March 3rd, 2022 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
(Note: I apologize for not posting much in the last several months, as I have been dealing with family health issues. Hopefully, things will gradually be returning to normal soon. I also want to thank those who have stepped up and contributed to keeping this website going since Google has demonetized it…thank you!)
As I continue to see all of the crazy proclamations of how human-caused climate change is disrupting lives around the world (e.g., the Feb. 28 release of the IPCC report from Working Group 2, [Pielke Jr. analysis here]), I can’t help but return to the main reason why human causation for recent warming has not been convincingly established. I have discussed this before, but it is worth repeating.
As a preface, I will admit, given the lack of evidence to the contrary, I still provisionally side with the view that warming has been mostly human-caused (and this says nothing about whether the level of human-caused warming is in any way alarming).
But here’s why human causation is mostly a statement of faith…
ALL temperature change in any system is due to an imbalance between the rates of energy gain and energy lost. In the case of the climate system, it is believed the Earth each year absorbs a global average of about 240 Watts per sq. meter of solar energy, and emits about the same amount of infrared energy back to outer space.
If we are to believe the last ~15 years of Argo float measurements of the ocean (to 2000 m depth), there has been a slight warming equivalent to an imbalance of 1 Watt per sq. meter, suggesting a very slight imbalance in those energy flows.
One watt per sq. meter.
That tiny imbalance can be compared to the 5 to 10 Watt per sq. meter uncertainty in the ~240 Watt per sq. meter average flows in and out of the climate system. We do not know those flows that accurately. Our satellite measurement systems do not have that level of absolute accuracy.
Global energy balance diagrams you have seen have the numbers massaged based upon the assumption all of the imbalance is due to humans.
I repeat: NONE of the natural, global-average energy flows in the climate system are known to better than about 5-10 Watts per sq. meter…compared to the ocean warming-based imbalance of 1 Watt per sq. meter.
What this means is that recent warming could be mostly natural…and we would never know it.
But, climate scientists simply assume that the climate system has been in perfect, long-term harmonious balance, if not for humans. This is a pervasive, quasi-religious assumption of the Earth science community for as long as I can remember.
But this position is largely an anthropocentric statement of faith.
That doesn’t make it wrong. It’s just…uncertain.
Unfortunately, that uncertainty is never conveyed to the public or to policymakers.
There was a 10% drop and rebound of global evaporation centered on 1978 over a 20 year period where your monitoring started. YU 2007, woods hole
It was supposedly caused by a drop in wind speed and signifying a supposed shift of some kind in climate.
Have you ever reviewed and have comments on the big picture.
Regards
PDO shift of 1977.
Any idea how it would be connected to wind speed over a large area.
Because PDO impacts water temperature over a large area.
There is an element of a mass movement to CAGW, which tends towards being quasi-religious. Eric Hoffer, in The True Believer, laid out the common characteristics of such a creed.
Marxism is purportedly an economic theory, the sort of thing to be tested against the real world. In practice, Marxists are as much followers of a religion as Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Similarly, predicting Armageddon is something often sold by evangelical faiths, that if one does not follow their faith, doom is imminent. Environmentalists have been acting in that manner for as long as I can remember.
Comparing JWs to Marxists is a direct insult to JWs. I have known several, and they are uniformly nice people (not so much for Marxists). I do not believe their tenets, but I will not insult them by that comparison.
The statement does not in any way compare Jehovah’s Witnesses to Marxist.
That’s why so many of them have entered the Jehovah’s Witness Protection Program…
JWs are not all nice. They have some serious issues with how they handle sexual abuse cases. Following a religion says nothing about the niceness of the people. A religion can be murderous but some of the followers nice. And vice versa like Christians and their crusades. It’s the individual who is nice, not the religion.
“Similarly, predicting Armageddon is something often sold by evangelical faiths, that if one does not follow their faith, doom is imminent.”
As far as I know, no form of Christianity claims the Apocalypse (Revelation) is contingent on whether or not people “follow their faith”. (Though there is a potential timing link to how quickly some unspecified number of Believers are killed for their Faith . . but it’s difficult to tell how that might relate to how many people come to Believe)
I wouldn’t call the “Warmageddon” based faith a “quasi-religion”, it’s a full blown religion to me . . Anything people are religious about, is a religion, including science, and Siants (sounds like science ; ) it just means something people share a common set of strongly held beliefs/doctrines in regard to, and that includes atheism (if one has a strong belief in the absence of any God/gods. Obviously that’s a faith based belief, since there’s no way to demonstrate such an Absence.)
We live in a time of many non-theistic religions, it seems to me, with the “Wokism” sect being perhaps the clearest example right now, though “human authorityism” in general seems the most widespread. Siantism (strong faith in the proclamations of strident/prominent scientists) is also a form of authorityism, it seems obvious to me . .
The fact that CO2’s ability to warm was saturated long ago should be enough to convince anyone that the warming is natural. It simply cannot be due to CO2.
http://www.john-daly.com//artifact.htm
There have been a couple of claimed refutations of this saturation science, but they don’t respond directly to this article by Dr. Heinz Hug. The reason is he actually refutes the refutations in this article.
I have no idea why Dr. Spencer believes that CO2 causes any warming at all.
The CO2 is saturated argument is false. It ignores the effective radiating level (ERL). Saturated below, but never by definition at. As CO2 increases, the ERL rises. This has three consequences. First, thanks to lapse rate, there is less humidity overlapping CO2 emission bands, making CO2 IR emission MORE effective. Second, thanks to pi math, the effective emitting surface sphere increases, again increasing CO2 emission. Third, against these positives is the lapse rate fact that higher troposphere is colder, so the rising ERL IR emission carries away less energy per photon. The net effect of all this is the 1938 Callander log curve. Not new news.
Please understand the basic GWE physics before commenting here. I spent years doing so, and will always (well, almost always) correct those who do not.
