Climate Factors

History Shows Today’s Ocean at Cool End of Range

Posted on by Ron Clutz

You may have heard claims recently that the ocean is now “boiling”.  Fortunately, a world expert in ocean heat uptake provides a deep dive into oceanic temperature history, thereby putting that fear to rest.

Geoffrey Gebbie of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution has published an highly informative study Combining Modern and Paleoceanographic Perspectives on Ocean Heat Uptake in Annual Review of Marine Science (2021).  H/T Kenneth Richard.  Below are the main findings, along with some excerpts in italics with my bolds, explaining some oceanography for the rest of us.

The large climatic shifts that started with the melting of the great ice sheets have
involved significant ocean heat uptake that was sustained over centuries and millennia,
and modern-ocean heat content changes are small by comparison.

Abstract

Monitoring Earth’s energy imbalance requires monitoring changes in the heat content of the ocean. Recent observational estimates indicate that ocean heat uptake is accelerating in the twenty-first century. Examination of estimates of ocean heat uptake over the industrial era, the Common Era of the last 2,000 years, and the period since the Last Glacial Maximum, 20,000 years ago, permits a wide perspective on modern-day warming rates. In addition, this longer-term focus illustrates how the dynamics of the deep ocean and the cryosphere were active in the past and are still active today. The large climatic shifts that started with the melting of the great ice sheets have involved significant ocean heat uptake that was sustained over centuries and millennia, and modern-ocean heat content changes are small by comparison.

Objective

This review seeks to put the most recent ocean heat uptake estimates of 0.5–0.7 W m−2 into the context of longer (multidecadal to millennial) timescales. Such timescales put a wider perspective on present-day heat uptake. In addition, the dynamics of these longer timescales may still have some expression today. This research direction leads to the long temperature time series of paleoceanographic proxies that predate the instrumental record. Ocean heat uptake over the last deglaciation (∼20,000–10,000 years ago) and the Common Era (previous two millennia) will serve as examples to explore the longer-timescale dynamics of ocean heat uptake.

Common Era Evolution of Mean Ocean Temperature

The Ocean2k global-mean SST compilation is derived from 57 marine proxy records that, in aggregate, show a statistically significant cooling trend from 700 to 1700 CE over the MCA–LIA transition (Medieval Climate Anomaly, Little Ice Age). The data compilation contains a time series of 200-year averages that have been nondimensionalized. Here, we dimensionalize the values with the recommended values of McGregor et al. (2015) to obtain temperature anomalies, and the inferred global-mean surface cooling over the MCA–LIA transition is near the high end of the expected 0.4–0.6°C range (Figure 4a).

Figure 4  The Common Era. (a) The evolution of Ocean2k SST (blue circles, with σ/2 error bars) and mean ocean temperature, , as inferred from noble-gas measurements (red circles, with σ/2 error bars), the Gebbie & Huybers (2019) Common Era inversion (red line), and a power-law estimate (black line, with 2σ error shown in gray), referenced to global-mean SST in 1870. (b,c) Average ocean heat uptake over a running 50-year interval (panel b) and a 500-year interval (panel c) plotted from the Gebbie & Huybers (2019) inversion (red line) and a power-law estimate (black line, with 1σ error shown in gray). Heat uptake is expressed in terms of an equivalent planetary energy imbalance. Abbreviation: SST, sea-surface temperature.

One realization of the Common Era was produced by an inversion that attempted to reconstruct the three-dimensional evolution of oceanic temperature anomalies over the last 2,000 years (Gebbie & Huybers 2019). The inversion fits an empirical ocean circulation model to modern-day tracer observations, historical temperature observations from the HMS Challenger expedition of 1872–1876 (Murray 1895), and the global-mean Ocean2k SST. The resulting ocean temperature evolution is dominated by the propagation of surface climate anomalies from the MCA and LIA into the subsurface ocean, where the propagation is coherent for several centuries (red line in Figure 4a). Although the Gebbie & Huybers (2019) inversion was not constrained with oceanic power laws, the resulting mean ocean temperature is consistent with a power-law estimate over the Common Era.

Early-twenty-first-century SST may already be warmer than MCA SST, but it is
less likely that modern mean ocean temperature has surpassed MCA values.

From the Gebbie & Huybers (2019) inversion, it was inferred that the MCA ocean stored 1,000 ZJ more than the ocean of the year 2000, and that the ∼500 ZJ of heat uptake during the modern warming era is just one-third of what is required to reach MCA levels. Amplification of the high-latitude SST signal relative to the global mean can produce a greater MCA–LIA mean ocean cooling, which explains the greater MCA heat content relative to the present day. When considering the range of Common Era scenarios consistent with a power law, however, some cases are admitted where the MCA and the present day have similar oceanic heat content.

Deep-Ocean Heat Uptake During Modern Warming

Figure 6  Ocean heat uptake below 2,000-m depth, in terms of a planetary energy imbalance, for 50-year averages given by Zanna et al. (2019) (blue line), Gebbie & Huybers (2019) (red line), and the power-law estimate from this review (black line, with 2σ error in gray). An observational estimate (purple, with 2σ error bar) for 1990–2010 is also included (Purkey & Johnson 2010).

The confidence in upper-ocean heat content during the modern warming era starkly contrasts with the remaining uncertainties in heat content below 2,000-m depth (Figure 6). Observational estimates have indicated a deep-ocean heat uptake of 68 ± 61 mW m−2 (2σ) when differencing hydrographic sections between 1990 and 2010 (Purkey & Johnson 2010, Desbruyères et al. 2017). Estimation of deep-ocean heat uptake over the entire instrumental era relies to a greater extent on circulation models. Simulations of modern warming that are initialized from equilibrium in 1870 suggest that heat penetrates downward (Gregory 2000) and that average deep-ocean heat uptake is small over 50-year time intervals (Zanna et al. 2019). These estimates would not capture ongoing trends from the earlier Common Era, if any existed. An inversion that accounts for the LIA found a deep-ocean heat loss of 80 mW m−2 early in the modern warming era (Gebbie & Huybers 2019), and our power-law estimate suggests that an even greater cooling is possible, although the uncertainties are large. These discrepancies highlight the ongoing effect that Common Era variability could play in the modern-day ocean. Unfortunately, recent observations do not appear to be sufficient to distinguish between these scenarios, as they all suggest a weak deep-ocean heat uptake in the early twenty-first century.

Deep-ocean cooling could exist as the result of
disequilibrium between the upper and deep ocean.

Oceanic disequilibrium exists at a range of spatial and temporal scales, from local, short-term variability to longer-term changes that are anticipated to generally have greater spatial extent. Oceanic disequilibrium has been anticipated as a result of the 1815 Tambora (Stenchikov et al. 2009) and 1883 Krakatoa (Gleckler et al. 2006) volcanic eruptions and their lingering effects on energy imbalance. More generally, ocean disequilibrium can result from the differing adjustment times of the interior ocean to surface forcing, where the deep-ocean response may take longer than 1,000 years (e.g., Wunsch & Heimbach 2008). Accordingly, some influence of changes in surface climate over the last millennium is potentially present today. The most isolated waters of the mid-depth Pacific, for example, should still be adjusting to the MCA–LIA transition. In this scenario, these deep waters are cooling, but they are anomalously warm due to the residual influence of the MCA. 

The degree to which the ocean’s long memory affects today’s ocean is uncertain due to difficulties in integrating state-of-the-art circulation models over the entire Common Era. An accurate assessment may also require a model that can skillfully predict ocean circulation changes in both the past and the future. The climate history of the Common Era should also be better constrained by recovering additional observations, such as historical subsurface temperature observations and paleoceanographic data. Proper inference of climate sensitivity depends on the past oceanic heat uptake, which this review suggests is tied to the long timescale of deep-ocean dynamics.

Do notice the scale on the left axis. As though we can measure the whole ocean (71% of earth surface) to 0.05 C. It’s a formula converting zettajoules to temp change.

 

Sun and Water Drive Climate, Not Us

Posted on by Ron Clutz

One year time lapse of precipitable water (amount of water in the atmosphere)
from Jan 1, 2016 to Dec 31, 2016, as modeled by the GFS.The Pacific
ocean rotates into view just as the tropical cyclone season picks up steam.

Lately the media refers increasingly to how important is the water cycle in our climate system.  Unfortunately, as usual, the headlines confuse cause and effect.  For example, Climate change has a dramatic impact on the global water cycle, say researchers. from phys.org.  How perverse to position climate change as an agent rather than the effect from water fluxes in the ocean and atmosphere. The headline misleads entirely (written by scientists or journos?) as the beginning texts shows (in italics with my bolds).

For Christoph Schär, ETH Zurich’s Professor of Climate and Water Cycle, “global warming” is not quite accurate when it comes to describing the driver of climate change. “A better term would be ‘climate humidification,'” he explains. “Most of the solar energy that reaches the Earth serves to evaporate water and thereby drives the hydrological cycle.” Properly accounting for the implications of this is the most challenging task of all for climate modelers.

In order to build a global climate model, grid points spaced around 50 to 100 kilometers apart are used. This scale is too coarse to map small-scale, local thunderstorm cells. Yet it is precisely these thunderstorm cells—and where they occur—that drive atmospheric circulation, especially in the tropics, where solar radiation is highest.

The workaround, at present, is to add extra parameters to the model in order to map clouds. “But predicting future climate change is still pretty imprecise,” Schär says. “If we don’t know how many clouds are forming in the tropics, then we don’t know how much sunlight is hitting the earth’s surface—and hence we don’t know the actual size of the global energy balance.”

Even worse from NewScientist How we broke the water cycle and can no longer rely on rain to fall.  What hubris and how preposterous to claim our puny CO2 emissions have upset hydrology.  The lack of correlation is obvious to those who care to look:

The climatist paradigm is myopic and lopsided.  A previous post below provides a cure for those whose vision is impaired by the IPCC consensus view of climate reality.

