What Do We Think About Climate Change

[Jimbo1490]

Originally Posted by alanrockwood

Interesting, but not the topic we were discussing, which was the error in the graphic.

To tell the truth, I never even looked at the graphic, as it was an audio presentation. I left the playback screen too small to even see what was going on with the graphic. There's a video of a lecture he did on the subject about a year ago on Youtube also. I posted it about a year ago to the thread, here it is again.

[Jimbo1490]

And another:

[Jimbo1490]

Originally Posted by troy2000

I'm sorry, but I have trouble taking any scientist who appears on the Rush Limbaugh show seriously. It's as bad as going to Rachel Maddow's show for objective scientific information. Or Bill O'Reilly, or Randi Rhodes.

Rushbo is one of the most consistent sources of misinformation in this country, because he filters and interprets everything through his narrow political viewpoint. That raises serious doubts about the objectivity of anyone willing to be connected with him or his show; those doubts are increased by the fact that Rush has so few guests to begin with -- and never any who might possibly disagree with him.

Not surprisingly, Spencer is also a proponent of Intelligent Design. That doesn't help my opinion of his reasoning powers any, either.

Screw ya, then. Nobody gives a damn if you never learn what's really going on with the climate; stick yer greasy fingers back in yer ears and go "La, La, LA" for all the care I can give your personal edification.

You're the one who should care.

Jimbo

[troy2000]

Originally Posted by Jimbo1490

Screw ya, then. Nobody gives a damn if you never learn what's really going on with the climate; stick yer greasy fingers back in yer ears and go "La, La, LA" for all the care I can give your personal edification.

You're the one who should care.

Jimbo

So I should be getting my scientific education from the Rush Limbaugh Show? Sure. That's going to happen....I can see it's done wonders for you.

[alanrockwood]

There has been some talk on this thread about the concept of saturation of the greenhouse effect. What has been said is that once the concentration of one of the absorbing gases (H2O, CO2, CH4, or whatever) rises above a certain level then nearly all the radiation of interest (let us say some particular band in the infrared to keep things relevant to the general discussion) is absorbed and a higher concentration would have little or no effect.

I believe there are two factors that are being overlooked here. The first is that it is not just the absorption of infrared radiation by the atmosphere that is important. It also matters where the radiation is being absorbed. An increase in greenhouse gas concentration will result in the radiation being absorbed closer to the ground, and the closer to the ground the radiation is absorbed the more it will affect the temperature in the lower atmosphere where we live. (I could be wrong on that, but I don't think so.)

The second overlooked point relates to the concept of radiation diffusion. As the concentration rises above the point where a photon has a high probability of being absorbed something very interesting happens, i.e. photons that have been re-radiated are again absorbed by the gas. Thus, the loss of energy via radiation becomes a diffusive process, and the higher the concentration of the absorbing gas becomes the more difficult it is for radiation to diffuse all the way to the top layers of the atmosphere, where it can be radiated into space.

Being a diffusive process, the net rate of energy transfer is proportional to a gradient, in this case a temperature gradient. If the diffusion coefficient decreases (i.e. slower diffusion, which would be the case if the concentration of the absorbing species increases), then to transfer energy at a given rate would require a larger temperature gradient. This implies that the temperature in the lower atmosphere must be higher. Hence, an increase in greenhouse gas concentration past the saturation limit does not mean that the greenhouse effect also becomes saturated. Rather, the greenhouse effect continues to increase.

By the way, radiation diffusion plays an important role in the theory of energy transfer from the interior of the sun to the sun's surface, where it is then radiated into space. Scientists believe that the interior of the sun is much hotter than the surface of the sun, and radiation diffusion is part of the reason.

[Boston]

ah a brief hiatus

Alan
dont be fooled by Spencer

he is a paid hack and his tricks have been exposed over and over again
its just the kind of junk science that the deniers are clinging to and its easily found out

if you are interested in following any of the links or seeing the graphs I lifted this from

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php...-easy-lessons/

How to cook a graph in three easy lessons
Filed under:

* Climate modelling
* skeptics

— raypierre @ 21 May 2008

These days, when global warming inactivists need to trot out somebody with some semblance of scientific credentials (from the dwindling supply who have made themselves available for such purposes), it seems that they increasingly turn to Roy Spencer, a Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama. Roy does have a handful of peer-reviewed publications, some of which have quite decent and interesting results in them. However, the thing you have to understand is that what he gets through peer-review is far less threatening to the mainstream picture of anthropogenic global warming than you’d think from the spin he puts on it in press releases, presentations and the blogosphere. His recent guest article on Pielke Sr’s site is a case in point, and provides the fodder for our discussion today.