Rud,
I recall from one of Will Happer’s recent presentations (based on Happer and van Wijngaarden?) that a doubling of CO2 equated to about 3 w/m^2 clear sky and even less under cloudy conditions. I.e., not a big deal. Is that in line with the Callander results you mention above?
Frank, Will’s numbers are no better than any of the others. They are all wrong. All of them are just measuring increases in downwelling IR. They are ignoring the proportional increases in upwelling IR. When put together you get a net increase in upwelling IR and hence a cooling effect.
“Will’s numbers are no better than any of the others. They are all wrong.”
That’s quite a claim. Do you have any support for that other than the linked paper by Heinz Hug?
Rud, thanks for the response. I also believed that rebuttal at one time. Guess what? I was wrong. The atmosphere doesn’t work that way. The atmosphere radiates to space everywhere, not just at the top of the atmosphere.
This becomes clear when you understand exactly how energy radiates outward. At every level in the atmosphere there are CO2 molecules absorbing energy from a lower level. However, that lower level has more CO2 molecules radiating upward and at a higher temperature. The higher level cannot absorb them all and some of them end up in space.
This constant loss of upward radiating energy is tied to the change in density as you move upward. If you double CO2, you double the number of molecules at every level. The difference is proportional. The loss of energy is therefore proportional. There can not be any change in the temperature of the outgoing radiation because it’s coming from the same places.
The ERL is a myth.
There is more energy heading upward though, since at the very bottom of the atmosphere you also increased the CO2 concentration as well. Hence, this is truly a cooling effect. But, there’s a reason we are not seeing this cooling. It’s called pressure broadening.
I know you understand this but I will explain for others. As the CO2 concentration increases the frequency range where it absorbs also increases. You mentioned part of that in your water vapor overlapping reference. It also overlaps with the atmospheric window and energy is captured that would otherwise go directly to space.
So yes, there is a warming effect that almost perfectly balances out with the cooling effect I described above. The result is no warming. The saturation effect is real.
What I described is not intuitively obvious. At least I didn’t figure it out initially. But, once you start thinking of the atmosphere as concentric layers, it becomes obvious. You just need to think about it for awhile.
As a side effect of this process the CO2 driven radiation is making available a specific amount of energy to every layer. If that layer gets out of balance due to any cause, this process will work to restore that layer back at the same proportional energy level. This stabilizes the lapse rate and reduces extreme weather.
Richard M,
As a lapsed spectroscopist, I can see no problems with your conclusions and have often blog commented about the upwards-heading IR component, geometry and series expansions that sum to a change of nothing. But I have to be careful because I have not been active in this field for many years, so I could be wrong. Geoff S
Could you please review how the A G W argument developed between Arhennius 1896 and IPCC in the nineties
Rud says:” As CO2 increases, the ERL rises.”
Can you provide a 30 year chart/graph of the measured ERL so we can see the rise over time?
The lapse rate you mention is controlled by water vapor the Cp of air. Can you provide a new updated Cp of air?
You mention CO2 emissions. Can you provide an emissivity for CO2?
They try to squeeze like eels through perceived loopholes in IR absorption saturation, monkeying around (sorry to mix metaphors) with silly things like quirks at the margins or “shoulders” of troughs in IR absorption spectra.
I know, Phil. I originally fell for those excuses. They all fall apart upon deeper examination.
Every aspect of Global Warming’ is a matter of faith. The dogmas of the new Green religion include temperature, storm, flood, drought, ice extent, species migration, precipitation, sea level, and prophecies of doom and destruction. All counter-indicators are rejected as being counter-faith. Humanity is lectured that unless it follows the Creed of the Green, it will be doomed to Hellfire.
Fortunately, religious doomsters have a very poor track record when it comes to forecasting the end of the world…
I discussed ARGO in a guest post here a few years ago, something like ARGO—fit for purpose? The general answer was yes, given its design intent. But given its sampling and instrument drift issues, it was planned to take up to 30 years to get a good handle on OHC change. So the 1W ocean heat uptake is itself still quite uncertain.
IMO there are simpler and more certain ways to show that anthropogenic global warming mostly does not exist as claimed:
I remeber seeing the yearly variation from orbit distance in some Argo data. Has any one tried to back out sensitivity from this.
Orbit distance has to do with satellite altimetry SLR, not ARGO. See my years old post titled something like ‘Jason 3–fit for purpose?’
You misunderstood, the sun/earth orbital distance. You can see small seasonal signiture in Argo data.
Milankovich cycles are much slower than what you apperently postulate.
The TSI variation over the year caused by eccentricity of the orbit I believe +/- 3.6 percent as a cosine function over the orbit. Can this be pulled out of the Argos data?
You are correct, the total variation is about 10-12%—I can dig out the equation if you are interested.
“Well, natural variation did not magically stop in 1975.”
Michael Mann believes it stopped long before. In a recent article here, he was quoted as saying that the only thing interestng about the LIA was it had much more natural variability than now. This of course is totally illogical.
It gives an insight, however into how the same illogical thinking resulted in his “hiding the decline” in earth proxy temperature from tree rings after 1967. The glaringly correct interpretation should have been that this decline shows that the trees in question are not suitable at all as temperature proxies. How can one escape the truth of this? I assumed he was guilty of fraud -picking the samples that supported a GW and discarding the rest. Could it be that he is simply stupid?
Not, I suggest, simply stupid.
More fraudulently stupid.
I love to point out that Mann is basically a self-confessed fraud.
In his lawsuit against Tim Ball, Mann avoided actually going into court and presenting evidence under his control. His lawsuit was therefore pitched out because of his inexcusable delays.
There is the concept of adverse inference where, if someone fails to present evidence under his control, the other party may make a reasonable inference about what the evidence would have shown.
Mann sued Ball for saying something like:
Based on that, the reasonable inference is that Mann does indeed belong in state pen.
One of the things that gives me confidence that CAGW is bunk is that, if it were real, ‘they’ wouldn’t have to stoop to fraud to prove it.
