ComplexClimate

Dr Roy Spencer raises another interesting point.

2011-01-03T18:15:00.002Z

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.

2009-12-07T15:42:00.001Z

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!

2009-11-29T12:23:00.001Z

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

A Challenge to Dr Roy Spencer

2009-11-27T17:20:00.002Z

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

2009-11-13T14:56:00.000Z

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

2009-08-11T19:18:00.000+01:00

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?

2009-05-20T17:00:00.000+01:00

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.

More McDonald meta-Science.

2009-03-09T10:24:00.000Z

I placed a long comment on Bob Grumbine's blog More Grumbine Science, but have had no reaction [I have now :-)]. Bob was arguing that you can tell the difference between science and pseudo-science by the amount of evidence. As an example of pseudo-science he used the idea of a flat earth. I pointed out that the overwhelming evidence I have is that the earth is indeed flat! It is only because of reports I have had, secondary evidence such as the lesson in geography from my junior school teacher in whose utterances I had blind faith, that I now believe otherwise. Thus Bob's technique for distinguishing science from pseudo-cience is far too simplistic.

I have been re-reading State of Fear by Michael Crichton, for a writing course I am taking. The theme of this blockbuster is difficult to summarise. It takes the author twelve pages to state it in two appendices that follow the novel. Suffice it to say that a fellow student who had also read the book had been persuaded that global warming was not something to be worried about.

The technique Crichton uses is to present all the evidence against global warming and none to support it, while claiming that he is giving a balanced summary. Thus his evidence is impeccable, and would pass Bob's test. However, the book is just science fiction. What he has done is to use agnotology, a term introduced to me by John Mashey, another commentator on Bob's Blog. Although the word is new to me the concept is not. I have long been aware that my deepest convictions could be altered by new facts. That was even before Donald Rumsfeld came out with his inimitable lines:

The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.

—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

Agnotology is not about "known unknowns". It is about "unknown unknowns". Michael Crichton gives examples of papers which show the Antarctic was not cooling, but he does not quote the papers which show the Artic ice is thinning. For my fellow student, and perhaps Crichton, this was an unkown unknown. So pseudo-science is not about quantity of evidence. Pseudo-science is about supressing some of the evidence that conflicts with the thesis.

Sir Issac Newton has a lot to answer for. He put physical science on a mathematical footing. Since we know that mathematics is always correct, we infer that science too is always true. But for natural science there are always unknown unknowns. This is especially true of the earth sciences such as geology. Earth sciences are mainly non-mathematical, and new things are being discovered every day - both uknown knowns and unknowns unknowns become known knowns.

Michael Crichton claims in State of Fear:

I am certain there is too much certainty in the world."

Nice joke, but true! Unknown unknows are ignored because no one knows that they are there!

His final claims is:

"Everyone has an agenda. Except me."

Well my agenda is that you should not trust scientists, especially mathematicians. They believe all of science is true, ignoring the unknown unknows. Why even that mathematical pioneer Euclid was wrong. In the real world the sum of the angles in a triangle are not 180 degrees. We do not live on a flat earth. We live on a sphere where the angles of a triangle can sum up to almost 360 degrees!

Climate Crunch

2009-03-08T17:21:00.000Z

“Whether it is hiring people over fifty, or acting on climate change, it won’t happen unless people are pushed.” Aged 51 and, having admitted that he was an unemployed victim of the Credit Crunch, obviously he spoke from his heart. What a pity Dr Vicky Pope, the Met Office's leading adviser on climate change to the government, was not there to hear him.

The previous week in the Guardian Newspaper she was quoted as saying: “News headlines vie for attention and it is easy for scientists to grab this attention by linking climate change to the latest extreme weather event or apocalyptic prediction. But in doing so, the public perception of climate change can be distorted. The reality is that extreme events arise when natural variations in the weather and climate combine with long-term climate change. This message is more difficult to get heard. Scientists and journalists need to find ways to help to make this clear, without the wider audience switching off."

How does she think that the message can be got across by scientists if they do not try to grab the headlines? She admits that if the public are told the boring truth then they will switch off. Isn’t it better that people have half the truth than no truth at all?

Meanwhile in the February issue of the Royal Meteorological Society’s magazine “Weather” Simon Keeling of the University of Birmingham’s Weather Consultancy Services asked “Could we be in danger of raising the public’s understanding of climate change to a level beyond that of the current science?” Presumably by that he does not mean the public are being converted into Einsteins, but rather he too is worried that the dangers of climate change are being exaggerated.

