Climate change

[jc456]

I'm just really interested to see the arguments against the concept of climate change and whether or not you believe it's due to mankind

From what I can gather I would say we know too little about the natural cycles. It was a lot colder in the 1700s after it was warmer for the previous few hundred....but how is it possible to measure it accurately?? So are we just really comparing the 1970s with today after a slightly warmer cycle??

I'm VERY skeptical about the future being a dead world. Frankly that's just greenie crap!!

Greg

Why are you interested in only the arguements against climate change? And why 'arguements". What about evidence for? And the scientific basis of?

The Carbon Dioxide Greenhouse Effect

That site is from the American Institute of Physics, the largest scientific society on this planet.

The site that gives us Herr Koch experiment, that to date, hasn't been debunked by another experiment. Hmmmmmmmm..

 

[CrusaderFrank]

This isn't even about global warming or climate change if we are being honest, about C02 or anything else. There is a dead zone in the beautiful gulf of Mexico the size of Rhode island, where no fish can live due to runoff pollutants from our rivers, the oxygen content around the world is decreasing as CO2 composition increases. We need oxygen to survive, we need air to breathe. It doesn't matter if you think it's causing a warming effect or not. On certain days in China you can see the pollution fog settling over the land. Respiratory illnesses there are staggering. More coral reefs, essential to maintaining fish life in our oceans go barren as acidic pollutants make them unlivable.

Toxic fishing practices such as dredging the sea floor with what equates to a semi truck tanker have devastated ocean habitats turning sea floor forests into nothing but mud. The amount of ocean floor made barren is the equivalent of ALL OF THE DEFORESTATION DONE BY MAN ON LAND SINCE THE START OF CIVILIZATION. And we did it in fifty years.

Toxic blooms from out of control algaes that are a direct result of the dead zones are killing people in Florida every year, and making others very sick. Sea birds that fly over these piles of algae ashpyxiate and die. There are beaches in France where this algae now has to be bulldozed off the beaches every year.

How, in the face of all of this can anyone maintain that our practices are fine, that it will all be OK? Beach side property is becoming a health risk. I don't care how you feel about the atmosphere and if its cooling or if there's some storm catastrophe, you really think environmental issues are a leftist issue? All of these are easy, easily verified measured facts, every one of them. We should continue with business as usual?

Billions of dollars of cost in industry is nothing compared to giving our children a toxic world to live in, and when they have to stay inside because it is too toxic out there today an they are short of breath. They can look back at the record keeping of the internet and say "oh look, there's my parents or grandparents saying everything is fine, continue with business as usual".

It is insanity. Pure and simple.

Eugenics: its the only solution

 

[jc456]

I'm just really interested to see the arguments against the concept of climate change and whether or not you believe it's due to mankind

From what I can gather I would say we know too little about the natural cycles. It was a lot colder in the 1700s after it was warmer for the previous few hundred....but how is it possible to measure it accurately?? So are we just really comparing the 1970s with today after a slightly warmer cycle??

I'm VERY skeptical about the future being a dead world. Frankly that's just greenie crap!!

Greg

We can take ice core samples from the poles that have records of year after year atmospheric conditions dating back hundreds of years, like tree rings for the environment. It's pretty basic science and shows a huge increase in greenhouse gases since the industrial revolution. We know quite a bit about it

Thank you for your response.

Antarctic Ice Cores The Sample Rate Problem Watts Up With That

Greg

Look, you want to site un-degreed ex-TV weathermen, obese junkies on the AM radio, and fake British Lords, go ahead, just don't expect any credibility or respect. Go to Google Scholar, type in your question, and look at what real scientists have to say.

because you have a cartoonist to believe in. Funny stuff old socks.

 

[The sheeple sea]

This isn't even about global warming or climate change if we are being honest, about C02 or anything else. There is a dead zone in the beautiful gulf of Mexico the size of Rhode island, where no fish can live due to runoff pollutants from our rivers, the oxygen content around the world is decreasing as CO2 composition increases. We need oxygen to survive, we need air to breathe. It doesn't matter if you think it's causing a warming effect or not. On certain days in China you can see the pollution fog settling over the land. Respiratory illnesses there are staggering. More coral reefs, essential to maintaining fish life in our oceans go barren as acidic pollutants make them unlivable.

