John Stossel interviewed me and Gavin Schmidt yesterday at the FoxNews studios in Manhattan, and I’m told he will interview Matt Ridley today, for tomorrow nights Stossel Show (9 p.m. EDT Thursday, March 28, Fox Business Channel) entitled “Green Tyranny”. As is often the case, the show might air on FoxNews Channel once or twice this weekend.

Looking for a global warming debate, Stossel said they asked 10 natural climate change deniers (sorry, my term, I couldn’t help myself), and only Gavin took them up on it. Scott Denning was also willing, but unavailable.

At least Gavin knows what he’s talking about…I’ve debated people who so badly mangled the explanation of anthropogenic climate change that I had to fix it for them so the audience wouldn’t be misled.

I thought we both held our own, although I wish I would have answered his CO2 “fingerprint” claims better. There is no CO2 fingerprint of warming; warming due to any cause (say, a slight decrease in oceanic cloudiness) will look basically the same: stronger over land than ocean (a land-vs-ocean heat capacity issue); warming *should* increase with height in the troposphere (a moist convective adjustment issue).

What could cause a natural change in clouds (as I am sometimes asked by the other side)? Well, what causes chaos?

I agreed with Gavin that stratospheric cooling might well be a fingerprint of increasing CO2, but the stratosphere involves MUCH simpler physics than the troposphere/land/ocean system, with basically just radiation operating, no clouds, and a vanishingly small heat capacity. The coupled ocean/atmosphere climate system is a nonlinear dynamical system, thus chaotic, capable of causing changes all by itself. The past evidence for natural climate change on multidecadal, centennial, and millennial time scales is abundant.

The average energy imbalance associated with ocean warming since the 1950s — so widely attributed to our CO2 emissions — is only 1 part in 1,000 (around 0.25 Watts/m2 versus average flows closer to 250 W/m2)…do we really believe the climate system is incapable of causing such imbalances all by itself? Just based upon global warming theory, I believe part of the warming *is* anthropogenic, but as I said during taping, I don’t think we have a clue how much of it.

Talking with Stossel afterward, he said he thought Gavin did a good job of articulating his position. I hope Gavin is willing to return, although I could tell he was somewhat annoyed by the conservative/libertarian vibe he was surrounded by. It will also be interesting to see what Matt Ridley has to say.

Many people have noted on the satellite temperatures webpage the plunge in temperatures as recorded by AMSU channel 5 on the Aqua satellite. Since it looked pretty suspicious, I decided to investigate.

The following plot shows 3 satellites’ global AMSU5 measurements (Aqua, NOAA-15, and NOAA-18) that I computed this morning from the raw orbit files. The dates run from Feb. 1 through yesterday, March 24:

Clearly, Aqua AMSU ch 5 is now “out to lunch”. The reason why the plunge in Aqua temperatures in the above plot is so much stronger than what is displayed on the daily update website is that the latter shows running 3-day averages, and is only updated through March 23.

We knew that this channel has been slowly failing for a long time, which is why we have not been using it in our monthly updates. We will discuss the possibility of switching to the NOAA satellites on the website, although since the site is NASA-funded, they are reluctant to spend resources on NOAA satellite data. But, given the popularity of the page, we will work something out even if we have to make our own web page.

I ran across an old pamphlet with photos of the tornado which struck Omaha 100 years ago today, and thought I would post a few. The tornado killed 140, injured 350, and demolished 550 houses (click on the photos for the full-size versions).

Here’s the 1st page description:
Nut-Shell Story of the Deadly Tornado
This most destructive windstorm hit Omaha about six o’clock in the evening, Easter Sunday, March 23, 1913. To the eye it had the distinctive funnel-shaped twisting character of the typical tornado, sweeping along at a furious rate of speed.

The damage done and the desolation left in its wake are clearly portrayed by the photographs taken the next day, and by those taken a second day after a light snowfall.

