OK, so yesterday’s hearing really was entitled, “Climate Change: It’s Happening Now”. I like my title better.

In this exceedingly rare photo of me actually cracking a smile, note my subliminal shout out to the “Coke” brothers (whom I’ve never met, btw…I don’t even know what they do):

From the opening remarks made by the Democrats on the Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee, apparently you can see climate change yourself just by looking in your backyard, or seeing how far from shore fishermen must go now to catch fish, or even (help me with the logic on this one) the fact that smoking causes cancer.

I just submitted my updated written testimony (Spencer_EPW_Written_Testimony_7_18_2013_updated) to include the following chart (Click for full size):

This chart illustrates that, yes, we are currently warm, but not significantly warmer than the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) or the Roman Warm Period (RWP). So how is it we know today’s warmth is human-caused, when the last two warm periods couldn’t have been caused by humans? Hmmm?

And if you want to hit me with a Hockey Stick, might I remind you that there are many more papers supporting the MWP and RWP than there are supporting the Hockey Stick’s slick revision of history?

Or does “consensus” only count when it supports your side?

What’s that you say? The hockey stick is now the “new consensus”? So a scientific consensus can be wrong, after all? Hmmm.

Hearing Post Mortem
The advertised star of the show was Heidi Cullen (aka “de-certify all TV meteorologists who don’t toe the line on global warming Heidi”) who did an admirable job of presenting a litany of half-truths (hurricanes have increased [except in the last 7 years]; strong tornadoes have decreased [but she couldn’t bring her self to actually say that]; wildfire acres burned have increased dramatically [but the number of wildfires have decreased dramatically…all consistent with the USFS “let it burn” policy]; droughts and floods have increased [except NOAA’s charts say there is no change over the last 100 years], etc.).

Roger Pielke, Jr. was absolutely devastating in his testimony. Here’s a guy who claims to largely support the IPCC party line, even claiming increasing CO2 is having a “profound” effect on the climate system, yet he chides those who would try to use severe weather as evidence of climate change. The evidence simply isn’t there. Very Lomborgian, sans the sexy T-shirt.

During my testimony (in the Flash video, starting about 3:04 for my oral, and 3:23 for follow-up questions/interrogation) I decided to depart from my usual practice of reading of a prepared text to just winging it. There is VERY little you can cover in 5 minutes, and there were a number of things I would have liked to have said, but there simply isn’t time…that’s just the way committee hearings go.

All of the senators were moving in an out of the hearing room for a floor vote, so there were only 2-4 senators present at any given time.

Thanks to all of those who have posted and e-mailed supportive comments…I really appreciate it. Getting flogged in public by Sen. Boxer (last time I testified) and Sen. Whitehouse (this time) is not one of my favorite activities. But I warned the staffers I wasn’t going to be pushed around this time without some pushing back. I think we did OK for a hearing where the witness numbers were stacked against us.

I’ve been receiving more e-mails than usual asking about chemtrails, the supposed clandestine spraying of chemicals by jet aircraft, so I thought I would talk a little about the issue.

I was at a townhall meeting a couple years ago, and some biker dude got up and demanded that our congressman do something about chemtrails (the congressman said he had never heard of the issue before). Based upon the level of interest I have seen, there is considerable popular support for the view that chemtrails exist.

First let me say there are such things as “conspiracies”…some people conspire together with all kinds of nefarious motives, both inside and outside government. But not everything that happens in life is a conspiracy.

Jet aircraft at high altitudes produce condensation trails (contrails) which form from water vapor, one by-product of combustion. Some of these clouds can be colorful at sunrise or sunset, just as natural clouds are. Contrail activity has increased dramatically since the 1950s, for the obvious reason that high altitude jet traffic was almost non-existent before that time.

It is indeed possible that the high altitude cirrus clouds formed by jets might have contributed to warming in recent decades due to the greenhouse effect produced by cirrus clouds (thin cirrus reduce outgoing infrared radiation more than they reflect sunlight), although research on this has a large amount of uncertainty.