Toxic fishing practices such as dredging the sea floor with what equates to a semi truck tanker have devastated ocean habitats turning sea floor forests into nothing but mud. The amount of ocean floor made barren is the equivalent of ALL OF THE DEFORESTATION DONE BY MAN ON LAND SINCE THE START OF CIVILIZATION. And we did it in fifty years.

Toxic blooms from out of control algaes that are a direct result of the dead zones are killing people in Florida every year, and making others very sick. Sea birds that fly over these piles of algae ashpyxiate and die. There are beaches in France where this algae now has to be bulldozed off the beaches every year.

How, in the face of all of this can anyone maintain that our practices are fine, that it will all be OK? Beach side property is becoming a health risk. I don't care how you feel about the atmosphere and if its cooling or if there's some storm catastrophe, you really think environmental issues are a leftist issue? All of these are easy, easily verified measured facts, every one of them. We should continue with business as usual?

Billions of dollars of cost in industry is nothing compared to giving our children a toxic world to live in, and when they have to stay inside because it is too toxic out there today an they are short of breath. They can look back at the record keeping of the internet and say "oh look, there's my parents or grandparents saying everything is fine, continue with business as usual".

It is insanity. Pure and simple.

Eugenics: its the only solution

If you are talking about genetic modification of ecosystems, I actually agree, its time for radical action, we can't slowplay this.

 

[CrusaderFrank]

I'm just really interested to see the arguments against the concept of climate change and whether or not you believe it's due to mankind

From what I can gather I would say we know too little about the natural cycles. It was a lot colder in the 1700s after it was warmer for the previous few hundred....but how is it possible to measure it accurately?? So are we just really comparing the 1970s with today after a slightly warmer cycle??

I'm VERY skeptical about the future being a dead world. Frankly that's just greenie crap!!

Greg

We can take ice core samples from the poles that have records of year after year atmospheric conditions dating back hundreds of years, like tree rings for the environment. It's pretty basic science and shows a huge increase in greenhouse gases since the industrial revolution. We know quite a bit about it

why then are today's climate k00ks adjusting historical records then? Is it feasible from your position, that it's ok to chart today's instrument records with ice core and tree ring records?

Come on, the records had it wrong, they we're DENIERS!!!! and got adjusted.

That's how Einstein forced through Relativity, right?

 

[flacaltenn]

This isn't even about global warming or climate change if we are being honest, about C02 or anything else. There is a dead zone in the beautiful gulf of Mexico the size of Rhode island, where no fish can live due to runoff pollutants from our rivers, the oxygen content around the world is decreasing as CO2 composition increases. We need oxygen to survive, we need air to breathe. It doesn't matter if you think it's causing a warming effect or not. On certain days in China you can see the pollution fog settling over the land. Respiratory illnesses there are staggering. More coral reefs, essential to maintaining fish life in our oceans go barren as acidic pollutants make them unlivable.

Toxic fishing practices such as dredging the sea floor with what equates to a semi truck tanker have devastated ocean habitats turning sea floor forests into nothing but mud. The amount of ocean floor made barren is the equivalent of ALL OF THE DEFORESTATION DONE BY MAN ON LAND SINCE THE START OF CIVILIZATION. And we did it in fifty years.

Toxic blooms from out of control algaes that are a direct result of the dead zones are killing people in Florida every year, and making others very sick. Sea birds that fly over these piles of algae ashpyxiate and die. There are beaches in France where this algae now has to be bulldozed off the beaches every year.

How, in the face of all of this can anyone maintain that our practices are fine, that it will all be OK? Beach side property is becoming a health risk. I don't care how you feel about the atmosphere and if its cooling or if there's some storm catastrophe, you really think environmental issues are a leftist issue? All of these are easy, easily verified measured facts, every one of them. We should continue with business as usual?

Billions of dollars of cost in industry is nothing compared to giving our children a toxic world to live in, and when they have to stay inside because it is too toxic out there today an they are short of breath. They can look back at the record keeping of the internet and say "oh look, there's my parents or grandparents saying everything is fine, continue with business as usual".

It is insanity. Pure and simple.

That's part of the legacy of all this Global Warming hype and hysteria.. It has SQUASHED all of the other enviro issues that you mentioned. OR worse -- it has been used as a faulty cause of those important issues you bring up.

