JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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Clouds over Amazon forest (Rio Negro). Image NASA Earth Observatory.
What if winds were mainly driven by changes in water vapor, and those changes occurred commonly in air over forests? Forests would be the pumps that draw in moist air from over the oceans. Rather than assuming that forests grow where the rain falls, it would be more a case of rain falling where forests grow. When water vapor condenses it reduces the air pressure, which pulls in more dense air from over the ocean.
A new paper is causing a major stir. The paper is so controversial that many reviewers and editors said it should not be published. After two years of deliberations, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics decided it was too important not to discuss.
The physics is apparently quite convincing, the question is not whether it happens, but how strong the effect is. Climate models assume it is a small or non-existent factor. Graham Lloyd has done a good job describing both the paper and the reaction to it in The Australian.
Sheil says the key finding is that atmospheric pressure changes from moisture condensation are orders of magnitude greater than previously recognised. The paper concludes “condensation [...]
Yet more observations from the planet show that modelers misunderstand the water based part of the climate – on our water based planet.
Modelers thought that dry ground would decrease afternoon storms and rainfall over those frazzled parched lands (though I don’t remember many headlines predicting “More Drought means Fewer Storms” ). But observations show that storms are more likely to rain over dry soil. Why? Probably the dry soil heats up faster than moist areas thanks to the cooling effect of evaporation, and that in turn creates stronger thermals over dry land. Modelers assumed that wetter soils means more evaporation and thus more rain, but the moisture laden air is evidently coming from further away.
It’s another example of a point where climate modelers assume a positive feedback, yet the evidence suggests the feedback is negative. Once again water appears to be the dominant force with feedbacks (it does cover 70% of the surface). In a natural stable system the net feedbacks are likely to be negative. Positive feedbacks make the system less stable (and more scary and harder to predict.)
Climate change models misjudge drought: “A four-nation team led by Chris Taylor from Britain’s Centre for Ecology and [...]
Yet another paper shows that the climate models have flaws, described as “gross” “severe” and “disturbing”. The direct effect of doubling CO2 is theoretically 3.7W per square meter. The feedbacks supposedly are 2 -3 times as strong (according to the IPCC). But some scientists are trying to figure out those feedbacks with models which have flaws in the order of 70W per square meter. (How do we find that signal in noise that’s up to 19 times larger?)
Remember climate science is settled: like gravity and a round earth. (Really?)
Miller et al 2012 [abstract] [PDF] find that some models predict clouds to have a net shortwave radiative effect near zero, but observations show it is 70W per square meter. Presumably, cloud shortwave radiative effect means the sunlight bounced upwards off the surface of the clouds and out into space.
What’s especially interesting about this paper is the level of detail. They test shortwave and longwave radiation, precipitation flux, integrated water vapor, liquid water path, cloud fraction, and they have observations from the top of the atmosphere and the surface. With so much information they can test models against short wave and long wave radiation, to see [...]
Today in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, for the first time, David Evans has been published in the Op-Ed section. Something is going on in those newsrooms…? This article, below, simply makes the point that the models amplify the direct effect of CO2 by a factor of three and that is where the most important uncertainties lie. This key factor in the debate — which we cover repeatedly on this blog– has virtually never been made before in these newspapers which are the major dailies for Australia’s two largest cities. Any debate about the effects of CO2 needs to start with the fact that most of the warming in the models comes from amplification of humidity and clouds. If the models were right about water vapor, we would have found that missing hot spot. – Jo PS: The SMH and The AGE have both closed comments already! Have they run out of electrons? Oh my? Or were they afraid the comments looked like a debate?
UPDATE: I’ve just posted that these major dailies have “disappeared” the Muller conversion article too!
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Dr David M.W. Evans
31 Jul 2012
Climate scientists’ theories, flawed as they are, ignore [...]
This is part of a series that Tony Cox and I are doing that drills down to the most important points and papers, with proper references, as a definitive resource.The models are wrong: not just “unverified”, not just “uncertain”, but proven to have failed. — Jo
Joint Post: Tony Cox and Jo Nova
Across different regions, and different time-spans over the last century, the models fail.
Koutsoyiannis and Anagnostopolous et al show those models can’t model the recent century, and because the models fail to predict regional and smaller scale effects it’s impossible that they could predict longer and global values.[i]
On 30 year time frames, the original observations are nothing like the models projections on a local scale. (Click to enlarge).
