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Jeff Freymueller at 15:08 PM on 16 March 2010Watts Up With That's continued ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
#22 Jeff Id: "In Fig 2, you can see the red band encircling the entire continent with a blue center." Sorry, but I don't see this. Are you referring to Figure 2 of this posting, or of some paper? In Figure 2 of the posting, the brightest red spots are indeed at the edge of the continent, but labeled "former site of Larsen B ice shelf" and so on. The "trend" here is presumably due to the loss of the ice shelf revealing the unfrozen ocean beneath. Admittedly, this is probably a step function change in time rather than a trend, but the result hardly seems unreasonable. The blue vs. red patterns I see on the continent bears some resemblance to high vs. low elevation at least for East Antarctica, although that is just eyeballing. Most of West Antartica is red, so there is no simple relationship between trend on the figure and distance from the coast, pole, or anything else. The "ring" you suggest is quite distorted -- why are you convinced that this particular shape is a clear symptom of the "noise problem"? If you are really talking about some other figure, can you post that one? As for removing the error, it is certainly true that sometimes you can put bounds on the errors but not remove them. Can you be more specific about what bounds you estimate on errors in trend here? -
hank at 14:11 PM on 16 March 2010Watts Up With That's ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
Oh, and someone noted the Comiso book chapter isn't "peer reviewed" -- but if you read it, it's a compilation about the whole range of work and methods and statistical approaches, citing peer reviewed papers for each statement. Just one example, where it points out that the models are consistent with the observations: "The trends are all negative in the northern hemisphere and all slightly positive in the Southern Hemisphere, as has been reported previously [Parkinson et al., 1999; Zwally et al., 2002], but with slightly different values. This phenomenon suggests that the climates of the two hemispheres are not closely coupled. The results, however, are consistent with predictions from some Global Circulation Models [Manabe et al., 1992]..." -
hank at 13:49 PM on 16 March 2010Watts Up With That's ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
> Comiso It says (updated from Comiso, 2003) in the text. -
gallopingcamel at 13:17 PM on 16 March 2010CO2 levels during the late Ordovician
John Cook says "CO2 is a strong driver of climate". This claim fails at all time scales. If this were true it would be easy to show correlation between CO2 concentration and global temperature. Modern times. There is good correlation between the variables from 1850 to 1998. Looking back from 1850 the correlation breaks down unless you re-write history by denying the Medieval and Roman Warm Periods. Looking forward, the variables have diverged over the last 12 years. Last 700,000 years. CO2 and temperature proxies correlate very well through several glaciations. However, CO2 frequently lags temperature by ~600 years. While correlation does not imply causation, it would be more plausible to suggest that temperature drives CO2 concentration than the opposite. Last 600 million years. See (#39) on this thread. Starting late in the Ordovician, Scotese et al. say there was a sharp drop in temperature followed by a rise. Hot, cold and then back to hot. Royer uses Berner's CO2 reconstruction which show fluctuations that are too small to account for these changes unless you torture the data by taking liberties with the large error bars. -
Jeff Id at 11:45 AM on 16 March 2010Watts Up With That's continued ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
So many questions. Lessee. We quantified it from a dataset released by Comiso and the NSIDC. I've not worked with ALL other peoples data. However the errors in trend are actually visible in your figures. In Fig 2, you can see the red band encircling the entire continent with a blue center. There is considerably more variance in the center vs the edges which you would expect from ocean dampening, however expecting a long term trend difference in a ring shape is a different story. Certainly, you can claim it's reasonable as some have, but in reality it's just a symptom of the noise problem. The center of the continent varies many times greater and because of the difficulties that creates, it has substantially more trend error. It turns out that in the case of the Comiso dataset when the AVHRR data was compared to the surface stations at the same points, statistically significant differences were discovered. Steig would not be surprised by this, nor would Comiso. The error cannot be removed easily because the satellites have considerably more spatial information than a hundred individual temp stations with intermittent readings. On a daily spatial basis, it's easy to imagine that cloud contamination would create problems on a variable basis. One could simply correct the average slope, but that just makes it into surface information so that doesn't make sense. I've not investigated the difference between buoy data but again, it's not as simple as an average trend check. -
Doug Bostrom at 11:28 AM on 16 March 2010Watts Up With That's continued ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
Jeff Id at 11:08 AM on 16 March, 2010 If you can identify an error, quantify it, why can it not be removed? If you cannot quantify the error, by what means do you assess the amount of error and for that matter how do you ascribe the error at all? Why does scattering of the AVHRR temperature error record against buoy data not show an error trend and not show an overall bias? Finally, where is data showing an overall trend upward in this purported uncorrected error? Many more people than Comiso have worked on cloud correction, successfully as it turns out. -
Berényi Péter at 11:24 AM on 16 March 2010Watts Up With That's continued ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
