What ‘back radiation’ does and doesn’t do

There has been some progress in the greenhouse. On the ‘toy planet’ thread, physicist Tim Folkerts now agrees with me that longwave infra-red radiated from the air towards the surface doesn’t directly heat the ocean but makes it harder for the ocean to cool. In my view this is due to IR radiation from the ocean making the air warm, reducing the temperature differential between ocean and air, slowing the rate of the Sun warmed ocean’s heat loss. Tim says:

LWIR is indeed incapable of “heating” the oceans in the strict sense of the word (net transfer of thermal energy). The best it can do is aid in making it “a far more difficult task escaping” for the energy.

But it’s hard for him to let go of ingrained notions, so his next comment is full of ambiguities, which I have tried to deal with in my followup comment:

Tim Folkerts: The DWIR DOES amount to ~ 330 W/m^2.

Fine, no problem.

This energy DOES get absorbed by the ocean.

In the top few microns, and is soon re-emitted along with an additional ~60W/m^2 IR, upwards.

The ocean IS warmer than it would be without this DWIR from the atmosphere.

But not because it is absorbed and re-emitted from the top few microns of ocean. The thermalisation of IR in the bulk air helps keep the air warm and that warm air slows the sun warmed ocean’s heat loss.

But the reason the air is warm is because the ocean warms it with the energy it emits into it which is absorbed and re-emitted, or conducted to the O2 and N2 in the air, by water vapour (from the ocean) and co2 (mostly from the ocean). Air has very little heat capacity of its own, and is nearly transparent to incoming solar short wave radiation. And this ocean warmed air is usually convecting upwards.

The so called ‘Effective Height of Emission’ vs the Actual Height of Emission – which is more informative?

The mainstream climatologists are fond of telling us that additional co2 increases the ‘Effective Height of Emission’ of radiation to space by ‘Greenhouse Gases’, and that this must cause a rise in surface temperature because the lapse rate from the average temperature of 255K at the ‘EEH’ to the surface will mean a higher temperature. That lapse rate is what is shown by the slanting red line from surface to tropopause in Fig 1 below.

Figure 1: The atmospheric temperature profile of Earth

But there are some problems with this theoretical scenario.

The 255K figure is derived from the 240W/m^2 solar shortwave radiation incoming to the Earth’s climate system AFTER a proportion has been removed to account for reflection by clouds. But the models underestimate the amount of solar radiation absorbed by clouds because the fundamental physics of light scattering in clouds is poorly understood.

Although we are told a change in the EEH ‘must’ change the surface temperature, no viable mechanism is offered to explain how this imperative ‘must’ will be enforced.  The more rational proponents of the enhanced greenhouse effect hypothesis long ago abandoned trying to claim ‘downwelling longwave radiation’ heats the ocean, since nearly all LW emitted in wavelengths absorbed by water vapour and co2 is absorbed with a kilometre of the surface, all downwelling longwave from above a kilometre above the surface will be absorbed, converted to sensible heat, and convected back  upwards before reaching the surface too. In any case, the 10% of LW reaching the surface from on high can’t penetrate the ocean surface by more than a few nanometres.

So much for radiative theory, but what can a look at the data for the vertical temperature profile shown in Fig 1 tell us that might be really useful?

H. C. Russell: The Periodicity of Seasons – Lunar Timed Drought Cycles

H/T to Phill for this paper by H.C. Russell reproduced in The Queenslander (Brisbane, Qld. : 1866 – 1939) Saturday 27 June 1896

Periodicity of Good and Bad Seasons.
MR. H. C. RUSSELL’S THEORY.

The Nineteen Year Weather Cycle—Diagram Illustrating Mr. H. C. Russells Paper on ” The Periodicity of Seasons”

The paper lately read before the Royal Society of New South Wales by Mr. H.C. Russell, the Government Astronomer, a condensation of which has already appeared in the ” Queens lander,” has excited so much interest and so much discussion that no apology is needed for returning to the subject. With the view of affording our readers as full an insight as possible into the grounds upon which Mr. Russell has based his conversion to the theory of the nineteen-year cycle we reproduce the complete paper, as published in the ” Sydney Mail,” with the accompanying diagrams.

Mr. Russell said :— I feel some reluctance in coming for ward to-night with the result of my investigations into the periodicity of good and bad seasons—floods and droughts if you will—because they must come to you as a surprise, and they will make a claim on your confidence which at first sight you will probably not be disposed to grant. For myself, I know that some years ago, if anyone had come to me, stating that it was possible to forecast the seasons many years in advance, I should have received the statement with incredulity, and an inclination to think lightly of the man who advanced such views.’

