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skagedal at 20:33 PM on 27 May 2010Why Greenland's ice loss matters
Just quickly pointing out that his last name is spelled "Eschenbach". Thanks for the post.Response: Fixed, thanks. -
aj1983 at 20:33 PM on 27 May 2010Why Greenland's ice loss matters
I do however agree that, though the increasing rate of mass loss is worrisome, it (the acceleration) is hard to tell if this is temporarily or not because we do not understand the mechanism behind it well, and the measurement series is rather short. -
chris at 20:27 PM on 27 May 2010Why Greenland's ice loss matters
FerdiEgb at 17:38 PM on 27 May, 2010 "Extrapolating a trend from a cyclic behaviour is quite triggy..." No one is "extrapolating a trend from cyclic behaviour". Variation of Greenland temperatures/ice sheet mass balance through the Holocene has no element of "cyclic behaviour" (other than the very long term Milankovitch influences whose high N. hemisphere forcing resulted in high N. hemispheric warming around 9000-7000 years ago - this should be causing the Earth to cool achingly slowly now). The ice sheet varied according to variations in forcings and heat transfer, and the effects can be understood in relation to causes. So we certainly don't look at historical variations of climate phenomena (temperature/ice sheet/heat transport/sea level or whatever) arbitrarily call these "cyclic" and then pretend that that's an "explanation". Variability has accessible explanations in relation to known physics. That's why we can make projections of future behaviour based on empirical observations and theoretical knowledge. It's very difficult to escape the strong evidence that polar ice mass balance and its rate of change, and the resulting effects on sea level variation, are strongly linked to global temperatures (see references cited here here). -
Berényi Péter at 20:23 PM on 27 May 2010Has the greenhouse effect been falsified?
#59 Riccardo at 17:22 PM on 27 May, 2010 for good reasons Specify those reasons, please. -
CoalGeologist at 20:19 PM on 27 May 2010Why Greenland's ice loss matters
Berényi Péter @7: One thing new "under the sun" (unfortunately) is another 100+ ppm CO2.... (and by "new" I mean post-Ecclesiastes!). -
aj1983 at 20:13 PM on 27 May 2010Why Greenland's ice loss matters
@B. Peter: And how does the total area compare to today? What about other glaciers? -
CoalGeologist at 20:06 PM on 27 May 2010Why Greenland's ice loss matters
Peter Sinclair's Climate Denial Crock of the Week for April 11 includes an informative discussion of the mass loss of the Greenland ice sheet vis-a-vis "skeptical" arguments (in "Debunking Lord Monckton, Part One"). Discussion of Greenland begins at 5:50. The power of any scientific theory is to explain what we observe, and to predict what we have not yet observed. Climate scientists are making their best effort to anticipate future trends, but there will always be uncertainty. Thingamadonta @3 & FerdiEgb @2, the term "Climate Optimum" is value laden. It may have been optimal for some species, but surely not for woolly mammoths (among others). In any case, circumstances were quite different then, with continental glaciers still receding, sea levels considerably lower (stablizing at near current levels ~4,000 B.P.), Venice and New Orleans still in the planning stages, etc. In any case, warming at that time was apparently confined mostly to Arctic regions. Global temperatures are interpreted to have been cooler. We can't assume that contemporary warming will lead to "optimal" conditions. -
Berényi Péter at 19:54 PM on 27 May 2010Why Greenland's ice loss matters
#2 FerdiEgb at 17:38 PM on 27 May, 2010 In the period 1935-1950, the break-up point of the largest glacier was moving upward as fast as today From the 1920s on. Indeed.
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us. There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.