Antarctica is a curious heat engine. There is about a 100 W m-2 deficit in average annual insolation relative to outgoing longwave radiation to space. The difference is supplied by dry air sucked in from milder latitudes 500-1000 m above the ice sheet surface. Ice is highly reflective in the short wave portion of em spectrum, but it is pitch black in thermal IR, so emissivity is high. Radiative surface cooling is very strong, especially because of low atmospheric water vapor. Air close to surface gets cold and heavy, starts to roll downhill, more air is sucked in from above. Even the low moisture contents of air is deposited on surface as floating ice needles and hoarfrost. As air gets to ever lower levels, its pressure increases. Normal reaction would be adiabatic warming, but contact with surface keeps cooling it. Due to high elevation of Antarctica, gravitational pull on dense cold air accelerates it, at shores this katabatic wind reaches gale force. Blows sea ice north, coastal polynyas open up. Sea surface cooled by strong cold winds, excess sea ice production, deep water formation facilitated by salt rejection in sea ice. Works in high gear during winter. Significant fall sea ice area increase in last four decades indicates this heat sink getting more efficient. Wind speed and pressure trends would tell more than temperature alone. -
Jeff Id at 11:08 AM on 16 March 2010Watts Up With That's continued ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
#18, I've recently been part of a group that submitted for publication on the subject, the raw instrument is quite accurate as you correctly assert. Where you go wrong is in misunderstanding that the readings are contaminated by cloud data. Comiso has spent years trying to correct for clouds. If you're really interested, half of my blog work was on the topic. If the data were good for trend the surface/sat data combining methods would not be required. The total length of the data is biased warm but it's caused by noise, there are subsections which were biased cold. AVHRR consists of several satellites, with different instruments that drifted in different directions over time, there were statistically measurable steps and trends between sat and surface at several points. -
Doug Bostrom at 10:38 AM on 16 March 2010Watts Up With That's continued ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
Jeff Id at 07:44 AM on 16 March, 2010 To say "the AVHRR data is biased warm" is a rather gross oversimplification, isn't it Jeff? Any readers wondering why or how or especially if yet another instrumentation record should prove faulty should be sure to use Google scholar to get the full story on Jeff's assertion. The raw accuracy of the data product is excellent. See: Validation of AVHRR and MODIS ice surface temperature products using in situ radiometers Meanwhile, the scatter of AVHRR derived temperature data against drifting buoy measurements has remained constant or even decreased slightly over the past two decades, is now in the range of 0.5 degree C, meaning that even if this data proved to have a warm bias that bias is not for some mysterious reason increasing. In turn this implies that temperature trends can in fact be extracted with reasonable confidence from AVHRR results. "AVHRR is biased warm" seems to be a variation of the famous "Watts' Fallacy" regarding surface station records. or numerous other articles on this topic. -
Jeff Id at 10:36 AM on 16 March 2010Watts Up With That's continued ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
#14, Steig et al is also flawed. They chose two few PC's for their analysis which caused the oversampled peninsula warming to be spread around the continent. There are a lot of stations in the peninsula. When the number of eigenvectors is increased or a regridding of surface station data is used, the trend drops to about 0.06C/Decade with some cooling since 82. -
Ned at 10:00 AM on 16 March 2010Watts Up With That's continued ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
We're mostly talking about sea surface temperatures around Antarctica, right? AVHRR is very widely used for producing SST. I haven't looked into the source for fig. 1 and fig. 2, but the claim that you can't get reliable SST measurements from AVHRR is a new one to me. -
Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
(#88) So true, Philippe; "...any scientific field that is studied enough will, at some point, see the emergence of some level of consensus, unless no significant progress is being made..." From my viewpoint as someone with a degree in Philosphy: at one point 'Natural Philosophy' was _all_ of science. As consensus accumulated in various aspects we got Chemistry, Physics, Math, Biology, Engineering, etc. Now the only questions really left under the Philosophy tent are those that people are still arguing over after thousands of years, like 'why act justly when you won't get caught', 'what is the nature of the universe', and 'tastes great vs. less filling!' -
CO2 levels during the late Ordovician
My apologies, the first time I tried that and I put in a bad URL: CO2 and IR animation -
CO2 levels during the late Ordovician
RSVP - here's a link I found for a fun animation of this. The animation only shows one direction of emission, unfortunately, rather than a spherical distribution, but it's still a useful illustration: CO2 and IR animation -
CO2 levels during the late Ordovician
RSVP - CO2 absorbs then re-emits the energy, with fairly high efficiency. Some absorbed IR will (small percentage chances) be converted to molecular motion (hitting another air molecule at a high energy level prior to re-emission), a _very very__ small percentage will break molecular bonds (energy is low, but we're dealing in probabilities here), but the vast majority is incoherently re-emitted in a random direction as the electron shell of the CO2 molecule returns to its low energy state. I work with fluorescent dyes - this is fairly basic in molecular/photon interactions. This changes part of the IR vector from UP (hemispheric emission pattern from the ground to the sky) to spherically symmetric, sending some of it back down to the ground; the ground loses energy more slowly as a result. Even if it doesn't head straight back down, the IR now has a longer atmospheric path length, increasing the chances of hitting water vapor or other heating events in the atmosphere itself. CO2's not a mirror of IR, it's a randomizer. And ~50% (simplifying multiple absorption events, sums of series, etc.) of what gets randomized heads back down. -
Riccardo at 09:05 AM on 16 March 2010Watts Up With That's continued ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
Although not stated espicitly, it is customary to report clear sky skin temperature. As far as i know the latter correlates quite well with in situ measurements (see for example Scambos et al. 2006, Annal. Glaciol. 44,345) -
Peter Hogarth at 08:41 AM on 16 March 2010Watts Up With That's continued ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
Jeff Id at 07:44 AM on 16 March, 2010 I would hope then that Steig 2009 can be trusted, and on the NASA webpage Satellites Confirm Half-Century of West Antarctic Warming we get a 2009 update on the images in this post.