But you don’t get people to buy house insurance by telling them that their home might not burn down, despite the fact that it is most likely true! Nor do you get people to give up flying to Thailand for their annual holiday, nor abandoning their car and using public transport, by downplaying the dangers of climate change. It seems from what these two scientists wrote that they do not see a major danger from global warming.

Perhaps that is because they are unaware of the facts. For instance, Dr Pope continued with a reference to the Arctic sea ice. She wrote "The record-breaking losses in the past couple of years could easily be due to natural fluctuations in the weather.” But these losses are almost certainly due to the thinning of the sea ice which has been happening as a result of climate change. In fact the recent contraction in the area of summer ice is well outside the limits set by natural variability over the last twenty years.

As Julienne Stroeve, from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, told a meeting of the American Geophysical Union: “The sea ice is entering a new state where the ice cover has become so thin that no matter what happens during the summer in terms of temperature or circulation patterns, you're still going to have very low ice conditions."

Chris Field was a coordinating lead author of the fourth assessment report (AR4) produced by the IPCC, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. Field believes that the dire warnings about the oncoming devastation wrought by global warming were not dire enough. The same day as Dr Pope’s comments were published he wrote "We now have data showing that from 2000 to 2007, greenhouse gas emissions increased far more rapidly than we expected." The 2007 AR4 presented at a "very conservative range of climate outcomes" but the next report will "include futures with a lot more warming," Field said. "We now know that, without effective action, climate change is going to be larger and more difficult to deal with than we thought" the Telegraph reported.

So rather than the dangers being exaggerated, they have been down played. The Credit Crunch may well be followed by a Climate Crunch. In this age of gender equality who can rule out that Dr Pope may not be the first female head of the Met Office. If there is a climate catastrophe how will she behave. Will she, unlike the ex-chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland who led the British economy to disaster, accept responsibility and refuse to take her pension?

What Gavin Schmidt should have written

2009-03-01T20:09:00.000Z

This ComplexClimate blog was set up as an antidote to RealClimate. I don't really want to fall out with that crew, so since I see a way of saying he is wrong without causing offence I am going to post what I consider a better response to George Will than Gavin's latest blog on that subject.

George F. Will's Op-Ed for the Washington Post "Dark Green Doomsayers" begins: A corollary of Murphy's Law ("If something can go wrong, it will") is: "Things are worse than they can possibly be." That is false; there is no such corollary. Murphy's Law is itself a corollary of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which can be stated as disorder always increases. It is not a mantra of the pessimist. It is a scientific law which is absolutely true. If something can happen and you wait long enough it will happen.

Most times you don't have to wait very long. Just think of those poor scientists in the 1970s who had discovered that the climate changes suddenly. They had evidence that the last ice age ended in less than 50 years. (Now we think the climate of Greenland jumped 20 F in three years.) Moreover the global climate had been cooling from a peak in 1945, see adjacent figure from the CRU Information Sheet , so they were worried that a new ice age would start soon. They wrote a letter to the President of the USA, but Murphy's Law struck and temperatures rose!

So now what is going to happen? Well if something can go wrong it will, and the Arctic ice looks as though it could disappear suddenly. All I can say is that it will happen this summer, and hope that I fall victim to Murphy's Law and am proved wrong :-(

PS. Wikipedia has a list of corollaries to Murphy's Law. I thought I had better check them in case I was doing George Will a disservice, and "Thing are worse than they could possible be" was there. I shouldn't have worried. The second entry in that list is wrong, so the list is unreliable anyway. Item 2 states "Anything dropped in the bathroom will fall in the toilet (or the sink)." I had an ink jet cartridge today that was leaking, and when I took it to the sink, it fell on the bathroom carpet. So much for Wikipedia!

Real Climate? - I think not.

2009-02-01T17:46:00.000Z

Here's a comment that I posted on RealClimate which has not appeared. Presumable that is because it does not say: "Thank you for giving us hope,...", "Wonderfully hopeful.", "Thank you.", or "David, thanks ..." all which appear in the first 6 published comments. I thought scientists were supposed to be sceptical. The lot replying to RealClimate just seem to be sycophants.

Anyway, RealClimate's latest epistle is entitled “Irreversible Does Not Mean Unstoppable”. It discusses a paper in PNAS by Susan Solomon et al. which "shows that the climate change that takes place due to increases in carbon dioxide concentration is largely irreversible for 1,000 years after emissions stop. " David Archer's spin is that once we stop emitting fossil fuels the increase in temperate will stop. So we need not be terrified by Susan Solomon's paper.

