Dr Roy Spencer raises another interesting point.

I have to admit that I find Dr Roy Spencer blog more interesting than RealClimate.

I have tried a couple of times to post comments there but they did not appear. Recently he has been involved in a debate with Andrew Dessler regarding as to whether the feedback from clouds is positive or negative. He has a post with a title taken from a 2005 paper "Why Most Published Research Findings are False". Since I had already decided that both Roy and Andy were wrong, this gave me a tag to hang my thoughts on.  In case my post did not appear on Roy's blog I took a copy and am posting it here. So far it is there, so I await any reaction, but here is what I wrote.
 
Dear Roy,

If it is true that most published research findings are false, then it could be argued that most of the two recent papers published by yourself and Andy Dessler are false, viz. both!

It seems obvious to me that cloud feedback on solar forcing is negative, and solar forcing is effectively the only source of heat to the climate. Thus Andy is wrong.

However, your idea, that because clouds produce a negative feedback, we need not worry about the effects of increased CO2, is equally fallacious. It is well known that in the geological past the climate has been much warmer than it is today. How can this be possible if clouds produce a negative feedback. Would they not have prevented temperatures rising in the past just as they do today?

Above you state that global warming is "a one-of-a-kind event", but we know that the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum was caused by a sudden increase in greenhouse gases. Why did the negative feedback from clouds not prevent temperatures from soaring then?

Clouds are not the only phenomenon that affect planetary albedo. Ice coverage is another. When the Arctic sea ice disappears, melted by rising levels of carbon dioxide, then the global temperatures will rise until the cloud cover has increased to compensate for the loss of albedo caused by the melted ice sheets. The radiation at the top of the atmosphere must balance.

Most research findings on global warming are based on the concept that the greenhouse acts by re-emitting radiation back to the surface, but that is false. Carbon dioxide absorbs the heat radiated by the surface, and warms it. Enough CO2, then you have enough heat to melt the surface ice. That is how the greenhouse effect of climate change operates!

Cheers, Alastair.

Climategate or Cancergate? That is the question.

Dr Roy Spencer repeats the question asked my by his wife What if Climate Gate was Cancergate?  She/he thinks that "Scientists behaving badly while the health of people was at stake would not be defended by anyone."

There are two errors here.  No one is defending the perpetrators of Climategate, however they do deserve to be considered innocent until proved guilty.  Of course Mrs Spencer was responding to Senator Barbara Boxer who had said that the theft of the e-mails from a computer at the Climatic Research Unit in the UK should lead to prosecution of the hacker who did it. That is hardly defending the scientist, who remains suspended. Moreover, the hackers seems to have been the Russian secret service who specialise in this type of work.  Russia not only wants no restriction on it taking advantage of its great oil wealth, but also global warming could benefit Siberian agriculture. It is an ill wind that blows nobody any good. Meanwhile, here in the UK we have an autistic man waiting in jail for extradition to the US for hacking into computers there. He was searching for evidence on UFO's! He may end up in prison for 20 years. He too thought he was on a moral crusade.

The second error comes from assuming that the doctor fudging the data would be putting people's health at stake. If he was exaggerating or embroidering the dangers of smoking, wouldn't that have been a good thing? Of course people who have smoked for over 50 years and are feel perfectly healthy will see such an act as an infingement of their liberty.  And those who are consuming two and a half times the sustainable resources of the earth, and seen no downside, will also feel aggrieved at the idea that they should stop.

Unless we do stop burning fossil fuels the Greenland and the west Antarctic ice sheets will disappear. Both have alread started melting, and the only way to stop that is not just stabilise  but to reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.   The alternative is a sea level rise of over 10 m (30 feet), far higher than is practicable to hold back with dykes. Moreover, as temperatures rise, wild fires, droughts, floods, hurricanes, and famines will all increase.  We are not talking here of saving a few million people from lung cancer. We are talking about saving billions from death through thirst, starvation and wars!

Dr Roy Spencer says "I’m willing to admit that I could be wrong about all my views on manmade global warming." Is he willing to admit he might be wrong and the disasters I have described might come to pass? If so, doesn't he think that replacing bad proxy data with the real values may have been for the good of mankind?

My Future!

I found this on Eduardo Zorita's list of publications. It sums up How I feel.

A Challenge to Dr Roy Spencer

In 2001, I attended a Symposium in Dublin's fair city where we had a talk from Professor Mike Baillie entitled "Irish dendrochronology and weird stuff." He is an expert on tree rings (dendrochronology), and at the end of his talk he mentioned that most recent tree rings then were not showing signs of global warming. He implied that this news would appear in the literature soon. Eight years later I am still waiting, but it seems that it was never published because it would have given ammunition to the climate sceptics. Instead, that part of the temperature graph was replaced with instrumental readings. Yes, I too am on about the CRU Hack!

