SurfaceStations.org paper Accepted

[tacoman25]

Spencer is absolutely an extremist activist. He spends a large portion of his time writing and speaking to the public denying AGW using arguments and facts that are completely unsubstantiated in the peer-review literature. In fact, his public statements are frequently are at odds with what he has published in peer-review himself. Only a small portion of his time, especially in recent years, has been spent conducting and publishing actual science in peer-review journals.

Translation: Spencer is a skeptic scientist.

Extremist activist? Don't be ridiculous. How many times has Spencer been arrested? Has he written an extremist book on par with Hansen's alarmist Storms of My Grandchildren - The truth about the coming climate catastrophe and our last chance to save humanity?

[tacoman25]

There is no inconsistency.

I am not casting aspersions on his peer-reviewed work. I am saying that his extra-curricular activist activities for the heritage foundation and his book deals are unscientific blather. Which is precisely why it gets published by the Heritage foundation instead of in peer-reviewed journals. It's as if you didn't read what I wrote at all.

How do you not understand the difference between casting aspersions on the utter nonsense he has published on his own and via the Heritage foundation, and casting aspersions on his work which has actually been peer-reviewed?

Please reference this "utter nonsense" and his "activist activities", as well as "unscientific blather".

Roy Spencer believes the IPCC climate models predict too much warming. He does not deny AGW, publicly or in his published work. So please back up your sudden and obviously desperate accusations.

[skierinvermont]

Translation: Spencer is a skeptic scientist.

No.. a scientist engages in dialog with his peers via the peer-review process and professional communication at conferences and collaborative work.

Spencer has done absolutely no such work to support his skepticism. Zero. Nada. He doesn't direct his skeptic arguments at a scientific audience, he directs them at the general public. Which is activism. To make money. Not science.

[skierinvermont]

Please reference this "utter nonsense" and his "activist activities", as well as "unscientific blather".

Roy Spencer believes the IPCC climate models predict too much warming. He does not deny AGW, publicly or in his published work. So please back up your sudden and obviously desperate accusations.

For example, arguments in his book are directly contradicted by his own peer-reviewed work, and the peer-reviewed work of others:

http://www.realclima...arming-blunder/

His whole deal about cloud's being a massive negative feedback has never been published in a scientific journal and is contradicted by large amounts of evidence and peer-reviewed articles. I can provide you with dozens of peer-reviewed articles which contradict the arguments he has made elsewhere. It's possible that clouds are a weak negative feedback or a weak positive one.. but his claims that they are a strong negative feedback are completely unsubstantiated. Which is why he has never been able to get them published. So he feeds them to the public in his speaking engagements and book deals for CASH.

And then there was that classic blog post where he developed a statistical "model" to show that the warming was natural... only Mallow and I both proved that the model uses flawed statistical methods which would predict infinite warming due to natural oscillations of the PDO. This is the kind of unscientific blather which would never make it through the peer-review process.

The list goes on and on .. the caliber of his non-peer-reviewed work is not at all comparable to the work he has done on UAH TLT.

[ORH_wxman]

Ooh cheerleading...!

trixie pwn'd you all.. it is nice to have other people in this forum who understand how real science is done

Uhhh...no. She called Watts a nutjob and then when I said the same could be said for big AGW alarmists like Hansen, she started blabbering about peer review science. Then when tacoman asked what basis there is to call Watts a nutjob and then cited multiple arrests of Hansen, she again turned back to the concept of peer review which isn't what he was asking at all in the first place.

[tacoman25]

No.. a scientist engages in dialog with his peers via the peer-review process and professional communication at conferences and collaborative work.

Spencer has done absolutely no such work to support his skepticism. Zero. Nada. He doesn't direct his skeptic arguments at a scientific audience, he directs them at the general public. Which is activism. To make money. Not science.

Like Hansen, Spencer engages both the general public and his scientific peers. Unlike Hansen, Spencer does not fall near the extreme end of the spectrum, and he doesn't get arrested for activist activities.

