Amplifying feedbacks and the Arctic Heat Scream: Study finds polar albedo falling at twice expected rate, added heat equal to 25% CO2 forcing globally, 4 times human forcing locally

by Robert Schribbler, (from his blog), February 20, 2014

What’s the difference between a majestic layer of white sea ice and an ominous dark blue open ocean?

For the Arctic, it means about a 30 to 50% loss in reflectivity (or albedo). And when seasonal sea ice states are between 30% and 80% below 1979 measures (depending on the method used to gauge remaining sea ice and relative time of year), that means very, very concerning additional heating impacts to an already dangerous human-caused warming.

(A dark and mostly ice-free Arctic Ocean beneath a tempestuous swirl of clouds on September 1, 2012, a time when sea ice coverage had declined to an area roughly equal to the land mass of Greenland. Image source: Lance-Modis/NASA AQUA.)

How concerning, however, remained somewhat unclear until recently.

In the past, idealized climate simulations and physical model runs had produced about a 2% overall loss in Arctic Albedo based on observed sea ice losses. This decline, though minor sounding, was enough, on its own, to add a little more than a 10% amplifying feedback to the, already powerful, human atmospheric CO2 forcing during recent years. Such an addition was already cause for serious concern and with sea ice totals continuing to fall rapidly, speculation abounded that just this single mechanism could severely tip the scales toward a more rapid warming.

But, as has been the case with a number of Arctic model simulations related to sea ice, these computer projections failed to measure up to direct observation. In this case, direct satellite observation. The situation is, therefore, once more, worse than expected.

A new study produced by University of San Diego Scientists now shows that loss of albedo for the Arctic Ocean due to rapidly declining sea ice was 4% during the period of 1979 to 2011. This amazing loss of reflectivity, on its own, created a powerful enough heat trap to produce an amplifying feedback to human warming equal to 25% of the heat captured by CO2 emitted during that time — when spread out over the entire globe. A feedback double what we were led to expect from climate model simulations. Perhaps more importantly, the local feedback in the Arctic — a region containing gigatons and gigatons of additional carbon waiting to be released during a period of rapid warming — is not 25% greater, but 4 times greater than the total human CO2 forcing since the start of the industrial revolution.

It is important to step back for a moment and consider the implication of this new information. If you took all the emissions from cars in the world, all the buses, all the aircraft, all the land use CO2 emissions, all the agriculture, and all the amazing extra atmospheric heat capture that an emission equal to 160 times that of all the volcanoes on Earth would entail and added it all together, just one insult to our natural world in the form of Arctic sea ice loss has now equaled a 25% addition to that amazing total. Or just add enough extra heat equal to 40 times the CO2 emitted by Earth’s volcanoes (for a total of x200). And the burden of all that extra heat is directly over a region of the world that contains a number of very large ice sheets which, if rapidly warmed, result in catastrophic land change and sea level rise, and a number of outrageously enormous carbon deposits that, if rapidly warmed and released make the current albedo loss feedback look like child’s play.

In short, the game just got a lot uglier. Such an increase is a very big deal and will have strong implications going forward that affect the overall pace of human caused warming, the pace of Earth and Earth Systems changes, and the degree to which we might contain ultimate temperature rises under a scenario of full mitigation.

From the study contents:

We find that the Arctic planetary albedo has decreased from 0.52 to 0.48 between 1979 and 2011, corresponding to an additional 6.4 ± 0.9 W/m2 of solar energy input into the Arctic Ocean region since 1979. Averaged over the globe, this albedo decrease corresponds to a forcing that is 25% as large as that due to the change in CO2 during this period, considerably larger than expectations from models and other less direct recent estimates.

It is worth noting that the period measured by the study did not include the unprecedented sea ice area, extent and volume losses seen during 2012. So it is likely that albedo loss and related Arctic additions to human warming are somewhat worse than even this study suggests. It is also worth noting that the total additional radiative forcing from all human CO2 emissions since the industrial age began is estimated to be about 1.5 W/m2.

No Way Out Through Increasing Cloud Cover

The study also found that:

Changes in cloudiness appear to play a negligible role in observed Arctic darkening, thus reducing the possibility of Arctic cloud albedo feedbacks mitigating future Arctic warming.

Though seemingly innocuous, this statement is a death knell for one proposed method of Geo-engineering — namely cloud generation via spray ships deployed throughout the Arctic basin. The proposal had suggested that numerous ships could be spread about the Arctic during summer. These ships would be equipped with large machines that would dip into the ocean and spray sea water into the atmosphere to form clouds. The notion was that this would somehow increase albedo. Proponents of the plan neglected to provide scientific evidence that such a scheme would actually work or wouldn’t make matters worse by increasing atmospheric water vapor content — a substance with known heat-trapping properties.

(Conceptual drawing of an Arctic cloud-producing ship. Image source: Geo-engineering Watch.)

Others had hoped a cloudier Arctic would take care of itself by producing a negative feedback naturally. Numerous studies have found that an Arctic with less sea ice is a much stormier, cloudier Arctic. And a number of specialists and enthusiasts hinted that the extra clouds would provide some cooling.