I would LOVE to see REAL pollution addressed.. Instead of the circus surrounding this not yet mature "science" of climate. But you need not worry about the "oxygen" thingy. That's not a health concern in the least. What you breathe OUT has 4 to 8 times the CO2 "pollution" in it than the air you breathe in. And any displacement of oxygen by CO2 is virtually negligable... Worry about the TRADITIONAL enviromental causes that can no longer get a fair hearing because of this Global Warning propaganda campaign..

 

[mamooth]

Stratospheric observations cannot discriminate between atmospheric thickening from CO2 back radiation or natural warming.

Ah, the mysterious "natural warming" again. It just spontaneously happens, without a cause. And if you can't absolutely prove such magic doesn't happen, you have to admit AGW theory is wrong. Or so the denier 'science' goes.

And it's impossible to get direct GLOBAL readings of backradiation to derive that increase.

Well, yes, because clouds and water vapor change the backradiation amounts, and have to be corrected for. And because the whole planet isn't covered by SURFRAD station monitoring.

That is CALCULATED from the observed warming you nit and ASSUMED to be all due to CO2....

Well, the cloud and water vapor the corrections are calculated from satellite data.

Global atmospheric downward longwave radiation over land surface under all-sky conditions from 1973 to 2008 - Wang - 2009 - Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres - Wiley Online Library

After showing their 36 individual site measurements agreed with the model, they used the model for the whole earth. But even if you don't like that model, you're still left with the issue that backradiation was increasing at the 36 individual sites, and none of the "natural cycles" theories have an explanation for that.

 

[mamooth]

And any displacement of oxygen by CO2 is virtually negligable... Worry about the TRADITIONAL enviromental causes that can no longer get a fair hearing because of this Global Warning propaganda campaign..

Yet you're the one crucifying the EPA, the organization directly addressing all the issues you claim to care about.

Everyone else except you has no trouble addressing issues besides global warming. Deniers seem to be the only people who can only fixate on global warming.

 

[Toddsterpatriot]

Credit CO2 Insanity web site:

Back Radiation Co2 Insanity

excerpt:
"Doomsaying Climatologist Abandons ‘Back Radiation’ Meme

Only recently did Professor Claes Johnson persuade long-time greenhouse gas effect believer Dr. Judith Curry to abandon this unscientific term. Curry now admits:

“Back radiation is a phrase, one that I don’t use myself, and it is not a word that is used in technical radiative transfer studies. Lets lose the back radiation terminology, we all agree on that.”"

Fine, call it radiation. It's still radiation moving from the cooler atmosphere toward the warmer surface.

and adding no heat to surface or troposphere temperatures.

All matter above 0K radiates all the time, in all directions.
Even if it's radiating toward warmer matter.

Are we clear on the basics yet?

yep agree, however, the radiation toward the surface does not heat jack.

Well, radiation toward the ground makes it warmer than if there were no radiation toward the ground, so it slows cooling.

So are we clear yet that radiation from the cool atmosphere can hit the warmer ground?

 

[gtopa1]

Mind you: what was done to Hubert Lamb was galling.

I hadnt' seen that specific denier conspiracy theory before. I had seen "Connolly is the devil!" nonsense before, just not that specific nonsense.

You might find this interesting

Gish gallops are boring. People with the facts on their side don't have to resort to pointing to an avalanche of crap. If you have a point, state it directly and concisely. People with the facts on their side especially don't have to resort to cherrypicking fallacies to create strawman, like the deniers do with their "but look at this catastrophic prediction!" deflections.

People with the facts on their side can get to the point and avoid logical fallacies. Like this.

Hiatus claims are crap. There never was a hiatus. That was something deniers manufactured. Back in the real world, it's just been steadily warming.

The natural cycles theories are crap. They're contradicted by the directly observed evidence of stratospheric cooling, the decrease in outgoing longwave radiation in the GHG bands, and the increase in backradiation. No natural cycles theory explains that evidence, hence such theories are just flat out wrong.

Global warming theory, of course, does explain all of the observed evidence. As it's the only theory that does so, hence it's the accepted science. If you want to change that, you have to provide an alternate theory that's even better at explaining the evidence.

And you brought up Popper, so tell us, what data could falsify your natural cycles theory? Popper says if it can't be falsified, it's garbage. Mainstream global warming theory can be falsified in many ways, since it's real science. Denialism ... I've yet to have a single denier tell me what evidence could falsify their beliefs, which push them into the category of religion.

