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invicta at 08:33 AM on 25 February 2011Hockey Stick Own Goal
Tom Curtis @102 Thanks for the extra enlightenment I was surprised by dana's reply but glad to see he is human -
John Mason at 08:30 AM on 25 February 2011Motl-ey Cruel
Started reading, saw the personal stuff and gave up. If he cannot make points without feeling the need to embellish them with unpleasant personal stuff, then frankly his arguments aren't worth following up. Cheers - John -
citizenschallenge at 08:28 AM on 25 February 2011Hurricanes aren't linked to global warming
Very interesting. So the Maue graph is misleading because it is missing an important metric - rainfall(and its energy release). If that were included that graph would look much different. Thank you for info and those links. -
scaddenp at 08:23 AM on 25 February 2011Climate sensitivity is low
The problem of getting your "physics" from George White instead of from a textbook. Is George untroubled by lack of match with empirical data? -
muoncounter at 08:18 AM on 25 February 2011Motl-ey Cruel
What do you expect from a blog carrying a link to 'the list'? -
muoncounter at 08:10 AM on 25 February 2011Models are unreliable
"... in many journals, missing, flawed and uncertain physics, are discussed" That is an utterly devastating argument. Of course, one could equally say 'in many journals, complete, correct and convincing physics are discussed'; another utterly devastating argument. No, rebuttal of science must be made with science and not with vague generalization. This is an excellent example of the poverty of argument in denierdom: At some point, the denial always reduces to merely another version of 'No, its not. Because I said so.' An interesting non-technical review of the state of climate science modeling appears in the Winter 2010 Tau Beta Pi magazine: ... climatology is a young science. Its practitioners rarely work in laboratories. They must rely on highly variable field measurements and complex mathematical models that have very visible limitations. Arrayed against them are a smaller number of scientists and engineers. Only some have degrees in climate-related sciences. They charge that governments and climate activists have a pro-global warming agenda that stifles true scientific debate and that climate data and models are flawed. Many of these so-called skeptics have a clear agenda. They seem bent on denying climate change at any cost. Few do original research or publish in peer-reviewed climate journals (some submit articles to friendly journals in unrelated fields). Nor do they propose research to resolve the contradictions they claim to find, a common practice among the climate scientists whom they also claim lack skepticism. It is a recipe for controversy. And on the Internet, these scientific debates take on a life of their own. ... But key to the question here, If models raise so many questions, why does anyone trust them? The answer is that they do a surprisingly good job of predicting climate. -
LDW at 08:02 AM on 25 February 2011Antarctica is gaining ice
Any loss of land or sea ice due to melting increases sea levels which threatens those in Florida waterfront real estate. In fact the majority of the state at such a low sea level may be threatened even while more and more people migrate south. -
XPLAlN at 08:01 AM on 25 February 2011Monckton Myth #13: The Magical IPCC
Dikran: “This seems to me to be making a mountain out of a molehill.” It’s just possible that back in 1990 someone at the IPCC made a comment similar to mine and someone else there made a comment similar to yours ;-) -
gsanmartin at 07:44 AM on 25 February 2011Climategate CRU emails suggest conspiracy
NOAA PR, Feb 24, 2011: Inspector General’s Review of Stolen Emails Confirms No Evidence of Wrong-Doing by NOAA Climate Scientists http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2011/20110224_climate.html Partial excerpt: At the request of U.S. Sen. Inhofe, the Department of Commerce Inspector General conducted an independent review of the emails stolen in November 2009 from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, and found no evidence of impropriety or reason to doubt NOAA’s handling of its climate data. The Inspector General was asked to look into how NOAA reacted to the leak and to determine if there was evidence of improper manipulation of data, failure to adhere to appropriate peer review procedures, or failure to comply with Information Quality Act and