From the “language gives away the intent of the study” department comes this clear attempt at a headline.
Long-term global warming not driven naturally
Study “debunks” argument that warming is driven by natural factors
DURHAM, N.C. — By examining how Earth cools itself back down after a period of natural warming, a study by scientists at Duke University and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory confirms that global temperature does not rise or fall chaotically in the long run. Unless pushed by outside forces, temperature should remain stable.
The new evidence may finally help put the chill on skeptics’ belief that long-term global warming occurs in an unpredictable manner, independently of external drivers such as human impacts.
“This underscores that large, sustained changes in global temperature like those observed over the last century require drivers such as increased greenhouse gas concentrations,” said lead author Patrick Brown, a PhD student at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment. Natural climate cycles alone are insufficient to explain such changes, he said.
Brown and his colleagues published their peer-reviewed research Feb. 1 in the Journal of Climate.
Using global climate models and NASA satellite observations of Earth’s energy budget from the last 15 years, the study finds that a warming Earth is able to restore its temperature equilibrium through complex and seemingly paradoxical changes in the atmosphere and the way radiative heat is transported.
Scientists have long attributed this stabilization to a phenomenon known as the Planck Response, a large increase in infrared energy that Earth emits as it warms. Acting as a safety valve of sorts, this response creates a negative radiative feedback that allows more of the accumulating heat to be released into space through the top of the atmosphere.
The new Duke-NASA research, however, shows it’s not as simple as that.
“Our analysis confirmed that the Planck Response plays a dominant role in restoring global temperature stability, but to our surprise we found that it tends to be overwhelmed locally by heat-trapping positive energy feedbacks related to changes in clouds, water vapor, and snow and ice,” Brown said. “This initially suggested that the climate system might be able to create large, sustained changes in temperature all by itself.”
A more detailed investigation of the satellite observations and climate models helped the researchers finally reconcile what was happening globally versus locally.
“While global temperature tends to be stable due to the Planck Response, there are other important, previously less appreciated, mechanisms at work too,” said Wenhong Li, assistant professor of climate at Duke. These other mechanisms include a net release of energy over regions that are cooler during a natural, unforced warming event. And there can be a transport of energy from the tropical Pacific to continental and polar regions where the Planck Response overwhelms positive, heat-trapping local effects.
“This emphasizes the importance of large-scale energy transport and atmospheric circulation changes in restoring Earth’s global temperature equilibrium after a natural, unforced warming event,” Li said.
###
Jonathan H. Jiang and Hui Su of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, managed by the California Institute of Technology, co-authored the new study.
Funding came from the National Science Foundation (#AGS-1147608) as well as the NASA ROSES13-NDOA and ROSES13-NEWS programs.
CITATION: “Unforced Surface Air Temperature Variability and Its Contrasting Relationship with the Atmospheric TOA Energy Flux at Local and Global Spatial Scales,” Patrick T. Brown, Wenhong Li, Jonathan H. Jiang, Hui Su, Feb. 1, 2016, Journal of Climate; DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-15-0384.1
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“Our analysis confirmed that the Planck Response plays a dominant role in restoring global temperature stability, but to our surprise we found that it tends to be overwhelmed locally by heat-trapping positive energy feedbacks related to changes in clouds, water vapor, and snow and ice,” Brown said. “This initially suggested that the climate system might be able to create large, sustained changes in temperature all by itself.”
That’s a start..
“This emphasizes the importance of large-scale energy transport and atmospheric circulation changes in restoring Earth’s global temperature equilibrium after a natural, unforced warming event,” Li said.
Well we have been saying that.
Then they arrive at the politically correct (wrong) conclusion. Sigh…
The Pleistocene must have been extremely cold, despite the plant life fossils all over the planet. They had to have survived because of the low levels of CO2, which is great for plants, as we all know.
Sorry, mods, but this deserves extreme sarcasm.
You are watching a Ph.D climate student prostrated on the alter floor of the church of warmunism, taking his priestly warmunist vows and then offering climate model communion. Nothing more.
Cause the fact (per Lindzen) that the ~1920 to -1945 warming (not CO2) and ~ 1975-2000 ( all CO2) are statistically indistinguishable, or the fact of the now near 20 year pause (except in karlized temps) falsifying all climate models are noticeably missing in action. No doubt expunged by copious warmunist incense dispensed at the J. Climate ‘ceremony’.
Gosh, every month warmunism gets more ridiculously detached from reality.
Ristvan have you got a link to that Lindzen warming estimate for the two periods?
Neville, Yes. Is explained with graphic illustrations and IPCC references in my essay C?AGw in my ebook Blowing Smoke.
For another accessible explanation, visit judithcurry.com/2015/12/19/week-in-review-science-edition-29/.