Not my theory old son. AGW is yours. But I am not surprised that you slackjaw on Lindzen.

limate feedbacks are estimated from fluctuations in the
outgoing radiation budget from the latest version of Earth
Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE) nonscanner data.
It appears, for the entire tropics, the observed outgoing
radiation fluxes increase with the increase in sea surface
temperatures (SSTs). The observed behavior of radiation
fluxes implies negative feedback processes associated with
relatively low climate sensitivity. This is the opposite of
the behavior of 11 atmospheric models forced by the same
SSTs. Therefore, the models display much higher climate
sensitivity than is inferred from ERBE, though it is difficult to
pin down such high sensitivities with any precision. Results
also show, the feedback in ERBE is mostly from shortwave
radiation while the feedback in the models is mostly from
longwave radiation. Although such a test does not distinguish
the mechanisms, this is important since the inconsistency of
climate feedbacks constitutes a very fundamental problem
in climate prediction.
Citation:
Lindzen, R. S., and Y.-S.
Choi (2009),

http://www.drroyspencer.com/Lindzen-and-Choi-GRL-2009.pdf

I am actually interested in what you think about this work..as distinct from slagging.

Greg

 

[mamooth]

Lindzen and Choi (2009)? Universally regarded as a bad paper. Lindzen concluded temperature sensitivity was low. But to do so, he only used temperature data from the tropics, the region of the earth where the warming is smallest. That cherrypicking made the conclusions invalid.

He tried a rewrite in 2011, but he didn't address that fatal flaw, so the peer reviewers rejected it, and he could only find a publisher in an obscure Korean journal. Natural, Lindzen claimed he was persecuted after the peer reviewers universally rejected his flawed science.

 

[flacaltenn]

Stratospheric observations cannot discriminate between atmospheric thickening from CO2 back radiation or natural warming.

Ah, the mysterious "natural warming" again. It just spontaneously happens, without a cause. And if you can't absolutely prove such magic doesn't happen, you have to admit AGW theory is wrong. Or so the denier 'science' goes.

And it's impossible to get direct GLOBAL readings of backradiation to derive that increase.

Well, yes, because clouds and water vapor change the backradiation amounts, and have to be corrected for. And because the whole planet isn't covered by SURFRAD station monitoring.

That is CALCULATED from the observed warming you nit and ASSUMED to be all due to CO2....

Well, the cloud and water vapor the corrections are calculated from satellite data.

Global atmospheric downward longwave radiation over land surface under all-sky conditions from 1973 to 2008 - Wang - 2009 - Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres - Wiley Online Library

After showing their 36 individual site measurements agreed with the model, they used the model for the whole earth. But even if you don't like that model, you're still left with the issue that backradiation was increasing at the 36 individual sites, and none of the "natural cycles" theories have an explanation for that.

According to you 1998 wasn't a natural temperature event because it couldn't possibly happen.. Where do you think all that STORED heat in the Oceans ends up? Is it sunk to the bottom forever? Or does it appear periodically back at the surface? THAT --- has NOTHING to do with downdwelling IR does it?

Delays in the thermal transfers from the tropics to the poles and the CYCLICAL cycles that manifest off of that ALSO have a direct bearing on decadal temperature measurements in the realm of a Watt or two.. Put a couple cyclical events together at a random phase and you can start to synthesize any shape temperature curve that you want.. Arctic Oscillations, MJ Oscillations, PDOs, AMOs, there are DOZENS of these identified and probably MORE we don't yet recognize.. Every decade is a new opportunity for them to get together in some fashion and construct a different resulting Global temperature shape..

And what was the AMOUNT of the backradiation increase measured that you are relying on.. Did it explain ALL of the warming as seen from a GLOBAL number? Was it done in the tropics and the arctic?

 

[Billy_Bob]

I'm just really interested to see the arguments against the concept of climate change and whether or not you believe it's due to mankind

One; The climate is changing and has been for eons..

Two: Man can only influence localized ares of the earth as CO2 does not control the earths climate. Water vapor does!

Three: The misuse of the term "Climate Change" by science deniers and alarmists is a political charade to deprive you of your ability to provided for yourself and place a dictator/command and control dictate over you by socialists who are a pile of crap. It is a Lie.

SO which one do you really want to discuss? How the earth has cyclically changed for eons, or the lies form alarmists and socialist power mongers?