Actually, Roy has been pretty busy dishing out the confusion recently. Future posts will take a look at his mass market book on climate change, entitled Climate Confusion, published last month, and his article in National Review. We’ll also dig into some of his peer reviewed work, notably the recent paper by Spencer and Braswell on climate sensitivity, and his paper on tropical clouds which is widely misquoted as supporting Lindzen’s IRIS conjecture regarding stabilizing cloud feedback. But on to today’s cooking lesson.
They call it "Internal Radiative Forcing." We call it "weather."

In Spencer and Braswell (2008), and to an even greater extent in his blog article, Spencer tries to introduce the rather peculiar notion of "internal radiative forcing" as distinct from cloud or water vapor feedback. He goes so far as to say that the IPCC is biased against "internal radiative forcing," in favor of treating cloud effects as feedback. Just what does he mean by this notion? And what, if any, difference does it make to the way IPCC models are formulated? The answer to the latter question is easy: none, since the concept of feedbacks is just something used to try to make sense of what a model does, and does not actually enter into the formulation of the model itself.

Clouds respond on a time scale of hours to weather conditions like the appearance of fronts, to oceanic conditions, and to external radiative forcing (such as the rising and setting of the Sun). Does Spencer really think that a subsystem with such a quick intrinsic time scale can just up and decide to lock into some new configuration and stay there for decades, forcing the ocean to be dragged along into some compatible state? Or does he perhaps mean that slow components,like the ocean, modulate the clouds, and the resulting cloud radiative forcing amplifies or damps the resulting interannual or decadal variability? That latter sounds a lot like a cloud feedback to me — acting on natural variability whose root cause is in the ponderous motions of the ocean.

Think of it like a pot of water boiling on a stove. What ultimately controls the rate of boiling, the setting of the stove knob or the turbulent fluctuations of the bubbles rising through the water? Roy’s idea about clouds is like saying that you should expect big, long-lasting variations in the boiling rate because sometimes all the steam bubbles will decide to form on the left half of the pot leaving the right half bubble-free — and that things will remain that way despite all the turbulence for hours on end.

The only sense that can be made of Spencer’s notion is that there is some natural variability in the climate system, which in turn causes a natural variability to some extent in the radiation budget of the planet, which in turn may modify the natural variability. Is this news? Is this shocking? Is this something that should lead us to doubt model predictions of global warming? No — it is just part and parcel of the same old question of whether the pattern of the 20th and 21st century can be ascribed to natural variability without the effect of anthropogenic greenhouse gases. The IPCC, among others, nailed that, and nobody has demonstrated that natural variability can do the trick. Roy thinks he has, but as we shall soon see, it’s all a matter of how you run your ingredients through the food processor.
The impressive graph that isn’t

So here’s what Roy did. He took two indices of interannual variability: the Southern Oscillation (SOI) index, which is a proxy for El Nino, and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation Index (PDOI). He formed an ad-hoc weighted sum of these indices,and then multiplied by an ad-hoc scaling factor to turn the resulting time series into a time series of radiative forcing in Watts per square meter. Then he used that time series to drive a simple linear globally averaged mixed layer ocean model incorporating a linearized term representing heat loss to space. And voila, look what comes out of the oven!

Roy is really taken with this graph. So much so that he uses it as a banner near the top of his climate confusion web site under the heading "Could Global Warming Be Mostly Natural?" But is it as good as it looks? To find out, I programmed up his model myself, but chose the set of adjustable parameters based on compatibility with observations constraining reasonable magnitudes for these parameters. Here’s what I came up with:

So why does Roy’s graph look so much better than mine? As Julia Child said, "It’s so beautifully arranged on the plate – you know someone’s fingers have been all over it."
A Cooking lesson

Lesson One: Jack up the radiative forcing beyond all reason. Reliable data on decadal variability of the Earth’s radiation budget are hard to come by, but to provide some reality check I based my setting of the scaling factor between radiative forcing and the SOI/PDOI index on the tropical data of Wielecki et al 2002 (as corrected in response to Trenberth’s criticism here.) The data is shown below. On interannual time scales, it’s mostly the net top-of-atmosphere flux that counts, so the curve to look at is the green NET curve in the bottom-most panel.