Or just google around with some pointed keywords like Lindzen, comparisons, early 20th late 20th century, global warming. You will find several of Lindzen’s own online observations in various speeches and presentations. If I recall correctly, the most recent was to the British Parliament in 2012. The year I visited him for a day at MIT in early June to get his feedback on the climate chapter of The Arts of Truth, two weeks before he retired.
Duke says she already has a phd. Doesn’t say how or where she earned it.
“…. said Wenhong Li, assistant professor of climate at Duke.”
I’ve been wanting to get a definition of “climate scientist” for a long time now. I guess Mr. Lee is it.
So, we’re are back to the Mann Myth that the Medieval Warming Period, Roman Warming Period, Minoan Warming Period, and what is probably a warming period at the end of the Old Kingdom in Egypt (~2050 BCE) never happened. Oddly, stuff like the C14 age calibration curves say there was less C14 produced during those warming periods.
” Natural climate cycles alone are insufficient to explain such changes, he said.”
What like we entered the Little ice Age by magic and came out of the Little ice age as fossil fuels grew and hence SO2 induced cooling occurred? And then we got warming as SO2 was reduced by the clean air acts.
Oh – grabbing my popcorn!
This is the precise reason why when Duke called last night to ask me to donate to my PhD-mater, I told them to go pound sand. RGB was one of my professors, and he was one of the most fascinating sources of knowledge there. I highly respect him.
I’s long been known that the Nichols School is where you wind up when you can’t get into any other prestigious reeducation camp.
Dr. Sandman, the day Harvard hired Oreskies was the day I stopped giving until she is gone. Have made that quite plain. Wish I had been able to take a Duke RGB course. My sub major thing was and remains math modelling. Biology, ecology, probability, economics… About which he knows a lot.
“you can’t get into any other prestigious re-education camp”. It came out of nowhere. And now I’m cleaning beverage off of everything in range…lol!
Humans came from the earth, they manipulate materials found on the earth ie coal, oil, natural gas. Therefore any warming caused by humans is natural.
Ah, but you see, humans are flawed thus most of what they do is evil. And using ‘Original Sin’ as a guilt inducing mechanism doesn’t work so well any more.
OK. They admit that natural unforced warming effects occur. Therefore, there must also be natural unforced cooling effects. The temperature of the globe will not be uniform. The question is whether the globe can even out these unforced effects faster than they can occur. Judith Curry’s work on stadium waves indicates that is not the case. I think their whole premise is wrong.
Thousands of years of history show these nincompoops are blowing hot greenhouse gasses.
“Unless pushed by outside forces, temperature should remain stable.”
Well duh! Of course the only constant in the environment is change. The did change long before man. So yes there are forcing functions.
The mere fact that change has occurred slow enough that life thrives on the earth is evidence that small changes in the ghg concentration are not going to cause the climate to become unstable.
In the face of this non-stop propaganda, there is hope.
http://dailycaller.com/2016/02/01/poll-91-of-americans-arent-worried-about-global-warming/
“Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment.” Well what would you expect them to say? It is their whole reason for being. If they were to say anything else, they would no longer exist.
So let me get this straight. “By examining how Earth cools itself back down after a period of natural warming”, they are able to prove that there is no natural warming.
Got it.
w.
Willis, if you take an 8=oz ball-peen hammer and hit yourself in the head in just the right spot with precisely the right amount of force, it all makes sense. (Don’t ask how I know this to be true.)
“if you take an 8=oz ball-peen hammer and hit yourself in the head in just the right spot with precisely the right amount of force, ”
Oh! Now I get it! THAT is what they mean when they say “climate forcing”!!
They definitely didn’t take any courses on logic or philosophy.
Wait…
You went too fast, could you type that again – but not so fast – so I can read it slower to help me avoid becoming confused?
I’m getting “a study on natural warming confirms there is no natural warming”.
Does that leave only natural cooling? Or will that too go away once they complete their next study?
+1
tss Willis. this is unfair.
Would you make a sarcasm on a sentence like
“By examining how human body cools itself back down after a period of fever”, they are able to prove that there is no fever
?
Of course this make sense only if you can distinguish beforehand between fever and, say, sun stroke, and assess that human body cools itself differently in each case (which is true regarding fever Vs sun stroke) so that you can, indeed, distinguish between the two.
I doubt that our student did this assessment …
“Using global climate models and NASA satellite observations of Earth’s energy budget from the last 15 years…”
Hardly need to read any further. Model…..Fifteen years is not even enough to establish a trend according to some climate scientits.
“scientits”
Freudian?
From the press release:
So how did the Medieval Warm Period get us out of the cold? Maybe the Norse god Thor drove it away so the Vikings could settle in Greenland. Then of course they became Christians, so he gave up in disgust and the Little Ice Age began.
“External drivers,” you know.
/Mr Lynn
They actually love Thor who is an Ice Age god. When it got warmer, the Vikings tossed out Thor and got a new god who immediately made it very cold again. Now that it is warming up, fewer Norse people worship the new god and more are signing up with Thor again.