Now, I suppose it’s possible the Air Force or some other entity has experimented with spraying of chemicals from jets for various purposes. For example, chemical defoliants were sprayed by aircraft from low altitudes during the Vietnam War. But there is no evidence I am aware of that any of the jet contrails you see in the sky on a daily basis is anything other than the passive (and necessary) result of combustion.

Contrails don’t always form behind a jet because sometimes the air is so dry that it absorbs the water vapor from aircraft without condensation taking place. When I was the lead scientist on a microwave radiometer we used to fly over thunderstorms on a modified U2 aircraft, the U2 pilots told us stories of flying spy missions; if the U2 started forming a contrail, they would return home because the aircraft would be too easy to spot from the ground.

I was looking at some of the claimed evidence for chemtrails, for example a 1990 USAF chemistry course outline entitled “Chemtrails”. This indeed seems to establish that the USAF coined the term “chemtrail”, but it was simply a play on “Contrails”, a handbook routinely distributed to cadets. I looked through the chemistry course materials and there was no mention of “chemtrails” in the modern sense of the word.

And graphic artists don’t help when they come up with spoofs, like this one showing airline pilots marching against chemtrails:

Another supposed proof is patents related to spraying of chemicals from aircraft. There is some truth to this claim, because with talk of geoengineering the climate system to offset global warming, there has been considerable interest in spraying a variety of substances into the stratosphere as a way to reflect sunlight in the manner of a large volcanic eruption. As a result, private companies are patenting methods for performing this spraying if it ever becomes a funded project.

But the claim that daily, routine jet traffic involves the secret spraying of chemicals for population control by the government, or to keep us sick to support the pharmaceutical industry, etc., is pretty wild. There is much more information debunking various chemtrail claims at a website called contrailscience.com.

So how do flying saucers fit into this? Well, it was pointed out that a patent for a chemtrail (or any other) device does not mean that a device has ever been developed…or that it would even work. I’d be interested in hearing some physicists’ opinions on the patent for a Space vehicle propelled by the pressure of inflationary vacuum state:

But, I suppose conspiracy is in the eye of the beholder, and I’m sure someone in comments below will claim I am part of the conspiracy that perpetuates the “myth” of the greenhouse effect. Oh, well.

After 10 days in Michigan’s U.P. for my 40th high school reunion, here’s the belated monthly global temperature update.

We added two satellites to the processing, Metop-A starting in 2007 and NOAA-19 starting in 2009. The resulting anomalies, which we will call Version 5.6, differ by as much as 0.04 deg. C from v5.5. You can read the details of the new processing here.

We are now making good progress on Version 6.0, which includes a variety of improvements in our processing procedures which have taken much more time than we anticipated.

The Version 5.6 global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for June, 2013 is +0.30 deg. C (click for large version):

The global, hemispheric, and tropical LT anomalies from the 30-year (1981-2010) average for the last 18 months are:

YR MON GLOBAL NH SH TROPICS
2012 1 -0.145 -0.088 -0.203 -0.245
2012 2 -0.140 -0.016 -0.263 -0.326
2012 3 +0.033 +0.064 +0.002 -0.238
2012 4 +0.230 +0.346 +0.114 -0.251
2012 5 +0.178 +0.338 +0.018 -0.102
2012 6 +0.244 +0.378 +0.111 -0.016
2012 7 +0.149 +0.263 +0.035 +0.146
2012 8 +0.210 +0.195 +0.225 +0.069
2012 9 +0.369 +0.376 +0.361 +0.174
2012 10 +0.367 +0.326 +0.409 +0.155
2012 11 +0.305 +0.319 +0.292 +0.209
2012 12 +0.229 +0.153 +0.305 +0.199
2013 1 +0.497 +0.512 +0.481 +0.387
2013 2 +0.203 +0.372 +0.034 +0.195
2013 3 +0.200 +0.333 +0.068 +0.243
2013 4 +0.114 +0.128 +0.101 +0.165
2013 5 +0.083 +0.180 -0.015 +0.112
2013 6 +0.298 +0.337 +0.259 +0.221

Yesterday I spoke with EnviroMission President Chris Davey to get an update on the progress of the first, large-scale solar tower (aka solar updraft tower, or solar chimney). EnviroMission is progressing through the permitting process and plans to start construction late next year in La Paz County, Arizona.

