Climate Science Glossary

Term Lookup

Enter a term in the search box to find its definition.

Settings

Use the controls in the far right panel to increase or decrease the number of terms automatically displayed (or to completely turn that feature off).

Term Lookup

Term:

Settings

Beginner Intermediate Advanced No Definitions Definition Life:

All IPCC definitions taken from Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Working Group I Contribution to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Annex I, Glossary, pp. 941-954. Cambridge University Press.

Comment Search Results

Search for Willis Eschenbach

Comments matching the search Willis Eschenbach:

The escalator rises again

Eclectic at 08:23 AM on 10 February, 2023

Bob Loblaw @12 ,

please do not go over to WUWT to point out their problems. There is already a (very) small number of scientific commenters in the WUWT threads, but they are continually shouted down by all the loons, goons, and crackpots (including the intelligent Willis Eschenbach and Rud Istvan).

The scientific commenters there are clearly getting some pleasure from tweaking the Denialist noses, yet they do not (and cannot) bring enlightenment to the denizens of WUWT. But their comments are worth reading in themselves ~ and I enjoy reading them, and I manage to stomach (or skip over) the comments by the crazies who oppose them.

There is a Schadenfreude to be had in viewing the statements by the crazies ~ it is challenging & interesting to recognize & unravel their logical errors and motivated reasonings. That gets tiresome rather quickly, though.

# Thank you Bob, for your statistics criticism. My own education stopped at Statistics-101 and has rusted since ~ so I cannot do much more than apply common sense to what I see at WUWT. And it is always impressive how *determinedly* the WUWT-ites refuse to use common sense in their thinking.

[Excuse repeated scathing of WUWT ~ but WUWT deserves no less.]

The escalator rises again

Bob Loblaw at 01:44 AM on 10 February, 2023

I don't have the stomach to go over to WUWT, but the author of this blog post has also reposted it on his own blog, and here have been some interesting comments over there.

Willis Eschenbach, of WUWT fame, has commented, and posted a graphic of what he calls "an actual structural breakpoint analysis" for the period 1969 to now. He draws attention to the steps, claiming "this is not done by 'cherry picking' but by mathematical analysis, this brings up the interesting question … what is causing the jumps?".

Spolier alert: the "jumps" are an artifact of an inappropriate statistical analysis, and Willis has no explanation of any physical process to explain them, other than a brief hand-waving about El Nino events. But let's entertain the possibility for a bit.

I pointed out in the comments over at ATTP's that the month-to-month change in the anomalies (i.e., this month's anomaly minus last month's) shows absolutely nothing to suggest that the anomaly goes through any sort of slow change (as suggested by the linear segments) interspersed with sudden jumps. If you take the entire BEST record, this is what you see for the month-to-month change in the anomalies:

Month-to-month change in BEST anomalies

The month-to-month change in anomaly looks pretty much like random noise to me. If Willis' hypothesis of meaningful "jumps" existed, I'd expect to see periods of fairly steady (i.e., unchanging) anomalies, with periodic short episodes of large changes representing "jumps" No such structures appear in the data.

I also took the information from the graphic Willis posted of his "structural breakpoint analysis" and added the six line segments he created to a graph of the 1969-present BEST anomalies. This is a reproduction of that information from Willis' graph:

BEST temperature anomalies, 1969-2022

The point I made over at ATTP's is that Willis six-segment linear fit to the data provides virtually no additional statistical explanation of the overall data. The equation on the above graphic is the basic linear fit for the entire data set. Note that the r² value is 0.81. The regression standard error is 0.145 C - indicating the remaining "unexplained" variation in the residuals from the regression.

How much better does Willis do with six line segments (and five breakpoints)? Not much. The accumulated standard error from the six regression lines is 0.133C - just over 0.01C better than the simple fit.

If we look at some statistics for the six segments, we get:

End Year	Standard error	P-value	R^2
1976.8	0.131	0.07	0.0353
1986.9	0.141	0.764	0.0008
1994.7	0.141	0.25	0.0143
2001.8	0.137	0.376	0.0095
2014.9	0.119	0.005	0.0504
2022.9	0.137	0.126	0.0001

The P-values do not account for auto-correlation (there is lots), so take them with a grain of salt. But only one of Willis' line segments looks remotely significant, and the r² values are very low.

The fact is that nearly all of the statistical explanation in Willis' analysis is in the jumps, but there is no reason (looking at the month-to-month changes) to expect this analysis to come up with anything that is not just a misrepresentation of the noise.

A basic linear regression does almost as well, with only two parameters (slope and intercept). In Willis' analysis, he needs 17 parameters: six lines (slope and intercept = 12 parameters) and five break-point years. This is not particularly parsimonious.

Splitting a gradual increase in the data into a bunch of "jumps" that are a function of noise may be entertaining, but it's not particularly scientific.

2021 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming Digest #1

Eclectic at 11:58 AM on 16 January, 2021

Philippe @31 ,

Greetings. And no offense taken by me. For anyone interested in the science of climate science, the WUWT blog is indeed an almost complete waste of time.

However, as a student of human nature, I must say that WUWT illustrates some of the human response to the challenges of AGW ~ and in that connection WUWT is a marvellous microcosm of mental pathologies. And being somewhat of a gentleman of leisure myself (sadly, far more a bourgeois gentilhomme than a true gentilhomme ) it is easy for me to find time to indulge my hobby there. Also helps me to keep some practised ripostes at the ready, against Denialists.

But I must not deflect further from this thread's topic. Despite the WUWT attractions of the ridiculous Christopher Monckton and the slightly less ridiculous Andy May, Willis Eschenbach, et alia. And despite the "peanut gallery" as you call it ~ a gallery rich in old chestnuts as well as peanut ideations, and even including some Brazil nuts (well, one or two from Chile or Argentina actually, as expatriate Yankees).

So I had better get off my hobbyhorse, and return the thread to its main topic, which seems to be the good Doctor Reddy.

2020 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #35

Eclectic at 01:02 AM on 15 September, 2020

KR @45 , yes the WUWT blog and the Curry blog are an entertaining read, IMO.

The Curry blog is a somewhat upmarket version of WUWT , with notably less frothing-at-the-mouth . . . but only marginally less of the super-selfish political extremism (see the recent "Politics Only" thread, where the regular commenters flaunt their underlying philosophies).

Willis Eschenbach is one of my favorites ~ a guy with a high IQ and a sense of humor . . . but a bad case of Motivated Reasoning, and a sad lack of insight & common sense. Crackpot, but at least not one of the "bad actor" Shills, I think.

As you probably know well, WUWT has not only hordes of climate-deniers of the ultra-lukewarmer type and wingnut type, but also a goodly share of CO2-greenhouse deniers plus a few super-wackies who are even more extreme in their anti-science beliefs.

Pretty much all commenters there have a bad case of "We Are The Only True Scientists Remaining In The World". And it is indeed amusing to see the mutual contradictions and squabbling. But ~ they unite as one pack, to pile schoolyard vitriol onto the rare commenters (Nick Stokes and a few other brave souls) who occasionally try to fly the flag of rational scientific thinking.

The Curry blog ~ nowhere near as bad, mostly. On the surface !

Sadly, I get the impression that the Host (Hostess?) at ClimateEtc has for many years been gradually veering into less and less rationality re climate science. Perhaps her Geothermal advocacy is a single aberration of the ultra-wacky type? Or just a bigger Red Flag?

2020 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #35

KR at 23:10 PM on 14 September, 2020

Re: Eclectic and the reference to bad arguments at Judith Curry's blog:

I'm greatly amused in that article on the Ethical Skeptic and the attempt to claim global warming is due to geothermal effects to see Willis Eschenbach (long time contributor to WUWT, primarily with ad hoc and unsupportable math) as a major dissenter, pointing out that the blog post is simply unsupportable.

When other climate denialists weigh in loudly noting your argument is bad, it's really bad.

YouTube's Climate Denial Problem

Eclectic at 12:32 PM on 10 April, 2020

Since the SkS scene is a bit quiet at the moment (a covid-19 effect?) , I take the liberty of doing some more waffling about the notorious WUWT website. So my apologies for this long post.

WUWT claims to be the world's "most viewed site" for global warming and climate change ~ and I have seen no evidence disproving WUWT 's possession of the crown for most popular Climate Denial echo-chamber website status.

As mentioned above, WUWT has a rapid churn of headlines to keep its fans interested & clicking-on frequently. Proprietor Anthony Watts claims WUWT receives no subsidy from the fossil fuel industries ~ I don't know if this was so in its early days, but it could well be so nowadays. (There are of course many ways in which secret sponsors can covertly channel funds indirectly to WUWT or associated entities . . . but that's not immediately relevant to the site's anti-science activities.) Judging by the large range of of on-line advertising at the WUWT site, it seems there is no shortage of dollar income ~ and it also suggests that the on-line advertising agencies have examined & confirmed a high rate of traffic going to the website.

Nigelj and OPOF ~ my earlier wording that many of the regular WUWT commenters "are thick as two short planks" . . . was a colloquialism, and was not meaning that Denialists are of lower IQ than the general population. AFAIK, there is no evidence that Denialists have an average IQ lower than logical thinkers have. Yes, most of the WUWT commenters are "pretty average" [another colloquialism!]. But as always ~ it is not whether you are intelligent but whether you actually use the intelligence you have.

And there are indeed [a few] highly intelligent commenters at WUWT. My favorite is Willis Eschenbach. Very intelligent, and he has a sense of humor I like . . . but despite his analytical skills, he nevertheless has a "Dark Side" twist in his psyche ~ such that he always fails in the end to reach the destination of logical synthesis of the full context of the climate issue. I reckon he has a combination of Motivated Reasoning and Doublethink. Like so many (all?) Denialists, he somehow manages ultimately to suppress seeing the Bleeding Obvious.

