Bishop Hill Stratospheric persistence
Nov 4, 2014 Climate: Models Climatologists are nothing if not persistent. A new paper by a large team of climate scientists, among them Susan Solomon and Ben Santer, reckons it has found the reason for the model-observations divergence. I think this brings the tally of explanations to over 40 now. The correct answer, it seems, is that aerosol cooling, in particular that due to volcanoes, has been severely underestimated:
Understanding the cooling effect of recent volcanoes is of particular interest in the context of the post-2000 slowing of the rate of global warming. Satellite observations of aerosol optical depth (AOD) above 15 km have demonstrated that small-magnitude volcanic eruptions substantially perturb incoming solar radiation. Here we use lidar, AERONET and balloon-borne observations to provide evidence that currently available satellite databases neglect substantial amounts of volcanic aerosol between the tropopause and 15 km at mid to high latitudes, and therefore underestimate total radiative forcing resulting from the recent eruptions. Incorporating these estimates into a simple climate model, we determine the global volcanic aerosol forcing since 2000 to be −0.19 ± 0.09 Wm−2. This translates into an estimated global cooling of 0.05 to 0.12 °C. We conclude that recent volcanic events are responsible for more post-2000 cooling than is implied by satellite databases that neglect volcanic aerosol effects below 15 km.
I'm not sure what they've actually done, since the paper is paywalled. No doubt the credibility of their claims will be examined over the next couple of days.
Reader Comments (94)
Are they sure the "aerosol forcing" has not been -0.189769 +/- 0.008953 degrees?
How ridiculous are these clowns becoming?????
First they deny the pause.
Then when it is impossible any longer to deny
They say it is just natural variation
Then as it becomes obvious that if it's natural variation, then the 20th century is also natural variation
They say the warming is happening but it cannot be seen
Then when they cannot find any warming that is hidden
They try to say something else is preventing the warming.
Then as each and everyone one of these fall flat on their face
They blame us sceptics for being sceptical and demand we change our view to match them
Then .... after all else fails. .... they quietly change their view claiming that the sceptics have admitted they were right.
But when sceptics .... just keep on saying the same old things and worse - are allowed to print our own views on this new fangled thing called the internet .... without any buddy review by the academics ... and we make outrageous statements that were never allowed to be printed in the past that .... we've never changed our views.
... they don't know what to do.
How on earth can they square these two:
"We are absolutely certain that mankind caused the warming in the 20th century"
"We haven't got a clue what caused the pause in the 21st century"
One of them is a complete utter lie and it's not the second.
You cannot just explain the pause
Many of these excuses try to identify something that caused the "pause". This is just typical confirmation bias working. Because it is just as likely that something unexpected caused the "warming" from 1970-2000 than that something caused the "pause" from 2000 onward.
So, e.g. if someone says "increasing Chinese pollution caused the pause", then this also means that the 1970s clean air acts were responsible for the warming.
And in these 40 excuses we are seeing the real nature of climate "science" because all they are doing is trawling the data with no real understanding of how the climate works trying to find some blip in the data to confirm their initial bias.
They make it up as they go along.
Do you give a link to the abstract? if not, here it is
It's a good job the science was settled years ago, otherwise we might have to start believing all these new-fangled 40+ unsettling hypotheses/explanations.
Martin A
I was about to say something very similar.
I shall wait for further details but how is it that I "just know" that a paper from Solomon, Santer et al will "prove" that the real warming is still there and that anything that suggests the contrary can be accounted for by some event or circumstance as yet unaccounted for?
Because that's all they ever look for perhaps?
Another Cause of the Pause.
Will they be able to bring the number up to 97?
Ah....I guess they's exhumed Harry_read_me's famous 'fudge_factor'.
Attempting to impute causality in a highly interdependent system is well nigh impossible. However we are led to believe it can be done by using greenhouse gases as some overiding "primary" driver, there is no observational support for this. All we can say is climate is complex and even then emerges from the chaotic flux of weather events over some period of study.There are lots of climates find one that suits your agenda I guess.
No doubt the credibility of their claims will be examined over the next couple of days.
Tu crois ? Really ? Not by the crimatologists it won't. It is already accepted fact now.
Climate Bodgers ® reveals our latest theory patch. Users are warned that downloading this patch will invalidate all the calculations and results previously generated. We accept no liability for any loss of credibility this upgrade may cause.
There have always been phenomena that science has striven to explain. But this is like nothing experienced so far. The attempts to explain 20 th Century 'global' warming, by the over-supported CAGW teams has been a disaster. I cannot think of any other branch of science needing forty attempts to explain a discrepancy between theory (sorry models) and empirical data. And where those funding the work are happy to keep supporting the work.
