Your helicopter analogy doesn’t make any sense at all.
The very simple point about warming a fish tank with a heater is that you can’t measure what will happen to its temperature unless you allow enough time for any changes to take full effect. The bigger the fish tank (and the Earth with its oceans is a pretty big tank!) the longer the time needed for an accurate result.
R. Gates, the paleo data is not exactly simple to interpret. I have tried to show you on a number of occasions that changes in meridional and zonal heat flux impacts climate’s response to forcing. It is an asymmetry thing. You can just pick a period a few hundred k or m ago and expect the same response.
Right now the temperature of the NH oceans is ~3C warmer than the SH ocean with the SH getting much more solar forcing than the NH. If the difference in the NH and SH oceans change over time as is becoming pretty well established, paleo can be a complete red herring without kick butt ocean modeling, which we don’t got.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2009PA001809/abstract
Since you are becoming an expert on SSW events, it might be a good idea to look at how the stratosphere “averages” respond to different forcings and heat transfers.
http://redneckphysics.blogspot.com/2013/05/tropical-hot-spot.html
That definitely doesn’t do it justice, but basically internal transfer has a huge impact on “temperature” and little impact on “energy”. Paleo is temperature estimates with an average +/-1 C of accuracy. It can infer a crap load of stuff and never prove anything.
Myrrh, Keeling and his group stand out as outstanding scientists who work on very difficult problems. I have looked through many of his publications and publications of his colleagues and one can see they are very cautious in their claims for instrument design and measurement.
Their sampling and calibration routines, including testing their own standards and publishing errors identified due to their standard gas mixtures being below specification, indicate that they are dedicated, hardworking and honest scientists and people.
I disagree that money is necessarily wasted if ECS is 1.7C.
First of all it depends on how it’s distributed. The average doesn’t mean much except where the uneven distribution happens to be average which is probably not much of the planet. Empirically speaking it’s delivered preferentially to where/when the surface is dry which means higher latitudes over northern hemisphere continents. The southern hemisphere with more ocean moderates continental warming. NH there’s less influence on land temperatures because there is more land mass on average further inland. Then it further depends on when, how, and if weather patterns change and how they change. A few degrees C warming inland in high northern latitudes might be good and might be bad. Paleo inference from most of the last 500my when there were no ice caps and far higher CO2 speaks to it greening the earth which should be welcome news to those who want the biospahere to flourish and grow. There is growing evidence the earth has been greening for the past 50 years and that’s likely a result of higher CO2 level in the atmosphere because CO2 is, if nothing else, plant food and plants can utilize a lot more than 400ppm and aren’t harmed by 5x as much as that provided nothing else required for growth is missing like adequate water, sunlight, and NPK in the soil. Moreover plants require less water with increasing CO2 which makes it doubly beneficial.
Given that the burning of fossil fuel is what makes global civilization possible with rising living standards even as it grows the weight of all the evidence points to a huge net benefit from fossil fuel consumption in just about every way after cleaning out the pollutants that have known immediate health hazards like particulates and noxious gases.
So beneficial in fact that when it runs out we’ll be in a world of hurt if the energy can’t be produced and consumed in a less costly way and we’ll also want to keep the atmospheric level fluffed up so the earth can keep on greening.
Then when we further consider that there’s no politically possible way of limiting fossil fuel consumption on a global basis enough to matter even if the consequence turns out to be disastrous then it’s even more imperative we don’t spend money unless we know with reasonable certainty that the money is going to a productive end. Since we know we would benefit from less expensive energy and we know that traditional refined fuels like gasoline and diesel and jet-a are getting onerously more expensive due to running out of light sweet crude then the only sensible place to invest is in alternative energy which holds out the promise of being less expensive than fossil fuels and doesn’t require replacement of trillions upon trillions of dollars in capital equipment that is powered by gasoline, diesel, and jet-a. We need artificial drop-in replacements for those fuels to transition away from oil as a primary energy source. I don’t hold out much hope for nuclear but it should certainly be pursued. Harvesting sunlight is potentially almost free either by solid state conversion to electricity then storing in chemical bond energy (which if the electricity is free doesn’t really matter how inefficient the conversion to chemical storage) or direct generation of chemical bond energy biologically. Windmills and crap like that are ineffective band-aids at best and at worst things that people exploit for personal gain at the expense of everyone else.
typo correction less should be more: NH there’s MORE influence on land temperatures…
“Given that the lapse rate varies tremendously with latitude (i.e. poleward/equatorward of the Polar Front), whatever “standard” lapse rate was used in aircraft design included a large range of variation. “
That is worth pursuing. I would agree that definitely the height of the tropopause depends with latitude. In fact, the tropopause height is proportional to the mean tropospheric temperature; that is a rule of thumb used by pilots and meteorologists.
One way for this relationship to hold is for the lapse rate to be constant across latitudes.
Sure enough, this is what research has found out:
“Early observations of the vertical structure indicated that the lapse rate was close to 6.5 L km-1 with rather little seasonal or latitudinal variation”
[1]P. H. Stone and J. H. Carlson, “Atmospheric lapse rate regimes and their parameterization,” J. Atmos. Sci, vol. 36, no. 3, pp. 415–423, 1979.
However, that paper does reveal that there are deviations with latitude and with pressure as the altitude changes, which is indicative of instability of atmospheric layers. I will keep researching along these lines. As a loyal marxbot, thanks for the tip.