“The new analysis shows that Antarctic surface temperatures increased by an average of 0.22°F (0.12°C) per decade between 1957 and 2006. That's a rise of more than 1°F (0.5°C) in the last half century. West Antarctica warmed at a higher rate, rising 0.31°F (0.17°C) per decade. The results confirm earlier findings based on limited weather station data and ice cores”.
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Peter Hogarth at 08:05 AM on 16 March 2010CO2 levels during the late Ordovician
gallopingcamel at 11:53 AM on 15 March, 2010 In your reference Shaviv (I haven't seen this before?) was trying to respond to Royer around 5 years ago. It is hardly a direct rebuttal to the subsequent influential 2006 paper by Royer. Since then the evidence for CO2 (as a driver and amplifier) has continued to increase both in the paleo-record and in recent times, whilst very little convincing weight has been added to the evidence for the Cosmic Ray (Galactic or otherwise) hypothesis. As more work is done, and we look in more detail at the paleo records it is fair to say the scales are tipping further and many hitherto unresolved questions are finding answers (as in Young). This does not preclude other drivers (or most likely, combinations or drivers) of climate, but in the decades of intense research "CO2 as a significant factor throughout the history of the planet" has survived, and new corroborating evidence continues to emerge, plenty of it discussed here! -
Jeff Id at 07:44 AM on 16 March 2010Watts Up With That's continued ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
The trends in figures 1 and 2 cannot be trusted. They are from Satellite AVHRR skin temperature measurements. This instrument is easily confused by cloud contamination, well documented by Comiso. The problem is the key reason that Steig 09 was required to combine surface trend information with satellite spatial information to determine a trend for the antarctic. The AVHRR data is biased warm. -
Ned at 07:34 AM on 16 March 2010Antarctica is gaining ice
Geo Guy writes: In a nutshell their findings identified ice mass loss in East Antarctica to be minimal but in the western part of the continent identified widespread losses along the Bellingshausen & Amundsen seas in the amount of 59% over ten years. In the Peninsula area losses were estimated at 140%. Here's a link to the Rignot 2008 paper. Just to be clear, since readers might be confused how the peninsula could lose 140% of its ice ... From 1996 to 2006, annual loss of ice mass from West Antarctica increased from 83 Gt/yr (+- 59) to 132 Gt/yr (+- 60), which is a 59% increase in the rate of loss. Likewise, annual loss of ice mass in the peninsula increased from 25 Gt/yr (+- 45) to 60 Gt/yr (+- 46), a 140% increase in the rate of ice loss. I think these kinds of regional-scale analyses nicely complement the continent-wide GRACE data. GRACE tells us, with a pretty high degree of confidence, how much mass Antarctica is losing per year. Studies like this one help elucidate the different components of the mass balance budget that should add up to the net change in mass as measured by GRACE. -
Riccardo at 07:16 AM on 16 March 2010Antarctica is gaining ice
Geo Guy, I think that upon reading the text and not just looking at the figures, the two sentences "While the interior of East Antarctica is gaining land ice, overall Antarctica is losing land ice at an accelerating rate. " and "The ice gained in the interior is roughly balanced by the ice loss at the edges." address your point and quite well describe what is going on down there. -
MattJ at 05:58 AM on 16 March 2010Watts Up With That's continued ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
Yes, clearly, "Steve is depriving himself and his readers of the opportunity to explore the complex and fascinating question of Antarctic sea ice." But that IS what some people out there want. Scientists may be interested in "complex and fascinating quesitions", but neither the general public nor the politicians manipulating them care. They prefer a simple answer even if it is clearly wrong. -
papabob at 05:54 AM on 16 March 2010Watts Up With That's ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
I have quit discussing the subject with the folks to whom melting glaciers, thinning arctic shelf ice, thinning of the Greenland Ice Cap and other phenomena are just "natural occurances" and warming has nothing to do with them!! -
Geo Guy at 05:45 AM on 16 March 2010Antarctica is gaining ice