Curing Radiation Myopia Regarding Climate

E.M. Smith provides an helpful critique of a recent incomplete theory of earth’s climate functioning in his Chiefio blog post So Close–Missing Convection and Homeostasis. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

It is Soooo easy to get things just a little bit off and miss reality. Especially in complex systems and even more so when folks raking in $Millions are interested in misleading for profit. Sigh.

Sabine Hosenfelder does a wonderful series of videos ‘explaining’ all sorts of interesting things in and about actual science and how the universe works. She is quite smart and generally “knows her stuff”. But… It looks like she has gotten trapped into the Radiative Model of Globull Warming.

The whole mythology of Global Warming depends on having you NOT think about anything but radiative processes and physics. To trap you into the Radiative Model. But the Earth is more complex than that. Much more complex. Then there’s the fact that you DO have some essential Radiative Physics to deal with, so the bait is there.   However…

It is absolutely essential to pay attention to convection in the lower atmosphere
and to the “feedback loops” or homeostasis in the system.

The system acts to restore its original state. There is NO “runaway greenhouse” or we would have never evolved into being since the early earth had astoundingly high levels of CO2 and we would have baked to death before getting out of our slime beds as microbes.

Figure 16. The geological history of CO2 level and temperature proxy for the past 400 million years. CO2 levels now are ~ 400ppm. Source: Davis, W. J. (2017).

OK, I’ll show you her video. It is quite good even with the “swing and a miss” at the end. She does 3 levels of The Greenhouse Gas Mythology so you can see the process evolving from grammar school to high school to college level of mythology. But then she doesn’t quite make it to Post-Doc Reality.

Where’s she wrong? (Well, not really wrong, but lacking…)

I see 2 major issues. First off, she talks about the “lower atmosphere warming”. Well, yes and no. It doesn’t “warm” in the sense of getting hotter, but it does speed up convection to move the added heat flow.

In English “heating” has 2 different meanings. Increasing temperature.
Increasing heat flow at a temperature.

We see this in “warm up the TV dinner in the microwave” meaning to heat it up from frozen to edible; and in the part where the frozen dinner is defrosting at a constant temperature as it absorbs heat but turns it into the heat of fusion of water. So you can “warm it up” by melting at a constant temperature of frozen water (but adding a LOT of thermal energy – “heat”) then later as increasing temperature once the ice is melted. It is very important to keep in mind that there are 2 kinds of “heating”. NOT just “increasing temperature”.

In the lower atmosphere, the CO2 window / Infrared Window is already firmly slammed shut. Sabine “gets that”. Yay! One BIG point for her! No amount of “greenhouse gas” is going to shut that IR window any more. As she points out, you get about 20 meters of transmission and then it is back to molecular vibrations (aka “heat”).

So what’s an atmosphere to do? It has heat to move! Well, it convects. It evaporates water.

Those 2 things dominate by orders of magnitude any sort of Radiative Model Physics. Yes, you have radiation of light bringing energy in, but then it goes into the ocean and into the dirt and the plants and even warms your skin on a sunny day. And it sits there. It does NOT re-radiate to any significant degree. Once “warmed” by absorption, heat trying to leave as IR hits a slammed shut window.

The hydrological cycle. Estimates of the observed main water reservoirs (black numbers in 10^3 km3 ) and the flow of moisture through the system (red numbers, in 10^3 km3 yr À1 ). Adjusted from Trenberth et al. [2007a] for the period 2002-2008 as in Trenberth et al. [2011].

So what does happen? Look around, what do you see? Clouds. Rain. Snow. (sleet hail fog etc. etc.)

Our planet is a Water Planet. It moves that energy (vibrations of atoms, NOT radiation) by having water evaporate into the atmosphere. (Yes, there are a few very dry deserts where you get some radiative effects and can get quite cold at night via radiation through very dry air, but our planet is 70% or so oceans, so those areas are minor side bars on the dominant processes). This water vapor makes the IR window even more closed (less distance to absorption). It isn’t CO2 that matters, it is the global water vapor.

What happens next?

Well, water holds a LOT of heat (vibration of atoms and NOT “temperature”) as the heat of vaporization. About 540 calories per gram (compared to 80 for melting “heat of fusion” and 1 for specific heat of a gram of water). Compare those numbers again. 1 for a gram of water. 80 for melting a gram of ice. 540 for evaporating a gram of water. It’s dramatically the case that evaporation of water matters a lot more than melting ice, and both of them make “warming water” look like an irrelevant thing.

Warming water is 1/80 as important as melting ice, and it is 1/540 th as important as evaporation of the surface of the water. Warming air is another order of magnitude less important to heat content.

So to have clue, one MUST look at the evaporation of water from the oceans as everything else is in the small change.

Look at any photo of the Earth from space. The Blue Marble covered in clouds. Water and clouds. The product of evaporation, convection, and condensation. Physical flows carrying all that heat (“vibration of atoms” and NOT temperature, remember). IF you add more heat energy, you can speed up the flows, but it will not cause a huge increase in temperature (and mostly none at all). It is mass flow that changes. The number of vibrating molecules at a temperature, not the temperature of each.

In the end, a lot of mass flow happens, lofting all that water vapor with all that heat of vaporization way up toward the Stratosphere. This is why we have a troposphere, a tropopause (where it runs out of steam… literally…) and a stratosphere.

What happens when it gets to the stratosphere boundary? Well, along the way that water vapor turns into water liquid very tiny drops (clouds) and eventually condenses to big drops of water (rain) and some of it even freezes (hail, snow, etc.). Now think about that for a minute. That’s 540 calories per gram of heat (molecular vibration NOT temperature, remember) being “dumped” way up high in the top of the troposphere as it condenses, and another 80 / gram if if freezes. 620 total. That’s just huge.

This is WHY we have a globe covered with rain, snow, hail, etc. etc. THAT is all that heat moving. NOT any IR Radiation from the surface. Let that sink in a minute. Fix it in your mind. WATER and ICE and Water Vapor are what moves the heat, not radiation. We ski on it, swim in it, have it water our crops and flood the land. That’s huge and it is ALL evidence of heat flows via heat of vaporization and fusion of water.

It is all those giga-tons of water cycling to snow, ice and rain, then falling back to be lofted again as evaporation in the next cycle. That’s what moves the heat to the stratosphere where CO2 then radiates it to space (after all, radiation toward the surface hits that closed IR window and stops.) At most, more CO2 can let the Stratosphere radiate (and “cool”) better. It can not make the Troposphere any less convective and non-radiative.

Then any more energy “trapped” at the surface would just run the mass transport water cycle faster. It would not increase the temperature.

More molecules would move, but at a limit on temperature. Homeostasis wins. We can see this already in the Sub-Tropics. As the seasons move to fall and winter, water flows slow dramatically. I have to water my Florida lawn and garden. As the seasons move to spring and summer, the mass flow picks up dramatically. Eventually reaching hurricane size. Dumping up to FEET of condensed water (that all started as warm water vapor evaporating from the ocean). It is presently headed for about 72 F today (and no rain). At the peak of hurricane season, we get to about 84 or 85 F ocean surface temperature as the water vapor cycle is running full blast and we get “frog strangler” levels of rain. That’s the difference. Slow water cycle or fast.

IF (and it is only an “if”, not a when) you could manage to increase the heat at the surface of the planet in, say, Alaska: At most you would get a bit more rain in summer, a bit more snow in winter, and MAYBE only a slight possible, of one or two days that are rain which could have been snow or sleet.

Then there’s the fact that natural cycles swamp all of that CO2 fantasy anyway. The Sun, as just one example, had a large change of IR / UV levels with both the Great Pacific Climate Shift (about 1975) and then back again in about 2000. Planetary tilt, wobble, eccentricity of the orbit and more put us in ice ages (as we ARE right now, but in an “interglacial” in this ice age… a nice period of warmth that WILL end) and pulls us out of them. Glacials and interglacials come and go on various cycles (100,000 years, 40,000 years, and 12,000 year interglacials – ours ending now, but slowly). The simple fact is that Nature Dominates, and we are just not relevant. To think we are is hubris of the highest order.

See Also  Bill Gray: H20 is Climate Control Knob, not CO2

Figure 9: Two contrasting views of the effects of how the continuous intensification of deep cumulus convection would act to alter radiation flux to space. The top (bottom) diagram represents a net increase (decrease) in radiation to space

Footnote

There are two main reasons why investigators are skeptical of AGW (anthropogenic global warming) alarm. This post intends to be an antidote to myopic and lop-sided understandings of our climate system.

  1. CO2 Alarm is Myopic: Claiming CO2 causes dangerous global warming is too simplistic. CO2 is but one factor among many other forces and processes interacting to make weather and climate.

Myopia is a failure of perception by focusing on one near thing to the exclusion of the other realities present, thus missing the big picture. For example: “Not seeing the forest for the trees.”  AKA “tunnel vision.”

2. CO2 Alarm is Lopsided: CO2 forcing is too small to have the overblown effect claimed for it. Other factors are orders of magnitude larger than the potential of CO2 to influence the climate system.

Lopsided

Lop-sided refers to a failure in judging values, whereby someone lacking in sense of proportion, places great weight on a factor which actually has a minor influence compared to other forces. For example: “Making a mountain out of a mole hill.”

The Big Lie About Global Warming

Posted on by Ron Clutz

The notion that CO2 from human activities causes global warming has multiple flaws, many of which have been dissected and rebutted here and elsewhere.  But The Big Lie is to fundamentally misrepresent how Earth’s climate system works. Richard Lindzen explains in the above interview with Jordan Peterson.  For those who prefer reading I provide a transcript from the closed captions in italics with my bolds and added images.

JP: When you started to object to the narrative, back say in ‘92, To what narrative were you objecting and on what grounds were you objecting?

RL: You’re touching on something that took me a while to understand. You know Goebbels famously said: If you tell a big enough lie and repeat it often enough, it’ll become the truth. there’s been a lot of that in this. But there are aspects of establishing the narrative, that is, what makes something the truth that I hadn’t appreciated.