# There are certain neurological conditions [often, from stroke] where the brain fails to identify the human face, or other objects. Climate Denialists achieve that status, sometimes wilfully perhaps . . . but eventually it becomes an automatic mental habit to "not see" what their emotions don't want to see.

Nigelj , as I mentioned earlier, it surely must be that the WUWT Moderators allow Nick Stokes as a token example of their "non-discrimination" policy. But there is yet another example ~ Steven Mosher. Mosher does not come from the strong scientific background of Stokes . . . but over the years he has gained his stripes as a scientist (in a de-facto manner). IIRC, Mosher was at first rather climate-skeptical, and joined the original BEST project in a sort of literary capacity. And when the BEST project eventually confirmed the mainstream climate science data, he accordingly "converted" to become a mainstreamer.

As a convert from "skepticism" , Mosher is loathed and hated by the bulk of WUWT commenters. Mosher's style is usually not to go into details on how the OP or fellow commenters have messed up or been stupid . . . but he more often issues a one-liner to point out an error, or he merely says [in effect] : "Sigh. You've gotten it wrong again." Unsurprisingly, this enrages many of the Denialists.

Stokes is hated too, and is hated also because he is unfailingly correct , and the Denialists can find no chinks in his scientific armor ~ not that the Denialists at WUWT would ever change their viewpoint merely because someone publicly proves them wrong !

In the past, WUWT had a system where registered commenters could vote a Like or a Dislike to any post in the Comments column. Run-of-the -mill Deniaist comments sometimes garnered one or two or a handful of Likes. But I always found it amusing to see how every comment by Stokes or Mosher was immediately garnering 20 - 50 Dislikes ! (In a way, it's pity this Like/Dislike barometer got scrubbed.)

# Over my years of observation, there have not really been any other "anti-Denialists" to stay the course in the hostile environment at the WUWT comments columns. Some appear for a little while, then disappear ~ mostly by being censored I think (but doubtless, a few have become tired & disgusted). Yet I also detect a few who (after banning) resurrect themselves under a new pseudonym. However, in recent months WUWT has introduced a new stricter regime of registration to make resurrection far more difficult. ( It also raises your risk of being doxxed.)

And no, I myself don't post at WUWT. The denizens there are largely rabid political ultra-extremists, quite uncharitable to humanity as a whole. There are also some (apolitical or non-partisan) scientific crackpots. But all are hard-core deniers of climate science, and they show zero inclination to become sane.

# If you examine the bulk of WUWT posted articles, you see a strong undercurrent of petulant and childish propaganda slant. Clearly WUWT is essentially aiming at the Lowest Common Denominator of everyday Denialists. (Some Denialist websites exist, which are slightly more high-brow e.g. Judith Curry's and Roy Spencer's .) But for rampant psychopathology, my "vote" goes to WUWT.

My apologies once again for the long post. I hope readers have found elements informative and/or entertaining.

Examining Hansen's prediction about the West Side Highway

Tom Dayton at 09:25 AM on 4 October, 2015

Willis Eschenbach on WTF just repeated this myth about James Hansen's "prediction" of the West Side Highway being covered by now.

Tropical Thermostats and Global Warming

Tom Curtis at 11:52 AM on 18 March, 2014

Following on from a discussion elsewhere, I would like to discuss Willis Eschenbach's hypothesis, in that he at least presents what at first glance looks like evidence for his hypothesis. The evidence is scattered through three posts at WUWT, and shows that SST above 30 C are uncommon. Eschenbach argues that because those temperatures are uncommon, there is a "hard limit" on ocean temperatures, slightly above 30 C.

Eschenbach's hypothesis faces an immediate hurdle in that his own data refutes it. Here is his plot of "all" NH Argo surface temperatures (Fig 2, AOTM):

The "all" is dubious in that there are far to few data points for "all" ARGO NH surface temperature records, and it is likely that Eschenbach has used a random sample of the data to make distributions clearer. Regardless of that point, however, it is very clear from the graph that there is not a hard limit at 30-32 C. Several temperatures are recorded above those values, and some very far above those values. This is most clear in 2012 which shows a cluster of data points above 35 C. Further, the period of peak temperature does not show a well defined limit. Indeed, the upper limit on temperatures is less well defined in the warm months than in the cool months, the opposite of what we would expect if there were indeed a "hard limit".

What we would expect with a genuine "hard limit" can be seen by comparing the NH warm temperatures with the lower range of the SH cool temperatures (Fig 2, Notes 2):

You can clearly see a hard limit in low temperatures slightly below 0 C, representing the freezing point of sea water. The key feature is that the lower limit of temperatures is far more sharp ly defined in the cool months than in the warm months. That is in strong contrast to the upper temperature limit, which is more sharply defined in cool months than in warm months, a feature which by itself refutes Eschenbach's hypothesis.

At this point I will make a short logical excursion. As everyone knows, there is a "hard limit" on liquid water temperatures at 0 C, ie, the freezing point. Despite that, the hard limit in sea water is obviously less than 0 C. The reason is that increased salinity reduces the freezing point. Therefore, the "hard limit" is only a hard limit under a certain set of condition. If you change those conditions, you also change the "hard limit". It follows that even had Eschenbach been able to demonstrate a hard limit, he would not have demonstrated that Sea Surface Temperatures would not rise above that limit in the future, under different conditions. Of course, that is a point purely of logical interest in that Eschenbach has not demonstrated a "hard limit" to begin with.

Returning to Eschenbach's evidence, he presents more evidence that he supposes supports a hard limit. Specifically, he shows that the closer to the equator, the smaller the annual variation in temperatures (Fig 3, AOTM):

He says of this graph,

"As you can see, the warm parts of the yearly cycle have their high points cropped off flat, with the amount cropped increasing with increasing average temperatures."

That, however, is not what you see at all. Rather, at the warmest times of the year, the upper limit of temperatures are least well defined. If anything, at that time you have a spike in temperatures.

I suspect the misdescription is because Eschenbach reffers to the guassians rather than the data. He expects the Gaussians to show a series of sine waves, with those closer to the equator being warmer than those further away. He thus interprets the actual series of successively smaller amplitude sine waves with the upper cycle nearly coinciding in values as the top of the cycles having been truncated.

Unfortunately for his hypothesis, there is a well known phenomenon in nature that shows a similar pattern to his Gausians, ie, the daily TOA insolation relative to latitude:

(Source)

You will notice the near constancy of insolation at the equator, and also that insolation at 20 degrees North is higher in the summer than it is at any time on the equator. The reason for that is that, at 20 degrees North, when the sun is directly overhead, the days are longer than they are when the sun is directly overhead on the equator. And with a longer day, and the same peak forcing we expect higher SST, which is what we see. Curiously Eschenbach draws attention to the fact that the peak temperatures are found not at the equator, but between 15 and 30 degrees North, in the Summer. But given the insolation data, that is just what we would predict. So also, given the insolation data, would we predict that peak summer temperatures through out the tropics and near tropics would match or exceed peak equatorial temperatures, and that the closer the equator, the less variation in SST.

Eschenbach also draws attention to the shape of the Gaussians (shown in Fig 6), noting in particular that "...summer high temperature comes to a point, while the winter low is rounded". But again, however, he needs search no further for an explanation than the insolation pattern:

(Wikipedia)

I mentioned in my introduction that Eschenback presents data that "...at first glance looks like evidence for his hypothesis". It should not be plain, however, that it is onlyh at a first, and superficial glance that that is true. His most convincing evidence turns out to be a direct consequene of the patterns of insolation at, or near the equator. The more direct evidence is seen to contradict his claim of a hard limit, showing as it does a less defined limit to temperatures in the warmest months - the exact opposite of what is required by his hypothesis. It is only by maintaining a superficial glance, and by not paying attention to actual forcings that his hypothesis appears to have any support at all.

MP Graham Stringer and CNN Crossfire are wrong about the 97% consensus on human-caused global warming

Russ R. at 05:43 AM on 16 February, 2014

Tom Curtis,

"You are correct that you can both oppose mitigation of AGW and accept the concensus that greater than 50% of recent global warming has been caused by anthropogenic factors."

For the record, I don't categorically oppose all mitigation policies. Some are sensible, some may or may not be effective, and some are very likely to do more harm than good.

"However, that in no way obviates Dana's claim about the actual strategies of AGW deniers. They need not have taken that strategy, but as a matter of historical record, they did. Consequently, I am not sure what point you are trying to make. Perhaps it was that when given a choice of an honest strategy, they chose a dishonest one? "

I agree, people make disingenous arguments all the time... some do so habitually. I see this on both sides. I'm not defending them. The point(s) I am trying to make, and I apologize for not having been sufficiently clear, are as follows:

Not everyone who opposes a given climate policy is "a denier". One can fully accept the "97% Consensus" (or a more general form of scientific agreement), yet not be convinced that various policy actions are warranted or will be effective. There are plenty of good-faith reasons that people may differ in their beliefs.

The much touted "97% Consensus" is much narrower than it is frequently portrayed. It is often misrepresented (for example by Barack Obama and KR above) as supporting positions that weren't tested in the paper. Also, it is not, by itself, sufficent justification for any policy action, let alone grounds for being "100 percent certain that Congress needs to pass serious climate legislation..." as Dana wrote in the Sacramento Bee.

That's all.

"Russ, I am glad to see that you have in fact criticized those on your own side"...