Decadal lag of temperature response to solar input: A qualitative summary

I’m of the opinion that before getting into the complexity of numerical modelling, it’s wise to put considerable effort into trying to understand the physical processes at work in the climate system, and the origins of the energy flows that drive them. David Evans’ recent series of posts over at Jo Nova’s site have generated a lot of interesting discussion (despite being roundly ignored by Anthony Watts at WUWT), and I think we can shed some light on the ‘mysterious 11yr lag’ between solar input and climate response.

Tropical storms head polewards

Tropical Storm Beryl 2012
[image credit: US Govt.]

The BBC reports – laced with the inevitable ‘warmist catchphrases’ – a trend in weather phenomena described in a recent research paper.

No surprise to find this:
‘The researchers believe humans are influencing the changes’
(but they haven’t found the mechanism)

or this:
‘There is compelling evidence that the expansion of the tropics is attributable to a combination of human activities, but we don’t know which is the primary factor.’

How compelling is that? It’s hard to keep a straight face.

MET Office, BBC: Needlessly scaring people about air pollution

From the Times:

“The Met Office has admitted that it overstated the threat from air pollution yesterday and said that people had been panicked partly because it had just introduced a new forecasting system. On Tuesday the Met Office forecast that there would be high or very high levels of air pollution across southern England and the Midlands yesterday.

However, results from 130 monitoring sites showed that it remained low or moderate for most of the day over most of the country.
In the late afternoon, air pollution reached 7 on a scale of 1 to 10 in the South East and East.”

Then on the BBC’s ‘PM’ program yesterday, after spending some minutes worrying the public further with talk of keeping children and ashsmatics indoors, some truth finally emerged:

Well our scale of 1 to 10 can’t be compared to China’s… their 10 would be a hundred on our scale.

New paper links warm Atlantic oscillation with cold winter extremes

There is a new open access paper published in Environmental Research Letters by Yannick Peings and Gudrun Magnusdottir entitled ‘Forcing of the wintertime atmospheric circulation by the multidecadal fluctuations of the North Atlantic ocean’. It’s another blow to the ‘bad winter weather is caused by us wicked humans’ doom mongers such as Met Office chief scientist Julia Slingo. 

Click for larger image

Claim: Evidence of missing heat hiding in deep oceans is now hiding in deep forests

From the ‘you couldn’t make this sh1t up… oh, they did’ dept. via Reuters:

Sea level rise has been one of the clearest signs of climate change – water expands as it warms and parts of Greenland and Antarctica are thawing, along with glaciers from the Himalayas to the Alps.

But in a puzzle to climate scientists, the rate slowed to 2.4 millimeters (0.09 inch) a year from 2003 to 2011 from 3.4 mm from 1994-2002, heartening skeptics who doubt that deep cuts are needed in mankind’s rising greenhouse gas emissions.

Writing in the journal Nature Climate Change on Sunday, experts said the rate from 2003-2011 would have been 3.3 mm a year when excluding natural shifts led by an unusually high number of La Nina weather events that cool the surface of the Pacific Ocean and cause more rain over land.

“There is no slowing in the rate of sea level rise” after accounting for the natural variations, lead author Anny Cazenave of the Laboratory for Studies in Geophysics and Spatial Oceanography in Toulouse, France, told Reuters.

In La Nina years, more rain fell away from oceans, including over the Amazon, the Congo basin and Australia, she said. It is unclear if climate change itself affects the frequency of La Ninas.

Rainfall over land only temporarily brakes sea level rise.

“Eventually water that falls as rain on land comes back into the sea,” said Anders Levermann, a professor at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, who was not involved in the study. “Some of it goes into ground water but most of it will drain into rivers, or evaporate.”

HIATUS IN WARMING

The apparent slowing of sea level rise coincided with what the U.N. panel of climate experts calls a hiatus in global warming at the Earth’s surface, when temperatures have risen less sharply despite record emissions of greenhouse gases.

“The slowdown in sea level rise … is due to natural variability in the climate and is not indicative of a slowdown in the effects of global warming,” Nature Climate Change said.

Many scientists suspect that the “missing heat” from a build-up greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is going into the deep oceans as part of natural variations in the climate.

But, because water expands as it warms, that theory had been hard to reconcile with the apparent slowdown in sea level rise.

Read the full story

Jaime Jessop: Climate Wars – CO2 vs. Solar in the Battle to Lay Claim to Jet Stream Anomalies

Reblogged from Jaime Jessop’s nascent climatecontrarian site:

Climate Wars – CO2 vs. Solar in the Battle to Lay Claim to Jet Stream Anomalies
By Jaime Jessop – 23-2-2014
Mat Collins of Exeter University admitted to the world a week ago that the direct cause of the UK’s wet and windy winter was/is the North Atlantic Jet Stream. It has been directly responsible for the ‘conveyor belt’ of powerful storms which have hit the UK, one after another, in seemingly endless succession, since December 2013 all the way into February of this year. The rain precipitated by those storms has resulted in widespread river flooding.