Well Tom Wigley did say in the Climategate emails
“I have just read the M&M stuff criticising MBH. A lot of it seems valid to me. At the very least MBH is a very sloppy piece of work – an opinion I have held for some time”
However, Karl (2015) degraded the quality of the temperature data to match the low-quality engine room boiler-intake temperatures.
re. point 3
The null hypothesis should be that we continue to warm out of the Little Ice Age.
commieBob,
This oft-repeated assertion about recovery from the ice age would be more powerful if the mechanism(s) causing the change were clearly described. I do not know the mechanism, but I can see adequate available energy in the extent of cloud coverage and/or total precipitable water.
It is hard to convince others that the warming was ‘natural’ with no explanation of how it was done. Geoff S
Wrong. Lack of a mechanism is no refutation.The Alarmists love to turn the NH on its head. They have proposed a mechanism for warming with no real world evidence. About all they have are some cherry-picked correlations along with Fraudscience.
The Null Hypothesis remains.
Perhaps Mr. Sherrington can tell us the mechanism(s) by which the Ice Age (as opposed to the Little Ice Age) recovered.
Would anyone be interested in an actual natural warming mechanism that would predict all of the observations that the anthropologic warming side claims by default to support their faulty conjecture?
Earth is a plate tectonic black box. So little is understood about the planet’s tectonic processes that there is not even a dynamic model to describe how it works. (Except the one at the bottom of this post) The rudimentary theory taught at the moment can only be described as a kinematic model that can only tell us the plate motions and not what drives them or how these systems are interconnected.
So, that alone says it could be a natural phenomenon. Here is an interesting coincident, or not;
We all know about Snowball Earth but did you know Plate tectonics is connected to it also?
In the study below the research strongly indicates that this link is evident in the geologic record. The seafloor spreading appears to have almost completely halted or slowed to barely discernible levels for 250 million years. At which time the Earth entered the period known as Snowball Earth.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/223745786_Evidence_and_implications_for_a_widespread_magmatic_shutdown_for_250_My_on_Earth
Earth & Planetary Sci. Letters 282, (2009): 294-298 Condie, K. C., O’Neill, C. and Aster, R.
” We suggest that an episodic mantle thermal regime, during which a large part of the plate circuit effectively stagnates, may explain the 250-My magmatic age gap on Earth and a remarkable feature of the Paleoproterozoic record.”
Conclusions
“The distribution of U/Pb zircon ages from both subduction-related granitoids and detrital sediments shows a pronounced and robust minimum between 2.45 and 2.2Ga .Furthermore, there is a sparsity of greenstones and subduction-related granitoids, as well as evidence for juvenile continental crust in this 250-My time window. We hypothesize that this reflects a globally significant period of cessation or slowdown global magmatism and perhaps in plate tectonics”.
Interesting isn’t it? Plate Tectonics stops and the world freezes, it starts again and the world warms.
Consider then that the earth sweltered in greenhouse heat for 226 million years, starting in the late Permian (298.9 million years ago /Mya) and ending in the early Oligocene. At which time polar icecaps and ice sheets were unknown, and tropical flora and fauna extended from pole to pole.
These climatic oscillations from greenhouse to an icehouse have happened five times in the earth’s history. But our earth has only spent about 670 million years out of its 4.5-billion-year history in glacial conditions. So, the glacial periods only account for 15% of the earth’s total existence. This fact means that the normal state of the earth’s climate is a hot, mostly ice-free planet. This cold world of today is a geological and statistical anomaly. These odds alone say this warming is a natural phenomenon.
The Earth’s plate movement mechanism is variable and is not only responsible for the unprecedented cold period described in the study by Condie et al. above, but also the other glacial periods that followed. The Plate Tectonic mechanism/climate forcing also operates on much more moderate scales and can be shown to fit perfectly to our current plate movement and climate dynamics without the need of the current poorly constrained Co2 forcing model. The Co2 is instead a response to the geologic thermal forcing agent as it varies over extended time periods. It comes and goes from the systems as the Earth responds to the geologic forcing as is seen by the well-known Co2 lag time after warming has taken place.
http://pubs.usgs.gov…/fs-0095-00.pdf
“An early association between sunspots and terrestrial phenomena was the observation that the number and intensity of aurora borealis sightings were greatest during sunspot maxima when the sun was most active (active sun), and lowest during sunspot minima (quiet sun). Another terrestrial observation was that the Maunder Minimum coincided with the coldest part of the Little Ice Age.”
What is even more remarkable is this correlation extends to the historic Japanese earthquake records. To be exact, at the end of the Little Ice Age the records that the Japanese have so carefully compiled show an abrupt increase in activity continuing to the present age.
There were only five 8.0 earthquakes noted in Japanese records during the 265 years (1603-1868) of the Edo period. As opposed to the 11 quakes that occurred in the much shorter 161 years since 1850 (2011 Great Sendai). This works out to one single 8.0 earthquake every 53 years on average for the Edo period vs one single 8.0 earthquake every 15 years on average for the period that followed it to the most recent events.
But what could be the connection between solar, climate and seismic phenomena?
The answer is actually quite simple; it’s just that we just don’t have the correct model for Plate Tectonics to understand it. The Sun and Earth’s magnetic field generators are mutually inductively coupled, this means the Earth’s inner and outer core will respond thermally to the varying magnetic field strength of the two coupled generators. This thermal expansion/contraction requires the mantle to respond in kind, as is seen in the Japanese records. The mantle’s thickness imposes immense strain energy differential forces to its outer surface (earthquakes) that causes mantle’s surface to be stretched and torn, releasing strain energy as heat (climate warming) into the oceanic basins and volcanic boundaries (mid-ocean ridges). The increase in climate temps and earthquakes began when the solar magnetic energy began to increase at the end of the Little Ice Age. During the last glacial maximum the ocean surface was 122 meters (400 feet) lower than today. And then more sudden than now, temperatures went up a lot, then down again suddenly to glacial again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas
“The change to glacial conditions at the onset of the younger Dryas in the higher latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere between 12,900–11,500 BP in calendar years has been argued to have been quite abrupt. In sharp contrast to the warming of the preceding Older Dryas interstadial. It has been inferred that its end occurred over a period of a decade or so, but the onset may have been faster.” . . . . . .