The models should retrospectively match the actual temperature over the past 100 years. This test of retrospectivity is called hindcasting. If a model has valid assumptions about the climatic effect of variables such as greenhouse gases, particularly CO2, then the model should be able to match past known data.
“…all the models were “irrelevant with reality” at the 30 year climate scale…”
When tested, the global climate models failed to [...]
You’ll find this hard to believe but I get excited about the 1990 First Assessment Report (FAR). It’s very different from wading through the later ones, because it’s remarkably honest, and things are not hidden in double-speak (well, not so much). Scientists behave like scientists and talk of null hypothesis, and even of validating models. Indeed they had a whole chapter back then called “validation”. How times have changed.
This is the short summary of Chapter 8 “Attribution”
Thanks to Alan for sending me this link today (Chapter 8, IPCC FAR).
The “Attribution” Chapter is the part where they try to figure out what “caused” the warming. Chapter 8 says, essentially, “we don’t know, we might never know, our models don’t work, and we can conclude it might all be natural, but then again, it might not.” Got it?
This is in the same era that Al Gore was saying “the science is settled” and “there is no debate”.
What’s clear in 1990 from the FAR was that it was widely admitted that the models were bodgy, and that figuring out exactly what caused the recent warming was very difficult, indeed impossible at the time. There were too many variables, [...]
Dr Andrew Glikson (an Earth and paleoclimate scientist, at the Australian National University) contacted Quadrant offering to write about the evidence for man-made global warming. Quadrant approached me asking for my response. Dr Glikson replied to my reply, and I replied again to him (copied below). No money exchanged hands, but Dr Glikson is, I presume, writing in an employed capacity, while I write pro bono. Why is it that the unpaid self taught commentator needs to point out the evidence he doesn’t seem to be aware of? Why does a PhD need to be reminded of basic scientific principles (like, don’t argue from authority). Such is the vacuum of funding for other theories that a debate that ought to happen inside the university obviously hasn’t occurred. Such is the decrepit, anaemic state of university science that even a doctorate doesn’t guarantee a scientist can reason. Where is the rigor in the training, and the discipline in the analysis?
Credibility lies on evidence
by Joanne Nova
April 29, 2010
Reply to Andrew Glikson
Dr Andrew Glikson still misses the point, and backs his arguments with weak evidence and logical errors. Instead of empirical evidence, often [...]
One of the main arguments from the IPCC is that essentially, we can’t explain temperature changes any other way than with carbon forcings. This is matched with impressive pink and blue graphs that pose as evidence that carbon is responsible for all the recent warming.
This is argumentum ad ignorantiam — essentially they say: we don’t know what else could have caused that warming, so it must be carbon. It’s a flawed assumption.
It’s easy to create impressive graphs, especially if you actively ignore other possible causes, like for example, changes in cloud cover and solar magnetic effects.
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Carbon dioxide only causes 1.1°C of warming if it doubles. That’s according to the IPCC. Did you know?
The real game is water.
Researchers made guesses about humidity and clouds in the early 1980s and they built these guesses into their models. We now know they were wrong, not about carbon, but about water in the form of humidity and clouds. Here’s how the models can be right about carbon and wrong about the climate.
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Thanks to Eric Raymond, famous computer guru and leader of the open-source movement, at ESR, we can see what those sophisticated climate modelers were doing. They’ve found the code from the leaked files, and Eric’s comment is:
This isn’t just a smoking gun, it’s a siege cannon with the barrel still hot.
Here’s the code. The programmer has written in helpful notes that us non-programmers can understand, like this one: “Apply a very artificial correction for decline”. You get the feeling this climate programmer didn’t like pushing the data around so blatantly. Note the technical comment: “fudge factor”.
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Undoubtedly the best summary of the current state of affairs is the SPPI monthly CO2 report. The April report contains news that—if there was a free and high quality media—would have generated headlines like these (well, sort of—you get the idea).
Any investigative journalist who was doing their job only had to Google for the other side of the story. I’m not saying those journalists have to agree with us, just that, at the moment most environmental writers think ‘balanced’ means saying, “The world will cook: the question is, lightly toasted OR totally pan-fried’.
Here’s the counter summary of the headlines we didn’t see, accompanied by an analysis you probably won’t see anywhere else.
Planet Unmoved by IPCC Forecast
Despite the power of the authority vested in the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), The Planet appears to be unswayed by the large well funded international bureaucracy, and is similarly immune to following the collected wisdom of the software engineers who compress it’s 1100 billion cubic kilometers of complexity into a PC.
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