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bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, CA
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Jul 28, 2011 - 12:06am PT
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positive feedback on the warming
Is this geek-talk for increased warming???
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bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, CA
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Jul 28, 2011 - 12:14am PT
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Geek.
But a nice analysis. Which is why some geeks are kinda cool....
Thanks, Ed!
EDIT:
the periodicity of the glaciations has to do with the orbit of the earth about the sun and all the various and well known perturbations... the initiation of an interglacial period (a period without glaciers) starts with increased warming due to the sun.
as the ice retreats and the land starts to support life, the increased CO2 in the atmosphere accelerates the warming, it's a greenhouse gas. This is a "positive feedback", the more warming that happens during that period, the faster the warming occurs. It is a non-linear system.
Since we just went through a solar maximum, wouldn't your theory point to a solar event causing the warming? ANd as we enter a minimum, a calming of events and a change in weather patterns?
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dirtbag
climber
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Jul 28, 2011 - 11:58am PT
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Wow, Roy Spencer. Now there's a guy without an axe to grind. LOL.
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k-man
Gym climber
SCruz
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 28, 2011 - 12:43pm PT
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I knew the Heartland Institute article would make its rounds here. The tone of the article shows a heavy bias. Count the number of times the term "alarmists" is used to describe the scientists who study climate change.
I was curious, so I looked up the Heartland Institute and found it has strong ties to the tobacco industry (that's why they were often quoted by that industry when the industry was being sued about the addictive nature of tobacco).
But wait, there's more. The author of the current hit piece is none other than James Taylor:
The Heartland Institute's Environmental "expert," James Taylor, is a lawyer based in Florida. Despite presenting a veneer of scientific expertise in their Environmental advocacy, the Heartland lacks any(?) scientists trained to understand climate issues.
Read about Heartland Here.
Still, I am curious to see the paper in the "peer-reviewed" journal (note that the article does not say the paper itself was peer reviewed). I say this because the links to the journal throw a 502 error. Also, note the grammar in the link to Climate Science--I'd hope a high-school student could write better than that. Really, take a look.
But go ahead alarmist deniers, grab onto anything you can to support your beliefs. It does not matter.
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blahblah
Gym climber
Boulder
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Jul 28, 2011 - 12:45pm PT
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From Ed:
as the ice retreats and the land starts to support life, the increased CO2 in the atmosphere accelerates the warming, it's a greenhouse gas. This is a "positive feedback", the more warming that happens during that period, the faster the warming occurs. It is a non-linear system.
You lost me there: isn't the increased plant growth from increased CO2 and warming a negative feedback (as the increased biomass is a CO2 sink)? Remember the NASA article from a few months ago that discussed this?
Don't worry about responding to this if you're busy on other stuff, which I imagine you may be. This is a pretty minor detail compared to the groundbreaking research reported in Forbes (see above links).
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k-man
Gym climber
SCruz
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 28, 2011 - 12:49pm PT
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blahblah, can you find me a link to the article in the peer-reviewed journal on which the Forbes article is based? I can't seem to find it.
Don't worry about responding to this if you're busy on other stuff, I know this would take valuable time away from your nursery rhymes.
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blahblah
Gym climber
Boulder
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Jul 28, 2011 - 12:55pm PT
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Don't worry about responding to this if you're busy on other stuff, I know this would take valuable time away from your nursery rhymes.
Hehe--is Ed on vacation and you got tasked with writing petulant responses while he's out?
Yeah I looked for the article and got timed out also. But calm down: unless you think this all a big hoax by Forbes, we'll get the article soon enough.
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k-man
Gym climber
SCruz
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 28, 2011 - 01:00pm PT
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OK, blahblah. Let me know when the links to the article become live. I'm certain that the peer-reviewed journal will have lots of good info. Especially on who, besides a lawyer from Florida, reviewed the NASA findings.
Addendum
OK, the article is UP!
http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/3/8/1603/pdf
From the Abstract:
It is concluded that atmospheric feedback diagnosis of the climate system remains an unsolved problem, due primarily to the inability to distinguish between radiative forcing and radiative feedback in satellite radiative budget observations.