Freedom of Information Act guidelines. “We welcome the Inspector General’s report, which is the latest independent analysis to clear climate scientists of allegations of mishandling of climate information,” said Mary Glackin, NOAA’s deputy under secretary for operations. “None of the investigations have found any evidence to question the ethics of our scientists or raise doubts about NOAA’s understanding of climate change science.” The Inspector General’s report states specifically: “We found no evidence in the CRU emails that NOAA inappropriately manipulated data comprising the [Global Historical Climatology Network – monthly] GHCN-M dataset.” (Page 11) “We found no evidence in the CRU emails to suggest that NOAA failed to adhere to its peer review procedures prior to its dissemination of information.” (Page 11) “We found no evidence in the CRU emails to suggest that NOAA violated its obligations under the IQA.” (Page 12) “We found no evidence in the CRU emails to suggest that NOAA violated its obligations under the Shelby Amendment.” (Page 16) PR truncated here - read the rest here: http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2011/20110224_climate.html No backlinks to this page exist yet as of this post. -
John Hartz at 07:31 AM on 25 February 2011500 scientists refute the consensus
Something is amiss. On the "Listing of Arguments" page, the "What the Science" says blurb for this argument is: "Around 97% of climate experts agree that humans are causing global warming." This statement does not appear in the above rebuttal article. -
johnd at 07:25 AM on 25 February 2011The Dai After Tomorrow
Daniel Bailey at 02:12 AM on 25 February, 2011, the infomation in the graph below is the basis of the study referred to and helps visualise the historic perspective of the regular cycles.
Measurement of oxygen isotope ratios (red) and grayscale (black) arranged to show drought cycle duration and intensity with 20th century wet period indicated. Credit: Mark Abbott
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Whilst this study is for what has occurred at one particular location, being linked to the El-Nino/La-Nina cycles ties it in directly to what will have occurred elsewhere in the region, and by extension neighbouring regions, because what El-Nino brings to one man is what La-Nina brings to another.
Add to this the systems that have been identified in other oceans, also with regular cycles that do not necessarily oscillate with the same frequency or pattern, and what seems to be chaotic takes on some form that becomes more predictable.
For example, the primary driver of the conditions most recently affecting Australia is the coinciding of a La-Nina pattern with a negative phase of the Indian Ocean Dipole, the last time both a La Nina and IOD-ve combined was in 1975, when there were three consecutive La-Nina years resulting in the overall wettest period for Australia since first settlement.
In Australia too, some years ago the realisation come about that much of the planning for our water resources was based on a period that rather being the normal, was in fact just the opposite.
Perhaps with the pattern that appears to be forming now, those responsible for planning may have been handed a get-out-of-gaol-free card with a generally wetter period of some decades that should allow them some breathing space to make more realistic plans for when "normal" conditions return.
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Don Gisselbeck at 07:04 AM on 25 February 2011Motl-ey Cruel
We are dealing with an industry (oil, gas and coal) that probably has more than $1 billion a day in profits. Some people who work less hard than a tomato picker make thousands an hour from this industry. Banning people from a blog is on the low end of what has been done for much less money. It will get worse. Many of them apparently think the survival of western civilization is less important than more money. -
Riccardo at 07:03 AM on 25 February 2011Motl-ey Cruel
The rise and fall, it's really sad to see how low a scientifically trained man can fall. I know many physicists, many conservatives, but no self-proclaimed "conservative physicist"; what does this suppose to mean? The disclosure of his political bias in science? Dana ignore him, for he (hopefully) does not know what he's saying. Keep going with your very informative posts; luckly, only a few share the not-so-enviable destiny of crashing years of study under their own feet. -
