Clouds, supercooled water, Svensmark perhaps, GCM problems

One of the groups working on untangling cloud peculiarity are based at Reading University, nicely close to Chilbolton Observatory.

I’ve quickly pulled out files from Chilbolton which show the cloud ice altitude, a sharp line of attenuation change. I’ve added a horizontal line and included the ground temperature plot for the day, ice level follows.

Logging for biofuel not Earth-friendly after all. Who would have thought?

From Science Daily:

Using wood for energy is considered cleaner than fossil fuels, but a Dartmouth College-led study finds that logging may release large amounts of carbon stored in deep forest soils.

Global atmospheric studies often don’t consider carbon in deep (or mineral) soil because it is thought to be stable and unaffected by timber harvesting. But the Dartmouth findings show deep soil can play an important role in carbon emissions in clear-cutting and other intensive forest management practices. The findings suggest that calls for an increased reliance on forest biomass be re-evaluated and that forest carbon analyses are incomplete unless they include deep soil, which stores more than 50 percent of the carbon in forest soils.

Chris de Freitas: Rebuttal of Jim Salinger’s wild Alarmist Claims in the NZ Herald

From the New Zealand Herald

Several aspects of Jim Salinger’s op-ed “Climate hurtling towards a hothouse Earth” (Herald 24/5/13) are quite misleading.

It is true most climate scientists would agree that rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere due to fossil fuel use could affect global climate. The basic physics is there to support this view. But there is no evidence that the putative change would be large or damaging. Output from computer models is not evidence unless model performance has been validated. So far, it has not.

The so-called evidence of minor human-caused climatic change can also be attributed to causes or processes other than those related to the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

What is rarely mentioned by climate alarmists is the incontrovertible fact that adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere has an ever-decreasing effect on global temperature. To illustrate this, compare covering a glass window with very thin paint. The first coat of paint cuts out some light, the second some more; but each subsequent coat has an ever decreasing effect on light shining through.

CERN’s Jasper Kirkby: The Newest Unpublished Results Of CLOUD “Are Very Interesting”

Repost from Pierre Gosselin’s No Tricks Zone

CERN’s Jasper Kirkby On The Newest Unpublished Results Of CLOUD: “The Results Are Very Interesting”
By P Gosselin on 19. Mai 2013

The Latest On The CLOUD Experiment at CERN
By Sebastian Lüning and Fritz Vahrenholt

On May 10, 2013, at the online Austrian ORF, there was a rare interview with the CLOUD Experiment director of the European European Organization for Nuclear Research, Jasper Kirkby. Within the scope of the CLOUD project, it is being investigated to what extent solar activity has on cloud formation via the mechanism of cosmic radiation and the impact this could have on the Earth’s climate (see Chapter 6 of our book “Die kalte Sonne“). Here’s an excerpt of the worthwhile interview:

ORF: What is the relationship between solar activity and cosmic radiation?

Kirkby: Cosmic radiation consists of high energy, charged particles. When they reach our solar system, they are deflected away by the magnetic field of the sun. Foremost by the magnetic field of the solar plasma. When the sun is active, less cosmic radiation reaches the Earth. The relationship to the solar cycle: When there are many sunspots, the Earth receives 10 – 30% less cosmic radiation.

Twinkling clouds, insolation higher than normal

Sometimes the sun shines through, reflects off and other optical effects of cloud. This does lead to insolation well in excess of the maximum for the time of year. An instance is shown above complete with an hourly sky thumbnail which almost caught one at the time, the effect comes and goes very quickly.

Solar activity affecting the earth, the link

What follows is incomplete, I’ve decided to throw this out early, let the team help fill in more detail.

Original drawing from 1999 paper

“The role of solar forcing upon climate change”
B. van Geel!,*, O.M. Raspopov”, H. Renssen#, J. van der Plicht$,
V.A. Dergachev%, H.A.J. Meijer$ [1][2 details]

Greenhouse Panic Over: New model demonstrates dependence of Planetary surface temperature on atmospheric pressure

New talkshop visitor ‘David’ has dropped a fruitful link on Wayne Jackson’s recent thread which, after a bit of sleuthing via AstroBio.net, leads to a new paper from the Trieste Astrobiology Group led by Giovanni Vladilo. This will be of great interest to our friends Nikolov and Zeller, because it vindicates their contention that atmospheric pressure is the principle determinant of planetary surface temperatures. However, there is a twist. As well as affecting the near surface heat capacity, evaporation rates and meridional energy transport, atmospheric pressure also affects the atmospheric optical depth of atmospheres, and this explains the role of ‘greenhouse gases’ and their radiative properties in contributing to the overall distribution and magnitude of energy at planetary surfaces. Although not dscussed in the paper, I think it will also be the case that regardless of extra emissions of a greenhouse gas such as carbon dioxide, since the pressure is the primary variable, the optical depth will remain constant, as NASA Physicist Ferenc Miskolzci found. If so, the Man Made Greenhouse Panic is over.

