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.

Our Version 5.5 global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for May, 2013 is +0.07 deg. C, down a little from +0.10 deg. C in April (click for large version):

The global, hemispheric, and tropical LT anomalies from the 30-year (1981-2010) average for the last 17 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 +0.175 +0.368 -0.018 +0.168
2013 3 +0.183 +0.329 +0.038 +0.226
2013 4 +0.103 +0.120 +0.086 +0.167
2013 5 +0.074 +0.162 -0.013 +0.113

The Integrated Surface Hourly (ISH) weather data I have described before allows one to examine how various surface weather elements have changed as a function of time of day. (The ISH data volume is very large and it is not a trivial task to decode and analyze many years of it.) Three-hourly synoptic weather observations have been made at many U.S. weather stations for at least 40 years: 1973 seems to be the year when the number of stations reached a fairly large number, and so that is the year my analyses begin with.

I have previously mentioned that ISH surface data shows U.S. warming since 1973 (primarily a winter phenomenon, due to unusually cold winters in the 1970s), and a curious decrease in surface wind speed.

Here I’d like to point out another curiosity: while the dewpoint temperature has increased in step with air temperature at 12Z (around 6 a.m.), it has increased much less so at other times of the day, and even decreased slightly at 21Z (around 3 p.m.), during the period 1973-2012:

Assuming that dewpoint sensor design changes over the years have not introduced a diurnally varying measurement bias, a natural question arises: what would cause afternoon dewpoints to not rise in the face of warming both day and night? (Note I have not made any adjustments for sensor changes, siting changes, or urbanization in the above plot).

The first explanation that comes to my mind is a change in daytime convective mixing of the troposphere. If there is a slight increase in the depth of convective mixing, then drier (lower dewpoint) air aloft will be mixed down toward the surface. Such a change would probably also be associated with deeper moist convection and probably an increase in heavy rain rates, evidence for which has been claimed elsewhere (e.g. here). The implication of such a change for climate feedbacks is complicated and not obvious.

A second possibility is a long-term decrease in middle and upper tropospheric humidity, and no increase in convective mixing. In this case, daytime mixing would bring down the lower humidity air to the surface from the same altitude as before. There is some radiosonde evidence for such a decrease in absolute humidities above the turbulent boundary layer (e.g. Paltridge, 2009). If real, such a decrease might well result in negative water vapor feedback, since a small decrease in mid- and upper tropospheric humidity can have a natural radiative cooling effect which outweighs the warming from a larger increase in lower tropospheric humidity (e.g. Spencer and Braswell, 1997; Miskolczi, 2010). Of course, all climate models exhibit strongly positive water vapor feedback, approximately doubling the direct warming effect of increasing CO2 alone.

I don’t have a strong opinion on which of these possibilities (sensor problems, deeper convection, or a dryer mid- and upper troposphere) is more likely. Too little information, too many questions.

I get scattered e-mails from a lot of people, but I get routine updates from someone named “Ol’fisherman” on the sinister weather modifying effects of the HAARP facility in Alaska. The Wikipedia page describing the research facility even has a section on Conspiracy Theories.

Now, if you go to Google images and search on “lenticular clouds” you will find MANY photos similar to this one, which Ol’fisherman sent to me:

Here is the description he provided of this photo (I am not making this up):

“These are HAARP generated Vortex Clouds. The exact type formation as seen in NORWAY HE LASER photos. The Energy here came down from Stratosphere Bounce from Earthbound HAARP Machine Array in AK. The Particle Physics as seen in Photo say’s the Proton to Neutron Interaction Threshold has not been reached yet at elevations shown. But when the spiral cone gets closer to Earth’s Teller Currents, and it will; the E- GAP is bridged Electrically, and the Record Tornado size and Speeds being reported, are the Result!!”

Now let’s see how long it takes for someone to post a comment that I shouldn’t be poking fun, since I’m a believer in the greenhouse effect which is obviously a “conspiracy” of misguided physicists.

The standard explanation of the “greenhouse effect” is that it keeps the surface of the Earth warmer than it would otherwise be, through infrared radiation downwelling from the atmosphere. Even though this IR radiation is being emitted at a lower temperature than the surface, it actually keeps the surface warmer. Some people have trouble with this explanation, claiming it violates one or more laws of thermodynamics.