. . . . . .”Various paleoclimatic records from ice cores, deep sea sediments, speleothems, continental paleobotanical data, and loesses show similar abrupt climate events, which are consistent with Younger Dryas events, during the terminations of the last four glacial periods. They argue that Younger Dryas events might be an intrinsic feature of deglaciations that occur at the end of glacial periods.” . . . . . .
. . . . . . . “Measurements of oxygen isotopes from the GISP2 ice core suggest the ending of the Younger Dryas took place over just 40–50 years in three discrete steps, each lasting five years. Other proxy data, such as dust concentration, and snow accumulation, suggest an even more rapid transition, requiring about a 7 °C (13 °F) warming in just a few years. Total warming in Greenland was 10 ± 4 °C (18 ± 7 °F).”
It is telling that all of the warming events since the Younger Dryas; the two Holocene Climate Optimum periods, Roman Warm Period, Medieval Warm Period and the cold period of the Little Ice Age don’t get much press from the promoters of Anthropologic warming. The same evidence that can explain the Younger Dryas can also explain our more recent warming that has occurred since the end of the Little Ice Age, and even all those inconvenient ups and downs that occurred in between them. More important is the fact the speed of these excursions are beyond the passive forcing systems described in regards to Co2 alone, with or without an anthropologic component.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_climatic_optimum
“Of 140 sites across the western Arctic, there is clear evidence for conditions that were warmer than now at 120 sites. At 16 sites for which quantitative estimates have been obtained, local temperatures were on average 1.6±0.8 °C higher during the optimum than now. Northwestern North America reached peak warmth first, from 11,000 to 9,000 years ago, but the Laurentide Ice Sheet still chilled eastern Canada.”
When the Sun and Earth’s magnetic field generator’s energies eventually lower and the mantle subsides once more, the divergent plate boundaries will slow down and the oceans will cool pulling the atmosphere’s content down, and the real source of the Earth’s plate movement energy is revealed, but you will just have to go to my site and read it for yourself.
Plate Tectonics: A history of a changing climate through geologic forcing.
https://electroplatetectonics253852156.wordpress.com/ or
https://electroplatetectonics.blogspot.com/
An interesting concept, with lots of supporting details. Unfortunately, it tends to derail this post due to its breadth.
On the other hand, perhaps it deserved it’s own post.
I would love to see some comments from various WUWT contributors with more insight than I can bring to bear.
I particularly like the focus on the power required to drive plate tectonics and how that might answer many climate questions.
4: When “hi temp records” from 100 or more years ago are “tied” I ask the believers how can this be given the alleged increase in co2 concentration? Blank stares, silence.
“the Earth each year absorbs a global average of about 240 Watts per sq. meter of solar”
“provisionally side with the view that warming has been mostly human-caused”
“a slight warming equivalent to an imbalance of 1 Watt per sq. meter”
Lets say 0.7 watt per sq. meter anthropogenic = 0.3 % of total.
See https://edberry.com/blog/climate/climate-co2-temp/the-impact-of-human-co2-on-atmospheric-co2/ to understand that only about 33PPM of the recent increase in atmospheric CO2 is anthropogenic while 100 PPM is natural. Even if the increased CO2 is the sole cause of the warming,which is far from proven, only about 25% of it is human caused.
Very succinctly stated. Thanks!
The null hypothesis demands that unless we have solid and irrefutable evidence to the contrary, we must assume that whatever has caused small fluctuations in the past forever number of years, is what has also caused the recent fluctuations, to the extent we can even measure such accurately and precisely.
Then there is the whole issue of biased advocates altering data.
Remember the foundational IPCC charter was biased to ‘only’ anthropogenic.
Then there is the whole issue of biased advocates altering data.
___________________________________________________
Every month NASA’s GISTEMP changes hundreds of monthly entries to their Land Ocean Temperature Index (LOTI) Here is the count of those changes by month last year:
Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
330 468 338 256 497 348 267 217 285 291 375 277
Starting in January 2022 there were 291 changes.
Plotted out over the last ten years, it looks like this:
These changes or corrections go on month after month in a steady drone. ALL of the temperature anomaly data from 1980 going forward is increased, and prior years they are mostly decreased.
The Climate Mafia.
Steve Case,
So how valid is a paper by a scientist who used an early version of GISTEMP, only to find after publication that the official temperature had changed?
Do monthly changes mean that new papers have to be written, approved, printed inside a month to avoid a criticism of using out-of-date data? Geoff S
Steve, so if I’m reading the chart correctly, the data tampering, excuse me changes, since 2011 have increased the ~ 1910 to 2010 warming by a little more than 0.2C. I’ve seen much larger changes on the order of more than 1.5C from other sources – is that because the more substantial NASA / GISS ‘adjustments’ for TOBS and UHIE were made prior to 2011?
Occam’s Razor
A paraphrased, parallel observation to Dr Spencer’s, but in the same vein –
Because all credible evidence and observations that point to internecine violence, genocide, slavery, misogyny etc etc gets suppressed (canceled) in case it ‘offends’ the sensibilities of wokesters who believe in the good fairies who watch over people with “acceptable views” (as Justin would say).
Roy Spencer:
– Has published multiple highly flawed climate science papers. (One resulted in the resignation of the journal’s editor, admitting, “…I perceive this paper to be fundamentally flawed and therefore wrongly accepted by the journal.”
– Has held director-level positions at multiple climate science Denial organizations, notably the George Marshall Institute (now the CO2 Coalition) and the Cornwall Alliance. Both organizations receive(d) substantial funding from the fossil fuel industry.
– Has published multiple climate science Denial books through Encounter Books, a Koch-funded operation.
– Was a columnist and member of Tech Central Station, an organization run by lobbyists supporting ExxonMobil.