A group of scientists ( Eric Rignot, Jonathan L. Bamber, Michiel R. van den Broeke, Curt Davis, Yonghong Li, Willem Jan van de Berg & Erik van Meijgaard) recently assessed the loss in ice mass from 1992 to 2006 in Antarctica using radar interferometry and regional climate modeling and published their findings in Nature Geoscience. In a nutshell their findings identified ice mass loss in East Antarctica to be minimal but in the western part of the continent identified widespread losses along the Bellingshausen & Amundsen seas in the amount of 59% over ten years. In the Peninsula area losses were estimated at 140%. However they identified the losses as being concentrated along narrow channels occupied by outlet glaciers and attributed the cause to ongoing and past glacier acceleration. The concludedthat "changes in glacier flow have a significant, if not dominant impact on ice sheet mass balance." This issue goes back to my previous comment that any interpretations made from aggregated data should be taken with a grain of salt - especially when dealing with gravimetric readings. Contoured maps showing highs and lows and changes to those highs and lows over time are more relevant than a simple time series graph as posted in this article. -
NewYorkJ at 04:45 AM on 16 March 2010Watts Up With That's continued ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
"Perhaps Steve was distracted by the continental cooling in Figure 1 and didn't notice the warming over the ocean. " It defintely seemed odd to me that Goddard was using that map to support his assertion that cooling was leading to sea ice increases. It could also be that he's confusing sea ice and continental ice. Many serious readers of WUWT seem likely to make that mistake. -
ptbrown31 at 02:57 AM on 16 March 2010Watts Up With That's continued ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
It is also interesting to look at the Ice Mass loss of the Antarctic Ice sheet which has been accelerating noticeably. http://www.columbia.edu/~mhs119/IceSheet/Velicogna.pdf http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2009GL040222.shtml -
HumanityRules at 01:28 AM on 16 March 2010Watts Up With That's continued ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
Having said all that I don't see how Zhang's system can lead to a trend. It should produce a dymanic situation where the ocean upwelling should alternate between being switched on and off. -
HumanityRules at 01:16 AM on 16 March 2010Watts Up With That's continued ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
6.CBDunkerson at 00:53 AM on 16 March, 2010 From Zhang's abstract "The model shows that an increase in surface air temperature and downward longwave radiation results in an increase in the upper-ocean temperature and a decrease in sea ice growth, leading to a decrease in salt rejection from ice, in the upper-ocean salinity, and in the upper-ocean density. The reduced salt rejection and upper-ocean density and the enhanced thermohaline stratification tend to suppress convective overturning, leading to a decrease in the upward ocean heat transport and the ocean heat flux available to melt sea ice.The ice melting from ocean heat flux decreases faster than the ice growth does in the weakly stratified Southern Ocean, leading to an increase in the net ice production and hence an increase in ice mass. This mechanism is the main reason why the Antarctic sea ice has increased in spite of warming conditions both above and below during the period 1979–2004 and the extended period 1948–2004." and from section d "This indicates that the increasing P [precipitation] is not the main cause of the simulated increase of Antarctic sea ice cover. Zhang is all about increasing sea/surface air temp leading to increasing ice extent. Precipitation is of minor importance to his theory. -
CBDunkerson at 01:07 AM on 16 March 2010CO2 levels during the late Ordovician
RSVP, your 'scenario 3' is inherently flawed... CO2 and other GHGs do absorb infrared radiation (at various wavelengths), but they then re-emit it. Thus your argument that a 100 ppm increase in CO2 doesn't have the capacity to retain enough heat to cause significant warming is entirely irrelevant... NO ONE claims that is happening. Rather, because of that extra 100 ppm CO2 more infrared radiation which WAS going up and escaping out into space is instead absorbed and re-emitted back down... where it is then retained in things like the land and oceans which DO have the capacity to store a great deal of heat and cause global warming. -
HumanityRules at 00:58 AM on 16 March 2010Watts Up With That's continued ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
The Boning 2008 paper seems to be covering an area of the Southern Ocean outside the range of the antarctic sea ice (30oS to 60oS). I don't think this should be included in "the full array of empirical data" -
CBDunkerson at 00:53 AM on 16 March 2010Watts Up With That's continued ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
HumanityRules, I see nothing in Zhang which suggests that ice production should be inversely proportional to local sea temperature. Rather the opposite in fact. Zhang argues (amongst other things) that the GLOBAL increase in temperature has caused a GLOBAL increase in water vapor and thus greater precipitation. That increased precipitation would act to increase ice formation throughout Antarctica... but would be hampered in doing so in areas where the oceans have warmed significantly. This is one of the reasons most researchers expect the Antarctic sea ice trend to reverse... as the oceans continue to warm (and the ozone hole to close) the balance of forces will tip back. The flaw in your argument here is the same as with the common 'skeptic' argument that increased temperatures will not lead to drought because there will be more precipitation... both ignore that the extra precipitation will not fall in perfect proportion on the locations of increased evaporation. -