Except for the response to the Pinatubo eruption (the pronounced dip during 1991), the fluctuations are on the order of 1 W/m2 or less once you smooth on an annual time scale. Based on this estimate and on the typical magnitude of Spencer’s combined SOI/PDOI index, I chose a scaling factor (Roy’s a) of 0.27 W/m2 .. In his article, Roy uses a value ten times as big, but then he partly covers up how large the annual radiative forcing is by showing only the five year averages. With Roy’s value of the scaling coefficient, the annual radiative forcing looks like this

which is clearly grossly exaggerated compared to the data. Moreover, in my own estimate of the scaling factor I tried to match the overall magnitude of the fluctuations, whereas restricting the estimate to that part of the observed fluctuation which correlates with the SOI/PDOI index could reduce the factor further. Finally, even insofar as some part of climate change could be ascribed to long term cloud changes associated with the PDOI and SOI, one cannot exclude the possibility that those changes are driven by the warming — in other words a feedback. Still, let’s go ahead and ignore all that, and put in Roy’s value of the scaling coefficient, and see what we get.

So here’s our cooked graph as of Lesson 1 of the recipe:

Lesson Two: Use a completely unrealistic mixed layer depth. OK, so we’ve goosed up the amplitude of the temperature signal to where it looks more impressive, but the wild interannual swings in temperature look completely unlike the real thing. What to do about that? This brings us to the issue of mixed layer depth. The mixed layer depth determines the response time of the model, since a deeper mixed layer has more mass and takes longer to heat up, all other things being equal. The actual ocean mixed layer has a depth on the order of 50 meters. That’s why we got such large amplitude and high frequency fluctuations in the previous graph. What value does Roy use for the mixed layer depth? One kilometer. To be sure, on the centennial scale, some heat does get buried several hundred meters deep in the ocean, at least in some limited parts of the ocean. However, to assume that all radiative imbalances are instantaneously mixed away to a depth of 1000 meters is oceanographically ludicrous. Let’s do it anyway. After all, as Julia Child said, "In cooking you’ve got to have a ‘What the Hell’ attitude." Here’s the result now:

Lesson 3: Pick an initial condition way out of equilibrium. It looks better, especially in the latter part of the century. But it doesn’t get the trend in the early century right. Gotta keep cooking! The essential ingredient this time is the choice of initial condition for the model. If we initialize the anomaly at -0.4C, which amounts to an assumption that the system is wildly out of equilibrium in 1900, then this is what we get:

Now, it’s finally looking ready to serve up to the unsuspecting diners. Note that it’s the adoption of an unrealistically large mixed layer depth that allows Roy to monkey with the early-century trend by adjusting the initial condition. With a more realistic mixed layer depth, changing the initial condition on temperature anomaly only leads to a rapid adjustment period affecting the first few years.

My graph is not absolutely identical to Roy’s, because there are minor differences in the initialization, the temperature offset used to define anomalies, and the temperature data set I’m using as a basis for comparision. My point though, is that this is not an exacting recipe: it’s hash — or Hamburger Helper — not soufflé. Following Roy’s recipe, you can get a reasonable-looking fit to data with very little fine-tuning because Roy has given himself a lot of elbow room to play around in: you have the choice of any two variability indices among dozens available, you make an arbitrary linear combination of them to suit your purposes, you choose whatever mixed layer depth you want, and you finish it all off by allowing yourself the luxury of diddling the initial condition. With all those degrees of freedom, I daresay you could fit the temperature record using hog-belly futures and New Zealand sheep population. Anybody want to try?
Postlude: Fool me once …

Why am I not surprised about all this shameless cookery? Perhaps it’s because I remember this 1997 gem from the front page of the Wall Street Journal, entitled "Science has Spoken:Global Warming is a Myth":

That’s not Roy’s prose, but it is Roy’s data over there in the graph on the right, which purports to show that the climate has been cooling, not warming. We now know, of course, that the satellite data set confirms that the climate is warming , and indeed at very nearly the same rate as indicated by the surface temperature records. Now, there’s nothing wrong with making mistakes when pursuing an innovative observational method, but Spencer and Christy sat by for most of a decade allowing — indeed encouraging — the use of their data set as an icon for global warming skeptics. They committed serial errors in the data analysis, but insisted they were right and models and thermometers were wrong. They did little or nothing to root out possible sources of errors, and left it to others to clean up the mess, as has now been done.

So after that history, we’re supposed to savor all Roy’s new cookery?