[BethesdaWX]

it is nice to have other people in this forum who understand how real science is done

And you're obviously not one of them. The only people who take you seriously here are soft-nosed Liberals like Trix, Rusty, etc... You are in good Company

I mean really:

-You Hug GISS/Hansen, and Ignore NCDC, NSIDC, for surface analysis, depite their better reputations and non-activism...

-Call Roy Spencer a crazy Activist, and are unaware that his activism has nothing to do with UAH.....

-Make Love to non-operational Datasets like STAR, who's flawed infrared channels have kept it out of mainstream critism.......

And you expect to be taken seriously by objective posters? Nzucker, ORH, Taco, Clifford, have all contributed valuable insight here, and have essentially put you to rest, or on ignore. Your Social life would improve if you could take notice of this.

I'm sorry to break this to you.........this "AGW Catastrophe" just isn't going to happen. Its getting blatantly obvious now. Sure, there is a small amount of CO2 warming, and yes, we're hurting the environment with pollution, and should not burn through all these Fossil fuels so quickly, but it should begin to dawn on you soon enough.

You'll have your "coming out of the closet" moment sometime in the next decade.

[tacoman25]

For example, arguments in his book are directly contradicted by his own peer-reviewed work, and the peer-reviewed work of others:

http://www.realclima...arming-blunder/

His whole deal about cloud's being a massive negative feedback has never been published in a scientific journal and is contradicted by large amounts of evidence and peer-reviewed articles. I can provide you with dozens of peer-reviewed articles which contradict the arguments he has made elsewhere. It's possible that clouds are a weak negative feedback or a weak positive one.. but his claims that they are a strong negative feedback are completely unsubstantiated. Which is why he has never been able to get them published. So he feeds them to the public in his speaking engagements and book deals for CASH.

From Wikipedia:

In August, 2007, Spencer and others published an article in Geophysical Research Letters regarding cloud feedback in the tropics.^[10] Current understanding of the climate system predicts that an increase in high-level, heat trapping clouds will accelerate global warming. Spencer's observations in the tropics found a negative feedback, and a lower climate sensitivity than the current consensus. Spencer and colleagues state that the negative feedback possibly supports Richard Lindzen's Infrared Iris hypothesis of compensating meteorological processes that tend to stabilize climate change.^[11]

In a subsequent press release, Spencer said, "To give an idea of how strong this enhanced cooling mechanism is, if it was operating on global warming, it would reduce estimates of future warming by over 75 percent... The big question that no one can answer right now is whether this enhanced cooling mechanism applies to global warming." ^[12]

In 2008, Spencer and a colleague published a paper in the Journal of Climate which stated that conventional diagnoses of positive cloud feedback are artificially biased positive, because they ignore natural cloud variability.^[13] Climate model analyses treat decreasing cloud cover as an evidence of positive feedback of atmosphere to initial CO₂ induced warming, while it easily could be the other way around: the real cause of warming could be small naturally caused variations in cloud cover with rising temperatures as a result.

[skierinvermont]

Like Hansen, Spencer engages both the general public and his scientific peers. Unlike Hansen, Spencer does not fall near the extreme end of the spectrum, and he doesn't get arrested for activist activities.

Spencer doesn't engage his peers on climate change. He engages them on the development of UAH temperature measurement. His skeptical arguments have never been peer-reviewed.

In terms of how extreme they are compared to the consensus, Hansen falls at the high end of the mainstream view of temperature change and sea level rise. Spencer falls far below the accepted range of uncertainty.

[tacoman25]

One thing I like about Spencer is that he at least appears to have a greater humility (and sense of perspective, imo) about science than many other scientists.

From a op-ed piece he wrote for the New York Post a few years ago:

Contrary to popular accounts, very few scientists in the world – possibly none – have a sufficiently thorough, "big picture" understanding of the climate system to be relied upon for a prediction of the magnitude of global warming. To the public, we all might seem like experts, but the vast majority of us work on only a small portion of the problem.

Yup...sounds like a real whack-job extremist.

