How many things can Lord Deben get wrong?

I did a spot on the ABC Drum today. Very odd to do it from a studio where I could not see any of the panel at all, and didn’t know the etiquette of how these things work. (I know a lot more now). But I’m glad to have a chance to speak, even if it was short.

So just in case there is anyone out there thinking that Lord Deben had some good points, here’ s what I was thinking as he spoke without pausing to breathe, and here’s my reply (it would have been nice to say it on air):

Firstly, all of this presupposes that there is a reason to reduce CO2. Thousands of scientists and millions of measurements suggest not.

That aside, saying Australia is “not a special case” is to deny geography and demographics.

The UK might have the fastest growth rate in the EU but Australia’s population growth rate is two-to-three times faster than the UK. Do those people count? Not in climate change maths. Australia’s population has grown by 38% since 1990. It’s massive and it matters.

Adding more wind power won’t help solve the problem that on our Eastern National Grid, about once every ten days or so the wind towers contribute nothing. More towers on the same grid only makes for more wild swings: 3,000 MW one day, nothing the next. We have to have the coal or gas back up, and wind can’t replace it.

Nor can Lord Deben add a mountain range and large rivers to an ancient flat land that doesn’t have them. Other nations doing “renewables” like Norway and China can do hydro power. Without adding another Great Dividing Range, we can’t. And politically, thanks to the Greens and Labor Party, we won’t consider nuclear, which is how France meets its renewable targets.

As for China, its efforts are just token. They are producing massive emissions, adding new coal stations, planning even more, and it isn’t just because they are making the “world’s products” that they produce large emissions. It turns out they are also hopelessly inefficient. For every kilo of product made, they produce four times as much CO2 as factories in the EU would produce. So shipping our jobs and our factories to China would be making the problem worse, (if there was a problem). And they may well promise big cuts in future, but how much of that is due to them inflating their emissions right now? How easy would it be for them to artificially pump up the numbers now, and can anyone trust any of the figures coming out of China? (I have two posts coming up on exactly these points).

Deben said he likes Australia but spends most of his time unfairly putting the nation down trying to give us the guilts in the hope of getting us to cough up more money to support the Green industry. He claimed that Australia wasn’t pulling its weight at Kyoto, but he ignores the fact that we actually met our targets and most of the countries that promised to do more than us, didn’t. Per capita we cut our carbon emissions by 28% from 1990 to 2014 – and that includes us gaining 38% more people. That’s really spectacular (not that I think it was useful, worthwhile, or “an achievement” in any sense).

As for us being more “vulnerable” to climate change — they say that to everyone. All nations are more vulnerable than every other nation, it just depends on which nation the UN is trying to scare some money from this particular minute, doesn’t it? (See this map of countries most at risk? Australia isn’t one of them).

Deben pulled the “science is settled” excuse, which is always what someone says when they really don’t want a debate about the science. Climate science is immature, and thousands of scientists are protesting around the world: go online and find them. Thirty thousand scientists have put their names to a petition protesting at this exaggerated scare, that includes 9,000 PhD’s, astrophysicists, nuclear chemists, atmospheric scientists, meteorologists, and thousands of geologists and engineers. It also includes two guys who won Nobels in Physics, and three men who walked on the moon. Those guys have reputations that matter. They certainly know a lot more about climate science than Lord Deben.

If Lord Deben was really concerned about the environment, he would want the best science and open public debate.

You can watch it (though the Deben arguments are the same-old-same-old tedium) Deben runs from 2:00 – 8:40. I speak from 8:50 – 10:30, he replies from then to 13:00. Yes, typical mainstream media “time-share”. There are a few more bits after that like from 17:25.

If the ABC Drum got some real interchange, with to and fro, and live debate going, its ratings would probably double. A TV in the studio with the show on (muted) would be a helpful thing.

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Climate Change is altering the shape of the Planet (blame your car)

It’s taken five years to figure it out, but apparently climate change is even worse than the last time we thought it was worse. Who knew? Once upon a time, glaciers were at a constant perfect position. Life was paradise on Earth and all the animals were happy. But then mankind built that first planet-destroying coal powered station in 1880 and now mountains are being moved, the Earth is changing.

Or at least, that’s sort of what the press release implies. What this tale is really about is the way the media hyperbole is just another excuse to repeat The Climate Mantra even if has nothing much to do with what the paper. What were those observations again?

If Nature, the formerly esteemed journal, was half what it used to be, it would have helped young Michele Koppes keep a longer term perspective, and not lace the press release with baseless speculation. Probably she’s seen a few too many Greenpeace-BBC specials and thinks Antarctica is warming (when the satellites show it isn’t). And curiously, the part that is warming happens to be right over the edges of the tectonic plates where the volcanoes are. She might think climate models work too.

The paper itself might reveal some new insight about the world, but the press release is just untested assumptions extrapolated ad absurdio.

Global warming can alter shape of the planet, as melting glaciers erode the land

Climate change is causing more than just warmer oceans and erratic weather. According to scientists, it also has the capacity to alter the shape of the planet.

In a five-year study published today in Nature, lead author Michele Koppes, assistant professor in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia, compared glaciers in Patagonia and in the Antarctic Peninsula. She and her team found that glaciers in warmer Patagonia moved faster and caused more erosion than those in Antarctica, as warmer temperatures and melting ice helped lubricate the bed of the glaciers.

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New Science 9: Error 3: All Radiation Imbalances Treated the Same — The Ground is not the sky!

Climate Models, Model architecture, feedbacks, David Evans, Error

…

The ground is not the sky

Here’s a big big flaw that is easy for anyone to understand, yet has lain at the core of the climate models since at least 1984. Indeed, you’ll wonder why we all haven’t been chuckling at this simplistic caricature of our atmosphere for 31 years.

The theory underlying the alarm about CO2 is built around a bizarre idea that blocking outgoing energy in the CO2 pipe is equivalent to getting an increase in sunlight. The very architecture of all the mainstream climate models assumes that the Earth’s climate responds to all radiation imbalances or “forcings” as if they were all like extra sunlight. (We call that extra absorbed solar radiation (ASR) to be more precise. It’s all about the sunlight that makes it through to the surface.)

Extra sunlight adds heat directly to the Earth’s surface, and maybe the climate models have correctly estimated the feedbacks from clouds and evaporation and what-not to surface warming. But it is obvious, in a way even a child could comprehend, that this is not the same as blocking outgoing radiation in the upper atmosphere, which is the effect of increasing CO2. Why would the Earth’s climate respond to this in an identical way? Why would we think that evaporation, humidity, winds and clouds would all change in the same direction and by the same magnitude, whether the warming occurred by adding heat to the ground or by blocking heat from escaping to space from the upper atmosphere?

Climate Models, Model architecture, feedbacks, David Evans, circuit diagram

Computation diagrams like this expose the architecture of climate models much better than a bunch of equations.

The climate modelers have viewed Earth as a baby-simple energy-in energy-out diagram — but in reality, for starters, there is one path in, and four main paths out. Blocking the one solo path that energy comes in on is not the same as blocking one of the four exits, where energy escaping to space can reroute and flow out a different pipe. This is not a symmetric or reversible flow. Also, the energy flowing out is at different wavelengths to the energy flowing in; they don’t have the same effect as they travel through the air.

In short, the ground is not the sky, yet conventional climate models treat warming on the ground as the same as blocking outgoing radiation in the sky — they say they have cause the same radiation imbalance, so they have the same “forcing”, so they have the same effect.

Establishment scientists have been touting this simplicity as a feature for years, e.g. right in the abstract of James Hansen’s landmark 1984 paper^[1]

“Our 3-D global climate model yields a warming of 4°C for either a 2 percent increase of [total solar irradiance] or doubled C02.”

And on page 138:

The patterns of temperature change are remarkably similar in the [total solar irradiance] and C02 experiments [i.e. the answers his models give him], suggesting that the climate response is to first order a function of the magnitude of the radiative forcing. The only major difference is in the temperature change as a function of altitude; increased C02 causes substantial stratospheric cooling [due to sunlight on the way in interacting with ozone]. This similarity suggests that, to first order, the climate effect due to several forcings including various tropospheric trace gases may be a simple function of the total forcing.

