Ugh, he brought up the ID things. I knew that about Spencer but refused to bring it up as the author of that blog should have as well. Its unnecessary to point that out and he even goes as far to say why. All that matters is that Spencers model's are not very good at all - and that's being kind.
aaaah. D'oh! Or should I say duh!
I thought that seemed a bit out of charactor for you, and was a bit puzzled when I read it.
Via RealClimate
To help interpret the results, Spencer uses a simple model. But the simple model used by Spencer is too simple (Einstein says that things should be made as simple as possible but not simpler): well this has gone way beyond being too simple (see for instance this post by Barry Bickmore). The model has no realistic ocean, no El Niño, and no hydrological cycle, and it was tuned to give the result it gave. Most of what goes on in the real world of significance that causes the relationship in the paper is ENSO. We have already rebutted Lindzen’s work on exactly this point. The clouds respond to ENSO, not the other way round [see: Trenberth, K. E., J. T. Fasullo, C. O'Dell, and T. Wong, 2010: Relationships between tropical sea surface temperatures and top-of-atmosphere radiation. Geophys. Res. Lett., 37, L03702, doi:10.1029/2009GL042314.] During ENSO there is a major uptake of heat by the ocean during the La Niña phase and the heat is moved around and stored in the ocean in the tropical western Pacific, setting the stage for the next El Niño, as which point it is redistributed across the tropical Pacific. The ocean cools as the atmosphere responds with characteristic El Niño weather patterns forced from the region that influence weather patterns world wide. Ocean dynamics play a major role in moving heat around, and atmosphere-ocean interaction is a key to the ENSO cycle. None of those processes are included in the Spencer model.
Even so, the Spencer interpretation has no merit. The interannual global temperature variations were not radiatively forced, as claimed for the 2000s, and therefore cannot be used to say anything about climate sensitivity. Clouds are not a forcing of the climate system (except for the small portion related to human related aerosol effects, which have a small effect on clouds). Clouds mainly occur because of weather systems (e.g., warm air rises and produces convection, and so on); they do not cause the weather systems. Clouds may provide feedbacks on the weather systems. Spencer has made this error of confounding forcing and feedback before and it leads to a misinterpretation of his results.
The bottom line is that there is NO merit whatsoever in this paper. It turns out that Spencer and Braswell have an almost perfect le for their paper: “the misdiagnosis of surface temperature feedbacks from variations in the Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance” (leaving out the “On”).
That blog is trying WAAAY too hard. If "deniers" are quacks, why go to this effort to refute them?
I'll let the data decide. I do think the satellite record is superior to the terrestrial record, especially to GISS.
Because people breathlessly write ty op-eds for Forbes.
I'm just the messenger... I found it on another site and just merely passing it along. I didn't read the OP nor the blog.
Um, look at the response that stupid ass op ed has generated. Its pretty funny and in the end no amount of bad science changes whats happening but I really don't think there's much effort put into a blog post with a few links.
I don't think clouds are a climate driver either, because they are too transient. It does seem that clouds would have some albedo effect. I don't think this is any groundbreaking research.
I do like how that blog blasts Heartland Ins ute and then cites ThinkProgess. Lol
Maybe boutons has a blog?
Manny, it has to do with lag and energy out. The longer the lag is and smaller the outgoing heat vs incoming changes, the more the global temperature increases for a given change. This is because the earth stops heating up when equilibrium is reached. This shows a quicker response than the IPCC claims, hence, the heating the IPCC says will happen is more than what will.
Clouds definitely have an albedo effect but they are more insulator than anything. The point that Spencer keeps trying to drive is that cloud patterns drive large climatic patterns which there is NO evidence for and virtually no one agrees with. I know I've discussed his views on ENSO and clouds before here and its just not good science.
I wish that posts concerning papers on blogs would stick to analyzing the papers. I don't care if dude believes in ID and have 6 toes - I just care about how sound the science is. Luckily blogs like the one I linked above and RealClimate will simply stick to the science.
I do think the op ed linked in OP was FOS though.
You have no idea what you're talking about. I didn't expect anything differently though. Parroting things like that doesn't change the fact that the way energy is measured in Spencer's model is absolutely worthless considering the parameters can be changed in order to give whatever result Spencer wants to prove. If I want to show that the earth is heating up slower then I can do so by changing parameters in that model that have no real world bearing what so ever.
What if we flooded Black Canyon?
Well... If you don't backward engineer observation, then you cannot make a viable model. I guess you would say using the same arguments that the IPCC models are all full of too.
I don't care what you say. You dismiss anything that doesn't fit in the boxes given to you by others. Science means looking into all possibilities.
irony rich
Its not about backward engineering observation. You don't seem to understand what I've posted about this model and how its parameters - unlike IPCC modeling - are not constrained to real world physical situations.