What fernfreak said. Every how you look at the climate system - with the same pair of 'eyes' - it shows the same face to you. The climate system's organizing principles bind it into a whole. There is no beginning or end. To think that climatologists attack this system with the crudest of possible tools - the Chinese yin-yang like 'energy imbalance' model - to explain multi-decadal variations...
http://online.kitp.ucsb.edu/online/hitc00teach/laughlin/oh/09.html
Peter Stroud, I think the simple answer to that is that the end result has already been determined, and must remain unchallenged. Therefore there can be no end to attempts to "prove" it, and the "correct" answer eventually arrived at, even if it costs a fortune, because the predetermined result MUST override everything else..
They rake around the mud to find:
"The correct answer, it seems, is that aerosol cooling, in particular that due to volcanoes, has been severely underestimated"
What happened to: what pause; or the heat hidding in the deep ocean?????????
However, it hasn't crossed their tiny minds that climate sensitivity to CO2 has been severely OVERestimated!
Ah the clarity of the delusional zealot!
Wow, they sound clever enough to me that they ought to be able to work out how much warming pre 2000 was caused by the reduction of aerosols following the clean air acts.
I was wondering what Santer would bring me for Christmas
[Snip - venting]
Nov 4, 2014 at 9:55 AM | Unregistered CommenterPeter Stroud
We are now trying to explain a 'phenomenon' that doesn't actually exist now. I must be funding it at the moment and I'm not happy to support it. I think the public sector funding is a massive part of the problem.
And I thought everything to do with climatology was my fault for driving a car, heating my house, using electrical appliances from energy produced by that nasty fossil fuel stuff. The IPCC said so! /sarc
Why should poor old volcanoes, the oceans, cows, or the other 40 things get the blame for the stasis in temperatures?
Have I got this right: we are successfully preventing global cooling by burning fossil fuels?
Now the climate excuse makers are just digging holes.
If there was a sudden increase of volcanic activity we would have heard about from our geological friends, not climate scientists.
The secret to holes is to stop digging.
Instead our climate hustlers are digging enough holes to fill the Royal Albert Hall.
Climate ‘sciences’ heads you lose tails I win , has got be the easiest approach to doing ‘science’ the world has ever seen. Can someone remind me how many breakfast cereal boxes you have to collect to get your PhD in climate ‘science’
As others have observed there appears to be a need for a new word in this area. Nonscience, nonsciense, nonscense, nonsense. Take your pick.
it's science Jim, but not as we know it.
Ah - so its the volcanic aerosols, then....
Nothing to do with the aerosols which these people have got their heads up...?
Ignore the men and women behind the IPCC curtain...
Umm... I suppose that if the "Cause of the Pause" is recent volcanic activity reducing radiative forcing, then the heat isn't there to be hiding in the oceans. So the oceans won't be warming up at 91 Hiroshima bombs per day or whatever. Which is a relief... Or something.
Some thought has gone into this:
"currently available satellite databases neglect substantial amounts of volcanic aerosol between the tropopause and 15 km at mid to high latitudes"
Note only at mid to high latitudes and only above the tropopause. That's an important point since there is nary a trace of any aerosol effect in the Mauna Loa data. These are real sneaky stealth aerosols that only fly higher than airliners and avoid overflying places where they could be measured
The aerosol excuse is one of their favourite jokers or get-out-of-jail-free cards. For example they often use it to "explain" the cooling from about 1940-1960. They then have to concoct a reason why there were lots of aerosols in the atmosphere around 1940-1960 and 1998-now, but somehow less around 1960-1998 - a period which included several major volcanic eruptions!
Aerosols and volcanoes are such deniers as well. The whole thing's financed by Big Oil you know.
1. We were wrong.
2. Not our fault -- the satellites did it.
3. We are lowering our forecasts of global temperatures.
I made that last one up.
Richard Drake
How about........................abs(i)ence
Always interesting to see how positions change and how little concensus there actually is.
Some nice quotes here from 2006
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/05/current-volcanic-activity-and-climate/
"So what of the current eruptions? Well Bezymianny appears to be explosive enough, but its latitude (55 N) will tend to preclude it having any big climate impact. Merapi is in the right location but doesn’t appear (so far) to be explosive enough to put anything in the stratosphere, and so this too seems unlikely to impact climate. At some point, there will be another climatically important eruption, but it hasn’t happened yet… "
"I think this brings the tally of explanations to over 40 now."
I believe it's more accurate to say that there have been over 40 papers giving explanations, as the explanations overlap. Although not a climate scientist, imo they group into 10 or 12 explanations.
Also interesting is that recent papers less often speak of a "pause" or "hiatus", as did earlier papers. Instead they adopt the more pleasant sounding phrase "slower rate of {SAT} warming". As the pause continues that becomes ever less accurate.
A smart meter for your heating system?
Or maybe he'll just take your fireplace with him when he departs back up the chimney.
Whatever. They have apparently been using aerosol fixing as the 'balancing item' for quite a long time now. It should therefore come as no surprise to learn that they now claim to have found a justification for what they were already doing.
"Incorporating these estimates into a SIMPLE climate model"
Grant$ + Lies = Climate Science
As I said on a thread a while back about NASA and no heat hiding in the oceans, are we going to hear that apology to Lord Lawson? He did after all correct the assertion made during his BBC stint. Apparently he didn't know what he was talking about.