So the narrative was the climate is determined by a greenhouse effect
and adding CO2 to it increases warming. And moreover besides CO2
the natural greenhouse substances–water vapor, clouds, upper level clouds–
will amplify whatever man does.

Now that immediately goes against Le Chatelier’s principle which says: If you perturb a system and it is capable internally of counteracting that, it will. And our system is so capable.

So that was a little bit odd. You began wondering, where did these feedbacks come from? Immediately people including myself started looking into the feedbacks, and seeing whether there were any negative ones, and how did it all work?

But underlying it, and this is what I learned: if you want to get a narrative established, the crucial thing is to pepper it with errors, questionable things. So that the critics will seize on those and not question the basic narrative.

The basic narrative was that climate is controlled by the greenhouse effect. In point of fact the earth’s climate system has many regions, but two distinctly different regions. There are the tropics roughly minus 30 to plus 30 degrees latitude, and the extra Tropics outside of plus or minus 30 degrees.

They have very different dynamics, and this is the crucial thing for the Earth by the way. And this is a technicality and much harder to convey than saying that greenhouse gases are a blanket or that 97 percent of scientists agree.

This is actually a technical issue. The Earth rotates. Now people are aware that we have day and night, but there is something called the Coriolis effect. When you’re on a rotating system it gives rise to the appearance of forces that change the winds relative to the rotation. So at the pole the rotation vector is perpendicular to the surface, while at the equator it’s parallel to the surface:it’s zero.

And this gives you phenomenally different Dynamics. So where you don’t have a vertical component to the rotation, vector motions do what they do in the laboratory in small scales. If you have a temperature difference, it acts to wipe it out.

Figure 11. Most sunlight is absorbed in the tropics, and some of the heat energy is carried by air currents to the polar regions to be released back into space as thermal radiation. Along with energy, angular momentum — imparted to the air from the rotating Earth’s surface near the equator — is transported to higher northern and southern latitudes, where it is reabsorbed by the Earth’s surface. The Hadley circulation near the equator is largely driven by buoyant forces on warm, solar-heated air, but for mid latitudes the “Coriolis force” due to the rotation of the earth leads to transport of energy and angular momentum through slanted “baroclinic eddies.” Among other consequences of the conservation of angular momentum are the easterly trade winds near the equator and the westerly winds at mid latitudes.

And so if you look at the tropics the temperatures at any surface are relatively flat: they don’t vary much with latitude. On the other hand you go to the mid Latitudes, in the extra Tropics the temperature varies a lot between the tropics and the pole. We know that about how temperatures are cold at high Latitudes. And if you look at changes in climate in the Earth’s history, what they show is a Tropics that stays relatively constant, and what changes is the temperature difference between the tropics and the pole.

During the Ice Age it was about 60 degrees Centigrade, today it’s about 40.  During 50 million years ago something called the eocene the difference was about 20. So that’s all a function of what’s going on outside the tropics. Within the tropics the greenhouse effect is significant but what determines the temperature change between the tropics and the pole has very little to do with the greenhouse effect.

It is a dynamic phenomenon based on the fact that a temperature difference with latitude generates instabilities. These instabilities take the form of the cyclonic and anticyclonic patterns that you see on the weather map. You can see the tropics are very different from even a casual look at a weather map.
The systems that bring us weather travel from west to east at latitudes outside the tropics. Within the tropics they travel from east to west. The prevailing winds are opposite in the two sections.

Sometimes people say that changes due to the greenhouse effect are amplified at the poles. That is not true: there’s no physical basis for that Statement. All they do is determine the starting point for where the temperature changes in mid-latitudes and that’s determined mainly by Hydrodynamics.

Okay that’s complicated to explain to someone and yet it’s the basis for those claims of seemingly large significance of these small numbers. You know they’re saying if Global mean temperature goes up one and a half degrees it’s the end. That’s based on it getting much bigger at high latitudes and determining that. But all one and a half degrees at the equator would do or in the greenhouse part of the Earth is change the temperature everywhere by one and a half degrees, which for most of us is less than the temperature change between breakfast and lunch.

See Also

Arctic “Amplification” Not What You Think

 

Arctic “Amplification” Not What You Think

Posted on by Ron Clutz

HT to Dr. David Whitehouse writing at GWPF regarding a recent study claiming Arctic Amplification is causing a wavey polar vortex, resulting in winter warming and cooling extremes.  His critique is Extreme cold snaps and global warming: A speculative explanation.

This post is challenging the notion of Arctic Amplification itself.  The term is bandied about with the connotation that man-made global warming is multiplied in the Arctic and responsible for weather extremes.

As the animation above shows, there have been in recent years alternating patterns of unusually cold or warm weather in the Northern Hemisphere.  There are several problems in the attempt to link these events to global warming/climate change, i.e. claiming causation from a slow increase in baseline global average temperatures.

  1. Arctic Amplification is an artifact of Temperature Anomalies
  2. Arctic Surface Stations Records Show Ordinary Warming
  3. Arctic Warmth Comes from Meridional Heat Transport, not CO2

Clive Best provides this animation of recent monthly temperature anomalies which demonstrates how most variability in anomalies occur over northern continents.

1. Arctic Amplification is an artifact of Temperature Anomalies

Beyond the issues with the measurements and the questionable adjustments, there is a more fundamental misconception about air temperatures in relation to “climate change.” Clive Best does a fine job explaining why Global Mean Temperature anomalies do not mean what people think. Below is my synopsis of his recent essay entitled Do Global Temperatures make sense? (link)

Background: Earth’s Heat Imbalance

ERBE measurements of radiative imbalance.

The earth’s temperature at any location is never in equilibrium. It changes daily, seasonally and annually. Incoming solar radiation varies enormously especially near the poles which receive more energy per day in summer than the equator.

The earth cools primarily by moving heat from hot tropical regions towards high latitudes where net IR radiation loss cools the planet, thus maintaining a certain temperature profile.

Key Point: GMT Anomalies Are Dominated by the Highest Latitudes

The main problem with all the existing observational datasets is that they don’t actually measure the global temperature at all. Instead they measure the global average temperature ‘anomaly’. . .The use of anomalies introduces a new bias because they are now dominated by the larger ‘anomalies’ occurring at cold places in high latitudes. The reason for this is obvious, because all extreme seasonal variations in temperature occur in northern continents, with the exception of Antarctica. Increases in anomalies are mainly due to an increase in the minimum winter temperatures, especially near the arctic circle. 

To take an extreme example here is the monthly temperature data and calculated anomalies for Verkoyhansk in Siberia. Annual temperatures vary from -50C in winter to +20C in summer. That is a seasonal range of 70C each year, and a year to year anomaly variation of ~8C is normal. The only global warming effect evident is a slight increase in the minimum winter temperatures since 1900. That is not due to any localised enhanced greenhouse effect but rather to an enhanced meridional heat transport. Temperatures in equatorial regions meanwhile have only ~4C seasonal variations, and show essentially no warming trend.

2. Arctic Surface Stations Records Show Ordinary Warming

Locations of 118 arctic stations examined in this study and compared to observations at 50 European stations whose records averaged 200 years and in a few cases extend to the early 1700s

A recent extensive analysis of Northern surface temperature records gives no support for Arctic “amplification” fears.

The Arctic has warmed at the same rate as Europe over the past two centuries. Heretofore, it has been supposed that any global warming would be amplified in the Arctic. This may still be true if urban heat island effects are responsible for part of the observed temperature increase at European stations. However, European and Arctic temperatures have remained closely synchronized for over 200 years during the rapid growth of urban centres.

And the warming pattern in Europe and the Arctic is familiar and unalarming.

Arctic temperatures have increased during the period 1820– 2014. The warming has been larger in January than in July. Siberia, Alaska and Western Canada appear to have warmed slightly more than Eastern Canada, Greenland, Iceland and Northern Europe. The warming has not occurred at a steady rate. Much of the warming trends found during 1820 to 2014 occurred in the late 1990s, and the data show temperatures levelled off after 2000. The July temperature trend is even slightly negative for the period 1820–1990. The time series exhibit multidecadal temperature fluctuations which have also been found by other temperature reconstructions.

The paper is: Arctic temperature trends from the early nineteenth century to the present W. A. van Wijngaarden, Theoretical & Applied Climatology (2015).  My synopsis: Arctic Warming Unalarming

3. Arctic Warmth Comes from Meridional Heat Transport, not CO2

Key Point: Heat Distribution Changes, not Global Temperatures

Rising CO2 levels modify that radiation imbalance profile slightly. Surface temperatures in the tropics are not really warming at all. Any excess heat induces more clouds and more convection while surface temperatures remain constant. What really happens is that the meridional radiation profile changes. Slightly more heat is transported polewards so that hot places are shifting more heat to cold places which are doing the warming. If CO2 levels stop rising then a new temperature and radiation profile would rather quickly be reached. This is then called ‘climate change’ but any such changes are concentrated in colder regions of the world. The global ‘temperature’ itself is not changing, but instead the global distribution of temperature is changing.

Key Point: More Atmospheric Heat means Warming in the Coldest Places

Temperatures at the poles during 6 months of darkness would fall well below -150C if there was no atmosphere, similar to the moon. Instead heat is constantly being transported from lower latitudes by the atmosphere and ocean and so that temperatures never fall much below -43C. If more heat is transported northwards than previously, then minimum temperatures must rise, and this is what we observe in individual measurements.

Long term changes in temperature anomalies occur mainly in northern continents in winter months. This is not because the earth as a whole is warming up but rather that meridional heat transport from the equator to the poles has increased and the largest effect on ‘anomalies occurs in winter. The average absolute temperature of the earth’s surface is unknown. Basing the evidence for climate change on the 150 year trend in global averaged temperature anomalies still biases the result towards higher latitudes where most of the stations are located.

Summary

When heat is released into the atmosphere from the oceans, it is transported toward the poles to dissipate into space. Places in higher latitudes are warmed, not by radiative effects of greenhouse gases in those locales, but by the incursion of warmer air from the equator.

