Bob Irvine
The IPCC’s position, based on a doubling of CO2 concentration (CO2x2), is that an initial warming at equilibrium of 1.1°C without feedback is increased nearly 3-fold to about 3.0°C by strong net positive feedback.
This strong net positive feedback to small initial warming from increased CO2 concentration implies several improbable outcomes.
- Firstly, that CO2 must be the dominant control knob of the climate. A corollary of this is that nearly the entire 33°C Greenhouse effect would disappear if the 8°C CO2 component was removed. This despite the sun still beating strongly into the tropical oceans creating large quantities of water vapour, a strong GHG. In Lacis et al, 2010, the CO2 GHE was zeroed and consequently the modelled high feedback reduced global mean surface temperature by 34.8°C within 50 years. They used GISS 2° x 2.5° Model E (AR5 Version) to achieve this unlikely result.
- Secondly, all the models that include this high net feedback are running too hot and have been falsified.
- And thirdly, that there would be little or no change in temperature over the last few millennia followed by a sharp up-tick as CO2 concentrations increased from about 1950 onwards. The hockey stick graphs produced by the IPCC to support this narrative are very obviously either very poor science or corrupt. Take your pick.
The problem and paradox here is that all the IPCC’s known feedbacks when counted together produce a strong positive temperature reinforcement while real world measurements point to benign or even negative feedback.
WHAT IS THE IPCC’S NET CLIMATE FEEDBACK THAT CREATES THIS PARADOX
The IPCC AR4 (2007) defines its net climate feedback as follows.
In AOGCMs, the water vapour feedback constitutes by far the strongest feedback, with a multi-model mean and standard deviation for the MMD at PCMDI of 1.80 ± 0.18 W m–2 °C–1, followed by the (negative) lapse rate feedback (–0.84 ± 0.26 W m–2 °C–1) and the surface albedo feedback (0.26 ± 0.08 W m–2 °C-1). The cloud feedback mean is 0.69 W m–2 °C–1 with a very large inter-model spread of ±0.38 W m–2 °C–1 (Soden and Held, 2006).4
The IPCC AR6 (2019) changes some of these feedbacks significantly but ends up with approximately the same net feedback. The AR4 and AR6 feedbacks are compared in the table below. The lapse rate feedback (LRF) and the water vapour (WV) feedback have been combined in this table for comparison purposes.
| FEEDBACK | AR4 (2007) (W/M-2 °C-1) | AR6 (2019) (W/M-2 °C-1) |
| Combined WV + LRF | 0.96 ± 0.08 | 1.30 (1.15 to 1.47) |
| Albedo | 0.26 ± 0.08 | 0.35 (0.1 to 0.6) |
| Cloud | 0.69 ± 0.38 | 0.42 (-0.1 to 0.94) |
| Bio | N/A | -0.1 (-0.27 to 0.25) |
| Other (Approximate) | 0.19 | 0.04 |
| TOTAL | 2.1 | 2.1 |
Table 1 – Global temperature feedback for CO2 doubling in the IPCC’s AR4 and AR6.
You can see that if we multiply the AR4 and AR6 total (2.1) by the standard conversion factor (ƛ) 0.3 then plug the result into the standard feedback equation, we get the IPCC’s likely temperature at equilibrium after all feedback has acted.
Equation 1 – Equilibrium Temp. for CO2x2 (ECS) = 1.1/[1-(2.1×0.3)] = 3.0°C
The first thing to notice here is that the IPCC’s cloud feedback parameter is believed to have fallen significantly between 2007 and 2019 with this fall compensated for by a large rise in combined WV and LRF. One of the readers here may be able to offer a good explanation for this but it does seem unlikely considering the fall in Global Relative Humidity recorded by the UK Met Office, figure 2, and discussed below.
The other thing to notice is that the IPCC’s high feedback leads us very close to a crazy discontinuity as can be seen in figure 1, below. For example, if the LRF was not relevant or was removed then Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) (CO2x2) using the AR4 figures would become an improbable 9.16°C as per equation 2.
Equation 2 – Equilibrium Temp. CO2x2 (ECS) (2007) = 1.1/[1-(2.94×0.3)] = 9.16°C
Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) is increased by an improbable 6.16°C (9.16 – 3.0) simply by removing the LRF. This would occur, for example, if the hot spot above the tropics were less than expected or insignificant, something that appears to be the case. The atmosphere under this high feedback scenario would become very unstable and unlike the atmosphere we live with every day.
This may not be just wild conjecture as our understanding of average changes in emission at a warming average emission height are limited as can be seen by the IPCC’s large change in WV+LRF from 2007 to 2019. Although representing the same thing, they couldn’t even get their model spread (confidence limits) to overlap. What is going on here?
A consequence of this is that small changes in our understanding of the WV and LRF have a disproportionate effect on the estimated ECS.
This high net positive feedback to CO2x2 could, of course, be possible but to my mind is very unlikely, particularly given the temperature variation over recent millennia and the recent failure of the climate models that incorporate this high net feedback.
Figure 1 – Primary feedback compared to final equilibrium temperature, °C. Graph- Thanks to “The GH Defect…saving the planet from idiocy”.
To counter the IPCC’s high feedback, sceptical types like myself need to come up with a feasible alternate scenario. This is what I have tried to do in the next section.
POSSIBLE REASONS WHY NET CLIMATE FEEDBACK IS BENIGN OR POSSIBLY NEGATIVE
There are several possible reasons why net feedback could be significantly lower than the IPCC’s published range as outlined in table 1 including various negative cloud feedbacks that have not to date been included by the climate models. In addition to these the possibility that decreasing relative humidity would significantly lower feedback response in a warming world is discussed below.
Global Specific Humidity is following global temperature very closely, so the atmosphere is accumulating moisture as it warms. The problem for the climate models is that they assume that Global Relative Humidity will remain steady or increase slightly over the oceans as the planet warms. This is simply not happening according to the UK Met Office with significant implications for the WV feedback and its partner the LRF.
How much this would affect ECS and our understanding of the WV/LRF feedback is hard to say. What we can say is that it should increase the negative LRF feedback significantly compared to the positive WV feedback. The modelled signature of this WV feedback is a distinct warming high above the tropics. This has not occurred as expected and has caused many to doubt the models in this area. The falling Relative Humidity over the oceans could be related to and possibly help to explain the failure of this hot spot to materialize.
Figure 2 – Global time series of annual average relative humidity for the land (green line), ocean (blue) and global average (dark blue), relative to 1981-2010. The two-standard deviation ranges for uncertainty are shown combining the observation, sampling and coverage uncertainty. Credit: Met Office Climate Dashboard
Figure 3 – Global time series of annual average specific humidity for the land (green line), ocean (blue) and global average (dark blue), relative to 1981-2010. The two-standard deviation ranges for uncertainty are shown combining the observation, sampling and coverage uncertainty. Credit: Met Office Climate Dashboard.
Note: The Specific Humidity as seen in Figure 3 bears a striking resemblance to the UAH satellite temperature series while not matching the NASA GISS series well at all.
Development of these graphs is discussed here.
ESSD – Development of the HadISDH.marine humidity climate monitoring dataset (copernicus.org)
Here is a quote from Dr. Kate Willett that indicates the problem this falling Relative Humidity could have for the climate models.