What I wrote was:
************
Well, all I can say is that you have excelled yourselves in this post. It is nothing but denialist rubbish. You state:

"It is not really news scientifically that atmospheric CO2 concentration stays higher than natural for thousands of years after emission of new CO2 to the carbon cycle from fossil fuels. "

So that is all right then. We don’t have to worry unless the levels of greenhouse gases increase. How are you going to prevent that? Stop burning all fossil fuels? That is the only way!

The Arctic sea ice is retreating and the glaciers are melting worldwide. This will reduce global albedo and raise sea level temperatures, so the oceans will release more CO2 even if we stop adding fossil fuels now.

When are you going to face up to the fact that the world is heading for disaster. Unless we take panic measures we are all doomed.

**************

Perhaps I have been too hard on the poor boy who was only trying to counter the real sceptics and deniers who are now claiming it is too late. But all this pussyfooting with public opinion has been going on for too long. The IPCC may have achieved a Nobel Prize but the have singularly fail to get any action from the worlds leading greenhouse gas producers: China, India and the US. In fact since the Kyoto treaty was drawn up the US has increased it emissions of CO2 by an amount equal to the total emissions of the UK.

There is a little hope. Barak Obama seems to be moving towards taking action, but he cannot do all that needs doing without the backing of Congress. Congress only respond to their voters and the voters, Congressmen and Senators must be told how serious the problem is.

Cheers, Alastair.

H-B de Saussure and the Greenhouse Effect

2009-01-10T14:10:00.000Z

The famous 19th Century French mathematician, J B Fourier, is generally credited with discovering the Greenhouse Effect but he was only reporting the work of a great 18th Century Swiss earth scientist: Horace-Benedict de Saussure. The work of both these scientists has been neglected recently because they wrote in French which is no longer the lingua franca of the scientific world. Recently two new translations of Fourier's work have been made available on the web, by William Connolley and Raymond Pierrehumbert [2004b], but de Saussure's ideas never seem to have been translated into English.

I have translated what I believe are the relevant documents, and I am making my working files available on a new web site: http://sites.google.com/site/saussureproject/. This post has been created to receive any comments regarding the accuracy of the transcription and translation of the two documents: Chapter 35 of "Travels in the Alps" and de Saussure's letter to the Journal de Paris.

It is not intended that this post should be used for comments on the significance of de Saussure's work. I am planning an annotated version of the translation where I will give my views. However, I thought some people might be interested in what I have done so far, and I welcome any comment here.

Cheers, Alastair.

References:

Pierrehumbert 2004a: Warming the world. Nature 432 677.
Pierrehumbert 2004b: Translation of M´emoire sur les Temp´eratures du Globe Terrestre et
des Espaces Plan´etaires by J-B J. Fourier. Nature 432 (online supplementary material to
Pierrehumbert, 2004a)

An even more complex answer

2008-09-12T21:33:00.000+01:00

Spencer Weart has commented on my previous post. Since I rather went off topic there, here is a second attempt, hopefully including some new ideas.

Spencer, you wrote: "Apologies to engineers! I only meant to report that people who emailed me and self-identified as engineers (often "experienced" or "retired") were a surprisingly large number of the people who demanded to know why they couldn't find a page on the Web with a simple calculation of greenhouse warming. I don't think they are typical of engineers in general and regret the implied insult. Engineers are great!"

Don't apologise. It gave me an excuse to slag off the mathematicians and the physicists who write the climate models :-)

I wonder if "experienced" is just a euphemism for "retired". I don't like admitting that I am retired, and have even thought of calling myself an "emeritus" student :-) On the other hand, "experienced" could mean that he has learnt from his mistakes. Scientists don't seem to make them, since science is always right!

You continued:
"As you know, I agree with you that computer models are problematic. But I think you deeply undervalue the very important successes they have had in actual prediction. Given that they predict -- not a certainty to be sure -- but a large risk of bad stuff, and that many things outside of climate models point in the same direction, it's shortsighted to dismiss the modelers as fools."

Actually I did not know that you thought that the models were problematical, but even so you are not facing up to the fact that they do not reproduce abrupt climate change. We know that it happens, so the models do not reflect reality. They can reproduce the climate over last 10,000 years, but not the 100 before that when the glacial Younger Dryas switched into the Holocene interglacial. Should I give the models credit for the 10,000 that they can get right, or fail them for the 100 they get wrong in the past and the 100 they are about to get wrong in the future?