[skierinvermont]

From Wikipedia:

In August, 2007, Spencer and others published an article in Geophysical Research Letters regarding cloud feedback in the tropics.^[10] Current understanding of the climate system predicts that an increase in high-level, heat trapping clouds will accelerate global warming. Spencer's observations in the tropics found a negative feedback, and a lower climate sensitivity than the current consensus. Spencer and colleagues state that the negative feedback possibly supports Richard Lindzen's Infrared Iris hypothesis of compensating meteorological processes that tend to stabilize climate change.^[11]

In a subsequent press release, Spencer said, "To give an idea of how strong this enhanced cooling mechanism is, if it was operating on global warming, it would reduce estimates of future warming by over 75 percent... The big question that no one can answer right now is whether this enhanced cooling mechanism applies to global warming." ^[12]

In 2008, Spencer and a colleague published a paper in the Journal of Climate which stated that conventional diagnoses of positive cloud feedback are artificially biased positive, because they ignore natural cloud variability.^[13] Climate model analyses treat decreasing cloud cover as an evidence of positive feedback of atmosphere to initial CO₂ induced warming, while it easily could be the other way around: the real cause of warming could be small naturally caused variations in cloud cover with rising temperatures as a result.

If you read these articles you will find they argue that the cloud feedback is biased positive, not that it is strongly negative. In other words, they do not support and even implicitly contradict his non-scientific work.

[tacoman25]

In terms of how extreme they are compared to the consensus, Hansen falls at the high end of the mainstream view of temperature change and sea level rise. Spencer falls far below the accepted range of uncertainty.

Give me a break. The other end of the spectrum would be those who completely deny AGW. Spencer does not and doesn't present himself that way to the public. He is not an extremist. Hansen is.

[skierinvermont]

Give me a break. The other end of the spectrum would be those who completely deny AGW. Spencer does not and doesn't present himself that way to the public. He is not an extremist. Hansen is.

The spectrum of uncertainty remotely supportable in the peer-review literature at this point is 1.5-5C per doubling. Hansen falls within this, Spencer does not.

[tacoman25]

If you read these articles you will find they argue that the cloud feedback is biased positive, not that it is strongly negative. In other words, they do not support and even implicitly contradict his non-scientific work.

I see no statements from him that contradict those papers. They indicate a negative feedback, and they were published in scientific journals.

Regardless, arguing minutia like this is just avoiding the real issue: you are trying to paint Spencer as an equal activist to Hansen, but on the opposite end of the spectrum. Completely ridiculous and misleading.

[skierinvermont]

I see no statements from him that contradict those papers. They indicate a negative feedback, and they were published in scientific journals.

Regardless, arguing minutia like this is just avoiding the real issue: you are trying to paint Spencer as an equal activist to Hansen, but on the opposite end of the spectrum. Completely ridiculous and misleading.

They argue that the cloud feedback may be biased slightly positive. In his book and on his blogs and in his speaking engagements he claims that the feedback is strongly negative. There is a world of difference. The claim that the feedback is strongly negative is completely unsubstantiated and easily disprovable.

[tacoman25]

The spectrum of uncertainty remotely supportable in the peer-review literature at this point is 1.5-5C per doubling. Hansen falls within this, Spencer does not.

Sorry, but the scientific consensus at this point on a very uncertain and unproven issue is far from the bible. Saying that someone is an "extremist" because they don't agree with the mainstream viewpoint is wrong.

[skierinvermont]

Doesn't sound like humility to me... either everyone else is stupid or they are corrupt:

I find it difficult to believe that I am the first researcher to figure out what I describe in this book. Either I am smarter than the rest of the world’s climate scientists–which seems unlikely–or there are other scientists who also have evidence that global warming could be mostly natural, but have been hiding it. That is a serious charge, I know, but it is a conclusion that is difficult for me to avoid. (p. xxvii)

The first thing a true scientist should think of in a situation like this doesn't seem to have even occurred to Spencer. "What if I'm wrong?" He was.