At around the same time I recall being told by another emminent professor that it was about to be announced that the melting of the Greenland ice sheet had passed the point of no return. That item appears to have been censored too. No doubt on the grounds that it would have enabled the sceptics to accuse the scientists of alarmism. Last month it was finally but sheepishly admitted that "Warming could push Greenland ice sheet beyond ‘tipping points’
It seems that the scientific method differs in practice from the theory.

Of course RealClimate put up a stout defence of the Hack, and I was convinced. But I happened to read Dr Roy Spencer's blog, and the light dawned. (Roy is one member of the notorious double act of Christie and Spencer, who pointed out that the satellites were registering temperatures in the upper troposphere which are cooler than those predicted by the models.) He wrote that "At a minimum, some of these e-mails reveal an undercurrent of elitism that many of us have always claimed existed in the IPCC. These scientists look upon us skeptics with scorn."

It is not just the skeptics that they look at with scorn. It is everyone who is not a member of that exclusive club of the IPCC and its sychophants. They regularly abuse the press for incompetance, without realising that it is the reporters who know how to get their articles past the editors, who in turn are only interested in providing their readers with news they will want to read.

But, from my point of view, the real problem is that it is impossible for me to get my ideas even considered. I have finally worked out exactly where the models are wrong, but what hope have I of getting anything published? What reputable journal editor would put my ideas out for review, and if he did then it would be to modellers whose work I am criticising. Even my professor did that :-(

Dr Spencer continued "Skepticism really is at the core of scientific progress. I’m willing to admit that I could be wrong about all my views on manmade global warming. Can the IPCC scientists admit the same thing?" I am pretty sure the answer to that question is "No!", but would Dr Spencer really be willing to be convinced that global warming is a major threat to humanity if I presented him with the evidence?

Clouds in a Glass of Iced Beer

Bob Grumbine's post Experimental Reading made me look out my copy of "CLOUDS in a GLASS of BEER" by Craig F. Bohren. The book is as entertaining as its title suggests, consisting of a series of articles describing "Simple Experiments in Atmospheric Physics".

I bought my copy before I took a serious interest in earth science. When I first realised that AGW was a real threat, that book was the only one of which I knew where a serious scientist had expressed doubts about those dangers. Rereading it now, I see that what he wrote may explain why my sea ice prediction this year went so wrong.

He wrote that the dispute over global warming was between those who thought that feedbacks played a major role (e.g. Jim Hansen) and those who did not (e.g. Dick Lindzen.) To explain feedbacks he uses as an example a toy box that was popular in the early 1980's. He wrote

"The best example of feedback that I have ever seen was a black box on the side of which was a toggle switch and a sign: DO NOT TURN ON. Perhaps you could resist the temptation, but I couldn't. The result was, after some grinding and whirring from inside the box, that the lid opened, a hand emerged, turned off the switch, and then withdrew back into the box. Turning on the switch eventually led to a feedback which eventually turned it off. And so it is also with the atmosphere. One possibility, for example, might be that warming the oceans will result in more water vapour in the atmosphere and, as a consequence, more clouds. But this might lead to more solar radiation scattered to space, hence lower temperatures."

As an electrical engineer, I did not feel that this was a good example of feedback. There are two types of feedback - positive and negative. This box is a horrible example of both. The small mechanical operation of a switch is amplified to become a lid opening and the hand emerging, so showing positive feedback. But the switch being operated and the system returning back to its original state is a negative feedback. The two types of feedback have been combined in an unholy alliance.

I also found his atmospheric example flawed. If warming the oceans causes more clouds, and clouds cause cooling, then when that cooling occurred the clouds would disappear and the ocean surface would warm again. Therefore, if more atmospheric CO2 causes the sea surface to warm, and more clouds to form, then we cannot have a net cooling otherwise there would be less clouds than before and the planet would warm again.

However what is possible is that one summer we have the oceans warmed by clear skies, and the following summer these warm seas create more clouds cooling the oceans. The result would be a biennial oscillation in sea surface temperatures. Of course the cycle could take longer than two years, and then that describes ENSO, the El Nino Southern Oscillation. During an El Nino the Pacific Ocean is covered in cloud and the water which has accumulated in the Warm Pool loses its heat to the atmosphere.