This is Hansen saying that experiments based on his computer models show extra sunlight and extra CO2 have the same effect (once the effect of incoming sunlight on ozone is stripped out). His models are based on the basic climate model, which treats all forcings the same. It’s circular all the way down.

This over-simplification is the inevitable result of an architecture based only on a simple radiation balance. There is more to the climate than balancing radiation! Any radiation imbalance, no matter what the source, has the same effect in the conventional basic climate model, including all the feedbacks to the imbalance (and its very nearly the same in the GCMs; the differences are second order). If some climate phenomenon (such as the rerouting feedback of post 7) isn’t a response to sunlight then it does not — cannot — exist in the conventional basic climate model, and basically doesn’t exist in a GCM.

Because of this architecture, the models keep making predictions that don’t work. Modelers are so sure that this is “basic physics” and the models are right that they assume the equipment needs correction — but really it is the models that need rebuilding. What’s more likely, the models are right, or all the radiosondes, satellites, Argo buoys, and ground thermometers need adjustment in the same direction?

Years from now people will wonder how such a simple mistake could have diverted so many lives and so much money — Jo

9. Error 3: All Radiation Imbalances Treated the Same

Dr David Evans, 4 October 2015, David Evans’ Basic Climate Models Home, Intro, Previous, Next, Nomenclature.

We call the response of a climate model to increased absorbed solar radiation (ASR) its “solar response”. Due to its architecture, the conventional basic climate model applies its solar response to the radiation imbalance caused by any influence on climate, even a radiation imbalance due to increased CO2 — one size fits all. This causes clashes with certain physical realities, which we explore in this post with the dual aim of developing a more realistic model for estimating sensitivity to increased CO2.

While no model is perfectly realistic, these clashes are sufficiently severe as to make it difficult to take the conventional architecture seriously. This architecture, based only on a radiation balance, is the foundation for both the basic climate model and the big computerized climate models (GCMs). Something more than a radiation balance is going to be required to more realistically model the effect of increased CO2.

Increased ASR primarily heats the surface, which could explain why the conventional model neglects feedbacks other than to surface warming (post 5), thereby excluding the possibility of a CO2-specific feedback such as the rerouting feedback (post 7). The conventional model considers only forcings (radiation imbalances due to influences on climate) and “feedbacks” (but only in response to surface warming), so it has a blindspot for feedbacks other than in response to surface warming. Due to the possibility of CO2-specific feedbacks that do not apply to increased ASR, climate model obviously needs a specific response to increased CO2. There is no place for a CO2 response distinct from the solar response in the conventional architecture, but there is in the alternative model developed later in the series.

Following the conventional architecture, the GCMs apply the solar response to all radiation balances to first order, where as we argue that the actual response to increasing CO2 is very different from the solar response.

Interchangeability

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Miranda Devine: Perth electrical engineer’s discovery will change climate change debate

Good news, a spot of media coverage.

Perth Edition, The Sunday Times

Miranda Devine: Perth electrical engineer’s discovery will change climate change debate

Photo: AustralianClimateMadness

A MATHEMATICAL discovery by Perth-based electrical engineer Dr David Evans may change everything about the climate debate, on the eve of the UN climate change conference in Paris next month.

A former climate modeller for the Government’s Australian Greenhouse Office, with six degrees in applied mathematics, Dr Evans has unpacked the architecture of the basic climate model which underpins all climate science.

He has found that, while the underlying physics of the model is correct, it had been applied incorrectly.

He has fixed two errors and the new corrected model finds the climate’s sensitivity to carbon dioxide (CO2) is much lower than was thought.

It turns out the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has over-estimated future global warming by as much as 10 times, he says…

The series of posts flows under the tag: “Climate Research 2015″

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Turnbull, Hunt suggest carbon emissions trading could start mid 2016 (Thank Gore and Palmer for the open door)

Australians have voted against a carbon tax twice. Liberals threw out Turnbull over the introduction of an emissions trading scheme in 2009, yet here he is, barely leader for two weeks and already they are floating a timeframe for the introduction of emissions trading.

I did warn that the Turnbull agreement with the Nationals to keep Tony Abbott’s climate policies means almost nothing. It’s easy for him to keep the “target” and shift towards an Emissions Trading scheme (ETS) and he and Greg Hunt are suggesting that already.

Indeed, some of the fine print Turnbull probably wanted was already written in Abbott’s plan. Thanks to Al Gore and Clive Palmer, the possibility of emissions trading was left in the Direct Action legislation.Why else would Gore fly out here to stand next to a coal miner? And what did he offer Clive in return we wonder? Suddenly, Palmer demanded an ETS for his vote, but finally settled for a clause saying an ETS should be “reviewed” if our main trading partners brought one in. So Turnbull can technically keep the Abbott “plan” but entirely break the spirit of it. The Nationals (and 54 pro-Turnbull Liberals) will look like fools if they have inadvertently given a green light to force Australians to pour money into corrupt pointless foreign carbon trading schemes. It’s money for nothing. The EU will get to decide how much a carbon credit (and your electricity) costs in Australia.

Our main trading partners — like China — are bringing in token trading plans. China is going to keep increasing emissions for at least ten to fifteen years (which it was always going to do). But these symbolic plans are enough for Turnbull to pretend that bringing in an emissions trading scheme is what the Abbott plan does, and what Australian voters “want”.

Australians have voted against a carbon tax twice. Liberals threw out Turnbull over the introduction of an emissions trading scheme in 2009, yet here he is, barely leader for two weeks and already they are floating a timeframe for the introduction of emissions trading.

A forced payment to a “trading scheme” is a kind of tax, and it’s the worst kind where the money goes direct to financial houses rather than the government, creating long-lived commitments that are expensive or difficult to get rid of.

From the Australian Fin Review last weekend:

The purchase of international permits could start as early as mid-2016 with the introduction of the government’s safeguard mechanism regulations for the top 140 biggest polluters. Andrew Meare

September 22:

Mr Hunt said “the door was open” for international permits to be considered as part of a 2017-18 review of the emissions reduction fund and safeguards.”

The Turnbull government is considering fast-tracking a scheme to allow big emitters of carbon to buy international permits to offset their emissions.

This is the strategic door left open by Clive Palmer when Al Gore came in June 2014:

The Abbott government left the door open for review of the purchase of international permits in 2017-18 as part of its Direct Action scheme to tackle climate change.

But the departure of Tony Abbott – who was not a fan of international permits – has cleared the way for a reshaping of the federal government’s climate change policies including bringing forward the date for the purchase of permits as well as the survival of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency.

The purchase of international permits could start as early as mid-2016 with the introduction of the government’s safeguard mechanism regulations for the top 140 biggest polluters.

Under the possible changes, international permits could also be used by companies in the $2.5 billion Emissions Reduction Fund to meet their obligations. That option was supported by Environment Minister Greg Hunt when the fund was first proposed and blocked by Mr Abbott.

There has been no direct discussion about the international permits being moved forward, but it is strong possibility given the support for the scheme, including from Mr Hunt and senior Nationals MPs.

Note that Australia does not have to have an ETS, only to “review it”.

But the review will be carried out by the Climate Change Authority, and we can guess what they will say. It will be the excuse. Abbott stymied Palmer (and Gore) as much as he could, but the door was still left open. An ETS was not ruled out.

From October 2014:

Wednesday’s deal also represents a concession by Mr Palmer because he has secured no commitment to adopt an ETS even if the review finds one is required to meet Australia’s international obligations.

Fairfax Media first revealed on Sunday that an agreement was imminent after Mr Palmer appeared to soften his position by calling for a review of an ETS, rather than a straight commitment.

Here’s a detail we need to pay attention too in the Fin Review last weekend:

Under the Coalition’s safeguard mechanism policy – which is supposed to stop rogue emitters from negating reductions in other parts of the economy – companies will be penalised for exceeding emissions baselines. The purchase of international permits would allow them to offset any potential rise in their emissions.

Hunt said there has been “no decision” or even a discussion on bringing in international permits. The second auction for the Direct Action plan happens next month.