Not so according to the San Diego study. And this makes sense as clouds, while reflective of direct radiation contain large quantities of heat-trapping water vapor and tend to also trap long-wave radiation — which is more prevalent in the Arctic due to low angle of light or extended periods of darkness.

Extraordinarily Rapid Arctic Amplification

Despite the various hollow conjectures and reassurances, what we have seen over the past seven years or so is an extraordinarily rapid amplification of heat within the Arctic. Arctic sea ice continues its death spiral, hitting new record lows at various times at least once a year. Heat keeps funneling into the Arctic, resulting in heatwaves that bring 90 degree temperatures to Arctic Ocean shores during summer and unprecedented Alaskan melts during January. We have seen freakish fires in regions previously covered by tundra. Fires that are the size of states in the Yakutia region of Russia, Alaska and Canada. Fires in Arctic Norway during winter time. And we see periods during winter when sea ice goes through extended stretches of melt, as we did just last week in the region of Svalbard.

One need only look at the temperature anomaly map for the last 30 days to know that something is dreadfully, dreadfully wrong with the Arctic:

(Global temperature anomaly vs the, already warmer than normal, 1981 to 2010 baseline. Image source: NOAA/Earth Systems Research Laboratory.)

And one need only begin to add the number of amplifying feedbacks in the Arctic together to start to understand how much trouble we’ve set for ourselves:

1. Arctic albedo decrease due to sea ice loss.
2. Arctic CO2 release due to thawing tundra.
3. Arctic methane release due to thawing land tundra.
4. Arctic methane release due to thawing subsea tundra and venting seabed methane.
5. Arctic albedo loss due to black carbon deposition.
6. Arctic albedo loss due to land vegetation changes.
7. Warming Arctic seas due to runoff from warming lands.
8. Arctic albedo decrease due to land snow and ice sheet melt.
9. South to north heat transfer to the Arctic due to a weakening, retreating Jet Stream and increasing prevalence of high amplitude atmospheric waves.

We all know, intuitively what an amplifying feedback sounds like. Just hold a microphone closer to a speaker and listen to the rising wail of sound. And it is becoming ever more obvious with each passing day, with each new report that the Arctic is simply screaming to us.

How deaf are we? How deaf are those of us who continue to fail to listen?

http://robertscribbler.wordpress.com/2014/02/20/amplifying-feedbacks-and-the-arctic-heat-scream-study-finds-polar-albedo-falling-at-twice-expected-rate-added-heat-equal-to-25-of-co2-forcing/

"Spread in model climate sensitivity traced to atmospheric convective mixing," by S. C. Sherwood, S. Bony & J.-L. Dufresne, Nature 505 (2014); doi: 10.1038/nature12829

Nature, 505 (2 January 2014) 37-42; doi: 10.1038/nature12829

Spread in model climate sensitivity traced to atmospheric convective mixing

• Steven C. Sherwood,
• Sandrine Bony and
•  Jean-Louis Dufresne

Abstract

Equilibrium climate sensitivity refers to the ultimate change in global mean temperature in response to a change in external forcing. Despite decades of research attempting to narrow uncertainties, equilibrium climate sensitivity estimates from climate models still span roughly 1.5 to 5 degrees Celsius for a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, precluding accurate projections of future climate. The spread arises largely from differences in the feedback from low clouds, for reasons not yet understood. Here we show that differences in the simulated strength of convective mixing between the lower and middle tropical troposphere explain about half of the variance in climate sensitivity estimated by 43 climate models. The apparent mechanism is that such mixing dehydrates the low-cloud layer at a rate that increases as the climate warms, and this rate of increase depends on the initial mixing strength, linking the mixing to cloud feedback. The mixing inferred from observations appears to be sufficiently strong to imply a climate sensitivity of more than 3 degrees for a doubling of carbon dioxide. This is significantly higher than the currently accepted lower bound of 1.5 degrees, thereby constraining model projections towards relatively severe future warming.

See 10 figures at this link:  http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v505/n7481/full/nature12829.html

Planet likely to warm by 4C by 2100, scientists warn

New climate model taking greater account of cloud changes indicates heating will be at higher end of expectations

by Damian Carrington, The Guardian, December 31, 2013

The role clouds play in climate change has been something of a mystery – until now. Photograph: Frank Rumpenhorst/ Frank Rumpenhorst/dpa/Corbis

Temperature rises resulting from unchecked climate change will be at the severe end of those projected, according to a new scientific study.

The scientist leading the research said that unless emissions of greenhouse gases were cut, the planet would heat up by a minimum of 4 degrees centigrade by 2100, twice the level the world's governments deem dangerous.

The research indicates that fewer clouds form as the planet warms, meaning less sunlight is reflected back into space, driving temperatures up further still. The way clouds affect global warming has been the biggest mystery surrounding future climate change.

Professor Steven Sherwood, at the University of New South Wales, in Australia, who led the new work, said: "This study breaks new ground twice: first by identifying what is controlling the cloud changes and second by strongly discounting the lowest estimates of future global warming in favour of the higher and more damaging estimates."

"4 C would likely be catastrophic rather than simply dangerous," Sherwood told the Guardian. "For example, it would make life difficult, if not impossible, in much of the tropics, and would guarantee the eventual melting of the Greenland ice sheet and some of the Antarctic ice sheet," with sea levels rising by many metres as a result.