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Riccardo at 19:44 PM on 27 May 2010Why Greenland's ice loss matters
crhiscanaris, immagine to have a pot of water sitting in equilibrium on a spring on a slowly subsiding land; the pot will go down with the land. Then you start draining water from the pot, the spring pushes the pot up and the result will be that the pot will slower motion downward or even reverse direction if you drain fast enough. Not sure if this analogy makes it clearer. -
Riccardo at 19:31 PM on 27 May 2010Why Greenland's ice loss matters
thingadonta, models do not extrapolate current behaviour. They project on the basis of scenarios, not extrapolations. -
chris1204 at 19:21 PM on 27 May 2010Why Greenland's ice loss matters
Returning to an earlier post, I still haven't got a good sense of why Greenland seemed to be in a state of decelerating rebound (sinking?) around 2003 if ice was melting at an accelerating rate. Apologies if an answer has been posted which I've overlooked. -
thingadonta at 18:21 PM on 27 May 2010Why Greenland's ice loss matters
You mention that "Extrapolating an accelerating curve into the future is always problematic." But isn't this what all the IPCC future climate projections do? These very 'problems' are what skeptics are concerned about. Another point, wasn't the early Holocene also 1-2 degrees C warmer than now? I think Eschenback is making a point that minute Greenland ice losses are sometimes reported as something large and worrisome right now, rather than if they continue to accelerate. It's ony going to be a major problem if the 'extrapolated acceleration curves' of the IPCC turn out to be correct. -
Riccardo at 17:59 PM on 27 May 2010There's no empirical evidence
PaulK, the process you describe is just an integration, which we already know. In some cases, like for example the linear forcing, we have the analytic solution. For a more general forcing we need to do it numerically. And we agree on this. But then you confuse the forcing with the OLR and never in you analysis does the net balance appear. Indeed you write dH/dt=-f(t); here f(t) should be the net energy (im)balance but then it cannot be equal to the OLR. You need to have both the forcing and the thermal radiation. I'd suggest to first write and solve the heat balance equation for ΔT (sorry if i keep using variations, why bother with the equilibrium values?). After that we can try to see who's that guy we call OLR. -
PaulK at 17:47 PM on 27 May 2010There's no empirical evidence
Doug, Looking back at my posts, my attack on the article in the Open Mind site was completely ill-founded, and I retract my comments unreservedly. I claim temporary insanity since I was in the grip of an obsession that led me to believe incorrectly that Riccardo was using the Open Mind article to support an invalid definition of the forcing term as used in the Schwartz model. The author's reputation for infallibility remains untarnished - at least by me. -
FerdiEgb at 17:38 PM on 27 May 2010Why Greenland's ice loss matters
One need to take into account that the "accelerating" ice loss of Greenland's ice sheet is based on only a decade of accurate satellite measurements. But Greenland shows a quite different climate behaviour, compared to other parts of the world. In the period 1935-1950, the break-up point of the largest glacier was moving upward as fast as today and with a lot of ice loss at the ice sheet edges. After 1950, the glacier break-up point advanced again until the late 1990's. If one compares the summer temperatures around Greenland, these were higher in the previous period than today... See: http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/greenland_temp.html Some 6,000 years ago, the ocean north of Greenland was (at least in summer) ice free, due to higher temperatures (the Holocene optimum). Extrapolating a trend from a cyclic behaviour is quite triggy... -
ubrew12 at 17:26 PM on 27 May 2010Why Greenland's ice loss matters
Comparing 2009's loss to the entire sheet is, perhaps, apples and oranges. Compare the 2009 loss to the loss needed to raise sea levels by 1m, which is 14% the size of the entire sheet. Then, project the loss from 2029 onto the same block diagram, to give a visual of the acceleration. Just a thought. -
Riccardo at 17:22 PM on 27 May 2010Has the greenhouse effect been falsified?