What happens if more CO2 is added into the atmosphere? No one knows, but there are many opinions, a popular one being that more heat is retained in the atmosphere. But in that case, that additional heat will be shed by the planet in exactly the same manner: transport to the poles with slightly less extremely cold air at the higher latitudes.

Why in the world would we pay anything to prevent a little bit of warming in the world’s coldest places?

Clive Best takes the analysis further and relates to work by Christopher Scotese in a later post Fact: Future Climate Will Be Flatter, not HotterMore explanation at The Climate Water Wheel

Resources:  Bill Gray: H20 is Climate Control Knob, not CO2

No, CO2 Doesn’t Drive the Polar Vortex (Updated)

Quantifying Natural Climate Change

Update September 24, 2022 Richard Lindzen Weighs In

H/T Not A Lot of People Know That

London, 23 September – A prominent climate scientist has warned that the picture of climate change presented in the IPCC’s narrative is simplistic, ill-conceived, and undermined by observational evidence.
In a new discussion paper, Professor Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) points out that the official picture, focusing narrowly on carbon dioxide as a warming agent, becomes implausible when applied to the details of the climate system.  According to Lindzen,

“If you are going to blame everything on carbon dioxide, you have to explain why, on all timescales, temperatures in the tropics are extremely stable while those in high latitudes are much more variable. The IPCC’s story is that small amounts of greenhouse warming near the equator are ‘amplified’ at high latitudes. But neither theory nor data support the idea of amplification.”

Instead, says Lindzen, this pattern – of stable tropical temperatures and fluctuating ones in high latitudes – is mostly a function of natural processes in the atmosphere and oceans; in other words, changes in oceanic and atmospheric currents that transport heat poleward while drawing varying amounts of heat out of the tropics.  These changes in transport affect the tropics, but they are not determined by the tropics.

“The changes in the earth’s so-called temperature are mainly due to changes in the temperature difference between the tropics and the poles – at least for major changes.  The changes in tropical temperature, which are influenced by greenhouse processes, are a minor contribution.”

Richard Lindzen: An assessment of the conventional global warming narrative (pdf)

 

Ocean Warming Mystery: Two Natural Factors

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Many have seen the media news splash of ocean warming.  For example, from Washington Post Scientists are baffled why the oceans are warming so fast.  The image above comes from that article, excerpts below with my added bolds.

A steady and remarkable rise in average global ocean temperatures this year is now outpacing anything seen in four decades of satellite observations, causing many scientists to suddenly blare alarm over the risks and realities of climate change. But even those typically aligned on climate science can’t agree on what, exactly, triggered such rapid warming and how alarmed they should be.

Some climate researchers suspect that a drastic reduction in air pollution from ships has allowed more sunlight to radiate into oceans, a conclusion others vigorously criticize. Meteorologists also say a weakening of Atlantic winds may be encouraging warming; normally these winds help cool waters and carry sun-blocking plumes of Saharan dust.

Scientists nonetheless agree on this: Conditions are ever ripening for extreme heat waves, droughts, floods and storms, all of which have proven links to ocean warming.

In the Pacific Ocean, warming temperatures are to be expected during El Niño — its impacts on weather around the world stem from warmer-than-normal surface waters along the equatorial Pacific. But the extreme warmth extends beyond the Pacific. Record warmth is also occurring in the equatorial and northern Atlantic — and in the tropics, where hurricanes form.

“This is totally bonkers and people who look at this stuff routinely can’t believe their eyes,” Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami, wrote on Twitter. “Something very weird is happening.”

Antarctic sea ice concentration on June 27, 2023, with white representing solid ice and dark blue representing open ocean. The median ice edge for 1981–2010 is drawn in orange. (Credit: Map by NOAA Climate.gov, based on data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center)

And of course there is the added warning about Antarctic sea ice not freezing as rapidly as usual in SH winter.  The media always refers to “climate change” as the causal factor, which is code for rising CO2 and humans to blame.  For a more reasonable discussion, see Antarctic Sea Ice Varies, It’s Complicated.

What About Natural Factors?

Because the power, glory and money comes from CO2 hysteria and taking over the energy industry, the theories are all about the atmosphere.  Realists know that Oceans Make Climate, and look for more direct means by which sea temperatures can warm.

The HadSST4 AMO dataset was finally updated and showed dramatic 2023 warming in the North Atlantic. Let’s consider two possibilities.

1.  The Ocean Warming Could Be Bottom Up

An article from CICOS explains the importance of hydrothermal action on the ocean floor.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.  Scientists Discover Three New Hydrothermal Vent Fields on Mid-Atlantic Ridge

An international team of scientists led by CICOES researcher David Butterfield
work together to rapidly find and explore large hydrothermal vents
on the world’s longest mountain range.

Sometimes Mid-Atlantic ridge is called the “40,000-mile Volcano”

Scientists have discovered three new hydrothermal vent fields over a 434-mile-long stretch of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge during the first scientific expedition aboard Schmidt Ocean Institute’s recently launched research vessel Falkor (too).

The multidisciplinary science team representing 11 institutions from the United States, Canada, and France used advanced ocean technologies to make the discovery. Scientists used autonomous and remotely operated underwater vehicles resulting in 65 square miles (170 square kilometers) of seafloor mapped at one-meter scale resolution, an area approximately the size of Manhattan Island.

The discovery of the active hydrothermal vents is the first on this section of the world’s longest underwater mountain range, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, in more than 40 years. One of the discovered vent fields was located at the Puy des Folles volcano and has five active sites over 6.95 square miles (18 square kilometers). High-temperature ‘black smoker’ vents were also found at the Grappe Deux vent system and Kane Fracture Zone.

This discovery of new hydrothermal vents under the Atlantic ocean reminds of hundreds of thousands of sea mounts active on the ocean floor, with a high concentration in the North Atlantic  For a more complete discussion of bottom up ocean warming, See Post:

Overview: Seafloor Eruptions and Ocean Warming

 

2. It May Be the Aftermath of Hunga Tonga Eruption 2022

Khaykin et al. (2023) explan the climate impact in their article Global perturbation of stratospheric water and aerosol burden by Hunga eruption.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

The eruption of the submarine Hunga volcano in January 2022 was associated with a powerful blast that injected volcanic material to altitudes up to 58 km. From a combination of various types of satellite and ground-based observations supported by transport modeling, we show evidence for an unprecedented increase in the global stratospheric water mass by 13% relative to climatological levels, and a 5-fold increase of stratospheric aerosol load, the highest in the last three decades. Owing to the extreme injection altitude, the volcanic plume circumnavigated the Earth in only 1 week and dispersed nearly pole-to-pole in three months.The unique nature and magnitude of the global stratospheric perturbation by the Hunga eruption ranks it among the most remarkable climatic events in the modern observation era, with a range of potential long-lasting repercussions for stratospheric composition and climate.

The perturbation of stratospheric water vapour burden by 13% is tremendous and has no frame of comparison in the entire observation record dating back to 1985. As there are no efficient sinks of water vapour in the stratosphere, this perturbation is expected to last over several years. Indeed, in 9 months since the eruption, the water vapour mass anomaly has gradually decreased only by 2.5% (4.3 ± 0.1% annual rate), which should lead to the perturbation timescale of over 3 years, assuming the further linear decay trend. The persistent stratospheric moist anomaly may lead to changes in atmospheric radiative balance; stratospheric dynamics as well as amplification of the polar ozone depletion through wider occurrence of polar stratospheric clouds. The ability to assess the longer-term impacts of the HT eruption on stratospheric chemistry will depend strongly on the quality and availability of global satellite observations such as MLS in the coming years.

In addition to blasting seawater to the stratosphere, the event shook the ocean floor worldwide.  

The massive volcanic blast in the Pacific last year was felt 18,000km away on the other side of the world, on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.  The cataclysmic eruption of Hunga-Tonga Hunga-Ha’apai on 15 January 2022 sent pressure waves through Earth’s atmosphere that connected with the sea surface and triggered 50 highly sensitive seismometers placed 5,000m under water on the seabed.  It was one of a number of intriguing phenomena picked up by the instrument network in the Azores-Madeira-Canary Islands region. Source:  BBC

Summary

Let’s stop pretending we can alter nature by spending trillions of dollars “fighting climate change.”  Better to solve actual problems we are causing and can fix, rather than obsessing over imaginary ones.

 

 

 

 

 

Yes, We Will Avoid a Climate Catastrophe.

Posted on by Ron Clutz

At Quora someone posed this  question:  Will we avoid a climate catastrophe just in time (please be positive I need some hope)?

Paul Noel ,Former Research Scientist 6 Level 2 UAH (2008–2014) wrote this response.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

I have researched this issue in depth. As a good scientist I have gone deeply and gotten the facts. I have gotten:

  • the Satellite data on the global profiles,
  • the weather data.
  • the storm data and disaster data
  • the polar ice data.
  • the historical data.

I have looked in deeply on this issue. I have studied the physics too! I have studied the history too! I have studied the archeology and even the paleo geology and even the ice core data.

This isn’t easy to get because lots of people are producing lies on the topic. So I have worked very hard to get down to the facts. Then the job becomes one which is very hard. If I just tell you the answers I got , it is a case of if you believe me or not. If I tell you the science data it is likely to get way in over your understanding and that is back to if you believe me or not. This is a job of explaining to you very carefully what the data is using things you can see and understand.

So taking this from the top there are 2 ways I can go.
One way is to go into the advocates of the topic that are so scaring you deeply
and the other is to go into the science.

The explanation of the science is pretty easy and such but explaining to you the motives of people and their actions and methods is much harder. But I am going to start with the people.

Why are they scaring you about the climate?

Climate policy has almost nothing to do anymore with environmental protection, says the German economist and IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer.

This is what this is all about. There is no other motive. You may dispense with your worries here if you are worried for the world environment. But I will now switch to the facts and reality on the ground. Remember this alone should pretty much put an end to your worries. You are facing a very large deliberate well funded and most professionally constructed set of lies and propaganda designed to get you scared like you are. This is 5th generational warfare. It is not anything you are used to thinking about. That is why it is effective.

