Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach [see update at the end]
Over on Twitter, Michael Tobis made the claim that the 1979 Charney report entitled “Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment” was a “triumph of 20th century meteorological science”, in part for predicting “surface warming tending to be concentrated in polar regions”.
This got me to thinking and when I think, I think about actual observations. So I went and got the UAH MSU satellite data for the temperatures of the lower troposphere (the part of the atmosphere closest to the surface).
Using that data, I calculated the temperature trends by 1° latitude band for the area that the satellite covers (85 North to 85 South). Here is that result:
UAH MSU T2LT (lower troposphere) satellite data.
A “triumph of 20th-century meteorological science”?
Hardly … this result is totally unlike what Charney et al. predicted. Not just a little different. Not even in the same ballpark.
My very best regards to everyone on a sunny summer day … going outside now to get some work done.
w.
[UPDATE] My thanks to Nick Stokes, who pointed out in the comments that Charney was talking about the surface and I’d graphed the lower troposphere. So I’ve rectified that below, where I show both the surface (white) and the lower troposphere (red) temperature trends. Lower troposphere temperatures are red as in Figure 1. Note the change in scale from Figure 1 necessary to encompass the surface temperature trends.
Hmmm … not sure what to say about that. The surface trends shown in white are not too far from a straight line from 85°North (top right) to about 60° South (bottom left). Also, much more of the surface is actually cooling (trend below zero) and the surface at ~ 60° South is cooling more than the lower troposphere trends.
I do love exploring the data, always more to learn.
[UPDATE 2] In the comments, esalis said:
We in Finland are on the white straight line of the graph between 60 and 70 lat. As far as I know we have not had such an increase in warming towards north. Could you plot as well along longitudes?
Thanks, esalis, for moving the discussion forwards. Here you go:
If it is only Northern hemisphere, something else is going on than a CO2 warming effect.
somebody didnt read the charney report.
At -42 South we just equalled the lowest recorded temp for June of -6.7C in my town. And eyeballing that chart we are at about the same trend as the pole of 0.06 C°/Decade.
So not much GW to see here at the moment, just your typical sequence of low pressure systems, gale-force winds and cold fronts rolling across the coolings surface (c-0.04C) of the Southern Ocean. And you don’t need a model to see them coming!
Charney (relayed via Tobis)
“in part for predicting “surface warming tending to be concentrated in polar regions””
WE
“This got me to thinking and when I think, I think about actual observations. So I went and got the UAH MSU satellite data for the temperatures of the lower troposphere (the part of the atmosphere closest to the surface).”
Closest? But they aren’t actual observations of the surface. And if the Charney report is to be revisited (rather than Twitter), it should be quoted. Here is one thing they said:
“Hence we estimate that the warming will be somewhat greater in the northern hemisphere and somewhat less in the southern hemisphere.”
Here is an AR5 plot of trends of actual surface observations. The bottom panel covers 1981-2012. Seems to me they got that one right.
Looks to me as though trend correlates very well with the ratio of land to water at each latitude.
And that where there is no land, the trend is negative
Ocean Currents?
CO2 is obviously less dense than air…
The first few IPCC reports always showed the same diagram, showing
1) higher mid-troposphere temperatures above the tropics, (the “hot spot” that was never found) and
2) a nearly perfectly symmetrical (around the equator) temperature effect increasing at BOTH poles.
Hard to pack so much wrong-headedness into a single chart.
Those data are over 2003-2017. They also look similar to the GISTEMP data set, but more extreme near the poles. See here. https://aqua.nasa.gov/
I have also been reviewed the Charney Report and been compiling a paper on this topic. It is still in the preparation stage awaiting more detailed information. The Charney Report predicted an increase in temperature from a doubling of CO2 of 1 degree C. I think your figures are pretty much in line with this. Besides, it can be checked empirically. The Charney Report also predicted a much greater increase of some 2.5 degrees C from the increase in water vapor in the upper Troposphere. I’ve been reviewing studies on this aspect and have found the results to be very inconclusive. The earliest studies show a decline in water vapor where the increase was predicted. The 8 more recent studies, many “reanalyses”, have findings varying from minor decreases to minor increases, with some having indeterminate results and indicating that additional studies need to be done.