[skierinvermont]

Sorry, but the scientific consensus at this point on a very uncertain and unproven issue is far from the bible. Saying that someone is an "extremist" because they don't agree with the mainstream viewpoint is wrong.

There are dozens of peer-reviewed journal articles proving that the response to doubling CO2 is unquestionably between 1.5 and 5C. Find something, anything, wrong with these publications, and maybe you will have my attention.

[tacoman25]

They argue that the cloud feedback may be biased slightly positive. In his book and on his blogs and in his speaking engagements he claims that the feedback is strongly negative. There is a world of difference. The claim that the feedback is strongly negative is completely unsubstantiated and easily disprovable.

From what I've read, it appears that he presents his findings in stronger words in his books/blogs than he does in his published literature - which is true of many scientists, simply because you must word things very carefully in a scientific paper. His basic hypthesis remains the same, you just seem to want to argue semantics.

[tacoman25]

Doesn't sound like humility to me... either everyone else is stupid or they are corrupt:

I find it difficult to believe that I am the first researcher to figure out what I describe in this book. Either I am smarter than the rest of the world’s climate scientists–which seems unlikely–or there are other scientists who also have evidence that global warming could be mostly natural, but have been hiding it. That is a serious charge, I know, but it is a conclusion that is difficult for me to avoid. (p. xxvii)

The first thing a true scientist should think of in a situation like this doesn't seem to have even occurred to Spencer. "What if I'm wrong?" He was.

He's speaking partly tongue-in-cheek (he obviously doesn't think he's the smartest man alive), but also expressing an honest viewpoint. He doesn't think his research is so brilliant that no one else could have discovered something similar.

You don't know just from that excerpt that he never considered the possibility that he was wrong. Unlike Hansen, I don't see him making bold and extreme predictions about the future, which speaks more to pride (and thinking you can't be wrong) than anything else.

[tacoman25]

There are dozens of peer-reviewed journal articles proving that the response to doubling CO2 is unquestionably between 1.5 and 5C. Find something, anything, wrong with these publications, and maybe you will have my attention.

Really? So with something that has so much uncertainty that it has a range where the higher number is more than 300% of the lower number, you are telling me anything beyond that range is "unquestionably" wrong? Sorry, but that's just silly.

[skierinvermont]

Really? So with something that has so much uncertainty that it has a range where the higher number is more than 300% of the lower number, you are telling me anything beyond that range is "unquestionably" wrong? Sorry, but that's just silly.

No it's not, if climate sensitivity were any less than that it would be impossible to explain the large swings in temperature in the earth's history. If the earth had all these strongly negative feedbacks then there's no which temperatures could fluctuate as much as they have.

[skierinvermont]

Looks like people in the field had the same complaint Mallow and I had about Spencer's "model." Natural oscillations in the PDO produce infinite warming.

http://arthur.shumwa..._degree_warming

If we run a reconstruction of the PDO since 993 AD through his model, temperatures rise 6 trillion degrees over the course of the next 1000 years, simply due to the PDO oscillating.

These are the sorts of blatant errors that would be caught by peer-review which is why it's unfortunate Spencer is choosing to ignore the peer-review process.

[tacoman25]

No it's not, if climate sensitivity were any less than that it would be impossible to explain the large swings in temperature in the earth's history. If the earth had all these strongly negative feedbacks then there's no which temperatures could fluctuate as much as they have.

Well, the popular viewpoint seems to be that we are about as warm now as we've been since the last ice age. So in the somewhat modern era, we've seen temperatures fluctuate between this warm and much colder. There seems to be more evidence of negative feedbacks leading to runaway cooling (ice age) than positive feedbacks leading to runaway warming.

[skierinvermont]

Well, the popular viewpoint seems to be that we are about as warm now as we've been since the last ice age. So in the somewhat modern era, we've seen temperatures fluctuate between this warm and much colder. There seems to be more evidence of negative feedbacks leading to runaway cooling (ice age) than positive feedbacks leading to runaway warming.