What are the climate facts on the ground?

The fact on the ground are that if the changes you are supposing to see are real they should be obvious. They should be something you can see, feel, hear and touch. That is where we are going right now!

If the world is warming up the paleo-climate data says that the polar regions warm first. That is what you are being told about arctic ice melting and sea level raise. If you go to the Denmark Polar Portal on the web you can get the data.

Greenland Ice Sheet is not Melting Away

Because these people have to comply with the IPCC they put in all kinds of disclaimers trying to keep you scared of melt down etc.. The reality is we are solidly into the melt season and the ice is not melting down more than usual.

Arctic Sea Ice Is Not Going Away

The polar ice is at normal levels. I can go on and on here but the reality is that there is no emergency.

Global Warming is Not Accumulating

The data from UAH which is technical showed from January 1995 to January 2023 the global temperature did not increase at all.  And from 2016 actually went down (-0.7C) . That isn’t some melting or Global Warming or some Climate Catastrophe. It just is not.

CO2 Is Rising But Far Below Its Optimum

Is CO2 rising it sure is and it isn’t even to the maximum level that occurred in the last maximum in the last interglacial period of earth. CO2 is not 1% it is 0.042%. The earth has thrived with maximum life at 1% CO2 there are no melt down periods.

Is the climate variable, You bet it is. We have seen in the last 2000 years it go up and down in temperature and we are actually near the bottom of that period. The reality is that we have been up to 10C warmer and guess what that time mankind did his very best. We don’t thrive on cold.

Warming Has Been Beneficial and More Would be a Good Thing

Now let’s look at the trends and in a way you never imagined. I have looked into this matter because Alabama where I live has a cute lovely vacation town called Orange Beach. I highly recommend Orange Beach for a vacation it is beautiful. Orange Beach was named in 1898 when the US Post Office (Now the USPS) opened a new post office there. The unincorporated town’s principal business was raising oranges commercially. Alabama used to raise oranges up to about Evergreen Alabama or almost to Montgomery Alabama the state capitol.

 Production of Oranges Limited by Freezing Temperatures in SE US

No commercial orange production exists in Alabama at this time. The reason is simple. The growing season in Orange Beach Alabama went from 365 days a year to 268 days a year. The orange trees froze out. Now they have new varieties that can grow in the colder weather but even they are severely limited in Alabama. The orange trees have frozen out almost to Orlando Florida now.

Orange beach would be right next to North Florida along the Gulf of Mexico. Literally Florida is just across the Perdido River from Orange Beach.

The Gulf Stream Makes Climate Change in the North Atlantic

The reality is the climate from 1898 to the present has gotten colder in the USA. This is significant to the whole earth for a very important reason.

You see the heat from the whole earth gets aimed directly at Alabama! We cool down so is the rest of the world. The whole circulation for the whole earth focuses on the Gulf of Mexico and Alabama.

This by the way is why Greenland has so much ice. You see it is the warm water from the Gulf Stream that generates the steam that freezes and comes down as snow. You have to make the steam to make the ice.

Sea Level Depends on Land Buoyancy, not CO2

Now on to sea level rise. First of all if you believe that the sea level is rising and such it is only reported to be rising in the order of the thickness of 2 US 5 Cent coins per year. So if you believe it is happening it is no emergency and no real problem. It isn’t worthy of losing sleep over. The stories of melting sea ice are silly. First of all even if they melt they will have absolutely no effect on the sea level because they are floating. But there is another thing these people don’t tell you about.

The sea level is not the product of the amount of water in the ocean. It is in fact the product of a large sum of buoyancy issues and the gravity of the earth. The continents are where they are because they have less gravity than the other areas. The seafloor is a zone of higher gravity. Because the continents are floating that means that their level above the sea is determined by the laws of buoyancy. If Greenland were to melt off, the resulting reality would cause the area to buoy up because it would weigh less. At the same time the water added to the oceans would simply sink the sea floor deeper.

Continents Can Sink to Form New Seas

But to illustrate this you must learn about the Great Rift Valley of Africa. That valley is a place where the base continental rocks have spread apart. The land is sinking there and has already sunk to form the Red Sea! A new ocean is forming in Africa. This is what has sunk the continental shelves of the continents. The edge of the continents tinned out and lost the thick granite below that floats on the magma and they sunk. So sea level is not in any way related to ice melting. Sea level is related to this continental buoyancy issue. So nothing in their story not melting ice nor rising seas is happening. But I will show you this in pictures because we have these now.

Many Coastlines Show Water Receding Rather than Rising

Tell me if you see any sea level rise in the past 246 years now. (None!)

[Since we are looking in New England:]

This is just about due south of London–Pevensey Castle.

It was started construction in about 203 AD. It was built right on the sea on a coastal island. Such a fort only has value as far as an archer can shoot an arrow. It guarded the entrance to Pevensey Bay. The bay doesn’t exist it is nearly 30 meters above sea level now. Lots of people just refuse to see them. The fort itself is 110 feet above sea level and 5/8 mile from the sea.

If it isn’t clear yet that you have been hoaxed into a panic I don’t know what I can do. I have shown you that it got colder not warmer. That the ice is not melting. That the seas are not rising. Shall I go on?

CO2 Is Plant Food not a Pollutant

How about the real truth of CO2 and what it is doing on our earth. Look at these pictures carefully they tell the truth beyond any possible doubt.

C3 photosynthesis plants are growing 800% better than they were. Our C4 plants are doing 650% better.

The whole earth is growing better and the forests are growing because of CO2. Sorry this isn’t a “doom and gloom” story here.

Wild fires are down too!

The fact is that in 1960 the world was running out of food because our plants and farms were at their limits. Today we are run over with food and 45% of our crop land has been turned back to the forests. We are not at the limits. This has led to an explosion of wildlife too!

Life is Thriving Not Facing Extinction

There literally is no mass extinction going on. We are in the largest bloom of life on earth that has been seen in the past 10,000 years.

The human race is on the edge of unlimited energy, unlimited food, unlimited technology and we are sitting here in terror of some imaginary doom and gloom hating the very system that is feeding mankind and building him up.

Everything is quite literally the opposite of what you are told!

In Sum;

The only catastrophe would be ill-advised climate policies willfully destroying
our energy platform and economic supply processes out of irrational CO2 hysteria.

 

Sabine’s Video Myopic on GHG Climate Role

Posted on by Ron Clutz

E.M. Smith explains Curing Radiation Myopia Regarding Climate

E.M. Smith provides an helpful critique of a recent incomplete theory of earth’s climate functioning in his Chiefio blog post So Close–Missing Convection and Homeostasis. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.  The reference is to a video by Sabine Hossenfelder you can view below in the post.

It is Soooo easy to get things just a little bit off and miss reality. Especially in complex systems and even more so when folks raking in $Millions are interested in misleading for profit. Sigh.

Sabine Hosenfelder does a wonderful series of videos ‘explaining’ all sorts of interesting things in and about actual science and how the universe works. She is quite smart and generally “knows her stuff”. But… It looks like she has gotten trapped into the Radiative Model of Globull Warming.

The whole mythology of Global Warming depends on having you NOT think about anything but radiative processes and physics. To trap you into the Radiative Model. But the Earth is more complex than that. Much more complex. Then there’s the fact that you DO have some essential Radiative Physics to deal with, so the bait is there.   However…

It is absolutely essential to pay attention to convection in the lower atmosphere
and to the “feedback loops” or homeostasis in the system.

The system acts to restore its original state. There is NO “runaway greenhouse” or we would have never evolved into being since the early earth had astoundingly high levels of CO2 and we would have baked to death before getting out of our slime beds as microbes.

Figure 16. The geological history of CO2 level and temperature proxy for the past 400 million years. CO2 levels now are ~ 400ppm. Source: Davis, W. J. (2017).

OK, I’ll show you her video. It is quite good even with the “swing and a miss” at the end. She does 3 levels of The Greenhouse Gas Mythology so you can see the process evolving from grammar school to high school to college level of mythology. But then she doesn’t quite make it to Post-Doc Reality.

Where’s she wrong? (Well, not really wrong, but lacking…)

I see 2 major issues. First off, she talks about the “lower atmosphere warming”. Well, yes and no. It doesn’t “warm” in the sense of getting hotter, but it does speed up convection to move the added heat flow.

In English “heating” has 2 different meanings. Increasing temperature.
Increasing heat flow at a temperature.

We see this in “warm up the TV dinner in the microwave” meaning to heat it up from frozen to edible; and in the part where the frozen dinner is defrosting at a constant temperature as it absorbs heat but turns it into the heat of fusion of water. So you can “warm it up” by melting at a constant temperature of frozen water (but adding a LOT of thermal energy – “heat”) then later as increasing temperature once the ice is melted. It is very important to keep in mind that there are 2 kinds of “heating”. NOT just “increasing temperature”.

In the lower atmosphere, the CO2 window / Infrared Window is already firmly slammed shut. Sabine “gets that”. Yay! One BIG point for her! No amount of “greenhouse gas” is going to shut that IR window any more. As she points out, you get about 20 meters of transmission and then it is back to molecular vibrations (aka “heat”).

So what’s an atmosphere to do? It has heat to move! Well, it convects. It evaporates water.

Those 2 things dominate by orders of magnitude any sort of Radiative Model Physics. Yes, you have radiation of light bringing energy in, but then it goes into the ocean and into the dirt and the plants and even warms your skin on a sunny day. And it sits there. It does NOT re-radiate to any significant degree. Once “warmed” by absorption, heat trying to leave as IR hits a slammed shut window.

The hydrological cycle. Estimates of the observed main water reservoirs (black numbers in 10^3 km3 ) and the flow of moisture through the system (red numbers, in 10^3 km3 yr À1 ). Adjusted from Trenberth et al. [2007a] for the period 2002-2008 as in Trenberth et al. [2011].

So what does happen? Look around, what do you see? Clouds. Rain. Snow. (sleet hail fog etc. etc.)

