Moderated Global Warming Discussion

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No, they're not. They're a feature of the weather.

Cloud Feedback

This is climate science 101.

Precisely. Only if climate change affects the prevalence and distribution of clouds in a way which in turn influences climate are clouds a feedback.

Incorrect. Please read the above link for clarification.

Something has prevented the world warming as much as it has? Is that really something you want to hang your hat on?

According to the alarmists we should be knee deep in ice water and cannibalizing by now. ;)

The heads that will do nothing now or soon, if ever. The non-alarmed, cool heads like yours.

I think it's "getting done", it's just that there are unrealistic expectations being set by some people who don't fully understand how things actually work.
 
Have you drummed up any examples of the new feedbacks being discovered monthly? I'd be particularly interested in any new negative feedbacks which have emerged in, say, the last thirty years.

Tropical ice clouds? Humidity fluctuation in large scale cirrculation? Which vegetative studies are you familiar with? Longwave radiation in the sub tropics? Midlatitude cyclones? Atmospheric moisture over North America in the Winter, Summer? Large and small droplet size effects on long and shortwave radiation?
Here's a recent one in the Journal of Physical Research: "Atmospheric chemistry-climate feedbacks"
Which climate chemistry feedbacks are you familiar with, all of them?

I'm not about to catalogue the thousands of feedback mechanisms discovered and studied over the last 30 years. You're going to have to read some of them and see for yourself if they're positive or negative.
 
My point exactly. You said clouds cause it the cool when if fact they are caused by it getting cooler and their formation warms the atmosphere so you have the science exactly backwards.
Incorrect.
I suggest you try the experiment and report your results. If it's hotter in the shade than in the sun I'll eat your hat. :D

Saying it doesn't make it so. As I said the short term feedbacks are all quite well understood.

Incorrect. We're just starting to understand all of the feedback mechanisms.

Clouds are the largest remaining short term uncertainty this means other short term feedbacks are much better understood.

Incorrect. It's long term and the uncertainty has nothing to do with how well understood a feedback is in relation to one another.
 
A constant percentage rate of increase is not a reduction. Neither is it indicative of a reduction. It is an increase.

There was no hot debate about this, there was simply page after page of people trying to get such obvious truths through to you and of you steadfastly refusing to see the point.

That's incorrect. The reduction in emissions will be indicated in the change in rate in growth. That's just the nature of an exponentially growing system. I've explained this numerous times and it seems to elude everyone without a genuine desire to understand ie, the alarmists.

An increase is an increase. A reduction is not an increase. An increase is not a reduction. A reduction is a reduction.

Nope. This is a tricky subject that many first year students fail to grasp, you must pay attention to the slope of the graph showing the growth. It's even more difficult when it's exponential growth like we are discussing. I attempted to linearize the graph to make it more understandable by discussing the rate of change in the growth, but that was well over most people heads here.

You still fail to comprehend that what is being done is not equivalent to what you have advocated.
That would make sense if I had advocated anything. As I haven't, it doesn't.

I refer you to your post 3199
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=7418225#post7418225
And therefore nothing should be done now or soon, if ever.
That's just the easiest example to find.
:dl:
That's about whether or not clouds represent a negative or positive feedback! We're talking about reducing emissions. I'm glad I could clear up this misunderstanding, finally.

There would be an industry. The first use of natural gas from the North Sea in the UK was in replacing town gas in the existing gas system. The industry existed before gas-burning generators were built - in fact they were only built because the infrastructure was already there.

And like I said, "If a frog had wings....".

Once again you sound off on something you're totally ignorant about. [/quote[

Incorrect. I know without cheap energy there is no industry and growth. It's common knowledge.

It led to an inefficient use of a now-depleted resource simply in search of short-term (in a modern capitalism sense) profit boost for the by-then-privatised energy industry. If a strategic view had been taken, meaning one that looks beyond this year's bonuses and dividends, the total benefit of that resource would have been greater.

I really couldn't care less about what happened in the UK 50 years ago. I know burning NG instead of coal is better. Then and now. That's all there is too it. Your theories on how it should have happened are reactionary and "after the fact".

Your argument for it being a fact is predicated on it being a fact. That is indeed begging the question.

No it's a statement of fact. You're simply confused because you don't realize it yet as fact.

With the internal combustion engine and cheap oil there was no need to develop alternatives. Without them there would have been. Electric (and steam) cars were invented in the same period as petrol-driven cars but they weren't developed because they couldn't compete. Take that competition out of the equation and they would have been.