Keep your eyes on the “Safeguard mechanism”…

This may force some of our companies (and hence Australian consumers or stockholders) to buy emissions permits:

Some have criticised the federal government’s carbon rules as “all gums, no teeth”, which would allow big polluters to increase their emissions without penalty. They said the emissions baselines should be lowered to force companies to change their behaviour and cut emissions.

A study by Melbourne-based carbon consultancy RepuTex in August found that only 30 of the largest 150 polluters will be required to reduce their carbon emissions under the existing safeguard mechanism rules.

The “Safeguard Mechanism” is a basis for an ETS, it gave hope to Alan Pears, Sustainable Energy and Climate researcher at RMIT, Nov 4, 2014:

The fine print on Xenophon’s proposed “safeguard” mechanism to prevent emissions blowouts under the Direct Action scheme will be critical. If this is weak, as envisioned by the government, we are wasting time we no longer have. If an effective framework is introduced, it could form a basis for a “baseline and credit” emissions trading scheme, which could be run by industry if the government doesn’t want to be accused of a backflip, having promised never to return to what it views as the dark days of carbon pricing.

Sadly, Pears resorts to namecalling in the rest of his confused article, but then, if CO2 has a minor role, he doesn’t have a job.

Greg Hunt has been given the role of “greening cities” and working with state and local government

The ICLEI and Agenda 21 people will like the direction this is going.

The new government has beefed-up Mr Hunt’s responsibilities ahead of crucial international climate talks in Paris later this year.

Although Mr Hunt, a Victorian, backed Mr Abbott in last week’s leadership ballot, he has emerged from the cabinet reshuffle with greater powers, including overall responsibility for the new Cities and Built Environment portfolios being taken on by junior minister Jamie Briggs.

The yet-to-be-finalised cities agenda is expected to focus on long-term planning for cities up to 2050, transport – including a greater focus on public transport and road design to deal with congestion – and the “greening” of cities.

The new role is expected to involve close cooperation with state and local governments …

Read more: Australian Fin Review (paywalled).

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Weekend Unthreaded

…. Grand Final game in Australia today.

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Scientist calling for RICO investigation on skeptics is now being investigated himself

Psychological projection anyone?

Remember how some climate scientists wanted to give up debating science and potentially jail skeptics instead? These were the 20 “scientists” who reasoned by looking for “tobacco tactics” in opponent’s arguments. They called for a RICO investigation — a the kind of racketeering investigation done on the mafia. I pointed out their team used more “tobacco tactics” against skeptics than anything the skeptics did, but looks like that may have been only the minor part of their projection of their own flaws.

It turns out that the scientist driving the letter, along with his wife and daughter, has made over $5m above his university salary, and now questions are being raised in Congress about his “double dipping”. The National Science Foundation is very unhappy about scientists who blur the line between their university and their outside consulting, and earn twice for doing the same job. I hear people have been jailed for this sort of thing.

Have a look at how well the leader of the group-of-20 has been doing: meet Jagadish Shukla, professor of climate dynamics at George Mason University, who must now be wishing he hadn’t called for an investigation.

Their letter was posted on the website of Institute of Global Environment and Society (IGES), a non-profit, tax-exempt research institute led by Shukla. Oddly, after the media attention, the RICO request letter suddenly disappeared off the website in late September, with a note saying it was “inadvertantly posted“. Oops? This is about the same time the investigation he requested turned around to bite him. Roger Pielke Jr investigated Shukla’s 990 filings and the odd way a Prof at a public university was also earning millions on the side. That was reported and expanded upon by Steve McIntyre.

Ian Tuttle at the National Review picks up their story:

The curious disappearance set several people inquiring. It turns out that heading up IGES is nice work if you can get it. The Washington Free Beacon reports that since 2001 the organization has received more than $63 million — 98 percent of its total revenue — from taxpayers, mainly in the form of grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. And an astonishing amount of that money has ended up in Dr. Shukla’s pocket.

Not only did a lot end up in Dr Shukla’s pocket, but a lot ended up in his wife’s and daughter’s pockets too. His family has gained some $5.6million in compensation from IGES since 2001, plus his daughter’s salary (whatever that was). Shukla also earned a salary from George Mason University, a nice $314k last year.

This “double-dipping” — receiving compensation from a research organization on top of academic compensation — is prohibited by the federal agencies from which IGES receives money, as well as by George Mason University, as detailed by Climate Audit’s Steve McIntyre. Yet IGES officially joined the university, as part of the College of Science, in 2013.

Over the years, as Shukla earned more from his university, he and his wife earned more from the non-profit too. Too much is never enough?

As Steve McIntyre reported:

“Despite the various changes in grant structure, one constant (or rather steadily increasing amount) has been the several sources of compensation to Shukla and his wife.

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New Science 8: Applying the Stefan-Boltzmann Law to Earth

Earth, Greenhouse gas, emissions, wavelength, altitude, graphic

Energy is emitted to space from many different heights in the atmosphere, depending on the wavelength (not to scale, suggestive only).

One more quick post of mostly uncontroversial foundation for the math-and-physics-heads among us. But it’s a must for anyone who wants to talk Stefan-Boltzmann and follow the details of the next posts. My intro here, just has the gist without the equations.

Mostly the IPCC will agree with this post, but they might be a bit snooty that David thinks their “effective temperature” is too much of an approximation conceptually, and the slightly more complicated idea of a “radiating temperature” is needed. Strictly, the effective temperature idea treats Earth like it is a black-body at infrared, which it isn’t really. Earth is almost a black-body, but not quite.

There is no single layer that radiates to space, instead emissions come from many different heights, depending on the wavelength. We could average the emissions into “one layer”, but doing that would lose detail that matters when computing sensitivity to increasing CO2.

Technically the Stefan-Boltzmann law is not supposed to be applied to Earth, because there is no single physical radiating surface to which to apply it. So this is where David introduces and defines the concept of “radiating temperature”, so it can effectively be applied.

As David says: “This linearizes the otherwise highly non-linear Stefan-Boltzmann law, giving us a simple result: the increase in radiating temperature is equal to λ_SB times the increase in OLR, where λ_SB is the slope of the Stefan-Boltzmann curve where the Earth is.”

— Jo

8. Applying the Stefan-Boltzmann Law to Earth

Dr David Evans, 2 October 2015, David Evans’ Basic Climate Models Home, Intro, Previous, Next, Nomenclature.

Before discussing the third error in the conventional basic climate model (next post), we will review the application of the Stefan-Boltzmann law to Earth. This is the last of the foundational posts, predominately reviews to ensure readers can get up to speed on background topics.

It’s not quite straightforward, because the Stefan-Boltzmann law applies to the emissions of a body with a single surface for all wavelengths, whereas the Earth’s outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) comes from multiple emission layers (see post 6).

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New Science 7: Rerouting Feedback in Climate Models

Climate Models, Rerouting feedbacks, David Evans

Conventional models assume increasing atmospheric CO2 warms the surface, then apply the feedbacks to the surface warming. But if feedbacks start up in the atmosphere instead, everything changes.

This is a post with big potential. A feedback the other climate models miss?

All the establishment models assume carbon dioxide warms the sky, which leads to the surface warming*, and the feedbacks then apply to the surface warming. It’s in the model architecture, the models can’t do it any other way. But what if the feedbacks don’t wait — what if the feedbacks start right away, up in the atmosphere? What if, say, CO2 warms the air, and that affects humidity and or clouds right then and there? These would be feedbacks operating on tropospheric warming, and they can reroute that energy.

Potentially, this blows everything away. If the energy blocked by increasing CO2 is merely escaping Earth through emissions from another gas in the atmosphere, like say, the dominant greenhouse gas, water-vapor, then could this explain why the effect of Co2 has been exaggerated in the conventional models?

We call this the “rerouting feedback” because when it’s harder for energy to escape to space through the CO2 pipe, this feedback would reroute it out through the water vapor pipe instead.

Put another way, as Earth emits (relatively) less energy through carbon dioxide’s favorite wavelengths, some of that blocked heat, possibly transferred through kinetic collisions, just reroutes out to space on the water vapor wavelengths instead.