Our planet is a Water Planet. It moves that energy (vibrations of atoms, NOT radiation) by having water evaporate into the atmosphere. (Yes, there are a few very dry deserts where you get some radiative effects and can get quite cold at night via radiation through very dry air, but our planet is 70% or so oceans, so those areas are minor side bars on the dominant processes). This water vapor makes the IR window even more closed (less distance to absorption). It isn’t CO2 that matters, it is the global water vapor.

What happens next?

Well, water holds a LOT of heat (vibration of atoms and NOT “temperature”) as the heat of vaporization. About 540 calories per gram (compared to 80 for melting “heat of fusion” and 1 for specific heat of a gram of water). Compare those numbers again. 1 for a gram of water. 80 for melting a gram of ice. 540 for evaporating a gram of water. It’s dramatically the case that evaporation of water matters a lot more than melting ice, and both of them make “warming water” look like an irrelevant thing.

Warming water is 1/80 as important as melting ice, and it is 1/540 th as important as evaporation of the surface of the water. Warming air is another order of magnitude less important to heat content.

So to have clue, one MUST look at the evaporation of water from the oceans as everything else is in the small change.

Look at any photo of the Earth from space. The Blue Marble covered in clouds. Water and clouds. The product of evaporation, convection, and condensation. Physical flows carrying all that heat (“vibration of atoms” and NOT temperature, remember). IF you add more heat energy, you can speed up the flows, but it will not cause a huge increase in temperature (and mostly none at all). It is mass flow that changes. The number of vibrating molecules at a temperature, not the temperature of each.

In the end, a lot of mass flow happens, lofting all that water vapor with all that heat of vaporization way up toward the Stratosphere. This is why we have a troposphere, a tropopause (where it runs out of steam… literally…) and a stratosphere.

What happens when it gets to the stratosphere boundary? Well, along the way that water vapor turns into water liquid very tiny drops (clouds) and eventually condenses to big drops of water (rain) and some of it even freezes (hail, snow, etc.). Now think about that for a minute. That’s 540 calories per gram of heat (molecular vibration NOT temperature, remember) being “dumped” way up high in the top of the troposphere as it condenses, and another 80 / gram if if freezes. 620 total. That’s just huge.

This is WHY we have a globe covered with rain, snow, hail, etc. etc. THAT is all that heat moving. NOT any IR Radiation from the surface. Let that sink in a minute. Fix it in your mind. WATER and ICE and Water Vapor are what moves the heat, not radiation. We ski on it, swim in it, have it water our crops and flood the land. That’s huge and it is ALL evidence of heat flows via heat of vaporization and fusion of water.

It is all those giga-tons of water cycling to snow, ice and rain, then falling back to be lofted again as evaporation in the next cycle. That’s what moves the heat to the stratosphere where CO2 then radiates it to space (after all, radiation toward the surface hits that closed IR window and stops.) At most, more CO2 can let the Stratosphere radiate (and “cool”) better. It can not make the Troposphere any less convective and non-radiative.

Then any more energy “trapped” at the surface would just run the mass transport water cycle faster. It would not increase the temperature.

More molecules would move, but at a limit on temperature. Homeostasis wins. We can see this already in the Sub-Tropics. As the seasons move to fall and winter, water flows slow dramatically. I have to water my Florida lawn and garden. As the seasons move to spring and summer, the mass flow picks up dramatically. Eventually reaching hurricane size. Dumping up to FEET of condensed water (that all started as warm water vapor evaporating from the ocean). It is presently headed for about 72 F today (and no rain). At the peak of hurricane season, we get to about 84 or 85 F ocean surface temperature as the water vapor cycle is running full blast and we get “frog strangler” levels of rain. That’s the difference. Slow water cycle or fast.

IF (and it is only an “if”, not a when) you could manage to increase the heat at the surface of the planet in, say, Alaska: At most you would get a bit more rain in summer, a bit more snow in winter, and MAYBE only a slight possible, of one or two days that are rain which could have been snow or sleet.

Then there’s the fact that natural cycles swamp all of that CO2 fantasy anyway. The Sun, as just one example, had a large change of IR / UV levels with both the Great Pacific Climate Shift (about 1975) and then back again in about 2000. Planetary tilt, wobble, eccentricity of the orbit and more put us in ice ages (as we ARE right now, but in an “interglacial” in this ice age… a nice period of warmth that WILL end) and pulls us out of them. Glacials and interglacials come and go on various cycles (100,000 years, 40,000 years, and 12,000 year interglacials – ours ending now, but slowly). The simple fact is that Nature Dominates, and we are just not relevant. To think we are is hubris of the highest order.

See Also  Bill Gray: H20 is Climate Control Knob, not CO2

Figure 9: Two contrasting views of the effects of how the continuous intensification of deep cumulus convection would act to alter radiation flux to space. The top (bottom) diagram represents a net increase (decrease) in radiation to space

Footnote

There are two main reasons why investigators are skeptical of AGW (anthropogenic global warming) alarm. This post intends to be an antidote to myopic and lop-sided understandings of our climate system.

  1. CO2 Alarm is Myopic: Claiming CO2 causes dangerous global warming is too simplistic. CO2 is but one factor among many other forces and processes interacting to make weather and climate.

Myopia is a failure of perception by focusing on one near thing to the exclusion of the other realities present, thus missing the big picture. For example: “Not seeing the forest for the trees.”  AKA “tunnel vision.”

2. CO2 Alarm is Lopsided: CO2 forcing is too small to have the overblown effect claimed for it. Other factors are orders of magnitude larger than the potential of CO2 to influence the climate system.

Lopsided

Lop-sided refers to a failure in judging values, whereby someone lacking in sense of proportion, places great weight on a factor which actually has a minor influence compared to other forces. For example: “Making a mountain out of a mole hill.”

Empirical Proof Sun Driving Climate (Scafetta 2023)

Posted on by Ron Clutz

On June 14, 2023 Nicola Scafetta published at Science Direct Empirical assessment of the role of the Sun in climate change using balanced multi-proxy solar records.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds with exhibits from the study.

By design, climate models exclude solar forcing of earth’s climate,
and perform poorly without it.

Scafetta (2023) Highlights

•  The role of the Sun in climate change is hotly debated with diverse models.

•  The Earth’s climate is likely influenced by the Sun through a variety of physical mechanisms.

•  Balanced multi-proxy solar records were created and their climate effect assessed.

•  Factors other than direct TSI forcing account for around 80% of the solar influence on the climate.

•  Important solar-climate mechanisms must be investigated before developing reliable GCMs.

Abstract

The role of the Sun in climate change is hotly debated. Some studies suggest its impact is significant, while others suggest it is minimal. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) supports the latter view and suggests that nearly 100% of the observed surface warming from 1850–1900 to 2020 is due to anthropogenic emissions.

However, the IPCC’s conclusions are based solely on computer simulations made with global climate models (GCMs) forced with a total solar irradiance (TSI) record showing a low multi-decadal and secular variability. The same models also assume that the Sun affects the climate system only through radiative forcing – such as TSI – even though the climate could also be affected by other solar processes.

In this paper I propose three “balanced” multi-proxy models of total solar activity (TSA) that consider all main solar proxies proposed in scientific literature. Their optimal signature on global and sea surface temperature records is assessed together with those produced by the anthropogenic and volcanic radiative forcing functions adopted by the CMIP6 GCMs. This is done by using a basic energy balance model calibrated with a differential multi-linear regression methodology, which allows the climate system to respond to the solar input differently than to radiative forcings alone, and to evaluate the climate’s characteristic time-response as well.

The proposed methodology reproduces the results of the CMIP6 GCMs when their original forcing functions are applied under similar physical conditions, indicating that, in such a scenario, the likely range of the equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) could be 1.4 °C to 2.8 °C, with a mean of 2.1 °C (using the HadCRUT5 temperature record), which is compatible with the low-ECS CMIP6 GCM group.

However, if the proposed solar records are used as TSA proxies and the climatic sensitivity to them is allowed to differ from the climatic sensitivity to radiative forcings, a much greater solar impact on climate change is found, along with a significantly reduced radiative effect. In this case, the ECS is found to be 0.9-1.8 °C, with a mean of around 1.3 °C. Lower ECS ranges (up to 20%) are found using HadSST4, HadCRUT4, and HadSST3.

The result also suggests that about 80% of the solar influence on the climate may not be induced by TSI forcing alone, but rather by other Sun-climate processes (e.g., by a solar magnetic modulation of cosmic ray and other particle fluxes, and/or others), which must be thoroughly investigated and physically understood before trustworthy GCMs can be created. This result explains why empirical studies often found that the solar contribution to climate changes throughout the Holocene has been significant, whereas GCM-based studies, which only adopt radiative forcings, suggest that the Sun plays a relatively modest role. The appendix includes the proposed TSA records.

Comparative Analysis

Figure 5. (A) Anthropogenic (blue) and volcanic (orange) effective radiative forcing functions adopted by the CMIP6 GCMs (Masson-Delmotte et al., 2021). (B) Comparison between the solar effective radiative forcing function from Table Annex III of the IPCC-AR6 (green) (after Masson-Delmotte et al., 2021) and the three TSI forcing functions deduced from the TSI records shown in Fig. 4. All records are anomalies relative to their values in 1850.

The solar forcing functions depicted in Fig. 5B differ in several respects. Just a very modest secular trend can be seen for the solar forcing function used by the CMIP6 GCMs, which has remained nearly constant for about 200 years. Although not depicted in Fig. 5B, the TSI forcing adopted by the CMIP6 GCMs is so flat that even the 1790–1830 Dalton grand solar minimum almost coincides with the 1890–1910 solar minimum and the 2019 solar cycle minimum (Supplementary Data Table S5). Furthermore, because this record is also based on SATIRE and the PMOD TSI satellite composite, its solar effective forcing function decreased progressively from 1970 to 2020. Thus, by using this TSI record, the CMIP6 GCMs could only conclude that solar forcing did not account for almost any of the warming observed after the pre-industrial period (1850–1900), and, particularly, from 1980 to 2020. (Masson-Delmotte et al., 2021).