It would appear that 2/3rds of the predicted warming according to the theory is very questionable, but only one or two of the studies even indicated that there was a significant problem with the theory proposed in the Charney Report and adopted by they IPCC.
Any additional information on the water vapor issue in the upper troposphere would be greatly appreciated. A 1 degree increase in global temperature plus the benefits of CO2 fertilization would appear to be a win-win from my perspective.
“Here is an AR5 plot of trends of actual surface observations. The bottom panel covers 1981-2012. Seems to me they got that one right.”
LOL… NCDC makes “adjustments” like this to the ” actual surface observations”. Sorry, but they are not credible. Why would we not think they made the same “adjustments” to the MLOST models
cLIEmate “UNscientists” don’t use thermometers to measure temperature nowadays!
“The data doesn’t matter. We’re not basing our recommendations on the data. We’re basing them on the climate models.”
~ Prof. Chris Folland ~ (Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research)
It’s good to see the big picture. This indicates that the earth’s heat sink poleward is virtually all in the Arctic. Antarctica seems to be insulated from the dissipation of the heat from the mildly warming earth. Clearly this is because the bulk of the exhaust of heat engine earth poleward is the flow of warm ocean currents into the Arctic Ocean. Warm water melts more ice from underneath than warm air does on top. The much larger land area in the NH is also part of this asymmetry.
The twitter by Michael Tobis reveals a lack of understanding of the simplest aspects of the thermodynamics of a heat engine in his high praise. Charny, as any scientist or engineer, would simply know that dissipation of the heat from the equatorial band would be by moving it to colder regions of the planet -upward through the atmosphere and poleward, so this wasn’t a brilliant prediction. Not identifying asymmetry of the polarward flow might be considered at least modestly careless of Charny by some scientists given the knowledge of the Gulf Stream flows in 1979 and the effect of the much greater land mass in the NH.
The Holocene Climate Optimum from 9,000 to 5,000 years ago is also thought to have a similar temperature profile with respect to latitudes and Hemispheres.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_climatic_optimum
“The Holocene Climate Optimum warm event consisted of increases of up to 4 °C near the North Pole (in one study, winter warming of 3 to 9 °C and summer of 2 to 6 °C in northern central Siberia)”
“The average temperature change appears to have declined rapidly with latitude and so essentially no change in mean temperature is reported at low and middle latitudes.
“Tropical reefs tend to show temperature increases of less than 1 °C; the tropical ocean surface at the Great Barrier Reef about 5350 years ago was 1 °C warmer”
“In terms of the global average, temperatures were probably warmer than now (depending on estimates of latitude dependence and seasonality in response patterns). While temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere were warmer than average during the summers, the Tropics and parts of the Southern Hemisphere were colder than average.
Out of 140 sites across the western Arctic, there is clear evidence for conditions warmer than now at 120 sites. At 16 sites, where quantitative estimates have been obtained, local HTM temperatures were on average 1.6±0.8 °C higher than now.
Report:
The effect of cloud albedo by itself gives a negative feedback. Thus if clouds at all levels were increased by 1 percent, the atmosphere-earth system would absorb about 0.3 m-2 less solar radiation and lose about 0.5 W m-2 less thermal radiation. The net effect would be a cooling of about 0.4 W m- 2 , or, if this occurred together with a doubling of CO2 , a decrease of flQ from 4.0 to 3.6 W m-2 •
Question – Why 1% more clouds, why not 5%? Seems that the resulting amount of low vs high cloud cover from C02 doubling is the biggest uncertainty in the whole debate. Please respond.
That net heat flux asymmetry – about the equator – of the ocean/atmosphere is well documented. And the Gulf Stream is conspicuous in those diagrams as a source. I’d post a link but I’m not at my computer. I also saw a recent paper that claims the Gulf Stream continued to flow warm under the surface during the last glaciation.
And, well, they’ve been wrong about the amount of warming as indicated by average global temperatures, too, as well as basically wrong about the latitudinal distribution of warming?