The research is a "big advance" that halves the uncertainty about how much warming is caused by rises in carbon emissions, according to scientists commenting on the study, published in the journal Nature. Hideo Shiogama and Tomoo Ogura, at Japan's National Institute for Environmental Studies, said the explanation of how fewer clouds form as the world warms was "convincing," and agreed this indicated future climate would be greater than expected. But they said more challenges lay ahead to narrow down further the projections of future temperatures.

Scientists measure the sensitivity of the Earth's climate to greenhouse gases by estimating the temperature rise that would be caused by a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere compared with pre-industrial levels – as is likely to happen within 50 years, on current trends. For two decades, those estimates have run from 1.5 to 5 C, a wide range; the new research narrowed that range to between 3 and 5 C, by closely examining the biggest cause of uncertainty: clouds.

The key was to ensure that the way clouds form in the real world was accurately represented in computer climate models, which are the only tool researchers have to predict future temperatures. When water evaporates from the oceans, the vapour can rise over 9 miles to form rain clouds that reflect sunlight; or it may rise just a few miles and drift back down without forming clouds. In reality, both processes occur, and climate models encompassing this complexity predicted significantly higher future temperatures than those only including the 9-mile-high clouds.

"Climate sceptics like to criticise climate models for getting things wrong, and we are the first to admit they are not perfect," said Sherwood. "But what we are finding is that the mistakes are being made by the models which predict less warming, not those that predict more."

He added: "Sceptics may also point to the 'hiatus' of temperatures since the end of the 20th century, but there is increasing evidence that this inaptly named hiatus is not seen in other measures of the climate system, and is almost certainly temporary."

Global average air temperatures have increased relatively slowly since a high point in 1998 caused by the ocean phenomenon El Niño, but observations show that heat is continuing to be trapped in increasing amounts by greenhouse gases, with over 90% disappearing into the oceans. Furthermore, a study in November suggested the "pause" may be largely an illusion resulting from the lack of temperature readings from polar regions, where warming is greatest.

Sherwood accepts his team's work on the role of clouds cannot definitively rule out that future temperature rises will lie at the lower end of projections. "But," he said, for that to be the case, "one would need to invoke some new dimension to the problem involving a major missing ingredient for which we currently have no evidence. Such a thing is not out of the question but requires a lot of faith."

He added: "Rises in global average temperatures of [at least 4 C by 2100] will have profound impacts on the world and the economies of many countries, if we don't urgently start to curb our emissions."

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/dec/31/planet-will-warm-4c-2100-climate

Arctic low cloud changes as observed by MISR and CALIOP: Implication for the enhanced autumnal warming and sea ice loss, by Dong L. Wu & Jae N. Lee, JGR 117 (2012); doi:10.1029/2011JD017050

Journal of Geophysical Research, 117 (2012) D07107; doi:10.1029/2011JD017050

Arctic low cloud changes as observed by MISR and CALIOP: Implication for the enhanced autumnal warming and sea ice loss

Dong L. Wu (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, U.S.A.) and Jae N. Lee (Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD, U.S.A.)

Abstract

Retreat of Arctic sea ice extent has led to more evaporation over open water in summer and subsequent cloud changes in autumn. Studying recent satellite cloud data over the Arctic Ocean, we find that low (0.5–2 km) cloud cover in October has been increasing significantly during 2000–2010 over the Beaufort and East Siberian Sea (BESS). This change is consistent with the expected boundary layer cloud response to the increasing Arctic evaporation accumulated during summer. Because low clouds have a net warming effect at the surface, October cloud increases may be responsible for the enhanced autumnal warming in surface air temperature, which effectively prolong the melt season and lead to a positive feedback to Arctic sea ice loss. Thus, the new satellite observations provide a critical support for the hypothesized positive feedback involving interactions between boundary layer cloud, water vapor, temperature, and sea ice in the Arctic Ocean.

Key Points

• October low cloud cover over the Arctic Ocean has been increasing
• The cloud change may be responsible for the enhanced autumnal surface warming
• New satellite observations support the hypothesized positive cloud feedback

"Issues in Establishing Climate Sensitivity in Recent Studies" by Kevin E. Trenberth, John T. Fasullo & John P. Abraham, in Remote Sensing, 3 (2011)

Remote Sensing, 3(9) (2011) 2051-2056; doi: 10.3390/rs3092051

 

Commentary

Issues in Establishing Climate Sensitivity in Recent Studies

Kevin E. Trenberth^1,* , John T. Fasullo¹ and John P. Abraham ²

¹National Center for Atmospheric Research, P.O. Box 3000, Boulder, CO 80307, USA ²School of Engineering, University of St. Thomas, OSS101, 2115 Summit Ave., St. Paul, MN 55105, USA

Received 8 September 2011; accepted 8 September 2011; published 16 September 2011.

