From ARS Technica
We aren’t likely to see it happen, but it’s still sobering.
Scott K. Johnson – 2/25/2019, 6:13 PM
Stratocumulus clouds, like those in the lower two-thirds of this image, are common over the oceans.
The word “hysteresis” doesn’t immediately seem threatening; it hints at a portmanteau of “history” and “thesis”—a dense read, perhaps, but those never killed anyone. But that’s not what the word means. Hysteresis is a profound behavior some systems can display, crossing a sort of point-of-no-return. Dial things up just one notch, and you can push the system through a radical change. To get back to normal, you might have to dial it down five or six notches.
Earth’s climate system can provide examples. Take the conveyor-belt-like circulation of water in the Atlantic Ocean. Looking back at the past, you can see times that the circulation seems to have flipped into an alternate pattern regarding climatic consequences around the North Atlantic. Switching from one pattern to the other takes a significant nudge, but reversing it is hard—like driving up to the top of a ridge and rolling down into the next valley.
A new study led by Caltech’s Tapio Schneider may have identified a disturbing hysteresis in Earth’s climate—a shift in cloud patterns in response to warming that could quickly heat the planet much further. If we were to continue emitting more and more greenhouse gas, we’d eventually end up running this experiment for real. (Let’s not, please.)
Cloud services
The center of this drama is a particular type of cloud. Stratocumulus clouds typically blanket about a fifth of the low-latitude ocean. Most clouds are formed because air warmed by the Earth’s surface (or forced over mountains) cools as it rises, condensing water vapor to cloud droplets.
Stratocumulus clouds are a little different. The convection that lifts their moisture isn’t driven by warming at the bottom but by cooling at the top.
The water in this cloud deck absorbs much of the infrared radiation emitted upward from the warm surface. The cloud deck re-emits some radiation back downward and some into outer space. The air above these clouds is drier and absorbs much less of the outgoing energy passing through it. That means you can think of these clouds like the cooling fins of a radiator. They shed more heat upward than they receive from the atmosphere above them, allowing them to cool off from the top down. The cold air at the top of the clouds sinks, setting up a convection loop that brings water vapor up from the sea surface to the cloud deck.
So, what happens to this unique process in a warmer world?
Nothing but blue skies
To tackle this, Schneider and his colleagues flipped things around. They utilized a model that can simulate these clouds in a small patch of atmosphere—given a simplified version of the world around them. Specifically, they simulated a patch of the subtropical ocean with stratocumulus clouds above and a neighboring patch of tropical ocean responding to global warming. They did this for varying concentrations of greenhouse gas equivalent to 400 parts per million of CO2 (similar to today) on up to 1,600 parts per million.
Up to about 1,000 parts per million, there were no major surprises. Things got around 4°C warmer and numbers changed for things like water vapor and cloud altitude. But the cloud deck generally looked familiar.
At about 1,200 parts per million, however, the simulated clouds suddenly dissipated. And without that shade reflecting sunlight, the world warmed another 8°C.
Processes responsible for the cloud deck breaking up around 1,200 ppm CO2 in the model. Temperatures shown in units of kelvins.
Schneider et al./Nature Geoscience
How is CO2 flipping the switch on these clouds? The researchers found a pair of simple processes working together in their simulation. First, warmer air carries more water vapor up from the sea surface, and when that water vapor condenses, it releases a lot of latent heat. That extra latent heat gives the air a little buoyancy boost, increasing the turbulent movement that can mix dry air from above into the cloud layer. This dries out the cloud deck and makes cloud formation less likely.
Yet another predictably fallible climate model. When will they learn?
What is the ECS of the model they used? Additionally, I’m unaware of any scenario that result in CO2 concentrations at or above 1,000 ppm.
The CO2 levels used to be above 5000ppm without this “change over” occurring.
That, too, MarkW.
That’s why we are all dead and everything is just a simulation, or will be within 12 years.
But will we be frozen like fish fillets or burnt to cinders?
Oolitic limestone in the rock record is testament to spontaneous precipitation of calcite oolites when the CO2 level in the atmosphere is high enough. This occurs in shallow continental shelves. It only occurs in 3 places in the world today, Barhia Lagoon, Baja, in Qatar, and one more site I cannot recall. So there is an atmospheric stopping point of CO2 when oolites begin to form and pull CO2 out of sea water, and hence the atmosphere. What that stopping point level is, I have not seen published. Infinite CO2 level in the atmosphere is not possible by that geologic model.
Bahia Lagoon, Baja.
So at 1200 ppm clouds dissipate, the top ocean warms, and calcite oolites precipitate. This takes CO2 out of the atmosphere and no feedback further occurs. Okay. Sort of like runaway hysteresis but then a square wave filter for the gain is applied.
