Greenhouse Gas Theory Fails to Explain Global Warming Hiatus
Researchers from the Universities of Princeton, California, Tokyo, Kyushu, and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography said the recent hiatus in global temperatures rising has led to a surge in climate science.
The global effort to understand the global warming hiatus they say has led to an increased understanding of some of the key metrics of global climate change such as global temperature and ice-cover.
Searching for an answer to the hiatus, they say, meant that the scientific community grappled with difficulties with these climate metrics, in particular the fact that they do not unequivocally portray the same story about global warming.
For instance, as the global surface temperature increase underwent an apparent slowdown, Antarctic sea ice expanded and boreal summer Arctic sea ice declined rapidly, at least until 2007.
Hot and cold extremes increased in northern hemisphere continents, and the Hadley circulation shifted poleward.
Many of the changes are not ones expected due to increasing greenhouse gas forcing. For some this called into question the viability of computer models of the climate and whether these changes indicated a fundamental lack in our understanding and ability to simulate radiatively forced changes, or indeed if internal climate variability alone is sufficient to explain the changes.
The researchers point out that since the hiatus was identified just over a decade ago it stimulated advances in our understanding of the multidecadal variability of these key metrics, providing insight into internal climate variability.
As well as drawing attention to biases in the temperature record it has also improved our understanding of the role of the tropical Pacific Ocean in mean global temperature.
Despite the research progress, many challenges remain, especially due to the relatively short timescale of the observations.
There are also limitations of climate models in simulating internal, multidecadal climate variability, and the way radiatively forced changes to interact with that inherent variability.
Data Uncertainty
The short period over which we have reliable observations restricts the number of independent simulations of observed multidecadal variability that can be performed. Uncertainties in the data, such as sea ice extent are very large before the satellite era in the late 1970s.
Other datasets with records extending more than a century, such as global sea surface temperature, have large uncertainties in the first half of the 20th century particularly over the Southern Ocean due to sparse data.
Because of these uncertainties, the scientists say, many existing sea surface temperature reconstructions may have underestimated the amplitude of early 20th-century natural climatic variations, impeding our ability to understand associated climate changes such as accelerated Arctic warming.
Although recent climate models can simulate the basic structure of internal climatic variability, they underestimate the strength of some important modes of internal multidecadal variability, in particular the oceanic climate cycles.
Specifically, the decadal-to-multidecadal component of the North Atlantic Oscillation which has important consequences for the Northern Hemisphere temperature.
As with the recent hiatus, they say, it is inevitable that internal variability will offset and possibly even temporarily reverse the radiatively forced trends for each of these metrics over decadal to multidecadal periods, that is possibly bring on a period of global cooling.
The scientific community should be ready for this they imply.
Johnson et al writing a review article in Global and Planetary Change concludes that because of these multidecadal modulations, the trends of these metrics must be calculated over several decades to suppress the noise of internal variability.
This is in contrast to the prevailing message before the identification of the hiatus which was the long-term climate warming signal was strong and the “noise” relatively weak.
The hiatus, they add, demonstrated that natural variability of global surface temperature can overcome the effects of radiative forced global warming over periods of about 15 years.
For other more regionally confined metrics, this timescale tends to be even longer and may extend beyond available observational records.
In other words, we do not have enough long-term data to evaluate natural climatic variability to place today’s change into their proper historical perspective.
Thus, these researchers lay bare some of the dominant memes of climate change regarding its ability to forecast the future.
The lesson of the hiatus is that we do not understand internal climatic variability as much as many think we do, and our predictive power is less than many believe.
Read more at GWPF
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jerry krause
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Hi David and Readers,
Here are two sites (https://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/uscrn/products/hourly02/) and (https://www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/scan/) of the hourly averaged soil temperatures measured at five depths. So one can see the daily the oscillation of these temperature as solar energy is stored during the day and conducted to the surface and emitted to space during the night. And if one studies these daily measurements one can see the season oscillation. And some of the USDA data goes back 3 decades.
Have a good day, Jerry
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richard
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R. W. Wood explained it best in his Note on the Theory of the Greenhouse:
“Is it therefore necessary to pay attention to trapped radiation in deducing the temperature of a planet as affected by its atmosphere? The solar rays penetrate the atmosphere, warm the ground which in turn warms the atmosphere by contact and by convection currents. The heat received is thus stored up in the atmosphere, remaining there on account of the very low radiating power of a gas. It seems to me very doubtful if the atmosphere is warmed to any great extent by absorbing the radiation from the ground, even under the most favourable conditions.”