They still can't compete 100 years later. All you're doing is delaying progress 100 years. Think about it. (you can't remove the competition anyways, gasoline came before cars. Plus you can't assume the technology wouldn't have been abandoned, many have because they are infeasible or "uncompetitive")

Your point being?
You need to look at productivity World Wide in the 100 years before and 100 years after the invention of the internal combustion engine and see for yourself. It's amazing. If I find a link I will, if you're in Detroit go to the Henry Ford Museum.

Which of these proposals would you advocate for?

You claimed I advocated a proposals before, now you're asking me??? Which is it?

You should also note that proposals, whether or not they're in a pipeline yet, are not actions.

Baloney. It should be obvious from the word "proposals", it's verb, verbs are called "action words".

You're actually trying to say because they are proposals they haven't been implemented. That would be correct. Most things don't happen overnight.

Many messengers have been shot in the process.

I appreciated that one :D
 
as I was saying about lack of understanding about clouds in certain circles.....including Roy Spencer - our favorite Intelligent Designer..applying his magic to climate...

snip from the dissection by actual climate scientists

Clouds are not a forcing of the climate system (except for the small portion related to human related aerosol effects, which have a small effect on clouds). Clouds mainly occur because of weather systems (e.g., warm air rises and produces convection, and so on); they do not cause the weather systems. Clouds may provide feedbacks on the weather systems. Spencer has made this error of confounding forcing and feedback before and it leads to a misinterpretation of his results.


The bottom line is that there is NO merit whatsoever in this paper. It turns out that Spencer and Braswell have an almost perfect title for their paper: “the misdiagnosis of surface temperature feedbacks from variations in the Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance” (leaving out the “On”).
http://www.realclimate.org/
 
Incorrect.
I suggest you try the experiment and report your results. If it's hotter in the shade than in the sun I'll eat your hat.

My statement is perfectly correct. You have the cause and effect revered. Clouds are caused by cooling air while you claimed they caused the air to cool.

Incorrect. We're just starting to understand all of the feedback mechanisms.

Wrong. It's already been pointed out that clouds are the only short term feedback with significant uncertainty. You have linked to such papers yourself. Even if you have some new feedback to offer up (which you don’t) you also need to find an opposite feedback to cancel it you to explain the predictive power of models using the feedback that’s already documented.
 
Originally Posted by Furcifer
Incorrect.
I suggest you try the experiment and report your results. If it's hotter in the shade than in the sun I'll eat your hat.

The critical issue is not incoming radiation but outgoing which you seem to fail to grasp every time it is discussed.

Clouds block out going IR which warms the atmosphere instead of allowing it to escape to space.

The ONLY negative feedback clouds can achieve is albedo.

Clouds trap IR day or night and are somewhat transparent to incoming solar radiation but very opaque to outgoing IR.
So half the day they reflect say 30% and let 70% incoming through
100% of the day they trap say 70% of the space bound IR radiation.
That is positive feedback - magnifying the effect of C02 increases - in fact the magnification by way of water vapour is 1.6 x the heat trapping of C02 alone.

Very very basic atmospheric physics.

So the physics tend toward a positive feedback with warmth being trapped......by clouds. :garfield:
 
snip from the dissection by actual climate scientists

http://www.realclimate.org/

The link should be
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/07/misdiagnosis-of-surface-temperature-feedback/

Let's look at what real scientists say instead.
The study of climate and climate change is hindered by a lack of information on the effect of clouds on the radiation balance of the earth, referred to as the cloud-radiative forcing.

Quantitative estimates of the global distributions of cloud-radiative forcing have been obtained from the spaceborne Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE) launched in 1984. ...

The monthly averaged longwave cloud forcing reached maximum values of 50 to 100 W/m2 over the convectively disturbed regions of the tropics.

However, this heating effect is nearly canceled by a correspondingly large negative shortwave cloud forcing, which indicates the delicately balanced state of the tropics.

The size of the observed net cloud forcing is about four times as large as the expected value of radiative forcing from a doubling of CO2. The shortwave and longwave components of cloud forcing are about ten times as large as those for a CO2 doubling.

Hence, small changes in the cloud-radiative forcing fields can play a significant role as a climate feedback mechanism. .
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/243/4887/57.short
 
My statement is perfectly correct. You have the cause and effect revered. Clouds are caused by cooling air while you claimed they caused the air to cool.
(More goal post shifting)

No it isn't correct. I wasn't talking about cloud formation.

Wrong. It's already been pointed out that clouds are the only short term feedback with significant uncertainty.

