Lindzen cool climate paper strongly rebutted

Trenberth eh?

 

The response to assail Realclimate actually took a few minutes longer than I expected. I was betting under 5 minutes, but it took a bit longer than 10 minutes. Nice to know that the deniers are still,,,,,

 

Do people still even bother with that site? ClimateGate proved conclusively that RealClimate is nothing more than a propaganda site for the ClimateGate team.

It must have been quite a shocker for all of the people who were sucking up to RealClimate for so long to see ClimateGate happen. The very people who own RealClimate were implicated in ClimateGate. Truly hilarious.

 

It would take a better atmospheric physicist than I to judge with confidence whether Lindzen and Choi (2009) or Trenberth et al. (2010) have performed the better analysis. However, it is interesting to note that Lindzen and Choi (2009) state in their introduction that increasing atmospheric CO2 will decrease outgoing long-wavelength radiation. This will come as a surprise to those who suggest that CO2 gas does not have that effect.

I suppose that all such studies will lead us to a better understanding of the Earth system over time. Personal attacks on the authors or their colleagues...perhaps not.

 

No one is arguing that CO2 doesn't have an effect, it's only the magnitude of the effect as it relates to global climate that's at issue. CO2 has a trace effect compared to water vapor and methane. Also, the data indicate it's a lagging indicator of temperature. The Warmists have never been able to explain this, to my knowledge. Also, most (all?) of the ad hominem attacks have been against the skeptics.

Instead of calling the skeptics names, people should look at what they're saying. Those who won't look at the data prove that they are "true believers"
and are taking the word of Al Gore and company on faith.

 

As always I am impressed with your ability to avoid the typical non-scientific banter and just stick to the data. I guess your scientific training has helped curb any irrational or ideological opinions. I hope to be able to do the same some day my friend. Thanks again for the papers.

Ohh, if you happen to run acrossed any more soil science papers that relate to carbon sequestration and cycling please let me know. The rangeland science outfits here at UC Davis and UC Berkeley as well as the California Cattlemen's Association are really getting into this stuff. The Summit I just attended was really hitting this stuff hard.

 

Right, we need more scientists like this:

 

At current volumes in the atmosphere, current consensus seems to give these approximate percentages to those three gases (yes, the ranges are large!):

CO2: 9-26%
Water vapor: 36-76%
Methane: 4-9%

The real difference between the three is how long each remains in the atmosphere after getting there. Water vapor tends to precipitate within days or weeks, methane within years and CO2 in many, many decades.

Not really. Most changes in climate in the past occurred over thousands of years, and normally, CO2 was not the initial cause of the warming. Which is no surprise, since there are many other well known causes of climate change.

Yes, isn't that the point of research - whether or not it agrees? Is to try to find a better understanding of how things work - if we already knew how things worked, there would be no point to research.

I welcome any new research regarding climate change, whether or not it agrees with the current consensus. In the long term, the ones that are correct will stand, the others will not, but most will add to the current knowledge base.

 

Nevermind I see what you meant.

 

Wow, another thread full of nonsense. Where to start.

I think it's probably enough just to quote what Realclimate actually said about the paper in question:

"It will take a little time to assess the issues that have been raised (and these papers are unlikely to be the last word), but it is worth making a couple of points about the process. First off, LC09 was not a nonsense paper – that is, it didn’t have completely obvious flaws that should have been caught by peer review (unlike say, McLean et al, 2009 or Douglass et al, 2008). Even if it now turns out that the analysis was not robust, it was not that the analysis was not worth trying, and the work being done to re-examine these questions is a useful contributions to the literature – even if the conclusion is that this approach to the analysis is flawed."

That seems to me to be a model of moderation and reason. Certainly compared to the posts here.

 

Quoting RealClimate for climate info is like quoting Michael Vick for animal compassion info. Or like quoting Michael Jackson for child care info.

 

Or quoting you on climate change!