“This decrease is difficult to explain given our current physical understanding of humidity and evaporation. For example, the expectation from climate models is that ocean relative humidity should remain fairly constant or increase slightly.”
Dr Kate Willett, a climate scientist at the Met Office Hadley Centre
Guest post: Investigating climate change’s ‘humidity paradox’ – Carbon Brief
Bony et al. discuss the relationship between Relative Humidity and feedback in the climate system below.
“As illustrated in Fig. 12, the free troposphere is particularly critical for the water vapor feedback, because humidity changes higher up have more radiative effect (Shine and Sinha 1991; Spencer and Braswell 1997; Held and Soden 2000; Marsden and Valero 2004; Forster and Collins 2004; Inamdar et al. 2004). In the Tropics, the upper troposphere is also where the temperature change associated with a given surface warming is the largest, owing to the dependence of moist adiabats on temperature. If relative humidity changes little, a warming of the tropical troposphere is thus associated with a negative lapse rate feedback and a positive upper-tropospheric water vapor feedback. As explained by Cess (1975), this explains a large part of the anticorrelation discussed in the introduction between the water vapor and lapse rate feedbacks of climate models (Fig. 1). It explains also why the magnitude of relative humidity changes matters so much for the magnitude of the combined water vapor–lapse rate feedbacks: a change in relative humidity alters the radiative compensation between the water vapor and lapse rate variations, so that an increase (decrease) in relative humidity will enhance (lessen) the water vapor feedback relative to the lapse rate feedback.”
CONCLUSION
The IPCC has indicated many times that they believe the science around global climate feedback is settled. How can this be reconciled with the published WV/LRF increasing significantly between their 2007 report and their 2019 report (Table 1). The published confidence limits don’t even overlap.
The climate model expectation is that relative humidity should remain steady or rise slightly with increased temperature. This is not happening (Figure 2) and cannot be reconciled with the large rise in WV/LRF between the 2007 and 2019 IPCC reports.
Unless somebody has a better explanation, it seems likely that the IPCC needed to keep the 3.0°C ECS for political reasons and simply altered the various feedback parameters to suit.
I think you are correct when you say “it seems likely that the IPCC needed to keep the 3.0°C ECS for political reasons and simply altered the various feedback parameters to suit.“. I wrote about this at WUWT many years ago, eg. https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/09/17/how-reliable-are-the-climate-models/ : “Parameters controlling the unknowns in the models were then fiddled with (as in the above IPCC report quote) until they got a match [to observation].“.
I also did some work on clouds more recently, where the data indicated that cloud feedback was negative. https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/05/31/clouds-havent-behaved-the-way-the-ipcc-or-the-models-say/
A virtual no-feedback effect of CO2, and resultant virtual primary change of surface temperature, is physically misleading.
The notion of calculating virtual feedback response kernels resulting from a virtual no-feedback temperature change is mathturbation with no real physical meaning.
Back to the drawing board. The whole idea borrows from a flawed framework.
This is such good advice. No one can understand anything about climate using averages across the entire globe.
This lack of insight is so pervasive that the qualifier “average” inevitably goes missing when referring to Average Global Surface Temperature to Average Global Relative Humidity.
Exactly. The entire paradigm of the greenhouse effect is wrong. Yes, GHGs are part of the reason the atmosphere is warmer but not in the way climate science assumes. Their problem stems from thinking radiation models can be used without considering what else is going on in the atmosphere. This is what leads to the initial wrong answer of 1.1 C. The real number today is zero.
What really happens is the lower atmosphere is warmed by radiation, conduction and latent heat. That energy then radiates/convects upward. It’s a dual process and ignoring a major component is always going to get the wrong answer. When both processes are considered together all the claimed warming effect disappears.
It has been unreasonable since the beginning to ever suppose the GCM simulations could diagnose or project the climate response to single-digit W/m^2 “forcings” from non-condensing GHGs. The dynamics of water vapor, clouds, and precipitation completely overwhelm the minor static warming effect experienced at the surface looking toward space.
https://climatereanalyzer.org/wx/todays-weather/?var_id=pwtr&ortho=1&wt=1
(Yes, a reanalysis is a model too but it’s not attempting to diagnose a small increment.)
The latent energy of a 25 kg/m^2 value of precipitable water is about 17,400 Wh/m^2, and a 25mm/hour rate of rainfall involves an energy conversion of 17,400 W/m^2.
It never made sense to me to think the models were anything but fancy ways to apply the predetermined “forcing/feedback” framing and produce a result. The results mean nothing at all. Maybe it’s just me.
I am in strong agreement with all of what you have written. I will nit pick on one fine point:
The results offer one really useful insight if you go into the detail of the models. They invariably show all regions of the globe having increasing temperature for every month of the annual cycle. That is the way CO2 is supposed to work. However the regional temperature trends vary enormously from month-to-month and direction.
So the single insight from climate models is that the climate does not respond as assumed and embodied in the models. No amount of twiddling parameters will ever change that because fundamental assumptions are wrong.
Any polynomial can be tuned to any record but the polynomial has zero predictive ability. Prediction requires an understanding of the significant variables and the physics of the significant processes in the climate system.
A fair point. I credit Pat Frank and Willis Eschenbach for their emulator equations showing how the GCMs are little more than forcing/feedback number generators as an end result.
This is exactly what I have experienced when looking at various locations around the globe. Several graphs here on WUWT of temperatures like Japan, etc. show this fact.
If CO2’s effects are radiative, then there is no reason that everywhere shouldn’t see the same temperature change over a long period of time. The fact that this is not occurring is proof that something is amiss in the models.
The fact that Dr. Frank showed that the models all turn into a linear output is sufficient evidence to me that the models are junk. That is fundamentally a canceling of the next glaciation occurrence. While I would like to believe that could be the case, history just doesn’t support that conclusion.
Indeed, it is straightforward to convince yourself that the “greenhouse” effect of CO2 (or water vapour) at surface level is not radiative at all. Just try to measure it. At night, at ambient temperature, the power transfer (Poynting vector) is all upward. It ranges from 0 to about 100 W/m^2 depending on the humidity. If CO2 reduces the upward heat loss from the surface at all, by thermalizing it, the effect is swamped by the water vapour. We live on a water planet, not a carbon dioxide planet…
The first word “Global” highlights the problem with understanding. It should be preceded with “average”.
Then realise you will never understand anything from looking at averages. Averages in climate are the result of a huge number of variables. Understanding is in the details of those variables requires a good deal of examination.
To give further insight into this and go some way to answering your question, I have attached a chart that shows the annual thermal response to solar forcing for land and ocean regions in the the classic zones of the two hemispheres.
There are 11 loops because there is no good data for land temperature in the polar region. This is only 11 regions but it shows how differently the regions respond.
Looking at the two loops in the temperate zone for the NH highlights an interesting point. Both land and ocean are reaching the same maximum temperature. That means that heat advection from ocean to land will be very low at that time. . Moisture over oceans will increase but moisture over land away from the coast will reduce as both warm up. Looking at the minimums of the two loops, there is a huge difference in temperature so winter advection from ocean to land is high and increasing because the ocean winter temperature is increasing while land autumn and winter sunlight is reducing.