Negative feedbacks prevent cooling or warming. Positive feedbacks enhance warming or cooling.

Definition of Feedback

[tacoman25]

Looks like people in the field had the same complaint Mallow and I had about Spencer's "model." Natural oscillations in the PDO produce infinite warming.

http://arthur.shumwa..._degree_warming

If we run a reconstruction of the PDO since 993 AD through his model, temperatures rise 6 trillion degrees over the course of the next 1000 years, simply due to the PDO oscillating.

These are the sorts of blatant errors that would be caught be peer-review which is why it's unfortunate Spencer is choosing to ignore the peer-review process.

And was that critique run through the peer review process?

It sounds like it depends on the pre-1900 PDO data/reconstructions, which are sketchy at best.

[tacoman25]

Negative feedbacks prevent cooling or warming. Positive feedbacks enhance warming or cooling.

Definition of Feedback

Whoops, I knew that. But you see my point, I hope. The evidence more strongly supports feedbacks leading to runaway/rapid cooling (ice ages), than runaway warming.

[skierinvermont]

And was that critique run through the peer review process?

It sounds like it depends on the pre-1900 PDO data/reconstructions, which are sketchy at best.

It doesn't matter whether the reconstruction is accurate. The point is that oscillations in the PDO produce infinite warming. If the PDO oscillates from -1 to +1 to -1 in his model, that produces net warming. If it does it again, it produces further warming. Etc. etc.

This is a pretty straightforward blatant error.

[skierinvermont]

Whoops, I knew that. But you see my point, I hope. The evidence more strongly supports feedbacks leading to runaway/rapid cooling (ice ages), than runaway warming.

That is simply indicative of the high level of positive feedbacks. These same positive feedbacks produced the rapid warming that ended the ice ages and produced the holocene thermal max with trees growing on the siberian coast. When you create warming via the energy imbalance caused by CO2 (NOBODY denies this) then the positive feedbacks will amplify this warming.

[BethesdaWX]

Andrew, you are so clueless sometimes, its sad and unfortunate in my view... Positive feedbacks... Noope.

You have no knowledge of the climate system, but I can help you here, this is my area of "specialty"... if you wanna call it that. You're a funny dude, but everything you assert is either assumtion or blatently false... unfortunately, and it is easy to demonstratre why.

You should know, The only reason cloud cover is assumed to be a positive feedback in climate models is because we notice that there is less GCC in warm years.....thats it....we have no Mechanism for why GCC would decrease as a "result" of warming... but we have a mechanism to how GCC decrease would cause warming... and how that would drive the climate and the rising OHC. More water vapor would also coincide with more GCC, not less. But the real issue is is LLGCC (low Level), not upper level.

I hope you understand that Less GCC causing warming instead of amplified GHE would completely explain GISS/Surface data warming faster that the LT...

Low-level clouds cover more than a quarter of the Earth's surface and exert a strong cooling effect on the surface. A 2% change in low clouds during a solar cycle will change the heat input to the Earth's surface by 1.2 watts per square metre (W/m²). This compares to the total warming of 1.4 W/m² the IPCC cites in the 20th century. (The IPCC does not recognize the effect of the Sun and Cosmic rays, and attributes the warming to CO2.)

Cosmic ray flux can be determined from radioactive isotopes such as beryllium-10, or the Sun’s open coronal magnetic field. The two independent cosmic ray proxies confirm that there has been a dramatic reduction in the cosmic ray flux during the 20th century as the Sun has gained intensity and the Sun's coronal magnetic field has doubled in strength.

The overall reflectance (albedo) of planet Earth is about 30 percent, meaning that about 30 percent of the incoming shortwave solar radiation is radiated back to space. If all clouds were removed, the global albedo would decrease to about 15 percent, and the amount of shortwave energy available for warming the planet surface would increase from 239 W/m² to 288 W/m² (Hartmann 1994). However, the longwave radiation would also be affected, with 266 W/m² being emitted to space, compared to the present 234 W/m² (Hartmann 1994). The net effect of removing all clouds would therefore still be an increase in net radiation of about 17 W/m². So the global cloud cover has a clear overall cooling effect on the planet, even though the net effect of high and low clouds are opposite. This is not a pure theoretical consideration, but is demonstrated by observations (see diagram below).