No matter how many thousands of runs someone does on a conventional climate simulation, this outcome could never occur.

If this feedback is real and significant, it could explain why CO2 is not as potent as the IPCC supposes.

We will be expanding on this hypothesis in the future. It explains some anomalous observations. There are serious implications and tests we will develop.

— Jo

7. The Rerouting Feedback

Dr David Evans, 30 September 2015, David Evans’ Basic Climate Models Home, Intro, Previous, Next, Nomenclature.

In post 5 we noted that the architecture of the conventional model only allows feedbacks that are responses to surface warming, thereby omitting any feedbacks that are primarily in response to climate drivers. In post 6 we discussed where outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) is emitted from, and introduced the “pipes” terminology. Now we build on both.

This post proposes the existence of the “rerouting feedback”, a feedback in response to an increase in the CO2 concentration, where the action takes place high in the atmosphere. It is omitted from the basic sensitivity calculation because it is not a response to surface warming, and it is also omitted from the large computer models (GCMs). Represented by f_C in Fig. 1 of post 5, it reduces the radiation imbalance ultimately caused by an increase in CO2 and thus the warming influence of rising CO2.

Background

For this discussion, let us suppose that all heat escapes the Earth through the four main pipes: the CO2 pipe, the water vapor pipe, the cloud top pipe, or the surface pipe (see Fig. 3 of post 6).

“How does the outgoing radiation rearrange itself among the four pipes?”

Increasing the CO2 concentration impedes the flow of OLR (or heat) through the CO2 pipe, so there is less OLR emitted on the CO2 wavelengths. The heat backs up a little, warming the atmosphere, but when steady state is resumed the total OLR is the same as it was originally because the absorbed solar radiation (ASR) is the same (ignoring the minor albedo feedbacks to surface warming).

The crucial question is: in light of the lowered OLR in the CO2 pipe, how does the OLR rearrange itself among the four pipes?

A pipe’s OLR is solely determined by the temperature of its emitting layer — the OLR in the surface pipe is determined by the surface temperature, the OLR in the water vapor pipe is determined by the average temperature of the water vapor emissions layer (WVEL) which in turn is determined by its average height and the lapse rate, and so on. Knowing the rearrangement of OLR between the pipes would allow us to know the change in OLR in the surface pipe, and thus the surface warming and the equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS).

In the conventional model, increasing the CO2 concentration causes a sympathetic decrease in OLR in the water vapor pipe, due to amplification by water vapor feedbacks — the influence of extra CO2 is represented as a forcing, equivalent to extra ASR, which warms the surface, causing more evaporation and more water vapor, which presumably causes the WVEL to ascend because there is more water vapor in the atmosphere, whereupon the WVEL is cooler, which reduces the OLR in the water vapor pipe. So, in the conventional model, the surface and cloud top pipes must compensate for decreases in OLR in both the CO2 and water vapor pipes, by increasing their combined OLR by a matching amount. Obviously this requires much more surface warming than if the water vapor pipe also increased its OLR in response to the decreased OLR in the CO2 pipe.

Sketch of the Mechanism

Increased CO2 causes a decrease in OLR in the CO2 pipe. Now consider how it might also trigger a feedback that increases OLR in the water vapor pipe, by way of partial compensation (as if f_C in Fig. 1 of post 5 was negative).

From the point of view of heat in the upper troposphere, increased CO2 makes it harder to escape to space in photons fired from CO2 molecules, and therefore relatively easier to escape in photons fired from water vapor molecules. Increased CO2 thus increases the relative propensity of OLR to come from water vapor molecules. The energy has to escape to space somehow, the relative attractiveness of the CO2 pipe has decreased compared to the water vapor pipe, and the heat is essentially available to all molecules because they swap energy back and forth by thermal collisions. Furthermore, the changes in the CO2 spectrum with increased CO2 occur in the wings of the CO2 “well” (see for instance the last diagram on this page of Barrett Bellamy), at heights around 8 km, which is about the average height of the WVEL.

“…when increasing CO2 makes it more difficult for heat to radiate to space on the wavelengths at which carbon dioxide absorbs and emits, some of the blocked heat simply reroutes out to space on the water vapor wavelengths instead.”

If more OLR comes from the water vapor molecules, the population of water vapor molecules would be less energetic and would thus tend not to ascend quite so high in the Earth’s gravitational field — so the WVEL would descend slightly (which would be compatible with the non-observation of the “hotspot”; more on that in later posts). Although the population is less energetic, the top of the population is in a lower and therefore warmer place compared to it where was before the increased CO2 caused it to descend. Thus the WVEL is warmer, emitting more OLR.*

Note that it is possible for the WVEL to descend despite increased evaporation from the surface, if the extra water vapor is mainly confined to the lower troposphere and the consequent greater stability at low altitudes leads to less overturning and less transport of water vapor to the upper troposphere — indeed this seems to be happening, as reported by Paltridge et. al in 2009 ^[1], from study of the better radiosonde data from 1973.

We call it the “rerouting feedback” because some fraction of the OLR that is blocked from escaping to space out the CO2 pipe by rising CO2 levels is instead rerouted out the water vapor pipe.

“It is not a response to surface warming, but to CO2 enrichment.”

In other words, when increasing CO2 makes it more difficult for heat to radiate to space on the wavelengths at which carbon dioxide absorbs and emits, some of the blocked heat simply reroutes out to space on the water vapor wavelengths instead. This feedback takes place high in the atmosphere, far from the surface, so there is no place for it in the conventional climate model — which only contains feedbacks in response to surface warming.

This proposed feedback is contained within f_C in Fig. 1 of post 5. It is not a response to surface warming, but to CO2 enrichment. It all occurs within the higher atmosphere, so it responds more strongly to variables describing the upper atmosphere and radiation than to the surface temperature. (Perhaps a suitable variable to describe the strength of the feedback is the height of the CO2 emission layer plus the height of the WVEL.)

The rerouting feedback might offset a substantial portion of the reduction in OLR in the CO2 pipe due to an increasing CO2 concentration. If it exists, the rerouting feedback would lower our estimates of the sensitivity of surface temperature to rising CO2 levels.

A Negative Feedback?

The rerouting feedback reduces the ultimate radiation imbalance due to extra CO2, so it is a negative feedback in terms of its effect on the CO2 forcing, so f_C is negative. Applying the feedback diagram in Fig. 1 of post 3 with a equal to D_R,2X and b to f_C, the rerouting feedback changes the radiation imbalance due to increasing CO2

For example, if f_C was −0.6 then

and the influence of increasing the CO2 concentration would be reduced by 70%.

Semantic point: Although the rerouting feedback reduces the sensitivity of the surface temperature to changes in CO2, and although f_C is negative, it is not a feedback in response to surface warming so it is not a “negative feedback” as that term is understood in the conventional paradigm.

Energy Considerations

Consider how the climate might adjust to a decrease in OLR in the CO2 pipe. The blocked OLR has to find its way to space somehow. The resistance of the surface pipe to carrying more OLR is exceptionally high in the tropics, where most of the heat is, because heat loss from the surface via evaporation rises exponentially with surface temperature (Kininmonth 2010 ^[2] elaborates on this). The resistance of the water vapor pipe to carrying more OLR might be relatively low, because it requires only that the average height of the WVEL (~8 km) ascends or descends by a few tens of meters. Like the WVEL, the cloud tops might ascend or descend slightly with little apparent energy requirement.

The energy required to warm the surface on a sustained basis, with the ocean warming that would entail, might be much greater than the energy required to change the average height of the WVEL or cloud tops sufficiently to change OLR by the same amount. (More research is needed to get the figures to assess this.) This would suggest that the bulk of the response to the decrease in OLR escaping via the CO2 pipe would come as more OLR from the WVEL or cloud tops, rather than from the surface — which is consistent with the proposed rerouting feedback and with a lower ECS.

