Need proof of Global Warming

Great Debates
361

You have come up with lots of speculative hypotheses and that is fine. But, now you still have the hard work ahead of you, which is to flesh them out, do some real calculations, and publish them in the peer-reviewed journal. In the meantime, I don’t think it is realistic for you to expect the scientific community to abandon their theories just because you can throw out some speculative hypotheses.

And, by the way, I am pretty confused about the way you think about these. For example, I don’t understand on a basic level why you think that certain perturbations to the system like continent location and some things that might affect cloud formation or wind speed (that you don’t really flesh out) would have an effect on the temperatures but changes in GHG concentrations won’t.

Okay, here at least you come up with an argument for my last complaint above, but alas you fail quite badly. And, to be honest, I think the fact that you still cling to this view shows how deeply ingrained your biases are. What you are repeating here is the argument that you used at Briggs website to claim why the models predict amplification of temperature trends in the tropical atmosphere. This is an extremely simplistic picture that you have regarding how the GHGs work. I have some doubts about whether you have even done the radiation balance correctly, but at any rate, you have ignored all other mechanisms of heat transfer in the atmosphere. It is strange that you cling to this simplistic picture while at the same time attacking the moist adiabatic lapse rate picture by noting the ways in which it is a simplification.

And, in fact the moist adiabatic lapse rate picture has strong advantages over your picture. One is that the models clearly predict that the amplification occurs for fluctuations on a range of timescales, which implies that in the models this amplification is not due to the nature of what is causing the warming. And, actually runs of the models with greenhouse gas forcing and solar forcing show basically the same amplification in both cases (see the first figure here). (The one notable difference is the stratosphere, where the models predict cooling for the GHGs case and warming for the solar case…and indeed the observational evidence is that there is cooling occurring although part of this is admittedly due to ozone depletion.)

The second advantage is that the moist adiabatic lapse rate picture actually has strong experimental support, as is shown in the Santer et al. paper, by looking at fluctuations on the monthly to yearly timescale!

So, you have hinged your entire argument on observational data that is known to have severe problems…and, which doesn’t entirely support the lack of amplification anyway. You basically have to discount the RSS satellite analysis and the latest attempts to correct the balloon data [RAOBCORE1.4] and go back to an earlier version RAOBCORE1.2. Sure, Douglass et al. have come up with some arguments why they don’t believe the latest RAOBCORE version and Spencer and Christy have their reasons for doubting the RSS analysis, but it is kind of hairy when your claim of inconsistency with observational data depends on carefully choosing which data sets you look at.

And, furthermore, your argument is wrong anyway, since you have wrongly attributed the tropical amplification claim to a claim specific to the greenhouse gas mechanism of warming when, in fact, the model predictions, backed by the experimental observations on monthly to yearly timescales clearly demonstrate that it is not!

And, with all these problems with your own analysis, you seriously expect us to believe that you are right and almost the entire climate science community is wrong!?! So, even if the discrepancy between the models and observational data on decadal timescales is really due to problems with the models, it would not have anything to say in regards to the mechanism causing the warming.

362

Oh, and regarding the issues of the discrepancy between model and experiment regarding tropical amplification of the temperature trends: I forgot to mention the whole issue of whether the differences are statistically-significant anyway. I have to say that it was pretty painful to read this thread over at ClimateAudit, where beaker was desperately trying to explain things to you folks, who were basically just ignoring his correct posts and persisting in your mistakes.

Having said that, I will compliment you on your idea of making a plot where you normalized the temperature trends at the surface. A major point of the Santer et al. paper is precisely that the model predictions of the amplification when you normalize in this way are more robust across the different models than the predictions of the absolute trend…and thus I was surprised that Douglass et al. even did things in the way that they did. The irony is that Douglass et al. used what is clearly an incorrect argument (using the standard error instead of standard deviation) in order to make the case for disagreement between the models and observations when they may have been able to arrive correctly at that conclusion if they had only done what you did and then actually done the analysis correctly!

There are still problems, however: namely, that they have already incorrectly averaged over multiple runs of the same model and that they have cherryshown results using only RAOBCORE1.2 and not the more recent version RAOBCORE1.4. And, there are other issues like the fact that the different analyses of the balloon data are not really independent and hence may all suffer from the same systematic errors. But, at least, if Douglass et al. had proceeded in this way, they may have been able to make some sort of argument for a statistically-significant difference between models and observational data without having to make elementary statistical errors in order to get that result.