Billed as a 200 MW electrical generation facility, its towering hot air chimney will be about 2,600 ft tall, making it the second tallest manmade structure in the world, and about twice as high as the Empire State Building.

What has always captured my imagination about the concept is that it uses the daily generation of warm air at the surface by the sun to generate electricity. It takes the familiar principle of a chimney filled with buoyant, hot air to the extreme. The taller and wider the tower, and the hotter the air it contains, the greater the potential for energy generation. The solar heated air in the tower continuously draws air into the 2.5+ mile wide glass/plastic canopy and through approximately 32 wind turbines, each rated at 6.25 MW, circling the base of the tower.

Now, all of this hot air would have been generated anyway, without the solar tower there. But it would have driven turbulently mixed thermals as pockets of buoyant hot air rise and gradually warm the lower troposphere during the daytime. The solar tower simply organizes all of this buoyant energy into a single updraft, which will drive a fairly continuous 30 knot wind through the 32 turbines.

One advantage of this design over conventional solar is since the ground will absorb much of the heat, electricity generation will continue at night as the ground gives up that heat, and the outside ambient air temperature cools by about 30 deg. F, helping to maintain buoyancy in the tower.

Design details are still being optimized by industry leader Arup Engineering, based in the UK. Mr. Davey mentioned a couple of the remaining design uncertainties, such as what material to use for the canopy (tempered glass or some kind of plastic); easy servicing of the clear panels is very important.

The facility requires no water for cooling, a significant advantage, and is designed to last for decades. I forgot to ask about the anticipated effects of wind loading on a tower that tall, but Mr. Davey said there are no major design problems with the facility.

Here’s a pretty cool computer animation video which was made back when the tower height was anticipated to be 1,000 m, rather than 800 m. From what I understand, EnviroMission is also negotiating solar tower projects in Texas, and a few foreign countries, as well.

(Any errors, misrepresentations, or misrememberings in the above are my own.)

Since I’m getting asked to comment on the President’s speech, I guess it’s time for a little detour from science into policy. If you don’t like me mixing science and policy, go complain to Al Gore or Joe Romm or Jim Hansen or Gavin Schmidt or Michael Mann or the American Meteorological Society or the American Geophysical Union or the American Physical Society…or the President himself.

Oh, I could go into the President’s appeal in his address today to those who don’t know any better…that severe weather is supposedly worse due to global warming. Sorry, but by almost all objective measures, severe weather hasn’t gotten worse (storm damage costs increase over time, but that increase isn’t due to weather; Sandy-type storms have always occurred, and always will…they just hardly ever hit a major metropolitan area).

Or, I could go into the silliness of his equating carbon dioxide (which is necessary for life on Earth) to poisonous chemicals like arsenic and mercury.

Or maybe his swipe at skeptics as flat-Earthers, even though most, if not all, of us DO believe that humans influence climate to some extent. (I thought he understood “nuance”?) But all of these things have been addressed by me and others before in considerable detail.

Or his cherry-picking of data. Yes, even our satellite measurements of lower atmospheric temperatures over the U.S. registered record warmth in 2012. But John Christy also tells me our measurements for Australia (similar in size to the U.S.) in 2012 were below normal.

And our tropical tropospheric temperatures (where almost 50% of Earth’s sunlight is absorbed) have a 34-year temperature trend which is not statistically different from zero, in stark contrast to 73 state-of-the-art climate models.

Unfortunately, our President reminds me of a Hollywood star who thinks we can wave a magic wand and create abundant renewable energy if we just try a little harder. A few years ago I debated Daryl Hannah on TV down in Cancun during an IPCC climate conference. I was impressed with her knowledge of the pros and cons of various renewable energy strategies.

But after we were done filming, she told me, basically, “we just need to switch over to wind and solar right now”.

