Rob Burton, thank you for that. Your comment about negative feedbacks in the tropics due to water answers confirms what I understood. In Bermuda it is known as the 3 O'Clock shower?

So, by logical extension, is there a maximum temperature achievable in the humid tropics, because either humidity blocks the sun or causes it to rain?

For any evolutionary biologists, is there a link to the temperature of warm blooded animals?

Satellites can obviously do it now pretty accurately.

Sep 1, 2017 at 5:23 PM | Rob Burton

1-2% cloud cover decrease could account for all global warming.and there was a decrease during the warming period.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/08/20/spencers-cloud-hypothesis-confirmed/

Sep 1, 2017 at 6:59 PM | Schrodinger's Cat

Consensus Climate Scientists don't like Roy Spencer!

Interesting weekend. BOM (Australian Met Office) has been fiddling the raw temperature data for two decades and deleting the original measurements. They electronically removed recent low temperatures, raising the recent average. This dominates the data for the Southern hemisphere and affects the global dataset. When added to the antics of GISS and NOAA, one wonders whether there is a global temperature record of any integrity at all.

Even the Met Office was caught fiddling the temperature record on the Bank Holiday Monday. Holbeach broke the record, but only because the Met Office reduced the previous record by 1.1 degrees Celsius on the night before. The Met Office is willing to do its bit for alarmism but it is not as subtle as its partners in crime.

Meanwhile the BBC and sister media company, The Guardian, have been giving huge publicity to explorer, Pen Haddow's Arctic Mission to take two yachts to the North Pole to publicise the lack of ice. The mission was aborted several days ago due to solid ice in the way of the boats, far from the pole. (79 degrees). For some reason the PR failed because the BBC still hasn't mentioned the failure and the Guardian keeps deleting comments that helpfully bring it to their attention.

One cannot help but wonder about a branch of science that is conducted like a scam on a publicly funded international scale.

Sep 3, 2017 at 7:51 PM | Schrodinger's Cat

In Monopoly, there is the card that says (I think)

"Bank makes error in your favour. Collect £100."

Climate Scientists never make mistakes that are not in their financial favour. Has historic data ever had to be "adjusted" or "homogenised" in a direction that did not favour the claims of Climate Scientists?

Pen Hadow had expert advice and support from the US Team led by Mark Serreze. Either the advice was rubbish, or it was quite clear there was no chance of success before they set sail. The latter is more probable, so presumably they only set sail for the publicity required by the mission sponsors. The professional crew of the two yachts acted responsibly, by turning back BEFORE they required rescuing.

In an interview prior to setting sail, Hadow stated that he wanted a photo of a sailing yacht at the North Pole, because of its value in terms of impact and publicity. What has he achieved?

http://notrickszone.com/2017/09/04/ph-d-physicist-uses-empirical-data-to-assert-co2-greenhouse-theory-a-phantasm-to-be-neglected/#sthash.2B1rjyT1.dpbs

2017 is correcting the lack of hurricanes making US landfall over the last decade.

Does 2017 require any corrections to Climate Science predictions of more hurricanes?

Does 2017 represent accumulated heat in the Atlantic that has not been previously vented via a hurricane into the air? ie nature self corrects?

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/09/09/hadcru-power-and-temperature/

Andy May has a go at the problem I've tried to outline in this discussion, that of the difference between t^4 of the average and the average of T^4 of each station. He finds 391 w/m2 reduces to 379 w/m2 using HADCRUT anomalies adjusted to absolute temps. The difference of course is greater than the supposed contribution of CO2 increase. I don't endorse his results or methods, that's for others to debate, but I do claim this exposes the methods accepted by the consensus are invalid, like I always said.

rhoda- I've just been reading that. He touched on a number of other assumptions as well. Climate science really is a collection of assumptions and shoddy science. Academics from other branches of science who have heard of Planck's constant, the S-B equation and greenhouse gases draw the conclusion that it is based on solid physics. They add to that that the alarmist papers have been peer (pal) reviewed and assume that it is all above board. Also add to that the complete garbage that is John Cook's consensus and most academics give the whole thing the benefit of the doubt.

I believe that in the real world, carbon dioxide has a minor role that can be welcomed or ignored. Water in its different phases plays a major role in climate control in the thermostat sense and the oceans, which absorb sunlight to say, 50 metres, are the main drivers of changes in our climate. The solar cycle is the third variable, with changes to cloud formation, UV influence on ozone and the effect of electromagnetic fields on cosmic and meteorite dust entering our atmosphere.