I do not consider the modellers to be fools. Most have PhD’s in maths or science. I struggled to get an ordinary degree in engineering. But it is their success which has been their undoing. They are not used to making mistakes, so when they do then they cannot believe it. In engineering, the criteria is whether a design works. In science the criteria is whether the theory explains the outcome. In other words, engineers work using heuristics, rules of thumb, or simple models. That is why they are surprised there is not a simple model for the greenhouse effect.

Scientists build on the success of their predessors. As Newton said “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” When their model does not work, then they just build on a bit more. No wonder there is not a simple model now!

But why did their simple model not ework? The reason is that a mistake was made by a giant of astrophysics Robert Emden. In 1913 he applied the equations for internal solar radiation derived by his brother in law, another giant of astrophysics Karl Schwarzschild, to the earth’s atmosphere. The radiation scheme is based on Schwarzschild's equation. However, we have a planetary atmosphere not a stellar one!

The climate modellers have have been dazzled by the prestige of the astrophyicists such as Eddington, Einstein, Milne and Chandrasekar. But these giants were considering high temperature electronic radiation from atomic plasma at phenomenal pressures, not vibrationsl radiation from molecules at room temperatures and pressures or lower. No-one now considers the fundamentals of atmospheric radiation. They consider that those problems were solved in the dim and distant past.

Spencer, it is not, as you suggests, that I think the models are problematical. It is that they have a fundamental flaw in the way they handle greenhouse gases. Otherwise they are fine. I was informed personally by a professor that if I could see the way the model outputs reproduce the global climate then I would find it difficult to distinguish that form satellite imagery. True? Only an hour later a speaker informed us that the models produce a double ITCZ. It would have been too embarrassing and counter productive to have confronted the professor with the fact that satellites do not show two bands of clouds circling the equator.

If the current model was correct, then it would not produce a double ITCZ, nor would the predictions of warming in the upper troposphere be found to be false by the radiosonde measurement. Philipona would not be reporting that it is boundary layer water vapour that is melting the Alpine glaciers, and there would not have been the gross under estimation of the speed of the melting of the Arctic sea ice. The problem with handling clouds would have been solved, and abrupt climate change explained.

Dr Iain Stewart signed off from episode 1 of his TV program “Earth: the climate wars” saying that in the next episode he would describe how the sceptics won. They have won. They have prevented any action being taken by claiming the models are wrong. The scientists have lost by arguing against them, instead of fixing their models! If they had, then they would have found that the greenhouse effect is more effective than currently believed, and they would have been able to predict the next abrupt climate change.

You concluded:
"Clearly I'm not going to change your mind on this, however."

Dale Carnegie wrote in "How to win friends and influence people" that you can never win an argument. Even if your opponent concedes he will still believe he is correct. We cannot bear to lose face. So no doubt you mind, like mine, has not been changed either, but hopefully I have given you some food for thought :-)

Cheers, Alastair.

A Complex Answer

2008-09-11T04:39:00.000+01:00

This blog is meant to be an antidote to the RealClimate blog, but it seems rather churlish of me to attack that blog for the same reason as that given by George Mallory when asked 'Why climb Everest?'. He replied "Because it is there". So, when Spencer R. Weart guest posts "Simple Question, Simple Answer… Not" which is a thinnly veiled attack on we engineers (I have a BSc in Electrical Engineering), how can I refuse to respond :-)

Spencer claims that we engineers want a simple answer to global warming, but in truth what we want is an answer that works. What the climate modelers fail to see is that a computer model is not a valid proof that a theory is correct. For two millenia Aristotle's ideas were held sacrosanct until Galileo used experiments to show them wrong. It was this empirical breakthrough that led to the scientific revolution. Now Syukuro Manabe reputation in climate models is held in the same regard as was Aristole in natural science. When Christy and Spencer showed that his model is wrong, they like Galileo became scientific outcasts.

The problem with the Manabe-Wetherald system is not that it is too complex for engineers to follow, but that it is too simple to match the complex earth system. It is based on the idea that as the Earth's surface warms and more infra-red radiation is emitted, then the proportion of this radiation escaping to space will match the incoming solar radiation. Plausible, but wrong!

The outgoing radiation to space, in the greenhouse bands, is emitted by the atmosphere not the surface. This is obviously true for ozone, but is also true for carbon dioxide. The surface of the atmosphere that radiates to space is isolated from the surface by a thick layer of the atmosphere in local thermodynamic equilibrium. If you increase the CO2 concentration you do close the IR window but that effect is trivial, because the main CO2 band around 667 cm-1 is already saturated.