Electrical analogy for OLR to space

Figure 1: Electrical analogy for heat escaping to space. The zig-zags are electrical resistors; the current (a la heat) mainly flows through the paths of least resistance — the current in a resistor is inversely proportional to its resistance. Increasing CO2 increases R_C, so some current reroutes from flowing through R_C to flowing through the other resistors, mainly through the other resistor with the lowest resistance.

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“Green” cars cause real pollution, and now scamming fuel economy too – Half the CO2 “cuts” imaginary

Carbon markets = corruption

Fake markets are easy to scam, because no one really wants or cares about “the product”. Fake markets are dangerous tools. Judging by the way people act, the point of carbon markets is to feed bureaucrats and bankers, not to change the weather. If that’s true, it’s entirely predictable that yet another scandal has run for years, and no one “noticed” or acted to stop it. Not only were diesel cars scamming the lab tests for pollution, but other cars were built to exploit loopholes (that may be legal) in the lab tests for fuel economy as well. The audacity is remarkable — real car CO2 emissions are often a gobsmacking 40- 50% higher than reported, even in top brand, expensive cars.*

As much as two-thirds of CO2 cuts since 2008 may have been imaginary and made by cars that were only fuel efficient in the lab. CO2 “pollution” doesn’t hurt anyone, but misleading fuel economy figures may have cost owners €450 a year more in fuel to run. The companies known to get suspiciously good results on fuel economy (so far) are BMW, Mercedes, Renault and Peugeot. Companies using software to get around other pollution tests now include VW, BMW, Mercedes, Audi, Seat, and Skoda. (VW owns Audi, Skoda, and apparently Porsche, Bentley, Bugatti, Lamborghini as well.) South Korea, Britain, France and Japan are all ordering their car makers to answer questions. Though, hypocritically, governments of UK, France and Germany have all lobbied to keep in the loopholes in the emissions tests. Everywhere we look, “seeming” is important, but few really care about CO2 or pollution. The market is fake, the numbers are fake, and the “concern” is fake too.

From GWPF

“Two-thirds of CO2 emissions cuts due to improved fuel economy since 2008 were delivered through manipulating car tests”

Date: 28/09/15 Energy Post

“On average, two-thirds of the claimed gains in CO2 emissions and fuel consumption since 2008 have been delivered through manipulating tests with only 13.3 g/km of real progress on the roads set against 22.2 g/km of ‘hot air’” according to the T&E report.

New cars, including the Mercedes A, C and E class, BMW 5 series and Peugeot 308, are now swallowing around 50% more fuel than their lab test results reveal, according to new on-the-road results compiled by NGO Transport & Environment (T&E). T&E calls for a comprehensive investigation into both air pollution and fuel economy tests across Europe and a complete overhaul of the testing system.

“The gap between official and real-world performance found in many car models has grown so wide that it cannot be explained through known factors including test manipulations. While this does not constitute proof of ‘defeat devices’ being used to fiddle fuel economy tests, similar to that used by Volkswagen, EU governments must extend probes into defeat devices to CO2 tests and petrol cars too,” says T&E in a press release.

T& notes: “The gap between official test results for CO2 emissions/fuel economy and real-world performance has increased to 40% on average in 2014 from 8% in 2001, according to T&E’s 2015 Mind the Gap report, which analyses on-the-road fuel consumption by motorists and highlights the abuses by carmakers of the current tests and the failure of EU regulators to close loopholes. T&E said the gap has become a chasm and, without action, will likely grow to 50% on average by 2020.”

Greens create real pollution — the VW, and now BMW, Audi, Mercedes, software scandal

All up, the carnage is pretty impressive. In Europe, the Greens played tax games and encouraged people to buy diesels to “cut CO2”. Once, there were hardly any diesel cars, then there were lots — thanks to green-government incentives. Meanwhile the companies cheated on software which produced good results in lab tests, but spewed out noxious gas the rest of the time. Eleven million VW’s maybe affected. Nearly half a million VWs and Audis have already been recalled. Those US cars would make made 10,000 – 40,000 tons of NOx, which is 10 – 40 times as much as they were supposed too if they met EPA standards.

The global warming zealots are to blame for the deadly diesel fiasco, writes STEPHEN GLOVER

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Lo! Shark god protects us from storms, floods, heatwaves (sayth Nature & ABC)

Big news: A new endogenous forcing found for climate change — sharks. For millions of years you thought predator-prey relationships were just about big fish having dinner, but not so, they are climate forcings. Sharks cool the planet, and stop storms, floods, droughts and malaria. Crabs, on the other hand, pollute like a coal company. It’s a miracle that the planet made it through the last billion years without the EPA managing the shark-crab numbers thing. This ABC interview inspired me to channel the spirit of neolithic science.

The dusken-shark doth smite the naughty fishies and give us nice weather

New research has found that sharks play an important role in preventing climate change, warning that overfishing and culling sharks is resulting in more carbon being released from the seafloor.

“Sharks, believe it or not, are helping to prevent climate change,” said Dr Peter Macreadie, an Australian Research Council Fellow from Deakin University and one of the paper’s authors.

Sharks: Good. Crabs and Turtles: Bad. Kill those turtles!

“Turtles, crabs, certain types of worms, stingrays — these animals that are overabundant to do with loss of predators used to keep their numbers in check,” Dr Macreadie said.

Someone send a note to Greenpeace — those turtle eggs are killing the planet.

The researchers used Cape Cod in Massachusetts as an example of where this process had been observed.

“There had been overfishing in the region, so a lot of the big fish had been removed and then what we saw was an increase — a remarkable increase, a huge increase — in the number of crabs that bury and borrow down in the system, in the salt marsh which sequestered all this carbon,” Dr Macreadie said.

“And we’d found that in an area there, the crabs had become so abundant that they had pretty much destroyed the salt marsh, and it was a small area, it was only 1.5 square kilometres, but it liberated 250,000 tonnes of carbon that had been stored in the ground.”

So the evil crabs release a quarter of a million tonnes of carbon? I say, save the planet with Chilli Crab Linguine!

Ooh. Look. There’s an Australian version: Chilli Crab Linguine With Vodka.

But don’t kill the turtles. They can buy carbon credits instead.

PS: This is going to be hard for big-chief climate modelers — tricky feedbacks ahead. In 2008 global warming was blamed for causing shark attacks. Now shark attacks are saving us from global warming.

Cue jokes now about how climate change jumped the shark…

h/t Brian, Michael Kile.

UPDATE: Leo G in comments: Critics say large-scale Cooked Crab Sequestration deployment is unproven and decades away from being commercialised.

UPDATE: Sophocles — What we really need to know is what effect [sharks] have on earth quakes…

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Ideology adds heat to the debate on climate change — Jennifer Marohasy

The national conversation is all about “seeming” and “confidence”. Greg Hunt (Environment Minister) boasted that he stopped an investigation into the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM), and prevented “due diligence” being a part of a one-day wonder “forum”.

His justification:

“In doing this, it is important to note that public trust in the Bureau’s data and forecasts, particularly as they relate to bushfires and cyclones, is paramount,” [Greg Hunt] said.

It used to be that public trust occurred when organizations were fully investigated, accountable, and found clean. Now “Public Trust” is apparently increased when there are no investigations, or only weak whitewashes. Either the public has got a lot stupider, or the media and ministers have.

Plenty of the self anointed (those who know more than the dumb punters) thought Hunt’s boast was a big achievement. Anthony Sharwood, News Corp journalist (oh for a “reporter”!), wondered if the government was paranoid for wanting to check the BOM. Perhaps next he’ll be calling for global corporates to figure out their own tax bill; who needs professional auditing, right — it’s just “paranoid”?

But the bad news for Hunt and the Bureau (and Sharwood) is that the Truth will out, the genie can’t be put back in the bottle, and word is spreading. Who wants to be caught covering up the gross errors, inexplicable adjustments, major changes, and bizarre hot-records in cold-places, all done with mystery methods? You don’t need a PhD to know that maximum temperatures are meant to be higher than minimums. Nor does it take many brains to recognize that there are strange repetitive patterns and errors in the oldest “quality” data that obviously didn’t come from any thermometer and are not real. Are those who cover it up gullible fools, or deceptive cheats?