As an example, its as if I wrote a model to explain why planes can fly and instead of looking at lift as a force I simply wrote in parameters where I could lower the force of gravity in order to make it seem as though the reason planes can fly was that gravity was weaker than it actually is.
So yes, I dismiss everything that requires the world to function in a way that it does not and instead function in a way necessary for their simple models to work. In science, one is not allowed to invent parameters in order to make their hypothesis correct.
Backward engineering a model that requires you to use the mixing depth of the ocean means using the actual mixing depths of the ocean and not some arbitrary number that makes your model work. Thats kind of the entire point.
Spencer's own words to describe his modeling
Since we don’t know how to set the four [parameters] on the model to cause it to produce temperature variations like those in [the 20th century temperature record], we will use the brute force of the computer’s great speed to do 100,000 runs, each of which has a unique combination of these four [parameter] settings. And because spreadsheet programs like Excel aren’t made to run this many experiments, I programmed the model in Fortran.
It took only a few minutes to run the 100,000 different combinations…. Out of all these model simulations, I saved the ones that came close to the observed temperature variations between 1900 and 2000. Then, I averaged all of these thousands of temperature simulations together…. What we see is that if the computer gets to “choose” how much the clouds change with the PDO, then the PDO alone can explain 75 percent of the warming trend seen during the twentieth century. In fact, it also does a pretty good job of capturing the warming until about 1940, then the slight cooling until the 1970s, and finally the resumed warming until 2000.
If I instead use the history of anthropogenic forcings that James Hansen has compiled…, somewhat more of the warming trend can be explained, but the temperature variations in the middle of the century are not as well captured. I should note that the “warm hump” around 1940 and the slight cooling afterward have always been a thorn in the side of climate modelers. (p. 115)
The problem? NO proof that clouds/the PDO are forcing agents dealing with the climate. None. Zero.
I see you are arguing against something else, and not the new paper.
Just your style.
Consider those from one of the links in the OP:
Data from NASA’s Terra satellite shows that when the climate warms, Earth’s atmosphere is apparently more efficient at releasing energy to space than models used to forecast climate change have been programmed to “believe.”In research published this week in the journal “Remote Sensing” http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/3/8/1603/pdf, Spencer and UA Huntsville’s Dr. Danny Braswell compared what a half dozen climate models say the atmosphere should do to satellite data showing what the atmosphere actually did during the 18 months before and after warming events between 2000 and 2011.Wow... All these IPCC models, and they ignore this?“The satellite observations suggest there is much more energy lost to space during and after warming than the climate models show,” Spencer said. “There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans.”
Not only does the atmosphere release more energy than previously thought, it starts releasing it earlier in a warming cycle. The models forecast that the climate should continue to absorb solar energy until a warming event peaks. Instead, the satellite data shows the climate system starting to shed energy more than three months before the typical warming event reaches its peak.
“At the peak, satellites show energy being lost while climate models show energy still being gained,” Spencer said.
This is the first time scientists have looked at radiative balances during the months before and after these transient temperature peaks.
Hardly fits what you are saying is wrong Manny.Applied to long-term climate change, the research might indicate that the climate is less sensitive to warming due to increased carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere than climate modelers have theorized. A major underpinning of global warming theory is that the slight warming caused by enhanced greenhouse gases should change cloud cover in ways that cause additional warming, which would be a positive feedback cycle.
Instead, the natural ebb and flow of clouds, solar radiation, heat rising from the oceans and a myriad of other factors added to the different time lags in which they impact the atmosphere might make it impossible to isolate or accurately identify which piece of Earth’s changing climate is feedback from manmade greenhouse gases.
“There are simply too many variables to reliably gauge the right number for that,” Spencer said. “The main finding from this research is that there is no solution to the problem of measuring atmospheric feedback, due mostly to our inability to distinguish between radiative forcing and radiative feedback in our observations.”
From the piece you quoted, sounds like he's running a Monte Carlo simulation on an empirical model. Nothing wrong with that. To quote George Box: "all models are wrong, but some are useful". He does bring up a good point about the cooling between 1940 and 1970.
Manny is right that, if his model is based on physics, and he uses a parameter that, let's say, violates some thermodynamic principle, then that model is pure .
No proof the IPCC is right either.
He is trying to get somewhere, and you criticize scientific methodology?
I see you are harsh with anyone that dare question your religion.
Last edited by Wild Cobra; 07-29-2011 at 06:40 PM.
This is pretty rich coming from the resident apologist...
When are you publishing your Black Canyon theory?
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