 

Download PDF Full-Text [329 KB; uploaded 17 September 2011, 12:41 CET] 

 

Abstract

 

Numerous attempts have been made to constrain climate sensitivity with observations [1-10] (with [6] as LC09, [8] as SB11). While all of these attempts contain various caveats and sources of uncertainty, some efforts have been shown to contain major errors and are demonstrably incorrect. For example, multiple studies [11-13] separately addressed weaknesses in LC09 [6]. The work of Trenberth et al. [13], for instance, demonstrated a basic lack of robustness in the LC09 method that fundamentally undermined their results. Minor changes in that study’s subjective assumptions yielded major changes in its main conclusions. Moreover, Trenberth et al. [13] criticized the interpretation of El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) as an analogue for exploring the forced response of the climate system. In addition, as many cloud variations on monthly time scales result from internal atmospheric variability, such as the Madden-Julian Oscillation, cloud variability is not a deterministic response to surface temperatures. Nevertheless, many of the problems in LC09 [6] have been perpetuated, and Dessler [10] has pointed out similar issues with two more recent such attempts [7,8]. Here we briefly summarize more generally some of the pitfalls and issues involved in developing observational constraints on climate feedbacks. [...]

 http://www.mdpi.com//2072-4292/3/9/2051/

It's lookin' like a case of pal review for Roy Spencer's disastrous paper in Remote Sensing -- maybe Roy would like to let everyone know who got to pick the reviewers

Editor-in-chief resigns as a new paper identifies errors in “fundamentally flawed” climate paper

by Brian Angliss, Scholars & Rogues, September 6, 2011

 

Roy Spencer

Last Friday, Wolfgang Wagner of the journal Remote Sensing resigned as editor-in-chief. He took this extraordinary step because he felt that it was his responsibility that Remote Sensing published a “fundamentally flawed” climate paper by Roy Spencer and William D. Braswell, both of the University of Alabama – Huntsville (UAH). In response, Spencer wrote on his blog “If some scientists would like do demonstrate in their own peer-reviewed paper where *anything* we wrote was incorrect, they should submit a paper for publication.” The first published response appeared this morning in the journal Geophysical Research Letters by Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M, and Dessler’s response points out multiple severe deficiencies in Spencer and Braswell’s paper titled “On the misdiagnosis of surface temperature feedbacks from variations in Earth’s radiant energy balance” (hereafter SB2011).




Wagner wrote an editorial in Remote Sensing to explain why he felt that SB2011 was “fundamentally flawed.” He wrote that “as a minimum requirement, [peer review is] supposed to be able to identify fundamental methodological errors or false claims,” but that SB2011 “is most likely problematic in both aspects and should therefore not have been published [emphasis added].” Wagner went on to point out that while he initially felt that SB2011′s controversial conclusion (that satellite data showed that clouds, not humans, were the dominant cause of climate disruption) deserved publication, he changed his mind because SB2011′s conclusions were not new and because Spencer and Braswell had ignored the challenges to those other conclusions when they wrote SB2011. Wagner wrote

In other words, the problem I see with [SB2011] is not that it declared a minority view, but that it essentially ignored the scientific arguments of its opponents.

Barry Bickmore of Brigham Young University and John Nielsen-Gammon, Texas State Climatologist, both observed that Remote Sensing has a policy of allowing paper authors to suggest their own reviewers, a policy that can have serious consequences for a journal like Remote Sensing that may lack climate expertise. Bickmore noted that if a journals’ editors “don’t know who would be better, or that the suggested reviewers are all buddies of the authors, [the editors] might just ask the suggested reviewers.” Nielsen-Gammon speculated “You don’t suppose the managing editor simply chose three referees from the list that Spencer and Braswell provided? Well, I do.”

Wagner wrote in his editorial that “the editorial team unintentionally selected three reviewers who probably share some climate sceptic notions of the authors.” Given the small number of “skeptics” among climate scientists, the probability that three randomly selected, qualified reviewers would have all turned out to be Spencer and Braswell’s brothers-in-arms is very, very small. In fact, recent data indicates that only 3% of climate scientists have serious concerns about humanity’s dominance regarding climate disruption, so the probability that three like-minded scientists would be selected at random is 0.03³, or about once out of every 37,000 tries.

This is a problem with any journal accepting papers in areas with which the journal’s editors are not familiar. Peter Gleick, President of the Pacific Institute and currently on the editorial boards of three different journals (and previously on the editorial boards of two more), wrote in an email to S&R

We regularly turn down journal articles, even good ones, that are not appropriate for the journal based on subject. Journals are often focused on a particular area of science, and we build up lists of reviewers competent in those areas. Receiving off-topic articles
dilutes that focus and complicates reviewing.

Gleick is not on the editorial board of Remote Sensing and wrote that he “cannot judge whether the S&B article was suitable” for that journal. “Only its editors can speak to that.” In resigning, Wagner has done so.

While Wagner’s resignation as editor-in-chief casts a shadow of impropriety over SB2011, Dessler’s new paper titled “Cloud variations and the Earth’s energy budget” goes to the core of the paper’s scientific arguments and finds them deficient. First, Dessler finds that SB2011′s first equation appears to violate conservation of energy (“energy can never be created or destroyed”), one of the most fundamental laws of physics. The problem is that the way Spencer and Braswell wrote their equation permits the ocean to change temperature without additional energy, a situation that is analogous to a cup of coffee sitting on a desk top suddenly warming up for no reason.

