds which keeps it cooler but soon we will never see the sun!
“tim” writes “To Mosher
one tree”
Damn pipped at the post. And by another tim too!
sleepingbear dunes:
A weakness in the study is that it is based on trend analysis. The predicted trend is compared to the measured trend but the measured trend is based upon untestable assumptions. In legitimate science, the predicted relative frequency is compared to the observed relative frequency and there are no assumptions.
The paper is 3 years old. Why did such an important finding find little publicity during that time?
Is it possible that increased CO2 has caused increased cloudiness AND decreased precipitable water?
It is only one site, but regional effects are known to have measurable global-wide consequences, right? Surely it is now worthwhile to study as many regions as possible.
The AERI data record demonstrates that the downwelling infrared radiance is decreasing over this 14-yr period in the winter, summer, and autumn seasons but it is increasing in the spring; these trends are statistically significant and are primarily due to long-term change in the cloudiness above the site.”
Some people do not believe in the effects (or existence, sometimes) of DWLWIR, so for them this changes nothing.
Me? It requires replication, but I am surprised.
Sturgis, no dice. Your linked paper cites outdated solar indices in its bibliography and doesn’t provide evidence other than passing reference to cyclomania regarding a solar driver connection. Try again.
As for my proposal, it is well supported in the literature. ENSO processes create 30 to 60 year unequal trends that show up all over the place, first identified in the fishing industry. For one of many land based affects, google Rocky Mountain Elk and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.
The Anthropogenic Global Warming hypothesis is falsified right there…… once again. How many times does this AGW hoax have to be falsified before people start to listen…. Oh, when the funding runs out. Silly me. I forgot. They’re doing politics, not science.
John Eggert wrote;
“I was going to argue the physics of this. Then I remembered an old adage. I’ll not repeat it here as it is rude.”
John, go ahead and be rude if you like, I have been on occasion, I have a thick skin;
Here’s the “physics” as I see it;
1) If you fill a fixed volume with a “GHG” and illuminate it with a constant light (at the wavelength where it absorbs) it warms, yes indeed it does. This is the classic “greenhouse effect” laboratory experiment, no doubt about that.
2) Well this is where it all goes down the “tube”;
2a) First off if the gas is not in a fixed volume (as in the atmosphere) it expands after warming which as expected changes it’s optical absorption properties.
2b) This gas in the real atmosphere “interacts” with it’s neighbors transferring heat via conduction, convection and radiation.
2c) As the gas’s density changes (from being warmed) it moves upwards.
3) There have been several experiments that clearly demonstrate than building a “greenhouse” with roof materials that transmit or absorb IR radiation has NO EFFECT on the internal temperature, Wood, Nashile, Penn State.
Anyway, no sense beating a dead horse, some folks will always be convinced that a single laboratory experiment (the thermal response of a bit of gas sealed in a tube) can be extrapolated to cover the whole atmosphere of the Earth, and the Ocean’s (with no apparent consideration of the relative thermal capacities of said subsystems).
Do you think that doing the CO2 in a tube experiment in a freezing cold laboratory could make the laboratory reach tropic temperatures ?
The HYPOTHESIS IS DEAD, yes that’s a rude phrasing, but it’s still DEAD. No temperature rise, no “backradiation increase”, no measurable effect of the HYPOTHESIS AT ALL.
As hypotheses go this one had a hell of a life, ulcers causes by stress and anxiety only lasted about three decades, this one made it a whole century before the wheels came off.
Cheers, Kevin.
KevinK wrote:
August 5, 2014 at 7:59 pm
>>but as an engineer I
What field of engineering did you study that you haven’t been exposed to thermodynamics and heat transfer? Because if you have taken an engineering course in heat transfer then you would know why CO2 is indeed a “greenhouse gas”. You may have forgotten the math, but you should at least know the foundations. And if you have thermodynamics, you would know about energy balances and know that “gravity” as a source of warming is . . . Wow. . . Just Wow. As an engineer, I’m embarrassed that an engineer said that.
JE
Kristian wrote this on another thread: Again, this has been pointed out so many times to those of you who actually believe DWLWIR (‘atmospheric back radiation’) to be a real, separate working flow of energy to the surface (an extra (and equal) input of energy next to the solar heat flux): If this were really the case, then why aren’t we harnessing this energy flux? It is seemingly twice as intense as the solar flux, evened out globally and across the diurnal cycle. Why aren’t we seeing ‘back radiation’ power plants all over the world?
It was the last in a series on the non-existence of heat transfer via DWLWIR. He has not been the only proponent of that view.
KevinK
1) If you fill a fixed volume with a “GHG” and illuminate it with a constant light (at the wavelength where it absorbs) it warms, yes indeed it does. This is the classic “greenhouse effect” laboratory experiment, no doubt about that.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
You are confusing heat capacity with greenhouse effect and that is not the classic experiment. The rest of your argument rests upon your weak grasp of the physics and goes even further off course from there.
The paper should get a thorough critique, but it is behind a paywall.
davidmhoffer: davidmhoffer says:
August 5, 2014 at 8:09 pm
that was a good post.
H Grouse says:
August 5, 2014 at 5:38 pm
“(Thank you Joni)”
You left out the most important lyrics as they pertain to this study and AGW:
“I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down, and still somehow
It’s cloud illusions I recall
I really don’t know clouds at all”
And to the “one site” people: teleconnections.