– Appeared in the court documents for the bankruptcy of coal giant Peabody Energy as a creditor, proving he was in the employ of the organization in direct contradiction to his public claims that he didn’t take money “directly” from the fossil fuel industry.
– Has a long history of patently false public commentary regarding global warming.
– Was specifically mentioned in a leaked memo from the fossil-fuel-funded Heartland Institute from Joe Bast, CEO, as being a high-priority funding target.
But, aside from that, ol’ Roy is a perfectly credible source of scientific information.
https://www.desmog.com/roy-spencer/
Barry’s points aren’t numbered, because numbers are beyond his IQ.
Why don’t you stop taking those drugs and reading that trash? Maybe you would then be able to make sense.
For the record:
DeSmog is a blog run by James Hoggan a public relations guy in Vancouver, the blog is financially supported by Canadian musician, composer, entrepreneur John Lefebvre.
(via Wiki).
Roy Spencer PhD is a meteorologist, ‘a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and the U.S. Science Team leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E) on NASA’s Aqua satellite. He has served as senior scientist for climate studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center’. (Wiki).
It’s always amusing to see how desperately Deniers flock to the Genetic fallacy when their confirmation bias is perturbed.
Do you understand how citations work, Chris? Which of the notes in the Desmog bio on Spencer isn’t supported by a citation? And which of the 110 citations in the bio are incorrect? Which of my claims above are incorrect?
Speaking of genetic fallacies, are there any that you have missed?
Because only government funding is ethical. And I laughed and I laughed and I laughed.
Are you leftist progressives capable of anything other than character assassination?
No, they are not. Character assasination is all they have.
You are just smearing a reputable person. Dr Roy supplies evidence to counter alarmist claims. Where’s yours.
Like PBS NOVA?
You are good at “Playing the Man” versus “Playing the Ball.” The above is a litany of ad hominen attacks without addressing any specifics of what Roy has published. You are not better than the ‘town gossip.’
Well, Barry, if you are sourcing information from desmog, then you’re in trouble.
Barry
If fossil fuels are so evil, why don’t the righteous governments of the US and Europe just stop using them altogether?
After all, there are clean renewable alternatives that are much cheaper.
How is it that a regional conflict in Ukraine is suddenly causing governments in places like Germany to talk about bringing back coal power? And even (jump-scare!) nuclear!? Has the world gone mad?!
Barry
Go to any climate science conference such as AGU and everywhere you look you will see evidence of fossil fuel industry sponsorship. You are a total hypocrite.
Barry Anthony,
Please explain why a scientific paper by any person who has received substantial funding from the fossil fuel industry is invalid?
I am old enough to remember when a majority of research in many fields was done by non-government people. There are many inventions that you enjoy today that originated from industry research.
Are you implying that industry people have lower intelligence that others, or that they are naturally ethically dishonest, or what? Geoff S
Barry Anthony:
– Is an idiot who apparently believes Desmogblog – a vile, anti-science online publication whose only purpose is to attack and smear anyone who opposes the Warmunist Doctrine.
A link to desmog. How wonderful. And we are supposed to be impressed by that. Give me a break. That says everything we ever need to know about Barry’s politics.
Not to long ago, Barry was whining about how only peer reviewed papers from reputable journals could be used for anything.
I guess that standard only applies to others.
As usual, Barry doesn’t attempt to refute any of the facts, because he can’t. Instead he goes straight for the man, because that’s the kind of sad, vicious person that he is.
1) Notice that the fact that the article passed peer review, something that Barry claims is his gold standard as to whether a paper is any good or not. Instead he has to focus on the fact that the politician who ran the journal was unable to force the actual scientists into changing their recommendations, so he quite.
2) Any organization that doesn’t fully support Barry’s position is a science denying organization and must be banned from polite society.
3) Even if it was funded by the Koch’s, so what. By the way, in Barry’s world, if 1% of the money comes from the Koch’s, and they produce something he doesn’t like, they are Koch funded and must be ignored. On the other hand if 100% comes from someone like Soros, as long as he agrees with the output, they are good to go.
4) The heck with it. The rest of the nonsense is the same trash, anyone who has ever been within spitting distance of someone who worked in the oil industry must never be listened to, unless they support the climate alarmist agenda. Blah, Blah, Blah.
It’s not like Barry is even capable of coming up with new lies or insults.
The Barely Clown Show makes another stop.
Over at Dr. Judith Curry’s site, Climate Etc., David Appell said that I was being emotional when using the term CliSciFi and calling the authors of the UN IPCC and U.S. National Assessment reports liars. He doesn’t answer when I cite the work of people like Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr.
Faith! Here I thought it was a matter of milking the government teat to the last drop.
That article by Roy is a correct and powerful statement, not needing much to be added to it. “Edenic stasis” as I call it is indeed the rather fantastic assumption of perfect static climate prior to the industrial revolution. The term “pre-industrial climate” implies this assumption inescapably.
(The warmists say they don’t assume this. But they do.)
If we are to believe the last ~15 years of Argo float measurements
______________________________________________________
NASA Earth Observatory
Correcting Ocean Cooling
Thank you Steve…I was just looking for this link to post it here.
To summarize the article, ARGO floats as installed did not find warming, they found cooling.
Since this result was considered completely unacceptable, a reason was searched for to alter the result and make it “correct”, IOW to make it show warming by adjusting the data.
What they settled on for a solution to this inconvenient “problem” was to use the measured/calculated TOA radiation imbalance as a correction factor.
They reasoned, circularly, that any imbalance in the TOA radiation, must represent energy being retained and stored in the deep ocean.
And so they simply changed the calibration of the ARGO floats!
So, instead of using one to verify the other, they used one to alter the results of the other.
As Roy points out, the absolute amounts in question are far lower than the resolution of the measurements, and so all they are doing is playing out an exercise in confirmation bias, although they are doing it despite a lack of confirmation from disparate sources, rather than because of any ACTUAL confirmation from these disparate data sources.