In addition, a particularly deep depression which coincided with a very high tide on the 5th/6th December also resulted in fairly severe coastal flooding along eastern coastal areas. Nothing as bad as the devastating tidal surge of 1953 but that was more down to massively improved flood defences in the last 50 years. The Dec 2013 tidal surge was probably only a shade less menacing in terms of actual sea level rise than was the 1953 event. Severe gales and storm force winds have also driven huge waves over sea defences in Wales and the West Country, resulting in yet more localised flooding.

All this chaos due to the Jet Stream, due to the run of extreme weather caused by that Jet Stream. But, given the exhaustive news coverage and the opportunity for a propaganda coup, it was inevitable that the proponents of CO2 induced global warming would figure out some way to link in the storms with ‘climate change’ and, right on cue, up stepped Julia Slingo to claim that ‘all the evidence’ pointed to a link between the UK floods and ‘climate change’.

Somerset floods: The fingerpointing begins

‘Dear God, please don’t get me sacked’

We made a mistake, there’s no doubt about that and we perhaps relied too much on the Environment Agency’s advice.
I’ll apologise. I’ll apologise unreservedly.
I am really sorry that we took the advice … we thought we were dealing with experts.
Communities Minister Eric Pickles BBC Andrew Marr Show 9-2-2014

Ouch!

‘Dear God, please stop pissing on my parade’

No matter how many mistakes the EA makes it is not up to ministers to criticise.
Environment Agency Chief Lord Chris Smith BBC R4 ‘today’ 10-2-2014

.
.

Blimey! The mandarin speaks. Paraphrase ‘Suck it up and spit it in a bucket peasants’

GP revolt against sale of patient data gathers pace as health trusts threaten the sack

Massive threat to personal medical data privacy as automatic opt-in to is enforced. From Computing.co.uk:

More GPs either refusing to comply with care.data as first refusenik GP is threatened with the sack

Increasing numbers of GP practices are revolting against the government’s care.data scheme to extract and sell “pseudonymised” patient data to the private sector.

And GPs that refuse to comply with central government instructions to allow the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) to extract and upload patient data have been warned that they are putting their jobs at risk.

Red letter day: Printed copies of PRP special edition arrive

Around ten days ago I made an enquiry to Copernicus (the innovative science unpublishers) asking when they would be billing me for the order I made at the end of 2013. It turned out they had forgotten to do so, and they provided an invoice for a fresh order on Jan 27, 10 days after they axed the journal.

A 0.6-Million Year Record of Millennial-Scale Climate Variability in the Tropics

A 0.6-Million Year Record of Millennial-Scale Climate Variability in the Tropics†

Kelly Ann Gibson2,*, Larry C. Peterson1DOI: 10.1002/2013GL058846©2014. American Geophysical Union

Abstract

[1] A ~600-kyr long scanning X-ray fluorescence (XRF) record of redox variability from the Cariaco Basin, Venezuela, provides insight into rapid climate change in the tropics over the past five glacial-interglacial cycles. Variations in the sediment accumulation of the redox-sensitive element molybdenum (Mo) can be linked to changes in Intertropical Convergence Zone migration and reveal that millennial-scale variability is a persistent feature of tropical climate over the past 600 kyr, including during periods of interglacial warmth.

Nils-Axel Morner: An Unbelievable Decision

An Unbelievable Decision
Nils-Axel MÖRNER
Handling editor of the Special Issue of PRP

The idea that the planetary motions affect and control the solar variability is old, but in the stage of an unproven hypothesis. In recent years major advancements have occurred and in 2013, it seemed that time was ripe for a major, multi-authored, reinvestigation. Therefore, a Special Issue of Pattern Recognition in Physics was devoted to: “Pattern in solar variability, their planetary origin and terrestrial impacts”.

The volume includes 12 separate research papers and General Conclusions, co-authored by 19 prominent scientists. Indeed, they agreed that the driving factor of solar variability must emerge from the planetary beat on the Sun, and by that its emission of luminosity and Solar Wind both factors of which affect the Earth-Moon system.

Doug Proctor: The Trouble with Global warming is it’s Regional

Guest Post By Doug Proctor.

What sparked my post is  Bob Tisdale’s graphs of global temperature anomalies AND a graph that split the anomalies into Northern and Southern Hemispheres. A clear example of a computational result that misleads: the Northern Hemisphere has been warming while the Southern Hemisphere has been cooling. Not global, regional.