Once you start looking into the detail you soon realise that ECS is so close to zero it is unmeasurable. You only need to look at temperature in detail to realise the truth of that. Most “global” warming is occurring in the Arctic region in winter. Greenland plateau has warmed 10C in January over the past 70 years. At the other end of the planet, Antarctica has cooled down but temperature measurements are sparse and no one really wants to know about places that are cooling down in our warming world.
“Understanding is in the details of those variables requires a good deal of examination.”
That is exactly what GCMs do. They do not deal in global averages – in fact they can’t. They solve partial differential equations locally, cell by cell, hour by hour, each variable accounted for.
Of course, once the GCM calculation is done, others can then deduce global averages if they want.
The missing piece in the GCMs is constraints on boundary conditions. OLR is a fixed proportion of surface flux on climate scales. The so-called optical depth is overwhelmed by convective adjustments. This is why the GCMs are not working.
Invoke this constraint and see what happens. To described climate change will thus require acknowledging the importance of transfers of radiant energy to-and from the global latent heat reservoirs. To date, this process is not computed in sufficient detail. The inter model spread in simulated latent flux exceeds 18 W m-2.
Rest assured, humanity does certainly impose an effect on the latent flux regime, by desiccating over 5 billion hectares of the landscape. Flux of mass from the surface (latent flux) has been replaced by tangible heat.
But when you look into the detail, they do physically impossible things like open ocean surface temperature exceeding 30C. The CSIRO model doing the physically impossible in the attached.
The invariably have every month of year with a warming trend everywhere. That is not is what is being observed.
The attached here compares the measured and modelled temperature of the top of the ice block in the NH.
Tell me how they get a block of ice to have an increasing surface temperature trend above 0C. Such unphysical nonsense can only occur in a parameterised model unrelated to the process physics.
I should have pointed the CMIP6 model mean has the top of Greenland getting to 8C by the end of the century. The models are SOOOOooo ridiculous. Anyone trying to defend them deserves a spot in either the naughty corner for telling fibs or the dunces corner for incompetence.
“Tell me how they get a block of ice to have an increasing surface temperature trend above 0C.”
It isn’t a block of ice. It is air temperature in a region 65-75N which includes considerable open ocean.
Silly point since the SST in the region is well below 8C. But on the remote possibility that the SST could get a lot higher than 8C to push up the average, I will look at just the land data from the models
Attached shows land only for the models.So land “only” shows the same rise to 8C. Why would the air temperature just above a block of ice change over any time frame?
Is that really land only? It looks identical to the previous one you showed.
They are vey much the same but the last one was both land and sea. The attached here is just land. It is identifiable by the “lan” in the heading.
Try Again. See if you can pick the difference. This one is definitely land.
In the attached, I have compared modelled and measured for a smaller region of the Greenland plateau with permanent ice cover. The model may be inappropriately reducing the ice extent when, in fact, ice cover on Greenland is expanding:
The entire island will have permanent cover by the end of the century.
Here the maximum measured has no trend while the modelled is rising at about 10C per century from 2000. It reaches -2C by 2100.
Nick,
I live seven kilometers outside town. I think of you often on my morning commute. Well, not you personally, just you’se guys.
You see, Nick, my climate is different from my butcher’s. Not weather, climate. The very grass upon which my dogs poop, are of different climatic zone than those in town. The elevation difference is about 10-20 meters only, with the only geographical feature between us a little stream a toddler can jump over.
I love looking at the clouds as I approach, trying to guess today’s weather in town. That’s when I smile, thinking how you’se guys think you can model clouds in blocks of a hundred miles, or 2.5 degrees, or zones, or whatever.
You’se guys must get out in the open more, but without all that fancy hiking gear. Walk barefoot for a mile in the woods, your mind may just clear from the nonsense you are honour bound to defend.
I shall not get into how you blokes think there are atmospheric diodes forcing radiation in one direction, my laughter sack is dry after yesterday’s Kerry smackdown.
Are you trying to tell us that the parameterization is entered cell by cell and that the parameters are dynamically changed as the “physics changes”? If not, then the claim that each cell can vary on its own is simply not true.
You’re havin’ a larf, aren’t you?
Bob Irvine’s overview of the feedback problem and the tweaking of relevant parameters by IPCC to maintain an elevated equilibrium doubled-CO2 sensitivity (ECS) is right on the button.
The error made by climatologists was to assume that differential feedback analysis, the usual method in control theory, was applicable to the climate. In this, they were and are wrong. The output signal in a feedback amplifier comprises a base signal, a perturbation signal and a feedback signal.
In standard control-theoretic applications, such as a process controller in a factory or a feedback amplifier in an electronic circuit to allow the signal to triumph over the noise, the feedback signal is by far the largest element in the total output signal – sometimes thousands of times the input signal (which is itself the sum of the base signal and the perturbation signal).
However, in climate – and climatologists had not realized this – it is the other way about. The base signal, the 260 K emission temperature, exceeds the sum of the natural and anthropogenic perturbation signals by an order of magnitude.
Therefore, the application by climatologists of differential feedback analysis serves only to conceal the fact that the absolute feedback strength, which perforce responds not just to the perturbation signals but to the entire input or reference signal, including emission temperature, is an order of magnitude smaller than the differential signals used in climatology.
Indeed, the interval of absolute feedback strengths corresponding to the entire [2, 5] K interval of IPCC’s currently-predicted ECS is [0.22, 0.27] W/m^2/K. The absolute values, and their interval, are so small that we have absolutely no way of constraining feedback strength to the extent of being able to determine where on IPCC’s implicit interval the true feedback strength lies, or even whether the true feedback strength falls on that interval at all.
Therefore, all predictions of ECS based on any feedback analysis, and that includes all ECS intervals predicted on the basis of feedback strengths derived from the outputs of general-circulation models (which do not themselves use feedback analysis), are no better than guesswork.
Precisely because the absolute feedback strength is so small, even tiny tweaks to its value have disproportionately large effects on ECS predictions, particularly at the high end, where, as Bob Irvine’s excellent graph shows, the response curve of ECS is rectangular-hyperbolic.
Correct climatologists’ error in forgetting that the Sun is shining and that, therefore, feedback responds to the sunshine-driven emission temperature and (in the Tropics at any rate) would do so even if there were no greenhouse gases in the air at all at the outset, and it becomes obvious that the entire case for doing anything at all on the basis of the official predictions collapses.
I shall be presenting all this to a very eminent Oxford professor next month, at his request. In academe, the worm is turning. Mr Irvine’s excellent article will prod it to turn a little faster. Bravissimo!
This part is right. From there on it goes down hill because it falls into the belief system that CO2 actually changes the surface energy balance.
Anyone who thinks Earth’s climate can be reduced to a single feedback loop with a CO2 control knob lacks basic understanding.
The most outlandish climate assumption is that CO2 can actually influence Earth’s energy balance in a measurable way.
Show me how you twiddle that CO2 control knob to get oceans to drop at 10mm a year and deposit 40mm a year of ice over all the land north of 40N. That is real climate change and requires real physics to understand not climate phiisics and electronic amplifiers.