Jennifer Marohasy has a great response, at On Line Opinion and in a shorter version in The Australian:

You Don’t Know the Half of It: Temperature Adjustments and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology

By jennifer on September 28, 2015 in Information

According to media reports last week, a thorough investigation of the Bureau’s methodology was prevented because of intervention by Environment Minister Greg Hunt. He apparently argued in Cabinet that the credibility of the institution was paramount. That it is important the public have trust in the Bureau’s data and forecasts, so the public know to heed warning of bushfires and cyclones.

This is the type of plea repeatedly made by the Catholic Church hierarchy to prevent the truth about paedophilia, lest the congregation lose faith in the church.

Sometimes the minority are right:

Contrast this approach with that by poet and playwright Henrik Ibsen who went so far as to suggest ‘the minority is always right’ in an attempt to have his audience examine the realities of 18th Century morality. Specifically, Ibsen wanted us to consider that sometimes the individual who stands alone is making a valid point which is difficult to accept because every culture has its received wisdoms: those beliefs that cannot be questioned, until they are proven in time to have been wrong. British biologist, and contemporary of Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley was trying to make a similar point when he wrote, “I am too much of a skeptic to deny the possibility of anything.”

At one time, Charles Darwin was in a bit of a minority.

Sharwood the journalist wants to understand temperature sets by studying “motivations”:

News Corp Australia journalist Anthony Sharwood got it completely wrong in his weekend article (“Does the weather Bureau Tweak Data”) defending the bureau’s homogenisation of the temperature record. I tried to explain to him on the phone last Thursday how the bureau didn’t actually do what it said when it homogenised temperature time series for places such as Rutherglen.

Sharwood kept coming back to the issue of “motivations”. He kept asking me why on earth the bureau would want to mislead the Australian public.

Jennifer M quotes ClimateGate emails, which is very apt, but let’s turn his question back on Sharwood: ask him which university or public institution in Australia would offer a job to a skeptical meteorologist? Any BOM staff who reported that Australia was always hot and dry, and climate change was natural, would be unemployable. (Lomborg accepted the science, just doubts the economics, and he’s treated like a leper.) Perhaps Sharwood can explain how more funding or status would arrive at the Bureau of Meteorology if it turned out that the climate was controlled by the Sun, that most long term climate modelling was useless, and that the BOM had been wrong for years? Rephrasing Sharwood: Why on Earth would the BOM want to show that its past predictions were wrong, and that it had mislead the public?

The BOM spoke too soon and unscientifically pegged their colors to the mast of climate change panic. What incentive is there for them to expose that?

This issue is only going to get worse until there is a real review, done by skeptical scientists (because there is no other kind of scientist):

It is so obvious that there is an urgent need for a proper, thorough and independent review of operations at the Bureau. But it would appear our politicians and many mainstream media are set against the idea. Evidently they are too conventional in their thinking to consider that such an important Australian institution could now be ruled by ideology.

This article was first published at A shorter versions was subsequently published at The Australian, with the wonderful cartoon of Greg Hunt by Eric Lobbecke.

Send your letters in to The Australian, and to Greg Hunt

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UK Energy Minister gives £5.8 billion of funding to UN to make everyone richer, may stem migration too

A few weeks ago UK Minister Amber Rudd cut subsidies to solar in the UK. I thought the UK government might be showing some signs of making sense, but now it appears Rudd was saving up for a UN gift:

The UK is increasing the money for climate activities in the development pot by at least 50%, to a further £5.8 billion of funding from April 2016 to March 2021, including at least £1.76bn in 2020. The UK is a leader on climate finance – we are the only G7 nation to meet the 0.7% aid commitment and the only one to enshrine it in legislation.

The UK is a leader on climate finance – we are the only G7 nation to meet the 0.7% aid commitment and the only one to enshrine it in legislation.The UK is a leader on climate finance – we are the only G7 nation to meet the 0.7% aid commitment and the only one to enshrine it in legislation.

Luckily it doesn’t cost money to fix the weather, it makes money.

To ensure a more secure and prosperous future for us all, the UK is playing its part by helping some of the most vulnerable communities become more resilient to climate change and by supporting the developing world to take the clean energy path to growth and prosperity rather than the high carbon route”.

Why stop at five billion. Let’s spend ten, I say…

Indeed, apparently reducing carbon emissions could fix migration too:

As well as helping vulnerable countries to reduce their emissions, finance can also help them better adapt to weather extremes and rising temperatures associated with climate change. This can increase their resilience, alleviating pressures on natural resources such as land, water and forests, which could lead people to sell their property or migrate.

Because millions of people are trying to move into countries which have low emissions of CO2, like Mali, Chad and Afghanistan, right?

Or is that because the world will be 0.00C cooler thanks to the UK government spending, and storms, floods and droughts will stop?

Over 40,000 people died in the last British winter. (Is that right? It seems awfully large?)

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New Science 6: How the Greenhouse Effect Works and “four pipes” to space

The Earth’s atmosphere is a leaky bucket, with four big holes (and a lot of little ones).

Whole libraries have been filled with talk of a single characteristic emissions layer — a simplistic idea that there is one effective “surface” that radiates to space. It exists in an abstract sense, after sufficient averaging, but it’s a paradigm that doesn’t help us think clearly. In any case, it’s too simple for our purposes in this series. In reality there are many layers that radiate to space, different for each type of molecule that can emit longwave radiation (which means infrared). Then there are the surface and cloud-tops too.

Earth, Climate, Greenhouse gas emissions to space, School, student resource,

Energy comes in one way but leaves through at least four different paths.

To follow this series you’ll need to understand the concept of four pipes through which energy flows to space. It’s a powerful idea and big advance on the simpler notion of one-pipe-in and one-pipe-out. For those not as familiar with photons and excited molecules, you may want to read the “Background” section at the end of the post first.

For a photon there are a lot of paths to space

Some photons at Earths surface will be at the right wavelength to head straight for Jupiter and stopped by nothing much in the sky. But others will bump into a CO2 molecule which will eat them up (for a while) and get “excited”. Eventually either that excited molecule will spit the photon’s energy right back out in a random direction, or it will run smack into a molecule like Oxygen or Nitrogen (O2 and N2). If a collision happens the excitement (the energy) shifts to another molecule, and so the air generally warms. But O2 and N2 are not greenhouse gas molecules — they can’t release the photon’s energy, so the heat sticks around for a while. Sooner or later the energy from the photon will have been shared and smacked until it hits the jackpot, and ends up in a molecule that is a greenhouse gas, and also happens to be high enough, in thin enough air, to have a sufficiently direct line to space, where it might get ejected in the right direction and leave the Earth forever. This is the top of the emissions layer. It’s different for each type of molecule, and even at different wavelengths for the same molecule. The ones packed in near the surface can’t eject anything to space; there are too many other molecules in the way. The height of the emissions layer turns out to matter a lot — if we thicken the blanket, the layer at the top that can emit is raised, and is also colder. A colder body can’t emit as much.

I know the greenhouse effect is the source of much debate among skeptics; I’ll diplomatically refer people to past discussions of thermodynamics on this site. None of that has changed. We don’t want to rehash that. I think skeptics who have worked doggedly to test the basic theory of greenhouse deserve some credit for intuitively knowing that “something is wrong” with the theory — they are right, CO2 has only a minor effect. But the details matter, and we have to get them correct. Let’s not get stuck in a semantic debate with badly defined words. This is about the net flow of energy — a river that runs inexorably from the Sun to Earth and on to space. Comments that imply that photon “knows” what direction it’s headed in or the temperature of its destination don’t belong here. Let’s talk about the four pipes instead. These diagrams are important.

— Jo

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6. How the Greenhouse Effect Works

Dr David Evans, 28 September 2015, David Evans’ Basic Climate Models Home, Intro, Previous, Next, Nomenclature.

Before proposing a feedback in response to increased CO2 that is omitted from the conventional basic climate model (next post), or the third error in the conventional model, we need to review some aspects of the radiation of heat to space.

All climate modelling at the basic level focuses primarily on how the outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) is affected by changes in the various climate variables. We limit this review to some background and the climate physics of OLR — this is not a complete explanation of the greenhouse effect, just enough for the modelling in this series.

