Yes, natural variability was way off, that means attribution was also wrong. Many feedbacks in existing models will need to be revised significantly.
I suspect water vapor is one. I think during Pinatubo attribution studies, they considered drying from cloud formation, temp, wind,… but I don’t think they considered the change in SW radiation on bodies of water and moist surfaces.
“Physics going back a century tells us that doubling CO2 causes warming, and furthermore that warming leads to more water vapor in the atmosphere that causes more warming. There is nothing circular about that. There was a direct prediction made before any of the warming was measurable or even before CO2 levels and changes were well known.’
Higher temp causes less evaporation than direct sunlight, and so clouds come into the picture. This has been known for some time, Jim D
For Steven Mosher. I thought you were going to educate me on what the scientific method is. I understand the difference between estimates and measurements. I thought I understood the scientific method. Where am I wrong?
+1000
Springer, SST appears to be capped at 30C because “average” ocean temperature is at 4C. The Dead Sea which is land locked has a higher maximum surface temperature, ~35C. The difference should be close to the rate of poleward advection.or about 32 Wm-2 which established the sea ice edge. In about 400 years should the “average” ocean temperature rise to 5C then the maximum SST will rise to about 31C increasing the overall poleward advection by about 5 Wm-2 with a corresponding increase in high latitude SST/Surface Air Temperature. So SST is not “fixed” by any means at 30C, just limited by ocean sub-surface heat transport. It is an energy balance thing :)
Brian Rose has been doing quite a bit of work with Aqua and ridge world models.
Yes, this would be most welcome !!!
CD – The 30 C limit of SST is hit during the day. It is a fast mechanism. Ocean heat uptake is a slow mechanism. I would expect it to operate over decades or centuries.
It’s a continuum. Air at higher temperature can hold more water vapor. This has been known forever. To first-order, clouds form along a phase line of Pressure/Volume/Temperature. This means that with higher surface temperature, the cloud bank will likely just move higher in altitude.
What kind of difference will this make? The difference will be determined by how much more a higher concentration of water vapor leads to a greater GHG effect versus how much difference a higher average cloud bank makes.
The water vapor factor is what is known as a first-order positive feedback while the cloud elevation factor is known as a second-order effect. The lapse rate modification may be greater than the cloud altitude effect.
Skeptics, please calculate the second order effects of cloud elevation changes. Consider it a homework problem — can’t be too hard for you since you seem to have all the answers.
Steve: OK. So you can get an outline answer by using the mathemagics that the models use without running the models themselves.
Still does not explain the variability in the data sets on times scales from above one year to below a century which are clearly visible in the measurements to date.
The satellite data shows exactly that
Here we have a high quality filter at annual resolution that shows the way in which the temperatures have evolved since 1979 (per UAH). Care to take a moment to think how you would describe that observed state of affairs?
Just how does the modelled system or its methodology demonstrate the above observed behaviour? What short term feedbacks to you have to use to create such an outcome in the models? Why do they not have such mechanisms?
Doug Cotton writes:
“(2) Imagine a process in an isolated system wherein (one-way) radiation from a cooler atmosphere is assumed to penetrate 2mm beneath the warmer surface of a lake and raise the temperature of that layer of sub-surface water. Does entropy decrease, stay the same or increase?”
I’m sorry. I can’t imagine net energy spontaneously going from cooler to warmer objects.
I predict a weak El Nino towards the end of this year based on this graph/predictor
http://climatedatablog.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/uah-tropics.png
For Steven Mosher. About your many “methods of observational science” discussion with Jim Cripwell, please notice that in the magacine “Science”, 4 Oct. 2013 in an article by R.A. Kerr, it is said: ” “Equilibrium climate sensitivity is kind of an odd diagnostic, since it represents something that has never been, and will never be, observed in nature”, writes modeler and IPCC author Gerald Meehl of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, in an e-mail.”
May be, Steven Mosher, you need to explain Gerald Meehl your many “methods of observational science” for the ECS parameter.
Well, General, the troposphere is in the realm of “macrostate statistics” such as I use, but a fundamental assumption of Kinetic Theory is that the dynamics of the molecules can be treated classically. Feel free to edit Wikipedia if you think otherwise.
Besides, warm gas rising on Uranus is not a fact of life (or no life) out there. There’s no significant incident solar radiation or internal energy reaching the base of its nominal troposphere where it’s hotter than here on Earth, even though nearly 30 times further from the Sun.
On Venus, when the Sun rises, most of its incident energy is absorbed by carbon dioxide in the colder upper half of the troposphere and above. Some of that now-warmer gas “falls” to the far hotter surface, and that’s how we can explain why the surface temperature rises by 5 degrees over the course of the 4-month-long Venus day.
Oh, and there’s no hot air rising in the outer 10Km of Earth’s crust where a borehole in Germany enabled temperature measurements that conformed with the expected gravito-thermal gradient.
You know, General, you really don’t have to teach me what climatologists teach their climatology students who teach their climatology students … I’ve spent thousands of hours learning about all the details of the hoax, so that I could be watertight in my book when debunking it..
So please keep your arguments to physics in which you hopefully have at least a pass degree in order to participate in this somewhat esoteric discussion of 21st century breakthroughs in thermodynamics and the physics of radiative heat transfer. Otherwise you’ll be out of your depth, as have been hundreds of climatologists I’ve debated over the last three or four years on several climate blogs.
For a very comprehensive analysis of the climatology conjecture that the Second Law can still apply to the “net” of two or more independent processes, see my peer-reviewed paper “Radiated Energy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics” published on several websites two years ago, and which you’ll easily find on Google.
Then consider the fact that the second law of thermodynamics states that “Every process occurring in nature proceeds in the sense in which the sum of the entropies of all bodies taking part in the process is increased.”
Notice the words “every process” (singular) and the word “proceeds” which rules out going backwards first before you go further forwards. Radiation does not have to be two-way. Just consider radiation from a colder atmosphere penetrating just below the surface of warmer water. Is it absorbed just below the surface like solar radiation (both visible and IR) can be down to 10 metres or more in the ocean thermoclines? If not, then why not, and what does happen?
Thinking some more about this overnight, what Steven Mosher fails to realise is that different problems can be solved using a variety of scientific techniques. In my own career, this includes problems solved using the various techniques of operations research.
Bur in the case of CAGW, there is only one way to show whether the hypothesis of CAGW is correct or not, and that is to use the scientific method; the way the majority of problems are solved in physics. CAGW will remain a hypothesis unless and until climate sensitivity has actually been measured; something that is beyond the capabilities of current technology.
Max is reduced to pointless demands with my chart.
Looking at just the points, they appear to be heading down at the end of the chart.
“The water vapor factor is what is known as a first-order positive feedback while the cloud elevation factor is known as a second-order effect”
That is a complete perversion of the accepted usage of the terms
first-order
second-order
positive feedback
cloaking your shallowness by peppering your language with scientific jargon does not bestow confidence.
Amazing that the land to ocean warming started at 2:1 years ago and now continues at 2:1.
http://imageshack.com/a/img838/6866/ypot.gif
What will Max do? What will he do?
And comparing the chart to past ENSO events, it appears you have a coincident indicator, not a predictive one.
Take the temperature down to 0K. See how much water vapor is left.
Push the temperature up another 100C, see what kind of steam bath we would be in.
That’s one of the things I learned about how to apply physics. You look at boundary conditions and you can fill in the gaps. First-order effects are the direct interpolation or extrapolation, while second-order effects are the wiggles in the curve that fill in the detail.
I suppose I could demand my money back from the university, eh?