Oolitic limestone is currently forming on the Bahamas Banks. Andros Island is one of the best modern analogs.
Oolites form on many tropical islands and atolls, wherever water is warmed in the shallows. Every beach I have visited in the Bahamas (dozens) has spherical oolite sand. Raising atmospheric CO2 reduces the supersaturation of CaCO3, making formation of oolites less likely, not more.
Dave, I understand the used the IPCC highest ECS. MORE CAGW insanity.
Do you mean 4 C per doubling?
They didnt use a GCM.
they used an LES.
what you said is not even close to being true
Light emitting spirit? More accurate than a GCM but still not close.
Which is why I said I heard.
Ok helpful genius, what did they use to determine the rate of warming that is not happening global or in the tropics?
Interesting – Use the output to seed the GCM…
https://climate-dynamics.org/pycles-a-new-open-source-atmospheric-les-code/
Is there enough fossil carbon accessible to raise the CO2 level to 1000 ppm?
pretty close to it
Maybe. However 1000 ppm was not a problem even in their absurd study. I believe 1200 ppm was the poi t where their projected problems occurred.
I’m unaware of any empirical evidence in support of the hypothetical effect of CO2 on temperature having ever occurred, so to me the ECS is just BS anyway, no matter where they choose to “set it” in their ASSUMPTIONS.
Never. Since they have no means to collect real experimental data to investigate the amount of warming from CO2 and the concomitant downstream climate effects, they have to fabricate the data in some fashion, and using computers to do the dirty work gives that data fabrication a false veneer of credibility.
” The cloud deck re-emits some radiation back downward and some into outer space. ”
The IR radiation downward is irrelevant as the surface, land or water will always be warmer than the IR from adiabatically cooled clouds. The IR would be reflected back upward because the similar energy levels of the warmer surface are already full. A cool object cannot warm a warmer object.
Even if we were warming, there would still be this immutable Law of Thermodynamics.
Willis will argue that doesn’t apply to thermal IR
I will too and it doesn’t.
The temperature difference between matter emitting a photon and matter receiving that photon doesn’t affect whether the receiving matter absorbs or reflects it unless the reflectivity is temperature dependent.
The law of thermodynamics being cited only applies to the relative temperatures of matter in physical contact with other matter. The transfer of energy by photons is fundamentally different from the transfer of energy by matter in contact with other matter.
Photons are a kindergarten myth. Learn something about EMR and Poynting vector.
Matter at low potential (as measured by temperature) cannot transfer energy to higher potential through the electric field and magnetic field that it exists in.
RW, watching the debate about whether cooler CO2 does, or does not, warm a hotter earth via IR reminds me of watching Christians debate the trinity. In that discussion there’s this certain nebulous triggering point that if you inadvertently activate trying to get to the truth behind the matter, you are anathematized by the orthodoxy. Not that long ago people were burned at the stake for crossing that line.
In this discussion that triggering point seems to be whether a cooler substance can warm a hotter substace via IR. I have yet to read a convincing explanation of exactly how that happens.
Tim,
It doesn’t defy SB, but is exactly what SB describes as a gray body whose emissivity, e, is the ratio between the average emissions of the planet and the average emissions of the surface and is equal to about 0.62. The net absorption of surface emissions is then 2*(1-e) = 76%. Half of this is returned to the surface as photons and the remaining half is emitted into space, also as photons.
Currently, the surface emits about 1.62 W/m^2 per W/m^2 of solar forcing. In the steady state, the first W/m^2 of the surface emissions is replenished by the solar forcing. The extra 620 mw of surface emissions per W/m^2 of forcing is being replenished by energy emitted by the surface absorbed by the atmosphere and returned to the surface at a later time. The delay is crucial to understanding how this all works. It’s not 620 mw of ‘feedback’ power, but is 620 mw of feed forward power which is among the many errors by the consensus that precludes applying Bode’s feedback analysis.
Additionally, the atmosphere is emitting another 620 mw per W/m^2 of forcing into space. The surface emits about 390 W/m^2 at its average temperature of about 288K. 76% of this is absorbed by the atmosphere (296 W/m^2) and the remaining 24% (94 W/m^2) directly reaches space. To be in equilibrium, the planet must emit 240 W/m^2 which is 146 W/m^2 more than the 94 W/m^2 coming directly from the surface. The 620 mw per W/m^2 emitted by the atmosphere into space is .62*240 = 149 W/m^2. and is a little more than the 146 W/m^2 required owing to rounding.