The bulk of Dessler’s paper is devoted to the second error in SB2011, namely that they dramatically underestimated a critical ratio in their equation because they didn’t constrain their equation using measured data from the real world. SB2011 assumes that the ratio in question was about 0.5, but real data requires that the ratio be closer to 26, an error of about 50x. When the constrained ratio is used in the equations in SB2011, the paper’s results are suddenly right in-line with the very models and papers that SB2011 was supposedly disproving.

Dessler also points out that Spencer and Braswell commit one of the cardinal sins of science, cherry-picking data. They wrote in SB2011 that they analyzed 14 models, but they only plotted the 6 models that agreed with their conclusions, ignored the models that agreed with the measured real world data in favor of the models that agreed with their conclusions, and neglected to mention that their analysis matched up well with three models that realistically model El Nino/La Nina cycles. Skeptical Science produced the following graph from Dessler’s Figure 2 that shows the cherry-picked information more clearly.


For comparison, below is SB2011 Figure 3a (which Dessler reproduced), from Barry Bickmore’s post on this subject:



As bad as all these errors are, Dessler saves the most serious for last. Dessler points out that the analysis in SB2011 assumes that the sea surface temperature is independent of changes in other climatic effects such as El Nino/La Nina, clouds, and changes in global wind patterns. In reality, all of these effects affect each other.

It’s unclear whether Spencer and Braswell have attempted to corrupt the peer review process by using the new and inexpert journal Remote Sensing to publish a paper that, as Wagner wrote, “should never have been published.”

Only Spencer and Braswell know for certain, and it would be a breach of ethics for Remote Sensing to publish the names of the anonymous reviewers without their permission. But what is clear is that Wagner felt that peer review had failed in this case and that Spencer and his allies are hypocrites for throwing about accusations of “pal review” as if they were stones thrown about glass houses. It is also clear from Dessler’s new paper that SB2011 has a significant number of major errors that cast into doubt every one of the paper’s conclusions and may cast into doubt the scientific integrity of Spencer and/or Braswell themselves.

Related posts (automated):

1. Heartland distorts AMS climate survey results, paper
2. Milloy’s latest climate op-ed riddled with errors
3. Oxygen isotope proxy errors corrected in Greenland ice cores
4. Interview with Greg Mitchell, Editor of ‘Editor & Publisher’
5. The Weekly Carboholic: David Evans’ climate facts hardly factual

http://www.scholarsandrogues.com/2011/09/06/spencer-braswell-paper-editor-dessler/

Scott Mandia: Roy Spencer Wants You to Believe the Magician Really Cuts Her Body in Half

Roy Spencer Wants You to Believe the Magician Really Cuts Her Body in Half

by Scott Mandia, "Climate Change -- Man or Myth?" blog, September 6, 2011

Source: Joe Conrad Magic Theatre

We all know that she is not really going to be cut in half, but heck, I like this magic trick just as much as the next person.  Magic is fun to watch but most of us understand that it is not real.  Roy Spencer believes in magic and wants you to also.


Roy Spencer and his friends, Christopher Monckton, John Christie, and Richard Lindzen (appearing clockwise to the right and hereafter referred to as SMCL) tell you that humans can keep dumping billions of tons of heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere and ocean and things are going to be just hunky dory. They believe that climate sensitivity [the equilibrium global surface air temperature change due to a doubling of CO2 from 280 ppm (pre-Industrial Revolution concentration) to 560 ppm] is very low. Simply put, they do not think that there will be much global warming this century despite the fact that just about every publishing climate scientist and every national academy of science state otherwise.

Skeptical Science lists some of SMCL’s public statements that fly in the face of the current scientific understanding. Compare SMCL’s statements with the following from the United States National Academy of Sciences (2011):

A strong, credible body of scientific evidence shows that climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for a broad range of human and natural systems…. Some scientific conclusions or theories have been so thoroughly examined and tested, and supported by so many independent observations and results, that their likelihood of subsequently being found to be wrong is vanishingly small. Such conclusions and theories are then regarded as settled facts. This is the case for the conclusions that the Earth system is warming and that much of this warming is very likely due to human activities.

Because they think we have nothing to worry about, SMCL are the darlings of the climate science deniers. For his part, Spencer thinks clouds cause climate change, instead of the other way around. His latest paper (Spencer & Braswell, 2011), published in the obscure journal Remote Sensing, caused quite a splash in the science denier world. Once again, the deniers trumpeted a single paper as somehow driving a nail into the coffin of man-made global warming. Of course, science does not work that way. To overturn the current scientific consensus requires extraordinary evidence and other scientists must be able to duplicate the results.