That’s an awful lot to swallow.

climate science is an intricate subject and when faced with this type of tom foolery its best to consult the specialists. Fortunately my most recent job was with a PHD in climate sciences from NOAA and of course your assessment of residence time is accurate and of course the deniers have used an oversimplified and second rate model to attempt to confuse the public once again

I notice someone is beginning to get frustrated which for him equals abusive and I would also like to make note of this to the readers as well. When faced with overwhelming evidence to the contrary the deniers tend to simply abandon the use of detailed analysis and pick up the torch of personal assault, exactly as predicted, took about 8 pages to prove itself.

cheers
B

[troy2000]

Interesting exposition there, Boston. It's too close to my bedtime (and too far from my first beer of the evening) for me to go study the graphs in your source tonight.

But the general tone of the piece reinforces my gut feeling: anyone who's shilling his scientific beliefs on blatantly partisan political shows is probably inherently unreliable.

And as the man says, it's one thing to make an honest scientific error. It's something else entirely to not only sit idly by without correcting the scientific record concerning that error, but remain silent while others use it to mislead the public.

[Boston]

agreed
same holds true for that Misklowski ( sorry misspelled it ) paper where the equations didn't add up and the guy says to just ignore that when its pointed out to him.

I asked him to retract it and publish a corrected version but unlike the fine example set by Oreske's he refused

why is the key question

most likely because the oil and gas industry pays for peer reviewed work in favor of there PR campaign and are unconcerned with the accuracy of the papers. My bet is if the paper is retracted he might have to give the money back

B

[fasteddy106]

Can anyone say specifically who Spencer was paid by? By this I mean just a bit more than "oil industry"or maybe even a payroll record entry? Then if you could show where his theory was directly influenced by the check he recieved. I mean if we are going to question a mans life work, honesty and integrity, there should be a bit more evidence than "everyone knows", don't ya think?

[troy2000]

Originally Posted by fasteddy106

Can anyone say specifically who Spencer was paid by? By this I mean just a bit more than "oil industry"or maybe even a payroll record entry? Then if you could show where his theory was directly influenced by the check he recieved. I mean if we are going to question a mans life work, honesty and integrity, there should be a bit more evidence than "everyone knows", don't ya think?

I haven't accused Spencer of being paid off; just of being unreliable. He seems to have his religious and political beliefs all jumbled into his scientific beliefs.

However, he can be linked to organizations that take oil money. That doesn't necessarily prove he's been bought; it's possible that because the world of scientific and pseudo-scientific climate skepticism is so small, he's bound to be touched by them in one way or another.

--Spencer is listed as a "scientific advisor" for an organization called the "Interfaith Stewardship Alliance" (ISA). According to their website, the ISA is "a coalition of religious leaders, clergy, theologians, scientists, academics, and other policy experts committed to bringing a proper and balanced Biblical view of stewardship to the critical issues of environment and development."

In July 2006, Spencer co-authored an ISA report refuting the work of another religious organization called the Evangelical Climate Initiative. The ISA report was titled A Call to Truth, Prudence and Protection of the Poor: an Evangelical Response to Global Warming. Along with the report was a letter of endorsement signed by numerous representatives of various organizations, including 6 that have received a total of $2.32 million in donations from ExxonMobil over the last three years.

http://www.desmogblog.com/roy-spencer

The general thrust of that ISA report is a call for religious groups to mobilize against any mandatory carbon-emission standards, on the grounds that it would harm the world's poor.

The other authors of the ISA report were Calvin Beisner, Paul Driessen and Ross McKitrick. Driessen is a lobbyist and author who has been defending the oil industry for years. he's also senior policy adviser for the Congress of Racial Equality and Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, two groups that have received ExxonMobil money for work by him and others on malaria eradication, Third World agriculture and economic development, climate change, and other issues.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php...=Paul_Driessen

I think you already know who Ross McKitrick is; he's one of those trying to discredit the so-called 'hockey stick.' It's interesting that he's also mixed up in opposing climate change mitigation on religious grounds, as well as disputing its very existence on scientific grounds.

Calvin Beisner is probably best known for his 1990 article, AIDS and Rationality, in which he argued against federal spending on AIDS research, treatment and education to fight a disease that "... is almost 100 percent self-inflicted by people intent on immoral and irrational behavior."

http://www.ecalvinbeisner.com/freear...ationality.pdf

--Spencer is listed as an author for the Heartland Institute, a US think tank that has received $561,500 from ExxonMobil since 1998.

The Heartland Institute has also received funding from Big Tobacco over the years and continues to make the claim that "anti-smoking advocates" are exaggerating the health threats of smoking.

--Spencer is listed as an "Expert" with the George C. Marshall Institute, a US think tank that has received $630,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998.

[Jimbo1490]

Originally Posted by troy2000

So I should be getting my scientific education from the Rush Limbaugh Show? Sure. That's going to happen....I can see it's done wonders for you.