“Robert Williams Wood (May 2, 1868 – August 11, 1955) was an American physicist and inventor. He is often cited as being a pivotal contributor to the field of optics and a pioneer of infrared and ultraviolet photography. Wood’s patents and theoretical work inform modern understanding of the nature and physics of ultraviolet radiation, and made possible the myriad uses of UV-fluorescence which became popular after World War I.[1][2][3][4] He published many articles on spectroscopy, phosphorescence, diffraction, and ultraviolet light.”
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jerry krause
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Hi Richard,
Yes, I am aware of Wood’s thoughts about the earth’s energy balance system but he according to your information, he did not attempt to substitute clouds for Svante Arrhenius’s radiation balance mechanism of carbon dioxide.
It is important that when one refutes a wrong scientific idea that one offers a better idea to replace the wrong one.
Have a good day, Jerry
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chris
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I disagree Jerry about having to replace a scientific theory with a better one. If a person can refute a scientific idea, they should. If they have a new, better one, then they should present it. These are two different actions. They are both important.
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James McGinn
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You are correct. Unfortunately the propaganda value of a theory/model is more important to most people than whether or not it and/or its underlying assumptions are true/accurate. This is true of liberal climatology and it is also true for conservative meteorology. Unfortunately the atmospheric sciences are dominated by ideologically motivated morons from both side of the fence.
The Plumbing of the Atmosphere
https://anchor.fm/james-mcginn/episodes/The-Plumbing-of-the-Atmosphere-ef3f7n
James McGinn / Genius
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jerry krause
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Hi Chris,
You concluded: “They are both Important.” We totally agree. And the second step cannot be done until the first has. As I wrote this I realized I must take this back. For, the second idea could just be an alternative explanation of what has been observed.
Thanks for your comment and have a good day, Jerry
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chris
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They still haven’t made a coherent theory of “radiative forcing” yet either. Moreover, they believe that co2 can reflect light that doesn’t reach it, but the very definition of reflection requires the light to reach co2. What I mean here is that if we do a simple math problem we can plainly see that only a small amount of IR light would be reflected to the Earth by co2. Say that 340 Wm^-2 is leaving the Earth, multiply this by the co2 concentration (.0004) = 0.136 Wm^-2 returns to the Earth due to co2 [this also requires us to ascribe a characteristic to co2 that it doesn’t possess, the ability to reflect co2].
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jerry krause
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Hi Chris,
Maybe this link (https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/grad/surfrad/metplot.html) will help you better see the influence of the atmosphere and cloud upon six radiations at the earth’s surface.
Have a good day, Jerry
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Peter
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It is hard to believe that a trace gas (0.04% or so) can have such leverage on climate. It doesn’t fit any kind of intuition or Occam’s Razor. Nuff said.
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jerry krause
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Hi Peter,
The only observed evidence that I know of which absolutely refutes the idea of the greenhouse effect (GHE) of carbon dioxide and other GH gases is that the atmospheric temperature has never been measured to be lower than that atmosphere’s measured dew point temperature which refutes the only prediction of idea of the GHE about which I know. Which prediction is that the atmosphere’s temperature would be about 33C lower if not for the GH gases.
Such density arguments are refuted by the observation that there are only about 10^9 condensation nuclei relative to the 10^25 gas molecules in a cubic meter of atmosphere. And it is this very small fraction of molecules which prevent the atmosphere from ever becoming supersaturated with water molecules. R.C. Sutcliffe (Weather and Climate, 1966) and other meteorologists)
Have good day, Jerry
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jerry krause
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Hi Readers,
As I reread what I wrote I see I made a mistake. For I referred to condensation nuclei as being molecules. Which they certainly are not. They are tiny ‘blobs’ of matter on which atmospheric water molecules can condense just as water molecules condense upon liquid water surface. In fact they might have a condensed water (either liquid or solid) which surrounds a core of other tiny particles of other solid matter.
Have a good day, Jerry
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mkelly
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The thermodynamic area of specific heat shows that CO2 will not cause warming in the atmosphere. The forcing equation is not mentioned in specific heat tables, the Shomate equation, nor in NIST data sheet. What is the updated specific heat of dry air with 400 ppm CO2.
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