These factors bring about natural changes to our climate and these greatly outweigh any alleged anthropogenic signal from carbon dioxide. The alarmists should really prove why any warming is caused by GHG and not the much more powerful background noise, but I suspect that they are ignorant about natural climate drivers because CO2 has dominated their entire careers. Unfortunately, due to the politicisation of the shoddy science, the tail wags the dog.

Two of these factors, ocean cycles and solar cycles may be in a cooling phase. Whilst cooling is unwelcome, it may well give the climate scientists, the press and particularly the biased BBC something to explain.

Steve Jones starred in a BBC propaganda piece on the Today programme this morning. He talked about various examples of scare stories where lapses in scientific integrity were given publicity by the press. He listed BSE, NMR, and another medical scare.

"And climate change?", prompted John Humphreys helpfully.

Jones claimed that the unprecedented rate of temperature rise proved beyond any doubt that climate change was real and dangerous. He went on to compare it with the tobacco industry denial about lung cancer.

We are forced to pay for this stuff. I am going to complain, why don't you? You can listen to it on the BBC web site.

Why are we not seeing much warming? Part of the warming has been natural, mainly attributed to ocean oscillations. I think that flaws in the GHG theory are to blame as well.

We are told that the warming is due to two mechanisms, both consequences of the IR activity of carbon dioxide. One is that the gas renders that atmosphere effectively opaque to outgoing IR cooling. The second is that the gas becomes excited when an IR photon of the correct frequency is adsorbed and after an unspecified time, the gas can re-emit that photon in a random direction, which includes downwards.

In my view, there are other mechanisms that are largely ignored by the models. These are:

Collisions are more likely and more frequent than photon emissions. Gases warmed in this way will rise due to convection. At higher altitudes, any emissions will have a greater probability of reaching space.

Heat loss will be via water vapour as well as carbon dioxide. I believe the models fail to include this.

The convection of atmospheric gases including water vapour will lead to condensation at a cooler altitude, releasing latent heat energy. This heat drives further convection of the surrounding gases. The condensed water will have a cooling effect by scattering incoming visible light and may even lead to cloud formation.

The models do not contemplate these dominant effects because the emphasis has always been on the additional warming of carbon dioxide and its radiative energy balance with incoming solar radiation. Too much effort has been spent on GHG theory and not enough on the dynamics of our atmosphere.

GHG theory has revolutionised the way climate scientists think about control of our climate. A trace gas in the air determines the temperature of our planet. This is nonsense as we shall see.

Sunlight heats our planet. The land warms up quickly, but at night it loses heat quickly. The oceans on the other hand, heat up very slowly. As we have discussed before, light only penetrates 50-100 metres and little or no mixing with the colder, deeper waters takes place. The sea also cools very slowly.

Water absorbs IR radiation. It is opaque to it. This means that fast radiative cooling towards the surface is not an option. Heat transfers by conduction and convection. We do not know how long it took to warm our oceans to the current temperatures but we can assume that we now have equilibrium with the rate of cooling equal to the rate of heating. The oceans warm the atmosphere so the air in contact with the sea surface is of a similar temperature.

GHG enthusiasts seem to think that CO2 warms the oceans. This is crazy. The heat capacity, on a volumetric basis, is 3,300 more for water compared to air. Furthermore, downwelling IR can only warm the sea surface molecules, promoting evaporation and cooling.

To be continued.

The sea controls our climate.

The oceans distribute some of the heat away from the equator to higher and lower latitudes, warming the air above. Due to its huge heat capacity, the sea prevents high and low extremes in temperature and generally acts as a stabilising buffer. As discussed above, the IR radiation does not penetrate the sea, so it is difficult to see GHG IR emissions making much of a difference.

Ocean oscillations, however do make a difference. The planet is a spinning sphere and the sea is a fluid on the surface. Currents are generated, There are a number of different sea masses and land masses and these interact. The moon also interferes with its tidal effect. The seas create atmospheric currents too, and in turn, these winds can push the surface waters of the seas. Many of the changes are cyclic and multidecadal, long enough to create changes that can be regarded as changes in climate.