Have your Oxford professor read the paper on the attached link:
Heat_Ice_Stores.pdf
That will give better insight on climate than discussing amplifiers.
RickWill is perhaps unfamiliar with the elements of control theory. One of those elementary principles is that feedback-amplifier analysis is of universal application, without exception, in all feedback-moderated dynamical systems (systems that change their state over time), including the climate. That is why analyses of the influence of greenhouse-gas enrichment on temperature have hitherto used feedback formulism. However, in attempting to use it, they have used it wrongly. Had it been used correctly, it would at once have become apparent that the very highly-resolved data necessary to constrain feedback strengths are not available, since the absolute feedback strengths, and their interval, are so tiny.
That is why the head posting, rightly, uses the feedback formulism originally derived to describe the behaviour of feedback amplifiers in electronic engineering to derive the long-standing (but misguided) official 3 K midrange ECS.
RickWill, in quarrelling with the head posting, with climatology and with me (though naming only me) in that we all use the equilibrium doubled-CO2 sensitivity (ECS) as the standard metric in our climate-sensitivity studies, says CO2 “cannot actually influence Earth’s energy balance in a measurable way”.
I use ECS as the standard metric because, to minimize the scope for disagreement on the part of official climatology, that is the metric which – whether RickWill likes it or not – official climatology uses.
Furthermore, elementary calculations based on the temperature equilibrium in 1850 (after which there was no trend in global mean surface temperature for 80 years) allow us to derive the natural greenhouse effect. It is the 28 K difference between the observed temperature of about 288 K that year and the sunshine or emission temperature of about 260 K. Neither of these values is computed by feedback analysis.
Of the 28 K, using formulae from IPCC (2007), the warming directly forced by the naturally-occurring, noncondensing greenhouse gases is about 8 K, of which about two-thirds is attributed to CO2, which, therefore, cannot legitimately be said to have a negligible influence on global temperature.
Official climatology reckons that the amplitude of the CO2 forcing is known to an uncertainty of +/- 15%. If RickWill disagrees with that uncertainty interval, and if he therefore disagrees with official climatology’s estimate of the reference or pre-feedback sensitivity of about 1.1-1.2 K per CO2 doubling, then his quarrel is not with me but with official climatology, and with distinguished authors such as Happer and van Wiijngaarden.
I cannot prove (and nor, one suspects, can RickWill) that reference sensitivity to doubled CO2 is of order 1.2 K. However, it can be proven, using elementary control-theoretic considerations, that feedback formulism, though unquestionably applicable to the climate since the climate is a feedback-moderated dynamical system, is valueless for attempting to constrain ECS because the absolute feedback strength and its interval derivable from the official ECS interval are both so tiny.
Therefore, all feedback strengths diagnosed from models’ outputs, and all ECS values derived therefrom, are merely speculative. The models – whatever their value in other directions – can tell us nothing at all about how much (or, rather, how little) global warming our minuscule perturbation of the atmospheric composition may cause.
A valid point. And I expect that I would have no problem convincing anyone that ECS is negligible if they have a basic understanding of physics and an open mind.
JCM in the second comment above states the problem succinctly:
Giving any credence to the notion of ECS being anything other than zero is the same as debating the existence of God (and I do not mean John Kerry – he just thinks he is God)
Some of the largest automated mining machines in the world are still using control systems that I developed in highly productive environments almost 50 years after they were developed. I expect I know a lot more about control theory than MoB.
There are many examples of powerful feedback processes that work in the climate system and they completely overpower any puny influence of CO2. And by the nature of their power, offset anything CO2 can possibly achieve. Look at the power involved in regulating open ocean surface temperature to 30C. The power input can go up by 100W/m^2 above the 420W/m^2 needed to achieve 30C and nothing happens. The entire 100W/m^2 remains unthermalised by the cloud formation..
Another powerful feedback is the lack of convective instability over oceans once the surface gets below 15C that results in high humidity that reduces the loss of heat by condensing cloud formation. Particularly observable over the SH in August:
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2022/08/17/1500Z/wind/surface/level/overlay=total_cloud_water/orthographic=23.30,-87.71,372
Another occurs on ocean surface at -1.8C when sea ice forms to reduce heat loss from oceans.
The one thing all these feedback processes have in common is ice formation – a temperature controlled process that makes Earth’s climate incredibly stable.
The one major instability is the ability of land to store ice and that ice is highly reflective so tends to stay around once it gets stuck over an annual cycle. However even glaciation recovers due to a powerful non-linear feedback as glacier calving cools the ocean surface and shuts down the water cycle.
RickWill says that, far from being unfamiliar with the elements of control theory, he knows more about it than me. In that event, it is baffling that he should have seen fit to write: “From there on [Monckton’s post pointing out climatology’s control-theoretic error] goes downhill because it falls into the belief system that CO2 actually changes the surface energy balance. Anyone who thinks Earth’s climate can be reduced to a single feedback loop with a CO2 control knob lacks basic understanding.”
Anyone who thinks Earth’s climate cannot be reduced to a single feedback loop, whether or not there be only one reference signal, lacks basic understanding.
At the temperature equilibrium in 1850 (after which the trend was zero for 80 years), global temperature was about 288 K. Emission temperature, which would prevail in the absence of greenhouse gases, is about 260 K. The difference of 28 K is the natural greenhouse effect. Of this, about 8 K was direct warming by (known as reference sensitivity to) the naturally-occurring, noncondensing, preindustrial greenhouse gases. From these values, and taking IPCC’s midrange estimate 3.22 W/m^2/K for the Planck sensitivity parameter (the first derivative of the Stefan-Boltzmann equation), the mean feedback strength that applied in 1850 may be readily derived using a single feedback loop. It was 0.224 W/m^2/K.
By the same token, from IPCC’s current [2, 5] K midrange estimate of equilibrium doubled-CO2 sensitivity (ECS) may be used as the starting-point for derivation of the interval of the mean feedback strength implicit in IPCC’s ECS interval, namely [0.22, 0.27] W/m^2/K.
Logically, therefore, if even the entire mean feedback strength, and its interval, are so very small, then a fortiori our knowledge of the individual feedback strengths whose interactions result in the mean feedback strength is bound to be insufficiently resolved to permit reliable projections of climate sensitivity, since the underlying uncertainties in individual and hence in overall mean feedback strengths are far too great.
As to the notion that CO2 is the “control knob” determining global mean surface temperature, RickWill ought not to have sought a quarrel with me on that point. It was Lacis et al. (2010) whose paper described CO2 as the “control knob”: if RickWill objects to that term, which I had not even used or implied, he must take the matter up with Lacis, not with me.
In any event, it may be that RickWill is unfamiliar with the use in climatology of equilibrium doubled-CO2 sensitivity is the standard metric for climate-sensitivity studies. The reason is that the direct forcing by CO2 caused by our emissions is thought to represent about two-thirds of all anthropogenic forcing. The use of ECS, which was discussed in the head posting without the slightest complaint from RickWill, does not, therefore, imply that CO2 is the “control knob” of the climate: simply that, if one is studying the impact of doubled CO2 concentration under the assumption that no other forcings are present (or, to put it another way, that ECS is the equilibrium sensitivity to a forcing equivalent to a doubled-CO2 forcing), one is not in any way stating or even implying that CO2 is the “control knob” of global mean surface temperature.