Berényi Péter, you did it again. You used a descriptive graph and said that it's sylas that should provide more details. Even a superficial look at your graph in comment #56 should evidence that it's not worth any quantitative comparison with actual data. And indeed, of the three environments (out of the four spectra shown) two do not much your expectations, and for good reasons. -
Doug Bostrom at 16:23 PM on 27 May 2010There's no empirical evidence
I'm not sure I see where the problem is regarding TOA imbalance, model versus observations (observed OLR vs. IPCC assumptions?). After cleaning up some obvious problems (>6W/m2, we'd cook more rapidly) with satellite measurements, we're left with direct imbalance observations of ~0.95W/m2 versus model predictions of ~0.85W/m2*. These rates are in reasonable agreement. I see PaulK's point w/regard to his formal look at the situation but something's not quite closing the circle; we can quibble about splicing etc. but it's pretty hard to simply say -all- OHC and atmospheric temperature measurements for the past 40 years are wrong and that temperature has not changed in that time, meanwhile both models and observations indicate an imbalance. Hmmm. A puzzle. *EARTH’S GLOBAL ENERGY BUDGET, K. E. Trenberth, J. T. Fasullo, J. Kiehl, Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc. 90, 311 (2009) Full text here. -
Jeff Freymueller at 16:16 PM on 27 May 2010Greenland rising faster as ice loss accelerates
#58 Humanity Rules, you can take solace in the model prediction if you like, but the present rate of mass loss rate of 300 Gt/year is about 300 km3/year of ice (1 km3 of ice masses about 0.9Gt), and by my count there remain 90 years of warming in the A1B scenario to go before we hit 2100. Meaning that the model is massively underpredicting the rate of ice loss. My guess is that the model ignores glacier flow, but that's a guess based on a quick look at Fettweis' web site, which shows figures for melting and precipitation. This may also provide some context for wes george's question about why this is a big deal (#51). I also got quite a chuckle out of someone's claim (I forget who) that Science and Nature were somehow competing to publish "alarmist data". You must be joking! -
Jeff Freymueller at 15:55 PM on 27 May 2010Greenland rising faster as ice loss accelerates
#49 Humanity Rules, where did I say that the Earth as a whole was not losing ice over the last couple hundred years? I said GREENLAND was not. Now it is. That's a fundamental change. The blue diamonds on your figure may be the red squares on Figure 2 in John's original post. I prefer that other figure because it shows all of the independent estimates rather than a single source (and it lacks the overly squiggly "linear reconstruction", which is based on heaven knows what (not the observations!). Not to say that the general trend of that reconstruction is necessarily wrong, just that without a lot more information about how it was estimated, it shouldn't be assumed to be right, and its continuity is misleading. -
Ari Jokimäki at 15:50 PM on 27 May 2010Working out climate sensitivity from satellite measurements
A recently published paper by Lin et al. addresses Spencer's feedback determinations. The end result seems to be that Spencer is studying noise. This paper is also relevant to Lindzen's stuff. By the way, here's my take on Lindzen & Choi (2009). -
Doug Bostrom at 14:37 PM on 27 May 2010There's no empirical evidence
Apart from your semi-deplorable fling about "junk science" PaulK, may I just say how refreshing it is to see people such as you and Riccardo, "e" roll up their sleeves and invest some serious mental elbow grease here? There are only a few folks hanging out on the site who can have a conversation of this nature and produce reasonable repartee, particularly when it comes to doing maths; Riccardo, BP and a very few others come to mind. I'm not sure about the importance of the discrepancy you mention as a dilemma, I'm off to see what's up in the recent observational department on that but it's certainly pleasant to see such detailed treatment. -
HumanityRules at 14:14 PM on 27 May 2010Working out climate sensitivity from satellite measurements
I read the (Chung et al 2010) paper. Could anybody tell me what climate sensitivity he reports from the satellite data. If you can convert it to oC I'd be grateful. This might be the relevant passage if that will help. "The recomputed slopes after removing the estimate of the Pinatubo radiative forcing (open circles in Figure 1d) are generally between 1.25‐2.0 W m−2 K−1 and more similar to the values of the AMIP model simulations." They also state "The computed values are consistently smaller than the value of the no‐feedback case (3.3 W m−2 K−1)" -
Philippe Chantreau at 12:58 PM on 27 May 2010Collective Intelligence and climate change
HR, complete re-organization of the transport system is inevitable at some point. It's just a matter of doing it in a controlled way, rather then being forced to. -
PaulK at 11:19 AM on 27 May 2010There's no empirical evidence