Despite short term uncertainty you're claiming long term there's certainty. That just doesn't make sense, logically or mathematically.

You have linked to such papers yourself. Even if you have some new feedback to offer up (which you don’t) you also need to find an opposite feedback to cancel it you to explain the predictive power of models using the feedback that’s already documented.

There's no "predictive power" in the models, that doesn't even mean anything.
If you read the actual science the list of feedbacks is almost inexhaustible. (this is the point where you attempt to shift the goal posts again I'm sure)
 
As Real Climate points out the Roy Spencer and Danny Braswell paper is fatally flawed since it is so incomplete as to not allow replication of its results. It also contains Spencer's usual mistake of taking a simple model and forgetting to apply physically realistic parameters.

I am not sure why you are citing such an old paper:
Science 6 January 1989: Vol. 243 no. 4887 pp. 57-63 DOI: 10.1126/science.243.4887.57
Cloud-Radiative Forcing and Climate: Results from the Earth Radiation Budget Experiment
V. RAMANATHAN, R. D. CESS, E. F. HARRISON, P. MINNIS, B. R. BARKSTROM, E. AHMAD and D. HARTMANN
when climate science has progressed enormously in the last 32 years.

A good description of the current climate science is at Skeptical Science - What is the net feedback from clouds?
Although the cloud feedback is one of the largest remaining uncertainties in climate science, evidence is building that the net cloud feedback is likely positive, and unlikely to be strongly negative.
 
The critical issue is not incoming radiation but outgoing which you seem to fail to grasp every time it is discussed.

Incorrect. I've discussed this in great length and the problem is with both. I've presented the science, tried to explain it beyond that there's little I can do to get people to understand it.

Clouds block out going IR which warms the atmosphere instead of allowing it to escape to space.

This would be a very basic interpretation of the science. It's much more complicated than that. NASA agrees.

Clouds trap IR day or night and are somewhat transparent to incoming solar radiation but very opaque to outgoing IR.
So half the day they reflect say 30% and let 70% incoming through
100% of the day they trap say 70% of the space bound IR radiation.
That is positive feedback - magnifying the effect of C02 increases - in fact the magnification by way of water vapour is 1.6 x the heat trapping of C02 alone.

Very very basic atmospheric physics.

And it's still incorrect as you've stated it.

So the physics tend toward a positive feedback with warmth being trapped......by clouds. :garfield:

That's only because you don't have the full picture.
 
(More goal post shifting)

No it isn't correct. I wasn't talking about cloud formation.

No you were not, which is why you had cause and effect reversed. Clouds are caused by warm air cooling, and are not the cause of that cooling.
 
Clouds are caused by warm air cooling, and are not the cause of that cooling.

This is incorrect, in the experiment I suggested clouds block radiation and cause cooling below them.

Not only is it incorrect, it's incomplete. Clouds are formed by condensation which occurs when warm air is cooled to the dew point. There are several mechanisms for doing so because temperature and pressure are directly related. http://www.physicalgeography.net/fundamentals/8e.html

Don't worry, it's an easy mistake to make. Just remember, warm air can cool all it wants, but if it doesn't condense clouds won't form.
 
That's incorrect. The reduction in emissions will be indicated in the change in rate in growth.

A reduction in emissions will be indicated by negative growth. The two things are equivalent.

That's just the nature of an exponentially growing system. I've explained this numerous times and it seems to elude everyone without a genuine desire to understand ie, the alarmists.

Everybody's out-of-step but you ...

Nope. This is a tricky subject that many first year students fail to grasp, you must pay attention to the slope of the graph showing the growth. It's even more difficult when it's exponential growth like we are discussing. I attempted to linearize the graph to make it more understandable by discussing the rate of change in the growth, but that was well over most people heads here.

You remind me of a kid at school who couldn't accept that an object with zero velocity could be accelerating. The teacher tried, then we all tried in different words, but no luck. He just could not get it, nor understand why we didn't get that an object with zero velocity could not be accelerating.

That would make sense if I had advocated anything. As I haven't, it doesn't.

Previously on Furcifer :
"Don't forget this is a relatively new area of science. There's so much more to learn it would be foolish and irresponsible to to make any judgement calls now. "

(My emphasis)

Tell me why that's not advocacy for not doing anything now.


That's about whether or not clouds represent a negative or positive feedback! We're talking about reducing emissions. I'm glad I could clear up this misunderstanding, finally.

You use the possibility of a negative feedback from changes in cloud cover as a reason for not doing anything now, since it would be foolish and irresponsible.