The above is what warmistas have done with every single data set they control, which is pretty close to all of them: They change them to show exactly what they want everyone to think is occurring, even though prior to adjusting, NONE of the data sets show what they want everyone to think.
Please see my previous post titled something like ‘ARGO—fit for purpose ?’ Turns out the original ARGO deployment had two T sensors, one good, one suspect. So the fabled biased corrections simply took out those floats that proved to have a faulty T sensor. Only one T sensor type since, despite 5 different ARGO float manufacturers. I described its accuracy and calibration in detail in my long ago ARGO post. Please either read past stuff here or do your own research before posting stuff that basically is not true. Please.
Rud, I do read a lot of stuff here, and I also do a lot of my own research.
But I do not think anyone can read every article ever posted here.
But I have read the linked article describing how they “corrected ocean cooling” that ARGO measured.
And it does not talk about the adjusting ocean cooling based on a study of the calibration of the ARGO floats, pulling them up and checking them, faulty sensors or calibration, or anything of the sort.
Instead it describes using a different data set to alter the results measured by ARGO.
I have also read several (possibly, probably even, not all) of the articles Willis Eschenbach has written here on the subject, and participated in many very long discussions of the subject right here.
I apologize for not having seen any discussion of what you are referring to here, regarding having refuted the criticism I noted above.
From my point of view, I have taken all of the information I am aware of and incorporated into my views on the reliability of the ARGO data and assertions of umpteen gazillion electron volts of energy being stored in the ocean.
Even the way the “warming” is reported smacks of dishonesty and disingenuity, by talking about a tiny fraction of a degree in terms of joules and Hiroshimas, thereby making a tiny and dubious number sound big and important.
I will happily find and read the article you mention.
In the meantime, I do not think I said anything that is demonstrably untrue, even if it is disputed and debatable.
At best, I will concede that Josh Willis probably learned at some point not to write articles in which he details how he and his ilk fudge data.
Please do. Else CRModerator and his on me lunch inspiring it was just wasted.
I remember I believe the first Willis presentation on the Argos data. He apologized for not finding enough heat.
From the linked article, Correcting Ocean Cooling:
“On a Thursday evening in February 2007, Josh Willis stood in front of his laptop, his wife cajoling him to get ready to go out to dinner. He looked with a sinking feeling at the map he had just made. Willis, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, specializes in making estimates of how much heat the ocean stores from year to year.”
Even at this point, the very first paragraph, one is struck by how the subject is presented. Here we have a guy who among the group of people warning us all of imminent catastrophe, and the result of a careful study of ocean heat content, using a brand new array consisting of a huge number of the most sensitive and perhaps most sophisticated devices every built to measure ocean heat content, informs him that the emergency does not exist.
Is he happy?
Oh, Hell no!
His reaction is dismay…a “sinking feeling”.
This is how warmistas react to data showing the world is not ending!
And the rest of the article details what he did about this opposite-of-alarming result…he made damn sure to change it!
Not the magnitude of the finding, but the very sign of it!
So if there is other information that may tend to offer a different perspective on the whole matter, as one of faulty sensors, excuse me if I am skeptical.
These guys are not honest about anything.
Rud, as true as your post may or not be, there’s a bias to be dealt with, and it is this: If the results confirm the bias, no further investigation is required. If the results do not confirm the bias, an investigation IS required. The result over time is a skewing of data toward one point of view to the exclusion of contrary evidence.
And now this bgwx person posts the ARGO “zetajoules” hockey stick graph over and over as if it has deep meaning (pun intended).
There is a weak sense of the word ‘faith’ which is to believe something without proof or good reason. CAGW may be based on an estimate or a hunch. But CAGW is based on faith in its strong sense, a religious movement. It is apocalyptic, millenarian, and salvific, so facts have little bearing (at least for now). You couldn’t stop the Crusades with some facts about what was really going on in Jerusalem.
Thanks Mark. I learned two new words today.
Salvific, PROBABLY. what WAS THE OTHER ONE?
(Apologies for UC. do not want to rewrite.)
Dudley
Millenarian.
In what is (I believe) an unfortunate enhancement of that theme, we are now witnessing human sacrifice in Ukraine as a result of the green crazies demonization, and Putin’s weaponization of (once)affordable fossil fuels.
“ALL temperature change in any system is due to an imbalance between the rates of energy gain and energy lost.”
This can be misleading if applied to the greenhouse effect and Earth’s average atmospheric temperature. The average atomospheric temperature can experience wild swings that have nothing to do with an imbalance between energy gained and energy lost via IR radiation from the Earth. In an El Niño, the average temperature spikes when hot water that was stored in the Pacific Warm Pool is transferred to the atmosphere. There are many other naturally occurring phenomena—the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation, The Pacific Decadal Oscillation, and others as yet to be discovered—that can cause transient heating or cooling of the atmosphere, but that have nothing to do with an enhanced greenhouse effect.
Thomas
I agree with you, but I think Roy does also. He is trying to explain something extremely complex in the simplest of ways.
In addition to your great comment, many of theses “naturally occurring phenomena” interact with each other on forever changing timeframes.
And yet, he did say “I still provisionally side with the view that warming has been mostly human-caused (and this says nothing about whether the level of human-caused warming is in any way alarming).” A rather odd, and unscientific stance.
Advice please.
Roy mentions
“That tiny imbalance can be compared to the 5 to 10 Watt per sq. meter uncertainty in the ~240 Watt per sq. meter average flows in and out of the climate system. We do not know those flows that accurately.”
These uncertainties are made up of the individual uncertainties in each phenomena ( for example albedo of ocean or Sahara ).
My question is how do these individual uncertainties change with time?
Read Crichton’s “State of Fear”. Man made global warming is a MYTH. And now it is a weaponized LIE brought to you by the same globalist scum who brought you covid and the death jab they pretend is a vaccine.
And the same globalist scum are now bringing you the “Putin is evil and invaded innocent Ukraine” lie. But everyone here seems to have fallen for that one.