This all leads to a trivial falsification of the entire range of ECS presumed by the IPCC. If the atmosphere absorbed 100% of what the surface emits, half of this ultimately leaves the planet while the remaining half is returned to the surface, limiting the emissions sensitivity to 2 W/m^2 of surface emissions per W/m^2 of forcing. Starting from 288K, this corresponds to a theoretical maximum temperature sensitivity of about 0.37 C per W/m^2 which is below the IPCC’s presumed lower limit of 0.4C per W/m^2.
Another of the many erroneous assumptions made by the consensus is that nearly all of what the atmosphere absorbs from the surface is returned to the surface. This incorrect assumption defies both the physics, the data and basic geometry.
And yes, a cold body can not heat a warm body by contact and in fact, the atmosphere is primarily warmed by the surface, but the atmosphere does not warm the surface by contact and instead warms it in the same way that the Sun does, which is by photons. These photons originate from cloud emissions and GHG’s returning to the ground state, rather than from the Sun. It couldn’t be any simpler.
Rick,
What experiment do you propose falsifies the existence of photons?
Do you understand that the Poynting Vector is a macroscopic property of an EM wave?
Do you also understand that a photon is a particle of EM energy?
You’re coming from a point of view restricted to planar EMR. There’s a demonstrable equivalence between planar EMR and photons and its called the particle-wave duality. This Quantum Mechanical property is somewhat counter-intuitive, so it’s easy to see how anyone lacking a strong background in Quantum Mechanics can be confused and this includes most climate scientists.
You might have a better case if you claimed that planar EMR emitted by a radio antenna, while equivalent to a collection of photons is not a collection of photons, but this doesn’t falsify the existence of photons and the Sun, GHG’s and clouds do not emit planar EMR, but emit photons, which paradoxically can also be quantified as a wave. You are going down a very wrong path if you think denying the existence of photons is the answer.
Learn about the maximum speed EMR can move and those vectors can build up and down and how fast that can be detected elsewhere.
The 2nd law doesnt give a schite what will thinks.
Even if the Earth did absorb the IR it would just re-radiate it. Almost all of the energy balance discussions you find on the net assumes that the Earth just absorbs all that “back radiation” which causes it to heat up but it never re-radiates any of that heat. That’s how the “greenhouse” effect apparently is supposed to work. It’s a violation of the Stefan-Boltzmann equation. As temperature goes up the amount of radiation is supposed to go up as well!
Not correct. The assumptions is that the residence time of escaping every is increased by redirecting it back towards the surface. Bit incoming radiation from the sun is constant, thus more net energy.
Think of it like traffic on a freeway. A certain number of cars get on and off.
Decrease the cars exiting ( increased residence time ) and there are now more cars on the freeway.
As a non-scientist reading this sub-thread, I am mightily confused with the statement, often heard, that the ‘science is settled’.
They lost me at “utilized a model”.
Looks like I could have saved myself the trouble of reading all the way to them mentioning the above if I had first seen it was from ARS.
Ars is an AGW echo chamber, bunch of ultra-liberal techies.
If you try and argue with them, providing links to real data, they will shout you down, swear at you until you say it is not worth the trouble.
No honest debates, no chance for dialog, just the party line.
Yes, I found out many a moon ago not to even bother with any sites run or populated with majority warmistas. Even ten years ago, trying to comment on sites like Sci Am was a waste of time. The comments just vanish.
I have recently been spending a lot of time on twitter, and that place…dang!
It is like a prison yard up in that biatch.
The difference is, there are plenty there from our side, and lots of them are tireless, just like warmista trolls.
Another even bigger difference about Twitter…you can just block someone. I have finally learned not to even wait…autoblock anyone that starts out rude. Especially if they do not use real name and/or have an actual photo.
I use my real name there.
I would here now too, I no longer work for an employer who I have to worry about.
For some things you can only do a model
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzInIjD6nKw
Of course some people will see the word model and doubt the answer?
So, when you watched this video above and saw that the guy used a model
Did you
A) think ” They lost me at “utilized a model”.”
B) accept the model
C) demand that we run an actual experiment with new buildings
They used a model
must be a conspiracy
Stephen Mosher – If you can accept one model then all models are valid.
Is that your argument?
The model you referenced is modeling the Laws the physics. There are no Laws under the Greenhouse Gas Theory, why is that? That’s why it can’t be modeled, it hasn’t been measured yet.
Perhaps you haven’t seen my comparison of the Theory of Gravity and the Theory of CAGW.
With the Theory of Gravity, we are still defining how it works, but mankind has been able to measure how it behaves with such precision that the planet Neptune was known to exist before it was ever seen. Man has derived a set of Laws and formulae under the Theory of Gravity which have been applied to land a spacecraft on an asteroid.
With the Theory of CAGW, detailed explanations are provided to explain how it works, but mankind has not been able to measure anything of significance. Since nothing has been measured, there are no Laws, Axioms, Postulates, nor formulae. There is no science to apply, we cannot even measure how CO2 manifests itself as a Greenhouse Gas on Mars where it makes up 95% of the atmosphere.