Mal Adapted at 00:21 AM on 16 March 2010CO2 levels during the late Ordovician
Chriscanaris @40: "I ask because people tend to resist making changes when not faced with immediate profits, costs, or like consequences. Moreover, we find it very difficult to consider consequences extending beyond our lifetimes (and perhaps our immediate offspring's')." I'm with you on that. The deacon's grace: Lord bless me and my wife, Son John and his wife, We four and no more. Science can often tell us, with a high degree of certainty, what will happen in the future. What it can't tell us is why we should care. It seems unlikely to me that Homo sapiens faces outright extinction. Population may crash, but there will be survivors, who will keep breeding. That's hardly an uplifting prospect, though. I'm glad I have no offspring. -
HumanityRules at 00:16 AM on 16 March 2010Watts Up With That's continued ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
This recent paper highlights the fact that sea ice increase varies for the seas around antarctica. JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 113, C07004, doi:10.1029/2007JC004564, 2008 Antarctic sea ice variability and trends, 1979–2006 D. J. Cavalieri and C. L. Parkinson It shows the greatest increase in sea ice in the Ross Sea. And the smallest (in fact a decrease in ice) in the Bellingshausen/Amundsen seas. Your Fig2 seems to show strongest sea warming in the B/A seas (the dark red along the west coast). And some of the lowest temp increases in the Ross Sea (the pink/blue area below the Ross Ice shelf). Just to summarize that because it seems counter-intuitive to the counter-intuitive Zhang theory. B/A Sea - Strongly warmer sea temp. Lowest (reduced) ice trend increase. Ross Sea - Weakly warmer/cooler seas. Highest ice trend increase. Does it matter that this seems the opposite to the Zhang theory? -
mspelto at 23:51 PM on 15 March 2010Watts Up With That's continued ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
#2 and #3 You are getting carried away with the amount of sea ice change. It is true you could starve an ice sheet for moisture, however, the actual precipitation rates in Antarctica have not been declining. Bromwich Monaghan Further the amount of sea ice increase is insignificant in terms of moisture transport distances. Focus on the actual air temps in the region during the sea ice formation period. Temp map -
gpwayne at 22:42 PM on 15 March 2010Watts Up With That's continued ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
"It could therefore easily be the case that increased sea ice near Antarctica will accelerate ice loss from the continent". In which case, this could also be a contributory factor in the mass loss now discovered in the EAIS, which took me rather by surprise since, like everyone else, I thought it was stable compared to the WAIS. -
Ebel at 22:29 PM on 15 March 2010CO2 levels during the late Ordovician
The fact that greenhouse gases absorb infrared radiation is rarely disputed - not even by Gerlich and Tscheuschner. But a body that absorbs, must necessarily also emit. This fact explains the division of the atmosphere into two layers: • at bottom of the troposphere where vertical circulation prevails and the temperature gradient is determined by the circulation and not by the radiation balance, and • above is the stratosphere , where the temperature profile is determined by the balance of radiation (absorbed energy of radiation = emitted energy of radiation). Boundary conditions for radiation intensities in the atmosphere are the high level of infrared radiation upward from the warm surface of the Earth, and the the practically non-existent downward infrared radiation from outer space. The total radiation from Earth into space must equal the absorbed radiation from the sun. Temporary fluctuations in this balance result in temperature changes which more or less (depending on the storage capacity of air, solid earth, ocean) quickly restore equilibrium. As a result of these conditions, the intensity upward flux decreases, and intensity downward flux increases. A temperature profile based on a dormant atmosphere which maintains the balance of radiation (absorbed radiation energy = emitted radiation energy, the vertical part would be reach to the surface) would show temperatures at lower altitudes changing quickly altitude increases (steep temperature gradient), such that initially small air movements increase rapidly - air that's a bit warmer than the surrounding air accelerates as it rises, and air that's a little colder than the surrounding air accelerates going