Lou Grinzo at 06:58 AM on 25 February 2011Motl-ey Cruel
A very concise and revealing example of Motl's view of the world and climate science can be found in his explanation that a rise in global temps of 13C would be just peachy. (Actually, he's talking about the Czech Republic being 13C warmer, which would result in much greater Arctic warming and who knows what horrors from the knock-on effects of rapidly melting that part of the world.) The post in question: http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/01/13-c-of-warming-would-be-fine-for-life.html -
Alex C at 06:56 AM on 25 February 2011Monckton Myth #14: Monckton's Hunt for the H-spot Leaves me Unsatisfied
I'm not sure how Monckton relates evaporation to climate sensitivity in your last quote. Can someone fill me in on what train of thought he was using? Probably regarding the "fourfold" part too, but I think that might just be him taking a figure form the lower end of that range of 1-3%. I also wonder if anyone will try to write off the hot spot in the second graphic as being too small to be definite or outside of error (i.e. a glitch in the model matrix). Props for the title too, very funny! -
Philippe Chantreau at 06:53 AM on 25 February 2011Dispelling two myths about the tropospheric hot spot
"Their errors were identified by others." Not only that, but they continued letting the old erroneous data being used for political purposes by non scientists. -
Philippe Chantreau at 06:50 AM on 25 February 2011Motl-ey Cruel
And we'll continue hearing the endless belly-aching of so-called "skeptics" about being censored here on SkS. Same old. -
RobertS at 06:46 AM on 25 February 2011Hockey Stick Own Goal
Wow, I completely missed that section just below regarding hot MWP and high climate sensitivity. My apologies... -
MattJ at 06:31 AM on 25 February 2011Monckton Myth #14: Monckton's Hunt for the H-spot Leaves me Unsatisfied
Oh, and when I say "last sentence", I am not counting "Confused?", for which I now make the excuse that it is not a full sentence;) -
MattJ at 06:30 AM on 25 February 2011Monckton Myth #14: Monckton's Hunt for the H-spot Leaves me Unsatisfied
The final sentence is an excellent summary of the whole article. It is a great example of how to summarize the point of an entire article in one simple, memorable, powerful antithesis. Cicero would be proud! -
Chemist1 at 06:25 AM on 25 February 2011Models are unreliable
Muon I guess you will have to purchase the article to see what I mean. I also notice you do not address the other abstracts. Here is a hint, on google scholar, google books, and in many journals, missing, flawed and uncertain physics, are discussed. Dikran I am done posting here You are simply mistaken -
MattJ at 06:12 AM on 25 February 2011Motl-ey Cruel
You say, " I have to admit, I was rather stunned at being banned from a site for doing nothing more than posting four polite comments pointing out an obvious error made by its author." I would not have been stunned by such behavior. Despite all the bland pronouncements of a new age of opennness the Internet has started, I knew all along that such dishonest banning still rules the day. The Internet has done nothing to even moderate such bad behavior, far less to ban it. The public discourse is still controlled by the criminally dishonest. -
Rob Painting at 06:08 AM on 25 February 2011Dispelling two myths about the tropospheric hot spot
MarkR -Spencer and Christy made a genuine mistake and found out how to fix it, then fixed it. No. For 10 years or so Spencer & Christy claimed that the surface temperature record was wrong. Rather than go over their data to check it's accuracy, they chose to do diddly. Their errors were identified by others. -
Motl-ey Cruel
I had the same experience on Spencer's blog. -
Dikran Marsupial at 05:14 AM on 25 February 2011Motl-ey Cruel
Likewise I was surprised (and dissapointed) that my posts on Roy Spencers blog ended up in permanent moderation limbo, also for no apparent reason. -
dana1981 at 05:07 AM on 25 February 2011Motl-ey Cruel
Agreed Rob, as I said I was shocked and disappointed. Motl immediately began backtracking and moving the goalposts on his hot spot fingerprint claim. After just 4 of my comments on the issue, he folded and banned me for no apparent reason. It's no way to behave if you want to be taken seriously in the climate debate. -
dhogaza at 05:01 AM on 25 February 2011Dispelling two myths about the tropospheric hot spot
MarkR: Just FYI, Spencer and Christy aren't the ones who fixed it.