In short, his graceless attack on my endorsement of the head posting seems to have been deliberately ill-founded. For if he is, as he says he is, expert in control theory he must have realized that my endorsement of the head posting was sound. And if he knows anything at all about climate-sensitivity studies, he will know that they use the doubled-CO2-equivalent forcing and the reference and feedback responses thereto as the inputs from which the standard metric, ECS, is derived.
Why, then, did he write as he did? I have noticed an exasperating tendency among commenters here to purport to find fault when they must have known that no fault – or at any rate no fault identified by them – was present. Such conduct, with respect, does not advance the discussion.
This is made up. There was no understanding of Global Average Temperature in 1850. No human had stepped onto the vast expanse of Antarctica to report it. No one was attempting to measure the temperature in the Southern Ocean in 1850.
The idea that there was any energy balance on Earth in 1850 is magical thinking. It requires complete ignorance of Earth’s ever changing relationship with its sole source of energy.
The sun is constantly moving around the barycentre of the solar system and Earth’s orbit around the barycentre is constantly changing so the available energy at the top of the atmosphere has never been stable and never will be. That means there can never be thermal equilibrium.
MoB is giving credence to unscientific nonsense by foolishly contemplating ECS is anything other than zero.
MoB also makes regular claims about the “pause” so is giving credence to some Average Global Surface Temperature as meaningful. There is no pause on the Greenland plateau. The January warming trend continues. There is no pause in the warming of the oceans in the NH. There is no pause in the cooling of the Southern Ocean.
The idea that Global average temperature can be reduced to a single feedback loop with a CO2 control knob is pompous foolery.
MoB will never understand climate until he realises it cannot be reduced to a single feedback loop with that magical CO2 control knob.
Take some time to understand how the sun moves around the barycentre of the solar system:
https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/18169/what-point-does-earth-actually-orbit
Take some time to study how the solar intensity changes over time and latitude due to Earth’s orbit:
http://vo.imcce.fr/insola/earth/online/earth/online/index.php
When you get a grip on some of the detail, we can have an intelligent discussion on the physics of climate rather the unscientific nonsense of a single feedback loop and the CO2 control knob.
This is an appeal to false authority without any understanding of the facts or basic physics.
I will happily educate anyone who has a basic understanding of physics and an open mind on the drivers of Earth’s climate. And I can tell you without any doubt that it is not CO2.
The inability of the climate models to predict the nuanced changes being observed across the globe is sufficient proof that CO2 does nothing. Climate models predict that everywhere will warm for every month of the year because that it what CO2 is supposed to do. That is not what is being observed.
No climate model has predicted sea ice would be expanding in the Southern Ocean. No climate model predicted that Greenland would be gaining elevation. No climate model predicted that both Greenland and Iceland would be gaining permanent ice cover.
I didn’t know where to jump in here so here I go. You are both correct to an extent. As a designer of several multi-stage HF receivers there are multiple feedback paths between stages some from the audio stage to the initial stage some between intermediate stages, etc. Some feedbacks add and some don’t. Trying to get interstage impedances and gain curves correct is difficult. That is the earth multiplied several times over with variables operating all over the globe. A single stage amplifier with a single feedback path is taking simplification to an extreme. It fails to consider the intricacies involved but may be useful to analyze the system on an overall basis. To arrive at the correct feedback though, requires much more sophisticated analysis of the involved variables.
Next to these issues already discussed in the original..
https://greenhousedefect.com/the-holy-grail-of-ecs/vapor-feedback-ii-the-lapse-rate-and-the-feedback-catastrophe
..the problem becomes more evident, if we apply your feedback logic onto our solar system. You make the point of the sun itself being a forcing, and rightfully so. However, this becomes more evident if we imagine a change of the orbit of Earth, closer to, or further from the sun. The change in solar radiation received would then definitely and undisputably be a forcing. If there were total feedbacks trippling the forcing, we would get the red curve in the chart below (the blue dots represent planets and moons, starting with Mercury to the left, the x scale gives the distance from the sun in AUs)..
https://greenhousedefect.com/about-the-physical-impossibility-of-feedbacks
Mr Schaffer’s argument is most interesting, but the units in the axes of his graph are not stated. It would be most helpful if he were able to identify the units in the axes and provide a little more detail as to the data sources and the method of calculation.
y – Temperature in Kelvin
x – Distance in AUs (astronomic units)
“The climate model expectation is that relative humidity should remain steady or rise slightly with increased temperature. This is not happening (Figure 2)”
A common misconception here. Models make no assumption about global relative humidity. Humidity is determined locally by evaporation and advection, with mass of water being conserved.
Figure 2 is for surface RH. It does turn out to be relatively constant, but the GHE depends on higher altitudes as well.
“Unless somebody has a better explanation, it seems likely that the IPCC needed to keep the 3.0°C ECS for political reasons and simply altered the various feedback parameters to suit.”
Ignorant. Water vapor feedback goes back to Arrhenius in 1896, where it approximately doubles ECS. He got 4.0°C/doubling. Unlike GCMs, Arrhenius did calculate based on constant RH.
Two factual supports for this general thesis:
One of the interesting observations with INM, is that it does not get any ocean surface temperature above 30C till after 2100.
To get the warming trend and limit to 30C, they have to cool the past so still wrong but they are not predicting a physical impossibility before 2100 like most other models.
Attached show INM prediction for tropical western Pacific. The measured averages 29.5C in this region as it has for thousands of years and will continue to do for thousands more.
Bob Irvine: “The falling Relative Humidity over the oceans could be related to and possibly help to explain the failure of this hot spot to materialize.”
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WR: Sure. The combination of figure 2 and figure 3 shows exactly what is happening in the atmosphere of Real Earth. Rising Specific Humidity (fig. 3) reflects a higher water vapor content in the atmosphere, which raises the strength of convection there where convection is happening. The higher speed of the convective wheel (which as a whole is cooling the warm surface areas of the Hadley Cells) results in more convected humid air which is becoming dried at high elevations, resulting in larger (and/or drier) high-pressure areas aside from the faster rising humid air.
Figure 3, rising specific humidity:
As high-pressure areas cover a much larger surface area than the relatively small band of faster rising already humid air (the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone, ITCZ), the average humidity of all air involved (here: the whole Hadley Cell) must go down, as shown by figure 2.
Figure 2: relative humidity going down:
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This is why all models are wrong. And this is why some initial warming (whatever its cause) recently resulted in some temporary warming of the oceans below the high-pressure areas, simply because more Sun energy became absorbed. More saline waters (my guess) were formed, finally enhancing Arctic sea ice melt because warmer water with a higher salinity sunk in the sub-Arctic and entered the Arctic as warmer than normal subsurface water. A process that happens over decades. But over the whole cycle of 60-80 years, the ocean-atmosphere system resets and shows a relative cooling in the second part of the cycle as we have seen before in the fifties and sixties. This trend of ‘a stepwise warming’ follows the long-term stepwise cooling of the Little Ice Age which happened before ‘modern (detailed) temperature measurements’ existed.