The balance between incoming solar radiation (ISR) and outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) which must exist at the top of the atmosphere only, is not maintained by variations of OLR, but by changes to the ISR. On Earth the ISR, which depends on the plantary albedo, is mainly controlled by water clouds. When the surface temperature rises more of it is vapourised and the cloud cover becomes thicker. On Venus the same effct happens, but there it is surphur that is vaporised to form the thick SO2 clouds of Venus. The high surface temperature of Venus can be explained by its need to reach the melting point of sulphur. The Martian temperature is limited by the formation of dust clouds.

On Earth (and Mars) there is an additional factor affecting albedo - surface ice. In contrast to clouds, the albedo from ice decreases as surface temperature rises. This means that the ice cover can alter abruptly due to the ice albedo affect. It is changes in ice cover, not ocean currents, that causes abrupt climate change, especially sea ice which is thin and even (Gildor and Tziperaman, 2003.)

Why then does Manabe and Wetherald's model work? They added convection to their model by setting the maximum lapse rate to 6.5 K/km. But convection is inevitable in an atmosphere heated at its base by solar radiation. Thus by limiting the lapse rate they were in fact setting it to 6.5 K/km. Since this is the observed mean lapse rate, then it was inevitable that their model matched reality.

It is also claimed that the current models get the OLR spectrum correct. If you investigate this using the model produced by David Archer of RealClimate, you will find a field named "Locality". This is where you select the lapse rate profile that will give you the appropriate OLR spectrum. Real Climate??? It is more like smoke and mirrors!

Why ComplexClimate?

2008-08-21T21:57:00.000+01:00

I see this blog as an antidote to the RealClimate blog and to all the climate scientists who believe that they have a monopoly on the truth. The climate scientists, and especially the climate modellers, have all been trained as mathematicians or physicists, not ignoble professions, but not suited to the fractal nature of earth science. Ironically, my objections to their involement are well described in the preface to the 1905 book "Science and Hypothesis", by the great French mathematician, physicist and philosopher, Henri Poincaré. He wrote:

To the superficial observer scientific truth is unassailable, the logic of science is infallible; and if scientific men sometimes make mistakes, it is because they have not understood the rules of the game. Mathematical truths are derived from a few self-evident propositions, by a chain of flawless reasonings; they are imposed not only on us, but on Nature itself. By them the Creator is fettered, as it were, and His choice is limited to a relatively small number of solutions. A few experiments, therefore, will be sufficient to enable us to determine what choice He has made. From each experiment a number of consequences will follow by a series of mathematical deductions, and in this way each of them will reveal to us a corner of the universe. This, to the minds of most people, and to students who are getting their first ideas of physics, is the origin of certainty in science. This is what they take to be the rôle of experiment and mathematics. And thus, too, it was understood a hundred years ago by many men of science who dreamed of constructing the world with the aid of the smallest possible amount of material borrowed from experiment.

The problem is that the current climate scientists, having been educated in mathematics and physics, believe that their science is unassailable. Their God does not play dice, and that chaos theory is a new type of algebra, not the basis of an earth system which is fractal. It is as if they lived in a world where they see only real numbers, yet if they only applied a little imagination then they would be able to see the whole realm of complex numbers. Thus my choice of ComplexClimate to contrast with RealClimate. Is that too contrived? Anyway ComplexClimate it is.

By writing that I am opposed to the mainstream scientists it may be imagined that I am a sceptic, or even a denier. That is far from the truth. I, like the sceptics, believe the models are wrong, but unlike the sceptics I believe, with evidence, that the models are underestimating the dangers not overestimating them. The retreat of the Arctic sea ice is the best example of where models are badly out. Other cases, such as the double ITCZ (Intertropical convergence zone), are less well known because no scientist publishes a paper saying my model does not work. Which journal would publish it anyway?

Poincaré continued:

"But upon more mature reflection the position held by hypothesis was seen [to be important]; it was recognised that it is as necessary to the experimenter as it is to the mathematician. And then the doubt arose if all these constructions are built on solid foundations. The conclusion was drawn that a breath would bring them to the ground. This sceptical attitude does not escape the charge of superficiality. To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.

So if I try to follow a route between the sceptics who doubt everything, and the scientists who believe everything, at least I have Poincaré's backing!

Cheers, Alastair.