Nor, when you measure at the altitude where the atmospheric pressure is the same as Earth’s, is there any difference between the temperature of Venus (95.5% CO2 atmosphere) and Earth (0.041% CO2 atmosphere) that can’t be explained by a single difference – the distance from the Sun.
Touché
i don’t think the gravity is an analog to the CAGW complexity in this debate – but the point made still seems valid
They lose us at “used a [CLIMATE] model,” because there IS no “model” that can accurately resemble something which is so poorly understood. That “revelation” simply lets anyone who is conscious know that this “study” is nothing more that a reflection of the unsupported ASSUMPTIONS made by the “modelers.”
Steven,
A broken model must not override first principles physics, yet climate models do this as a matter of course. How else can they support 4.4 W/m^2 of surface emissions (0.8C) per W/m^2 for the next W/m^2 of forcing. while all the other W/m^2 from the Sun only contribute 1.62 W/m^2 to the surface emissions?
If you think this is wrong, they explain how the planet can tell the next Joule from all the others so it can be amplified up to 4.4 W/m^2 of surface emissions, while all the others are amplified up to only 1.62 W/m^2 of surface emissions?
If you cite ‘feedback’, then you don’t understand the concept. The only effect of ‘feedback’ is the steady state 0.62 W/m^2 more surface emissions per W/m^2 of forcing, so again, how can the planet tell the next Joule from all the others, so it can be amplified by 3.4 W/m^2 of ‘feedback’ while all the others are amplified by only 0.62 W/m^2 of feedback?
Perhaps you don’t understand one or more of these basic facts:
1) 1 Watt is 1 Joule per second
2) Joules are a measure of work
3) all Joules can do the same amount of work
4) it takes work to warm the surface
They lost me when they told me I wouldn’t know what ‘hysteresis’ means. And I don’t have a science qualification to my name.
I think they meant “hysterical” instead of “hysteresis”.
Hysteriathesis?
Selective use of alarmist supportive model components with cherry picked world inputs.
Coupled with maximum temperature impacts from CO₂ increases.
Surprise!
The model results indicate a reachable tipping point!
But only in tailored simplified models using excessive CO₂ temperature responses.
Yawn! Just more Santer “Gold standard” “Five Sigma” prestidigitation results.
i.e. a flim flam.
yup
saw this on science alert last night aus time and was so annoyed i turned the pc off.
theory and modelling said it all
wait for the media to fall over themselves to promote this as gospel truth to the faithfully gullible sheepies
Exactly, same here.
The solution to the climate problem may be as simple as creating a simplified model which removes CO2 to any desired level which takes advantage of a favorable hysteresis which counteracts their model. Thus, run the two models side by side with the favorable one feeding the unfavorable one and the CO2 problem simple vanishes. Then we can all go back to our day jobs, holidays, vacations and living.
I got lost when I read “The cold air at the top of the clouds sinks, setting up a convection loop that brings water vapor up from the sea surface to the cloud deck.”
I thought we were talking about strato cumulus – ie very high. How does moisture from the sea SURFACE enter that picture?
In addition, the part about the CO2 trigger doesn’t explain at all just how CO2 is involved.
Strato-cumulus is low based. cirro cumulus is high.
The magic molecule finds a way.
It is the velociraptor of the atmosphere.
Methane is the T-rex.
Strato just means flattened or layer forming, in cloud lingo.
“… In addition, the part about the CO2 trigger doesn’t explain at all just how CO2 is involved”.
It’s slick how the article glides seamlessly from CO2 concentrations to degrees C.
CO2, AS USUAL, is simply ASSUMED to “drive” temperature, despite NO empirical evidence in support of that assumption, and plenty that refutes the notion.
Oh, fer crise sakes. If this were a possibility it would have happened during the many times in the earth’s past when CO2, and temps, were much higher than today’s.
More alarmist BS.
This is yet another proof that warmistas are allergic to Earth history.
Hence runaway greenhouse effects, ocean acidification, higher CO2 killing/dissolving coral and shellfish, etc.
They never take into account the past because they ignore it like it never happened.
They are History Deniers.
No. Actually they state that this can explain previous past climates when the temperatures
were significantly higher than current levels. This utility of paper is that it can help explain
past climates rather than what might happen in the future since the CO2 levels at which this might happen are significantly higher than what is predicted under any realist scenario.
Yes, it has never been possible to get realistic Eocene climates by current climate models. So this is just a fudge mechnism, to avoid having to take into account of the very different geography and the consequent completely different ocean circulation in the past. Because climate models don’t do oceans realistically, like they don’t do convection-
@Percy;
I don’t see how that works. We have past episodes when CO2 has been higher than today and temperatures have been both higher and lower than today. This mechanism doesn’t cover both cases.