If you remember the beginning of W's first administration, one of the administration's storylines was the need for more research to determine whether or not global warming was true blah blah blah. Much of that was based on the claims of Christy and Spencer. There was a conference fairly early in the administration attended by Christy (and maybe Spencer) and the RSS guys and others, that pretty much led to the conclusion that the UAH people were wrong and the RSS people mostly right (there were a series of errors that had been found, and corrections made, by UAH over a period of a couple or three or so years). It seemed apparent that the administration had held out hope that sponsoring the event would lead to UAH being shown right, but no such luck. -
Rob Honeycutt at 04:57 AM on 25 February 2011Motl-ey Cruel
I was watching some of the debate at Motl's site as this was going on. I was completely surprised how fast Motl caved. I was excited to maybe see some interesting exchanges and maybe have the chance to learn a thing or two. But... zilch. -
JMurphy at 04:42 AM on 25 February 2011Meet The Denominator
MothIncarnate has suggested a tongue-in-cheek response like this to those who think the 850 list is worth mentioning : [W]hy don’t you go and do a point by a point refutation of every single one of the (200+ recent) papers on MothIncarnate's list. [W]hen there are over (200+ genuine recent) scientific papers supporting AGW, surrely to any same person, that would at least provide some reason to back the theory.Moderator Response: URL fixed. -
Michael.M at 04:39 AM on 25 February 2011Motl-ey Cruel
Well, again its "pseudo-sceptics" rather than sceptics. (No surprise there) And - as nearly every time - its also easier to disinform than to explain real science. That is why the work here at sks is so important: rebuttals from basic to advanced to point to, ready for informing the really interested. -
les at 04:36 AM on 25 February 20112nd law of thermodynamics contradicts greenhouse theory
KR - not at all, I was alluding to 350 damorbel (where one moment all the radiation is returning to earth and the next it's radiating to space) and 351. Your excel and SoD's series are, IMHO, spot on. That people don't find they match their thought models is, IMHO again, because those thought models are wrong. -
2nd law of thermodynamics contradicts greenhouse theory
les - "A number of these 'models', designed to contradict the standard physics..." I hope you're not talking about the simple Excel models I posted earlier. They both support standard physics, and were intended to demonstrate to various people that greenhouse gases warm the surface. -
muoncounter at 04:26 AM on 25 February 20112nd law of thermodynamics contradicts greenhouse theory
"R W Woods built two greenhouses – one rock salt, one glass" Call me curious, but a rock salt greenhouse? Watering time for the plants must be interesting. The experiment by RW Wood was done in 1909. WM Connelly aka Stoat pointed out the error in comparing this exercise to the greenhouse effect here. -
les at 04:14 AM on 25 February 20112nd law of thermodynamics contradicts greenhouse theory
A number of these 'models', designed to contradict the standard physics - as well described by SoD - reminds me of the joke: A biologist, a physicist and a mathematician were sitting in a street cafe watching the crowd. Across the street they saw a man and a woman entering a building. Ten minutes they reappeared together with a third person. "They have multiplied", said the biologist. "Oh no, an error in measurement", the physicist sighed. "If exactly one person enters the building now, it will be empty again", the mathematician concluded. (although, personally, I'd expect better of the physicist) Even though the SoD series uses simplified models here and there to explore specific aspects of the physics, overall you can only understand what's happening by understanding the full system and physics. As said above, if a body is illuminated - with photons from any part of the spectrum - from another body, it'll reflect some, absorb others. Those absorbed (depending on the absorptance and spectrum) rise the temperature... the body will always radiate photons (not the ones absorbed, of course) depending on it temp, a la Boltzman + emissivity ... some or all of which (depending on geometry) will impinge on the original body doing the illumination, which will do the same physics. Then, you must account for the spectral nature of absorptance and emissivity, so that the respective conversion to heat and reflection won't be symmetric. Build the model properly, in your mind at least, otherwise you'll end up like our trio above. -
JMurphy at 03:50 AM on 25 February 2011Meet The Denominator