As I have discussed ad nauseum, the temperature of a heated object is always determined by rates of energy gain and energy loss, and that energy loss is almost always a function of the object’s cooler surroundings.

Whether one views the greenhouse effect as extra infrared energy gained by the surface from the cooler atmosphere, or just a reduced rate of infrared energy loss by the surface to the atmosphere and outer space, the effect is the same: a surface temperature increase.

I’ve been toying with a few different ways to demonstrate this effect with a simple experimental setup using household items. Apparently the IR thermal imager, which I showed directly measures the surface temperature effects of varying levels of downwelling IR sky radiation on a microbolometer within the instrument, is not sufficient for some people.

So, I’ve come up with the following simple setup, and if I carry it out, I want predictions from readers here of what will happen to the temperatures of the 2 heated metal plates:

The two metal plates will be heated in the oven to the same temperature, then placed vertically next to each other, but separated by a sheet of Styrofoam. Obviously, the plates will cool, partly by conduction to the surrounding air. The above cartoon is just a rough approximation of the setup. I will probably have the ends of the heated plates covered by Styrofoam as well, to help reduce conductive heat loss.

But the plates also cool from infrared energy loss. So, I will expose one of the heated plates to a third plate that I will have chilled to at least 0 deg. F in the deep freeze.

Finally, I will expose the other heated plate to a 4th plate just at the ambient air temperature, say 80 deg. F.

Very thin sheets of polypropylene (Saran wrap), which are nearly transparent to IR radiation, will be used to minimize the movement of air currents between the heated plates and their cooler counterparts. All 4 plates will be coated with high emissivity (0.99) Krylon flat white #1502 paint.

My question is this: Will the two hot plates cool at different rates? I predict the heated plate exposed to the ambient (80 deg. F) plate will consistently stay warmer than the other heated plate exposed to the chilled (0 deg. F) plate.

Of course, if one waits long enough, all plates will come to the same temperature, since the hot plates are not actively heated (like the climate system is by the Sun) and the cold plate is not actively chilled (which would partly mimic the infrared energy sink of deep space).

The main point is that cooler objects which surround heated objects affect the heated objects temperature. As far as I can tell, this is a universal truth, with examples all around you. I find it mind boggling that some people do not accept it. (For anyone tempted to say, “But a cooler star doesn’t make a hotter star hotter still”, stay tuned for an experiment Anthony Watts has been working on).

I will monitor the plates’ temperatures with my FLIR i7 thermal imager. Because there is still a small amount of reflection from the heated plates (0.01) the thermal imager must be pointed at an angle which will not pick up reflection from the cooler plates, which would bias the results. Another option would be to buy 2 inexpensive car thermometers with a remote display.

Again, I want to hear some predictions: Will the hot plates cool at different rates? If so, do you see a mechanism other than infrared energy transfer which will explain the different rates of cooling?

If you see pitfalls in the experimental setup, then feel free to point them out and suggest how to mitigate them.

UPDATE: I will be periodically checking in and deleting comments which do not directly address the above experiment and what results it will produce…unfortunately, the comments are already getting sidetracked.

I’ve had several requests for evidence of the hundreds of watts of downwelling infrared sky radiation. I’ve mentioned that there are many surface radiation budget observation sites around the world (but few in oceanic areas for obvious reasons). I found this presentation summarizing comparisons that Martin Wild and co-investigators have made between these measurements and the latest CMIP5 climate models at the observation sites. It is quite informative, and includes their version of the Kiehl-Trenberth energy budget diagram to fit better to the surface radiative energy budget observations.

For example, here’s a comparison for downward IR flux at the surface between the HadCM3 model and 41 Baseline Surface Radiation Network (BSRN) stations:

In this case, the model underestimates the downwelling sky radiation by about 9 W/m2. But for something supposedly “non-existent”, there is remarkable agreement between the average model behavior and the observations for this huge (300-400 W/m2) component of the surface energy budget.