This reminds me of the article here on WUWT, less than two years ago, a report on some British climate scientists being more or less stumped by their predictions being off. One little quote from that was, say, from ‘Myles Allen, professor of geosystem science at the University of Oxford’ (commenting on a temperature increase that was supposed to have been only 3 to 5 years away):
“He (Myles Allen) said that too many of the models used “were on the hot side”, meaning they forecast too much warming…
That’s about 20 years of emissions before temperatures are likely to cross 1.5C,” Professor Allen said.”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/09/19/climate-scientists-admit-they-were-wrong-on-climate-change-effects/
But of course, despite it all, I studiously continue to believe in ‘Charney sensitivity’. It’s so good to have a make believe world to escape into (says I as they haul me away, hehe haha) . . .
Willis again shows us something rather remarkable in the face of so much “Settled Science”. This will all be very unsettling for the Warmistas.
Highly interesting, thank You.
“Hmmm … not sure what to say about that. The surface trends shown in white are not too far from a straight line from 85°North (top right) to about 60° South (bottom left). ”
If You would ask me to to draw a line into the chart, it would be a vertical one from 70 north to 45 south at about 0,15 C. What is the UAH and HadCRUT error margin?
Since You showed the first part being wrong at least for the last 40 years, do You see a way to prove/disprove the (sceptic?) statement: “warming is mainly at the poles, in winter and at night”. I would love to see two addional charts…
My investigation …
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/04/10/the-curious-case-of-the-southern-ocean-and-the-peer-reviewed-journal/
… covered only the southern oceans, using sea surface temperature (SST), but it matches Willis’s result. As could be expected, of course.
The journal editor said then “I am in particular intrigued by the fact that the trends you calculate exhibit areas of nearly uniform gradients (negative between 72S and 65S, positive between 65S and 48S and negative again equatorward of 48S) separated by narrow regions of abrupt gradient change. I wonder why this is and it might be telling us about the physics of the system.“. (see https://wattsupwiththat.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/SageComplaintEmails.pdf ).
Well, it looks to me like Willis’s study covering more latitudes could tell them about the physics of the system too – but not until they look up from their models and look at the real world. What causes that unexpected gradient in temperature change? I don’t know, but I can make a couple of comments:
1. There is a sharp retreat from negative trends to about zero south of about 60S. In my chart, it was an artefact of the increasing presence of land south of 60S – that’s because I was using SST so there was no land data. But in Willis’s study it showed that while the sea was cooling fast the land wasn’t.
2. The data suggests pretty strongly to me that for the answers (the physics) we should be looking at the southern oceans and East Antarctica. That’s because those are the areas that the models have got most wrong, and the models supposedly model the physics.
Well lets see: record temps in Alert, N Canada and in Churchill recently.
Sea ice extent today at lowest for date.
Alaska and Svalbard consistently warmer.
Seems to me polar regions ARE warming fastest.
good work, willis
see also our response to the “arctic warming twice as fast” claim
https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/07/11/twiceasfast/
I wonder what the point is of doing this work and publishing it on a site where it is not going to have any influence on anyone?
Whenever I speak to a ‘true believer’, they simply tell me that ‘science’ has shown unequivocally that we are headed for Climate Armageddon, and that millions of people are displaced or dying at the moment. Any attempt to counter this belief with facts is met by a steadfast refusal to listen to them. There is no point waving the above article in front of them – they will simply claim that it is oil-funded propaganda.
Is there no way we can break out of the straitjacket of only trying to convince ourselves, and find a way of convincing other people?
From “The Charney Report”…
From Willis…
“Both series predict larger ΔT at upper levels, primarily because of added heating by cumulus convection”… Reality once again ignored the climate models, as usual.
The plot is symmetric with a land/ocean ratio influence. Latitudes 30, 60 and also 85. This symmetry suggests a well distributed gas. Over the past 40 years being more apparent over land.
Willis Eschenbach:
Another interesting topic from you. Can you adjust the plot by an ocean/land ratio? Take each lattitude, count the total cells and the land cells for the ratio. The plot should even up, be more vertical instead of its current slope.
After Centuries of the Northern Hemisphere warming more than the Southern Hemisphere as the world came out of the last Ice Age & Mini Ice Age how is a prediction that the world will carry on doing so got anything at all to do with CO2?