Alas, the paper was fundamentally flawed and used by Spencer to make false claims.  So much so that the Editor-in-Chief of Remote Sensing recently resigned. His resignation letter can be read here. An excerpt appears below:

I would also like to personally protest against how the authors and like-minded climate sceptics have much exaggerated the paper’s conclusions in public statements, e.g., in a press release of The University of Alabama in Huntsville from 27 July 2011, the main author’s personal homepage, the story “New NASA data blow gaping hole in global warming alarmism” published by Forbes, and the story “Does NASA data show global warming lost in space?” published by Fox News, to name just a few. Unfortunately, their campaign apparently was very successful as witnessed by the over 56,000 downloads of the full paper within only one month after its publication. But trying to refute all scientific insights into the global warming phenomenon just based on the comparison of one particular observational satellite data set with model predictions is strictly impossible. Aside from ignoring all the other observational data sets (such as the rapidly shrinking sea ice extent and changes in the flora and fauna) and contrasting theoretical studies, such a simple conclusion simply cannot be drawn considering the complexity of the involved models and satellite measurements.

Although Kevin Trenberth and John Fasullo were first off the mark correcting Spencer’s errors, Dr. Michael Ashley wrote the best summary of the problems with Spencer & Braswell (2011) in his post Spencer & Braswell 2011: Proof that global warming is exaggerated? Or just bad science? I also highly recommend reading Robert Grumbine’s Peer Review and Wagner Resignation over Spencer and Braswell and the set of related links he has posted there. Another good summary by Trenberth, Abraham, and Gleick can be read at The Daily Climate.

Today, an important rebuttal to both Spencer and Braswell (2011) and Lindzen and Choi (2011) was published in Geophysical Research Letters. Dr. Andrew Dessler, in his paper Cloud variations and the earth’s energy budget, shows that in the previous ten years, clouds are NOT the cause of the observed climate change and that mainstream climate models are not in disagreement with observed data. (Listen to Dessler explain his paper.)

“The bottom line is that clouds have not replaced humans as the cause of the recent warming the Earth is experiencing,” – Dr. Andrew Dessler

There is no nail in the coffin after all (shocker!) but there was plenty of drama offered by both Spencer and Lindzen this year. At COP16 in Cancun, Spencer stood with Monckton at a press conference to publicly criticize Dessler’s previous paper, and Lindzen complained about being shut out of prestigious journals and ended up publishing in the unheard of Asian Pacific Journal of Atmospheric Science. Both of these gentleman should be ashamed of their unprofessional behavior.

Mother Nature is also not buying what SMCL are selling.

Here is what scientists know:

Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases trap heat and cause the planet to be warmer. Humans are overloading the air with too much carbon dioxide (CO2). In the past decade, the increase of CO2 in the air due to human emissions has averaged about 2 ppm per year. To put that into perspective, the amount of CO2 that is emitted globally each day that remains in the air is equivalent to almost 8,000 Gulf oil spills each day!

8,000 Gulf Oil Spills Per Day

In the past 800,000 years, CO2 has naturally cycled between 170 ppm and 300 ppm. At 170 ppm there were massive ice sheets.  At 300 ppm there were no massive ice sheets and sea levels were hundreds of feet higher (goodbye Florida).  Small changes in the Earth’s orbit shape, tilt, and eccentricity were the initial cause of global climate change and then CO2 feedbacks accelerated the change.

CO2 Concentrations vs. Time

We have blown past 300 ppm and are adding CO2 at rates not witnessed in at least the previous 800,000 years.  How can anybody look at this image and believe SMCL when they tell you that these increases in CO2 will not cause much climate change?  Do you believe magic will save us?  SMCL do, but Mother Nature certainly does not.

Many independent observations convincingly indicate that the Earth’s surface and lower atmosphere are warming.  Oceans are gaining heat, ice is rapidly melting, and the atmosphere is warming.  (A wealth of details and illustrations regarding this warming may be viewed on my Web page titled: Modern Day Climate Change.)

The World is Warming (NOAA, 2010)

The pattern of warming matches that expected by increasing heat-trapping CO2 and other greenhouse gases.  There are no known natural mechanisms that can explain this pattern.  The physics of increasing heat-trapping gases tells us:

1. Higher latitudes (toward the poles) will warm the most while lower latitudes (tropics) will warm less
2. Winters will warm faster than summers
3. Nights will warm faster than days

Recently, NOAA (2011) issued the latest 30-year climate normals for the United States, and as expected, points #1,2,3 are evidenced in the graphics below:

Seasonal Changes in US Normal Temperatures

Latest 30-Year US Climate Normals for Max T and Min T.

Climate sensitivity is NOT low as SMCL believe. According to the IPCC (2007): “Climate sensitivity is likely to be in the range 2 to 4.5 °C (3.6 to 8.1 °F) with a best estimate of about 3 °C (5.4 °F), and is very unlikely to be less than 1.5 °C (2.7 °F). Values substantially higher than 4.5 °C cannot be excluded.”  Here is where we are headed in the best and worse case emission scenarios:

Climate Scorecard

According to Synthesis Report from the Climate Change Congress – University of Copenhagen (Richardson et al., 2009):

“Recent observations show that societies and ecosystems are highly vulnerable to even modest levels of climate change, with poor nations and communities, ecosystem services and biodiversity particularly at risk. Temperature rises above 2 °C will be difficult for contemporary societies to cope with, and are likely to cause major societal and environmental disruptions through the rest of the century and beyond.”

This is a polite way of saying that 2 °C may be a deal-breaker for people and for nature.  Unfortunately, it appears that the world, especially the US, does not have the political courage to change course and prevent us from “falling off the cliff”.  For much more information about the impacts of climate change please see Impact of Climate Change or my public presentation Climate Change is Not Being Nice to Mother Nature.