So this is where I went wrong with My Arctic sea ice prediction. I was arguing that the positive feedback from ice-albedo effect must drive on the continuous reduction in the size of the sea ice extent. However, an unknown and invisible hand has emerged and switched off the melting process. In fact it is probably the one that Craig Bohren mentioned - clouds. The thinner ice in the Arctic is forming more leads and so releasing more water vapour into the air. This is forming clouds which is preventing the sun from having its full effect on the ice, so inhibiting the ice-albedo effect. But as I explained, this mechanism cannot reverse the sea ice retreat, only slow it.

If we finally emerge from the current solar minimum, will next year see another major sea ice retreat?

My Weird Pet Aversion

This blog is supposed to be an antidote to the RealClimate blog. I have been too busy getting on with real science to bother posting here, but PETM Weirdness is related to my work so I thought I would attack them here rather than there.

Gavin's post is about a press release regarding the latest paper on the Methane 'Belch' which caused the minor extinction that marked the change from Paleocene to Eocene epochs 55 million years ago. Global temperatures during the Paleocene were similar to the the hot house world of the Cretaceous when the dinosaurs roamed the world, but the methane belch raised the temperatures even higher. We know the cause was methane because of the change in the fraction of carbon 13 that is recorded in fossils from that time. The problem is that the greenhouse effect of the estimated amount of methane, or of the carbon dioxide if the methane burned, does not account for the large rise in temperature. Obviously the models are wrong, and that is what the press release said and the title of the paper implied: Carbon dioxide forcing alone insufficient to explain Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum warming.

Gavin, as a climate modeller, plays down that issue despite the quotation in the press release from one of the authors which reads:

"In a nutshell, theoretical models cannot explain what we observe in the geological record," said oceanographer Gerald Dickens, a co-author of the study and professor of Earth science at Rice University. "There appears to be something fundamentally wrong with the way temperature and carbon are linked in climate models."

Instead, he mentions the point that this implies warming will be worse rather than less as the deniers are claiming. Then he rambles off contradicting what he has just said. He argues that the back of an envelope calculations done twenty years ago are still accurate, citing Annan and Hargreave's paper as proof. But that paper, like the estimate it justifies is merely calculates an average. It is meaningless for describing the behaviour of a non-linear system.

Gavin admits that the polar regions will warm more than the tropics, so the climate sensitivity in one region is different from that in another. The Zeebe et al paper is saying that the climate sensitivity during the Paleo-Eocene transitiorn was different from now. And the abrupt changes before and after the Younger Dryas don't fit with today'st climate sensitivity either. So not only does climate sensitivity vary geographically, it varies temporally too.

Changing it name from Charney Sensitivity to Earth System Sensitivity does not solve the problem. Sensitivity is just as chaotic as the surface temperature. Or if there is a carbon dioxide sensitivity, a fixed relationship between carbon dioxide concentration and its forcing, then it is clear we have not found it yet. That means the models are not correct - they are wrong!

As I see it, the danger is that by insisting that it is only weather that is chaotic, and that climate is linear, the potential for abrupt climate change is being ignored. The scientific establishment, excluding Hansen, Lovelock and Broecker, are too conservative to accept that catastrophe is around the corner. RealClimate is not fighting skepticism, it is breeding complacency.

Error in OLR Model?

My abstract for a poster at the Royal Meteorological Society's Conference has been accepted, but its formatting was lost before it was posted on the conference web site. Here it is laid out more neatly:

The standard model for outgoing long-wave radiation (OLR) views the atmosphere as a series of parallel slabs. It is assumed that each slab is in a state of local thermodynamic equilibrium (LTE) where the temperature of the slab can be used to determine its emission using Planck’s function. This leads to Schwarzschild’s equation:

dI = - Ikρ dz + B(T)kρ dz .............................. Equ. 1

where I is the intensity, k is the absorption coefficient, ρ is the density, z is the vertical coordinate and B(T) is Planck’s blackbody function at the temperature T of the slab.

However, the infra-red emissions from greenhouse gases have wavelengths of 20 microns and less, which requires a vibrational temperature of 719 K and more. Few molecules attain that temperature in the Earth’s atmosphere, and so the IR emissions of greenhouse gases are "frozen out". The value of T used in Equ. 1 should be the vibrational temperature and not the kinetic (or translational) temperature as is used at present.

This error has profound consequences, because it means that the outgoing long-wave radiation (OLR) in the greenhouse gas bands is completely absorbed in the lower 30 m of the atmosphere. Therefore the surface temperature has little effect on the OLR which is in fact emitted by the greenhouse gases in the upper atmosphere. Thus radiation balance is mainly achieved by the incoming short-wave radiation (ISR) being altered by cloud cover, as originally proposed by G. C. Simpson.

This also explains why weather models fail to calculate the correct height for the cloud base, and why climate models are unable to exhibit the runaway greenhouse effect of water vapour which happens during abrupt climate change.