Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
[UPDATE: Dr. Roy has most graciously apologized over at his blog, and he has my profound thanks. See—told you he’s a good guy.]
Sadly, I’m in a disagreement with a very good man and a very good scientist, Dr. Roy Spencer. Dr. Roy and Dr. John Christy are the brains behind the satellite measurements of the temperature of the atmosphere. Unfortunately, nearly a decade ago he falsely accused me of plagiarism by saying:
I’ve previously commented on Willis thermostat hypothesis of climate system regulation, which Willis never mentioned was originally put forth by Ramanathan and Collins in a 1991 Nature article.
There’s a simple reason I didn’t mention it. R&C’s hypothesis was as follows:
Observations made during the 1987 El Nio show that in the upper range of sea surface temperatures, the greenhouse effect increases with surface temperature at a rate which exceeds the rate at which radiation is being emitted from the surface. In response to this ‘super greenhouse effect’, highly reflective cirrus clouds are produced which act like a thermostat shielding the ocean from solar radiation. The regulatory effect of these cirrus clouds may limit sea surface temperatures to less than 305 K.
Heck, the essence of their hypothesis is obvious from the title of R&C’s study, which is “Thermodynamic regulation of ocean warming by cirrus clouds deduced from observations of the 1987 El Niño”.
Cirrus clouds.
Now, my hypothesis is that emergent phenomena such as thunderstorms regulate the temperature, particularly via the timing of their emergence. I’ve said nothing about a “super greenhouse effect”. I’ve said nothing about “cirrus clouds”. Read the link just above. No mention of either one. The one and only similarity is that we both use the word “thermostat”.
In addition, R&C’s hypothesis is limited to explaining the upper-temperature limit of the “Pacific Warm Pool” in the western Pacific, a very small part of the ocean.
My hypothesis linked above, on the other hand, covers all areas where we see thermally driven thunderstorms, which is a large percentage of the planet. And my hypothesis does not attempt to explain, or even discuss, the temperature of the Pacific Warm Pool.
And because the two hypotheses are totally different, I saw no reason to cite R&C’s hypothesis.
Why am I bringing this up now, nearly a decade later? Well, it’s because from time to time over the entire decade and right up until today, people have been saying things like “Willis can’t be a real scientist. Dr. Roy Spencer accused him of plagiarism, and Dr. Roy is a real scientist”.
The most recent time it happened, I lost the plot, and believe it or not, I actually said bad words. So I re-opened the discussion with Dr. Roy on his blog here. I asked him to either provide evidence that Ramanathan discussed the timing of thunderstorm emergence or to retract his statement.
Sadly, Dr. Roy hasn’t done either one. Instead, he’s simply claimed that my hypothesis about the daytime emergence of thunderstorms is wrong because the peak rain time over the open ocean is at night. He said that I was conflating thunderstorms near islands with deepwater thunderstorms, viz:
First of all, the diurnal peak in oceanic convection occurs at night, not during the daytime. Only near islands (or over the continents) does it shift to the afternoon, which is a local sea breeze effect around islands.
I have no idea what that has to do with his claim that I did not give proper credit to Ramanathan. Whether my hypothesis about the timing of emergence is true or not is immaterial to that question.
However, objections to my hypothesis matter even if they’re totally unrelated to the question of false accusations of plagiarism. And unlike Dr. Roy, I’ve done extensive blue-water sailing in tropical regions, so I was basing my hypothesis on my experience rather than theory.
But as an aficionado of data, his claim forced me to look at open-ocean tropical rainfall data. For this, I used the TAO buoy data from the buoys on the Equator. Here are the locations of the eight equatorial TAO buoys in question.
Figure 1. Equatorial TAO buoys used in this story, shown in red. Hollow squares do not have 10-minute rainfall data.
And here is the rainfall averaged across those 8 TAO buoys, by ten-minute intervals.
Figure 2. Average rainfall by ten-minute intervals, TAO buoys. Black/yellow line is a lowess smooth of the data.
So my memory of the tropical ocean is verified by observations of the open ocean rainfall. As I said in my original post linked above, the low point in the rain is in the morning. This is followed by a sudden increase in rain that starts just before noon, the sharpest increase in the 24-hour period. This leads to an afternoon peak in rainfall, due to the warming of the surface and the ensuing late-morning formation of first a cumulus field and then the afternoon emergence of the thunderstorms. This is exactly as I discussed in my hypothesis.
And Dr. Roy is also right, the largest peak of rainfall is in the early morning hours. Both are true. Go figure.