What is MOST interesting to me is the existence of multidecadal changes in sunlight (downwelling shortwave) reaching the surface, as some of the sites have such records extending back to the 1930s. For example, changes at Potsdam, Germany look somewhat like how global temperatures have changed:

The authors admit this is behavior not seen in the climate models. I suppose scientists like Trenberth or Dessler would claim these changes are positive cloud feedback in response to surface temperature changes. But the continually neglected possibility is that they have causation reversed: that natural changes in cloud cover have caused the temperature changes, and cloud feedbacks are in reality negative rather than positive.

And this is where I believe we should be spending our research time in the global warming debate. Not arguing over the existence of something (“backradiation”) which is routinely measured at dozens of observation sites around the world.

I have allowed the Sky Dragon Slayers to post hundreds of comments here containing their views of how the climate system works (or maybe I should say how they think it doesn’t work).

As far as I can tell, their central non-traditional view seems to be that the atmosphere does not have so-called “greenhouse gases” that emit thermal infrared radiation downward. A variation on this theme is that even if those gases exist, they emit energy at the same rate they absorb, and so have no net effect on temperature.

I have repeatedly addressed these views and why they are false.

As far as the Slayer’s alternative explanations go, I have addressed why atmospheric pressure cannot explain surface temperature. The atmospheric adiabatic lapse rate describes how temperature *changes* with height for an air parcel displaced vertically, it does not tell you what the temperature, per se, will be.

If it was just a matter of air pressure, why is the stratosphere virtually the same temperature over its entire depth, despite spanning a factor of 100x in pressure, from about ~2 mb to ~200 mb?

For the adiabatic lapse rate to exist in the real atmosphere, there must be “convective instability”, which requires BOTH lower atmospheric heating AND upper atmospheric cooling. But the upper atmosphere cannot cool unless greenhouse gases are present! Without greenhouse gases, the atmosphere would slowly approach an isothermal state through thermal conduction with a temperature close to the surface temperature, and convection would then be impossible.

In other words, without the “greenhouse effect”, there would be no decrease in atmospheric temperature with height, and no convection. The existence of weather thus depends upon the greenhouse effect to destabilize the atmosphere.

Put Up…

The Slayers have had ample opportunity to answer my challenge: take your ideas, put them into an alternative time-dependent model for surface temperature, and run it from any initial state and see if it ends up with a realistic temperature.

Determining the actual temperature at any altitude requires computing rates of energy gain and energy loss. I spent only an hour to provide a simple version of such a model based upon traditional physics, which produces the observed average surface temperature of the Earth. It is the same physics used in many weather prediction models every day, physics which if not included would cause those models forecasts to quickly diverge away from how the real atmosphere behaves on average.

Surely, of the 200 scientists and meteorologists the Slayers claim to have at their disposal, they can produce something similar.

Here’s the equation I used for surface temperature change with time, and it assumes a single atmospheric layer with an average infrared effective emissivity of 0.9, based upon the Kiehl-Trenberth global average energy budget diagram.

I also have a version of the model which adds the time rate of change of the bulk atmospheric temperature, too, based upon the Kiehl-Trenberth diagram. These are very simple models…usually in modeling the atmosphere and ocean are divided up into many mutually interacting layers, but I’m trying to keep it simple here.

…or Shut Up

The Slayers have ample opportunity to post comments here outlining their views, often dominating the bandwidth, and those comments will remain for posterity.

But my blog is no longer going to provide them a platform for their unsupported pseudo-scientific claims…they can post their cult science on their own blog. They have taken far too much of my time, which would be better spent thinking about the more obvious shortcomings of global warming theory.

If and when they answer my challenge to provide a quantitative model of surface temperature change, I might change my mind. But they must first provide a time-dependent model like that above which involves energy gain and energy loss terms, which is the only way to compute the temperature of something from theory. Those energy gain and loss terms must be consistent with experimental observations, and (of course) the physical units of the terms must all be consistent.

But I don’t see how they can ever do that, because they will ignore the hundreds of watts of downward emitted IR radiation from the sky, an energy flux which is routinely observed with a variety of instrumentation, and explained with well-established theories of radiative transfer and laboratory evidence of the infrared absorption characteristics of various gases.

If anyone challenges me to provide justification for anything I’ve stated above, well, I assume you know how to use Google. There is abundant information out there…go educate yourself.