 

[jon_berzerk]

Oil will run out by 2015
--LOL

I believe that the prediction was we would hit peak oil production and not be able to increase current production by 2015, many of these predictions were made before the advent of hydraulic fracturing or without factoring this new technology into being able to reach previously unattainable fuel sources. The prediction was never that oil would run out, except perhaps by some tinfoil hat men who also didn't understand what they were being told.

it was a scare tactic plain and simple

like the others made

 

[gtopa1]

This isn't even about global warming or climate change if we are being honest, about C02 or anything else. There is a dead zone in the beautiful gulf of Mexico the size of Rhode island, where no fish can live due to runoff pollutants from our rivers, the oxygen content around the world is decreasing as CO2 composition increases. We need oxygen to survive, we need air to breathe. It doesn't matter if you think it's causing a warming effect or not. On certain days in China you can see the pollution fog settling over the land. Respiratory illnesses there are staggering. More coral reefs, essential to maintaining fish life in our oceans go barren as acidic pollutants make them unlivable.

Toxic fishing practices such as dredging the sea floor with what equates to a semi truck tanker have devastated ocean habitats turning sea floor forests into nothing but mud. The amount of ocean floor made barren is the equivalent of ALL OF THE DEFORESTATION DONE BY MAN ON LAND SINCE THE START OF CIVILIZATION. And we did it in fifty years.

Toxic blooms from out of control algaes that are a direct result of the dead zones are killing people in Florida every year, and making others very sick. Sea birds that fly over these piles of algae ashpyxiate and die. There are beaches in France where this algae now has to be bulldozed off the beaches every year.

How, in the face of all of this can anyone maintain that our practices are fine, that it will all be OK? Beach side property is becoming a health risk. I don't care how you feel about the atmosphere and if its cooling or if there's some storm catastrophe, you really think environmental issues are a leftist issue? All of these are easy, easily verified measured facts, every one of them. We should continue with business as usual?

Billions of dollars of cost in industry is nothing compared to giving our children a toxic world to live in, and when they have to stay inside because it is too toxic out there today an they are short of breath. They can look back at the record keeping of the internet and say "oh look, there's my parents or grandparents saying everything is fine, continue with business as usual".

It is insanity. Pure and simple.

So why the hell are we wasting $ and effort on idiotic "End of Days" climate rubbish when we have REAL work to do. I quite agree with a lot of what you have posted. AGW dastards are giving we who want to see a cleaner greener world the finger; for them it is about defeating Capitalism.

Greg

 

[jon_berzerk]

I'm just really interested to see the arguments against the concept of climate change and whether or not you believe it's due to mankind

From what I can gather I would say we know too little about the natural cycles. It was a lot colder in the 1700s after it was warmer for the previous few hundred....but how is it possible to measure it accurately?? So are we just really comparing the 1970s with today after a slightly warmer cycle??

I'm VERY skeptical about the future being a dead world. Frankly that's just greenie crap!!

Greg

We can take ice core samples from the poles that have records of year after year atmospheric conditions dating back hundreds of years, like tree rings for the environment. It's pretty basic science and shows a huge increase in greenhouse gases since the industrial revolution. We know quite a bit about it

why then are today's climate k00ks adjusting historical records then? Is it feasible from your position, that it's ok to chart today's instrument records with ice core and tree ring records?

Come on, the records had it wrong, they we're DENIERS!!!! and got adjusted.

That's how Einstein forced through Relativity, right?

LOL

 

[Billy_Bob]

Of course if the hairball cat wants a different reading on climate model FORECASTING performance. Doesn't like the Dr Roy Spencer version, let's just submit the IPCC AR5 version...

Sucks kibble don't it???

What was funny, the IPCC added the GREY shaded section, which is outside of all their error bars, so that it would imply that their predictions were still somewhat valid. Deception of the highest magnitude... You will note there is no descriptive ] block. it was simply put their to deceive.

 

[gtopa1]

Stratospheric observations cannot discriminate between atmospheric thickening from CO2 back radiation or natural warming.

Ah, the mysterious "natural warming" again. It just spontaneously happens, without a cause. And if you can't absolutely prove such magic doesn't happen, you have to admit AGW theory is wrong. Or so the denier 'science' goes.

And it's impossible to get direct GLOBAL readings of backradiation to derive that increase.

Well, yes, because clouds and water vapor change the backradiation amounts, and have to be corrected for. And because the whole planet isn't covered by SURFRAD station monitoring.