I focused on the daytime changes for a simple reason—that’s when the sun is shining, so that is when the cumulus field and the ensuing thunderstorms have the greatest cooling effect on the radiation balance. Why the greatest effect? Because in addition to all the cooling effects that they have both day and night, during the day they reflect hundreds and hundreds of watts per square meter of solar radiation.
And because the daytime cumulus field and the thunderstorms have such a large effect on the surface temperature, the timing of their emergence is critical to the size of the effect. If the surface is cool and the cumulus/thunderstorms form later in the day, hundreds of watts per square meter of extra sunlight comes in to warm the ocean. And the reverse is true. When the surface is warmer and the cumulus/thunderstorms form earlier, a large amount of sunlight is blocked and the ocean is cooled.
On the other hand, Ramanathan and Collins, as far as I know, said nothing about the timing of the emergence of the cumulus field/thunderstorms.
So that’s where the situation stands with Dr. Roy and myself. Part of the tragedy for me is that I have a variety of scientific heroes. And from the time well before I met Dr. Roy up to the present, he and Dr. Christy have been my heroes … and still are. Hey, whether or not Dr. Roy and I might disagree, they’ve both done an amazing piece of work using the Microwave Sounding Unit to calculate atmospheric temperatures.
In any case, I wanted to raise this again in the hopes that Dr. Roy and I could put it behind us. Please do NOT insult or rag on Dr. Roy in the comments. He’s one of the good guys, and this has only come up again because I’m bone-tired of folks accusing me of plagiarism and citing Dr. Roy as their authority. Not true, not fair.
Here on our hillside, blessed rain is forecast … which of course means I have to get out my ladder and mess with the roof. Ah, the joys of home ownership.
Let me say in closing that I’ve been suspended from Twitter for a week now. I have no idea why. It was my belief that I was coloring inside the lines, and they don’t give any reason. I discuss the suspension on my blog in a post called “In Twitter Suspense“. And a copy of my most recent letter to the appeals board is here.
So if any of my friends are on Twitter, can I ask you to email @elonmusk to ask that my suspension be lifted? My Twitter handle is @WEschenbach.
Thanks to all, including thanks to Dr. Roy for all of his good work.
w.
AS USUAL: I politely request that when you comment, you quote the exact words you are discussing. This helps greatly in avoiding the kinds of misunderstandings that the interwebz are famous for.
Happy Thanksgiving to you and Roy. 🦃
I appreciate your posts.
Did you ever make up with the David guy at Joanne’s blog?
My only suggestion to both parties is that they seek out Michael Donnelly’s latest research on the Hadley tropospheric circulation model which he demonstrates is wrong. It’s not circulatory, it is (as Michael describes it) a pendulum effect according to the most precise balloon data available.
Thanks for that tidbit HotScot.
Speaking of pendula, another is the rainfall Willis highlights. There is an energy pendulum which is that the warming sun starts the cloud cover accumulating, as Willis points out, which leads to rain. As it cools, rainfall can increase as the system’s enthalpy collapses. The embedded energy pendulum swings to “Greater” then swings back to “Lesser” as the whole day progresses. There is no reason to expect that as the clouds are rising and spreading, that it must rain proportionately to the cloud cover.
Another analogy has that the morning sun spins up an energy flywheel which continues to turn well after sunset. It must be like this because every morning the atmosphere is in its ground state, plus or minus a small residual.
And yes, Dr Roy should withdraw his claim that Willis failed to cite a previous source for the idea. Failing to do so is unbecoming.
There are two other ideas which are the Lindzen Iris hypothesis and one from Prof Lu (Univ of Waterloo) whose idea is that the planetary heat outlet is Antarctica with an ozone-mediated valve similar to the Iris. All four hypotheses are viable and have data to back them.
Crispin, you say:
Dr. Roy has most graciously done that over at his blog, and has my thanks.
w.
Good!
HotScot
I have seen similar irregular, with no set rythm pulses from the equator to both poles. The pendulum “pulses” are created by convection pulses at low latitudes. As the vapor bursts into the atmosphere, the pulse when it reaches the south pole causes cooling over the 50 to. 70 south latitudes, and warming in the Arctic.
The pulses are also responsible for tropical cyclone initiation and rapid acceleration.
The R&C paper was published in 1991….are they still around to comment?
Ramanathan is alive.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veerabhadran_Ramanathan
Also Collins:
https://eesa.lbl.gov/profiles/william-collins/
Ramanathan would like to bury his paper because it does not fit with IPCC religion and he is a member of the cult.