I am willing to believe that statistically-significant errors do exist between the models and at least some of the data sets…but I think, as Santer et al. do, that these will most likely be resolved in favor of the models and that, at any rate, the implications of this discrepancy for whether GHGs are causing the warming is essentially nil. (The only implication if in fact the models are wrong on this is that there is something that the models are handling wrong in the tropical atmosphere on long timescales…but whether that means that the climate sensitivity is larger or smaller or about the same as the models project is still anybody’s guess.)

363

For those wondering what the word “cherryshown” means, that should be “shown”. (I admit that I originally had “cherrypicked” but changed it because there is some disagreement regarding which versions Douglass et al. had access to at the time that they wrote the paper…They claim that they were only sent versions 1.2 and 1.3 and that they inadvertently left out their argument for why they chose to use 1.2 instead of 1.3, sending it to the journal as an addendum later. Gavin claims to have heard [presumably from the RAOBCORE authors but this is unclear] that they had also been sent version 1.4. Anyway, I wanted to get rid of any possible implication that Douglass et al. proceeded in a dishonest manner and stick just with the facts.)

364

Could you please remind me exactly how many other fields of science you have worked in and thus can actually make the comparison to? What I have found is that you have a very naive view of science in other fields. Almost all of the complaints I have heard you level against climate science could be made in the fields of physics and applied physics that I am knowledgeable about. In fact, your views on things like what constitutes replication can best be categorized as “quaint”.

In the other fields that I have worked in, none of the papers are definitive…they all have problems and limitations and many are in fact riddled with more serious errors. However, this doesn’t mean that the scientific conclusions reached in the fields are all garbage. Science advances despite the imperfections, and even downright low quality, of many of the papers.

Welcome to the real world, my friend.

365

You haven’t explained what causes the changes in wind, humidity, and clouds that you are proposing and how these changes actually work to produce the effects that you claim they do. Just claiming that these changes have miraculously happened and that they produced the desired effects is worse than a speculative hypothesis; it is really no hypothesis at all.

As for the rest of your post, you have accused me of not doing the hard spade work and yet it seems to be you who is not willing to do it. You are the one challenging the prevailing theory; I gave you a reference into the literature, which is only a very short piece, and all that I get from you is whining about how they stated certain things without providing more explanation. Well, of course they do…This is just reviewing a larger array of work. What you have to do is go and read all the citations therein and read the citations in these pieces…and read the other papers that cite these pieces. This is how serious scientists trying to understand the prevailing theory and critically evaluate it or challenge it actually proceed.

Look, when you challenge a prevailing established theory of science, you can’t just go in and demand that everyone spoon-feed all the information and defend the theory to you or what have you. It is the established theory because it has convinced the scientific community in that field. It is up to you to do the hard work of getting up to speed, understanding the virtues and limitations of the theory and then demonstrating how you believe your hypothesis provides a more compelling explanation of the data. The sooner that you understand that, the faster you will move from being essentially completely irrelevant in the scientific discourse on the subject to actually being relevant.

My best to you.

366

The more I think about this argument, the more incredible it seems to me that the same person who is constantly telling people how the atmosphere is so complicated, and even simple basic physical arguments have to be questioned, is seriously continuing to advance this argument…particularly in light of the fact that all the evidence from the models and the experimental data show that this is in fact not the mechanism for tropical amplification. It is frankly just bizarre!

Is it really that almost no argument is too simplistic if it argues for your point-of-view, no matter how much it flies in the face of the facts…and almost no simple argument, no matter how well-supported, is believed by you if it argues against your point-of-view?

The argument for the greenhouse effect is more subtle than just that you put more GHGs in, they absorb more infrared radiation, because (as has been pointed out by skeptics), the atmosphere already has more than enough GHGs present to absorb most of the infrared radiation. However, as you go up in the atmosphere and the air gets thinner, the amount of GHGs is less. And so, what ends up mattering at the end of the day is the effective level in the troposphere from which the earth radiates rises as more GHGs are put into the atmosphere and, since the temperature is a decreasing function of the height in the troposphere, and since the amount of power radiated depends on the 4th power of the temperature, the effective radiative temperature is lower and the earth radiates less. This puts the earth out of radiative balance, a balance that is restored by absorbing more energy until such point as the temperature of the atmosphere warms so that the power being radiated once again equals the power that we are receiving from the sun.