Riccardo, I promised a post proving that the general solution I offered in #55 is easily reconciled with Schwartz if one accepts his assumptions. Generalised heating model: dH/dt = Q(t) – E(t) = absorbed SW (flux) – Outgoing LW(flux) at TOA Assume that at time t = 0, the system is in steady-state equilibrium: Q(0) = E(0). Now, keeping everything else unchanged, consider a positive impulse forcing F1 = constant which results in a perturbation, f(t), of the OLR. We can write: OLR(t) = Q(0) + f(t) ; Q(t) = Q(0) = constant ; dH/dt = -f(t) At this stage, we don’t know what f(t) looks like, but we do know some things about it: • Minus f(t) is positive definite on the open interval (0,te), where te is the equilibrium time. (Otherwise the (constant impulse ) forcing would have to cause a net cooling at some stage in its effect). • As the system restabilises at the equilibrium time, te, f(t) must go to zero. • It is both closed and integrable, since the area bounded by the curve represents the finite energy commitment associated with the impulse forcing, F1. This system can be solved for the total perturbation (and hence for OLR) by superposition. This permits one to model combinations of input and output forcings over time. But let us consider the simple case first of where we have an exponential or annually geometric growth in CO2, translated into a forcing which is linear with time: F(t) = bt. The solution is analytic for this condition, but for convenience later, we will choose a superposition timestep of 1 year. We set the first year forcing F1 = b. All subsequent years are then also equal to F1 to satisfy F=bt. This is equivalent to superposing each year the same perturbation function f(t) to obtain the total perturbation to the system. The solution is then OLR(t) = Q(0) + integral of f(t) from 0 to t for all t< te OLR(t) = Q(0) + integral of f(t) from 0 to te (i.e. a constant) for all t>=te Note then that independently of the choice/calculation of the perturbation function (f(t)), OLR is monotonically decreasing until the equilibration time, and stays constant thereafter for this case of F(t) = bt which is proxy for a geometrically increasing CO2 concentration. This is an analytic result. So, does the above solution work for the Schwartz model? In Schwartz, the equilibration time strictly speaking is infinity (NOT tau). The perturbation function for a constant impulse forcing F1 in Schwartz is given by f(t) = -F1*exp(-t/tau) = -b*exp(-t/tau) Substituting into the generalised solution for OLR above, we obtain: OLR (t) = Q(0) + integral of f(t) from 0 to t = Q(0) + b*tau*(exp(-t/tau) – 1) for all t less than te = infinity. You should then find that this is compatible with the solution we obtained directly from manipulation of Schwartz. Next stage is to better understand the difficulties of reconciling the increasing OLR with IPCC assumptions. -
HumanityRules at 10:33 AM on 27 May 2010Greenland rising faster as ice loss accelerates
Present and future climates of the Greenland ice sheet according to the IPCC AR4 models Bruno Franco1 , Xavier Fettweis, Michel Erpicum and Samuel Nicolay Climate Dynamics DOI 10.1007/s00382-010-0779-1 Abstract "......We also show that the GrIS surface mass balance anomalies from the SRES A1B scenario amount to −300 km3/year with respect to the 1970–1999 period, leading to a global sea-level rise of 5 cm by the end of the 21st century.........." 5cm would be less problematic. -
Doug Bostrom at 10:15 AM on 27 May 2010Working out climate sensitivity from satellite measurements
Thingadonta needs to go back to school. Basics of general circulation models. Free to read, no need to speculate. -
chris at 10:11 AM on 27 May 2010Working out climate sensitivity from satellite measurements
Berényi Péter at 09:02 AM on 27 May, 2010 "The paper is about short term water (vapor+cloud) feedback and they do find a low sensitivity here." No they don't Peter. I wonder whether you've read the paper. In a scientific paper your interpretations have to be consistent with the data you present and its analysis. In this case Spencer and Braswell fiddle around with various ways of plotting globally averaged anomalies in CERES net fluxes and find "considerable scatter". They try higher time resolution and find negative regression slopes (flux vs surface temperature) which they suggest cannot represent the real sensitivity. They try restricting the analysis to the global oceans (60 oN to 60 oS latitude) with daily resolution comparisons of flux with sea surface temperatures...however they find the correlations are negative. They try extending the time scales of intercomparisons (radiation flux and SST). They try phase space plotting of the data... Eventually they come up with "evidence of linear striations". These have slopes of around 6.2 W.m-2.K. Spencer and Braswell state: "These striations are significantly different from a similar plot of two time series of random numbers, shown in Fig. 3b, suggesting that the striations are due to some underlying physical process." Does that sound like they've "found low sensitivity here"? I don't think so. The paper has some interesting comparisons of a simplified model with GCM's. It's quite good at highlighting the difficulties of identifiying fast feedbacks in the presence of external forcinsg. What it doesn't present evidence of is "low sensitivity". Of course Spencer may say otherwise on his blog (a bad habit). But if you can't justify an interpretation in a scientific paper, then that interpretation is unlikely to be scientifically valid. -
Berényi Péter at 09:14 AM on 27 May 2010Working out climate sensitivity from satellite measurements
#13 chris at 08:17 AM on 27 May, 2010 Incidentally, it's worth looking at Foster and Gregory 2006 The paper is available here. -
Riccardo at 09:11 AM on 27 May 2010Working out climate sensitivity from satellite measurements