Plot by Bob Tisdale

What does it tell us about, in this case, “global” warming when the temperatures of inland areas correlate well to cloud cover while the coast does not, with a mentioned “protection” from sea winds? It tells us the “global” (in this case the inland + coastal area) will have a temperature rise in its combined data while only the inland area did. And it also tells us that there is no “global” cause: it is the regional cloud cover and lack of cooling seawind that is responsible. Computational, yes, representational, no.

Roger Andrews: Sunshine and Temperature study following up Euan Mearns article

Guest post from Roger Andrews, who says: ” This is a review that extends Euan Mearns’ article on sunshine hours, cloud cover and SAT in the UK over mainland Europe and the North Atlantic. It reveals some interesting features that I make no attempt to explain – basically because I can’t – but someone else may have some ideas.” Apologies to Roger A for the delay in getting this article posted.

SUNSHINE, CLOUD COVER AND SURFACE AIR TEMPERATURES IN EUROPE
by Roger Andrews

The recent “UK temperatures since 1933” post discussed the relationships between sunshine hours, which were assumed to be an inverse cloud cover proxy, on surface air temperatures (hereafter SAT) at 23 UK stations. Here I summarize the relationships between sunshine hours, cloud cover and SAT over  Europe using observations from ~30 stations selected from the European Climate Assessment (ECA) data set (acknowledgement as requested to Klein Tank, A.M.G. and Coauthors, 2002. Daily dataset of 20th-century surface air temperature and precipitation series for the European Climate Assessment. Int. J. of Climatol., 22, 1441-1453.) Station locations are shown in Figure 1:

The Austrian problem, waking up to reality

Pierre L. Gosselin at NoTricksZone has posted an article about the Austrian weather service admitting, well at least in effect, there is a problem with models, at least the computer climate kind.

Staggering Concessions By Austria’s National Weather Service: “Natural Factors Substantial…Models Inadequate”!

By P Gosselin on 27. November 2013

A November 11, 2013 press release by Austria’s national weather service, the Zentralanstalt für Meteorologie und Geodynamik (ZAMG), somehow got by me. And not surprisingly it was completely ignored by the German-language mainstream media. It’s titled: “Slower temperature increase: climate models under scrutiny“.

In the introduction the ZAMG writes:

If one compares the temperature development of the last 15 years to the simulations from the new climate model generation, then one sees a substantial deviation between reality and model: the so-called temperature hiatus.”

I wonder what the major would make of all this fuss today?  He was proud of his country, teach others how to handle snow.

Read more here http://notrickszone.com/2013/11/27/staggering-concessions-by-austrias-national-weather-service-natural-factors-substantial-models-inadequate/

Two meteorological equators, from The Hindu

Image credit Wiki

One of the more important but often ignored features of the terrestrial weather system is the ITCZ (Inter Tropical Convergence Zone), which does not stick to the geometric equator and sometimes splits into a north and south zone.

Paper: Solar wind linked electrically to terrestrial mid-latitude atmospheric pressure variation

Figure S1. A schematic diagram to explain how the mid-latitude surface pressure is influenced by IMF B in two stages… [full caption in supplement]

Figure from supplementary data. Note: to get your brain in. This is dealing with diurnal change, electric fields have an instant effect, 6MLT and 18MLT  means Magnetic Local Time[1].

The interplanetary magnetic field influences mid-latitude surface atmospheric pressure
M M Lam, G Chisham and M P Freeman
British Antarctic Survey, High Cross, Madingley Road, Cambridge CB3 0ET, UK
Open access online at stacks.iop.org/ERL/8/045001

European weather, 27 monthly videos, EUMETSAT geostationary

Co-moderator writes: I’ve copied an updated blog article (added September 2013) across from my own blog. I hope there is wide interest, a collated list of 5 to 10 minute videos showing cloud movement over a large part of Europe. The field of view changes some months and a few are infra-red, most are visible light, perhaps annoyingly going dark daily. Some have a sound commentary and a few have labels, perhaps detracting somewhat.

A variety of weather detail can be seen, such as high cloud streets pouring off the Norwegian mountains; convective storms “bubbling up”; general airflow such as cold air masses flowing out of the Arctic basin with typical cloud patterns.

September 2013 continues the repeated minor blocking weather over the UK, has been an erratic feature for several years. There is a south-west to north-east line where to the south-east there is dryer warmer (summer) or cooler (winter) air. Atlantic weather tending to bounce off, eastward movement diverting either to slide over western Scotland to the north or into the Mediterranean. Roughly speaking this is going on right now early October.

Image from the cold March 2013.