It is exactly as you say ……
https://breadonthewater.co.za/2022/11/20/the-lord-of-the-weather/
Go back to 89, Atmospheric Radiation, Goody;Yung section 9.4.3:
Convective models, cumulus version, believe lt started with Lindzen(82)
Go back to 89, Atmospheric Radiation, Goody;Yung section 9.4.3:
Convective models, cumulus version, believe lt started with Lindzen
You don’t have to visit Florida, Hawaii, the Galapagos or even Rocky Mountain National Park, to know … well just about anywhere like say Brown Deer, WI to know that it generally rains in the afternoon. Morning rainbows are rare.
Rare? I am on the east coast USA and expect rain in the morning from a front…rather common. The tropics have a different weather animal.
Tropical storms tend to produce super-cooled cloud tops, reducing emissions TOA to a range of about 100W/m2. Relative to surface emissions in the 450W/m2 region, you get a local GHE of about 350W/m2. So yes, you could call it a “super greenhouse effect”. However I am not certain if these cloud tops should be called “cirrus clouds”.
In order to understand why the ocean does not like to warm beyond certain levels, I think data on the evaporation rate are crucial. I have not found much about it, but apparently they change by a factor of 20 between night min and daytime max. That is not just because of temperature, but also because of insolation.
Under clear skies at noon the evaporation rate must be intense and the loss of latent heat will offset a good part of the energy added by the sun. But to quantify this, again, we need data..
Tropical warm pools have an evaporation and condensing limit around 7mm/day. However they get rainfall that can reach 15mm/day in the Indian Ocean during monsoon and typically 12mm/day in the Pacific because 30C produces the most powerful convective towers possible over ocean water and are always mid level convergence and high level divergence zones
This shows low level air convergence into the 30C water surrounding PNG at the present time.
https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/ocean/isobaric/700hPa/overlay=sea_surface_temp/orthographic=-216.65,-3.82,730/loc=146.421,2.996
This shows convergence to the Pacific warm pool in an El Nino phase.
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2016/01/13/0000Z/ocean/isobaric/700hPa/overlay=sea_surface_temp/orthographic=-164.67,-19.36,730/loc=-157.683,-7.395
This is the same time showing the divergence from the warm pool at high altitude:
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2016/01/13/0000Z/wind/isobaric/250hPa/orthographic=-164.67,-19.36,730/loc=-157.683,-7.395
John, for the sake of newbies to this site and those just plain confused, its better to make numbers more specific by referring to upwelling IR, reflected SW, and so on….
“It was my belief that I was coloring inside the lines,..”
I have zero idea what that means but the Twitter suspension was still likely done by AI. Musk has fired most of the idiots but retraining the AI may take much longer.
“Coloring in between the lines” is an American? idiom meaning following the rules.
w.
In Dutch we have the exact same expression.
It’s referring how kids are taught to fill in a coloring book picture: don’t colr outside of the lines in the picture. Lines are rules, stay inside of them. Just like “don’t cut line at the checkout counter”…
Ah, so that’s why I flunk Kindergarten :<)
Happy Thanksgiving to all!
As I have told Willis privately, the diurnal cycle in deep moist convection, including whether it peaks in the afternoon over land, or the early morning over ocean, is irrelevant to the idea that moist convection (and the associated cloudiness) supports a “Thermostat Hypothesis” of climate stability. Climate models — even those that produce large amounts of warming — have diurnal cycles which are unrelated to how much long-term warming those models produce.
Just to be clear, we are not talking about whether clouds and precipitation systems cool the current climate system. It’s been known for a very long time that they do. What we are talking about how these systems then respond to some warming (or cooling) influence away from the current climate state.
Now, I have also advocated that clouds and the processes which control them (e.g. water vapor removal by precipitation processes) are probably what keep climate sensitivity low. I’m only pointing out that, if there was clear evidence from observations that clouds will change in a warming climate in such a way to reduce that warming, it would have been published. It’s a complex problem. Most researchers think they change in ways that amplify warming. I don’t believe it, since there is huge uncertainty on the issue.
We already know that any planetary system with an atmosphere (even Venus) has a stable climate, because we don’t see planets exploding with runaway warming, so any “Thermostat Hypothesis” (there have been several over the years) must be more specific… what constitutes a “thermostat”? No warming in response to “turning up the heat”? Only 0.5 deg. of warming? 3 deg of warming? Even the hottest of the climate models stops warming once the temperature reaches the point that the extra IR emission to outer space finally stops the warming. So, what does “thermostat” mean?
The question really is, “What specific process(es) can be demonstrated to reduce the warming in response to a forcing?” (say, a 5% increase in solar output, since mentioning CO2 is taboo with many people here). Nothing I have researched, or Willis has presented, can be claimed to have done that. Only time will tell.
