GWPF takes up Sir Paul Nurse’s suggestion – Offers to host climate debate

Popcorn futures explode. But joking apart, I think (hope) this will be productive. Tim Palmer is realistic about model uncertainty (apart from being clueless about the magnitude of uncertainty around solar caused climate variation). Brian Hoskins is candid (though behind the curve on the latest findings).

GWPF INVITES ROYAL SOCIETY FELLOWS FOR CLIMATE CHANGE DISCUSSION

London, 22 May: In response to a suggestion by Sir Paul Nurse, the President of the Royal Society, the Global Warming Policy Foundation has invited five climate scientists and Fellows of the Royal Society to discuss the current state of climate science and its wider implications. 

In a letter to Lord Lawson, the GWPF chairman, Sir Paul stated that the Royal Society “would be happy to put the GWPF in touch with people who can offer the Foundation informed scientific advice.”

Sir Paul suggested that the GWPF should contact five of their Fellows: Sir Brian Hoskins; Prof John Mitchell; Prof Tim Palmer; Prof John Shepherd and Prof Eric Wolff.

The GWPF has now invited the five climate scientists to a meeting with a team of members of the GWPF’s Academic Advisory Council and independent scientists and has proposed a two-part agenda:

Shards of Shattered Turbine Blades Shower Scenic Spot

From the Halifax Courier: Published on 08/05/2013 16:56

Walkers had a narrow escape as blades on a wind turbine ripped off in high winds across common moor land.

The 17m turbine blades split and scattered across Ovenden Moor Wind Farm, Cold Edge Road, Wainstalls, Halifax.

Walkers and local residents were stunned at what could have been a nasty accident and fear for further blade breakages.

Energy provider E-on has a total of 23 wind turbines which tower at 32 metres tall on Ovenden Moor Wind Farm.

After the accident, a workman erected a safety fence around the turbine and a sign saying “danger, falling objects” was attached to the moor entrance gate.

But local resident Ann Arran, 64, of Lower Hazel Hurst Farm, Wainstalls, Halifax, who discovered blade debris said: “The safety fence they’re erecting after the carnage is inadequate as broken blade pieces could fly and land anywhere in high winds.”

Sue Midgley, 37, of Spring Mill Fold, Wainstalls, was out walking with Ann. “I couldn’t believe what we saw, it was frightening having to continue walking across the land.”

Ann said:

“At any minute more of the blades could shatter and who knows how long it will be until other turbine blades break – with disastrous consequences.

“It’s public land. More must be done to protect the people.”

Bing browser map of the site here

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.

Roger Andrews: A New Climate Index – The Northern Multidecadal Oscillation

My thanks to Roger Andrews, who sent me this guest post a little while ago and has been very patiently waiting for me to publish it. I had a good look around Bob Tisdale’s site before deciding to go ahead, to check he hadn’t already done the same thing. I can’t find anything directly comparable, so here it is. Hopefully Bob will join us in comments and let us know. Nicola Scafetta and others have shown a ~60-70yr pattern the motion of the solar system’s planets which we suspect is linked to this natural cyclic variation. It hasn’t been taken into account by climate models. The positive, warming phase of the oceanic cycles coincides with ‘global warming’ attributed to the increase in co2 by the IPCC. Ignoring the natural oceanic cycles amounts to something which in commercial law is known as ‘omitted variable fraud’.

A NEW CLIMATE INDEX – THE NORTHERN MULTIDECADAL OSCILLATION
Roger Andrews – March 28-2013

It’s widely recognized that weather and climate are strongly influenced by the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) in and around the North Atlantic Ocean and by the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) in and around the North Pacific Ocean, if not globally. But as illustrated below the AMO and the PDO show quite different trends, giving the impression that North Atlantic and North Pacific ocean cycles march to the beat of a different drummer:

http://www.eoearth.org/files/111301_111400/111389/AMO_-_USGS.jpg

Is the North Pole Going to Melt entirely? asks Newspaper in 1923

As the northern melt and polar bear worrying season gets underway, a timely reminder of the repetitive nature of ‘unprecedented’ climate happenings. H/T ‘IluvCO2′

NORTH POLE MELTING. CHANGE OF CLIMATE. MANY GLACIERS VANISHED.
Northern Star (Lismore, NSW : 1876 – 1954) Thursday 5 April 1923

Is the North Pole going to melt entirely? Are the Arctic regions warming up with prospect of a great climatic change in that part of the world? Science is asking these questions (says “Popular Science Siftings”). Reports from fishermen, seal hunters, and explorers who sail the seas around Spitsbergen and the Eastern Arctic all point to a radical change in climatic conditions, with hitherto unheard-of high temperatures on that part of the earth’s surface. Observations to that effect have covered the last five years during which the warmth has been steadily increasing. In August the Norwegian Department of Commerce sent an expedition to Spitsbergen and Bear Island under the leadership of Dr. Adolf Hoel, professor of geology in the University of Christiania, the object in view being to survey and chart areas productive of coal and other minerals.

Nils-Axel Morner: Solar Wind, Earth’s Rotation and Changes in Terrestrial Climate

My thanks to Nils-Axel Morner for sending me a copy of his new paper ‘Solar Wind, Earth’s Rotation and Changes in Terrestrial Climate’ published yesterday in Physical Review & Research Inernational. This is a great paper, full of interest, drawing together disparate dynamic phenomena into a comprehensible whole. Niklas is fully up to date with the latest research from Nicola Scafetta and the talkshop, incorporating planetary motion into the scheme encompassing the wider ‘frame of reference’ in which terrestrial climate change occurs. This is what will enable the new climate science to move beyond the constricted and constipated thinking of the current climate science mainstream.