I try not to take sides in this. I don't believe there is a right side or a wrong side here. There are good and bad arguments on both sides. I try to correct the bad arguments, but only where I think the person making the argument would actually be receptive and my efforts aren't going to be wated. I have better things to do my time.

"Given that the person criticized was Willis Eschenbach, I would point out that he has deserved such criticism far more than just once."

To Willis' credit, he is meticulous with his analysis, he shows all his work, he debates in good faith, and he admits when he's wrong. Also, he is very quick to point out errors from "his own side". One very recent example...

MP Graham Stringer and CNN Crossfire are wrong about the 97% consensus on human-caused global warming

Tom Curtis at 02:05 AM on 16 February, 2014

Russ R@23:

1) You are correct that you can both oppose mitigation of AGW and accept the concensus that greater than 50% of recent global warming has been caused by anthropogenic factors. However, that in no way obviates Dana's claim about the actual strategies of AGW deniers. They need not have taken that strategy, but as a matter of historical record, they did. Consequently, I am not sure what point you are trying to make. Perhaps it was that when given a choice of an honest strategy, they chose a dishonest one?

2) Russ, I am glad to see that you have in fact criticized those on your own side on at least one occassion when they deserved it. Given that the person criticized was Willis Eschenbach, I would point out that he has deserved such criticism far more than just once. Be that as it may, willingness to speak up about errors on your own side deserves real respect IMO, so well done. FWIW, I asked about criticisms of Inhofe (a US Senator) because you had chosen to criticize the office of the US President.

Update on BC’s Effective and Popular Carbon Tax

Russ R. at 02:11 AM on 26 July, 2013

Alexandre:

Do you have any data showing the significance of this side effect on the province's overall fossil fuel consuption?

That would require data on how many liters of vehicle fuel were "imported" back into BC from Washington, Alaska, Yukon, and Alberta border crossings. I'm pretty sure that no such data exist.

If you'd like a ballpark number, a good place to start would be with the Business Council of British Columbia who estimate that $2.0-2.6 billion in retail revenue is now being lost to cross border visits annually, of which a sizeable amount is gasoline (http://www.bcbc.com/content/879/PPv20n2.pdf). Obviously not peer reviewed, so take with a grain of salt.

From those figures, Willis Eschenbach estimates the imported gasoline volume at around 100 million gallons annually, or more than 50% of the reported reduction in total domestic fuel sales (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/07/12/fuel-on-the-highway-in-british-pre-columbia/ and http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/07/13/the-real-canadian-hockeystick/). Again, grain of salt.

I personally think he overestimates the actual amount due to some aggressive assumptions, but even if he's off by a factor of two, it would still be a significant amount of leakage that should not be ignored, especially since people are burning extra gas (and emitting more GHGs) to realize those cost savings.

I'd guess it just applies to cases where you have very near towns on both sides of the border, quantitatively very marginal.

I assume you're not from BC, because the distance from the biggest city in the province (Vancouver) to the nearest US border crossing (Point Roberts), happens to be only 25 km (17 miles) from the Oak St. Bridge in Vancouver to the Shell Station in Point Roberts. Traffic is usually terrible, but if you're on passing through the Tsawassen Ferry Terminal (to get to or from Vancouver Island), then Point Roberts is just around the corner.

Heartland's Chinese Academy of Sciences Fantasy

DSL at 10:24 AM on 2 July, 2013

Daniel, how many people are included in the category "knowledgeable about climate science"? If you're here at SkS, then you're probably knowledgeable enough about the war of rhetoric surrounding the subject. If so, it's puzzling you'd make such claims. The non-knowledgeable public relies on interpreters and experts to understand the science. They have no other route to the approximation of truth that science provides. Consensus is a powerful rhetorical tool. It's evidence that experts believe a proposition or set of propositions. That's good enough for many members of the non-knowledgeable general public. If it's not good enough for you, why complain about Cook? Why not complain about the social structure that forces most people away from engaging the science?

I find it extraordinary that people like Anthony Watts complain about a study like Cook's when Watts himself relies on a variety of evidence-free rhetorical tools to shape public opinion. The difference between Cook and Watts, of course, is that Cook's position is supported by both the consensus of scientists and the consensus of evidence. Watts is supported by the likes of Willis Eschenbach.

CO2 effect is saturated

Tom Curtis at 11:08 AM on 20 June, 2013

I have been looking more carefully at the PDF which is the detailed explanation of the WUWT story which is the basis of Stealth's comments. The inconsistency and, frankly, the dishonesty of the author, Ed Hoskins, is shown in the fifth chart of the PDF (page 3). It purports to show the expected temperature response to increases in CO2 according to a group of "skeptics" (Plimer, Carter, Ball, and Archibald), and three "IPCC assessments" by three authors. It also shows a "IPCC average", but that is not the average value from any IPCC assessment, but rather the average of the three "IPCC assessments" by the three authors.

The first thing to note about this chart is that it gets the values wrong. Below are selected values from the chart, with the values as calculated using the standard formula for CO2 forcing, and using their 100-200 value as a benchmark for the temperature response:

Concentration Skeptic Lindzen Krondratjew Charnock “IPCC” Mean IPCC
100-200______0.29____0.56____0.89________1.48______0.98_______3
200-300______0.14____0.42____0.44________1.34______0.73
Calc 200-300_0.17____0.33____0.52________0.87______0.57_______1.76
400-1000_____0.15____0.7_____1.19________1.78______1.22
Calc 400-1000_0.38___0.74____1.18________1.96______1.29_______3.97

The "Calc" values are those calculated using the standard formula for radiative forcing, with a climate sensitivity factor determined by the claimed temperure response for a doubling of CO2 from 100-200 ppmv. The '"IPCC" Mean' column is the mean of the three prior columns.

Clearly the values in the table are not consistent with the standard formula, typically overestimating the response from 200-300 ppmv, and underestimating the response from 400-1000 ppmv. That pattern, however, is not entirely consistent, being reversed in the case of Kondratjew. Other than that odd inconsistency, this is just the same misrepresentation of temperature responses shown in my 211 above.

More bizarre is the representation of the IPCC by Lindzen, Kondratjew and Charnock. As can be seen, their values, and the mean of their values significantly underrepresent the best estimate of the IPCC AR4 of 3 C per doubling of CO2. That is a well known result, and the misrepresentation can have no justification. It especially cannot have any justification given that neither Kondratjew nor Charnock are authors (let alone lead authors) of any relevant chapter in the IPCC AR4. Nor are they cited in any relevant chapter of the IPCC AR4. Presenting their work as "IPCC assessments" is, therefore, grossly dishonest.

Moving on, Hoskins shows another chart on page 2, which helps explain at least one cause of his error. It is a reproduction of a chart produced by David Archibald, purportedly showing the temperature response for succesive 20 ppmv increases in CO2 concentration. Looking at Archibald's article, he claims it is a presentation, in bar graph form, of a chart posted by Willis Eschenbach on Climate Audit:

As a side note, the forcing shown is 2.94 log(CO2)+233.6, and hence the modtran settings used do not correspond to the global mean forcing. The method used by Eschenbach, therefore, cannot produce a correct value for the global mean forcing of CO2. As it happens, his values produce a forcing per doubling of CO2 of 2 W/m^2 per doubling of CO2, and hence underestimates the true forcing by 46%. Note, however, that it does rise linearly for each doubling of CO2, so Hoskins has not even mimmicked Eschenbach accurately.

Far more important is that it is a plot of the downward IR flux at ground level with all non-CO2 green house gases (including water vapour) present. The IPCC, however, defines 'radiative forcing' as "... the change in net (down minus up) irradiance (solar plus longwave; in W m–2) at the tropopause after allowing for stratospheric temperatures to readjust to radiative equilibrium, but with surface and tropospheric temperatures and state held fixed at the unperturbed values". (My emphasis.)

It does so for two reasons. First, the theory of radiative forcing is essentially a theory about the energy balance of the planet. Therefore it is not the downward radiation at the surface that is at issue, but the balance between incoming and outgoing radiation at the top of the atmosphere.

Second, the temperature at the tropopause and at the surface are bound together by the lapse rate. Therefore any temperature increase at the tropopause will be matched by a temperature increase at the surface. Given reduced outward radiation at the tropopause, the energy imbalance between incoming solar radiation and outgoing IR radiation will result in warming at the surface and intermediate levels of the atmosphere. Adjustments in the rate of convection driven by temperature differences will reestablish the lapse rate, maintaining the same linear relationship between tropopause and surface temperature (ignoring the lapse rate feedback). The net effect is that the same effective temperature increase will occure at all levels, resulting in a larger downard radiation at the surface than the initial change at either the tropopause or the surface.

So, Eschenbach (and Hoskins) derive their values incorrectly because they simply do not understand the theory they are criticizing, and which is accepted without dispute by knowledgeable "skeptics" such as Lindzen and Spencer. They are in the same boat of denying simple physics as are the "skydragon slayers" who Watts excoriates. Watts, however, publishes pseudo-scientific claptrap on the same level as the "skydragon slayers" on a daily basis, however, because he also is completely ignorant of the theory he so vehemently rejects.

Lu Blames Global Warming on CFCs (Curve Fitting Correlations)

DSL at 01:25 AM on 8 June, 2013

Chordotonal, where did this become about Lu's basic use of curve-fitting. The problem all along has been his lack of providing the necessary mechanics to support that fitting. Should that be the basic requirement for publication? If so, Willis Eschenbach just smiled. The number of pedal strokes I used to get to work this morning was exactly the same as the number of strokes used by Paris Hilton to comb her hair this morning. I say the two are causally related. It has to do with the . . . ummm . . . gravitational resonance from the friction in my bottom bracket. The frequency of the resonance matches Hilton's brain structure, causing the repetitive motion at just the right time. What? She combs her hair every morning, even when I'm not riding my bike? Not listening! Not listening! I'll be publishing soon in Journal of Auras and Dweomers.