Chris G, did I say anything about the future? I just gave the "standard" definition of sensitivity which could in principle be used to evaluate it using past data. Maybe John's response to Alexandre #2 is clearer than mine. -
Berényi Péter at 09:02 AM on 27 May 2010Working out climate sensitivity from satellite measurements
#11 chris at 07:41 AM on 27 May, 2010 he (and Braswell) are quite explicit in stating that the parameter they pulled out of their analysis doesn't have any necessary realtionship to the climate sensitivity as it is commonly understood Of course they state that as it is true. The paper is about short term water (vapor+cloud) feedback and they do find a low sensitivity here. There may be any number of feedbacks operating on longer timescales, some of them strong positive. However, current computational climate models can't project much warming with no fast & strong positive water feedback. Here is an earlier presentation by the same authors on this topic, 16 December 2009 AGU Meeting, San Francisco, CA -
Berényi Péter at 08:47 AM on 27 May 2010Estimating climate sensitivity from 3 million years ago
FYI The Spencer & Braswell (2010) thing is continued here -
thingadonta at 08:44 AM on 27 May 2010Working out climate sensitivity from satellite measurements
Firstly, I think the above discussion is very good. A few points: The global data is too imcomplete to make a definitive conclusion about climate sensitivity, especially in the higher latitudes. However, most of the data I have seen does suggest the tropics don't warm as fast as other regions when the earth warms (which also means Hurricanes and Cyclones shouldnt increase in frequency with warming, because of the lower T difference and greater stability between the tropics and temperate regions). The papers looking at Earths history sensitivity, some of which you have presented on this site (eg Little Ice Age), are not definitive for climate sensitivity either. They are generally models which insert C02 to explain longer term trends, and leave out other factors, such as clouds and changes to ocean currents. The reason they 'converge' is because they use essentially the same causal explanations. They are not really that 'independent' (eg many papers refer to each other to provide eg back up to uncertainties in the data, like using the same dataset for proxy temperatures). Essentially, the models use the same assumptions to come up with the same conclusions. -
jimmck at 08:18 AM on 27 May 2010Human CO2 is a tiny % of CO2 emissions
You have referred me to "working out climate sensitivity by satilite measuements" as a response. While it is not conclusive on most points it is conclusive on the fact that no one has a handle on global sea temperatures. There seems to have been a concensus developed that average atmospheric temperatures have increased by 0.7C over the last century but there is none on average seawater temperatures. The reason I am interested is that on an holistic basis it seems that the solubility curve of CO2 would require the oceans to give up 4% of their CO2 for a 1.0C temperature increase. ie it would take a 0.03C increase in average seawater temperature from 2000 to 2010 to explain the 43Pg's/GT's increase of atmospheric carbon over that ten year period. -
chris at 08:17 AM on 27 May 2010Working out climate sensitivity from satellite measurements
Berényi Péter at 07:38 AM on 27 May, 2010 if......if...... I suspect the fast feedbacks will be found not to be negative, Peter. All the dodgy attempts to winkle out something with the appearance of a negative feedback (flawed analyses by Spencer and Braswell, and by Chylek, and by Schwartz, and by Lindzen and Choi) have turned out to be scientifically deficient. In any case, there are a couple of obvious flaws to the notion that fast feedbacks are negative. The first of these relates to the numerous direct measurements of enhanced tropospheric humidity in response to atmospheric warming. It's very difficult to come to a conclusion that this (a) doesn't exist, and (b) isn't a positive feedback. The second is the observation that we've had around 0.8-0.9 oC of global warming since the mid-19th century. It's easy to calculate that a radiative forcing from the known enhanced [CO2] with zero feedbacks should give a warming at equilibrium of around 0.4 oC (see point (v) here). Since we know that we aren't yet near equlibrium with the current forcing, and that a substantial aerosol load has offset some of the warming from enhanced anthropogenic [CO2], and that solar variability has made no more than around 0.1 oC contribution to this warming, it seems very unlikely indeed that the feedbacks to [CO2]-induced primary atmospheric warming are not positive and substantial (one should also factor in contributions from black carbon and non-CO2 greenhouse gases). And that's without considering the abundant evidence from paleotemperature/[CO2] relationships that indicate a climate sensitivity near 3 oC of warming at equilibrium per doubling of atmospheric [CO2]. Incidentally, it's worth looking at Foster and Gregory 2006, which does a very good job of highlighting the issues associated with attempting to use direct measures of TOA radiation to estimate climate sensitivity..... Incidentally (b!) Spencer and Braswell certainly are not talking about Charney sensitivity. They state this explicitly in their paper (see my post just above and the link therein). Lindzen would like to "sell" the pretence that his analysis is about Charney sensitivity, but it turns out not be... -
Berényi Péter at 08:13 AM on 27 May 2010Has the greenhouse effect been falsified?