Human emissions of CO2 are already changing our climate.  As predicted more than two decades ago, a warmer planet will result in more frequent and intense heat waves, droughts, fires, and floods.  You do not need me to tell you what your eyes are seeing.  These extreme events have been all over the news lately.

Scientists are not the only ones that are very concerned.  Health experts are concerned. Dr. Georges Benjamin, Executive Director of the American Public Health Association, made this point quite clearly in his recent statement:

Climate change is one of the most serious health threats facing our nation. Yet few Americans are aware of the very real consequences of climate change on the health of our communities, our families and our children.

Healthtipspedia.com (2010)

Dr. Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organization, made this point even more bluntly in stating:

We need to… convince the world that humanity really is the most important species endangered by climate change.

Military and intelligence experts are concerned.  In a 2010 statement, 33 of the top generals and admirals in the United States stated:

Climate change is making the world a more dangerous place. It’s threatening America’s security. The Pentagon and security leaders of both parties consider climate disruption to be a “threat multiplier” – it exacerbates existing problems by decreasing stability, increasing conflict, and incubating the socioeconomic conditions that foster terrorist recruitment. The State Department, the National Intelligence Council and the CIA all agree, and all are planning for future climate-based threats. America’s billion-dollar-a-day dependence on oil makes us vulnerable to unstable and unfriendly regimes.

scapetv.com (2010)

Financial experts are concerned.  A 2010 statement from 268 investors representing assets of more than US$15 trillion:

Several leading studies indicate that the systemic shocks to regional and global economies from climate change will be substantial and will worsen the longer world governments wait to take sufficient policy action.

Already this year, the United States has experienced the greatest number of billion-dollar climate-related disasters in its history, and you should expect this to become much more common and much worse in the decades to come.  We all pay for this whether we experience the event or not because our taxes and our insurance rates will be climbing to cover these costs.

Number of Billion-Dollar Climate-Related Disasters

Climate change is already here and the worst is yet to come.  Solutions are going to be put into place.  If you do not accept the science and choose not to sit at the solution table, you will have no say in what happens.  Why not come join the discussion.  There is no debate that humans are overloading the atmosphere with heat-trapping carbon and that big climate changes will occur if we keep emitting away like there is no tomorrow.  The debate needs to move away from the cause and on to the solutions.

Spencer, Monckton, Christie, and Lindzen want you to believe all of this evidence and all of these experts are wrong.  C’mon, you know that is not true just like you know that the woman is not really being cut in half.

Trust the evidence and the experts – not the magicians. 


http://profmandia.wordpress.com/2011/09/06/roy-spencer-wants-you-to-believe-the-magician-really-cuts-her-body-in-half/

Andrew Dessler, Real Climate: Feedback on Cloud Feedback

Feedback on Cloud Feedback

Guest article by Andrew Dessler, Real Climate, December 9, 2010

I have a paper in this week’s issue of Science on the cloud feedback that may be of interest to realclimate readers. As you may know, clouds are important regulators of the amount of energy in and out of the climate system. Clouds both reflect sunlight back to space and a trap infrared radiation and keep it from escaping the space. Changes in clouds can therefore have profound impacts on our climate.

A positive cloud feedback loop posits a scenario whereby an initial warming of the planet, caused, for example, by increases in greenhouse gases, causes clouds to trap more energy and lead to further warming. Such a process amplifies the direct heating by greenhouse gases. Models have been long predicted this, but testing the models has proved difficult.

Making the issue even more contentious, some of the more credible skeptics out there (e.g., Lindzen, Spencer) have been arguing that clouds behave quite differently from that predicted by models. In fact, they argue, clouds will stabilize the climate and prevent climate change from occurring (i.e., clouds will provide a negative feedback).

In my new paper, I calculate the energy trapped by clouds and observe how it varies as the climate warms and cools during El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycles. I find that, as the climate warms, clouds trap an additional 0.54 ± 0.74 W/m2 for every degree of warming. Thus, the cloud feedback is likely positive, but I cannot rule out a slight negative feedback.

It is important to note that while a slight negative feedback cannot be ruled out, the data do not support a negative feedback large enough to substantially cancel the well-established positive feedbacks, such as water vapor, as Lindzen and Spencer would argue.

I have also compared the results to climate models. Taken as a group, the models substantially reproduce the observations. This increases my confidence that the models are accurately simulating the variations of clouds with climate change.

Obviously, climate skeptics are quite upset with my results. Dr. Roy Spencer, for example, has been criticizing my paper on his blog. Dr. Spencer’s argument is, as he wrote in an e-mail to Dr. Richard Kerr of Science:

Andy’s study assumes that all co-variations between clouds and temperature are due to feedback, when in fact they are a mixture of feedback and “internal forcing” (natural cloud fluctuation causing temperature changes). 

Now, Andy DOES at least raise this as a possibility, referencing our (Spencer & Braswell) 2010 JGR paper on the subject (his ref. #26). But he then claims that since (1) ENSO is the main source of climate variability during 2000-2010, and since (2) no one has demonstrated that ENSO is in any way caused by cloud changes, that our cause-versus-effect claim does not apply to the 2000-2010 time period. 