In a world where rapid global warming is not an issue, does Lu repeat and publish the analysis? SkS is also about the communication of climate science, and Lu's garbage looks like gold to the paid misinformers of the general public. If you perform poor science and then try to get it published, knowing that it will be used to confuse the general democracy . . . what's up with that?

Cherrypicking to Deny Continued Ocean and Global Warming

Don9000 at 06:43 AM on 7 March, 2013

As a literary scholar I find the other side's analysis is often as rich in verbal silliness as it is in scientific gobblygook. Here's a pithy verbal pearl of wisdom from Willis Eschenbach's guest post on WUWT, which was posted in response to the Watts post linked to above:

"the ocean is huge beyond belief"

The quote can be found here:

wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/25/ocean-temperature-and-heat-content/

Eschenbach makes this profound point in an attempt to back up his notion--or maybe it's a scientific hunch?--that the data on the ocean's heat content or average temperature he is working with is suspect. Here is his complete sentence (the ellipsis is Eschenbach's):

"I find the claim that we know the average temperature of the upper ocean with an error of only one hundredth of a degree to be very unlikely … the ocean is huge beyond belief."

In other words, followers of WUWT should have faith in Eschenbach's idea that the temperature rise he's taken the trouble to graph is of no real signficance because the ocean is really, really, really big to the point where Eschenbach, who has possibly thunk about it hard and long, simply can't wrap his mind around the volume of water involved.

Okay. Fine. I grasp that Eschenbach is trying to imply that there aren't enough sampling points in the vastness of the briny deep to have faith in the stated accuracy of the data, but that is of course exactly the kind of thing scientists take into account when they do their work and present that data. And unlike those scientists, Eschenbach has provided no evidence to back up his claim beyond the aforementioned pearl of wisdom.

Oddly enough, if we accept that the ocean is so huge that even someone as talented as Eschenberg cannot believe how large it is, and we accept that the data is accurate to the degree scientists say it is, then it should occur to Eschenberg and others that the seemingly trifling increases in temperature he has graphed translate into vast increases in heat content over a short period of time.

As this is a very scary conclusion and I hate for people to actually worry about such scary things, I take a modicum of comfort from my own belief that it will not trouble the sleep of regular readers of WUWT.

Why SkS withdrew from the Bloggies

DSL at 14:27 PM on 3 March, 2013

Climaate4All, you're not serious. Science is essentially skeptical. What Willis Eschenbach does regularly at WUWT is not skeptical. The response to Steve Goddard's odd musings is not skeptical. The WUWT comments policy (or, rather, its enforcement) does not encourage skepticism. Note that Watts performed his first study on surface stations and didn't get the answer he wanted, so he tried it again (and had a rather embarassing fail, despite having trumpeted it as a back-breaker before it had even been peer-reviewed. What a showcase of skepticism!). Skepticism is not simply doubt. Consider the recent Luedecke fiasco. Would you call editor Zorita's decision to publish Luedecke properly skeptical? Would you call the Washington Times decision to publish this properly skeptical?

What would you call a properly skeptical blog?

The Y-Axis of Evil

KR at 01:20 AM on 8 February, 2013

There's a new Y-Axis of Evil graph up - over at WUWT Willis Eschenbach has just graphed Greenland ice loss over the next century (without, notably, considering acceleration from present rates) on a zero based scale. Which is just about as useful and deceptive as temperature anomalies graphed in Kelvin, not to mention completely neglecting the effect of that ice loss on sea level - which will eventually hit ~70 feet if the Eemian Period data on cryosphere response is accurate.

Just more of the same... sigh.

IPCC is alarmist

DSL at 13:01 PM on 7 August, 2012

This has to be the most pointless discussion I've encountered in several years, and that includes the engagement with Tim Curtin at OM, the SLoT thread, and everything Dan H has started at RC.

What will be the ultimate bottom line if krisbaum is correct in feeling misled by Pachauri? Would it mean anything where WG1, WG2, or WG3 are concerned? And although it's probably against comment policy, I'll wager krisbaum has no problem with (-Snip-), and those are much more damaging than anything Pachauri has to say about bloody grey literature (as one can see from the variety of mainstream media outlets that are seemingly plugged directly into WUWT).

Watts' New Paper - Analysis and Critique

Bob Loblaw at 12:59 PM on 2 August, 2012

There have been previous occasions where data homogenization has been discussed on a couple of blogs. Deltoid looked at some data analysis by Willis Eschenbach here, and a New Zealand "skeptics" group here , The latter post has a link to more details at this location.

In both cases, raw data was analyzed, in spite of clear metadata indicating station shifts or other known reasons. No surprises - the raw analysis ignoring the real shifts in data ends up with lower trends than the homogenized data that accounts for known issues. Deja vu all over again.

The first link mentions an Australian BoM document, but a different one from the one John Cook links to above. (At least, the link is different.)

Cliff Ollier: Swimming In A Sea of Misinformation

DMarshall at 01:52 AM on 17 April, 2012

Slightly off-topic - I think Willis Eschenbach needs his own category as in his latest guest article at WUWT he's managed to demonstrate that the "Year without a Summer" of 1816 never happened ( and presumably debunking Thomas Jefferson's record of the unusual weather of that year as false or misleading)

Shakun et al. Clarify the CO2-Temperature Lag

Michael Whittemore at 02:18 AM on 15 April, 2012

I know its not a big deal but I feel sort of short changed with these proxy's, due to the area-weighting. I do find it amusing that Willis Eschenbach at WUWT when talking about the Shakun paper never averaged the proxy data because he knew unless he area-weighed them he would not get the same data as in the paper.

Shakun et al. Clarify the CO2-Temperature Lag

mdenison at 04:10 AM on 10 April, 2012

... In the same post, Willis Eschenbach criticized the paper saying "My rule of thumb about these kinds of things is, no error bars … no science." ...

Not only do such comments ring hollow on reading the paper but a look at the supplementary material shows page after page after page (37 pages) of reasoned discussion, analysis and quantification of the uncertainties in the paper.

For those who want a look the supplementary pdf is not behind a paywall. It's hard work reading through it and you may not come away much the wiser but I think you certainly come away with a clear idea of the care climate scientists put into their work.

Human CO2 is a tiny % of CO2 emissions

Andy Skuce at 15:30 PM on 29 March, 2012

primespot:

-We have samples of the air going back 800,000 years in ice cores that show the concentrations of CO2. These are "known facts".
-Recent carbon dioxide increases have been caused by combustion of fossil fuels, even some of the skeptics like Willis Eschenbach and Roy Spencer accept that without reservation. This isn't a disputed hypothesis, this is as close to accepted fact as we get in science.
-What evidence is there that a "shrinking planet" could have contributed to the rise in CO2? Surely, you are not serious.
-Skipping over some of your other assertions, why do you believe that it is "arrogance" to assume that mankind can influence the climate? Do you think, for example, that it is arrogance to think that a nuclear war would be catastrophic? I suppose that your logic would at least lead you to believe that a nuclear war would be an entirely natural phenomenon.
-I agree with you that this dialogue "is taken over by biased people trying to shout over one another, rather than starting with facts and ending with a course of action". But not in the way you think.
-It's perhaps arrogance on your part to think that your "common sense" arguments are sufficient to overcome the consensus opinions of experts who have spent their lives studying this problem.

Eschenbach and McIntyre's BEST Shot at the Surface Temperature Record

Glenn Tamblyn at 23:41 PM on 17 November, 2011

Carl

Thanks for dropping by to SkS and for the kind words (and brickbats).

I was the author behind the opinions about STAR, Fu & V&G so let me clarify my intent. This post and my linked post on the satellite data began as a response to a post by Willis Eschenbach at WUWT. We at SkS often find we are trying to correct misinformation about the published science, often of a vague and misleading nature. However in the case of the post by Eschenbach I felt he was making an unreasonably definite staement about the degree of accuracy in the satellite temperature products. Perhaps he intended that as a means of casting too much doubt on the quality of the surface temperature products, presumably as a means of suggesting that they have a 'problem' and UHI is the likely culprit - ignoring the fact that the surface records include corrections for UHI.

As you are probably well aware, the various temperature records have become quite politicised, with 'skeptics' using whichever record could seem to bolster their claim, until they switched to another claim. So some years ago, when the UAH & RSS TLT products still showed significant differences the lower UAH product was always the skeptics darling. Since the two products are now giving similar results, this seems to have dropped away.

What I wished to do with this post was to highlight to a general audience that there are actually 5 different groups who are or have examined the satellite data and reached somewhat varying results. The work by the Star, Fu & V&G teams appears to be virtually unknown outside scientific circles compared to the UAH/RSS products.

I also feel that getting a graph of the weighting functions for the different channels in front of as many eyeballs as possible was an important exercise in informing people that the satellite records aren't as clearcut and black-and-white as they sometimes portrayed in the Blogosphere.

To your specific criticisms. The basis for the numbers for Fu are taken from Fu et al 2004, Fig 3. The bar graph highlights the difference between the basic T2 results from both RSS & UAH and the same values when the Fu method was applied to produce their T850-300 result. The key point I wished to convey was how much the Fu method altered the original T2 values. And the figure of around 0.2 comes from this graph. I do point out that this is from earlier data and provide a link to the NOAA site for the current Fu adjusted figures. I have included the weighting function for the Fu product to allow the reader to see the effect it has and that in particular its peak weighting is at essentially the same height as T2.