(And I now have deja vu because I think I’ve said all of this before.) 😉
-Roy
Open ocean surface cannot sustain a temperature above 30C. This temperature limit is unaffected by CO2. The limit is the result of the Level of Free convection approaching the altitude os 273K, which is solely a function of the buoyancy of water in air and the total air mass. The convective instability that occurs above 30C ocean surface results in persistent cloud; both cumulonimbus during the unstable phase and cirrus during the solidification, recharge phase.
There is a detailed description of the regulating process here:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/07/23/ocean-atmosphere-response-to-solar-emr-at-top-of-the-atmosphere/.
The Nino34 region of the tropical oceans is not warming. The Southern Ocean is cooling. The water south of Greenland is cooling as calving increases.
The so called “Global Warming” has occurred on Earth at 100kyr intervals for the last 500kyr. It is an inevitable consequence of the precession cycle. Greenland is gaining in elevation and permanent snow cover. The Northern Hemisphere snow extent is increasing every year.
As the NH oceans warm, the snowfall will increase and will eventually overtake snow melt – so far only being observed on Greenland. It will likely carry on for 4 precession cycles before there is enough calving to shut down the NH water cycle. as occurred about 20kyr ago.
The CO2 demonisers are missing this historic change for human civilisation because they are blind to anything other than the CO2 warming nonsense.
It is worth noting that most rapid warming is occurring on land north of 40N in January, averaging 3.7C per century since 1950. The only way that happens is due to increased latent heat advection resulting in higher snowfall.
Greenland plateau warming is a good example – per attached. Massive increase from MINUS 30C to MINUS 22C in 70 years.
The single insight that climate models offer is that CO2 does nothing because no climate model shows the ocean south of Greenland cooling. No climate model shows the Nino34 region temperature steady. No climate model shows the Southern Ocean and Antarctica cooling. No climate model replicates the steady rise in January temperature over the land north of 40N- the model average has a steady trend till 1980 then an abrupt uptick. The warming has been consistent since 1950.
Thanks, Dr. Roy, but you are still avoiding the elephant in the room—your false accusation that I plagiarized my ideas from Ramanathan, or that I should have cited him.
[UPDATE: As I said, Dr. Roy is one of the good guys, and after writing this, I find that he has indeed apologized over at his blog. Dr. Roy, my profound thanks to you. You’ve put the issue to bed once and for all.]
As to “What specific process(es) can be demonstrated to reduce the warming in response to a forcing?”, see the graphic below. It clearly demonstrates that at almost all temperatures above -5°C, cloud cooling increases with increasing temperature. And at the high end, it increases extremely rapidly, at up to 10 W/m2 per degree.
This is clear evidence that clouds reduce the warming in response to a forcing that warms the surface.
w.
Good to see the quarrel patched. Now, on with the science!
The above graphic by WE of CERES data with the %of Earth’s surface shown….is absolutely groundbreaking and will be found in textbooks in the near future.
“This is clear evidence that clouds reduce the warming in response to a forcing that warms the surface.”
Evidence! That’s what we are looking for! Thanks for providing some, Willis. 🙂
I think you are correct, on the basis of Le Chatelier’s Principle, which is one of the most basic principles underlying physical-chemical systems. If clouds responded to warming in such a way as to amplify the warming, that describes an inherently unstable system with a tendency to runaway heating (or cooling). This is not what we see in the climate, at local or global levels. Climate is more or less in equilibrium on the large scale.
I suspect that most climate scientists have forgotten all about Monsieur Le Chatelier and his principle; it’s probably too nineteenth-century for them. The beauty of Le Chatelier is that — in a large and complex system — you don’t have to know all the details of how it works, just that it does work.
Thanks, Rocky. I’ve been beating this drum for years, but folks keep telling me things like “That only works for chemical systems in equilibrium” yada yada …
w.
“I think you are correct, on the basis of Le Chatelier’s Principle, which is one of the most basic principles underlying physical-chemical systems. If clouds responded to warming in such a way as to amplify the warming, that describes an inherently unstable system with a tendency to runaway heating”
That’s right. We don’t see that happening, now or in the past, regardless of the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
There is no runaway Greenhouse Effect.
It is the persistent of clouds that matter. It does not matter if it is the unstable stage with cumulonimbus formation or the solidification (recharge) phase with cirrus cloud formation.
The convective instability that produces thunderstorms requires the formation of an LFC. When the ocean surface builds to 30C, the LFC is close to 273K altitude. That means there will only be brief periods of clear sky. The LFC cannot be sustained above 273K because there sunlight would be permanently blocked. The temperature regulation of 30C requires just under 200W/m^2 surface sunlight to be sustained.