Also it Seems like the heat magically (teleconnection after all) appears to be aerosol cooling. If someone can make a Sterling engine that harnesses this transformation we can have unlimited power.
So you guys really believe this fantasy that all is ok with business as usual. IPCC a conspiracy. Just gone through your comments and they are all devoid of anything that could lay claim to refuting AGM. A sad lot of tales re delusion, ignorance to outright lies (and I suspect you know it...).
One that sums it up..
" it's science Jim, but not as we know it. "
Science not as you know it. Couldn't have put it better myself...
Just gone through your comments and they are all devoid of anything that could lay claim to refuting AGM.
Something for which there is no evidence does not require refutation.
There is a yellow teapot in orbit around the Sun.
Onlybyaccident,
Your argument is on the level of someone who believes they found an image of the Virgin Mary in a tortilla and that anyone who disagrees with your vision is giong to hell.
And I do like the pathetic attempt you make to dismiss skeptics. Canada, Australia, China, all point to the idea that you are the one who is delusional.
And ignoring the fact that skeptics have been correct about sea level rise, temperature, drought, storm, snow, polar bears, Tibet, and linking weather to so-called clmate change makes you look sadly uninformed, if not severely limited.
Onbyaccident:
By that do you mean every single contributor is an active plotter? Or would it be wheels within wheels, going back to UNEP and related organisations before the IPCC came into existence in 1988? Having defined what you mean, would you like to quote people on Bishop Hill who have openly stated their belief in whatever scenario you've described? That could truly be interesting.
Even though it's been snipped I think I want to say something like Jimmy Haigh said.
Years and years ago at Lucia's it was my impression that 'Welikerocks' and I were among the first to figure out that aerosols were going to be the big fudge factor for manipulation of the narrative. It is, of course, a standard part of Steve Fitzpatrick's cogent critiques. Perhaps it was obvious to numerous others, but it worried me sadly about the coming bodge.
Now just waiting for the guilt to be thrown at China.
========================
"a simple climate model"
That looks like their first mistake.
@ Martin A
"Something for which there is no evidence does not require refutation."
Oh boy....ok in no particular order some examples of "evidence" that may require "refutation"
Sea Level Rise: Church, J. A. and N.J. White (2006), A 20th century acceleration in global sea level rise, Geophysical Research Letters, 33, L01602, doi:10.1029/2005GL024826.
Arctic Ice Retreat: L. Polyak, et.al., “History of Sea Ice in the Arctic,” in Past Climate Variability and Change in the Arctic and at High Latitudes, U.S. Geological Survey, Climate Change Science Program Synthesis and Assessment Product 1.2, January 2009, chapter 7
Global Temperature Rise: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/ -- look at graph on top right; might be familiar.
Ocean Temperature Rise: Levitus, et al, "Global ocean heat content 1955–2008 in light of recently revealed instrumentation problems," Geophys. Res. Lett. 36, L07608 (2009).
These not difficult to source. Peer reviewed. I could go on and suspect I may be forced to. Or you could just read this if you don't believe and/or understand climate change.
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/syr/SYR_AR5_SPM.pdf
@hunter - see above and let me know the skeptics stack up against that. Please provide counter-"evidence" (properly peer reviewed .... and not by "heavyweights" such as J Delingpole :-D - to whom I blame for accidentally finding myself on here...:-( )
Ok off out for a run...
"examples of "evidence"
One of the problems with discussions of evidence in climate science is the confusion about what evidence is. A graph is never anything but a visual representation of something else. In layman's terms, a graph is a drawing of the evidence.
So when you see graphs, think to yourself, "This is a representation of the evidence. The thing the graph is supposedly representing is the actual evidence."
Andrew
Their last paper said volcanic aerosols could account for no more than about 15% of the pause. And that is still a crock, simce neither volcanic activity nor atmospheric opacity and optical depth vary except with certain large VEI 5 and 6 eruptions. This whole volcano thing is deconstructed in the essay Blowing Smoke, in the ebook with same title.
Appalling science, and they know it. Blurring the whole picture by concentrating on too much detail. 0.19 W/m2 is unmeasurable and still smaller than CO2 forcing, so it could explain less warming but not a pause. The simple models they use have a radiative forcing uncertainty which is, easily, two orders of magnitude higher than the forcing they claim to have detected. And their reviewers should know it. A very rotten science indeed.
Nov 4, 2014 at 5:52 PM | Onbyaccident
In what way are those various things evidence of AGW? Probably very few people would dispute that sea level, arctic ice, global temperature and so on have changed in the past and will do so in the future, but observation of such changes does not determine what caused them.
My neighbour's cockerell claims that his crowing causes the sun to rise. There is no question that he crows noisily. But he has yet to convince me of the causal relationship between his crowing and the sun rising. I tell him that I am pretty sure that the sun rises to to factors that are beyond his comprehension. He scoffs at my ignorance of crowing theory and its literature.
Onbyaccident pops up following the usual script. Why bother rising to the bait?