To your comments about the Star data and suggesting a TLT trend from it. I know they don't yet have a TLT product although it is in the works. My purpose here was simply to highlight that since their SNO method is producing a significantly higher TMT value than either RSS or UAH, that a TLT trend when they produce it could well be higher as well. In this respect I was simply trying to suggest what seemed plausible. My comments there were:
"So what trend would Zou produce if the TLT calculations were added as well? We can’t know for certain yet, but they must be higher than UAH or RSS simply because their starting point from the TMT trend is so much higher. For a definitive answer we will need to wait for their analysis. But we can possibly make a ballpark estimate.

If we simply take the difference between the TMT and TLT values for RSS & UAH as being indicative of how much the TLT processing adds to the underlying TMT trend, and add them to the Zou teams TMT trend we might get some idea".

Not intended to be definitive, just suggestive. Hopefully the Star team will be able to produce their TLT product soon so we can gain clarification.

The thrust of this post was arguing against the implicit claim made by Eschenbach that particular temperature products were significantly better quality than others wereas it seems from the work of all the teams working on both surface and satellite temperature analyses that you are all converging towards a common point in the analysis but it is not yet completely clear how close each teams results are to that desired definitive result. You are all circling the target and a prettty damn close. And my hat is off to you guys working on the satellite data. That is one hell of a tricky problem, teasing meaning out of such a complex problem.

If you have any further comments we would be glad to hear them, or if you were interested in writing a guest post on some of these topics, John Cook would love to hear from you.

As an aside, a personal interest of mine, which I included as a speculation at the end of my post, is whether it is possible to apply a method akin to the TLT algoritm or the Fu method to tease out an upper Tropospheric signal without the stratospheric cooling bias. Looking at the weighting functions for TTS and TLS and their corresponding trends from UAH, RSS and Star, it certainly seems plausible that the TTS signal is indicative of a warming upper troposphere combined with a cooling stratosphere. Is such an analysis technically possible and do you know if anyone is planning such a project. I don't know what the scientific utility of such an analysis might be but it would certainly be useful as a data product in the public debate about AGW.

Is there a case against human caused global warming in the peer-reviewed literature? Part 2

Tom Curtis at 02:25 AM on 10 November, 2011

Eric @21, if that is Eschenbach's concern (natural variability not predicted), then the game is given away on his method by Steve McIntyre of all people, who describes his "target" as "An ensemble of GISS Model E global temperatures is used as a target."

The ensemble is of course the average (mean) of a large number of runs. Because natural climate variations, which do appear in the individual runs, do not all occur at the same time and strength, the cancel each other out in the ensemble mean. Consequently only known forcings will effect the ensemble mean, even though natural variability is modeled in any given model run.

Watts, Surface Stations and BEST

caroza at 21:24 PM on 5 November, 2011

DMarshall @39, I can answer a couple of these.

#3 in his points of agreement (the quote from David Whitehouse/GWPF, which has subsequently been hyped into a new denier meme that the "human component of global warming may be somewhat overestimated"). This is a soundbite cherry-picked from a paragraph which a) is a conditional statement, not a conclusion or statement of fact, and b) about questions which the paper didn't attempt to answer. Very good rebuttal on The Way Things Break.

Disagreements: #1 I'm sure somebody, somewhere has looked at the actual numbers (I haven't), but the point is that the BEST results and the two papers Watts cites here (Menne et al and Fall et al) agree, so even if using 60 years was catastrophically wrong, it doesn't seem to have biased the results. (Of course Watts will be trying to argue that that the BEST results would be very different from the other two papers if they had used 30 years worth of data instead of 60 - but then he should run the numbers himself and demonstrate this convincingly. Don't hold your breath.)

Also in #1, he quotes Willis Eschenbach's comment: "That seems crazy to me. Why compare the worst stations to all stations? Why not compare them to the best stations?"

This is nonsense. The objective is to use all the data to compute a mean and trend. So, simplistically, you get "the number" (whatever metric you're computing) from all the data, then you get "the number" from the worst data, and you compare the two results to see whether the worst stations introduce a bias to the overall results. Whether the "best" stations introduce a bias is a completely separate question (and again you would compare them to everything).

Disagreement #2: Watts is confusing measurements with trends. Again. The fact that a station is much hotter (or colder) than another station is irrelevant for computing the trend, provided temperature changes over time at the same rate at both locations. What the authors are saying is that the hot spots cover too small an area for their growth to have a big impact on the trend. (Some warming in urban areas will be due to increased urbanisation.)

#3 I think several people have observed that this is an outstanding example of pot-kettle-black... ;) Unlike Watt's Heartland Institute paper, these have all been submitted for peer review.

Hope that helps - I'm sure others will chip in.

IPCC were wrong about Amazon rainforests

Jose_X at 07:52 AM on 30 September, 2011

I respect that Willis Eschenbach has provided a lot of evidence to strongly argue that the IPCC report doesn't appear to have relied *entirely* on peer-reviewed sources; however, I believe he(?) is mostly still relying on his interpretation of what peer-review sources are or aren't saying. He makes a reasonable claim off that interpretation, but it's not the only reasonable interpretation. As I think doug_bostrom said, W.E. is going against the public opinion of the main author of those sources.

I want to argue against W.E.'s interpretation and also against his ultimate conclusion that the IPCC was not supported by peer-reviewed work.

I want to note that I tried to find the paper online but failed, so I am relying on quotations from this thread.

Here is a key quote from W.E.

**********start
Nowhere in your Nepstad quote does he show that the IPCC claim is in the peer reviewed literature. He says that:

> Our 1999 article (Nepstad et al. 1999) estimated that 630,000 km2 of forests were severely drought stressed in 1998, as Rowell and Moore correctly state, but this forest area is only 15% of the total area of forest in the Brazilian Amazon.

That was the only paper cited by Rowell and Moore as their reference for the claim. But that's not what the IPCC claim said. And Nepstad accepts that. He says:

> The IPCC statement on the Amazon is correct, but the citations listed in the Rowell and Moore report were incomplete.

OK, we see he thinks the IPCC statement is correct
##########end

That paper refers to "severely drought stressed". One can make a good argument from the above that Nepstat, the paper's principle author, agrees that such a characterization of rain forest ("severely drought stressed") is consistent with what the IPCC stated:

"Up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation; this means that the tropical vegetation, hydrology and climate system in South America could change very rapidly to another steady state, not necessarily producing gradual changes between the current and the future situation."

Now, that itself appears to cover only 15%. As for the rest, and as W.E. stated:

**********start
Nepstad would have us believe that to complete their citations, they should have cited the 2004 Nepstad et al. paper. In their 2004 paper, Nepstad said that "half of the forest area of the Amazon Basin had either fallen below, or was very close to, the critical level of soil moisture below which trees begin to die in 1998."
##########end

OK. It appears from this material that we have enough to claim the IPCC paper relied on peer-reviewed sources.

W.E. disagreed:

**********start
But that's not the claim made by the IPCC either. All that the Nepstad 2004 paper shows is that there was a big drought in the Amazon, and that the Amazon did not experience either the "drastic reaction" or the "climate shift" that the IPCC warns of.

So that doesn't support the Rowell and Moore/IPCC claim either. In fact, Nepstad 2004 tends to show that the Amazon is more stable than they claimed, rather than show it is very sensitive as they would like us to think.
##########end

I'd like to give a variable conclusion (a rebuttal to the rebuttal).

While I (and others) already pointed out that we can stop since Nepstad already stated his opinion, essentially that his papers and/or other papers supported the IPCC conclusion, let's get a bit more detailed.

Since this comment is a mess of quotations and can be hard to follow. Let me number the following section's main points.

1 -- Let me recap W.E.. (a) He does appear to accept that the 1999 paper is in agreement with the IPCC statement if we change the 40% to 15%. He apparently is accepting Nepstad's position about the meaning of his own 1999 paper. (b) However, it appears W.E. came to the conclusions that the 2004 paper (which mentions 50%) does not support the IPCC statement by the fact that the 2004 paper did not prove "drastic reaction" or "climate shift" occurred during a drier season than average.

2 -- The IPCC paper didn't state that "drastic reaction" or "climate shift" had happened. It merely stated qualitatively of a probability of those things happening. In fact, the 2007 report has to be taken in the context of the "dry" spell that already had occurred by the time the 2004 paper was written.

3 -- The 2004 paper showed that around 50% of the trees were in a tough position ("fallen below, or was very close to, the critical level of soil moisture below which trees begin to die in 1998").

4 -- That 2004 description sounds completely consistent with the earlier 1999 position of the trees being "severely drought stressed".

5 -- It was already noted that Nepstad (and W.E.) agreed that this 1999 conclusion was consistent with the IPCC wording.

6 -- So it seems very reasonable to conclude from these two papers that something like 50% of the trees in 2004 came close to the 1999 dangerous condition of being "severely drought stressed".

7 -- Thus, it appears we have peer-reviewed support for a condition ("severely drought stressed") which apparently is believed to be consistent with the condition described by the IPCC 2007 report, and that condition applies to a percentage amount of the rain forest (50%) which is a number also consistent with the IPCC 2007 statement.

To recap: It appears the IPCC example does rely on peer-reviewed material. It's a matter of interpretation perhaps, but the author of such works appears to agree with the IPCC. Maybe the author is not the best writer of English, but it appears that even W.E., despite variable interpretations of the author's words, should agree that the IPCC report is backed if we are to believe Neptstad's interpretation of his own words. Regardless of what W.E. ultimately believes, a great argument can be made that this example does not show Pachauri to have misspoken.