#57 Riccardo at 00:18 AM on 27 May, 2010 You can determine the temperature of the photosphere in the 14-16 μm range (CO2 stopband) comparing it to the blackbody radiation curves. As the atmosphere is absolutely opaque in this frequency range, it acts as a perfect black body here. As from photosphere height up it gets transparent fast, this black body radiation segment is seen above wit no attenuation. Approximate temperatures - Fig 8.3 a (Sahara Desert): 215 K (-58°C) Fig 8.3 b (Antarctic ice sheet): 197 K (-76°C) Fig 8.3 c (Tropical Western Pacific): 215 K (-58°C) Fig 8.3 d (Southern Iraq): 217 K (-56°C) Temperatures a & d are close to the respective tropopause temps. Temperature for b may be much colder than indicated for polar tropopause, but it must be during polar winter when tropopause drops to the surface. Temp c is warmer than expected, but troposphere temperature over the tropics is variable both in space and time (of day). Anyway, in that graph photosphere temperature in CO2 stopband is the same over clear sky and thunderstorm anvil. Therefore it should be above tropopause. -
Chris G at 08:04 AM on 27 May 2010Working out climate sensitivity from satellite measurements
Are Lindzen et al only talking about Charney sensitivity? I may have missed that; it sounded to me that their sensitivity estimates did not include caveats about assuming no ice surface area changes and no atmospheric composition changes, etc. OK, if you assume that there are only fast feedbacks and you can detect a reduction in the rate of energy flux, then you can make an educated guess as to where equilibrium will be reached. However, since they only used SST from 1985-1999, SSTs have changed a lot since then, the ice extent has change dramatically in the last decade, and the composition surely has not remained static, I don't see that these are realistic assumptions. -
chris at 07:41 AM on 27 May 2010Working out climate sensitivity from satellite measurements
Berényi Péter at 07:05 AM on 27 May, 2010 No I think we'll find that Spencer hasn't found anything of the sort Peter. In any case he (and Braswell) are quite explicit in stating that the parameter they pulled out of their analysis doesn't have any necessary realtionship to the climate sensitivity as it is commonly understood (i.e. the Earth surface equuilibrium temperature response to a radiative forcing equivalent to a doubling of atmospheric [CO2]). I described this in some detail here. I'm surprised you're commenting on a paper that you haven't read... -
Berényi Péter at 07:38 AM on 27 May 2010Working out climate sensitivity from satellite measurements
#9 Chris G at 07:15 AM on 27 May, 2010 If someone can explain how a current radiative imbalance can be used to predict the sum of future radiative imbalance, I'd be glad to hear it. We are talking about Charney sensitivity right now. Most of it is supposed to come from atmospheric water (vapor+cloud) feedback. As tropospheric H2O turnover time is short (~9 days) and even for the stratosphere it is on the order of one month, it is a fast feedback. If it is found to be strong negative, all other longer term feedbacks can only operate on an already attenuated signal. -
Chris G at 07:15 AM on 27 May 2010Working out climate sensitivity from satellite measurements
Riccardo, I don't think so. Measured in the long runs, energy-in equals energy-out. Whatever energy the earth receives is radiated off in time. This is true whether the earth is approximately stable in a snowball state or approximately stable in a hothouse state. A snowball state is possible when relatively more of the energy received is radiated back out at wavelengths more or less transparent to the atmosphere. A hothouse state occurs when there is relatively more of an asymmetry between wavelengths received and wavelengths emitted. An imbalance only tells you how much energy is being added or subtracted from the system at that time, or over the course of of whatever history you have. I don't think it can tell you what the future will bring. It can give you a good idea of the current rate of change, but since it doesn't tell you anything about the mechanics involved, I don't see that it can tell you if that rate will increase or decrease over time. The integral of the rate of change over time will absolutely tell you the total amount of change, but if you don't know anything about how long a rate of change will persist, you can't say anything about what the total change will be. Climate sensitivity generally refers to the amount of temperature change when a new point of equilibrium is reached. If someone can explain how a current radiative imbalance can be used to predict the sum of future radiative imbalance, I'd be glad to hear it. I kind of skimmed the article Barry linked. Two things struck me: Lindzen et al specifically state that they are aware of the shortcoming of only using tropic data; there's no need to hammer them on it. They apply a lot of linear tests for feedback effects while the historical proxy data indicate that they tend to be non-linear. I guess I still have the same basic problem with Lindzen that I've had for a while: If the climate sensitivity to forcings is so low, how did the climate change so much in the past? -