Note that the picture is necessarily a global one, not a local one. And, to understand how the temperature rises will be distributed within the atmosphere, it is necessary to understand how the atmosphere adjusts to such a global change in the radiation budget. It is bizarre to think that how this adjustment occurs on the timescale of years in a complex interacting atmosphere is going to be governed by simplistic ideas about the instantaneous radiation exchange.

It is more likely that the final structure of the temperature change will be governed by the basic physics that underlies the interactions in the atmosphere, such as the moist adiabatic lapse rate. And, indeed, this is what the models predict and this is what the experimental data on temperature fluctuations on timescales of months to year (where the data is most reliable) confirms.

367

Personally, I am wondering if you will ever quote and cite the “hard calculations” you have been trumpeting.

368

jshore, which part of “not my job” don’t you understand?

I am not challenging “a prevailing established theory of science”, that’s horseshit. Have you forgotten that we are talking about the Schrag study, in fact an uncited, speculative claim in that study? Here it is again, since you seem to not remember:

Note that he wants to prove his claim by exclusion. To do this, he has to show:

  1. We know all of the possible causes of sea surface cooling over the last million years.

  2. We have ruled out all but one of them.

  3. Therefore, the one that remains must be the cause.

And as I have said before, that’s his job, not mine, and I’m glad it is. I don’t see how he can demonstrate either 1) or 2) with any degree of certainty. In the event, he does not show either of those things, he does not cite either of them, nor, as near as I can tell, do the citations he mentions in other contexts do either of those things.

Now, if you know different, if there is somewhere in all of the stuff he cited (including the famous red flag of citing the entire IPCC report) a reference that establishes 1) and 2) above … bring it on. I’ve looked. I haven’t found it.

Until then, I’ll continue to assume that he is simply doing the famous waving of the hands … speaking of which, you were going to show us the “hard calculations” you spoke of above …

w.

369

jshore, you are correct, what I stated was the simplified version. It was not the major point of my post. It is true, I made no attempt to discuss the difference between instantaneous forcing F(i), and equilibrium forcing F(e). It is also true, as you say, that

At the end of the day, however, the story is the same. The more complex explanation comes to the same conclusion. In either exposition, the physical mechanism warming up the surface until it reaches the new radiation equilibrium is increased downwelling IR from the atmosphere. And in either exposition, to do that, the troposphere has to warm faster than the surface.

Now consider what happens in the tropics. The moisture evaporates at the surface, gets sucked into a thunderstorm. Inside the thunderstorm, isolated from the middle troposphere, the moisture gets wrung out, the dry air is warmed and continues upwards, rising and cooling, until it is dumped out at the top.

From there, the cool, dry air (containing some amount of ice crystals) descends to start the cycle again.

Now, the hotter it gets, the harder this cycle runs. When this cycle fully develops, what happens to the temperature of the middle troposphere?

Well, it gets populated with dry, descending cool air with some ice crystals from above … in other words, it does not warm, it cools.

So what we end up with is surface heating, combined with mid-tropospheric cooling.

So, we can conclude that while the GHG driven theory of warming requires that the tropical middle troposphere warm more than the surface, tropical heating accompanied by thunderstorms does not. The storms route the heat around the middle troposphere, and replace tropospheric air with descending dry, iced, cool air.

So yes, you are right … nothing is simple.

w

370

Since I apparently have to do all the legwork for you guys, here, and here are a couple of links to abstracts of calculations of the last glacial maximum.

371

intention: Thanks for the post. I have to admit though that having read it a few times now, I am confused about what you are saying. Do you now admit that the prediction that there is amplification of temperature fluctuations / trends as you go up in the troposphere in the tropics is not a prediction specific to GHGs as the mechanism causing the warming, but rather a more general consequence of moist adiabatic lapse theory and hence that your statement at the Briggs site is wrong:

372

You gotta be kidding. It’s my responsibility to search for scholarship to back up the claims you make?

Do you honestly believe that?

Look, you claimed that there were “hard calculations” which that looked at climate sensitivity over time scales of 50 to 100 years? That there are “hard calculations” which would show that there are NOT strong negative feedbacks at work over time scales of 50 to 100 years.

I don’t see any “hard calculations” on the pages you link to. I don’t see anything about looking at climate sensitivity over time scales of 50 to 100 years. I don’t see any reference to such things either.

Please QUOTE the “hard calculations” you have been trumpeting.