The pressure-dependent habitable zone is shown in the left figure below. The circles indicate solutions of the climate simulations with mean global annual habitability h>0. The area of the circles is proportional to the habitability h; the colors are coded according to the mean annual global surface temperature, Tm. The size and color scales are shown in the legend. The solid lines are contours of equal mean temperature Tm=0 C (magenta), 60 C (red) and 120 C (black). (Click for larger image)

The key passage from the paper is this one:

4.2.1. Surface Pressure and Planet Temperature Variations of surface pressure affect the temperature in two ways. First, for a given atmospheric composition, the infrared optical depth of the atmosphere will increase with pressure. As a result, a rise of [pressure] will always lead to a rise of the [radiative] greenhouse effect and temperature. Second, the horizontal heat transport increases with pressure. In our model, this is reflected by the linear increase with [pressure] of the diffusion coefficient D (Equation (A5), Appendix A.2). At variance with the first effect, it is not straightforward to predict how the temperature will react to a variation of the horizontal transport. In the case of Earth, our EBM calculations predict a rise of the mean temperature with increasing D. This is due to the fact that the increased diffusion from the equator to the poles tends to reduce the polar ice covers and, as a consequence, to reduce the albedo and raise the temperature.

Heavy H2O Hits Houston

Houston, Texas isn’t a place noted for having a lot of rainfall, but yesterday, according the the Weather Underground, the airport there got 6 inches of rain in 24 hours, with 1.17in falling in a seven minute period. Compared to the 8.3mm in the year to date, this is a serious amount of water; see the summary below the break:

Jan 2012 floods in Houston Texas

 

Angela Fritz of wunderground.com tweeted:

As of 2am CT, Houston has received over 6″ of rain. At one point, 1.21″ fell within 7 minutes, which is, well, meteorologically nuts.

— Angela Fritz (@WunderAngela) April 28, 2013

Chilbolton Observatory unofficial dataset, numeric and plots

Example data. Lidar is useful in identifying cloud layers, clear sky, it cannot though see multiple layers, where radar images if available are more useful. Click to open full size.

[UPDATE 2013/05/05,  archive release with corrections] An unofficial high resolution dataset has been derived from web published graphs running from 16th February 2013 to 20th April 2013 (less 23rd Feb), just over 60 days of data at about 2.3 minutes resolution for about 23 hours a day. The data includes atmospheric water parameters and thermal radiation parameters, all measured from surface level. Archive period includes the exceptionally cold March 2013. The weather hereabouts was cold but unlike most of the rest of the UK there was little snow, nor was the temperature very low.

A Personal Appeal to Britain’s Politicians: Wake-Up From Your Warm Dreams! Fuel Poverty is Killing People

“The most revolutionary thing one can do always is to proclaim loudly what is happening.”
Rosa Luxemburg

There are times when I find it hard to speak politely. I left school at sixteen and worked on the shop-floor of a large engineering works for ten years, gaining a higher national qualification in mechanical and production engineering along the way before getting the chance to study for a degree in the History and Philosophy of Science. While I worked in heavy industry, I learned some choice ways of expressing myself which are basic, direct, and hurt the sensibilities of those who have spent their lives in polite company, although they got the job done effectively. So I sometimes struggle to find the right tone at those times when a message needs communicating forcefully to people in a position to influence policy, but without having them recoil and ignore things they don’t want to contemplate.

But the time for niceties has passed. Britain’s people face a looming disaster of epic proportion. Britain’s political class needs to act swiftly to minimise the damage which cannot be wholly averted at this late stage. Successive governments have set the stage for the impending denouement, so this is not a partisan rant, but a cross-party appeal to common sense. People are dying by the thousand as a direct result of botched energy policy and we must act to save lives. Now.

Let’s clear some of the undergrowth so we can see the shape of the problem. Firstly, we’ll deal with the climate scare.