 

I've seen other data that show the human CO2 contribution to the total greenhouse effect is 0.117%. Check out this link that goes over the concepts overlooked by the Warmists and even has references:

Global Warming: A closer look at the numbers

Indeed, there are other drivers of climate, which is why CO2 levels are a lagging indicator. Why is the current situation any different? Sure, humans have a contribution to the CO2 levels, but there is no proof that those levels are driving climate change.

Yup. Another factor to consider is the observation that the so-called greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have a logarithmic effect. Their capability of trapping infrared radiation doesn't increase linearly as the concentration rises. The link below shows that the present levels are already high enough to trap all the IR in CO2's absorption bands.

Cold Facts on Global Warming

From the link:

"The arithmetic of absorption of infrared radiation also works to decrease the linearity. Absorption of light follows a logarithmic curve (Fig. 2) as the amount of absorbing substance increases. It is generally accepted that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is already high enough to absorb virtually all the infrared radiation in the main carbon dioxide absorption bands over a distance of less than one km. Thus, even if the atmosphere were heavily laden with carbon dioxide, it would still only cause an incremental increase in the amount of infrared absorption over current levels."

If the believers of man-made global warming would only get past the ad hominem attacks against the skeptics and look at the data we'd all be a lot better off. It might become obvious to many that the AGW movement is political, not scientific.

Here are a couple more good links on the topic:

IPCC'S FATAL ERRORS (Rocket Scientist's Journal)
JunkScience.com -- The Real Inconvenient Truth: Greenhouse, global warming and some facts

 

The graphic on that link cracked me up:

 

Huh?

 

I apologize for trying to keep this thread on topic, but it might be useful to summarize what Trenberth et al. showed.

The Lindzen and Choi analysis was a regression analysis linking changes in sea surface temperature to changes in outgoing radiative flux at the top of the atmosphere. They used data from the tropics only. Based on selected episodes of changes in sea surface temperature over a 16 year period, they claim to have found that additional heat was rapidly radiated away, cooling the earth. In other words, that feedback was strongly negative, so that if you tried to force the temperature higher (by, say, adding C02 to the atmosphere), the atmosphere would react (presumably via cloud formation) and rapidly radiate away any excess energy.

To assess the claim, put aside all the deep issues of statistics and the underlying theory, and ignore how much existing science would have to be dead wrong in order for this one claim, based on nine episodes selected from 16 years of data, to be correct.

Instead, just look at the first question Trenberth et al. did. They focused on those "selected episodes" and asked the simplest possible question: Are the results robust of you tweak the episodes a bit?

Answer: No, not at all. They shifted all the episode start/stop dates by one month, and the result completely disappears.

The upshot is that the Lindzen/Choi results, based on nine episodes selected from 16 years of data, were not robust to a one-month shift in the start/stop dates of the selected episodes. That small, arbitrary change makes them vanish.

Assuming Trenberth et al. is correct, that lack of robustness to such a simple change means that the Lindzen and Choi results should be regarded as a fluke. For their exact choice of episodes you get their results, but perturbing their choice even a bit makes the results disappear.

So you have to put it all in context. On the one hand, here we have a study, based on nine episodes of ocean warming/cooling spread over 16 years, tropical data only. If true, the results would negate a large body of scientific literature on climate. As I understand the implications (which is not all that well), if true, they would make it impossible to explain not just the 20th century warming but paleoclimate changes as well. But the results fail to pass even the simplest test of robustness, and replication with more robust techniques yields the opposite result. All things considered, I don't think I would put much weight on the Lindzen and Choi findings. Others will have to judge it based on their own criteria.

 

Roy Spencer PhD (a "skeptic") reviewed the paper as well and he wasn't in good agreement with Lindzen and Choi's paper either. This is good, healthy science! People auditing and reviewing each others work!

My problem will be reconciling ClimateGate with ever accepting the opinions of anyone implicated in it again. Climategate—analysis by John P. Costella, Ph.D. is just facsinating.