The detail on the reason for cloud persistence can be found here:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/07/23/ocean-atmosphere-response-to-solar-emr-at-top-of-the-atmosphere/
Does the Time Of Day graph refer to the local time at each TOA bouy locations given the distance spanned by them?
Yes, local time.
w.
Dr Roy Spencer has posted an apology to his blog.
An Apology to Willis Eschenbach
My profound thanks to Dr. Roy, like I said, he’s one of the good guys. And Paul, thanks for bringing it to my attention.
w.
w – In Figure 2, over what period is the rainfall averaged? It looks far too random to be over a significant period.
It’s averaged over all extant buoy records. However, they have large gaps in them, presumably times when they’ve malfunctioned and it’s been a while before they could be accessed to fix them.
w.
Am I wrong to see increasing rainfall as a proxy for reducing upper atmosphere temperature?
Michael,
Good question, but I suspect that the details in each case make it hard to make it a useful assumption.
Geoff S
Short answer : Yes.
Less short answer : The relationship between “upper atmosphere temperature[s]” and “rainfall” is more complicated than you seem to think it is (/ want it to be ?) … and it isn’t clear what you mean by the “upper atmosphere” (exosphere or thermosphere ?) …
Long answer : The phrase I have most often seen associated with (global) warming is “a more active hydrological cycle”. The basic idea is “hotter equals more evaporation” combined with “what goes up must come down”.
A good (to me …) summary can be found in the Abstract to Pratap & Marconis (2022), copied below :
NB : The important part is not the details of the specific points they go into in that paper, I think the highlighted parts (mostly ?) cover the question you asked.
Hope this helps you.
Elon Musk on Twitter: “Should Twitter offer a general amnesty to suspended accounts, provided that they have not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam?” / Twitter
Thanks, Jim. No action yet, but I’m hoping for the best.
w.
The whole of WUWT is dangerous span from the perspective of the CO2 demonisers.
Willis:
I don’t care who came up with the thermostat idea, and nor should anyone else. All knowledge is stolen fair and square from the previous guy and it has been ever thus.
But — and here is the key — almost everyone that “steals” an idea puts a slightly different shine on it, and very often that new shine makes all the difference.
Your great talent, Willis, is the Iselin gambit, of making things “real simple.” You do it, mainly, with pictures.
Thank you, Willis, for your magnificent contributions, your good humor, your wit, and of course, for your gorgeous ex-fiancee.
Thanks, Chris, for your kind words. Appreciated.
Regards,
w.
Tweeted 🙂
Thanks, Street. Your support is appreciated.
w.
Hi Willis,
There are two buoys, one a degree or so north and another a degree or so south of each of three of the buoys you used for the 10 minute rainfall data. Maybe if you included these for rainfall data the trends would be a little less noisy.
I see that you can also grab sea surface temperature along with 10 minute rainfall; maybe that temperature data would be reasonable to plot against time of day and see how it correlates with rainfall.
Buoys span a region which changes in surface temperature with ENSO, with the easternmost buoys likely seeing some pretty low temperatures during the la Nina phase. Perhaps the data would be clearer if you looked and compared the averages for buoys at three locations: western, central, and eastern Pacific.
Elon ran a poll:
“Should Twitter offer a general amnesty to suspended accounts, provided that they have not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam?
3,162,112 votes· Final results
I responded:
Hilarious, Theo, can’t thank my supporters enough.
w.
Willis:
I checked for your account this morning, but it isn’t there, yet.
Saturday 11/26/2022 @ur momisugly 3:50 AM Eastern Standard Time.
A Willis Eschenbach twitter account did appear, one “Willis Eschenbach
@ur momisuglyWillisEschenba2″
This apparently fake account was created in November 2022 and appears to be an attempt to mock/spoof your account; “Joined November 2022”, before you are re-instated.
Once, you receive your account again, this is reportable as a duplicate account that fails to note itself as a parody account.
Musk has banned many pernicious duplicate accounts.
Not a fake. It was a second account that I tried to set up so I could protest my suspension. Unsuccessful.
Onwards, the amnesty is supposed to start next week.
w.
@elonmusk
please address the suspension of @Willis Eschenbach
. Free speech must cover all scientific disagreement of “global warming”. Consensus is not scientific.
Willis, how about posting the tweet here that got you suspended?
I would … but they don’t tell you which tweet it was.
I discuss this issue in my new post, “An Open Letter To @elonmusk“. Have a read.
w.
[UPDATE: Dr. Roy has most graciously apologized over at his blog, and he has my profound thanks. See—told you he’s a good guy.]
w.