The larger cooling of the Little Ice Age and the more expressive warming of present Modern Warming paradoxically both result from the slow cooling of the oceans, happening during the last 5000 years. Over the last 5000 years, colder oceans resulted in much more snow and (sea) ice than during the Holocene Optimum of the 5000 years before, making the warming effect of melting sea ice much larger. A higher variation (!) in surface temperatures results and that higher variation is what we were looking at: The Little Ice Age and Modern Warming. A higher temperature variation on a long-term cooling Earth.
Dansgaard-Oeschger events as observed during Glacials are caused by the same pattern causing melting sea ice, but because there was much more ice and snow to melt, temperature effects during Glacial were up to four- or five-fold to what we have been looking at in the last one and a half-century.
‘Global’ Warming = [temporary] Arctic Warming. Caused by long-term orbital changes (Milankovitch) and following natural processes. Nothing new.
“This is why all models are wrong.”
Where do you get that from? What do they actually say that is wrong? You cite no model results.
‘What do they actually say that is wrong?’
The fact that any GCM ensemble exhibits a high spread implies most of them are wrong.
Nick, how much would you say you trust models projections for a period of, let’s say, four decades? Please, make a percent estimate.
I trust them 0%, meaning that we could get a period of 4 decades without any net warming, or even net cooling. Models say the chance of that happening under the current CO2 increase rates is next to zero.
WR: “This is why all models are wrong.”
Nick: Where do you get that from? What do they actually say that is wrong? You cite no model results.
WR: What we are measuring and what we try to predict are surface temperatures. Our models are principally atmospheric models, not concentrated on what happens at the surface. On Earth, the surface and its temperatures are dominated by the water molecule. Models should have concentrated on that molecule (H2O). All properties of that molecule and all processes related to and caused by that molecule should have been central in models.
But climate models are principally radiative models. However, from the moment a water planet like Earth has a greenhouse atmosphere, surface temperatures are not set anymore by radiation but by processes on the surface overcoming the effects of the greenhouse atmosphere.
Oceans are mainly cooled by evaporation. As Martin Wild 2015 shows in figure 2, oceans absorb 170 W/m2 but the net loss of surface absorbed energy by evaporation is 100 W/m2. Evaporation depends on temperature, meaning that the activation of the main surface cooling depends on temperature.
A higher temperature causes [much] more evaporative cooling. This results in more water vapor and so in a higher greenhouse effect, meaning that less surface radiation directly will reach space. The share of net surface radiation in total surface cooling diminishes when surface temperatures rise. A higher temperature results in an even larger role of evaporative cooling (and related processes) in setting surface temperatures and in a smaller role for surface radiation.
(two posts on the subject are in preparation)
Martin Wild’s Sea Only data:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00382-014-2430-z/figures/2
There’s more than that to the humidity story, Wim. Do you see the trend breakpoint around 1998 in Land Relative Humidity (figure 2)? That’s an indication that the 1997 climate shift in meridional heat transport is involved. Everybody ignores changes in meridional transport, but the transport is not only of heat but also of mass and chemicals, affecting clouds and wind.
Wind speed is one of the two most important factors determining evaporation (with relative humidity), while temperature is a distant third. And the wind has been changing big time with the changes in meridional transport.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/09/23/the-winter-gatekeeper-hypothesis-vii-a-summary-and-some-questions/
The strong fall in relative humidity over land coincides with a strong increase in wind speed over land. It is likely to be a temporary feature of the current transport regime that is likely to shift in a few years.
Climate is very complicated, and one has to be very careful with assumptions and conclusions.
Obviously, models don’t get the changes in transport and don’t understand climate regimes and regimes’ shifts, which were discovered in the 1990s. So yes, models don’t get climate right. They can’t because nobody understands climate change, and we can model what we don’t understand but to trust that model is hopelessly foolish.
Javier: “There’s more than that to the humidity story, Wim”
WR: Sure Javier, and I am aware of that. I am aware of the ‘chain of events’ and I tried to find the central mechanism ‘driving all other things’. And I think that for both oceans and the atmosphere, the main driver is buoyancy.
In the atmosphere, upward convection is mostly caused by water vapor and partly by temperature. But temperature is on the base of the quantity of water vapor, for that reason I concentrate on water vapor.
For oceans, there is the choice between temperature and salinity as the main driver of (downward) convection. Density is strongly influenced by the exact quantity of heavy salt molecules. Sub-Arctic surface water of three degrees with somewhat higher salinity sinks if surrounded by colder water with a temperature of two degrees but with a lower salt content. The colder but less saline water will stay at the surface.
Reasoning from the buoyancy of air and ocean water gives good results in explaining the change in weather patterns, for example for the change in weather patterns shown in your graphic above.
Wind certainly plays a role. But in the Hadley cells (not shown in your graphic) it is the buoyancy of a column of air mainly caused by its high content of water vapor which causes the high updraft resulting in strong trade winds over the surface of most parts of the Hadley cells. And in this way (by stronger trade winds) the updraft is causing more evaporation.
In the Arctic zone warmer than normal subsurface water entered the Arctic in previous decades. Normally there is a flow of warmer but saltier North Atlantic water entering the Arctic below the colder but fresh(er) water layer we find on top of the Arctic Ocean. The only reason warmer surface water can sink is because of higher salinity. It is the Warm Gulfstream passing the highly saline North Atlantic Gyre that brings warm very saline ocean water to the North Atlantic/sub-Arctic. A higher salinity than normal realizes ‘sink density’ at higher temperatures. I can only conclude that higher salinity must be the deeper cause of the entrance of ‘warmer than normal’ subsurface water into the Arctic. The warmer subsurface flows of the nineties and early 2000’s are well observed by various authors, for example by Polyakov. That relatively warm subsurface water (entering the Arctic roughly between Svalbard and Norway) caused sea ice melt, first and mainly observed in the Barents Sea (between Svalbard and Nova Zembla). The higher quantity of water vapor (resulting from zero-degree water instead of from winter ice with a temperature of minus 10, minus 20 or 30 degrees Celsius) resulted in more updraft of air, sucking in warm moist air from the North Atlantic and taking in its slipstream more low-pressure areas filled with warm humid air to the Arctic. The storms were causing more mixing of cold upper ocean layers with the warmer subsurface water below, causing more ice melt, etc., etc.
The change in weather patterns (well indicated by your graphic) finds in my opinion its deepest cause in the change in salinity of the surface waters of the sub-Arctic. It is causing warmer downward convection in the ocean.
And in the tropics the change in humidity (principally caused by a higher temperature) is causing the speed of the water cycle to rise, in turn influencing the oceans.
For both regions, it is density that is the central factor (my point of view) but in the tropics the buoyancy of the air (by water vapor and temperature) plays the main role. In the Arctic, however, it is the buoyancy of water by differences in salinity that plays the main role.
Both in the tropics and in the Arctic ‘some’ density differences finally result in changes in the oceans and changes in the oceans (when they occur in the Arctic) can have a long-during effect: a change in weather patterns over decades, some decades up and some decades down. Total cycle: roughly 60-80 years, but the exact time and strength of the cycle are dependent on the chaotic behavior of both atmosphere and oceans. Not predictable.