Zvon.org lists 785 Journals referred to by the last IPCC Report, and the top ten have a total of 3979 unique article citations between them. The IPCC itself used "500 Lead Authors and 2000 Expert Reviewers" and it "confirms that climate change is occurring now, mostly as a result of human activities; it illustrates the impacts of global warming already under way and to be expected in future, and describes the potential for adaptation of society to reduce its vulnerability; finally it presents an analysis of costs, policies and technologies intended to limit the extent of future changes in the climate system". That is the conclusion, based on all that work. Makes you see how insignificant that other little list is, doesn't it ? -
XPLAlN at 03:40 AM on 25 February 2011Monckton Myth #13: The Magical IPCC
RickG: “The 1990 report noted that it was not clear whether all the fluctuations indicated were truly global (p 202). How is that sloppy?” You may notice that note applies to a range of 3 different schematics for 3 different periods. It may bear some relevance to the other two but as for the schematic in question (7.1c) then you’d be spinning a line as it was clear that NONE of the fluctuations from that one were truly global! Seeing as you ask I’ll respond to the ‘sloppy’ bit: but first some context courtesy of the IPCC FAR: “The issues confronted with full rigour include history of the Earth’s changing climate. The result is the most authoritative and strongly supported statement on climate change that has ever been made by the scientific community.” So, on the subjective question of what constitutes ‘sloppy’ at the IPCC please bear in mind they set their own bar to the fullest rigour possible. To the question “how is that sloppy?” It’s sloppy because the schematic is labelled ‘global’ when it was actually, as the above article makes clear: “based on Lamb's approximation of the central England temperature. It was intended only as a schematic diagram, and known not to accurately reflect the global average temperature.” ...but it was still presented as a curve of ‘global temperature variations’. And I don’t care if it’s a schematic, or rock art. That’s just a red herring. In effect; ‘we knew all along that the data for Central England wasn’t great, and wasn’t representative of global or even NH. But it’s all we had so we used the curve anyway and downgraded it from a graph to a schematic to cover our arses’. I find this most unsatisfactory. What isn’t clear is: did the IPCC know that this schematic reconstruction was solely based on Central England or not? As (contributor to that section) Prof Jones himself says: “Many in the palaeoclimatic community have known that the IPCC graph was not representative of global conditions (even when it first appeared)...Greater amounts of documentary data (than available to Lamb in the early 1970s) were collected and used in the Climatic Research Unit in the 1980s.” This begs the question, why use Lamb as a basis to extrapolate a global picture or even reproduce his curve at all? Nor is it clear whether - in the absence of something global to give us - the authors of section 7 simply took a reconstruction of Central England and presented it to us as “global”, or maybe due to sloppy fact checking they used the schematic in good faith having lifted it from the UK DoE 1989 publication ‘Global Climate Change’. Either way I consider this to be sloppy. I certainly wouldn’t describe it as an ‘issue confronted with full rigour” even back in that huge vacuum of climatic knowledge that was 1990. -
MarkR at 03:21 AM on 25 February 2011Monckton Myth #14: Monckton's Hunt for the H-spot Leaves me Unsatisfied
I hope that I explained this in a clear and correct way; the 'hot spot' is quite a difficult concept and every article I've read has just talked about conserving the moist adiabat, which makes about as much sense to a non-specialist as when a professor of ancient languages starts babbling in Babylonian... If anyone picks out mistakes, let me know so I can correct them. I kept it shorter than I'd like to try and encourage people to read: I didn't properly cover 2 side points: 1) the 'hot spot' also encourages positive water vapour feedback because of Clausius-Clapeyron... but it is a signature of the lapse rate feedback and net modelled water feedback isn't too strongly dependent on that. Plus direct measurements suggest the WV longwave feedback is significant. 2) there could be more evaporation lower down and subsidence leading to it condensing lower down. In that case the lapse rate feedback (negative/cooling) is still weaker. -
Jeff T at 03:12 AM on 25 February 2011Dispelling two myths about the tropospheric hot spot