As W.E. quoted:

**********start
"People can have confidence in the IPCC's conclusions…Given that it is all on the basis of peer-reviewed literature." - Rajendra Pachauri, IPCC chairman, June 2008

"The IPCC doesn't do any research itself. We only develop our assessments on the basis of peer-reviewed literature." - Rajendra Pachauri, IPCC chairman, June 2007

"This is based on peer-reviewed literature. That’s the manner in which the IPCC functions. We don’t pick up a newspaper article and, based on that, come up with our findings." - Rajendra Pachauri, IPCC chairman, June 2008
##########end

It does appear that the IPCC doesn't just rely on newspaper articles and such but do try to make sure the peer-reviewed literature supports their conclusions.

Sea Level Hockey Stick

Camburn at 12:11 PM on 25 June, 2011

On a more serious note, Mr. Willis Eschenbach has raised some valid concerns about this paper at Anthony Watts site:

Willis Eschenbach's concerns

Sea Level Hockey Stick

KR at 05:43 AM on 25 June, 2011

The objections to this paper on WUWT (Willis Eschenbach column) are primarily complaints that insufficient data was published along with the paper, in particular the look-up table of depth versus species ratios for the ~200 calibration samples, and that (unspecified) sections of the math were lacking to the point of not enabling proper review.

I noted that establishing species ratios vs. depth is pretty standard practice in foraminifera studies, and asked whether they needed the paper to also contain multi-semester courses in GIA, foraminifera identification, tidal gauges, radioisotope dating, and perhaps a private tutor and a masseuse to help them through the material.../sarcasm

I expect impolite responses...

What's most interesting to me is that this paper was written by six authors, with Michael Mann as the fourth - contributing, but not the lead author - it's Kemp et al 2011. Yet the skeptic blogs are ranting about the "Mann" paper - he appears to be a favorite target for Ad hominem attacks. Logical fallacies, of course, but an easy target for that audience.

Can we trust climate models?

Charlie A at 05:21 AM on 1 June, 2011

Eric the Red, #80 "It appears to be a somewhat arbitrary approximation. I am not sure that it should be tied to the GHG forcings at all, .."

Obviously it is arbitrary to move from instrumental observations and reconstructions for the 1880-1990 period and then for the more recent 1990-2003 period change to a fixed level of aerosol forcings for the AR4 and Hansen 2007 paper. It is even more striking that four years later, Hansen changes again and decides to use the -1/2 of GHG forcing for the simulations of Hansen 2011, rather than using instrumental data. I don't know the reason for either of the changes in methodology.

Do we really believe that our measurement accuracy pre-1990 was better than we have in 2011?

The thread topic is "Can we trust the models?"
Perhaps the real question is "can we trust the data fed into the models?" or "can we trust the data used to tune the models?"

Obviously different types of emission sources have different ratios between aerosol emissions and GHG emissions. There is a lot of difference between a dirty coal plant without scrubber and burning high sulfur coal than one with scrubbers and/or using low sulfur coal.

OTOH, Willis Eschenbachs simulation of the CCSM3 model resulted in 0.995 correlation with just a simple 1 box model and using only the solar, volcano, and GHG forcings. If aerosol forcings were large and uncorrelated, he could not have gotten those results.

Hansen's 2001 senate testimony shows yet another version of forcings used by GISS. Note how the GHG and aerosols seem to be close to linearly related. Also of interest is the relatively low levels of aerosol forcings compared to GHG forcings. It is much less than the -0.5 factor now being used.

Caption: Fig. 3: Climate forcings in the past 50 years, relative to 1950, due to six mechanisms (6). The first five forcings are based mainly on observations, with stratospheric H2O including only the source due to CH4 oxidation. GHGs include the wellmixed greenhouse gases, but not O3 and H2O. The tropospheric aerosol forcing is uncertain in both its magnitude and time dependence.

Roy Spencer’s Latest Silver Bullet

Charlie A at 22:22 PM on 23 May, 2011

I gave a reference to the homepage of Isaac Held's blog and mentioned blogposts 3 through 6 as being the relevant ones. I see there is a need to be more specific.

Blogpost #3. The simplicity of the forced climate response shows how the globally averaged results of the CM2.1 model can be emulated with reasonable precision with a very simple 2 term model with 4 year time constant. The parameters for this emulation include a sensitivity of 3.5 W/(m2 K0, which is the equivalent of about 1.5 C increase for a doubling of CO2.

Willis Eschenbach has detailed a similar calculation for both GISS E and the CCSM3 models. See Zero Point Three Times Forcings and Life is like a Black Box of Chocolates

For more details and a replication of the same toy model of GISS E in R, see Climate audit post Willis on GISS Model E".

-------------------

If you prefer to see what Hansen says about this, then look at figures 7 and 8 of his recent self published white paper, "Earth's Energy Imbalance and Implications".

Here's a copy of Figure 8A, showing the response function of GISS E for the first 123 years. Fig 7 shows the longer term response, with about 80% response at 600 years and almost to equilibrium after 2000 years. So if the GISS E equilibrium response is 3.0C for a doubling of CO2, the GISS E models predicts only a 1.2C rise 8-10 years after a doubling of CO2; about 1.5C rise at 50 years after a doubling of CO2, rising to 2.4C after 600 years and then 3C after 2000 years.

Plain English climate science - now live at Skeptical Science

CoalGeologist at 09:38 AM on 17 August, 2010

This is an immensely valuable approach to the debate over human attribution of contemporary climate change (which, when everything is stripped away, is what all the controversy is about), but to me there's an important aspect missing, which is identifying the logical fallacies that commonly appear in skeptical arguments against AGW.

There are some skeptical arguments that have scientific merit, for which there may be a variety of [apparently] contradictory evidence. In such cases, addressing the argument will come down to a question of listing and weighing the evidence, particularly in regards to its reliability.

In many more cases, however, skeptical arguments against AGW entail invoking logical fallacies. Particularly common fallacies are:
a) strawman arguments (intentionally or unintentionally misrepresenting the opposing view, for the express purpose of “disproving” it),
b) red herring arguments (raising issues or evidence that are not relevant to the actual issue being debated),
c) cherry picking (misrepresenting the weight of scientific evidence by focusing on evidence that supports a particular conclusion),
d) ad hominem arguments (attacking the person who makes the argument, rather than the argument itself).
e) etc.

For example, the discussion about Did Global Warming Stop in 1998 makes reference to "cherry picking".
And the discussion about The Rate of Melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet addresses what is essentially a "Red Herring" argument by Willis Eschenbach. (In other words, even if Eschenbach is correct, his argument is irrelevant!)

These sorts of fallacies tend to occur again and again (and again!); only the specific details vary. True skeptics (i.e. those who are equally skeptical toward the arguments both for and against AGW) would benefit from learning how to identify these "type"-fallacies, as it will be easier for them to recognize similar sorts of fallacies in other circumstances.

With regard to making the presentation easily accessible, which is the goal of this approach, one option would be to include an icon of a "red herring" or a "straw man" or a clump of cherries on the "Basic" response (or a picture of Al Gore for the "ad hominem" category ;-), which would link to a more detailed explanation of why the argument is fallacious on the "Intermediate" page.

One potential argument against this approach would be that it presupposes a motive or intent in making a particular fallacious argument. While this may be true, my feeling is that "cherry picking is cherry picking", whether it is intentional or inadvertent. Our goal in science is an unbiased assessment of the evidence, and if a particular argument fails to adhere to this principle, the problem should be identified, irrespective of whether it was intentional or not.

Just a suggestion! Thanks, as ever, for your efforts to shine a light on the scientific evidence relating to climate change!

Is Willis Wrong at WUWT? or Sensitivity and Sensibility I

Alden Griffith at 03:38 AM on 8 July, 2010

Earth Sciences 101 – Final Exam

QUESTION: Willis Eschenbach recently estimated the Earth’s climate sensitivity by examining winter vs. summer temperature and insolation at different latitudes:

“My insight was that I could compare the winter insolation with the summer insolation. From that I could calculate how much the solar forcing increased from winter to summer. Then I could compare that with the change in temperature from winter to summer, and that would give me the climate sensitivity for each latitude band.”

From this estimate of climate sensitivity, Eschenbach concludes that the climate sensitivity to a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide is approximately 0.05 degrees C. This is in contrast to the IPCC climate sensitivity range of 2 to 4.5 degrees C. Explain why this is NOT an informative way to estimate climate sensitivity.

ANSWER: The main flaw in Eschenbach’s analysis is that the time period over which sensitivity is calculated (6 months) is too short. Thus, there is not nearly enough time to reach equilibrium (this is especially important given that the IPCC presents sensitivity at equilibrium). The heat capacity of the Earth is far too great to allow much of a temperature response over such a brief period. In contrast, if the Earth stopped orbiting the sun and the seasons remained fixed, then there would eventually be enough time to assess the equilibrium temperature response to such a large solar forcing. The equilibrium response would likely be very large indeed, yielding a much greater sensitivity value. However, this would still underestimate the true sensitivity because of teleconnections in the climate system, i.e. the Northern and Southern hemispheres are not isolated from each other in terms of energy flows. Energy from the summer hemisphere flows to the winter hemisphere and would reduce the apparent climate sensitivity.

A comparison with the planet Mercury is useful. On Mercury, there is very little heat capacity (e.g. no oceans, no atmosphere) and virtually no teleconnections (e.g. no oceans, no atmosphere). Thus we would expect its temperature to respond far more rapidly to changes in solar insolation (as it does). Eschenbach’s analysis of climate sensitivity based on seasonality might work for Mercury, but it is fundamentally inappropriate for Earth.