Funny, that's a little different than Taylor's synopsis:
NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth’s atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted ...
Could Taylor be reading into the Remote Sensing article something other than what the article concludes?
But I admit, reading that article makes my head spin. Especially sentences like this:
What this might (or might not) imply regarding the ultimate causes of the El Niño and La Niña phenomena is not relevant to our central point, though: that the presence of time varying radiative forcing in satellite radiative flux measurements corrupts the diagnosis of radiative feedback.
I would sure like a real scientist, like Ed, to read this article and give us a layman's synopsis of what the heck they are saying.
Not that I don't trust a lawyer from FL to summarize the paper, but actually, I don't.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Jul 28, 2011 - 01:12pm PT
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"alarmist computer models"
That isn't news reporting; that's an editorial.
And Roy Spencer is an evangelical and creationist who believes god created the Earth for mankind and so it has to be (to quote Roy as a signatory) "admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory. Earth's climate system is no exception."
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k-man
Gym climber
SCruz
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 28, 2011 - 04:38pm PT
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Hey Bookie, can you tell me why the scientist was put on leave?
Addendum
Say Bookie, let me help you out here since I've seen in the past that you have some trouble with reading comprehension.
From the article your referenced (emphasis mine):
[Monnett] was placed on administrative leave while officials investigate scientific misconduct allegations.
While it wasn't clear what the exact allegations are ...
While Monnett himself is not able to comment, his wife did answer some questions (emphasis mine):
Monnett had come under fire in the past within the agency for speaking the truth about what the science showed, and she feared what happened to him would send a "chilling message" within the agency at a time when important oil and gas development decisions in the Arctic will soon be made.
Hmm, do I smell a fish?
More:
The Guardian has an article on this:
Arctic Scientist Who Exposed Climate Threat to Polar Bear Is Suspended
US government conducts 'integrity inquiry' on federal biologist amid lobbying by oil firms for Arctic permits
From the article:
Oil firms, which want to drill in the pristine environment of the Chukchi and Beaufort seas, have been complaining of delays caused by environmental reviews. This month Obama issued an order to speed up Arctic drilling permits.
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corniss chopper
climber
breaking the speed of gravity
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Jul 29, 2011 - 01:52am PT
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As someone who lives in a civilization who's very existence depends on oil
the most beautiful thing in any pristine environment is an oil drilling platform.
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Jul 29, 2011 - 11:09am PT
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That "NASA Climate Data Blows Gaping Hole" quote is the headline writer's fiction. People who can understand Spencer's actual paper will realize it does nothing of the kind, but they're not who the headline is aimed at. It's bound to go viral as cut-n-paste bees (like our 3 above) get to work.
If you're not acquainted with Dr. Roy Spencer, his website drroyspencer.com will make a first impression, and offers to sell you his books The Great Global Warming Blunder and Fundanomics: The Free Market Simplified.
Spencer has been trying to blow gaping holes in climate change research since at least 1991, with no success. Early efforts were based on satellite data for which Spencer was responsible, but in which other scientists found a chain of biases that Spencer first denied but then eventually had to concede. More recently he has built arguments in blog posts and his books around extremely simplified models. A recurring theme in his writing is that he has discovered some basic flaw that undermines climate change research, but that thousands of other scientists were not smart or honest enough to see.
For a more technical review, here's a look at Spencer's recent modeling by geochemist Barry Bickmore:
http://bbickmore.wordpress.com/2011/07/26/just-put-the-model-down-roy/
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the Fet
climber
Tu-Tok-A-Nu-La
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Jul 29, 2011 - 11:51am PT
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corniss chopper
climber
breaking the speed of gravity
Jul 28, 2011 - 10:52pm PT
As someone who lives in a civilization who's very existence depends on oil
the most beautiful thing in any pristine environment is an oil drilling platform.
Asinine and selfish. What a way to go through life.
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DrDeeg
Mountain climber
Mammoth Lakes, CA
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Jul 31, 2011 - 12:30pm PT
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The Spencer-Braswell paper is indeed provocative, starting with the title (“On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance”). Lighting up the Blogosphere and even mentioned on Fox News, it has some serious flaws, as Kevin Trenberth and John Fasullo have described in detail at realclimate.org. The journal that accepted the paper (Remote Sensing) is a new open-access journal published in India. Although I like the trend toward open access (am urging the American Geophysical Union to move in that direction), the peer review and acceptance of the paper were perhaps too hasty.
