We’ve heard of short-cut, alarmist, alarmist reaction to global warming — using nuclear fire-extinguishers (nuclear-winter technology) to thwart the onslaught of intense 0.76 degree C flames.

Well, here is another short-cut: a greener world by toxy-proxy?

Check out “Barren Hill Made Green With Paint” at…

http://english.cri.cn/2906/200.....195972.htm

Quick cover-ups often uncover more long-lasting deception.

After reading of about the insignificance of UHI effects in basic global temperature data, I’m wondering if we will soon read that UHIs are compensated with PII (polar ice islands) or RRI(rural radiative islands).

“Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.”

Someone was asking about something you said last night. Go to the Michael Egnor thread and search for your name.

“The omission of reference to changes in Eg↓in the IPCC assessments brings into question
the confidence that can be placed in a topdown, ‘consensus’ science system that ignores such a major and significant element of climate change.
A separate and more fundamental question is whether scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficient to produce a useful consensus view. Is climate change a science or is it a trans-science, asking questions that can be stated in the language of science but that are currently beyond its ability to answer?

The cautionary note global dimming and brightening sounds for climate change scientists is not a new one; rather it strikingly vindicates the two rules of climate change set out by Peter Wright 30 years ago [Wright, 1971]. The first rule states that some feature of the atmosphere can always be found that will oscillate in accordance with your hypothesis; the second states that shortly after its discovery, the oscillation will disappear.”

Gerald Stanhill, Institute of Soil, Water and Environmental Sciences, Volcani Center, Bet Dagan, Israel.

Given that I can’t respond there (one comment is the quickest I’ve been banned anywhere and it certainly wasn’t for being rude or anything) I guess I’ll have to respond to raypierre’s lame polar amplication response here which didn’t say anything except acknowledge the Arctic is heating faster than anywhere else without giving the cause. I already knew the Arctic was heating way faster than anywhere else without raypierre telling me. I was asking why.

They should at least call it North Polar Amplification because the South Pole isn’t amplifying jack diddly squat and in fact has cooled off a bit in the last 10 years.

Antarctic temperatures disagree with climate model predictionsFebruary 15, 2007

“What we see now is that the temperature regime is broadly similar to what we saw before with snowfall. In the last decade or so, both have gone down,” he said.

Bummer. Polar Amplification is Polar De/i<>amplification in the Antarctic. One can only hope raypierre lurks here so he can keep up with what’s really going on.

And here Mark Frank told me they knew what they were talking about at realclimate? Yeah, right. Nothing but hot air at realclimate and I do mean that metaphorically.

First of all, Zach needs to read up a bit on what this energy budget stuff really means and how the term greenhouse is misused. I recommend:

http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/

Next Zach needs to be reminded that even if the earth is temporarily absorbing more energy than it is radiating this doesn’t necessarily translate to a higher surface or air temperature nor is it necessarily due to greenhouse gases. In fact the energy is not heating the earth very much and the excess absorption is not due to greenhouse gases to a large extent.

Zach surely must be forgetting that energy may be stored as potential energy in various forms; chemical, kinetic, gravitational, elastic, and so forth.

Some of the excess energy is being locked up in chemical energy by living things. That’s what oil is – excess energy from the sun stored as potential chemical energy. There’s all kinds of chemical energy storage.

But the real energy hog right now is water and it stores a LOT of energy in kinetic form when it transitions from solid to liquid and liquid to gas. 1 gram of ice at 0 degrees C will absorb 80 calories of heat energy to become 1 gram of water at 0 degrees C. It doesn’t get any warmer in the transition, all the energy is stored as kinetic energy. Turning it into water vapor is an even better storage mechanism. It takes 540 calories to turn 1 gram of water into 1 gram of water vapor without raising its temperature. The atmosphere can hold a lot more water vapor than it holds right now and there’s plenty of liquid water available to evaporate.

Now, while a higher concentration of gases that absorb infrared radiated from the earth’s surface will be able to soak up more energy for a while (eventually they reach a limit imposed by the solar flux density; think of this limit as the same one that keeps a potato from getting hotter than the oven its in) the real bandit in all this is dark soots and dusts that accumulate on snow and ice making them darker and better at absorbing solar energy. So where is all that excess 0.85w/m^2 going? It’s going to turn ice at 0 degrees C into water at 0 degrees C and after that it can drive evaporation turning warm water into warm water vapor, all the while not driving up the temperature of the earth as a whole because the energy is simply being stored as chemical and kinetic energy.

If this was where all that excess energy was being stored what would the symptoms look like, Zach? Give yourself a gold star for saying thinning/retreating ice sheets, permafrost melting, and things of that nature.

Here’s a quote by Dr. Christy from the UAH website. He said this just last year:

http://www.uah.edu/News/newsread.php?newsID=291

“It just doesn’t look like global warming is very global,” said Dr. John Christy, director of UAH’s Earth System Science Center. “Obviously some part of the warming we’ve observed in the atmosphere over the past 27 years is due to enhanced greenhouse gases. Simple physics tells you that.

“But even if you acknowledge the effects of greenhouse gases, when you look at this pattern of warming you have to say there must also be something else at work here.

“The carbon dioxide from fossil fuels is distributed pretty evenly around the globe and not concentrated in the Arctic, so it doesn’t look like we can blame greenhouse gases for the overwhelming bulk of the Northern Hemisphere warming over the past 27 years. The most likely suspect for that is a natural climate change or cycle that we didn’t expect or just don’t understand.”

“The computer models consistently predict that global warming due to increasing greenhouse gases should show up as strong warming in the tropics,” Christy said.