The gods are all confused about these climate changes! 🙂
The fleas on the EPA tail want to wag the dog.
Time to play the trump card of the 10th Amendment:
Control of state economies is NOT delegated in the Constitution to the EPA nor the United States.
Ahh, but at the Roberts court they will say: “Your state sells products to your neighboring states so we can take over your economy under the guise of regulating interstate commerce!”
See all tidy and constitutional now. (Though I wonder how many states will resist – would this trigger a new civil war?) Perilous times when the federal government completely stops caring about federalism.
Carbon dioxide is not the cause. All the IPCC, Trenberth and NASA energy budget diagrams (and the computer models) clearly imply that back radiation can be added to solar radiation and the total (after deducting non-radiative losses) used in Stefan Boltzmann calculations to obtain the surface temperature.
We can see that this conjecture is false just by considering a location like Singapore which is close to the Equator and has a tropical rain forest climate with more than twice the average concentration of the greenhouse gas water vapor.
On a clear day around noon in April or September the solar radiation reaching the surface could be easily two-thirds of the Solar constant – let’s say at least 800W/m^2. We’ll deduct about twice the average loss by non-radiative processes, reducing the net to about 600W/m^2 for which the black body temperature is 52°C. This could easily on its own explain the maximum temperature (which is virtually always less than 34°C) because the average solar radiation during daylight hours is a little less. But, if we add the backradiation (which could easily be another 600W/m^2 because of the high humidity) we get temperatures above 100°C. Hence it’s totally wrong to do so, and physicists have explained why such back radiation is mostly just pseudo scattered.
Ahh sweet, totally understand the earths energy budget now from 15 years of data in a single study. The debate is finally over!!!
AND they proved that the Earth’s energy budget balanced out in the past 15 years too! How cool is that?
“Our analysis confirmed that the Planck Response plays a dominant role in restoring global temperature stability, but ……. to our surprise ….. we found that it tends to be ….. overwhelmed …… (No poop, really?) locally by heat-trapping …. positive ….. (IPCC AR5 -20 W/m^2RF for clouds, 2 RF for CO2) energy feedbacks related to changes in clouds, water vapor, and snow and ice,” Brown said. “This initially suggested that the climate system might be able to create large, sustained changes in temperature …. all by itself (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!).”
Well, where have they been? Plus this seems to contradict the paper’s very title?
“global temperature does not rise or fall chaotically in the long run”? They have certainly risen and fallen chaotically in the last century, if words have any meaning, and if we can trust the temperature record at all. Building models is an essential part of science: look at something interesting, dream up an idea about how it might work, turn it into a model, then CONFRONT THE MODEL WITH REALITY. It’s the last step that makes it science. We don’t have to understand the models to look at the temperature record and say “large fluctuations at all scales”. Models can NEVER trump observations.
What utter poppycock
the much touted correlation between cumulative fossil fuel emissions and surface temperature is spurious.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2725743
Jamal Munshi, thank you for the link to your paper. It is already known that statistically independent autoregressive processes tend to be correlated with each other over finite time spans.
The title is interesting: Unforced Surface Air Temperature Variability and Its Contrasting Relationship with the Anomalous TOA Energy Flux at Local and Global Spatial Scales*
Contrasting flows from the surface and flows from the TOA is a step forward, in my opinion. Too bad it is behind a paywall. They use data from a 15 year span during which there has been little change in anything. That makes it impossible to account for any observed changes since 1880.
If any scientist gets a taxpayer funded grant to do a study, doesn’t the results of that study belong to the people that paid for it…aka…the taxpayers ?? How can it be pay walled ?
You’d think huh? I say it should be a rule that such papers are open access. But some evil, vile scientific journals now require SCIENTISTS to pay them to publish their papers. I believe most of us call it extortion or bribery.
Hmmm…I thought there were laws against that stuff ?? Only in Obama’s America are laws not actually laws, just kinda guidelines !! Sad…
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-QBPRkkgPI2w/VU47C6qRJ4I/AAAAAAAAEko/Tk6jrCofvU4/s1600/df5c504d10c538e4c5b88e308206a324ed6c0fcff9e54a3e131fc3c17aff7464.jpg
Enough said! LOL
OOH!! One of my favorite movies !
They could always publish in the Federal Register, or their personal web pages, or their ResearchGate pages, instead of Nature. But if the authors choose Nature, then Nature has the copyright.
“evidence” ? Were they really surprised to find positive feedback associated with cloud cover in models? They’ve not been keeping up, clearly…
There is another possibility for the hiatus and that is that TCS > ECS except perhaps over the very longest (and irrelevant to us) time-scales.
So hypothetically, the earth rapidly increase its CO2 levels and that causes a spike in temperature and earth’s accumulation of energy…and eventually the atmosphere and ocean adjusts to the new processes as entropy maximisation wins out, leaving us with a little surface warming.