down. The result is a temperature gradient that's nothing more than an edge case : When the air rising, the decrease in pressure causes it to cool at precisely the same rate as the surrounding air. Above, rising air would cool faster than the surrounding temperature decreases, causing it to drop back down to its resting point , leaving air stratification in a stable state. The driving mechanism of vertical circulation in the troposphere is that the air at the surface is warmed more than the surrounding air, and therefore rises. Because more is emitted than absorbed, the rising air is cooled, and gives off latent heat (from the condensation of water vapor) and the rate of ascent gets slower and slower until it reaches zero { this is the end of the troposphere. The convective and latent heat that is injected into the troposphere complements the energy balance at the surface. How quickly the pressure (or altitude) in the atmosphere is reached, at which the temperature is so high that the air stratification becomes unstable (the boundary between the troposphere and stratosphere - tropopause), depends on the absorption length of radiation in the atmosphere, as well as on the concentration of greenhouse gases. The higher the concentration, the faster the critical value is reached. Therefore, as a first approximation, it can be assumed that the column pressure of greenhouse gases in the tropopause is constant. But this is only a very rough approximation, since the temperature in the stratosphere has to decrease: As the surface temperature increases, wavelengths that the atmosphere only absorbs to a small extent, radiate for the most part directly into space. Consequently, the temperature conditions change such that less heat from the greenhouse gases radiates into space. This has the consequence that with increasing concentration of the greenhouse gas the column pressure decreases. Thus, the radiation conditions near the surface have practically no influence on the temperature profile. Arguments such as saturation of transparency through the atmosphere have no meaning. In the paper by Gerlich and Tscheuschner the tropopause is mentioned three times, two times that the tropopause would be mistaken with the ionosphere, and once in another quote. No connection to the greenhouse effect is shown - for Gerlich and Tscheuschner, there is apparently no cause for separation of the atmosphere. In reality, the actual location of the tropopause varies due to wind, etc. Note: At low pressures, there is still a temperature peak. This is the result of UV absorption and ozon e formation. UV is absorbed, but the absorbed energy is emitted as infrared. Since the UV is absorbed, the UV intensity decrease based on an e-function, and for small temperature changes, the emitted power is roughly proportional to the temperature. Based on this approach, the following equation describes the observed temperature profile between 220mbar (11 km height) and 1mbar (47 km height) very well. T = 56, 5°C + 67,3K * exp(p/5,03 mbar) The exponential term in this equation describes the heating (UV-ozone-process) from above. It follows that the heating from above can be ignored in case of pressures greater than 50mbar (< 20 km altitude: < 3 mK), and is not responsible for the constant temperature in the stratosphere. An increase in CO2 concentration leads to an increase and cooling of the tropopause. A water vapor feedback is not taken into account. -
mikeh1 at 22:26 PM on 15 March 2010The Dunning-Kruger effect and the climate debate
For 1077 at 08:17 AM on 16 February, 2010 After my post at 95, I realised that 1077 may have been attempting to illustrate the Dunning-Kruger effect. If that is the case there is no need for an apology. -
mikeh1 at 22:23 PM on 15 March 2010The Dunning-Kruger effect and the climate debate
For 1077 at 08:17 AM on 16 February, 2010 The actual quote from the NOAA site is "Data are reported as a dry air mole fraction defined as the number of molecules of carbon dioxide divided by the number of all molecules in air, including CO2 itself, after water vapor has been removed" Note the "all molecules in air". So your statement "Can you please enlighten a poor soul - who studied chemistry and physics quite some time ago - what exactly is "a molecule of air"?" looks rather silly. Feel free to post an apology. -
Jacob Bock Axelsen at 22:06 PM on 15 March 2010Watts Up With That's continued ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
Gildor and Tziperman (2003) has an interesting box-model where sea ice actually triggers major deglaciation for the pleistocene 100ky cycles by capping precipitation to the accumulation zone of the ice sheet. It could therefore easily be the case that increased sea ice near Antarctica will accelerate ice loss from the continent. -
barry1487 at 22:00 PM on 15 March 2010Watts Up With That's continued ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
Typo.On a more positive side, he also dropped by to clearly articulate why he thinks the Southern Ocean is warming.