Of course not. It’s just more Eco-Fascist speculation to support the “Cause.”
Menicholas is right. The pseudo-scientists pushing this crap are History Deniers.
Didn’t Mann say that “you can’t trust proxies older than…” you know, the ones HE likes. You see, there’s just WAY too much “inconvenient” information in the Earth’s climate history once you dig too far back.
The reason the propaganda pushers want to deride the distant past is, as Jim Carrey said in “Liar Liar,” “Because it’s DEVASTATING to my case!”
Seems like this process is happening over the warmest sections of the ocean right now. They are 3-4°C warmer than many other areas of the ocean, which would be the conditions of the study with increased CO2. Any evidence for reduced clouds above them?
Very little, if any, evidence of reduced clouds above at the hottest part of the tropics. I believe Will has shown that the tropics can change little. As the water T reaches a certain level the evaporation thundercloud feedback amplifies very quickly.
My understanding is that the “study” uses the highest IPCC feedback scenario to reach this level.
I cannot resist another round of this…
To the tune of Joni Mitchell’s. Both Sides Now
Both Sides Now
Woes and blows to warmist scares
Excise schemes now in cross hairs
And weather claxons now despair
I’ve looked at clouds that way
We all know that they block the sun
And rain and snowjobs on everyone
So many frauds have been done
But clouds got in their way
We’ve looked at clouds from both sides now
From cool and warm, and still somehow it’s
Warmist delusions I recall
They really don’t know clouds at all
Loons and goons with feckless deals
Are busy advancing their ideal
And so their fairytales reveal
We’ve heard them yack away
But now it’s not supposed to snow
So we’re laughing as they eat crow
And polar bears, their numbers grow
Their fairytales now all show.
We’ve looked for signs of high tides now
From near and far, and still no rise
Somehow its still
Warmist delusions we recall
They really don’t know squat at all
Tears and fears and feeling proud
To say “It’s bullshit!” right out loud
Dreams and schemes of circus clowns
The crooks’ in disarray
This now transcends just acting strange
We shake our heads, they’re so deranged
They’re data’s lost, still
unexplained
They make up more, it will ever change
We’ve heard their crap, from their government grants
From Ivory towers and brainwashed children all, its
still somehow Mann’s delusions I recall
He really doesn’t know clouds at all.
I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now
From cool and warm, and taxes they take
Those warmists really are dirt balls
They really don’t know clouds at all.
Dave, I understand the used the IPCC highest ECS. MORE CAGW insanity.
Sorry for the double post below. If a mod sees please remove one. WP fooled me. I really don’t know word press at all.
Brilliant!
I found out most of the words came from a poster named Gator. I made some modest changes to my version.
Evidence of reduced clouds.
Not that I know anywhere in the tropics. I remember Willis did a post on how the tropical water cannot go above a certain T due to the amount of evaporation and thunder heads growing exponentially at about 90 degree water.
Also consider that the tropics are not warming at that rate at all. The major warming, IF it occurs at the extreme high ECS used in this study
( very unlikely) will be mostly in the higher latitudes- towards the poles.
And it will be mostly at night.
I cannot resist – sung to the tune of Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” lyrics ?? Some mine
Both Sides Now
Woes and blows to warmist scares
Excise schemes now in cross hairs
And weather claxons now despair
I’ve looked at clouds that way
We all know that they block the sun
And rain and snow on everyone
So many frauds have been done
But clouds got in their way
We’ve looked at clouds from both sides now
From cool and warm, and still somehow it’s
Warmist delusions I recall
They really don’t know clouds at all
Loons and goons with feckless deals
Are busy advancing their ideal
And so their fairytales reveal
We’ve heard them yack away
But now it’s not supposed to snow
So we’re laughing as they eat crow
And polar bears, their numbers grow
Their scams now all show
We’ve looked for signs of high tides now
From near and far, and still no rise
Somehow its still
Warmist delusions we recall
They really don’t know squat at all
Tears and fears and feeling proud
To say “It’s bullshit!” right out loud
Dreams and schemes of circus clowns
The crooks’ in disarray
This now transcends just acting strange
We shake our heads, they’re so deranged
They’re data’s lost, still
unexplained
They make up more, it will ever change
We’ve heard their crap, from their government grants
From Ivory towers and brainwashed children all, its
still somehow Mann’s delusions I recall
He really doesn’t know clouds at all.
I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now
From cool and warm, and taxes they take
Those warmists really are dirt balls
They really don’t know clouds at all.