Incorrect. I know without cheap energy there is no industry and growth. It's common knowledge.

Incorrect. There has been industry and growth throughout most of history, even when energy was (in contemporary terms) expensive.

And anyway, you were sounding off on the UK natural gas industry. That's what I was very obviously referring to.

I really couldn't care less about what happened in the UK 50 years ago.

No wonder you're ignorant about it.

I know burning NG instead of coal is better. Then and now.

If natural gas was burned for generation as part of a long-term strategy to minimise total CO2 emissions, just something to get us though to when enough renewables came online, then it would have been a good idea. As it was, a valuable resource was squandered inefficiently simply because it was cheap at the time. (Price and value are not equivalent, of course.)

That's all there is too it. Your theories on how it should have happened are reactionary and "after the fact".

Actually I made the same argument before the fact. I've never been one for short-term thinking : that's for losers and the too-big-to-fail, to my mind.

No it's a statement of fact. You're simply confused because you don't realize it yet as fact.

You believe it's a fact, but your argument for why it's a fact starts with "it's a fact". Which is begging the question.

They still can't compete 100 years later. All you're doing is delaying progress 100 years. Think about it. (you can't remove the competition anyways, gasoline came before cars.

And kerosene for lighting before that, which is what established the oil industry and produced gasoline as a rather dangerous waste-product.

Plus you can't assume the technology wouldn't have been abandoned, many have because they are infeasible or "uncompetitive")

You seem to have lost the thread. You raised the hypothetical that the internal-combustion engine had never existed. From that you projected a world in which nothing associated with the ICE (in real history) would have happened. I've been pointing out that this is not a valid assumption.

You need to look at productivity World Wide in the 100 years before and 100 years after the invention of the internal combustion engine and see for yourself. It's amazing. If I find a link I will, if you're in Detroit go to the Henry Ford Museum.

I can easily picture the story presented in the Henry Ford Museum. I would find it simplistic and rather too focussed on the ICE. Not deliberately, but because people generally lack perspective. The up-close dominates their view, and they miss the big picture.

Exponential economic growth did not originate with the Oil Age; in fact it's been going on since the Mongols got civilised.

You claimed I advocated a proposals before, now you're asking me??? Which is it?

I was being ironic. Of course you wouldn't advocate any of these proposals, because it would be foolish and irresponsible to to make any judgement calls now.

Baloney. It should be obvious from the word "proposals", it's verb, verbs are called "action words".

"Proposals" is a plural noun.

You're actually trying to say because they are proposals they haven't been implemented.

Does that actually need saying?

That would be correct. Most things don't happen overnight.

Or at all if they remain proposals. If you recall, you raised these proposals as evidence that actions are already being taken. I see them as evidence of actions which are not being taken. Proposals (like targets, and talk) are cheap.
 
Clouds block out going IR which warms the atmosphere instead of allowing it to escape to space.

Indeed, but the top of a cloud radiates IR. Low clouds have a temperature close to the surface temperature and so are effectively neutral in their greenhouse effect. High clouds, on the other hand, are much colder than the surface, so emit less IR than the surface and so have a positive impact.

It helps to visualise this from space, which is where the energy goes. High clouds will appear dark on your IR camera and low clouds will seem much like the surface. (Low clouds at night will warm the surface and the air below them, but above them it's a clear and frosty night :).)

The ONLY negative feedback clouds can achieve is albedo.

Climate change does rearrange the distribution of clouds, and so is a potentially negative feedback. Also potentially positive, or neutral.

If we consider what actually happens to cloud distribution a negative feedback seems unlikely. Changes in the Hadley cells move the main cloud-belts in such a way as to be a positive feedback. In, for instance, a warmer world the cloud-belts move away from the equator and present a more oblique attitude to the Sun and hence less reflective surface. They also move to higher latitudes and so have less area.

That is positive feedback - magnifying the effect of C02 increases - in fact the magnification by way of water vapour is 1.6 x the heat trapping of C02 alone

Clouds are not water vapour, they consist of liquid water and relate to relative humidity and the physical characteristics of water (which remain unchanged). The positive feedback of water vapour relates to absolute humidity, and boy does that change.

(Two inches of rain in some parts of the UK today. That used to be remarkable outside Cumbria, but not anymore. Now it hardly rates a "Gosh!" on the BBC weather-forecast. Welcome to the new normal.)