WUWT readers are rightly skeptical of the global warming hysteria, but on all other issues they seem to be as clueless as the Breitbart GOPe water carriers.
Here’s an interesting point of view:
Tulsi Gabbard is the only person in the Democrat landscape fit to be president.
Go back to your fascist Russia, scumbag.
Putin seems to be getting a lot of protests from Russian citizens over the war.
I saw the Russian police arrest an old, feeble grandmother for holding up a sign protesting the war.
I guess Putin has plenty of prison space. He may need it.
Innocent governments don’t usually have to seal their people off from any and all information not approved at the highest levels of government.
Russia has arrested more of their own people for protesting this war, then the number of Ukrainian soldiers they have managed to kill. Though the number of Ukrainian civilians killed is probably higher.
It’s not just Putin. Isolated Russia got locked into a paranoid mind-space in which the Ukraine invasion became inescapable. The rest of the world could have done more over the last 3 decades to recognise and try to break them out of this mind-space. They/we did not. I’m still trying to figure out whether a defeated Russia would be a good thing or not.
Net surface energy balance components have never been resolved better than 10-20% error. This even with equipment specifically designed to measure such things, such as the Cabauw tower. https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.363.3967&rep=rep1&type=pdf
This is true but jumping to the conclusion that it is the result of an imbalance in the surface radiative flux is WRONG. The ONLY way deep oceans can warm in a matter of decades is by a reduction in net evaporation rate – transfer of latent heat from oceans to land. This has been the case for hundreds of years now as the NH land masses have increasing solar intensity due to orbital precession.
No climate model has predicted the observed reduction in freshwater runoff over the past 60 years. Reduced runoff is the result of reduced net evaporation from oceans and that is consistent with more heat retention in the deep oceans as evaporation induced upwelling slows down.
No no no, this is awful:
Quote:”ALL temperature change in any system is due to an imbalance between the rates of energy gain and energy lost
Good grief, even my dear old mother (RIP) noticed as a much when I introduced her to a dehumidifier for her expansive Cumbrian farmhouse.
She swore blind that it made ‘the whole house feel warmer’
OKaaaaay, so it was pumping maybe 60 watts (peak, it ran maybe 50% duty cycle so 30Watts average) of electrical energy into the place – would that much energy (power) have altered much – while an oil-powered AGA cooker in the kitchen was pumping 4kW into the place continuously?
So why did my mum notice and say that 60Watts from the dehumidifier made such a difference?
Maybe because her monetisation didn’t depend…………
I agree 100%. I think that natural factors have a significant role in the warming trend, after natural factors didn’t just magically stop in 1977. It’s a shame how 97% of the scientists can’t muster that, if there is a 97% consensus (are there any quality studies that contradict that claim by the way?).
Also in Salt Lake City where I live, we are under a winter storm warning and it’s going to snow all night until noon tomorrow according my weather forecast and I think this monstrous storm will break a record. It’s also going to be VERY cold this next week with highs in the low 30s and even high 20s, so take that AGW alarmists! No snow my ass!
Faith is a logical domain of trust. Science in the near-frame. Religion is a behavioral protocol.
There is an even more fundamental faith-based question underlying the whole climate issue. That is – “is it OK for the human race to exist on earth at all?”
The science of ecology tells us that every one of the millions of living species on earth, change the earth in some way. The way all those changes fit together results in the biosphere, whose effect on earth is a good one, as seen in the Gaia effect by which life modifies the earth system to the mutual advantage of both.
But the human species is different, is it not? We have covered one percent or so of the earth’s surface with our built structures. Farmland accounts for a larger percentage. We have altered the atmosphere and climate, and driven some species to extinction, like to dodo and Tasmanian wolf.
We humans are, surely, an exception? The living species that is bad, not good for the earth. Should we be here at all? Was biting into that apple of evolved intelligence and big brains, such a great sin and a great fall for the whole earth?
Well no. We are a species like any other – not gods or angels or demons. Just apes with oddly big heads. And believe it or not, the laws of ecology and Gaia by which we interact with the biosphere are the same as for any other living species. Our existence has not changed any law of nature. The fine structure constant of the electron is still about 1/137.
The human race is here to stay. We will likely remain a dominant species on the earth for millions, maybe hundreds of millions of years. Already other living species and whole ecosystems are adapting to our presence to mutual advantage – as life always does. Birds and bats will learn to dodge wind turbines. Whales will still communicate despite ships and offshore turbines. Some animals are losing fear of humans and even asking them for help occasionally.
Farmed animals like cows, sheep, even fish, and also pets and laboratory animals show the biosphere to be as good as ever at exploiting and filling new niche opportunities for life. This is not an abomination. These animals don’t need to be “liberated” from this commensal life they have found.
It’s all actually OK. Believe it or not. It’s OK for us humans to be here.
That’s an excellent point, and one I’ve thought about extensively. I can think of no cogent reason to view humans as anything other than another species resident in the natural environment.
Good to see Dr. Roy Spencer posting again.
“What this means is that recent warming could be mostly natural…and we would never know it.” True enough.
But we can also go to the high-resolution NOAA visualizations of imager data from the GOES geostationary satellites to lose the fear of non-condensing GHGs entirely. Grasp the implications of the motion and the wide range of radiance values converted into brightness temperature indicated by color-coding. The planet is a huge array of highly variable emitter/reflector elements powered by absorbed and stored energy. There is no way, as I see it, for heat energy to become “trapped” – accumulated to harmful effect in the land and oceans – by what GHG’s do.
Pasted below is a link to the viewer website for the GOES-EAST full disk images. This link is set for a 48-image animation for IR Band 16 (the “CO2” channel centered at a wavelength of 13.3 microns.) It takes a moment to load.
Bottom line: Sure, there is the static “greenhouse effect” as we are reminded by commenters here. But the atmosphere is obviously not static, and when visualized like this from space, its performance is not like a “trap” at all. The lateral and vertical motions change everything about where to expect the heat (i.e. absorbed energy) to end up.
https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES/fulldisk_band.php?sat=G16&band=16&length=48&dim=1
The Null Hypothesis states that the warmup since the LIA, which has fluctuated wildly is primarily natural. Whatever man’s contribution to it has been, it is small, and entirely inconsequential. All else is mere hand-waving.