This is all conventional climate science, except that we introduce the terminology of “pipes” for brevity.

The CO2 Blanket

Carbon dioxide absorbs and emits photons with wavelengths around 15 μm (microns). There are many absorption lines (distinct wavelengths, or energies, at which it absorbs) of CO2 around 15 μm, and each line is blurred by factors such as the Doppler effect so that the CO2 can effectively absorb and emit in a narrow but continuous range of wavelengths around each line. The end result is that, in the current atmosphere, CO2 absorb photons from ~13 μm to ~18 μm, with various probabilities. Absorption is less likely at wavelengths further from an absorption line — a photon on such a wavelength can on average travel further through a cloud of CO2. CO2 also has other absorption lines, but these are not so relevant to its effect on climate. These issues are well explained at greater depth on the Barrett-Bellamy website (see the last diagram!).

There is sufficient CO2 in our atmosphere to make it quite opaque at the wavelengths at which CO2 absorbs and emits. A photon near 15 μm can only travel, on average, a few meters through the troposphere before being absorbed by a CO2 molecule. CO2 is a slightly heavier molecule than N₂ or O₂, so it tends to settles to the bottom of the atmosphere. Nonetheless, CO2 concentrations are moderately uniform throughout the troposphere, gradually decreasing with height, and the CO2 blanket persists well into the lower stratosphere.

OLR consists of the infrared photons that escape to space. The crucial observation here is that, at the wavelengths at which CO2 absorbs and emits, the photons that contribute to OLR nearly all come from the very top layer of CO2.

The CO2 emission layer is the optical upper boundary of the CO2 surrounding the Earth. It is at the effective or average height of emission to space on the wavelengths at which CO2 absorbs and emits: photons on those wavelengths emitted well below the layer are usually absorbed before they reach space, photons on those wavelengths that are emitted upwards from above the layer mainly make it to space, and an observer in space at those wavelengths can only “see” into the atmosphere about as deep as the CO2 emission layer (about one optical depth).

The “greenhouse effect” works by displacing the layer from which OLR is emitted.

Figure 1: The “greenhouse effect” works by displacing the layer from which OLR is emitted, from the warm surface to some colder place high in the atmosphere

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New Science 5: Error 2: Model architecture means all feedbacks work through the surface temperature?

And the series continues, poking another hole in the models, with bigger holes to come.

Climate Models, Model architecture, feedbacks, David Evans

See the larger version in the post below

What if CO2 caused more greenery, which produced more volatile organic gases, which increased rainfall and changed cloud cover? The models would be blind to it. They’re “supercomputer-complicated”, but miss many of the feedbacks on Earth. The only feedbacks the models consider are ones that occur because of changes in temperature. And worse, it’s not just changes in temperature, but specifically, changes in surface temperature.

If, say, cosmic rays caused a change in cloud cover, or the Sun influenced ozone which in turn caused the jet streams to shift closer to the equator, there are no feedbacks worth mentioning according to the large GCM models. The conventional basic model assumes, is built on the idea that nothing causes changes to Earth’s climate unless it works through surface heating — and the GCMs have the same architecture. Cloud cover does not change ice cover. Ocean currents don’t change cloud cover. Changes in biology don’t change clouds. Only changes in surface temperature changes cloud cover.

It’s a good place to start looking for missing negative feedbacks (though, technically, “feedback” means a “feedback to surface warming” in much of the climate literature). Funny how the language matters isn’t it?

This architectural feature is inherited by the GCMs. Here David shows how the conventional model could be structured if feedbacks were introduced systematically. Baby steps…

— Jo

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5. Error 2: Omitting Feedbacks that are not Temperature-Dependent

Dr David Evans, 27 September 2015, David Evans’ Basic Climate Models Home, Intro, Previous, Next, Nomenclature.

The second error in the conventional basic climate model is an architectural error, a systematic error in structure: it omits all feedbacks that are not responses to surface warming.

In a general sense, a “feedback” is a response to a change that affects whatever caused the change in the first place. For example, surface warming causes more evaporation from the oceans and thus more water vapor, but water vapor is the main greenhouse gas so this might in turn cause more surface warming — so water vapor is a feedback (and the biggest feedback to surface warming; see the components of the total feedback f before Eq. (10) of post 3).

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Weekend Unthreaded

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New survey: Nearly one third in US say “climate change a total hoax”

How the landscape is shifting. If we give people the right question instead of the usual loaded surveys, they surprise us. Here’s an opinion poll with an outrageously skeptical option: “climate change is a total hoax”.

Bloomberg Politics National Poll

31% of US voters surveyed said they strongly or mostly agreed.

See what happens when you ask a good question?

QUESTION:

I’m going to read stances some candidates have taken on key issues. For each, please tell me if you
strongly agree, mostly agree, mostly disagree, or strongly disagree. (Read list. Rotate.)

	Total Agree	Total Disagree	Strongly Agree	Mostly agree	Mostly Disagree	Strongly Disagree	Not sure
Climate change is a total hoax	31	65	17	14	20	45	4

In March 2015 a Gallup poll on Climate Change suggested that 24% of the US population worried “Not at all”. I called these the “implacable skeptics”. I’d argue now that the implacable skeptic group stands at 31% who agree that it is a “total hoax”.

Has it really grown this much since March? Perhaps the ramp up of the US presidential campaign, with Republican candidates like Trump competing to be openly skeptical and even defiantly skeptical has shifted the Overton window (the range of views that are acceptable in polite society). It’s believable that in a mere 6 months 5% of the population who were undecided have become comfortable saying it’s a “total hoax”.

The Gallup poll showed that the only sector of the population that was growing were the skeptics.

Climate is the least popular part of the Pope’s new religion of political correctness

The Pope is gradually transforming Catholicism into the Church of Political Correctness — can anyone name a topic the Pope still supports that goes against political correctness? The Pope is taking climate change, immigration, gays and abortion but not so much about Jesus Christ.

Amazingly, despite all these hot-potato topics, the point that grates with by far the most people is the Pope’s “faith” on climate change. More than half the voters polled said they thought it was a “bad direction”. This was the point of most contention with the Pope — more people felt it was wrong for the Pope to be pro climate, than protested about his denouncement of the economy (37%), or his leniency on abortion (15%), gays (18%), annulling marriages (33%), and immigration (25%).

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New Science 4: Error 1: Partial Derivatives

Partial derivatives, maths, calculus, models

…

And so begins the list of errors. The conventional basic climate model (see post 1 for why it is important, post2 and post 3 for what it is) is based on partial derivatives of dependent variables, and that’s a No No. Let me explain: effectively basic climate models model a hypothetical world where all things freeze in a constant state while one factor doubles.* But in the real world, many variables are changing simultaneously and the rules are different.

Partial differentials of dependent variables is a wildcard — it may produce an OK estimate sometimes, but other times it produces nonsense, and ominously, there is effectively no way to test. If the basic climate models predicted the climate, we’d know they got away with it. They didn’t, but we can’t say if they failed because of a partial derivative. It could have been something else. We just know it’s bad practice.

To see an example of how partial differentials can produce quixotic contradictions in a normal and simple situation, see what happens when they are used with the Ideal Gas Law in this PDF from MIT.

Partial derivatives are useful when there are only independent variables. But in the climate paradox, there are a lot of variables and most of them are dependent. Partial derivatives might work, or they might blow up. For them to make sense we’d need to live in a world which can be held in a constant steady state while one factor does a step change. It’s a situation that probably hasn’t happened in the last 4.5 billion years.

The field of climate science draws on maths, but rarely draws on the leading mathematical minds. This first error of the three illustrates how people who may be well trained in geography or oceanography (or divinity) can miss points that professional mathematicians and modelers would not.

The big problem here is that a model built on the misuse of a basic maths technique that cannot be tested, should not ever, as in never, be described as 95% certain. Resting a theory on unverifiable and hypothetical quantities is asking for trouble. Hey but it’s only the future of the planet that’s at stake. If it were something more important, climate scientists would have brought in some serious maths guys.