That is CALCULATED from the observed warming you nit and ASSUMED to be all due to CO2....

Well, the cloud and water vapor the corrections are calculated from satellite data.

Global atmospheric downward longwave radiation over land surface under all-sky conditions from 1973 to 2008 - Wang - 2009 - Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres - Wiley Online Library

After showing their 36 individual site measurements agreed with the model, they used the model for the whole earth. But even if you don't like that model, you're still left with the issue that backradiation was increasing at the 36 individual sites, and none of the "natural cycles" theories have an explanation for that.

Why Back-Radiation is not a Source of Surface Heating the Air Vent

Probably worth the intellectual curiosity but so??

Please explain the cooler 40's. I've seen it said that it was because of the A-Bomb. lmao.

Greg

 

[flacaltenn]

Of course if the hairball cat wants a different reading on climate model FORECASTING performance. Doesn't like the Dr Roy Spencer version, let's just submit the IPCC AR5 version...

Sucks kibble don't it???

What was funny, the IPCC added the GREY shaded section, which is outside of all their error bars, so that it would imply that their predictions were still somewhat valid. Deception of the highest magnitude... You will note there is no descriptive ] block. it was simply put their to deceive.

That must be from the IPCC program managers. The ones that actually WRITE these reports with help from selected hired scientists.
But you may be right.. Would have to check the description in that section of AR5..

 

[gtopa1]

Lindzen and Choi (2009)? Universally regarded as a bad paper. Lindzen concluded temperature sensitivity was low. But to do so, he only used temperature data from the tropics, the region of the earth where the warming is smallest. That cherrypicking made the conclusions invalid.

He tried a rewrite in 2011, but he didn't address that fatal flaw, so the peer reviewers rejected it, and he could only find a publisher in an obscure Korean journal. Natural, Lindzen claimed he was persecuted after the peer reviewers universally rejected his flawed science.

On what basis was his paper rejected??

We have corrected the approach of Lindzen and Choi (2009), based on all the criticisms made of the earlier work (Chung et al., 2010; Murphy, 2010; Trenberth et al., 2010). First of all, to improve the statistical significance of the results, we supplemented ERBE data with CERES data, filtered out data noise with 3-month smoothing, objectively chose the intervals based on the smoothed data, and provided confidence intervals for all sensitivity estimates. These constraints helped us to more accurately obtain climate feedback factors than with the original use of monthly data. Next, our new formulas for climate feedback
and sensitivity reflect sharing of tropical feedback with the globe, so that the tropical region is now properly identified as an open system. Last, the feedback factors inferred from the atmospheric models are more consistent with IPCC-defined climate sensitivity
than those from the coupled models. This is because, in the presence of cloud-induced radiative changes altering SST, the climate feedback estimates by the present approach tends to be inaccurate. With all corrections, the conclusion still appears to be
that all current models seem to exaggerate climate sensitivity (some greatly). Moreover, we have shown why studies using simple regressions of ΔFlux on ΔSST serve poorly to determine feedbacks.

To respond to the criticism of our emphasis on the tropical domain (Murphy, 2010; Trenberth et al., 2010), we analyzed the complete record of CERES for the globe (Dessler, 2010) (Note that ERBE data is not available for the high latitudes since the field-of-view is between 60oS and 60oN). As seen in the previous section, the use of the global CERES record leads to a result that is basically similar to that from the tropical data in this
study. The global CERES record, however, contains more noise than the tropical record.
This result lends support to the argument that the water vapor feedback is primarily restricted to the tropics, and there are reasons to suppose that this is also the case for cloud feedbacks. Although, in principle, climate feedbacks may arise from any
latitude, there are substantive reasons for supposing that they are, indeed, concentrated mostly in the tropics. The most prominent model feedback is that due to water vapor, where it is commonly noted that models behave roughly as though relative humidity
were fixed. Pierrehumbert (2009) examined outgoing radiation as a function of surface temperature theoretically for atmospheres with constant relative humidity. His results are shown in Fig. 13.


Fig. 13. OLR vs. surface temperature for water vapor in air, with relative humidity held fixed. The surface air pressure is 1 bar. The temperature profile in the model is the water/air moist adiabat. Calculations were carried out with the Community Climate Model radiation code (Pierrehumbert, 2009).