Not Rush Limbo, Dr. Roy Spencer, ya friggin' *****, ya Willfully ignorant fool!

Jimbo

[Jimbo1490]

Originally Posted by troy2000

I haven't accused him of being paid off; just of being unreliable. He seems to have his religious and political beliefs all jumbled into his scientific stances.

However, he can be linked to organizations that take oil money. That doesn't prove he's personally been bribed; it's possible that because the world of scientific and pseudo-scientific climate skepticism is so small, he's bound to be touched by them in one way or another.

Spencer is listed as a "scientific advisor" for an organization called the "Interfaith Stewardship Alliance" (ISA). According to their website, the ISA is "a coalition of religious leaders, clergy, theologians, scientists, academics, and other policy experts committed to bringing a proper and balanced Biblical view of stewardship to the critical issues of environment and development."

In July 2006, Spencer co-authored an ISA report refuting the work of another religious organization called the Evangelical Climate Initiative. The ISA report was titled A Call to Truth, Prudence and Protection of the Poor: an Evangelical Response to Global Warming. Along with the report was a letter of endorsement signed by numerous representatives of various organizations, including 6 that have received a total of $2.32 million in donations from ExxonMobil over the last three years.

The other authors of the ISA's report were Calvin Beisner, Paul Driessen and Ross McKitrick .

http://www.desmogblog.com/roy-spencer

Spencer is listed as an author for the Heartland Institute, a US think tank that has received $561,500 from ExxonMobil since 1998.

The Heartland Institute has also received funding from Big Tobacco over the years and continues to make the claim that "anti-smoking advocates" are exaggerating the health threats of smoking.

Spencer is listed as an "Expert" with the George C. Marshall Institute, a US think tank that has received $630,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998.

The willfully ignorant "Troy2000" can't come up with even one point of contention with Dr Spencer's scientific assertions, because he probably does not even understand the issues at hand (he's willfully ignorant, after all and can't be bothered to learn enough to understand), so he spouts off about how Dr Spencer's religious beliefs make him unreliable as a scientist. What a load of horse ****! But what else can you expect from the willfully ignorant but horse puckey

You're talking in an echo chamber, Troy as your smear campaign doesn't convince anyone except the willfully ignorant, which is mostly just you on this thread.

Jimbo

[Jimbo1490]

Originally Posted by Boston

ah a brief hiatus

Alan
dont be fooled by Spencer

he is a paid hack and his tricks have been exposed over and over again
its just the kind of junk science that the deniers are clinging to and its easily found out

if you are interested in following any of the links or seeing the graphs I lifted this from

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php...-easy-lessons/


cheers
B

SurRealClimate.org still defends the "Hockey Stick" reconstruction as valid science YEARS after it was totally crushed. Wonder B is now going to tell you that the NAS upheld the Hockey Stick and that it was exonerated. What they in fact said was that once the errors are corrected, it is a scientifically sound recon. But once the errors are removed as specified, then there is a prominent medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age, just like every other recon has.

SurREalCLimate then pretends that the original Hockey Stick with its conclusions about the 20th century climate being unprecedented are still valid because of the NAS report

Some people buy this kind of dishonest garbage, but I hope most of you reading this are more intelligent than that.
But I do know that some of you are not

Jimbo

[fasteddy106]

So essentially what we have against Spencer is a smear attempt, plain & simple. No checks made out to him, no evidence of him falsifying data (unlike Mann, Jones, Briffa, and Hansen),simply that groups he did research for took a relative pittance from some oil companies in comparison with the 80+ billion the U.S. government has spent.

That evidence sounds about as empirical as the link between C02 and warming.

[troy2000]

Originally Posted by fasteddy106

So essentially what we have against Spencer is a smear attempt, plain & simple. No checks made out to him, no evidence of him falsifying data (unlike Mann, Jones, Briffa, and Hansen),simply that groups he did research for took a relative pittance from some oil companies in comparison with the 80+ billion the U.S. government has spent.

That evidence sounds about as empirical as the link between C02 and warming.

Climb off that hobby horse; you're riding it into the ground. I never offered anything as evidence of wrongdoing on Spencer's part. I never accused him of falsifying data, and I never accused him of taking bribes.

But it's instructive to see the circles he runs in and the causes he champions; I don't trust the judgment and scientific conclusions of a man who mixes religion, politics, economics and science.

"...unlike Mann, Jones, Briffa and Hansen?" Now that's a smear. Apparently you're fine with smearing, as long as you're the one with the dirty hands.