“They utilized a model that can simulate these clouds in a small patch of atmosphere—given a simplified version of the world around them. ”
This is playing computer games, not a scientific activity. It does not porvide us with information about how the planet really functions.
It is mathematical onanism, and the most likely result is that the authors are going to grow hair on their palms.
Right before they go blind?
“Thus will you know them…”
Sounds like the are relying on the mythical stratospheric hot spot.
Did their model include the increased evaporation from the oceans were clouds to suddenly disappear?
So if their computer games reflected reality, why wasn’t there any sort of runaway warming during periods when CO2 was several thousand PPM?
DING! DING! DING!
WE HAVE A WINNER!
Isn’t it impressive how Climate Crisis Central can blanket the world with a scary message, with enough variety in titles to disguise the robotic repetition? Yet just reading the headlines already suggests to anyone with critical intelligence what is false about this alarm. Let me list some of the obvious flaws before digging into this issue.
1. It’s a projection from a climate model, not a finding from observations.
2. It is based on highly uncertain supposed mechanisms.
3. It presupposes CO2 concentrations 3 times the present level.
4. The possible effect will occur after almost all readers will be dead of natural causes.
5. It claims a runaway warming “tipping point” which the earth has suppressed until now.
6. It contradicts the logic of a warmer world increasing the hydrology cycle with more clouds and precipitation.
7. It stokes fear of “hothouse earth” when presently we are slowly emerging from “severe icehouse earth.”
https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2019/02/26/clouding-the-climate-issue/
You missed the big one – It ASSUMES that CO2 levels drive temperature. NO empirical evidence supports THAT – the supposed “effect” is purely hypothetical.
And in a computer simulation fantasy, Superma can fly around the Earth and turn time backwards.
After 600+ million years of no runaway hot house or ice house (snowball earth) with CO2 levels much higher than anything conceivable under fossil fuel burning, and the fact the Earth is still in the Pleistocene, I see little reason to take a positive feedback runaway amplification scenario as anything but a model fantasy.
The Earth’s climate is robustly stable to strong forcings. That is the only logical conclusion we can draw based on the evidence, not the computer fantasy.
And the reason for that robust stability is not to be found in the clouds, where these researchers’ heads obviously are (or up their arse). It is because we live on a water planet with vast deep oceans.
“First, warmer air carries more water vapor up from the sea surface, and when that water vapor condenses, it releases a lot of latent heat. That extra latent heat gives the air a little buoyancy boost, increasing the turbulent movement that can mix dry air from above into the cloud layer. This dries out the cloud deck and makes cloud formation less likely.”
Wait a minute! What happened to the “more water vapor from the sea surface”? Does it all of a sudden just disappear? If it keeps coming up from the ocean then how does the cloud deck dry out? The water vapor coming up from the ocean will just re-hydrate it!
Something fishy here. Either this is a poor explanation of the actual model methodology or the model has a major hole in it! In either case how did this manage to pass any kind of peer review or editing?
The piss reviewers’ ideological masters needed another alarming headline.
“… That extra latent heat gives the air a little buoyancy boost, increasing the turbulent movement that can mix dry air from above into the cloud layer. This dries out the cloud deck and makes cloud formation less likely. …”
—
Exactly. The paper is paywalled, sure as eff not paying for it.
And when that cloud type is gone the humidity will rise again and other cloud types will form.
And the model they used, did it have day and night? Did it have diurnal change in T and P and humidity plus wind direction changes plus effects of land masses?
I bet it didn’t as they’ve simplified the model to remove all the other variables to CO2 changing.
i.e. GIGO
The humidity will not go away in the natural world.
I believe the use of the word “hysteresis” is incorrect in this article. Wikipedia and other web sites define hysteresis most simply as: “Hysteresis is the dependence of the state of a system on its history.” I believe a more appropriate technical term–consistent with the concept of a “tipping point” as used in the article’s title and “switching” as used in the article’s text–is “metastability”.
Beyond that, when a mathematical model of a dynamic system suddenly diverges in a metastable manner, one should immediately suspect the accuracy of the model’s mathematics and programmed feedback loops, and not the background physics.
I think they meant hysterical. But in actuality, this joke is not funny.
“Strike-out study finds a climate tipping point in clouds”
There, title fixed. You’re welcome.
Also the lag observed in some well known cause and effect phenomena – such as (if you look further down in the search results), the lag between an increase in a magnetic field and the magnetization of a chunk of iron. That is what they are using, apparently. The upper atmosphere turbulence happens at a certain temperature, but subsides only at a much lower temperature.