Excuse me? I’m sorry, I guess I was assuming too much regarding this Hollywood actress’s knowledge of basic physics.

It doesn’t matter how badly you want renewable energy to replace fossil fuels and nuclear, there are a few obstacles to overcome, akin to “you can’t get something from nothing”.

Wind, solar, and biomass all have very low energy densities compared to fossil fuels or nuclear, which are very dense concentrations of energy. Generating a substantial (i.e. realistic) amount of renewable energy is VERY expensive in materials and land. How many poor kids you want to take food and medical care from to pay for it?

Plus, for wind and solar, it isn’t always there when you need it (at night, when it’s cloudy, when the wind doesn’t blow). So, it has to be backed up with fossil fuels anyway.

Punishing our most cost effective forms of energy (as the President and the EPA want oh-so-badly to do) just further deepens our economic downturn. If the President really is concerned about “the children” maybe he should examine what really hurts the children – poverty.

Affordable, abundant energy is required to generate wealth, and without wealth, you can’t help those who can’t help themselves. I thought that’s what our President wanted to do..help the poor? But how can we do that if we punish the wealth generators at every turn?

In fact, I can’t imagine a better plan for purposely destroying the economy. Strike it at its heart, the availability of abundant low-cost energy.

Until we come up with affordable and widely deployable renewable energy sources, a war on fossil fuels is a war on the poor. Basic Economics 101. Wealth diverted to wasteful projects (or wealth destroyed) is no longer available for more deserving projects.

Yes, we need to continue renewable energy research, since fossil fuels won’t last forever. But you cannot simply legislate (or as Obama wants to do, regulate, without approval from Congress or the electorate) new forms of energy into existence.

The question is, how do we get from here to there? Now that we are finding global warming is, at worst, progressing at only 50% the rate predicted, we have time to be smart about it (assuming it’s entirely our fault and bad for life on Earth, which I’m not convinced of. Carbon dioxide is just as necessary for life as oxygen, yet it is over 500 times less abundant).

This isn’t a science fiction movie we are living in. I’m afraid the low-information voter won’t “get it” until we have brownouts and blackouts. As more coal-fired power plants are shut down, that day is fast approaching.

Or maybe the economy will be so weak we won’t need all that extra energy anyway.

A polar bear which collapsed from heat exhaustion before it could be shot.

I have in my possession a copy of one of the most authoritative books ever written on Arctic sea ice, including a section on the warming of the Arctic. It is written by one of the pioneering researchers in Arctic sea ice, N.N Zubov, a Russian, who spent his career studying the Arctic region.

His observations of warming in the Arctic, which he described as not localized, but universal, are taken from his book entitled Arctic Ice. I have excerpted several pertinent passages, which I’m sure will convince you that warming of the Arctic can scarcely be denied:

Along with the fluctuations in ice abundance in each individual sea from year to year, in late years a most interesting phenomenon has been observed – a warming of the Arctic, as evidence by a gradual and universal decrease in ice abundance. The main evidence of this general warming of the Arctic are:

Still more remarkable is the fact that the warming of the Arctic is not confined to any particular region.

I find these observations to be quite compelling evidence that warming of the Arctic is indeed unprecedented. Who would dare deny it? Clearly, we must do something about our carbon dioxide emissions!!

NOTE: Oh, silly me. This book was written in the late 1930’s. Nevermind.

In response to those who complained in my recent post that linear trends are not a good way to compare the models to observations (even though the modelers have claimed that it’s the long-term behavior of the models we should focus on, not individual years), here are running 5-year averages for the tropical tropospheric temperature, models versus observations (click for full size):

In this case, the models and observations have been plotted so that their respective 1979-2012 trend lines all intersect in 1979, which we believe is the most meaningful way to simultaneously plot the models’ results for comparison to the observations.

In my opinion, the day of reckoning has arrived. The modellers and the IPCC have willingly ignored the evidence for low climate sensitivity for many years, despite the fact that some of us have shown that simply confusing cause and effect when examining cloud and temperature variations can totally mislead you on cloud feedbacks (e.g. Spencer & Braswell, 2010). The discrepancy between models and observations is not a new issue…just one that is becoming more glaring over time.