The description suggests an isolated supercell thunderstorm merging with a squall line, which was followed by a cold air mass. Clearly, had they known about the science of tornadoes back then, the event would have been blamed on the methane emissions from their horses. /sarc

Check out the cool skull-tornado artwork:

Note the board driven through the side of this upright piano:

If the tornado had hit this area today, there would be much more damage simply because there are more structures. It is hard to say what the loss of life would be, though, with a higher population density but better warnings.

There is a new location for the daily global satellite temperature page:

http://ghrc.nsstc.nasa.gov/amsutemps/

Choose “ch. 5” to get the channel closest to our (UAH) lower tropospheric (LT) product that we update once a month. Use “ch. 9” if you are interested in the lower stratosphere.

As a reminder…this page shows data from the AMSU instrument flying on the Aqua satellite, which we don’t use anymore because it is drifting warm relative to other satellites. For ch. 5, it is currently running about 0.2 deg. C too warm, so keep that in mind when estimating how the current month is shaping up compared to the same calendar month in previous years.

I made this time lapse video of the PanSTARRS comet last night from just north of Hytop, Alabama. It gets noisy near the end due to the fixed exposure setting combined with a darkening sky. Taken with a Canon 5D Mk II, with a Canon 70-200 mm lens (200 mm at f2.8), ISO=250, 2.5 sec exposures taken every 4 seconds, HDR processing with Photomatix.
https://vimeo.com/61804646
PanSTARRS comet time lapse video

The global average sea surface temperature (SST) update for Feb. 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 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 0.19 deg. C cooler over 2003-2006.)

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. The various satellite 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.

Our Version 5.5 global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for February, 2013 is +0.18 deg. C, a large decrease from January’s +0.50 deg. C. (click for large version):

These large month-to-month changes are not that uncommon, especially during Southern Hemisphere summer, and are due to small variations (several percent) in the convective heat flux from the ocean surface to the atmosphere.

The global, hemispheric, and tropical LT anomalies from the 30-year (1981-2010) average for the last 14 months are:

YR MON GLOBAL NH SH TROPICS
2012 1 -0.134 -0.065 -0.203 -0.256
2012 2 -0.135 +0.018 -0.289 -0.320
2012 3 +0.051 +0.119 -0.017 -0.238
2012 4 +0.232 +0.351 +0.114 -0.242
2012 5 +0.179 +0.337 +0.021 -0.098
2012 6 +0.235 +0.370 +0.101 -0.019
2012 7 +0.130 +0.256 +0.003 +0.142
2012 8 +0.208 +0.214 +0.202 +0.062
2012 9 +0.339 +0.350 +0.327 +0.153
2012 10 +0.333 +0.306 +0.361 +0.109
2012 11 +0.282 +0.299 +0.265 +0.172
2012 12 +0.206 +0.148 +0.264 +0.138
2013 1 +0.504 +0.555 +0.453 +0.371
2013 2 +0.176 +0.369 -0.016 +0.169

After my first experience getting hacked, I am back up. Thanks to my developer, Jamon at Clearsightstudio.com, who also installed a new security plugin. Shouldn’t happen again.

Following up on yesterday’s post, I’d like to address the more general question of tropical sea surface temperatures since 1998. Why haven’t they warmed? Of course, much has been made by some people about the fact that even global average temperatures have not warmed significantly since the 1997/98 El Nino event.

Using the Tropical Rain Measuring Mission (TRMM) Microwave Imager (TMI) SSTs available from Remote Sensing Systems (all 15 GB worth), here I will statistically adjust tropical SSTs for El Nino and La Nina activity, and see how the resulting trend since 1998 compares to the latest crop of IPCC CMIP5 model runs. We will restrict the analysis to 20^oN to 20^oS latitude band, which is the usual latitudinal definition of “tropical”.

The resulting TRMM TMI SST anomalies since January 1998 through last month look like this:

The up and down variations are clearly related to El Nino and La Nina activity, as evidenced by this plot of the Multivariate ENSO Index (MEI):

We can then plot these SST and MEI data against each other…

…and use this statistical relationship to estimate SST from MEI, and then subtract that from the original SST data to get an estimate (however crude) of how the SSTs might have behaved without the presence of El Nino and La Nina activity (the blue line):

Note that I have now averaged the monthly data to yearly, and this last plot also shows an average of 35 CMIP5 climate models SSTs during 1998-2012 for the same (tropical) latitude band, courtesy of John Christy and the KNMI climate explorer website. Also note I have plotted all three time series as departures from their respective 1998/99 2-year average.