Beyond examining the assumptions of Eschenbach’s analysis, it is also worth examining its implications. A sensitivity of 0.05 degrees C to a doubling of CO2 is equivalent to 0.014 degrees C / Wm-2. This value suggests that the ~7 degree C change between glaciations would require a forcing of 518 Wm-2. This is greater than the average solar insolation of the entire planet (342 Wm-2)! This simple examination reveals that Eschenbach’s sensitivity is far too low to make any sense – the result of the extremely short time period over which it was calculated and the unaccounted for heat exchanges between hemispheres.

In short: Eschenbach takes an extremely large forcing (summer versus winter insolation), assesses the response over an extremely short period of time (summer to winter), and comes up with an extremely low sensitivity. What you put in is what you get out. Tada!

A+

IPCC were wrong about Amazon rainforests

JMurphy at 19:31 PM on 5 July, 2010

Willis Eschenbach wrote : How does invalidating two references, neither of which I cited, change that?

Leaving aside the dubious origin of your 'cites', as I have already cited above :

"Citizen Audit failed to classify book chapters that are actually peer reviewed papers as "peer reviewed". They also fail to place IPCC self-citations, which are peer reviewed, into the peer reviewed category. The IPCC self-cites are some of the most expert reviewed literature ever."

And as I already acknowledged that you hadn't used those actual references, reference to them was to show how untrustworthy that whole audit is. And that is just on a cursory glance : who knows what else will be found after a detailed proper audit ? But who has the time and energy to spend on deflating all these skeptical bubbles ?

You did however copy and paste the COPA COGECA, 2003a reference - Why would you expect that to be peer-reviewed ?
(The same goes for COPA COGECA 2003b.)

As for your statement "Unfortunately, science requires more than heartfelt belief ...", that explains why the so-called skeptics have to rely on faith and hope for their beliefs. They way they obssess about certain matters and automatically disbelieve any scientist they don't want to believe (except their lone, and lonely, gurus, of course), is a definite act of faith and belief. How long before they gather the torch-bearing mobs ?

IPCC were wrong about Amazon rainforests

Doug Bostrom at 17:06 PM on 4 July, 2010

Ho-hum, Willis has gone off down the Amazon rabbit hole yet again.

I suppose it would best to get Nepstad's entire statement out here so Willis can deal with it in detail.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been recently criticized in media coverage (e.g. Sunday Times) for presenting inaccurate information on the susceptibility of the forests of the Amazon Basin to rainfall reduction in its fourth assessment. The statement that has drawn the criticism reads as follows:

"Up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation; this means that thetropical vegetation, hydrology and climate system in South America could change very rapidly to another steady state, not necessarily producing gradual changes between the current and the future situation (Rowell and Moore, 2000)." (IPCC 2007, Magrin et al. 2007)

The Rowell and Moore review report that is cited as the basis of this IPCC statement cites an article that we published in the journal Nature in 1999 as the source for the following statement:

"Up to 40% of the Brazilian forest is extremely sensitive to small reductions in the amount of rainfall. In the 1998 dry season, some 270,000 sq. km of forest became vulnerable to fire, due to completely depleted plant-available water stored in the upper five metres of soil. A further 360,000 sq. km of forest had only 250 mm of plant-available soil water
left.[Nepstad et al. 1999]" (Rowell and Moore 2000)

The IPCC statement on the Amazon is correct, but the citations listed in the Rowell and Moore report were incomplete.(The authors of this report interviewed several researchers, including the author of this note, and had originally cited the IPAM website where the statement was made that 30 to 40% of the forests of the Amazon were susceptible to small changes in rainfall). Our 1999 article (Nepstad et al. 1999) estimated that 630,000 km2 of forests were severely drought stressed in 1998, as Rowell and Moore correctly state, but this forest area is only 15% of the total area of forest in the Brazilian Amazon. In another article published in Nature, in 1994, we used less conservative assumptions to estimate that
approximately half of the forests of the Amazon depleted large portions of their available soil moisture during seasonal or episodic drought (Nepstad et al. 1994). After the Rowell and Moore report was released in 2000, and prior to the publication of the IPCC AR4, new evidence of the full extent of severe drought in the Amazon was available. In 2004, we
estimated that half of the forest area of the Amazon Basin had either fallen below, or was very close to, the critical level of soil moisture below which trees begin to die in 1998. This estimate incorporated new rainfall data and results from an experimental reduction of rainfall in an Amazon forest that we had conducted with funding from the US National Science Foundation (Nepstad et al. 2004). Field evidence of the soil moisture critical threshold is presented in Nepstad et al. 2007.

In sum, the IPCC statement on the Amazon was correct. The report that is cited in support of the IPCC statement (Rowell and Moore 2000) omitted some citations in support of the 40% value statement.

Daniel Nepstad, PhD
Senior Scientist, Woods Hole Research Center
Coordinator of Research, Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazonia

Source for above statement by Nepstad

Nepstad versus "Willis Eschenbach." I know where my money would go.

IPCC were wrong about Amazon rainforests

Willis Eschenbach at 13:39 PM on 4 July, 2010

JMurphy at 07:46 AM on 4 July, 2010

It would appear that Willis Eschenbach has been using other sources without acknowledgement - some of his lists are even in the same order !

Duh ... anyone with half a brain would realize that I didn't go out and research the hundred or so IPCC references in a single day.

I didn't reference them because their original provenance is obvious ... the IPCC. What difference does it make where I got them? When the IPCC references a discussion paper, it references a discussion paper. No amount of intermediate collection of different references changes that.

IPCC were wrong about Amazon rainforests

JMurphy at 07:46 AM on 4 July, 2010

It would appear that Willis Eschenbach has been using other sources without acknowledgement - some of his lists are even in the same order !

They seem to come from here and here.

IPCC were wrong about Amazon rainforests

Riccardo at 06:23 AM on 4 July, 2010

I was wondering how many non peer review papers have been used by the IPCC and I'm impressed by the numbers Willis Eschenbach gave. Given that they were allowed to use non peer review papers I have to say that they did a really awesome job.

IPCC were wrong about Amazon rainforests

Riccardo at 19:25 PM on 3 July, 2010

"The problem is that 71.3% of what passes as peer reviewed climate science is simply junk science, as false as the percentage cited in this sentence."

So, discussing science and peer review with Willis Eschenbach appears to be really pointless.

IPCC were wrong about Amazon rainforests

Riccardo at 15:17 PM on 3 July, 2010

Willis Eschenbach,
as noted before, the IPCC rules state that non peer review article may be used. Your is only a personal attack against Pachauri and of no much interest for the science.
It's a well known and clearly political motivated tactics used way too often by various brands of skeptics. In my views it's unacceptable.

IPCC were wrong about Amazon rainforests

JMurphy at 20:08 PM on 2 July, 2010

Willis Eschenbach wrote :

"Pachauri said repeatedly that the IPCC was based 100% on peer reviewed science. As a result, one is too many ... and the Amazon claim is certainly one."

Well, since you love to demand citations (especially in front of an adoring crowd at WUWT), perhaps you could do so here and give links to Pachauri's 'repeated' claims ?

Then, give the stats which show the "far too often" IPCC reliance on "propaganda pieces", etc - as you have already been asked.

Then, tell why you believe Pachauri and the IPCC are one and the same, so that what he says is what the IPCC says. Do you have links to official IPCC paperwork, etc. which has statements by him claiming things like the IPCC 100% assertion you are so obsessed with ?

Anyway, you have already been shown where to look to see all the answers, by a Phil Clarke, on the WUWT thread you wrote recently.

But you seem to have ignored it, preferring to have a handbag fight with Richard North over who said what and when. Some of the posters on there were very upset at that - two of their so-called skeptic heroes not getting on ! Egos are such a pain, aren't they ?

Here is another version of the link that you were given over at WUWT but ignored.

IPCC were wrong about Amazon rainforests

Doug Bostrom at 23:39 PM on 27 June, 2010

I should amend my earlier remarks to Willis.

Willis, the reason I'm probably coming off as a bemused-to-irritated on this is for the very reason that you're clearly capable of spending your effort on more useful activities that dragging up done-to-death issues such as this one. On WUWT you've performed some noteworthy service and in fact have stuck your neck out to help set some of the more resistant folks there straight on some science basics. You've corrected the record on C02 attribution, you've assisted WUWT readers in understanding that there is in fact a phenomenon called anthropogenic warming, you've traced the path of anthropogenic pH change in the ocean. You've taken a bit of flack for that, no surprise. Despite all your unusually pragmatic work at WUWT, here you are regressed to grinding on IPCC process minutia of no actual significance. I don't understand it, it does not seem in character and when I read your post to Riccardo here I honestly wondered, "is this really Willis Eschenbach?"

Maybe your effort at WUWT is about getting folks to understand they should now be touting adaptation but I don't really know, only you can say. What I can say with more confidence is that focusing on one miss out of thousands of accurate hits is to miss a major point, namely that the IPCC WG1 synthesis is overwhelmingly useful in bringing together a multitude of inputs to help understand a novel situation we've accidentally created on our planet. If adaptation is the new mode for people discomfited with the unfortunate facts we're creating on the ground, maybe it would be better to focus on sections of the synthesis other than WG1. The more into policy one goes the more there is to argue about, meanwhile the fundamental science portion is a pretty futile subject of discussion at this point, as you've been pointing out.

Ocean acidification

HumanityRules at 11:37 AM on 24 June, 2010

It would be ridiculous to say that any ecosystem is a perfectly stable environment. So what matters is how the proposed human induced changes fits into these variable environments. Willis Eschenbach mused about this on WUWT suggesting that any human induced change was well within the spatial, diurnal and short term changes that occur in the pH of seawater.