However, and it is a big however, if the turbulence is real (possibly), they stopped their simulation as soon as they had the results they wanted (i.e., the basis for their next grant). “Drying out” the stratocumulus cloud layer (which is up about to 2,000 meters) will increase outgoing radiation (they are quite correct that less water vapor concentration allows higher outgoing IR). So, I would be willing to bet that, if they were to continue cranking up their model, they would indeed hit a tipping point. Right into the next ice age.
All hypothetical, of course. As noted by many, empirical evidence says that this does not happen.
Gordon,
If you read the article you will see that hysteresis is correct. They predict that the climate has
two states and the switch up to the higher temperature low cloud state occurs at >1200 ppm of
CO2 while the switch down doesn’t occur until the CO2 level drops to below 300 ppm. Both states
appear to be stable and the climate is bi-stable.
And again clearly the climate has at least several stable points — ice ages and interglacial being two.
This paper suggests that there are more and again that is not surprising given that the climate is a
nonlinear driven dynamical system. If you don’t want a bistable system then you need to argue that the
climate is linear.
Percy, as I tried to point out, the physical occurrence of hysteresis in any cycling system, by itself, does not CAUSE the occurrence of metastable states or “switching” events or “tipping points”, which were the main assertions of the above article’s assertions of happens to clouds as a function of varying atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
Furthermore, hysteresis describes the state-vector path variation on the beginning half of a closed cycle (“going up”) compared to the state-vector path variation on the ending half of a closed cycle (“going down”). Hysteresis does not, per se, address/analyze the degree of stability of a dynamic system as it changes over a cycle.
Gordon,
You can’t have a hysteresis cycle without switching events or “tipping points”. The cycle
can only exist if for a range of the control parameter there are two different stable states
and the only way you can get from one stable state to the other is to drive the system past the
bistability region at which point it will switch to the other state. And while hysteresis does not address the stability of the two states by definition both states need to be stable for a hysteresis cycle to exist. Typically in such a system there are three possible states — two stable and one unstable one which connects the two. The unstable state is never observed but must exist by continuity.
There ARE NO “unstable” states caused by CO2 levels. The paleoclimate record shows temperature is unaffected by the CO2 level, and that no “unstable” climate state could be induced by CO2 levels up to 7,000 ppm, much less 1200 ppm.
Sorry, Percy, but you appear to have a total misunderstanding of the physical term “hysteresis”, and I can only gently suggest you read up on it and consult some x-y plots that show the phenomenon for different scenarios.
One easy-to-see-and-understand example is the hysteresis curve for a piece of rubber that is stretched in pure tension and then relaxed. If one uses a instrumented mechanical tension testing machine, one can plot total tension load versus total displacement (stretch) of the material CONTINUOUSLY over, say, an elongation of 300%. In doing this, if one pauses just a few minutes at any time under any significant load, almost any rubber chosen for this experiment will have a load vs. displacement curve when the tension is being increased that is distinctly different from the load vs. displacement curve when the tension is being relaxed back to zero. There is only one “stable” point for the rubber coupon, and that is when it is not under any applied load. There are NO “tipping points” or “switching events” (as used in the context of the above article re: clouds and CO2) in the total, continuous hysteresis curve from first application of load to final removal of load.
Reaching a point of maximum displacement and staying there with the tension tester holding fixed elongation is NOT a stable point because the tension is continuously (but asymptotically) decreasing due to the long-term relaxation of the molecular chains comprising the rubber material. And, actually, any rubber that does not suffer a permanent “set” after being stretched to this degree will take seconds to hours (or even days) to have its length return to the starting dimension, even with no applied tension (a characteristic known as the rubber’s “recovery time”, which itself if a function of applied elongation).
You can simulation the above example, qualitatively, with a simple rubber band.
Good luck to you.
No, they failed right from the start by not even understanding and misrepresenting hysteresis. This is the level of stupid we are dealing with. Arseheadica is the epitome of sophistry.
If there WERE such a thing as run-away warming, or run-away cooling, then the Earth would currently be trapped in hell-like-Venus or Snowball-Earth. It isn’t, so there is no such thing as a run-away anything in our climate system. 3+ billion years of real-live testing demonstrate this. The climate system is stable.
It has had more than 1,200 parts per million CO2 before. It will likely again. It’s still stable. It may warm some, or cool some, but as long as the sun does not change the input into the system, we live on a stable planet with a stable climate.
There are a few unstable things. Their model – it’s not stable. Their thinking must not be stable either.
Actually, given the apparent periodicity of relatively-long glacial climates interspersed with relatively-long interglacial climates, Earth’s climate is really not stable, but instead varies in a non-smooth, metastable fashion between two general state points: globally cool and globally warm.
Rarely, the Earth can change from ~100,000 year (was ~41,000 year prior to about 1 million years ago) glacial-interglacial periodicity to intervals lasting 10’s to 100’s of million of years of sustained cold, the true Ice Ages.