Alternatively, if you are unable to back up your claim, why not just admit it?

373

I provided you with a link that discussed the hard calculations that are done to understand past climatic events. It was a short review article that did not itself actually contain the calculations…it only discussed what their results were…but I thought that maybe you would be capable of following the citations in that article to find them. However, apparently you want to be spoon-fed everything.

Actually, you seem to be changing my claim to make it more to your liking. What I noted is that those who have actually done the hard calculations to model past climatic events, and particularly ones that are in the recent enough past that we have the best data on them and that happened on timescales that are not too many orders of magnitude removed from the timescales of interest to us (so we don’t get confounded by negative feedbacks in the carbon cycle that may exist on geological timescales), have found that the climate sensitivity implied agrees with that predicted by the models or, in some cases, implies a sensitivity higher than the models predict.

Look, I don’t expect to convince you of anything. You are absolutely, positively unconvinceable. That is obvious. I am happy just to show the lurkers how foolish most of the things that you say on this subject are. Here is what the second abstract says:

374

That’s right, I want to be spoonfed. i.e. I want you to actually quote the “hard calculations” you have been trumpeting, rather than just wave your hands.

Nonsense. Unlike you, I am willing to actually look at underlying assumptions and consider them critically. As opposed to simply accepting uncritically anything that agrees with my agenda.

Have you seen me claim that “hard calculations” show that climate sensitivity to CO2 is low? Of course not. And if I did make such a claim, I would either back it up or concede.

Foolish, as in your “best estimate” of the cost of CO2 mitigation?

375

Just to add to this, I would point out that this discussion thread is not a classroom; you are not the teacher; and I am not your student.

Once in a while, it’s legitimate for a teacher to leave some questions open in hopes that the students will look into them and learn something.

However, this is a debate. It’s possible to learn things in a debate, but it’s unacceptable (in my opinion) to evade reasonable questions.

So again I ask you: Please quote the “hard calculations” you have been trumpeting.

376

brazil84: “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.” I’m done with you.

377

To extend your metaphor, you are leading people to kool-aid – not water. And you aren’t even aware of it.

i.e. after a few desperate searches on google, you were unable to find any “hard calculations” to back up your hand-waving.

This is at least the third time we’ve been in this kind of situation. The first time, it was politely explained to you that you were making incorrect statements about statistics. The second time, it was shown to you that your “best estimate” of CO2 mitigation costs wasn’t really an estimate at all. And now this.

Each time, you have shucked and jived and done everything to avoid admitting you were in the wrong. I don’t expect to convince you of anything, but please consider the possibility that your half-cocked statements are just spreading ignorance.

(Of course, it’s also possible that there really are “hard calculations” out there. If anyone wants to quote and cite them, I will be happy to take a look.)

378

For people honestly interested in learning (rather than just playing rhetorical games, as brazil84 is), another good reference into the literature into paleoclimate data and the modeling of it to understand past climate changes is Chapter 6 of the latest IPCC (Working Group 1)report; there’s also some discussion of estimates of climate sensitivity from paleoclimate events in Chapter 9.6.3 and in

379

I too would suggest that people look at the IPCC reports – but from a critical perspective.

Don’t read it like you would read a science textbook. Read it as if you are reading the balance sheet of a company that might be the next Enron. Pay careful attention to the weasel words and footnotes. Look up some of the sources. Note the difference between what the IPCC implies and what is actually stated.

Then look at some skeptic web sites from the same perspective. http://www.climate-skeptic.com is a good one.

Ask challenging questions. For example, if somebody claims that there exist “hard calculations” to support their position, they should be prepared to quote and cite those “hard calculations.”

If they are unable to do so, don’t expect them to simply concede. Instead they will invent excuses. They may even accuse you of playing “rhetorical games” rather than simply admit they are in the wrong.

380

You make the claim of hard calculations. You are asked for a citation. You dick around for a couple days. brazil84 asks again. I ask too, where are the hard calcs? Another day passes, we ask again for the citations of the “hard calculations” you spoke about

Now you want to turn this back on us? You want to pretend we’re not doing our homework? You want to stoop so low as to make the craven claim that you’re doing the legwork for us?

Now I’m a reformed cowboy … but son, I’m not that reformed.

You can osculate my fundament.

That’s the lowest thing you’ve ever done. It’s YOUR CLAIM, and you try to pusillanimously push this off on us?

Turns my stomach. This conversation is over.

w.