P.S. I noticed the role of the meridional flow you describe and I agree. But I think there is a deeper cause for the development of that flow: salinity.
Agreed. I’ve mentioned before my belief that the long term warm and cool periods that appear in ice cores could be the result of salinity variations in the global ocean currents (MOC).
Created by melt pulses during the Holocene onset, these variations bring higher and lower salinity levels to the surface on millennial time scales. It also appears the MOC has increased in speed over the last 10K years reducing the time between successive warm periods. This likely means the modern warm period will be shorter than all the previous warm periods.
In addition, the AMO is likely the result of the 60-80 year cycle you mentioned on top of the longer term millennial cycle.
WINTERS MAY BE ABOUT TO GET COLDER
18 Jan 2023 | Science Notes
New in the journal Nature-Climate and Atmospheric Science is a study (h/t Fritz Vahrenholt and NoTricksZone) making a projection we wouldn’t have expected climate models to produce or for a Nature group journal to publish: the world’s climate system is gearing up for a few decades of colder Northern Hemisphere winters, greenhouse gases notwithstanding. The authors argue that our climate system can be thought of as a set of large-scale slow-moving cyclical mechanisms that interact with each other through their effects on the oceans, sea ice, and other major components of the climate system. Every so often the cycles line up in such a way that the North Atlantic starts cooling, taking wintertime global temperatures down with it. It happened during the 1950s-1980s interval and it’s started again. Between now and 2050 you might need a sweater.
_______________________
Meh! Told you so 20 years ago.
We published the important conclusions to this debate in 2002 and nothing has changed:
The alleged Climate Crisis is a fifty-year-old scam, and “green energy” is not green and does not produce much useful energy.
The Climate scammers have wasted trillions of dollars and millions of lives on fraud.
FOR THE RECORD, WE PUBLISHED IN 2002:
1. “Climate science does not support the theory of catastrophic human-made global warming – the alleged warming crisis does not exist.”
2. “The ultimate agenda of pro-Kyoto advocates is to eliminate fossil fuels, but this would result in a catastrophic shortfall in global energy supply – the wasteful, inefficient energy solutions proposed by Kyoto advocates simply cannot replace fossil fuels.”
– by Sallie Baliunas (Astrophysicist, Harvard-Smithsonian), Tim Patterson (Paleoclimatologist, Carleton U), Allan MacRae (Professional Engineer, retired (Queen’s U, U of Alberta)
I PUBLISHED ON SEPTEMBER 1, 2002 in the Calgary Herald:
3. “If [as we believe] solar activity is the main driver of surface temperature rather than CO2, we should begin the next cooling period by 2020 to 2030.”
I UPDATED MY GLOBAL COOLING PREDICTION IN 2013:
3a. “I suggest global cooling starts by 2020 or sooner. Bundle up.”
[Some say global cooling started in Feb2016, the El Nino peak, but I prefer Feb2020.]
See CorrectPredictions.ca and my papers listed therein for proof and links.
Allan MacRae, B.A.Sc., M.Eng., Calgary
https://energy-experts-international.com/
Or both, as most will remember the first ‘sharp uptick’ from what is in effect merely a trend line starts from ~1880 and certainly cannot be due to human CO2 emissions although I’ve seen the Mann fan club try to attribute that purported temperature increase to land use changes.
The fact that the samples used throughout were screened to fit the assumed instrumental record for the 1902 – 1980 so-called ‘calibration period’ more or less guarantees a hockey-stick shape.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/01/16/weekly-climate-and-energy-news-roundup-536/#comment-3666669
[excerpt]
”Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” — Albert Einstein
SCIENCE FOR NON-SCIENTISTS, THE WOKE, THE FRIGHTENED, AND SENSIBLE REALISTS:
The alleged Climate Change (actually the “Catastrophic Human-made-Global Warming”, or “CAGW”) “Crisis” is a fifty-year-old falsehood.
The whole scare that “We’re all gonna Die from Global Warming” was always false nonsense.
The failed CAGW Hypothesis claims that increasing atmospheric CO2 from fossil fuel combustion drives dangerous global warming.
The CAGW hypo is based on observations at the molecular level that were scaled-up without rational analysis to the global level, ignoring the well-known phenomenon of “scale-up errors”.
A scale-up from molecular-scale to Earth-scale is one very large scale-up. Ignoring potential scale-up errors is foolish, or convenient. There is a huge scale-up error in the CAGW hypo.
…
Here is the Global Warming Alarmists’ dirty little secret, that they’ve been trying to hide for 33 years:
[… continued from above]
The CAGW hypo ASSUMES that more CO2 causes dangerous warming- if that is correct, CO2 should increase, and later temperature should increase.
The CAGW hypo was proved false by Kuo et al in the journal Nature in 1990, who proved that CO2 changes happen after (lag) temperature changes.
That scientific fact proved that increasing atmospheric CO2 cannot significantly drive temperature, because THE FUTURE CANNOT CAUSE THE PAST.
Kuo et al was swept under the rug and forgotten. Cannot have that fact known; it disproves the politically-driven CAGW hypo.
MacRae independently re-discovered this same fact in 2008. MacRae (2008) was swept under the rug.
Humlum et al independently re-discovered this same fact in 2013. Humlum et al (2013) was swept under the rug.
We know that changes in atmospheric CO2 are caused by human AND natural causes, but increasing CO2 does NOT drive dangerous warming.
____________________
From MacRae (2008):
See the close correlation between the rate-of-change dCO2/dt and (ocean and) atmospheric temperature T:
https://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/from:1979/mean:12/derivative/plot/uah6/from:1979/scale:0.18/offset:0.17
The integral of dCO2/dt is CO2 change and CO2 changes lag temperature changes by ~~9 months in the modern data record.
In 2019 I explained why the lag is ~~9 months – the integral (CO2 change) lags its derivative dCO2/dt by ¼ cycle, and that cycle is the ~~3 year cycle of oceanic temperature changes.
This observation is an absolute disproof of the CAGW nonsense. “The future cannot cause the past.”
Story Tip
WINTERS MAY BE ABOUT TO GET COLDER
18 Jan 2023 | Science Notes
Some questions:
When hydrocarbons are burned, H2O and CO2 are produced, along with smaller amounts of other compounds. If CO2 atmosphere concentrations have increased due to combustion of fossil fuels since eg IGY1958 what has happened to the other combustion products produced over the same period?
Some have demonstrated that there may be a relationship between temperature readings and urbanization of weather stations. Chart labels and wording above seem to show average readings applied by the British Met Office. Is the raw measurement data provided or just summary information. If the former, where were those humidity measurements made, and is there a possible relationship to urban/industrial/agricultural changes in the vicinity of those stations?
On review of station/location data, is the Met Office’s “Global Average” change to relative humidity claim justifiable?
I am fine with my content being published here, but it would be nice to provide a link to the original.
https://greenhousedefect.com/the-holy-grail-of-ecs/vapor-feedback-ii-the-lapse-rate-and-the-feedback-catastrophe
As explained in the article, the problem with LRF is that it is not a feedback. Just think about what it means. Except for albedo feedback, forcings and (WV-) feedbacks are about an elevation of the emission level (at for example 5000m). Somewhat simplified, since it will produce only a negligible error, we could also assume the emission level to stay fixed, but change in temperature.