His second claim is incorrect. 

As Fig. 4a in our paper (http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/Spencer-Braswell-JGR-2010.pdf ) shows, the major 2007-08 La Nina event shows the characteristic looping pattern in temperature-versus-radiative flux data that results from clouds causing temperature changes

In other words, Dr. Spencer is arguing that clouds are causing ENSO cycles, so the direction of causality in my analysis is incorrect and my conclusions are in error.

After reading this, I initiated a cordial and useful exchange of e-mails with Dr. Spencer (you can read the full e-mail exchange here). We ultimately agreed that the fundamental disagreement between us is over what causes ENSO. Short paraphrase:

Spencer: ENSO is caused by clouds. You cannot infer the response of clouds to surface temperature in such a situation.

Dessler: ENSO is not caused by clouds, but is driven by internal dynamics of the ocean-atmosphere system. Clouds may amplify the warming, and that’s the cloud feedback I’m trying to measure.

My position is the mainstream one, backed up by decades of research. This mainstream theory is quite successful at simulating almost all of the aspects of ENSO.

Dr. Spencer, on the other hand, is as far out of the mainstream when it comes to ENSO as he is when it comes to climate change. He is advancing here a completely new and untested theory of ENSO — based on just one figure in one of his papers (and, as I told him in one of our e-mails, there are other interpretations of those data that do not agree with his interpretation).

Thus, the burden of proof is Dr. Spencer to show that his theory of causality during ENSO is correct. He is, at present, far from meeting that burden. And until Dr. Spencer satisfies this burden, I don’t think anyone can take his criticisms seriously.

It’s also worth noting that the picture I’m painting of our disagreement (and backed up by the e-mail exchange linked above) is quite different from the picture provided by Dr. Spencer on his blog. His blog is full of conspiracies and purposeful suppression of the truth. In particular, he accuses me of ignoring his work. But as you can see, I have not ignored it — I have dismissed it because I think it has no merit. 

That’s quite different.

I would also like to respond to his accusation that the timing of the paper is somehow connected to the IPCC’s meeting in Cancun. I can assure everyone that no one pressured me in any aspect of the publication of this paper. As Dr. Spencer knows well, authors have no control over when a paper ultimately gets published.

And as far as my interest in influencing the policy debate goes, I’ll just say that I’m in College Station this week, while Dr. Spencer is in Cancun. In fact, Dr. Spencer had a press conference in Cancun — about my paper. I didn’t have a press conference about my paper. Draw your own conclusion.

I hope that this post has explained my work and cleared up exactly what my disagreement with Dr. Spencer is. If interested readers do some basic research on the causes of ENSO, I’m confident they will agree with me that my interpretation of the data is sound.

Link:  http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/12/feedback-on-cloud-feedback/#more-5676

Alex Lauer: climate may actually be more sensitive to perturbations by greenhouse gases than current global models predict, and even the highest warming predictions would underestimate the real change we could see

Study could mean greater anticipated global warming

		IMAGE: This is the type of marine stratus clouds off the South American coast that was studied in the model simulations. Click here for more information.

Eureka Alert, November 22, 2010

Current state-of-the-art global climate models predict substantial warming in response to increases in greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. The models, though, disagree widely in the magnitude of the warming we can expect. The disagreement among models is mainly due to the different representation of clouds. Some models predict that global mean cloud cover will increase in a warmer climate and the increased reflection of solar radiation will limit the predicted global warming. Other models predict reduced cloudiness and magnified warming. In a paper that has just appeared in the Journal of Climate, researchers from the University of Hawaii Manoa (UHM) have assessed the performance of current global models in simulating clouds and have presented a new approach to determining the expected cloud feedbacks in a warmer climate.

Lead author Axel Lauer at the International Pacific Research Center (IPRC) at UHM notes, "All the global climate models we analyzed have serious deficiencies in simulating the properties of clouds in present-day climate. It is unfortunate that the global models' greatest weakness may be in the one aspect that is most critical for predicting the magnitude of global warming."

To study the clouds, the researchers applied a model representing only a limited region of the atmosphere over the eastern Pacific Ocean and adjacent land areas. The clouds in this region are known to greatly influence present climate, yet current global models do poorly in representing them. The regional model, developed at the IPRC, successfully simulates key features of the region's present-day cloud fields, including the observed response of clouds to El Nino. Having evaluated the model's simulation of present-day conditions, the researchers examined the response of simulated clouds in a warmer climate such as it might be in 100 years from now. The tendency for clouds to thin and cloud cover to reduce was more pronounced in this model than in any of the current global models.

		IMAGE: Deviations from the average low-level cloud amount simulated in the IPRC model (red) compare well with satellite observations (black) over the stratocumulus region in the southeastern Pacific (25°–5° S, 100°–75° W). Warm... Click here for more information.

Co-author Kevin Hamilton concludes, "If our model results prove to be representative of the real global climate, then climate is actually more sensitive to perturbations by greenhouse gases than current global models predict, and even the highest warming predictions would underestimate the real change we could see."

Link:  http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-11/uoha-scm112210.php