What we know is that a strong negative feedback from a cloud response to climate change would prevent any transition between glaciations and interglacials. This is what fouled-up Lindzen's Iris all those years ago : he was so focussed on proving that the world wouldn't warm significantly that he indavertently proved that the current interglacial never happened. He missed the big picture.
 
This is incorrect, in the experiment I suggested clouds block radiation and cause cooling below them.

Not last night they didn't.

Not only is it incorrect, it's incomplete. Clouds are formed by condensation which occurs when warm air is cooled to the dew point. There are several mechanisms for doing so because temperature and pressure are directly related. http://www.physicalgeography.net/fundamentals/8e.html

Don't worry, it's an easy mistake to make. Just remember, warm air can cool all it wants, but if it doesn't condense clouds won't form.

The examples in your link all essentially refer to the same thing, which is adiabatic cooling. Climate change isn't going to affect that process.

For clouds to form a feedback to climate change then it must depend on global-scale changes in response to climate change. I've yet to see any decent argument in favour of a negative feedback.
 
Cloud Feedback

This is climate science 101.

None of which I'm unfamiliar with, and none of which alters the fact that clouds are weather features.

Incorrect. Please read the above link for clarification.

Your link says exactly what I said. Read beyond the title and you'll see.

According to the alarmists we should be knee deep in ice water and cannibalizing by now. ;)

You've just made that up, but Lindzen went on record proving that what has now happened wouldn't. See "Lindzen's Iris".

I think it's "getting done", it's just that there are unrealistic expectations being set by some people who don't fully understand how things actually work.

I understand all too well how things get done, and why they so often don't get done in time. It's all foolish and irresponsible until panic sets in.

I can remember when AGW denial was all about models and how bad they must be : now their predictions are coming to pass (rather sooner than expected, but science is conservative that way) and to you it still remains a new science, poorly-understood, so lets not leap to judgement, eh? irony
 


You left out the most significant portion:

Science 6 January 1989:
Vol. 243 no. 4887 pp. 57-63
DOI: 10.1126/science.243.4887.57
Cloud-Radiative Forcing and Climate: Results from the Earth Radiation Budget Experiment

I'm sure, according to the state of knowledge 23 years ago, that statement was very accurate. Of course, even then, it doesn't say that "without fully and completely understanding all aspects of cloud interaction, we cannot make any reasonable estimation of that process in relation to climate, and thus cannot assess or project future climate from what we do know," nor does it even suggest that then current, much less our current understandings are unreliable or in any way in significnat error due to what we did (do) not know. All this actually says is that, according to what was believed and understood at that time, "...small changes in the cloud-radiative forcing fields can play a significant role as a climate feedback mechanism. For example, during past glaciations a migration toward the equator of the field of strong, negative cloud-radiative forcing, in response to a similar migration of cooler waters, could have significantly amplified oceanic cooling and continental glaciation."

If you are aware of evidences which compellingly indicate that current mainstream theories and the projections based upon them are significantly in error, present them.
 
This is patently false as well. I suggest you read Dessler for clarification.

There is still too much uncertainty to make robust projections of how clouds would respond to a warming world in the long term. In fact, the observations do not rule out a negative feedback during the decade observed, although the likelihood of this is small. But, Dessler noted the observations do rule out the idea that clouds are producing a negative feedback large enough that it can prevent substantial carbon dioxide-induced warming.

While he believes clouds had a positive effect on warming from 2000-2010 he clearly indicates it isn't "significant" as you're suggesting.

From your popsci press release "reference" - beyond the cherry-picked segment you quote above (note the link name):
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/amplified-warming.html
...According to Dessler, clouds still remain too much of an uncertainty for this research to make a robust correlation to projections of long-term cloud feedback. But for the first time on a significant time scale and a global spatial scale, a likely positive feedback from clouds has been observed, and not just seen in model results.

The reason this observation has not been made previously is that it requires both high-resolution data, which wasn't available until more recently, and a long enough data set to observe what is happening with the climate, as opposed to just annual weather fluctuations. The decade Dessler studied, from 2000 to 2010, ended up being an ideal data set because it included both hot and cool years, compared to the mean, allowing him to observe how clouds responded to different conditions...

...In technical terms, Dessler found that for every 1 degree (C) of warming, clouds amplify that by trapping an additional 0.5 Watts per square meter – the standard for measuring incoming and outgoing energy in Earth's atmosphere. Dessler noted that the decade did not see an obvious enough temperature trend to say what fraction of any warming clouds were responsible for...

"For every one degree of warming, clouds amplify that by trapping an additional 0.5 Watts per square meter-"

sounds significant to me.
 
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