On the contrary, the other three TSI records reveal a multidecadal oscillation as well as a clear increasing secular trend from the Dalton solar minimum to 2000. More specifically, the TSI forcing significantly increased from the Dalton minimum (1810–1815) to around 1870–1876, then declined until around 1890–1905; it increased rapidly between 1910 and the 1940s, and declined again between 1950 and 1975. The TSI forcing then increased again until 2000, when it began to gradually fall until 2022. This oscillating pattern is especially noteworthy because, as demonstrated below, it is closely correlated with the changes observed in total surface temperature records, which show a very similar increasing trend and multi-decadal modulation (cf.: Scafetta et al., 2004, Scafetta and West, 2006, Scafetta and West, 2008, Scafetta, 2009, Scafetta, 2010, Scafetta, 2012b, Scafetta, 2013a, Scafetta, 2021b).

Figure 8. (A) HadCRUT5 global surface temperature versus the CMIP6 GCM ensemble average; (A’) the two records are detrended with the function f(t) = a (x-1850)2. (B) HadCRUT5 global surface temperature versus the energy balance model (Eq. (16)) using the TSI proxy model #2; (B’) the same as above. The green curves in Fig. 8A and B are sketches that highlight the different multi-decadal modulation of the red curves in Fig. 8A (monotonically increasing, like the anthropogenic forcing function) and in Fig. 8B (oscillating, like the temperature records).

Fig. 8 compares the HadCRUT5 global surface temperature record to (A) the CMIP6 GCM ensemble mean record and (B) the energy balance model (Eq. (16)) using the proposed TSI proxy model #2, which does not use the GCMs’ low secular-variability TSI record. The GCM simulation depicted in Fig.8A monotonically warms up, although occasional volcanic eruptions momentarily cause cold spikes; the monotonic warming trend produced by the model is simulated by the green curve. On the contrary, the model provided in Fig. 8B indicates an oscillating pattern developing around a warming trend. The global surface temperature record shows a similar growing trend, regulated by an approximately 60-year oscillation: the period 1880–1910 experienced a global cooling; the period 1910–1940 was characterized by considerable warming; and the period 1940–1970 experienced another global cooling. From 1880 to 1970, the model in Fig. 8B reproduces this oscillating pattern more precisely (corr. coeff. r = 0.79) than the CMIP6 GCM ensemble average simulation depicted in Fig. 8A (corr. coeff. r = 0.74). Thus, Fig. 8 illustrates that the suggested model (red curve, Fig. 8B) exhibits a multidecadal modulation that correlates significantly better with the temperature record (blue curve) than the GCM ensemble average simulation (red curve, Fig. 8A).

The different performance of the CMIP6 GCM ensemble average simulation and of the proposed regression model in reproducing the temperature pattern from 1850 to 1950 becomes more evident if a quadratic upward trend is detrended from the records. The correlation coefficient is r = 0.45 using the GCM ensemble average simulation (Fig. 8A’), and r = 0.55 using the proposed regression model (Fig. 8B’).

This result suggests that the observed multi-decadal modulation of the
temperature records could have been mostly determined by solar forcings,
and not by chaotic internal oscillations of the climate system.

Conclusion

The IPCC (Solomon and et al., 2007; Stocker and et al., 2014; Masson-Delmotte et al., 2021) conclusion that the Sun’s role in climate change has been negligible since the pre-industrial period (1850–1900) derives from the fact that this organization only consider the solar climatic signature produced by the present-day GCMs. These models, however, are computer programs that can only employ equations describing physical mechanisms that are already well known. Anything unknown or ambiguous cannot be included in the GCM software. If the climatic influence of neglected physical processes is significant, the reductionist approach employed in the GCMs for assessing climate change attributions may be completely inappropriate for the task.

The CMIP6 GCMs appear to greatly underestimate the Sun’s role in climate change because of two major limitations:

(i) erroneous solar forcings have likely been integrated into the models; and
(ii) TSI alone appears to likely be not the most important solar forcing.

Additional solar-magnetism related forcings and associated mechanisms are not included in the GCMs because they are currently poorly understood, despite the fact that there are several empirical indications that they might sufficiently modulate the cloud cover system (by 5% or less) to explain a significant component of the observed climatic changes (Svensmark and Friis-Christensen, 1997, Shaviv, 2002, Svensmark et al., 2016, Easterbrook, 2019, Svensmark, 2022; ). In fact, Table 1 shows that the actual climate sensitivity to TSA variations, which is expressed by kS, can be 4-7 times greater than the climate sensitivity to radiative forcing alone, which was denoted by kA.

Thus, about 80% of the solar influence on the climate could be generated

by processes other than direct TSI forcing. If this result is correct,

several solar-climate mechanisms must be thoroughly investigated

and fully understood before reliable GCMs can be developed.

The Sun Rules, and Warming from CO2 is Impossible

A complement to Scafetta’s study is a Quadrant article by Mark Imisides explaining the geophysical realities ruling out global warming from CO2.  DIY ocean heating  (Hint:  It’s the water, isn’t it?) Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Scarcely a day goes by without us being warned of coastal inundation by rising seas due to global warming.

Carbon dioxide, we are told, traps heat that has been irradiated by the oceans,
and this warms the oceans and melts the polar ice caps.

While this seems a plausible proposition at first glance, when one actually examines it closely a major flaw emerges. In a nutshell, water takes a lot of energy to heat up, and air doesn’t contain much. In fact, on a volume/volume basis, the ratio of heat capacities is about 3300 to 1.

This means that to heat 1 litre of water by 1˚C it would take 3300 litres of air
that was 2˚C hotter, or 1 litre of air that was about 3300˚C hotter!

This shouldn’t surprise anyone. If you ran a cold bath and then tried to heat it by putting a dozen heaters in the room, does anyone believe that the water would ever get hot?

The problem gets even stickier when you consider the size of the ocean.
Basically, there is too much water and not enough air.

The ocean contains a colossal 1,500,000,000,000,000,000,000 litres of water!  To heat it, even by a small amount, takes a staggering amount of energy. To heat it by a mere 1˚C, for example, an astonishing 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules of energy are required.

Let’s put this amount of energy in perspective. If we all turned off all our appliances and went and lived in caves, and then devoted every coal, nuclear, gas, hydro, wind and solar power plant to just heating the ocean, it would take a breathtaking 32,000 years to heat the ocean by just this 1˚C!

In short, our influence on our climate, even if we really tried, is miniscule!

So it makes sense to ask the question – if the ocean were to be heated by greenhouse warming of the atmosphere, how hot would the air have to get? If the entire ocean is heated by 1˚C, how much would the air have to be heated by to contain enough heat to do the job?

Well, unfortunately for every ton of water there is only a kilogram of air. Taking into account the relative heat capacities and absolute masses, we arrive at the astonishing figure of 4,000˚C.

That is, if we wanted to heat the entire ocean by 1˚C,
and wanted to do it by heating the air above it,
we’d have to heat the air to about 4,000˚C hotter than the water.

And another problem is that air sits on top of water – how would hot air heat deep into the ocean? Even if the surface warmed, the warm water would just sit on top of the cold water.

Thus, if the ocean were being heated by greenhouse heating of the air, we would see a system with enormous thermal lag – for the ocean to be only slightly warmer, the land would have to be substantially warmer, and the air much, much warmer (to create the temperature gradient that would facilitate the transfer of heat from the air to the water).

Therefore any measurable warmth in the ocean would be accompanied by a huge and obvious anomaly in the air temperatures, and we would not have to bother looking at ocean temperatures at all.

So if the air doesn’t contain enough energy to heat
the oceans or melt the ice caps, what does?

The earth is tilted on its axis, and this gives us our seasons. When the southern hemisphere is tilted towards the sun, we have more direct sunlight and more of it (longer days). When it is tilted away from the sun, we have less direct sunlight and less of it (shorter days).

The direct result of this is that in summer it is hot and in winter it is cold. In winter we run the heaters in our cars, and in summer the air conditioners. In winter the polar caps freeze over and in summer 60-70% of them melt (about ten million square kilometres). In summer the water is warmer and winter it is cooler (ask any surfer).

All of these changes are directly determined
by the amount of sunlight that we get.

When the clouds clear and bathe us in sunlight, we don’t take off our jumper because of greenhouse heating of the atmosphere, but because of the direct heat caused by the sunlight on our body. The sun’s influence is direct, obvious, and instantaneous.

If the enormous influence of the sun on our climate is so obvious, then, by what act of madness do we look at a variation of a fraction of a percent in any of these variables, and not look to the sun as the cause?

Why on earth (pun intended) do we attribute any heating of the oceans to carbon dioxide, when there is a far more obvious culprit, and when such a straightforward examination of the thermodynamics render it impossible.

Our Chaotic Climate System

Posted on by Ron Clutz

 

Foucault’s pendulum in the Panthéon, Paris

h/t tom0mason for inspiring this post, including his comment below

The Pendulum is Settled Science

I attended North Phoenix High School (Go Mustangs!) where students took their required physics class from a wild and crazy guy. Decades later alumni who don’t remember his name still reminisce about “the crazy science teacher with the bowling ball.”

To demonstrate the law of conservation of energy, he required each and every student to stand on a ladder in one corner of the classroom. Attached to a hook in the center of the rather high ceiling was a rope with a bowling ball on the other end. The student held the ball to his/her nose and then released it, being careful to hold still afterwards.

The 16 pound ball traveled majestically diagonally across the room and equally impressively returned along the same path. The proof of concept was established when the ball stopped before hitting your nose (though not by much).  In those days we learned to trust science and didn’t need to go out marching to signal some abstract virtue.

The equations for pendulums are centuries old and can predict the position of the ball at any point in time based on the mass of the object, length of the rope and starting position.