In "Watts it like at a climate skeptic speakers event?" there was a lot of skepticism in the discussion about how 'laboratory' experiments on CO2 induced changes in crop growth (FACE experiments) could be interpreted in the real world. These ocean pH experiments seem highly analogous. Any doubt here?

I don't think it's distracting to consider the natural variation in the envoronment, in fact ignoring it would be to ignore an importantaspect of the question. That fact that the movement may be in one direction doesn't really annul the far more important fact about the magnitude of the change. Let's assume the worst case scenario's of AGW are true and we've already gone too far. Maybe this would only leave geo-engineering as a solution to this problem. We already have several ideas about how to tackle acidification. We have 50, 100, 200 or more years to get these experiments right before implementing them. This is the worst case scenario.

Is the long-term trend in CO2 caused by warming of the oceans?

gallopingcamel at 14:41 PM on 12 June, 2010

HumanityRules (#28),
Thanks for that WUWT link. However, I think that Willis Eschenbach has got his carbon isotopes confused. C12 and C13 are stable but C14 is not. C14 is created in the atmosphere by incident cosmic rays. Once living creatures die the proportion of C14 in their remains falls as the C14 decays (5,730 year half life).

Fossil fuels buried underground are shielded from most cosmic radiation so the C14 is not replaced when it decays. Thus fossil fuels have much less C14 than atmospheric carbon has.

Is the long-term trend in CO2 caused by warming of the oceans?

HumanityRules at 14:20 PM on 12 June, 2010

Paul W at 00:18 AM on 12 June, 2010
Nice to see another debunk.

Maybe that's over stating it. Even Hocker states "I am not wed to the theory I present"

It's fair to say that WUWT also posted a Willis Eschenbach article that firmly states 20th century CO2 rise is caused by burning fossil fuels
Some people claim, that there’s a human to blame …

Abraham shows Monckton wrong on Arctic sea ice

NewYorkJ at 13:47 PM on 2 June, 2010

I'm perhaps pointing out the obvious here, but the main problem with Monckton's presentation of the data (at least it appears to be accurate in this case) is that the graph he uses is not really useful in showing trends from year to year or over a decade. It's meant to show the path of Arctic sea ice extent over the course of a single year, and compare the path with a relatively few recent years. It's rather difficult to sort out all those lines/colors for each year to discern where the trend is at the decadal level. The NSIDC graph is an obvious solution.

Since we're on the topic of obfuscating with graphs, here's a similar one by a Willis Eschenbach. It makes Monckton's presentation look almost reasonable on comparison:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/13/lies-damned-lies-statistics-and-graphs/

The WUWT alter ego site puts it nicely...

http://wotsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2010/04/14/lies-damned-lies-statistics-%e2%80%a6-and-graphs/

Why Greenland's ice loss matters

hadfield at 07:55 AM on 28 May, 2010

On a post at Michael Tobis's blog:

http://initforthegold.blogspot.com/2010/05/eschenbach-has-half-point.html

Willis Eschenbach, MT and others are expressing doubt about Velicogna's 2009 finding of accelerating mass loss from Greenland and Antarctica in the period 2002-2009. The suggestion is that she has neglected (or otherwise failed to account properly for) the effect of smoothing on the number of degrees of freedom in the data. My suggestion is that this criticism, if it's well-founded, needs to be conveyed in a comment to GRL. Does anyone else more statistically competent than me want to venture an opinion?

By the way, Ned (#16), on MT's blog I asked "Why would anyone extrapolate a quadratic fit based on a sample of 7 years of data out to 91 years beyond the sample end-points? In either direction?!". You have gone one better by converting it to an exponential before extrapolating. I can only admire your boldness, sir!

But seriously I think we all can agree that "Extrapolating an accelerating curve into the future is always problematic." Or into the past, I might add. We need understanding of the processes.

Unprecedented Warming in Lake Tanganyika and its impact on humanity

Albatross at 08:53 AM on 23 May, 2010

Si, SS and johnd,

How many Vostok ice cores were made? And I am not talking about individual core samples. How about EPICA? At how many locations did they drill cores for those projects?

Regarding the red herring of hydrothermal actvity. Authors addressed that see #79. Also, have you thought for a minute that those vents have probably been present for millenia, and that they are on the lake bottom and the authors are talkiing about warming of LST. That is akin to Monckton claiming that El Ninos are caused by undersea volcanoes, or thinking that that undersea volcanoes explain the increase in 0-2000 m glbal OHC.

If the lake was being warmed from below, the lower depths would have locally been warming at a rate much higher than has been observed and the LSTs would not be consistent with the surrounding SATs, which they are. These data have clearly not been contaminated by hydrothermal activity.

Really guys, you are grasping at straws and it is all too painfully apparant. SS says s/he has spent a few days looking at this on the internet. Wow, really? Scientists have devoted careers and students 5-6 years of their PhDs studying this issue and thereby reading hundreds, if not thousands, of papers. Not to mention that this paper was reviewed and critiqued by their peers, who are experts in the field.

The contrarians do not like the findings because they are yet more evidence that AGW is an issue and add to an already coherent and cohesive picture. So the best they can do is to try and make some rather lame attempts undermine the scientists' credibility.

Johnd @100, "LOL. Has anyone happened to notice that this study is basically about fishing for sardines?"

Please gorow up and show some respect. If you have not noticed the obvious, we have not had thermometers around for anywhere close to 1500 years, nevermind isolated equatorial regions in Africa.

Tierney is probably reading some of the contrarian comments on this read and shaking her head in disbelief, and who can blame her.

And for those willing to accept Eschenbach's "critique" of the Tierney et al. paper at face value, I would caution you against doing so. Willis has a reputation for, how shall I say this, for playing loose with the facts as has been shown several times by Dr. Lambert and others. That and the fact that he is not an expert in this field. EOS.

Unprecedented Warming in Lake Tanganyika and its impact on humanity

tobyjoyce at 23:54 PM on 20 May, 2010

Willis Eschenbach has posted a critique of the paper at WUWT, of which the above is the centrepiece.

Bujumbura and Mbala are two weather stations on the lake, and the chart sows the air temperature. he therefore attacks the statement "The surface temp. tracks with the air temperature over the last half-century". However, WE conveniently takes the "last half-century" back to 1950.

His other criticisms may have more merit: showing a comparison with the Northern Hemisphere, rather than the Southern, since the lake is in the souther hemisphere.

He also claims the numbers disagree with a paper of the same authors published in 2008.

Another criticism which I do not understand is "not calibrating their proxy."

"It turns out that they used a proxy called TEX86, which has been used in other studies. But how did they calibrate the proxy to the lake surface temperature (which they call “LST”)?

Well … they didn’t calibrate it. In their theory, no calibration is needed. However, that seems like a very problematic assumption, as there are always confounding factors for proxies that mean that they need to be calibrated to the instrumental record. Some of these factors are listed in their Supplementary Information."

On balance, I don;t think any of these stands up, except maybe for the last one. He did not mention the decline in productivity of the lake.

Unprecedented Warming in Lake Tanganyika and its impact on humanity

HumanityRules at 18:57 PM on 20 May, 2010

Thanks for the reply. it's just in previous discussions of paleoclimate reconstructions there has been a suggestion that they don't capture the most recent past including the dramatic past 30 years and generally miss the end of the blade of the hockey stick. My memory is that the blade on the Mann reconstruction only becomes greater than the natural variation of the past when you splice on the instrument record.

Anyway, I discovered some further reading on the subject.

There was a similar paper in Nature in 2003
Nature 2003

A comment by Willis W. Eschenbach
Eschenbach comment

And a reply to that by the original authors
Reply to Eschenbach

Every skeptic argument ever used

yocta at 11:18 AM on 3 March, 2010

The same Willis Eschenbach mentioned here?

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/12/willis_eschenbach_caught_lying.php

Every skeptic argument ever used

Charlie A at 11:03 AM on 3 March, 2010

tobyjoyce at 09:51 AM on 3 March, 2010 "From my own reading, I do not recall any reported instances of negative climate feedback ... where have you seen that evidence?"

Many climate scientists have noted that clouds provide both positive and negative feedback. IPCC also lists the effects of clouds as one of the biggest uncertainties in climate science.

Indeed, the recent work by Willis Eschenbach is related to the daily variation in clouds very common in the tropics. Low clouds form in the late morning, often turning into thunderstorms in late afternoon, and then clearing around sunset.

Several effects are at work. A low cloud generally is a positive feedback in that it adds to the greenhouse effect. But a low cloud also increases albedo. At local noon, a low cloud is an overall negative feedback. At night, it is clearly positive. So the phasing of diurnal cloud formation with respect to local noon affects the overall feedback.

Cumulonibmus clouds have the additional effect of heat transport upward above a sizable fraction of the lower atmosphere water vapor and other GHGs.

YouTube video on the empirical evidence for man-made global warming

Charlie A at 04:37 AM on 2 March, 2010

KR at 03:22 AM on 2 March, 2010
"Charlie A @#55 - interesting article, but the time scale for everything in it is _one year_. Short term is weather, long term is climate; it's an interesting look at seasonal variation, but says nothing at all about long term effects of higher IR retention, water vapor feedback, and the like."

You appear to misunderstand the hypothesis. Willis Eschenbach is analyzing changes in the daily pattern of cloud formation that work as a negative feedback. Looking at daily changes for a period of exactly one year is the appropriate interval for evaluating this diurnal change. See http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/14/the-thermostat-hypothesis/

Climate Science Glossary

Term Lookup

Settings

Term Lookup

Settings

Latest Posts

Comment Search Results