Since 71% of our planet is covered by water, and water has a much greater volumetric heat capacity than the atmosphere, it is not surprising that the oceans strongly influence our climate. The water cycle with its phase changes and latent heats provides the fine tuning of the planet’s thermostat. Too much heating creates evaporation and convection followed by condensation and cooling.

Many of these factors have been overlooked in the application of GHG theory to our climate with the result that CO2 induced radiative warming has been greatly exaggerated.

Schrodinger's Cat

What you write makes sense to me.

This article, (and many others) confirms what you say, UNTIL Global Warming is introduced as a cause for change, without identifying previous evidence of previous changes.

http://worldoceanreview.com/en/wor-1/climate-system/great-ocean-currents/

In the UK we can appreciate the importance of the Gulf Stream in warming and wetting our weather. The importance of the Nino/Nina fluctuations are now recognised as far more important to world weather. Only now are scientists starting to acknowledge the most powerful current on the Planet, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current.

I don't understand how tiny fluctuations in CO2, can change ocean currents. Mann's Hockey Stick does not help. Climate Science depends on scare stories about the possibility it could.

golf charlie - thanks for the comments. I firmly believe that AGW was hyped by Hansen and others back in the days when climate science hardly existed and the people involved were a small clique. Since then, enormous money, effort and people have helped to build the massive AGW movement and produced loads of very expensive models and masses of papers on the consequences of climate change.

The trouble is that they still know next to nothing about the effect of oceans and other fundamental aspects of our climate. Why should they? They thought CO2 was the answer to everything. Now a whole generation of "scientists" and their supporters have a closed mind to how the climate really works.

I cannot begin to understand why they could think that photons from CO2 makes the atmosphere warm the oceans when normal, everyday science makes it seem a daft idea. If you just think through common sense, basic logic you end up with something along the lines described above.

I'm no expert and perhaps people here will build on it tear it to shreds. That is how real science should work.

Sep 15, 2017 at 8:13 PM | Schrodinger's Cat

CO2 theories do not explain the drought and sudden glut of hurricanes effecting SE USA either.

The Atlantic did not cool through the Obama administration, and suddenly warm up under Trump's. This is very inconvenient for politicians and climate scientists, trying to prove anything, particularly a link with CO2.

RR-Good points. We looked at GHG warming step by step and found lots of things to question, but really that approach used GHG theory as the framework for how the climate works.

What I am trying to do now is to build a new climate model in a scientific and hopefully logical fashion without seeing everything through the prism of GHG theory. What strikes me immediately is that we can get to quite a good explanation of things just by considering what happens when sunlight reaches the planet.

It is beginning to look as though DWIR is not going to warm the oceans, the atmosphere does not have the capacity to do that either. GHG may just create a bit of hot air which is largely dissipated and lost overnight.

The problem for the warmists is that natural changes such as El Nino are much larger than AGW. To date, they claim everything is due to AGW and ignore natural changes and most people just swallow it. A quick look at SST charts show that everything is due to ocean cycles and AGW is a minor effect on top.

Schrodinger's Cat & Radical Rodent

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/09/15/what-you-need-to-know-and-are-not-told-about-hurricanes/

Apparently, hurricane prediction depends on Climate Models.

Climate Models have got it wrong about hurricanes, and they have not done very well over Global Warming.

Climate Scientists can try and blame programming glitches on the Millenium Bug, but Mann's Hockey Stick paper was 1998.

The argument outlined above is that solar energy warms the land and the oceans, the land cools quickly but the oceans retain the heat. The oceans are in long term equilibrium with the planet energy balance as well as with the atmosphere above them. With the sea temperatures maintained as they are, who needs the radiative properties of a GHG to explain why our surface temperature is warmer than the equilibrium radiative energies suggest? In a way, IR blocking is happening in the sea, where much higher heat capacities are involved.

Once the link is broken between the 33 degrees of extra warmth and the greenhouse effect, the whole global warming argument starts to collapse.

Schrodinger's Cat,

Does "current" research confirm how much polar ice melts from the top down, or bottom up?

Or to look at it another way, how much does the temperature of ocean currents flowing into the Arctic Circle vary, as air temperatures vary from, plus a bit, to minus a lot?

Waves and storms can be used to argue the extent of solid ice, but are they a factor in accelerating melting and freezing depending on the temperature of the water they introduce?