Berényi Péter at 07:05 AM on 27 May 2010Working out climate sensitivity from satellite measurements
Another major flaw in Lindzen's analysis is that they attempt to calculate global climate sensitivity from tropical data. Roy Spencer has found Strong Negative Feedback from the Latest CERES Radiation Budget Measurements Over the Global Oceans between 60N and 60S. That covers 87% of the Earth's surface and almost all the ice free oceans. Spencer, R. W., and W. D. Braswell (2010), On the Diagnosis of Radiative Feedback in the Presence of Unknown Radiative Forcing J. Geophys. Res., doi:10.1029/2009JD013371, in press. (accepted 12 April 2010), paywalled. -
Riccardo at 05:30 AM on 27 May 2010Working out climate sensitivity from satellite measurements
Alexandre, to evaluate climate sensitivity you need not know any specific forcing provided that you measure the total energy imbalance. Afterall, this is just (one of) the definition of climate sensitivity, the response to a energy imbalance. -
johnd at 04:56 AM on 27 May 2010Unprecedented Warming in Lake Tanganyika and its impact on humanity
Pat Moffitt at 14:01 PM, I agree totally with you on the dangers of wrongly assigning blame, particularly in this instance, it is something that also applies to many other issues globally. I cannot help but wonder how much influence respected journals have when they perhaps unconsciously create a preconceived notion in their readers minds when studies such as this one with overlapping implications are titled for publication. Getting back to the matter of nutrients, I do acknowledge that it is a large body of water with an expected large reserve of nutrients. But even in oceans, rivers through the creation of suitable habitats such as deltas, and the delivery of nutrients, sustain rich fishing grounds that have become dependent on the inputs from the river and thus are subject to the conditions that control the inputs into the river system in areas remote from the fishery itself. These are only general observations and I don't have any knowledge specific to this lake such as the distribution and output of any fishings grounds or even if there are such areas within the lake, but I agree totally that the focus should not be allowed to be taken off the work that needs to be done, not only to further understand what is happening and why, but as you noted, to create some workable plan to sustain the lakes output into the future. -
barry1487 at 04:09 AM on 27 May 2010Working out climate sensitivity from satellite measurements
I wonder what the climate sensitivity would be if Lindzen's method was applied to data from the Arctic circle. -
barry1487 at 03:24 AM on 27 May 2010Working out climate sensitivity from satellite measurements
Alexandre,I understood Lindzen's paper is about figuring out the relationship between radiative forcing and temperature. How was CO2 included there?
you can view the full version Lindzen et al 2009 here: http://www.drroyspencer.com/Lindzen-and-Choi-GRL-2009.pdf The brief mention of CO2 therein is much the same as here (example of energy imbalance from CO2 doubling). -
Ned at 03:11 AM on 27 May 2010Greenland rising faster as ice loss accelerates
wes george writes: You guys realize that it is hard to get to excited about Greenland's icecap melting at 300gt annually out of 2.8 million gt, especially since that's got to be the high end of the estimate. GRACE estimates the melt at only 185gt annually. No, actually, GRACE shows that the loss of mass from Greenland has been accelerating, and is now over 300 GT/year.
You really need to look at this quantitatively. Not many years ago, Greenland was actually neutral or gaining mass because warming was slight enough that the increased ablation was more than compensated for by precipitation. But the mass balance is now on a clearly accelerating downward trend.
From a discussion in another recent thread: [O]ver the past decade the rate of ice loss from Greenland accelerated by about 11% per year. This is highly unlikely to continue (there would be no ice left by ~2075 or so).