It does, however, provide an opportunity to examine just what the controversy involves. Some of what we know about climate is settled. Earth’s temperature has gone up over the past century, as have atmospheric CO2 concentrations. CO2 absorbs infrared radiation in a spectral region where water vapor does not, hence increasing CO2 causes the atmosphere to absorb more of the infrared radiation that Earth’s surface emits. Isotopic mixtures of atmospheric carbon show that the extra CO2 comes primarily from fossil fuels.
Let me be clear here. Roy Spencer and Richard Lindzen would both agree with the paragraph above.
So what’s the issue? The climate sensitivity: how much of a temperature increase will an increase in CO2 cause? For example, how much warmer will Earth be when CO2 reaches 540 ppm, double the preindustrial level (during the last million years up till ~1800, atmospheric CO2 never went above 270 ppm)? Here the calculation gets more complicated because of feedback; warmer temperatures from the CO2 cause changes in water vapor, snow, clouds, oceans, etc. Some of these cause positive feedback and thereby further warming, whereas negative feedback mechanisms reduce the degree of warming. Therefore the questions for the future (and the interpretation of evidence from the past) involve understanding the feedbacks. Some are undeniably positive; two examples are: (i) increases in temperature cause more evaporation from the oceans and thereby more atmospheric water vapor that in turn absorbs more infrared radiation; (ii) decreasing sea ice reduces Earth’s reflectivity and leads to more absorption of solar radiation.
Clouds are not so simple, with both negative and positive feedbacks. They are brighter than Earth’s surface and therefore reflect more solar radiation, so maybe a warmer world would have more clouds and thereby damp the temperature increase. However, clouds also trap more outgoing infrared radiation so maybe a cloudier atmosphere would lead to warmer temperatures. In fact, we see both, as you probably know from your own experience. Cloudy days are usually cooler than clear days, but cloudy nights are usually warmer than clear nights. Measurements of Earth’s radiation balance from the CERES instrument show spatial and seasonal variability of clouds’ effects, but in general clouds warm more than they cool. Spencer’s belief that the climate sensitivity to CO2 is less than the general climate science consensus is based on a hypothesis that clouds reflectivity of solar radiation will overwhelm their increase absorption of infrared radiation. Lindzen’s Iris Hypothesis is quite different: he believes that a warmer ocean will lead to a clearer tropical atmosphere and thereby allow more infrared radiation to escape to space.
The new Spencer-Braswell paper purports to see less sensitivity to climate from a decade of CERES data (yes, a decade is short, but it is the period over which we have excellent satellite measurements). Two main shortcomings of the paper (see the details from Trenberth & Fasullo at realclimate.org) are:
(1) “. . . no statistical significance of results, error bars or uncertainties are given either in the figures or discussed in the text. Moreover the description of methods of what was done is not sufficient to be able to replicate results.”
(2) “[Spencer’s] model has no realistic ocean, no El Niño, and no hydrological cycle, and it was tuned to give the result it gave. Most of what goes on in the real world of significance that causes the relationship in the paper is ENSO [El Niño/Southern Oscillation]. . . . There is a major uptake of heat by the ocean during the La Niña phase and the heat is moved around and stored in the ocean in the tropical western Pacific, setting the stage for the next El Niño, as which point it is redistributed across the tropical Pacific. . . . Ocean dynamics play a major role in moving heat around, and atmosphere-ocean interaction is a key to the ENSO cycle. None of those processes are included in the Spencer model.”
Bottom line: because of heat storage, particularly in the oceans, you got to be careful when interpreting results from the radiation measurements alone, particularly over a short time period. Also, clouds are a result of weather, not a cause.
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Jul 31, 2011 - 01:21pm PT
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Also, clouds are a result of weather, not a cause.
One might add that Roy Spencer, almost alone among credentialed climate scientists, argues the opposite view: that clouds cause El Nino, for instance, rather than being one of its effects.
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