Specific humidity is low in the extratropics, while it is high in the tropics. We see that for extratropical conditions, outgoing radiation closely approximates the Planck black body radiation (leading to small feedback). However, for tropical conditions, increases in outgoing radiation are suppressed, implying substantial positive feedback. There are also reasons to suppose that cloud feedbacks are largely confined to the tropics. In the
extratropics, clouds are mostly stratiform clouds that are associated with ascending air while descending regions are cloudfree. Ascent and descent are largely determined by the large scale wave motions that dominate the meteorology of the extratropics, and for these waves, we expect approximately 50% cloud cover regardless of temperature (though details may depend on temperature). On the other hand, in the tropics, upper level clouds, at least, are mostly determined by detrainment from cumulonimbus towers, and cloud coverage is observed to depend significantly on temperature (Rondanelli and Lindzen, 2008).

As noted by LCH01, with feedbacks restricted to the tropics, their contribution to global sensitivity results from sharing the feedback fluxes with the extratropics. This led to inclusion of the sharing factor c in Eq. (6). The choice of a larger factor c leads to
a smaller contribution of tropical feedback to global sensitivity, but the effect on the climate sensitivity estimated from the observation is minor. For example, with c = 3, climate sensitivity from the observation and the models is 0.8 K and a higher value
(between 1.3 K and 6.4 K), respectively. With c = 1.5, global equilibrium sensitivity from the observation and the models is 0.6 K and any value higher than 1.6 K, respectively. Note that, as in LCH01, we are not discounting the possibility of feedbacks in the extratropics, but rather we are focusing on the tropical contribution to global feedbacks. Note that, when the dynamical heat transports toward the extratropics are taken into account, the overestimation of tropical feedback by GCMs may lead to even greater overestimation of climate sensitivity (Bates, 2011).

This emphasizes the importance of the tropical domain itself. Our analysis of the data only demands relative instrumental stability over short periods, and is largely independent of long term drift. Concerning the different sampling from the ERBE and CERES instruments, Murphy et al. (2009) repeated the Forster and Gregory (2006) analysis for the CERES and found very different values than those from the ERBE. However, in this
study, the addition of CERES data to the ERBE data does little to change the results for ΔFlux/ΔSST – except that its value is raised a little (as is also true when only CERES data is used.). This may be because these previous simple regression approaches include
the distortion of feedback processes by equilibration. In distinguishing a precise feedback from the data, the simple regression method is dependent on the data period, while our method is not. The simple regression result in Fig. 7 is worse if the model
integration time is longer (probably due to the greater impact of increasing radiative forcing).

Our study also suggests that, in current coupled atmosphereocean models, the atmosphere and ocean are too weakly coupled since thermal coupling is inversely proportional to sensitivity (Lindzen and Giannitsis, 1998). It has been noted by Newman et al. (2009) that coupling is crucial to the simulation of phenomena like El Niño. Thus, corrections of the sensitivity of current climate models might well improve the behavior of coupled
models, and should be encouraged. It should be noted that there have been independent tests that also suggest sensitivities less than predicted by current models. These tests are based on the response to sequences of volcanic eruptions (Lindzen and Giannitsis, 1998), on the vertical structure of observed versus modeled temperature increase (Douglass, 2007; Lindzen, 2007), on ocean heating (Schwartz, 2007; Schwartz, 2008), and on
satellite observations (Spencer and Braswell, 2010). Most claims of greater sensitivity are based on the models that we have just shown can be highly misleading on this matter. There have also been attempts to infer sensitivity from paleoclimate data (Hansen
et al., 1993), but these are not really tests since the forcing is essentially unknown given major uncertainties in clouds, dust loading and other factors. Finally, we have shown that the attempts to obtain feedbacks from simple regressions of satellite measured outgoing radiation on SST are inappropriate.

One final point needs to be made. Low sensitivity of global mean temperature anomaly to global scale forcing does not imply that major climate change cannot occur. The earth has, of course, experienced major cool periods such as those associated with ice ages and warm periods such as the Eocene (Crowley and North, 1991). As noted, however, in Lindzen (1993), these episodes were primarily associated with changes in the equatorto-
pole temperature difference and spatially heterogeneous forcing. Changes in global mean temperature were simply the residue of such changes and not the cause.

New paper from Lindzen and Choi implies that the models are exaggerating climate sensitivity. Watts Up With That

Greg