If that acceleration dropped to 3% per year tomorrow and continued for the rest of the century, you'd end up with 0.3 to 0.4 m sea level rise from Greenland, 1.0 m SLR total.
One meter of sea level rise would be very problematic. But that's assuming a much lower rate of acceleration than we've seen over the past decade ... and Greenland would still have 93% of its ice. That's a pretty scary thought, IMHO.
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Doug Bostrom at 02:45 AM on 27 May 2010Greenland rising faster as ice loss accelerates
Further to Phila's remarks on "alarmists", "warmists" and the like, this research was done and will continue to be done quite apart from any ideological considerations; folks such as Phil Jones are nice examples of somebody's curiosity leading them inadvertently into the limelight, as Pielke Sr. recently remarked. The muse researchers are following is mostly a private spirit. Public reactions to research findings are quite divorced from motivations leading to new discoveries; Charles Darwin did not set out to upset Christian orthodoxy regarding creation but inadvertently blundered into that controversy. The exact behavior of ice sheets, the response of the crust to changes in mass balance, all these matters and more will be scrutinized to a fare-thee-well not because researchers are grinding some axe but instead due to the human inclination to resolve mysteries. That may be a hard thing to believe but I think most scientists would largely agree. -
Phila at 02:33 AM on 27 May 2010Greenland rising faster as ice loss accelerates
Wes, "Hard to imagine our hydrocarbon-based economy surviving the next 40 years of technological evolution." It was hard to imagine in 1970, too. And yet, here we are. -
chris at 02:33 AM on 27 May 2010Robust warming of the global upper ocean
Ken Lambert at 23:46 PM on 26 May, 2010 "The mechanism of heat transfer to the oceans from the atmosphere has always been unconvincing." Nope. An unconvincing variety of "common sense" doesn't "trump" a century of understanding of the thermodynamics of radiative heat transfer! Remember that for each 10^22 joules of energy added to the top 700 metres of the oceans, this region of the ocean (top 700 metres) warms by ~ 0.01 oC [*]. Therefore year on year variation of upper ocean heat content is very difficult to measure and yearly averaged measures of ocean heat content have a considerable associated error (as is apparent in the error bars in the data in the figures in the top post). As with all measurements where yearly data points have large associated errors, longer term measures are more robust than short term measures. So it's possible that the calibration errors in ARGO floats haven't been completely eliminated and we aren't quite measuring the upper oceans reliably. It's also possible that some of the heat may be in regions of the oceans (greater depths) and partly escaped detection. it's also possible that for a short period there hasn't been a significant radiative imbalance (e.g. due to a particular coincidence of atmospheric effects), and so some of the heat wasn't missing at all (we'll get it as an "added chunk" as atmospheric fluctuations shift in the other direction). We have reasonable evidence that sea level rise slowed for a couple of years around 2006-2008, but that the longer term trend of sea level rise has pretty much caught up. The sea level rise in recent years can't be fully accounted for from knowledge of land ice melt, and efforts to "close the sea level budget" for these short periods require some thermal expansion (enhanced ocean heat) contribution [**]. So there are some interesting uncertainties to be resolved for this very short period of time. No doubt in the next few years these uncertainties will be resolved. However as with all areas of science, one doesn't choose one area of uncertainty, select a particular set of data, and then assume that encasing this within a bit of arithmetic defines absolutely what's happening in the natural world. ------------------------------- [*] In case anyone wants to check my sums: surface area of oceans: 3.61 x 10^14 m^2 volume of top 700 metres: 3.61 x 10^14 x 700 = 2.57 x 10^17 m^3 = 2.57 x 10^20 litres weight of this seawater: 2.57 x 10^20 x 1.03 kg (density correction) it requires 4186 joules to warm 1 kg of water by 1 oC raising the temperature of the top 700 metres of the oceans by 0.01 oC requires 2.56 x 10^20 x 4186 x 0.01 = 1.07 x 10^22 joules..... [**] recently reviewed here: A. Cazenave and W. Llovel (2009)Contemporary Sea Level Rise Annual Review of Marine Science 2, 145-173 -
Doug Bostrom at 02:32 AM on 27 May 2010Robust warming of the global upper ocean
Ken Lambert: The mechanism of heat transfer to the oceans from the atmosphere has always been unconvincing. You'll need to develop that assertion into an explanation better than what others practicing in the field have done before you're convincing. You do realize that, right?
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