It will be interesting to see how all of this plays out in the coming years. I frankly don’t see how the IPCC can keep claiming that the models are “not inconsistent with” the observations. Any sane person can see otherwise.

If the observations in the above graph were on the UPPER (warm) side of the models, do you really believe the modelers would not be falling all over themselves to see how much additional surface warming they could get their models to produce?

Hundreds of millions of dollars that have gone into the expensive climate modelling enterprise has all but destroyed governmental funding of research into natural sources of climate change. For years the modelers have maintained that there is no such thing as natural climate change…yet they now, ironically, have to invoke natural climate forces to explain why surface warming has essentially stopped in the last 15 years!

Forgive me if I sound frustrated, but we scientists who still believe that climate change can also be naturally forced have been virtually cut out of funding and publication by the ‘humans-cause-everything-bad-that-happens’ juggernaut. The public who funds their work will not stand for their willful blindness much longer.

The satellite-based microwave global average sea surface temperature (SST) update for May 2013 is -0.01 deg. C, relative to the 2003-2006 average (click for large version):

The anomalies are computed relative to only 2003-2006 because those years were relatively free of El Nino and La Nina activity, which if included would cause temperature anomaly artifacts in other years. Thus, these anomalies cannot be directly compared to, say, the Reynolds anomalies which extend back to the early 1980s. Nevertheless, they should be useful for monitoring signs of recent ocean surface warming, which appears to have stalled since at least the early 2000’s. (For those who also track our lower tropospheric temperature [“LT”] anomalies, these SST anomalies average about 0.20 deg. C cooler than LT since mid-2002, but there is considerable variability in that number).

The SST retrievals come from Remote Sensing Systems (RSS), and are based upon passive microwave observations of the ocean surface from AMSR-E on NASA’s Aqua satellite, the TRMM satellite Microwave Imager (TMI), and WindSat. While TMI has operated continuously through the time period (but only over the tropics and subtropics), AMSR-E stopped nominal operation in October 2011, after which Remote Sensing Systems patched in SST data from WindSat. These various satellite SST datasets have been carefully intercalibrated by RSS.

Despite the relatively short period of record, I consider this dataset to be the most accurate depiction of SST variability over the last 10+ years due to these instruments’ relative insensitivity to contamination by clouds and aerosols at 6.9 GHz and 10.7 GHz.

Just thought I’d try to be the first the make the connection between the record wide (2.6 miles) EF5 tornado near Oklahoma City last Friday and Global Warming. (Click the above photo for the full story).

Of course, as I have discussed before, the missing ingredient in tornadoes is usually a cool air mass nearby. If warm humid air was the missing ingredient, the tropics would be filled with tornadic thunderstorms…which is not the case.

Courtesy of John Christy, a comparison between 73 CMIP5 models (archived at the KNMI Climate Explorer website) and observations for the tropical bulk tropospheric temperature (aka “MT”) since 1979 (click for large version):

Rather than a spaghetti plot of the models’ individual years, we just plotted the linear temperature trend from each model and the observations for the period 1979-2012.

Note that the observations (which coincidentally give virtually identical trends) come from two very different observational systems: 4 radiosonde datasets, and 2 satellite datasets (UAH and RSS).

If we restrict the comparison to the 19 models produced by only U.S. research centers, the models are more tightly clustered:

Now, in what universe do the above results not represent an epic failure for the models?

I continue to suspect that the main source of disagreement is that the models’ positive feedbacks are too strong…and possibly of even the wrong sign.

The lack of a tropical upper tropospheric hotspot in the observations is the main reason for the disconnect in the above plots, and as I have been pointing out this is probably rooted in differences in water vapor feedback. The models exhibit strongly positive water vapor feedback, which ends up causing a strong upper tropospheric warming response (the “hot spot”), while the observation’s lack of a hot spot would be consistent with little water vapor feedback.