Lindzen mentions corrections to data in this essay at GWPF. In the third paragraph, he discusses the tropospheric warm spot and concludes that ground-level temperature measurements must be erroneously high. After calling for corrections to those data, he goes on in the same paragraph to accuse the "climate science community" of corruption for correcting data. Did he realize that he was accusing himself of corruption? -
Rob Honeycutt at 03:06 AM on 25 February 2011Meet The Denominator
Poptech said.... "Rob, I never made any claim otherwise that there were not thousands of papers on climate change. I was well aware of this. My argument continues and has always been that only a small fraction of these explicitly endorse "anthropogenic global warming"." Do most papers on evolution explicitly endorse evolution? No. That's because it's well established. Same with climate change. -
cbrock at 02:32 AM on 25 February 2011Dispelling two myths about the tropospheric hot spot
This is a very nice post. I agree with Johnny Vector that axis labels are needed. If possible, convert the y-axes of the first four figures to logarithmic coordinates to match the later figures (although it looks as if these plots came from RC). -
Daniel Bailey at 02:12 AM on 25 February 2011The Dai After Tomorrow
For those readers living in the Pacific Northwest of the USA, there's an interesting new study just published in PNAS: Drought variability in the Pacific Northwest from a 6,000-yr lake sediment record Nelson & Abbott 2011 doi: 10.1073/pnas.1009194108 (Abstract, full paper is paywalled) Lake bed sediment core analysis reveals that the climate of the Pacific Northwest fluctuated more or less evenly between wet and dry periods for thousands of years. Droughts tended to be lengthier, with 25 percent of dry periods during the past 6,000 years persisting for 30 years (with a maximum of 75 years duration). Wet periods tended to be shorter with only 19 percent lasting more than 30 years (with a maximum of 64 years duration). The most recent 1,000 years has seen these periods become longer, shifting less frequently, and ushering in more extreme conditions. The wet cycle stretching from the 1940s to approximately 2000 was the dampest in 350 years (the only wetter cycle in the 6,000 year record began around 1650). Lead researcher Mark Abbott, a Pitt professor of geology and planetary science, said those unusually wet years coincide with the period when western U.S. states developed water-use policies."Western states happened to build dams and water systems during a period that was unusually wet compared to the past 6,000 years," he said. "Now the cycle has changed and is trending drier, which is actually normal. It will shift back to wet eventually, but probably not to the extremes seen during most of the 20th century."
Duration of dry and wet cycles by percentage over 6,000-year period. Another finding: the Castor Lake core matched the Palmer Index reconstructed with tree-ring data and expanded on it by 4,500 years, suggesting that lake beds are better records of long-term climate change. Finally, the change in cycle regularity found by Nelson & Abbott 2011 correlates with documented activity of El Niño/La Niña. When the those patterns became more intense, wet and dry cycles in the Pacific Northwest became more erratic and lasted longer. Fill up those canteens now. The Yooper -
rocco at 01:48 AM on 25 February 2011Dispelling two myths about the tropospheric hot spot
MarkR: Just FYI, Spencer and Christy aren't the ones who fixed it. -
2nd law of thermodynamics contradicts greenhouse theory
Fred Staples - "“Higher is Colder”, KR,337 is not “part of the greenhouse effect”. It is the only plausible way of explaining how increasing atmospheric absorption and emission can increase the surface temperature." Quite frankly, no. It's part of the story, but certainly not the entire thing. You might find the simple Excel models I posted here and here of interest. The first is a simple iterative single-layer atmosphere model (no convection/evaporation), so the numbers won't be accurate. But it starts with the surface of the Earth emitting exactly what it receives from the sun (240 W/m^2). Some of that energy is absorbed by the atmosphere, which radiates half of it upwards and half downwards. The end result (illustrative, if not numerically accurate due to model limitations) is that 240 W/m^2 come in, 240 go out, and the surface is emitting 267 W/m^2. A greenhouse gas atmosphere raises the temperature of the surface. The second is a more accurate radiative effect only zero dimensional model, which surprisingly (on my part) gets with 3% of real values. This uses the effective emissivity of the Earth, which drops as greenhouse