It’s a joke. You are apparently culturally illiterate, not being aware of the character Mojo JoJo from the kid’s cartoon Power-Puff Girls.
Perhaps, if you’re talking about tropospheric lapse rate. However, the height of the tropopause varies tremendously, especially relative to the characteristic height(s) of radiative surfaces. When you start talking about radiative surfaces, you need to factor in the essentially zero lapse rate of the lower stratosphere poleward of the Polar Jet Stream. This will lower the average lapse rate (at that point) considerably.
Excess heat diffuses downwards just like you would intuitively think. This will melt an iceberg more right below the surface and less as it gets deeper, but it does add up.
This is the model of dispersive thermal diffusion:
http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com/2013/03/ocean-heat-content-model.html
Look at your 3rd plot! Typo? Fair enough, but you did twice on the same graph.
My apologies…must be dyslicix ;)
I take it back atmos not atoms!
I am trying to explain the mean 6.5 C/km lapse rate on earth.
And the equivalent on Venus.
Each one is 50% below what the adiabatic derivation predicts. Venus has no water vapor in contrast to Earth.
Somebody must have a first-order derivation for this actual value. That’s all I am seeking.
I see many references to the derivation of the adiabatic derivation on Earth of a 9.8 C/km lapse rate, where it concludes that this is “close” to the 6.5 C/km mean lapse rate observed.
Close?
How could 50% off be considered close?
It just kind of bothers me, because that accuracy would not be tolerated in other situations.
Doc
Firstly, I didn’t realise you could determine the forcings from simple linear regression. Surely, you need to look at all the variables. PCA would be a good starting point.
As for CO2 release from oceans, one could assess this by first detrending both datasets then perform a cross correlation. I can see the problem with CO2 though, you’d need to remove the seasonal signal (also) – but this should be easy. If there is a clear lag effect then you got something happening. However, oceans take a long time to heat up and you’re not likely to see such an effect over a century, in short, you’d need to perform the same processing step with data covering tens of thousands of years. And this is the problem, you’re performing regression on two data series and assuming causality of a casual relationship. The trend could be just two natural signals coming into phase over during the period you’re interested in.
I am not referring to the stratosphere. I am talking about the linear decrease of temperature with increasing altitude in the troposphere. That is the constant lapse rate (or gradient) that should be derivable.
On top of that, there is the Poisson’s equation relating pressure, density, and temperature together. The adiabatic exponent of this relation is also off by 50%, which is why it is more often called a polytropic exponent. There is also the barometric formula, which also is dependent on the lapse rate. Lots of altimeters are based on a calibration due to the 6.5 C/km mean.
Where is the derivation for this that shows how it deviates 50% from the adiabatic prediction?
I am just curious.
This multi-decadal oscillation of the GMST has been described by Swanson et al :
“Temperatures reached a relative maximum around 1940, cooled until the mid 1970s, and have warmed from that point to the present. Radiative forcings due to solar variations, volcanoes, and aerosols have often been invoked as explanations for this non-monotonic variation (4). However, it is possible that long-term natural variability, rooted in changes in the ocean circulation, underlies much of this variability over multiple decades (8–12).”
After removing the multi-decadal oscillation, Wu et al have reported their result for the long-term warming rate [2]:
“…the rapidity of the warming in the late twentieth century was a result of concurrence of a secular warming trend and the warming phase of a multidecadal (~65-year period) oscillatory variation and we estimated the contribution of the former to be about 0.08 deg C per decade since ~1980.”
This long-term warming rate result of 0.08 deg C/decade by Wu et al has been confirmed by Tung and Zhou:
“The underlying net anthropogenic warming rate in the industrial era is found to have been steady since 1910 at 0.07–0.08 °C/decade, with superimposed AMO-related ups and downs that included the early 20th century warming, the cooling of the 1960s and 1970s, the accelerated warming of the 1980s and 1990s, and the recent slowing of the warming rates.”
Swanson et al. (2009)
Long-term natural variability and 20th century climate change
http://www.pnas.org/content/106/38/16120.full.pdf+html
Wu et al. (2011)
On the time-varying trend in global-mean surface temperature
http://bit.ly/10ry70o
Tung and Zhou (2012)
Using data to attribute episodes of warming and cooling in instrumental records
http://www.pnas.org/content/110/6/2058
Grima
Is it true that the models were written before the PDO was even discovered? If so then it must follow that what you say is correct.
Girma achieved a main post at WUWT with this, but it did not get a good reception from the denizens as even they seem to have their limits. Perhaps DocMartyn can get his published over there and see if he gets a better reception.
there were only two periods in thr 20th century when global temperature rose consistentiy: 1910 to 1940 and 1970 to 2000 and none in the 21st. Until we understand this behaviour we ate in no position to forecast future temperature anb the part played by CO2. If CO2 were rhe consisrent culprit thrn surely rhid would show up in the cross-correlation between CO2 and temperaturs but the IPCC nrver published this function. Why not? They don’t understand climate. See my website underlined above.
I noticed the geniuses over there arguing over numbers. One claiming that 12,000+ papers have been evaluated, whereas another is claiming that is a lie since the number is actually 11,991.
Teamwork is a little off. Probably due to jealousy over a scene-chewing youngster.