Either way, following the orthodoxy, a doubling of CO2 would elevate the emission level by 150m, or increase the temperature at a given emission altitude by 1K. Including feedbacks it could be 450m, or 3K respectively.
What LRF means is that at the surface this warming will be less. As the lapse shrinks with higher temperatures (more WV, more latent heat), there simply has to be a delta between temperature change at emission level and surface. And studying temperature gradients, the surface should warm by about 30% less, if emission altitude was 5000m. That percentage is consistent with climate related papers on LRF.
The awkward mistake the IPCC made in AR4 (and earlier) is not realizing how mighty a 0.84W/m2 LRF is. Next to simply not being a feedback. It reduced ECS by about 60%(!), which is off the charts. Also it masked the problem they had the positive feedbacks way too high.
They had to fix this somehow and what they did is to lower LRF on the one side, while also shrinking positive feedbacks on the other side.Yes, they largely shoved it off cloud feedback. This “fix” however equally unprofessional as the original mistake. Neither they have fixed to problem of treating LRF like a true feedback.
Its a very nice piece. Very interesting. Recommend everyone to take the trouble to work through it. Needs some time and attention, but not difficult given that.
A system that does not have sufficent negative feedbacs will runaway eventually. The mere fact that the earth has not had a runaway in the last 600 million years is a demonstration that the climate has lots of negative feedback.
Good article with a great conclusion that I want to repeat. This will get the title and link included on the best climate articles I read today on my climate science blog — an easy decision:
“Unless somebody has a better explanation, it seems likely that the IPCC needed to keep the 3.0°C ECS for political reasons and simply altered the various feedback parameters to suit.”
The IPCC was launched in 1988 to create climate change fear and blame humans.
It was handed the +3.0 degree C. ECS from the 1979 Charney Report and told that is settled science. It was actually a data free wild guess, but never mind that.
In 1995 the IPCC simplified their assignment by declaring all natural causes of climate change were small enough to call “noise”. The IPCC was probably ready to say that in 1988 but waited a few years to appear they were actually studying natural causes of climate change. It was just another wild guess.
The IPCC stuck with the +3.0 until a few years ago when they realized the bottom of the range +1.5 degrees C was not scary enough. To appear “fair” they moved the lower range up to +2.5 degrees C, and lowered the upper range to to 4.0 to seem fair and balanced. The new +2.5 to +4.0, or an average of 3.25 degrees C. is the new IPCC wild guess.
“IPCC” and “science” are two words that should not be used in the same sentence. The IPCC is a political organization set up to create fear about man made climate change. That conclusion was decided in advance and will never change. The models are climate propaganda — programmed deliberately to be inaccurate, because accurate climate predictions would not create enough fear. And fear is the primary propagande tool for leftist politicians and bureaucrats to seize more power over the private sector, in their beloved march toward fascism and Marxism — their ultimate goals.
I liken the IPCC AR reports as the submission to a court of the evidence in a trial as prepared by the prosecution team. It leaves out all the evidence that might be prepared by the defence team and so is completely unbalanced.
The prosecution only talk up things that help their argument and talk down or ignore anything that undermines it. Exactly what the IPCC reports do.
Lapse rate is determined by Boyles law, how on earth does this vary because there is 0.01% more CO2 in the gas?
Th dry lapse rate is 3 C per km, moist about 1.5 C. So when air is dry it is at its greatest, moisture reduces the lapse rate.
How can climate change increase it, when in its dry state it is at its maximum?
Lapse rate is not a positive feedback.
And why does Met Office SH differ so much from NASA NVAP-M data which shows no increase, has it been fudged?
The dry lapse rate is – g/ Cp ( specific heat of dry air). By adding CO2 we have changed the lapse rate but what the new one is is unknown.
But my question stems from this, “…followed by the (negative) lapse rate feedback (–0.84 ± 0.26 W m–2 °C–1)…”.
How does the lapse rate get turned into a power? Never seen this before.
I am pretty sure the dry lapse rate is not the issue (10C per km, by the way) — small amounts of CO2 cannot change
enough to measure the effect. However the wet lapse rate should, according to the long list of climate change causation, change substantially (i.e. becoming the effective lapse rate at lower elevation in lifted air) and put additional latent heat into the troposphere. This is the thinking behind the tropospheric hot spot fingerprint.
Thanks Kevin, but please note I did say the change to lapse rate was unknown. But it has changed. So has the air pressure, however small.
Those who claim that the temperature increase is due to ERL change then the wet lapse rate doesn’t matter because that line is where WV is. However a slight change in Cp may effect their claim.
My real question was something you skipped and that is the quote where lapse rate is noted in a power.
thanks again for your response.
Kip,
Here is my best shot at present. Climate scientists seemingly point to the Clausius-Clapeyron relationship as the basis for their belief that RH should at least remain constant or rise with temperture. This relation is rather “explosive” with increasing temperature, but it is also an equilibrium relationship. Equilibrium is the wrong premise. The humidity of the atmosphere is governed not by equilibrium thermodynamics but by transport processes which are 1) non-equilibrium, 2) begin at the nanoscale. It looks like something that would be parametrized in models and my view is it may be done very wrongly.
The hydrologic cycle humidifies the atmosphere in places but very strongly dehumidifies it in others. Where these places are, and where humidity is transported to, and how much are all very dependent on atmospheric dynamics — i.e. is it meridional or zonal?
Note: The Specific Humidity as seen in Figure 3 bears a striking resemblance to the AMO, which is colder when the solar wind is stronger, as in the mid 1970’s, mid 1980’s, and early 1990’s.
Thank you for this:
“The lapse rate feedback (LRF) and the water vapour (WV) feedback have been combined in this table for comparison purposes”:
Table 1 – Global temperature feedback for CO2 doubling in the IPCC’s AR4 and AR6.
Adding up the low end of the “projections” Gives 1.10 C. Judith Curry recently posted an estimate of 1.3 C if memory correctly serves me. A defensible value.
In light of the significant new studies the past several years on CO2 doubling ; I’ve recently wondered if the IPCC is getting concerned about being charged with fraud for clinging to and reporting the absurd high estimates in their never ending quest for a gigantic “carbon” tax. If so, this Table provides perfect “cover”.
I’ve long believed there’s a vast disconnect between what government grant dependent climate scientists claim to believe and what they actually believe. Get rid of the misleading urban island “data” and there’s not much observational evidence for their claims.
Monckton reports:
“The application by climatologists of differential feedback analysis serves only to conceal the fact that the absolute feedback strength, which perforce responds not just to the perturbation signals but to the entire input or reference signal, including emission temperature, is an order of magnitude smaller than the differential signals used in climatology”
If the IPCC didn’t know it before, they know it now. There’s a downside to their “analysis” if they continue to, “conceal” IMHO.
Why!?
Believers of AGW are the ones required to prove the null, That Earth really does experience higher temperatures in direct ratio to CO₂ levels and their calculated feedback.
They have not proven any such thing.
Announcing to the world, ‘We can’t think of any other way’ is a sure sign of delusion and belief, not science.