 

Ken Gregory: Water Vapor Decline Cools the Earth – NASA Satellite Data

My thanks to Clive Best for offering this analysis from Ken Gregory as a repost here at the talkshop. There’s already an active discussion of it on WUWT, but we’ll run it anyway, as its importance is high.

Water Vapor Decline Cools the Earth – NASA Satellite Data
Original article at http://www.friendsofscience.org/index.php?id=483

An analysis of NASA satellite data shows that water vapor, the most important greenhouse gas, has declined in the upper atmosphere causing a cooling effect that is 16 times greater than the warming effect from man-made greenhouse gas emissions during the period 1990 to 2001.

The world has spent over $ 1 trillion on climate change mitigation based on climate models that don’t work. They are notoriously poor at simulating the 20^th century warming because they do not include natural causes of climate change – mainly due to the changing sun – and they grossly exaggerate the feedback effects of greenhouse gas emissions.

Most scientists agree that doubling the amount of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere, which takes about 150 years, would theoretical warm the earth by one degree Celsius if there were no change in evaporation, the amount or distribution of water vapor and clouds. Climate models amplify the initial CO₂ effect by a factor of three by assuming positive feedbacks from water vapor and clouds, for which there is little direct evidence. Most of the amplification by the climate models is due to an increase in upper atmosphere water vapor.

The Satellite Data

The NASA water vapor project (NVAP) uses multiple satellite sensors to create a standard climate dataset to measure long-term variability of global water vapor. NASA recently released the Heritage NVAP data which gives water vapor measurement from 1988 to 2001 on a 1 degree by 1 degree grid, in three vertical layers.¹ The NVAP-M project, which is not yet available, extends the analysis to 2009 and gives five vertical layers. Water vapor content of an atmospheric layer is represented by the height in millimeters (mm) that would result from precipitating all the water vapor in a vertical column to liquid water. The near-surface layer is from the surface to where the atmospheric pressure is 700 millibar (mb), or about 3 km altitude. The middle layer is from 700 mb to 500 mb air pressure, or from 3 km to 6 km attitude. The upper layer is from 500 mb to 300 mb air pressure, or from 6 km to 10 km altitude.

The global annual average precipitable water vapor by atmospheric layer and by hemisphere from 1988 to 2001 is shown in Figure 1.

The graph is presented on a logarithmic scale so the vertical change of the curves approximately represents the forcing effect of the change. For a steady earth temperature, the amount of incoming solar energy absorbed by the climate system must be balanced by an equal amount of outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) at the top of the atmosphere. An increase of water vapor in the upper atmosphere would temporarily reduce the OLR, creating a forcing of more incoming than outgoing energy, which raises the temperature of the atmosphere until the balance is restored.

Figure 1. Precipitable water vapor by layer, global and by hemisphere.

Ian Wilson: Solar System Timings Evolved Lunar Orbital Elements Linked to Earth’s Chandler Wobble

My thanks to Astrophysicist Ian Wilson who has left a long comment which I’m reposting here for further discussion, because it contains findings which are as Ian says, amazing (and Ian isn’t a man of hyperbole) . The summary below is further explained in Ian’s new paper which I’ll be putting up a further post on soon: 

Are Changes in the Earth’s Rotation Rate Externally Driven and Do They Affect Climate? 

which is available from this link. This is a stupendous work, containing many exact period matches, rather than being dominated by tenuous statistical derivations like so many other climate papers are. Top quality science on the talkshop. In the meantime, to whet your appetite:

Ian Wilson:
We know that the strongest planetary tidal forces acting on the lunar orbit come from
the planets Venus, Mars and Jupiter, in order of the size of their respective tidal
influences. In addition, we known that, over the last 4.6 billion years, the Moon has
slowly receded from the Earth. During the course of this lunar recession, there have been
times when the orbital periods of Venus, Mars and Jupiter have been in resonance(s) with
the precession rates for the line-of-nodes and line-of-apse of the lunar orbit. When these resonances have occurred, they would have greatly amplified the effects of the planetary tidal forces upon the shape and tilt of lunar orbit. Hence, the observed synchronization between the precession rates of the line-of-nodes and line-of-apse of the lunar orbit and the orbital periods of Venus, Earth, Mars and Jupiter, could simply be a cumulative fossil record left behind by these historical resonances.

Place your Bets: What Will Sea Surface Temperature do Next?

Dr Roy Spencer has posted the latest monthly updates for global lower troposphere and sea surface temperatures. The latter is of more interest to those of us who appreciate that it directly relates to the bulk energy state of the biggest (and most stable) climate variable, the global ocean. Where will it go from here? Roger Andrews has kindly overlaid the ICOADS data for comparison in this plot:

Greg Goodman: Lunar-solar influence on Sea Surface Temperature

My thanks to Greg Goodman for submitting his first guest post at the Talkshop. It’s been a while since we discussed the role of the Moon in climate cycles and this analysis is a timely update. This subject will become more thoroughly investigated in a forthcoming paper and articles from Greg and others here.

On Zen and the Art of Climate Analysis
by Greg Goodman – March 2 2013

Biosketch
The author has a graduate degree in applied physics, professional experience in spectroscopy, electronics and software engineering, including 3-D computer modelling of scattering of e-m radiation in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Introduction

In trying to understand changes in climate it would be logical to look at the rate of change directly rather than trying to guess at and its causes by looking at the various time series of temperature data.

This is also important since most of what climate science refers to as “forcings” are power terms measured in W/m2 . Temperature is a measure of energy, so it is the rate of change of temperature that reflects power. If there is a change in radiative ‘forcing’ such as solar or CO2, the response will be instantaneous in rate of change, however the subsequent change in temperature will take time to accumulate before it becomes evident, by which time some other factors have probably already obscured or confused the signal.