Pictured above is the currently operating Foucault pendulum that exactly follows these equations. While it had long been known that the Earth rotates, the introduction of the Foucault pendulum in 1851 was the first simple proof of the rotation in an easy-to-see experiment. Today, Foucault pendulums are popular displays in science museums and universities.

What About the Double Pendulum?

Trajectories of a double pendulum

A comment by tom0mason at alerted me to the science demonstrated by the double compound pendulum, that is, a second pendulum attached to the ball of the first one. It consists entirely of two simple objects functioning as pendulums, only now each is influenced by the behavior of the other.

Lo and behold, you observe that a double pendulum in motion produces chaotic behavior. In a remarkable achievement, complex equations have been developed that can and do predict the positions of the two balls over time, so in fact the movements are not truly chaotic, but with considerable effort can be determined. The equations and descriptions are at Wikipedia Double Pendulum

Long exposure of double pendulum exhibiting chaotic motion (tracked with an LED)

But here is the kicker, as described in tomomason’s comment:

If you arrive to observe the double pendulum at an arbitrary time after the motion has started from an unknown condition (unknown height, initial force, etc) you will be very taxed mathematically to predict where in space the pendulum will move to next, on a second to second basis. Indeed it would take considerable time and many iterative calculations (preferably on a super-computer) to be able to perform this feat. And all this on a very basic system of known elementary mechanics.

And What about the Climate?

This is a simple example of chaotic motion and its unpredictability. How predictable is our climate with so many variables and feedbacks, some known some unknown? Consider that this planet’s weather/climate system is chaotic in nature with many thousands (millions?) of loosely coupled variables and dependencies, and many of these variables have very complex feedback features within them.

Hurricane Gladys, photographed from orbit by Apollo 7 in 1968 (Photo: NASA)

Summary

To quote the IPCC:

The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible. Rather the focus must be upon the prediction of the probability distribution of the system’s future possible states by the generation of ensembles of model solutions.

A recent National Review article draws the implications:
The range of predicted future warming is enormous — apocalyptism is unwarranted.

But as the IPCC emphasizes, the range for future projections remains enormous. The central question is “climate sensitivity” — the amount of warming that accompanies a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. As of its Fifth Assessment Report in 2013, the IPCC could estimate only that this sensitivity is somewhere between 1.5 and 4.5°C. Nor is science narrowing that range. The 2013 assessment actually widened it on the low end, from a 2.0–4.5°C range in the prior assessment. And remember, for any specific level of warming, forecasts vary widely on the subsequent environmental and economic implications.

For now, though, navigating the climate debate will require translating the phrase “climate denier” to mean “anyone unsympathetic to the most aggressive activists’ claims.” This apparently includes anyone who acknowledges meaningful uncertainty in climate models, adopts a less-than-catastrophic outlook about the consequences of future warming, or opposes any facet of the activist policy agenda. The activists will be identifiable as the small group continuing to shout “Denier!” The “deniers” will be identifiable as everyone else.

Climate System Summation

Esteemed climate scientist Richard Lindzen ends a very fine recent presentation (here) with this description of the climate system:

I haven’t spent much time on the details of the science, but there is one thing that should spark skepticism in any intelligent reader. The system we are looking at consists in two turbulent fluids interacting with each other. They are on a rotating planet that is differentially heated by the sun. A vital constituent of the atmospheric component is water in the liquid, solid and vapor phases, and the changes in phase have vast energetic ramifications. The energy budget of this system involves the absorption and reemission of about 200 watts per square meter. Doubling CO2 involves a 2% perturbation to this budget. So do minor changes in clouds and other features, and such changes are common. In this complex multifactor system, what is the likelihood of the climate (which, itself, consists in many variables and not just globally averaged temperature anomaly) is controlled by this 2% perturbation in a single variable? Believing this is pretty close to believing in magic. Instead, you are told that it is believing in ‘science.’ Such a claim should be a tip-off that something is amiss. After all, science is a mode of inquiry rather than a belief structure.

Flow Diagram for Climate Modeling, Showing Feedback Loops

What If Climate is Self-Regulating?

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Andy Kessler writes at WSJ Can the Climate Heal Itself?  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Dissenters from the catastrophe consensus on warming are worth listening to.

Stop with all the existential-crisis talk. President Biden said, “Climate change is literally an existential threat to our nation and to the world.” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin also talks about the “existential threat” of climate change. National security adviser Jake Sullivan identifies an “accelerating climate crisis” as one reason for a “new consensus” for government picking winners and losers in the economy. Be wary of those touting consensus.

But what if the entire premise is wrong? What if the Earth is self-healing? Before you hurl the “climate denier” invective at me, let’s think this through. Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years— living organisms for 3.7 billion. Surely, an enlightened engineer might think, the planet’s creator built in a mechanism to regulate heat, or we wouldn’t still be here to worry about it.

The theory of climate change is that excess carbon dioxide and methane trap the sun’s radiation in the atmosphere, and these man-made greenhouse gases reflect more of that heat back to Earth, warming the planet. Pretty simple. Eventually, we reach a tipping point when positive feedback loops form—less ice to reflect sunlight, warm oceans that can no longer absorb carbon dioxide—and then we fry, existentially. So lose those gas stoves and carbon spewing Suburbans.

Note nearly half incoming solar energy is not absorbed by Earth’s surface.

But nothing is simple. What about negative feedback loops? Examples: human sweat and its cooling condensation or our irises dilating or constricting based on the amount of light coming in. Clouds, which can block the sun or trap its radiation, are rarely mentioned in climate talk.

Why? Because clouds are notoriously difficult to model in climate simulations. Steven Koonin, a New York University professor and author of “Unsettled,” tells me that today’s computing power can typically model the Earth’s atmosphere in grids 60 miles on a side. Pretty coarse. So, Mr. Koonin says, “the properties of clouds in climate models are often adjusted or ‘tuned’ to match observations.” Tuned!

Last month the coddling modelers at the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization stated that “warming El Niño” and “human-induced climate change” mean there is a “66% likelihood that annual average global temperatures will exceed the threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels by 2027.” Notice that El Niño is mentioned first.

To enlarge open image in new tab.

Richard Lindzen, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and lead author of an early Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, told me, “Temperatures in the tropics remain relatively constant compared with changes in the tropics-to-pole temperatures. The tropics-polar difference is about 40 degrees Celsius today but was 20 degrees during the warm Eocene Epoch and 60 degrees during Ice Ages.” This difference has more to do with changes in the Earth’s rotation, like wobbling, than anything else. According to Mr. Lindzen, this effect is some 70 times as great as human-made greenhouse gases.

OK, back to clouds. Cumulus clouds, the puffy ones often called thunderclouds, are an important convection element, carrying heat from the Earth’s surface to the upper atmosphere. Above them are high-altitude cirrus clouds, which can reflect heat back toward the surface. A 2001 Lindzen paper, however, suggests that high-level cirrus clouds in the tropics dissipate as temperatures rise. These thinning cirrus clouds allow more heat to escape. It’s called the Iris Effect, like a temperature-controlled vent opener for an actual greenhouse so you don’t (existentially) fry your plants. Yes, Earth has a safety valve.

Mr. Lindzen says, “This more than offsets the effect of greenhouse gases.” As you can imagine, theories debunking the climate consensus are met with rebuttals and more papers. Often, Mr. Lindzen points out, critics, “to maintain the warming narrative, adjust their models, especially coverage and reflection or albedo of clouds in the tropics.” More tuning.

A 2021 paper co-authored by Mr. Lindzen shows strong support for an Iris Effect.  Maybe Earth really was built by an engineer. Proof? None other than astronomer Carl Sagan described the Faint Young Sun Paradox that, 2.5 billion years ago, the sun’s energy was 30% less, but Earth’s climate was basically the same as today. Cirrus clouds likely formed to trap heat—a closed Iris and a negative feedback loop at work.

Figure 2: At higher temperatures there are more thunderstorms over the ocean and the area without high level clouds (dry and clear) expands further and thus allows more heat to radiate off into space (strong OLR) than when temperatures are lower, i.e. when the iris is smaller. Source: Figure 1 from MS15.

In a 2015 Nature Geoscience paper, Thorsten Mauritsen and Bjorn Stephen at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology reran climate models using the Iris Effect and found them better at modeling historic observations. No need for tuning. Wouldn’t it be nice if the U.N. used realistic cloud and climate models?

Earth has warmed, but I’m convinced negative feedback loops will save us. Dismissing the Iris Effect or detuning it isn’t science. Sadly, climate science has morphed into climate rhetoric. And note, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen explained in April that green spending “is, at its core, about turning the climate crisis into an economic opportunity.” Hmmm. “Catastrophic,” “existential” and “crisis” are cloudy thinking. Negative feedback is welcome. Dissenters from the catastrophe consensus on warming are worth listening to.

Footnote–Phanerozoic Temperatures

Maurice Lavigne commented that the best evidence of our self-regulating climate is found in the Phanerozoic temperature record.  I had to find out what he meant, which led me to discover this:

The PhanSST global database of Phanerozoic sea surface temperature proxy data

And this graph from Nir Shaviv and Jan Veizer:

Cosmic radiation and temperature through Phanerozoic according to Nir Shaviv and Jan Veizer. The vertical axis on the left represents the temperature as deviations from present temperature. The vertical axis on the right shows the cosmic radiation as multiples of radiation today – today’s radiation is set to 1. Note that the right scale is inverted so that strong radiation can be compared to low temperature. The red curve represents the temperature and the blue radiation. Temperature and cosmic radiation appear to have a very good correlation. The horizontal axis represents time through Phanerozoic’s more than 500 million years. Note that the Carboniferous is divided into “Missisipian” and “Pennsylvanian”, that is an American custom, referring to different types of coal from the coal mines.

The image above comes from Christopher Scotese PaleoMAP project, showing the dramatic temperature and climate shifts, hothouse to icehouse and everything in between.  Finally, a graph showing these temperature cycles unrelated to CO2 concentrations.

See Also More Evidence of Nature’s Sunscreen

Greenhouse with adjustable sun screens to control warming.