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RSVP at 21:28 PM on 15 March 2010CO2 levels during the late Ordovician
CBDunkerson at 02:26 AM on 13 March, 2010 "RSVP, your model for testing the existence of the greenhouse effect seems to be lacking a Sun. Put in a visible light laser being continuously fired at the anvil to heat it up and make sure that the energy flows are significant enough for instruments to detect and you'd have a valid comparison. " Sorry for not replying sooner. Not sure why a "sun" or continuous heat source is needed. When I refer to comparing a cooling profile, I am talking about tracking the cooling of the anvil over time, until the anvil reaches the ambiente (assuming it is well below 100 C or 150 C). You would then superimpose these curves, and for that small difference of CO2 in column of say 3 meters (pick your height), it is hard to imagine there would be any appreciable difference. The curves would lay exactly one on the other. This would essentially indicate to what extent CO2 affects cooling. (i.e., zilch). Just for grins, the experiment should be conducted for incremented percentages of CO2 all the way up to 100%. This might help confirm other theories such as what might be happening on Venus. Again. I am not denying that CO2 absorbs IR. What I am saying is that what matters is the relative heat capacities of say the anvil of our thought experiment and this ity, bity amount of CO2 gas. There are three ways matter interacts with light. At least I can only think of three. 1) reflects it (as in a mirror), 2) passes it through (as in clear glass), 3) absorbs it (as in a black body). If I was being told that GHG acted as a mirror, case 1, such that photon emission was being hampered from the getgo, I could understand this AGW theory. But the experts are telling me that CO2 ABSORBS energy (case 3), meaning that heat capacity is the determinant which implies CO2 is acting like a heat sink. And whereas the mass of a heat sink determines its efficiency, the extra 100 ppm of anthropogenic CO2 in our atmosphere is essentially zero as compared to the mass (an therefore heat capacity) of land, water, etc. 100ppm is even almost zero compared to the air itself. So if we are going to entertain disucussions of AGW, it might make more sense to look at the effects of slash and burn, farmlands, human structures such as buildings, asphalt on highways, warming of water in artificial damns, etc. -
Riccardo at 18:43 PM on 15 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
shawnhet, "I was always taught that the scientific method proceeded by proposing a hypothesis that allowed testable predictions to be made." Indeed. What has this has to do with GCM? This is a quite common misunderstanding of the meaning of model. They are "just" a mathematical expression of more or less complicated physical laws, the theory is the big picture. Think about Arrhenius, his theory is the same we debating today but the model calculations are enormously different. Obviously we do not ignore GCM and their ability, but it's a different issue than the theory itself. They do a reasonable job in describing how the earth climate works, unless as Lucia says you think that "about 0.2 *C/decade" is a whole lot away from the estimated 0.16 °C/decade. It really surprises me that you "don't care what they describe". How do you test a model if not with as many as possible actual data and, eventually, new and still unrecognized effects? The future is uncertain by definition, especially when it will be at least in part decided by human actions and unpredictable natural forces. If, say, the sun decides to slow down for some decades, will it disprove the ability of GCM? No, of course, you'll plug in the new data and run them again, but it's not a prediction. Indeed, climatologists do not the word "predictions", the say "projections". "I can do just about as good a job as the GCMs by assuming a zero feedback model with a strong influence from the PDO." You sure could do it, but do you have any solid physical basis for it or you're just playing with numbers? As we all know, a correlation is just a hypothesis , then comes the physics. A model works differently, you plugin the physics and see the outcome. This is exactly why we CAN scientifically say that X is better than Y, just a correlation would not suffice. -
yocta at 17:30 PM on 15 March 2010CO2 levels during the late Ordovician
gallopingcamel. I haven't read that article you linked but as far as I can tell it is not a peer reviewed article but made to look so. The lead author (http://www.sciencebits.com/ClimateDebate) also seems to be quite critical of the IPCC and realclimate anyway (maybe he has some "bias and prejudice"?). When independent science academys from different countries all endorse the core findings of the IPCC I will more likely believe the claims the authors make from these organizations than something else. In no way does it mean I accept what they say at face value (hence why i've joined this site.) Tom Dayton linked to this video in John's other post which I highly recommend. Naomi Oreskes addresses the whole idea of consensus in science. She finishes with a quote by Sir Bradford Hill made when he overcame his skepticism with the link of smoking and cancer: All scientific work is incomplete—whether it be observational or experimental. All scientific work is liable to be upset or modified by advancing knowledge. That does not confer upon us a freedom to ignore the knowledge we already have, or to postpone the action that it appears to demand at a given time. -
actually thoughtful at 17:04 PM on 15 March 2010CO2 levels during the late Ordovician
Galloping camel wrote: "Ten years ago the Hockey Team was supreme; anyone who dared to question their views was branded as stupid, venal or even evil. The "science was settled" was being trumpeted throughout the "Main Stream Media" and woe betide any brave soul who dared speak against AGW. You talk about "ad hominem" attacks but have you forgotten how dissenters were treated? If you need reminding, the Climategate emails may help. Take a look at the ones mentioning Patrick Michaels or Fred Singer. " I don't recall this series of events. As I recall, folks wanted to argue with Al Gore about whether warming was happening. In the context of whether CO2 causes warming (ie is a greenhouse gas, and is being released ed by humans) he said "the science is settled." 10 years later it still seems that ALGORE was correct. Can you point me to the emails that are melting the arctic or Greenland? Emails showing people being people do not change the science, nor most people's opinion of the science. Tom -
shawnhet at 13:27 PM on 15 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