I find the author’s perception of the word “hysteresis” a little off. To me, it hints more towards a portmanteau of the words “hysteria” and “uresis” – as in the uncontrollable pissing of oneself while in a state of panic. This version seems to fit more with the general theme of “Climate Change®” articles than the author’s.
(Sarc off) I’m aware that neither version is anywhere near what the word actually means so, my version is an equally valid interpretation of what the word is “hinting”.
Buahah!
WO hands the Academy Award for sarcasm trophy to IO. Well done!
That what I thought, too.
So, what happens to this unique process in a warmer world?
Judging by the Holocene Optimum, far less El Nino, so a reduced water vapour supply.
Oh, computer models!
“Take the conveyor-belt-like circulation of water in the Atlantic Ocean.”
What conveyor belt? M. S. Lozier: Deconstructing the Conveyor Belt. That paper (Science 328(5985), 1507-1511) summarizes experimental evidence that pretty much refutes the conveyor idea.
Floating buoys at depth have been unable to detect a conveyor belt. See especially Figure 5 in 2002 Carl Wunsch Ocean observations and the climate forecast problem here.
That figure shows deep water floating buoys off the coast of Brazil jagging around in gyres, rather than embarking uniformly southward, as the conveyor belt model predicts.
Here’s Wunsch’s abstract: “The widely disseminated and accepted view of the ocean as a nearly-steady, nearly-laminar system is primarily a consequence of the great difficulty of observing it, and of the intense computational cost of modelling it. Uncritical use of the steady/laminar framework has led to a gross distortion of the science, particularly the study of climate change, partly manifested by the belief that a comparatively small number of simple observations suffices to describe the system, and by the inference that oceanic behavior under changed external forcing can be deduced by pure thought without integration of the equations of motion. All of the evidence of the last 25 years shows that the behavior is much more interesting and complex than this distorted view would imply.
“Real progress will involve confronting the actual system, not the fictitious one.”
Start off with a very wrong physical model, what is the meaning of the simulation?
That, apart from the fact that climate models cannot model clouds with enough accuracy to resolve any CO2 effect.
Tipping point, after all these billions of years?
*Al’s voice* “I don’t think so, Tim.”
Yeah, but could be! Give me your money and submit to global socialism!
Models posing as science again. Seeing more of this sort of late.
Well, the codes available if anyone wants to pursue it:
http://climate-dynamics.org/software/#pycles
You wonder how many models they had to try before they hit on one that gives them this interesting and paper-worthy result. Which of course is the big problem with massively simplified models of complex phenomena – they usually end up saying exactly what you want them to say…
Observer bias?
All models say exactly what the modelers want them to say. IIRC, UN IPCC modelers are on record as saying they adjust parameters, etc. until they get something that “looks right.” Ya picks your ECS and ya gets what you want.
On top of that, models tuned to the late 20th Century do poorly in both hindcasts and forecasts. All of the hand-waving in the world by model apologists and data manglers can’t change those facts.
It is impossible to “learn” anything from a computer model. The model represents only what the modelers already know, or think they know, or want to pretend they know. No important discovery will ever be made by a computer model. A computer model can never prove anything to be true. I wonder how the authors were able to validate their contention that their model “can simulate these clouds in a small patch of atmosphere”?
In electronics you would use a voltage divider to bias a transistor just below the crossing point (threshold) on the curve, that way you could simply add a small voltage to nudge it over the crossing point.
Without this biasing you could not “nudge” it anywhere.
It would seem to me people believe there is a natural biasing at play keeping the climate just below the crossing (threshold) and CO2 is doing the nudging.
Personally i think the hysteresis analogy like all analogies is BS, even if it was relevant i suspect the climate is way down the bottom of the curve, ergo we dont have the initial voltage to bias the climate and large swings in “forcings” (another B terminology) have no effect.
Is that a graphic from the paper? I note the cloud deck in the left hand frame is pretty high.
…and then what?
As Feynman once said, if you start an explanation at some point and don’t take it all the way to completion you can prove all sorts of things that are wrong.
ARS Technica is totally in the tank for hysterical Global Warming. Nothing they put out on the topic is worth reading. Certainly nothing worth a comment.
Tim Gorman:
Hat Tip for the quick, effective take down of their ridiculous “theory”.
Interested Observer:
A Tip O’ The Hat for the ridicule of that most insulting gimmick they used to open.
Not worth comment?
Sure it is…
Ridicule, derision, sarcasm, I could go on.
This study is just a crock of Beeee Esssss! Of course it exist in the virtual world of models. Well, I have a model that turns the earth into a snowball as the concentration of CO2 rises. Any takers? Ya think I can get a few hundred thousand for a grant?
This shist gets tiring!