Don't forget the energy comes from the sun and during winter time the Arctic doesn't get any, that is the main reason for it being cold. I may be wrong, but I believe that the Arctic ice melts due to the warmer water it floats on. The Antarctic, on the other hand, is on a land mass.

Sep 16, 2017 at 7:00 PM | Schrodinger's Cat
Thank you for your response

The extent of Arctic and Antarctic ice varies over years and decades. But a good year for Arctic ice does not necessarily follow or lead to a good year for Antarctic ice. There does not seem to be a positive correlation or trend, which would be expected if the oceans were warming consistently.

The Antarctic Circumpolar Current is the most powerful and constant flow of water - it can't take a shortcut or stop. The Arctic has more complex currents, whether iced over or not.

15-20 years ago, the idea that polar ice would be an indicator of a warming world made sense to me, but with the benefit of hindsight, and real evidence such as confirmed wrecks sites from the Franklin Expedition, there is no evidence today, that ice extent has shrunk more than it has before.

Climate Science claims to have found Trenberth's missing hot spot, without ever admitting the money wasted, looking in the wrong place. It is not logical to trust Trenberth's original conclusion, let alone claims he and the rest of Climate Science have been proved correct.

Climate Science is now bored with Polar Bears. I expect the feeling is mutual. Polar ice sheets and their resident bears have a greater life expectancy too.

SC, as far as I am aware, the argument put forward by global-warmers revolves around the effect of CO2 in the middle-upper troposphere, extrapolated down to the surface. In some way this ends up seeming ironic, because the "green house effect" varies with altitude, dropping to zero at the surface.

While I'm not disagreeing with that here (I take great care to neither agree nor disagree on some points), I have always born in mind that CO2 also increases the ability of moist air to radiate heat to space. More specifically, there is relatively warm, humid, air at altitude that got there by convection. Carbon dioxide helps that parcel of air radiate heat outwards at wavelengths it could not previously do so. How does this all add up in the grand scheme of things? I guess you need a computer to add it all up. Hence models, which is fair enough.

But I once tried broaching the fundamental subject with Science of Doom (who I generally respect) when he posted at BH. I got little more than a 'look at the numbers you silly boy' type of reply, without actually acknowledging that CO2 will increase some parts of the earth's radiation to space at the same time as decreasing in other places. Like many others, I can accept many of the basic assertions (or I choose to not disagree), but I need better evidence that the models can properly and accurately integrate all the effects.

OT, but an anniversary note, I entered the 'debate' on the internet more than a decade ago now on this specific topic with the same questions, and have received no good reply yet. About 2007 I also tried debating some such aspects on the-blog-that-cannot-be-named, run by one Mr Cook, and got my arguments "edited" down to precisely zero words.

RE: complaining to the BBC. I still generally choose to keep my powder dry, not least because others say it is ineffectual and the responses are designed to waste your time. I didn't hear the Steve Jones piece on the BBC but I always see they generally clearly know enough to not allow comments on many of the most controversial web articles (where I spend more time), yet they do take more care about facts they might be challenged over, in a very lawyerly fashion. Modern BBC journalism still seems well versed in the mantra of plausible deniability. It says a lot about them when you look at what topics they choose to cover but do not allow comment on.

The GWPF reports that Dr Adam Rutherford, a genetics man turned journalist and BBC presenter of "Inside Science" started a campaign against MP Graham Stringer when he found that Graham was on the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee. He has been on the Committee for 10 Years.

Rutherford urged people to complain to their MPs saying that science must not be so misrepresented in a democracy. He stepped up his campaign when he discovered that Stringer was on the Trust of the GWPF.

Of course, Rutherford was aghast that Stringer has doubts about AGW. That obviously makes him unsuitable for everything. Brian Cox, Steve Jones and Jim Al-Khalili are also scientists who work for the BBC and who leap up to complain if the BBC breaks its own rule about 100% support for AGW. Let us return to Rutherford.

He complained that a Sceptic must not be allowed to represent science in a democracy. This is on a committee which presumably has a range of views on a range of subjects. Rutherford is an undemocratic disgrace in my view. There is nothing democratic about barring people you don't agree with.

He doesn't seem to be much of a scientist either. Science makes progress by listening to challenge. That is the essence of the scientific method. These people campaign to silence the right of free speech by dissenters. Perhaps they get Brownie Points from the BBC. They certainly do nothing for science.

SC:

Have you any links to Rutherford urging people to complain?