Even the Warmunists know this, having moved on to an even more outrageous claim: that our CO2, aka “carbon” is now causing “extreme weather”.
The more they lie…
Dr Spencer, humanity is feeding the oceans with sewage, with nitrate, phosphate and silica run-off from farming, we are smoothing the surface with oil spills, run-off and surfactants. The ecosystem must be changing and there is no reason that the albedo remains the same. See SeaWifs data for an out of date idea of how much light oil we are letting run to the sea.
Perhaps the data exists about how phytoplankton populations change when overfed — my bet is that the silica will benefit the oleaginous plankters most, and we should see massive blooms together with an anomalously large warming signal where the pollution is particularly heavy. See Lake Michigan, Superior, Tanganyika, and, the prime examples, the Sea of Marmara and the Black Sea. Dying diatoms release lipids which are particularly effective.
More smooth, fewer waves, fewer CCNs, less evaporation. Etc.
I’ve seen a smooth from abeam Porto to a couple of hundred miles short of Madeira, thousands of square miles. Picture available of a little bit of it.
To check out this idea would cost a few million dollars. If surface pollution contributes to AGW then quantifying its effects could save much more — the more other things warm the planet the less urgent ids the pursuit of Net Zero.
JF
“given the lack of evidence to the contrary, I still provisionally side with the view that warming has been mostly human-caused”
That point of view is unworthy of a scientist. You ought to assume the null hypothesis.
As I see it, Roy thinks there is a ‘greenhouse gas effect‘ in which ONLY radiatively active gases such as carbon dioxide and water vapour warm the surface, on average, +33C above the temperature it would otherwise be.
What evidence is there for this idea? What experiments and observations, done with modern equipment, demonstrate it? There’s no evidence at all for a greenhouse gas effect. There may be some evidence for an atmospheric warming effect, but that is an entirely different thing which depends on all gases in the atmosphere.
Not only that,
Since Obama, 2008, funding of physical climate sciences quadrupled to about $4 billion per year. But, despite getting nearly all the money, alarmists can’t do basic experiments / observations to show their previous greenhouse gas effect (GHGE)! That’s because the GHGE is insignificant, and the models they use to project it are scientific fraud. Good observations / experiments will falsify their models.
“the ocean warming-based imbalance of 1 Watt per sq. meter“
What kind of watts are causing the imbalance? Do they come from the sun or “back-radiation”. Mentioning radiative forcing without telling us what kind of radiation it is, ain’t scientific. Warmists must show warming due to back-radiation. That’s what their models project. Yet they mostly show fake warming caused by their own temperature data manipulations – AKA homogenization. Then, they attribute it to people.
The sheer amount of bad science they do and bad faith they show has convinced me they’re fraudsters.
That CO2 levels have risen is a matter of fact.
That the CO2 in question is of human origin is a matter of fact
That surface temperatures have risen is a matter of fact.
Science clearly shows a link between more CO2 and rising temperatures – inescapable basic physics.
We don’t need models to show us there has been climate change.
That some Co2 is of human origin is fact, nothing else. That surface temps have risen is immaterial. What link can you show ?
The climate in my region is still the same as it was in 1964 when I moved there,
That is a FACT!
The sad thing is that griff actually believes that if CO2 rises and temperatures increase, this proves that CO2 caused the increase.
Then again, griff believes, not thinks.
Science clearly shows a link between more CO2 and rising temperatures
The toss of a coin would be just as good. At any time and place on earth temperatures are either rising or falling on fractal timescales.
As we already saw in the 1970’s, still visible through all the airbrushing, if we happen to be in a cooling phase the “science” would firmly attribute that to us also.
Looks like we’re condemned to being responsible for all weather/climate from now on.
Yes it does, just not in the way you think it does on “climate” timescales (30 years or longer).
Thank you for mentioning the issue with the uncertainty of the numbers – IMO that is a huge problem with arguing that we know enough, based on models, to act in the drastic manner as suggested by e.g., the net zero concept. What I find equally disturbing is the argument that the collective precision of climate models is somehow an indication of their accuracy. As any decent scientist knows, the two are not the same.
And the Marxism underlying most climate catastrophists is so contradictory and disproven that it can only be accepted on faith.
Nobody has yet shown where my empirical approach is wrong, they just ignore evidence based approaches, perhaps because they can only think in models? Too real?
Here I go again.
?dl=0
I simply take the natural proxy record and see how different the current rise from the LIA is from that of the MWP and RWP, both of which the IPCC denies in order to attribute all change to AGW.
It is immediately clear that there is no significant anomaly in this current warming as compared with the MWP and RWP, so nothing to attribute to humans/co2/eating bambi. 2 deg range, 0.7 deg pc rate, when on the move, up or down, and 1Ka period. Simples. They must be different in fact, as there are at least three dominant convolved frequencies so they will interfere variably.
I don’t deny some effect on the lapse rate from increased radiative scattering, but suggest it is in fact mostly negated by the natural control of the Roy Spencer global 2.6W/m^2 natural feedback of the planetary control system. The planet is closely controlled by the oceanic feedback, not an open loop system. Tipping points for small effects are obvious bunk, modellers’ delusions.
Not sure how you made the 2.6w/m^2 but John believes it, so I will. For others, it reflects the change in the 104W/m^2 of evaporative and convective cooling and the consequential 50W/m^2 low level cloud albedo. Simple, powerful. There are other effects. These two are the Daddies.
Better to prefer the observation of nature to the predictions of modellers?
Because observation is the test of theory, not vice versa.
Models are not proven, or provable, science. Arguing about them is like arguing about the reality of a fairy tale or a Hollywood movie. They are not real, so debate is pointless.
What do the observations say? Nothing to see here. QED. Kiss?