Even with a recent data correction that added tropical warming to the dataset, however, the satellite data still shows that the tropical atmosphere has warmed by only 0.19 C — just over one-third of a degree Fahrenheit — in 27 years.

I encourage you to provide more recent quotes where he has something different to say but I think I’ve demonstrated that the data I used is reliable and I have not contradicted a single thing that Dr. Christy has said on the subject.

However, I do think Dr. Christy is wrong about Arctic heating being either natural or misunderstood. The cause is manmade, it’s black carbon (soot) turning arctic snow darker, and there are a number of scientists I’ve found who do indeed understand it including James Hansen (see here for Hansen’s research).

From Hansen 2003:

Plausible estimates for the effect of soot on snow and ice albedos (1.5% in the Arctic and 3% in Northern Hemisphere land areas)yield a climate forcing of 0.3 W/m^2 in the Northern Hemisphere. The ‘‘efficacy’’ of this forcing is 2, i.e., for a given forcing it is twice as effective as CO2 in altering global surface air temperature. This indirect soot forcing may have contributed to global warming of the past century, including the trend toward early springs in the Northern Hemisphere, thinning Arctic sea ice, and melting land ice and permafrost. If, as we suggest, melting ice and sea level rise define the level of dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system, then reducing soot emissions, thus restoring snow albedos to pristine high values, would have the double benefit of reducing global warming and raising the global temperature level at which dangerous anthropogenic interference occurs. However, soot contributions to climate change do not alter the conclusion that anthropogenic greenhouse gases have been the main cause of recent global warming and will be the predominant climate forcing in the future.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (1) estimates the global climate forcing by fossil fuel black carbon (BC)aerosols as 0.2W/m^2. Jacobson (2) suggests that the fossil fuel BC forcing is larger, 0.5W/m^2. J.H. and colleagues (3–5) have argued that the total anthropogenic BC forcing, including BC from fossil fuels, biofuels, and outdoor biomass burning, and also including the indirect effects of BC on snow ice albedo, is still larger, 0.8 +- 0.4 W/m^2. Here we estimate the magnitude of one component of the BC climate forcing: its effect on snow ice albedo. Several factors complicate evaluation of the BC snow albedo climate forcing and dictate the approach we use to estimate the forcing.

Jacobson referenced above has this to say in Nature

The magnitude of the direct radiative forcing from black carbon itself exceeds that due to CH4, suggesting that black carbon may be the second most important component of global warming after CO2 in terms of direct forcing.

I’m a student at UAH and have heard a good bit about this from Dr. Christy and other scientists at NASA (Dr. Christy spoke to one of my classes last year). The data error was significant and the models at UAH now match up more closely with most other models

I quoted the published study by Dr. Christy. Regardless of what you think you heard on campus I used what was meticulously written by Dr. Christy and disseminated to the scientific community. Yes, the errors were significant but in 2 of 3 cases the radiosondes were at fault not the satellites and in the case where the satellite data is wrong it’s significant for only about a year and the maximum error is 0.2F lower reading than it should have been. While that is “significant” one year of error hardly changes the 25 year history of satellite temperature measurements.

From reading the report by Christy 2006 they found the satellite data was correct and the radiosonde ground data wrong in 2 of 3 discrepancies.

we conclude that the radiosondes experienced a spurious cooling shift in Jan 1990. Similarly, event C in Jun 1997 was discovered by both satellite datasets, was highly significant and of the same magnitude (+0.156 K, Table 1).
This was the point in time when most of the stations switched from VIZ-B to VIZ-B2 instrumentation. The B2 instrument included a solid-state baroswitch which replaced the mechanical arm that rotated through 180 discrete electrical contacts. This change provided a more accurate pressure reading and allowed the pressure and temperature to be simultaneously (i.e. stantaneously) measured. There was generally a lag between the pressure reported from the baroswitch, being the last contact made, and the temperature. The net impact introduced warmer temperatures.

Event B is of more interest to the issue at hand. We were unable to locate any information that might implicate the radiosondes as having a shift to cooler temperatures during late 1991 to 1993 as depicted by the z-scores in Fig. 1. However, this is a period in the satellite record for which spurious discontinuities and shifts may have occurred. First, NOAA-12 became operational in Oct 1991, so its data were first merged into the time series at that point. Secondly, the adjustments necessary for NOAA-11 to account for drifting through the diurnal cycle and separately for its instrument calibration problem were of significant magnitude in this period.

The graph at the bottom shows the z-score (the difference between radiosonde and satellite readings) for event B was only above 2.5 (above 2.5 is defined as “significant” in the text) for about a year in 1993. Moreover, the reported temperature measurement discrepancy for that period is a maximum of 0.13 K which is barely .2 degrees F.

Assuming event B is a satellite problem, the 31 stations provide a sufficient sample size to determine that the shift is on the order of –0.08 ± 0.05 K (applying the 36-month breakpoint methodology).

So, the long and the short of it is that yes, there was a discrepancy in satellite data due to orbital shifting but the error was limited to late 1991 to 1993 and at its worst was only 0.2 degrees F lower than actual temperatures aloft measured by radiosondes.

The objection that there are errors in the satellite data are there but are nowhere near sufficient to significantly alter the picture presented here:

http://wwwghcc.msfc.nasa.gov/temperature/

This is what I suspected. NASA is exceedingly expert at orbital calculations and the mistake only effected one satellite (NOAA-11) for a short period of time. The satellite data remains by far the best global temperature data available beginning in 1979. If you feel that’s not correct please present your case to the contrary.