dhogaza:And the rest of the paragraph is a blend of speculation. "couldn't've predicted the temperature increase from 1910-1945"? If it were possible to predict changes in solar insolation and frequency of volcanic eruptions decades in the future, well, yes, they *could* have. I think you'll find that if one compares the proposed forcing for the 1910-45 period to the observed temperature that the climate was behaving as though it was subject to more forcing that we currently accept. I know that one can always fall back on the error bars because they are so wide, but that doesn't really help the idea that the GCMs are good predictors of climate. Riccardo, "The GCMs are not the hypotheis, they're just calculations; it should be quite obvious that model calculations are not a theory, and they never will." I find this a fascinating idea. I was always taught that the scientific method proceeded by proposing a hypothesis that allowed testable predictions to be made. If the GCMs are not hypotheses, then by what reason are they a part of the scientific method. Surely the fact that there are more than one GCM establishes that the calculations can be done more than one way(IOW they are not simply some automatic process that makes no difference to the predictions). If the GCMs are not hypotheses, should we just ignore them from a scientific standpoint? No, I don't think so. We should just accept them as what they are: individual hypotheses about the nature of the climate. We can then use them to make a variety of tests about the real world and see which of them(if any) match the real world behavior and how often they can do so. "And no, GCM are not calibrated to the same data they reproduce, this is simply wrong." Rather than spend a lot of time going over this issue, Lucia does a good job of discussing model tuning here(about halfway down the page). http://rankexploits.com/musings/2009/how-far-off-are-the-ar4-aogcms/ "They are able to describe many other things you overlooked." Again, I don't care what they describe, its what they predict that matters IMO. "Then, following your first claim the logical conclusion is that there is consesus both on the AGW theory and on the ability of GCM. What is surprisingly missing is your consensus." Why do I need a consensus? The fact is that I can do just about as good a job as the GCMs by assuming a zero feedback model with a strong influence from the PDO. This matches the periods where the GCMs do less well better and the most recent period too. The point is that regardless of the number of people that think that hypothesis X is valid, until we can come up with an unambiguous test that separates if from hypothesis Y, we can't scientifically say that X is better than Y. Cheers, :) -
HumanityRules at 13:14 PM on 15 March 2010CO2 levels during the late Ordovician
38.dhogaza at 16:39 PM on 13 March, 2010 The temp reconstruction is very similar to the one shown in the paper, it is not controversial. The sourse I think is irrelevant unless you can show that it is inaccurate. The new papers aknowledge they can't account for changes seen over the first half of the Ordovician, that is stated in the text. You're correct the biodiversity plot is irrelevant but interesting. It made me think about a thing or two. I'm not really trying to refute the work. I'm just saying that these new papers have their own limitations just like the work that generated the previous estimate. In fact it seems a little remit of John that he clearly state the drawbacks of the previous study yet does not highlight them for this work. You can not say that the Young work now represents a new consensus on the subject. I'm not sure science works like that. -
Pierre-Normand at 13:06 PM on 15 March 2010CO2 levels during the late Ordovician
Another well-known example of a causality relation going both ways: A child on the back seat of a car can cause an accident. An accident of the back seat of a car can cause a child. -
Pete Dunkelberg at 12:57 PM on 15 March 2010Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project
The only type of disagreement that counts is science is published papers. After your paper gets through peer review and is more widely viewed it stands or not. I would the expect the people who created the petition to know this. -
dhogaza at 12:35 PM on 15 March 2010CO2 levels during the late Ordovician
dhogaza (#57), the trouble with the climate models is that they are doing a really poor job thus far.
And this statement is simply incorrect. They do a very good job of recreating paleoclimate scenarios, more recent events like cooling due to Pinatabu (done as a *prediction*, not hindcast), ENSO-like events arise as emergent properties of the major models, etc etc. NASA recently publicized the fact that water vapor feedbacks at various altitudes and with various temperature change scenarios, as measured by the AIRS sensor on the Aqua satellite, matches model predictions for such scenarios. In detail. On and on and on. Model validation efforts do *not* support your contention. And, of course, as far as the fact that we don't see monotonic increases in temperature, but rather a signal with considerable noise, is also consistent with individual model runs that show exactly the same kind of behavior. Again, on and on and on ... -
dhogaza at 12:31 PM on 15 March 2010CO2 levels during the late Ordovician
gallopingcamel:With regard to the link that you kindly provided, the folks who "shot down" L&C09 hardly inspire confidence; RealClimate as a whole fails the objectivity test (unlike this fine web site).
So your objection boils down to an ad hominem (ad sitium?) attack on Real Climate, rather an attack on the arguments made by those who shot down L&C 09. Figures. And Riccardo repeats exactly what I pointed out before:As per L&C09 paper, they didn't prove any model wrong given that they used the wrong ones.
They're essentially arguing that models developed for a totally different purpose prove that the coupled GCMs are wrong. That's like claiming that the low scores typical of soccer matches disprove predictions that professional US basketball teams average about 100 points a game! It's a different game! They're different models! If you are going to defend this, then there's not much reason to converse with you. My guess is that you didn't bother to read the rebuttal at Real Climate, nor the paper itself linked to by yocta. It's fingers-in-the-ears la-la-la L&C09 might be right all they way, eh?For example almost every paper supporting AGW is contradicted by some other paper. They can't all be right.
This statement isn't true. And those that do are typically garbage. G&T claiming that CO2 can't warm the planet because this would violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics. L&C09 cherry picking data then comparing it with models of type A claiming that this proves that models of type B are wrong.
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