This error is fairly easy to describe; the harder, bigger errors are coming soon, as we try to roll out the points as fast as we can. — Jo

________________________________________________

4. Error 1: Partial Derivatives

Dr David Evans, 26 September 2015, David Evans’ Basic Climate Models Home, Intro, Previous , Next, Nomenclature.

There are three significant errors with the conventional basic climate model (which was described in the basic climate model core part 1,and basic climate model in full part II). In this post we discuss the first error, the misapplication of the mathematical technique of partial derivatives, because it is the easiest of the three to describe.

By the way, noting that there are problems with the conventional model is hardly new even in establishment circles, but apparently itemizing them is a little unusual. For example, Sherwood et. al said in 2015 ^[1]: “While the forcing–feedback paradigm has always been recognized as imperfect, such discrepancies have previously been attributed to variations in “efficacy” (Hansen et al. 1984), which did not clarify their nature.”

Overview

The basic model relies heavily on partial derivatives. A partial derivative is the ratio of the changes in two variables, when everything apart from those two variables is held constant. When applied to the climate, this means everything about the climate must be held constant while we imagine how much one variable would change if the other was altered.

For example, how does changing the surface temperature affect how much heat is radiated to space (the outgoing longwave radiation, or OLR), if everything else — including humidity, clouds, gases, lapse rates, the tropopause, and absorbed sunlight — stays the same? (This particular partial derivative is the Planck sensitivity, central to the conventional model.)

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Camouflage illusions in the matrix: same mysterious temperature, same day, year after year

Wait til you see what Lance Pidgeon has found. He was looking at the BOM website temperature archive maps of Australia for early last century (using AWAP data). He was wondering how the Bureau of Meteorology could possibly create maps this detailed for specific days that long ago. He was especially curious about the remote, vast areas where there were no thermometers, yet there were wiggly jiggly temperature lines on the map, shaded as if they had meaning. I’ve heard that more people have visited the South pole, than have stood at the point in central Australia where the three large western and central states meet.

Then he noticed something positively strange — April 14th in 1915 and one year later in 1916 looked almost identical, as did the same day in 1917. The more he looked, the weirder things got. He plodded, year after year, all the way from 1911 to 1917, then through Jan, Feb, March, and so on. Worse, he tells me he could keep going right through to 1956 without seeing much change (though there are interesting exceptions). After that, temperatures of the area start to vary from year to year, like the “weather” we’d expect if we had multiple thermometers in the site with the black square, which we still don’t have. Even in the modern era there are only two sites.

It is not just “April 14ths” each year that are suspiciously similar, it’s pretty much all days of the same month. In this blockbuster graph below, he looks at one spot in central Australia, about the size of Tasmania (which is 65,000 km²), and tracks the temperature profile of that same area, on the same day, year after year. The BOM tells us they have good temperature records. They tell us the AWAP analyses are based on “in situ” surface observations, and they make much about AWAP trends being “unadjusted“. Yet here in an AWAP Map, presumably derived from the same data as those “unadjusted trends” there’s an area with no thermometers before 1940 (when Warburton opened) and we see detailed temperature lines that are identical year after year.

Do AWAP maps and AWAP data matter?

AWAP maps are used in press releases and in the news. The detailed wiggles send a message to the world that “we have very accurate data”. But when the BOM tells us we set an “area averaged” record across the whole of Australia since 1910, they don’t mention that it’s compared to “calculations” of estimated wiggles over hundreds of thousands of kilometers where there are barely any roads, let alone thermometers. Nor do they mention that suspiciously, magically, in the early part of the AWAP record the temperatures in remote central Australia appear to be the same year after year — or at least they are in the maps*.

Significantly, the BOM use trendlines from the AWAP data as justification that their all-homogenized ACORN data is virtually the same as the “unadjusted” data. It’s their excuse for why their massive adjustments in the ACORN set look neutral (when other analysis of ACORN shows the adjustments that warm the trend are much more common). The AWAP maps are created from this data too (but obviously the maps themselves aren’t “raw” because they must have an area weighting algorithm run over the data, plus elevations, plus who knows what else?). The question then is what is the state of the AWAP “unadjusted” data? The maps generated from it suggest quality control is awful, weekly data disagrees with daily data, and the program used to do area-weighting and to generate the maps is not producing results that look credible. How “unadjusted” are the trendlines that are called “unadjusted”?

Below Lance Pidgeon has graphed the squares that fit in the black box in central Australia (shown in the map below this) from Jan 14th each year, then Feb 14th, then March 14th… you get the picture. Astonishing. Thank citizen science for telling you what the BOM doesn’t mention.

Australian temperatures, central Australia, AWAP, 20th Century, Bureau of Meteorology

Year after year on the same day of the year, the temperature patterns are identical?

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Guest Post by Lance Pidgeon

Building the past — BoM style

To produce an area averaged temperature for Australia a fine matrix of squares on a map can be used. Just add the values in the squares and divide by the total after correcting for latitude. Anomalies and trends can be produced over time. Simple right?

The BoM “Australian Water Availability Project” (AWAP) maps have a fine lat-long grid over many years of daily data. But in parts of Australia thermometer sites are hundreds of kilometers apart, especially in the first half of last century. To make a complete picture gaps need to be filled — but with what exactly? Between thermometers MUST be derived values. Does the fill come from raw data, estimates and future averages or a desired outcome? Is the gridded data that was used to generate this map called “raw” data by the BOM?

In the map below, we’ll take a close look at the area marked by the black square. Horizontal lines drawn from the same island in W.A. shows two mapping methods.

Bureau of Meteorology, Grid line 1, map, Australia

…

Pasted squares in the graph pictures have been chosen to show a problem that would effect the whole map to some degree. Tasmania is about the same size as Ireland, Switzerland or the state of West Virginia in the USA.

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New Science 3: The Conventional Basic Climate Model — In Full

Read the post to see it properly.

A feast. A feast! For those who want the meat, the math and the diagrams (don’t miss the diagrams). As far as we know, this is the first time the architecture of the basic climate model has been laid out in one place on the Net. This is the most math heavy post this series, but it has to be done, and properly. This is where the 1.2 °C direct effect of doubling CO2 gets amplified to 2.5 °C with fairly basic physics. If the equations are not your forte, look at the “the Establishment Case” below the equations to get some idea why establishment scientists find it mind-bendingly hard to imagine how climate sensitivity could possibly be much different.

For commenters who know there are problems with this model (don’t we all), one of the points of doing this is to get through to the establishment leaders — to speak their language instead of having separate conversations. Of course, for some minds it will not matter what skeptical scientists say, but for other, key people, it will. We would expect seeing the flaws laid out so clearly will undercut the implacable confidence of leaders, though they may not say so.

Again, this ties for Most Uncontroversial Post on this blog. Everything here, the IPCC would agree with (except maybe the last sentence).

Do admire the diagram –Figure 2. It’s no accident it is similar to an electrical circuit diagram. Modeling and feedbacks have been tested to the nth by thousands of electrical engineers around the world building things we use every day. Thinking of the climate model this way is a useful technique to figure out where it goes wrong.

In a sense this is where silicon chip wisdom starts to scrutinize the climate maze.

— Jo

3. The Conventional Basic Climate Model — In Full

Dr David Evans, 24 September 2015, David Evans’ Basic Climate Models Home, Intro, Previous, Next, Nomenclature.

Here is the conventional basic climate model, in full. It builds on the previous post in the series, which explained how the model worked in the case of no feedbacks and only a CO2 input. This post uses the same terminology, notation, and ideas, without necessarily explaining them again. This is “heaviest” post in the series.

Readers who don’t want to see details of the mathematical modeling might want to skip straight to the diagram and the calculation of ECS at the end — a general understanding of the previous post and of the model diagram below is sufficient to make sense of the ensuing posts in this series.

The Set-Up: Multiple Influences and Multiple Feedbacks

Consider the hypothetical situation where only the only things that can change are:

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Overview

Do AWAP maps and AWAP data matter?

Guest Post by Lance Pidgeon

Building the past — BoM style

3. The Conventional Basic Climate Model — In Full

The Set-Up: Multiple Influences and Multiple Feedbacks

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