The decadal linear temperature trends are:
un-adj. SST: = -0.010 C/decade
MEI-adj. SST: +0.056 C/decade
CMIP5 SST: +0.172 C/decade

So, even after adjusting for El Nino and La Nina activity, the last 15 years in the tropics have seen (adjusted) warming at only 1/3 the rate which the CMIP5 models create when they are forced with anthropogenic greenhouse gases.

Now, one might object that you really can’t adjust SSTs by subtracting out an ENSO component. OK, then, don’t adjust them. Since the observed SST warming without adjustments is essentially zero, then the models warm infinitely faster than the observations. There. 😉

Why Have the Models Warmed Too Fast?

My personal opinion is that the models have cloud feedbacks (and maybe other feedbacks) wrong, and that the real climate system is simply not as sensitive to increasing CO2 as the modelers have programmed the models to be.

But there are other possibilities, all theoretical:

1) Ocean mixing: a recent increase in ocean vertical mixing would cause the surface to warm more slowly than expected, and the cold, deep ocean to very slowly warm. But it is debatable whether the ARGO float deep-ocean temperature data are sufficiently accurate to monitor deep ocean warming to the levels we are talking about (hundredths of a degree).

2) Increasing atmospheric aerosols: This has been the modelers’ traditional favorite fudge factor to make climate models keep from warming at an unrealistic rate…a manmade aerosol cooling effect “must be” cancelling out the manmade CO2 warming effect. Possible? I suppose. But blaming a LACK of warming on humans seems a little bizarre. The simpler explanation is feedbacks: the climate system simply doesn’t care that much if we put aerosols *OR* CO2 in the atmosphere.

3) Increasing CO2 doesn’t cause a radiative warming influence (radiative forcing) of the surface and lower atmosphere.

I’m only including that last one because, in science, just about anything is possible. But my current opinion is that the science on radiative forcing by increasing CO2 is pretty sound. The big uncertainty is how the system responds (feedbacks).

NASA’s Tropical Rain Measuring Mission (TRMM) has been, in my opinion, a huge success. It has been operating for over 15 years now, which makes me feel pretty old since I was involved in the early design of the TRMM Microwave Imager (TMI) that flies on TRMM. I campaigned for it to carry 10.7 GHz channels which would allow sensitivity to heavy rain, as well as all-weather sea surface temperatures. TRMM also carries the first spaceborne precipitation radar, which was built by Japan.

Given my recent post about the strong warming of global tropospheric temperatures in January 2013, I thought I would follow up with a comparison between tropical SSTs, tropospheric temperature, rainfall, etc. in January. The data support my previous claim: the anomalous tropospheric warmth was the result of a temporary increase in convective heat transport from the surface to the atmosphere, as evidenced by cooling SSTs, and well-above average precipitation. (Bob Tisdale has also addressed the SST issue in January, from a different set of [IR-sensing] satellites).

The following plot shows TMI monthly SST anomalies averaged over 38^oN to 38^oS since January 1998, the first full month of operations, and the maximum latitude range which TRMM has continuously covered over its 15+year lifetime:

Note that TRMM started operations in the middle of the historic 1997/98 El Nino event, so the beginning of the time series is very warm.

Also note the dip in SSTs in January, 2013. This was the same time as the AMSU instruments recorded an anomalously warm January.

The next plot shows the monthly rainfall anomalies for the same period of time, and it is clear that rainfall activity (and thus latent heating of the troposphere) was well above average in January:

I have other plots (cloud water, surface wind speed), but the above two plots tell the crux of the story: Above-average moist convective heat transport from the ocean surface to the atmosphere appears to have led to sea surface cooling, and tropospheric warming, in January 2013.