Variations in solar irradiance are recognized as a fundamental forcing factor in the climate system and may directly or indirectly influence the amount of clouds. For instance it is generally believed that the main cause of the cold intervals during the Little Ice Age 1300-1900 was reduced solar irradiance (Lean and Rind 1998; Shindell et al. 2001).

The solar irradiance varies by about 0.1 percent over the approximate 11-year solar cycle, which would appear to be too small to have an impact on climate. Nevertheless, many observations suggest the presence of 11-year signals in various meteorological time series, e.g., sea surface temperature (White et al. 1997) and cloudiness over North America (Udelhofen and Cess 2001). The flux of galactic cosmic rays (GCR) varies inversely with the solar cycle. Svensmark and Friis-Christensen (1997) suggested that GCR enhance low cloud formation, explaining variations on the order of 3 percent global total cloud cover over a solar cycle.

A 3 percent cloud cover change corresponds to a radiative net change of about 0.5 W/m^2, which may be compared with the IPCC 2007 estimate of 1.6 W/m² for the total effect of all recognized climatic drivers 1750-2006, including release of greenhouse gasses from the burning of fossil fuels. Since clouds have a net cooling effect on climate, the above would imply (Svensmark 1998) that the estimated reduction of cosmic ray flux during the 20th century (Marsh and Svensmark 2000) might have been responsible for a significant part of the observed warming. Since 1983, the cooling cover of low clouds have decreased from 29% to about 25%, During the same period the net change of warming high clouds have been small.

The new hypothesis on cloud formation being influenced by the intensity of galactic cosmic rays has been exposed to critique (Kristjánsson et al. 2002; Kristjánsson et al. 2004). Later, however, new experiments demonstrated that cosmic rays may indeed produce cloud condensation nuclei (CCN's). By way of the SKY experiment in Copenhagen was demonstrated how electrons set free in the air by passing cosmic rays help to assemble building blocks for CCN's (Svensmark et al. 2006, Svensmark 2007).

As more experiments are carried out and longer and improved dataseries on cloud cover, cosmic rays, atmospheric water vapour, the amount of atmospheric aerosols, etc. are established, knowledge on cloud cover formation will improve. Until all processes controlling cloud formation are thoroughly understood, any attempt of modelling future climate change may well prove in vain.

The Sun

The spectral analysis shown here is from sediment cores obtained from Effingham Inlet, Vancouver Island, British Columbia. The annually deposited laminations of the core are linked to the changing climate conditions. The analysis shows a strong correlation to the 11-year sunspot cycle.

N. Shaviv and J. Veiser using seashell thermometers shows a strong correlation between temperature and the cosmic ray flux over the last 520 million years.

Cosmic Ray Flux and Tropical Temperature Variation Over the Phanerozoic 520 million years

Sun and Cosmic Rays

During the 20th century the Sun has continued to warm and may have contributed directly to a third of the warming over the last hundred years. The change in solar output is too small to directly account for most of the observed warming. However, the Sun-Cosmic Ray connection provides an amplification mechanism by which a small change in solar irradiance will have a large effect on climate.

A paper by H. Svensmark and E. Friis-Christensen of the Center for Sun-Climate Research of the Danish National Space Center in Copenhagen has shown that cosmic rays highly correlate to low cloud formation. Changes in the intensity of galactic cosmic rays alter the Earth’s cloudiness.

A recent experiment in 2005 shows the effect of cosmic rays in a reaction chamber containing air and trace chemicals found over the oceans. Electrons released in the air by cosmic rays act as a catalyst in making aerosols. They significantly accelerate the formation of stable, ultra-small clusters of sulphuric acid and water molecules, which are the building block for the cloud condensation nuclei.