gases rise (more re-emitted to the ground, also higher effective emission altitudes - both effects). Given an emissivity of .612 (as measured for Earth by satellites), 240 W/m^2 comes in, 240 W/m^2 goes out, and the surface is emitting at about 392 W/m^2 - just as expected. Radiative balances and emissivity decreases caused by GHG's drive surface temperatures to measured values. I'm not interested in convective greenhouses, with or without rock salt - those are red herrings in this discussion of radiative greenhouse effects. As to back radiation - the total energy received by the ground is the sum of solar and back radiation - both impinge on the ground. Arguing that the ground doesn't receive energy from back-radiation is the violation of conservation of energy, and hence the thermodynamic no-no. -
2nd law of thermodynamics contradicts greenhouse theory
damorbel - I begin to see some of your issues, and quite frankly shudder to consider where to even begin. First - Do you think thermal emission is monochromatic? It's not! It covers a broad band of photon energies, due to a large number of possible electron band transitions of different levels. Second - Absorptivity describes the spectral efficiency of absorbing a photon at any particular energy/wavelength. It turns out to be equal to emissivity when the object is at thermal equilibrium. The ground, for example, has about a 95% probability of absorbing a photon at 6 micron wavelength. The thing is, photons do not carry ID cards - a 6 micron photon may be coming from a superheated plasma or a cold atmosphere - there's still a 95% probability of the ground absorbing it, and hence receiving energy from it. The recipient of a photon cannot know and does not care what the source of the photon is. But that photon still adds to the energy of the receiving object. So your statement "The temperatures are the same because the energies of the photons from both sources are the same" is incorrect. The sun provides a bunch of photons at various energies, the atmosphere emits (downward) a smaller bunch of photons at various lower energies, and these sum up to the total energy received by the ground. Which then emits it's own photons of thermal radiation. The heat flow, the net/summed power, is from sun -> ground -> atmosphere -> space, but even a cold atmosphere adds a tiny bit of energy to the warmer ground. If you cannot understand these basics, well, I can't help you, and I can't see spending my time banging my head on the wall. -
Climate sensitivity is low
I believe the "atmospheric window" issue is tied (again) to George White - he believes the window of IR going straight to space is >90 W/m^2, whereas Trenberth estimates 40 W/m^2, and asserts that all greenhouse gas effects operate by narrowing that window. He seems to neglect lapse rate and GHG concentration effects raising the altitude (and dropping the temperature) of emission, and in addition argues that the 90 W/m^2 represents a limiting band on GHG effects. RW1 - The models operate by calculating upwards and downwards emissions from all levels of the atmosphere, and the 3.7 W/m^2 represents all the effects: band broadening due to higher GHG concentrations, band deepening due to higher effective altitudes of emission to space, higher reemission to the ground, etc. So the answer to your question is partially, although not readily picked out of the other effects. -
Fred Staples at 00:09 AM on 25 February 20112nd law of thermodynamics contradicts greenhouse theory
“Higher is Colder”, KR,337 is not “part of the greenhouse effect”. It is the only plausible way of explaining how increasing atmospheric absorption and emission can increase the surface temperature. Incidentally, it is a mechanism which G and T did not discuss, although it was current from 1900 onwards. Think about an atmosphere without a lapse rate – an isothermal atmosphere where higher is not colder. Add greenhouse gasses, increase absorption, and you suggest that the atmospheric temperature will increase. What would happen if it did? Apply the Stefan-Bolzmann equation to the radiation to space, and energy emission will also increase (proportional to the fourth power of the atmospheric temperature). But the incoming energy, from the sun, will not change. So the atmospheric temperature will fall back to its original value. My simple model, is designed to make the same point. With a lapse rate, you can suggest that the effective emission level moves up to a colder region, reducing energy emission. All the temperatures must then increase to restore the balance. The only snag with that argument is that the evidence from the last 30 years shows that it does not happen to any detectable extent. Neither G and T (nor I) claim that AGW contradicts the second law. It is just that some of the sillier explanations of AGW do. Most of them confuse heat and energy, which is where entropy comes in. The silliest explanation, which you can still find in modern text-books, (Houghton for example) is the original greenhouse radiative effect. Consider a greenhouse made of non-absorbing material, such as rock salt. It will absorb heat from the sun, the interior will heat up, and, with convective cooling eliminated, the internal temperature will be higher than the surroundings (G and T’s car interiors, for example). The greenhouse will radiate W watts per square meter, proportional to the fourth power of its temperature. Now replace the rock salt cover with glass, which absorbs infra-red radiation. Half of the outgoing radiation will return to the interior, which, so the story goes, will heat up until it radiates 2W. The original W will then be radiated to the atmosphere, and W will be returned to the interior. The ratio of the glass interior temperature to the rock salt interior temperature will be the fourth root of 2, or 1.19. An increase of 19% of the rock-salt interior absolute temperature, or about 60 degrees C. Does that argument sound familiar? You will find it in part 1 of the Rabett paper to which SOD contributed. It is, of course, nonsense. Back radiation from the cooler glass cannot heat the warmer interior. It would breach the second law if it did. To check this R W Woods built two greenhouses – one rock salt, one glass – so that their convective warming would be identical. Any back-radiative effect would heat the glass green-house preferentially. Their temperatures were the same. -
Tom Curtis at 23:59 PM on 24 February 2011Hockey Stick Own Goal
HR @108, in Hegerl 2007 on table 2, he lists "... the best-guess scaling factor for the model’s fingerprint", ie, the factor by which either forcing or sensitivity must be multiplied by to best reproduce the reconstruction. For his reconstruction, for solar forcings, that factor is 0.5, which means, on the basis of that reconstruction, either climate sensitivity to solar forcings are half those of CO2 and aerosols, or that the solar forcings are around half of those reconstructed at the time of his paper. As it happens, new evidence favours the later conclusion. Hence your previously stated concern that the new evidence on solar forcings might require climate scientists to adopt unphyscical climate sensitivities to explain the past is unwarranted. Hegerl used the forcing reconstuctions from Crowley 2000, which yields a difference between maximum and minimum net solar forcing of 0.6 w/m^2. Halving that sits very comfortably with Gray et al 2010. Having said that, my initial caveat still stands. Neither techiques for reconstructing past forcings or past temperatures are sufficiently exact to tightly constrain climate sensitivity - hence the large error bars in calculatons of sensitivity from data over the last millenium:
This is one reason to prefer sensitivity calculations based on the last glacial maximum, where the much larger changes in forcings and temperatures restrict the potential error.
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Johnny Vector at 23:55 PM on 24 February 2011Dispelling two myths about the tropospheric hot spot
I realize this is the advanced version, but please put some axis labels on the first four images. I assume the horizontal axis is latitude and the vertical axis is pressure in millibars, and that the word "Temperature (°C)" at the top refers to the color scale at the bottom. Thanks. -
MarkR at 23:45 PM on 24 February 2011Dispelling two myths about the tropospheric hot spot
Spencer and Christy made a genuine mistake and found out how to fix it, then fixed it. Nothing inherently wrong in that. That's proper science and a good thing. It should be a cautionary tale for everyone though. Going through the 'hot spot' controversy a bit and the physics (latent heat transfer & change in the moist adiabat) looks a lot more solid than the direct temperature measurements, which we know have serious problems at that altitude. I'm convinced that the most reasonable explanation is measurement error, in some combination of surface overestimate and upper atmosphere underestimate. Most probably dominated by upper atmosphere underestimate. -
macwithoutfries at 23:01 PM on 24 February 2011Dispelling two myths about the tropospheric hot spot
Maybe the best debunking to the Lindzen smear is to remind him of the 'observational data' from his buddies Spencer and Christy (which insisted they were right and models and thermometers were wrong) - for instance discussed here!
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