Sky-high hole blown in AGW theory?

Two stories have dropped that may blow big holes in the anthropogenic global warming argument — one of which is literally sky-high. Forbes reports on a peer-reviewed study that uses NASA data to show that the effects of carbon-based warming have been significantly exaggerated. In fact, much of the heat goes out into space rather than stay trapped in the atmosphere, an outcome that started long before AGW alarmists predicted:

It should be noted that Dr. Spencer is a longtime AGW skeptic, but that doesn’t negate the NASA readings on which this study’s conclusions are based. If heat is escaping into the atmosphere at much higher rates than AGW computer models predict, then the outcome of AGW models will be highly biased towards the catastrophic outcomes. The problem, as Spencer notes in the press release, is that AGW theory makes too many assumptions based on incomplete data:

That could explain why global temperatures have failed to soar over the last 20 years as predicted, too.

Spencer’s study rebuts some poor but probably sincere assumptions from AGW theorists. Not every researcher falls into that category, however. The AP reports today that one researcher whose work “galvanized” AGW hysteria over the fate of polar bears has suddenly been suspended as his work on that claim has come under scrutiny for potential scientific misconduct:

The IG hasn’t published any conclusions about the investigation, and indeed hadn’t published that there is an investigation. It came to light when PEER announced that it would sue to reinstate Monnett, claiming that he was being persecuted for political reasons. That would be a rather interesting charge to make in an administration that wants to impose AGW-based policy in part on Monnett’s work. Had the probe started during the Bush administration, it might be a little easier to believe that it was politically motivated.

AGW advocates insist that people respect the scientific consensus that we’re all going to kill Mother Earth if we don’t take radical action now to stop emissions of a natural substance into the atmosphere. However, we don’t have consensus, and what little we do have seems less and less scientific as data emerges.

Looking for more detail...from Watts Up With that this may help:

Pielke Sr. on new Spencer and Braswell paper

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Posted on July 26, 2011 by Anthony Watts

http://nola2010.hamptonu.edu/EarthBalanceGSFC.gif

Earth Balance - Source: Allison, Mead A., Arthur T. DeGaetano, Jay M. Pasachoff. /Earth Science/. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 2006.

Reposted from Dr. Roger Pielke Sr’s blog

New Paper “On the Misdiagnosis Of Surface Temperature Feedbacks From Variations In Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance” By Spencer and Braswell 2011

There is a new paper published which raises further questions on the robustness of multi-decadal global climate predictions. It is

Spencer, R.W.; Braswell, W.D. On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance. Remote Sens. 2011, 3, 1603-1613.

The University of Alabama has issues a news release on it which reads [h/t to Phillip Gentry]
Climate models get energy balance wrong, make too hot forecasts of global warming

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (July 26, 2011) — Data from NASA’s Terra satellite shows that when the climate warms, Earth’s atmosphere is apparently more efficient at releasing energy to space than models used to forecast climate change have been programmed to “believe.”

The result is climate forecasts that are warming substantially faster than the atmosphere, says Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist in the Earth System Science Center at The University of Alabama in Huntsville.

The previously unexplained differences between model-based forecasts of rapid global warming and meteorological data showing a slower rate of warming have been the source of often contentious debate and controversy for more than two decades.

In research published this week in the journal “Remote Sensing” http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/3/8/1603/pdf, Spencer and UA Huntsville’s Dr. Danny Braswell compared what a half dozen climate models say the atmosphere should do to satellite data showing what the atmosphere actually did during the 18 months before and after warming events between 2000 and 2011.

“The satellite observations suggest there is much more energy lost to space during and after warming than the climate models show,” Spencer said. “There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans.”

Not only does the atmosphere release more energy than previously thought, it starts releasing it earlier in a warming cycle. The models forecast that the climate should continue to absorb solar energy until a warming event peaks. Instead, the satellite data shows the climate system starting to shed energy more than three months before the typical warming event reaches its peak.

“At the peak, satellites show energy being lost while climate models show energy still being gained,” Spencer said.

This is the first time scientists have looked at radiative balances during the months before and after these transient temperature peaks.

Applied to long-term climate change, the research might indicate that the climate is less sensitive to warming due to increased carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere than climate modelers have theorized. A major underpinning of global warming theory is that the slight warming caused by enhanced greenhouse gases should change cloud cover in ways that cause additional warming, which would be a positive feedback cycle.

Instead, the natural ebb and flow of clouds, solar radiation, heat rising from the oceans and a myriad of other factors added to the different time lags in which they impact the atmosphere might make it impossible to isolate or accurately identify which piece of Earth’s changing climate is feedback from manmade greenhouse gases.

“There are simply too many variables to reliably gauge the right number for that,” Spencer said. “The main finding from this research is that there is no solution to the problem of measuring atmospheric feedback, due mostly to our inability to distinguish between radiative forcing and radiative feedback in our observations.”

For this experiment, the UA Huntsville team used surface temperature data gathered by the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Great Britain. The radiant energy data was collected by the Clouds and Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) instruments aboard NASA’s Terra satellite.

The six climate models were chosen from those used by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The UA Huntsville team used the three models programmed using the greatest sensitivity to radiative forcing and the three that programmed in the least sensitivity.

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Dr. Spencer has a pdf available. He discussed the findings here.

On the polar Bears....from Watts Up With That?:

Al Gore’s “drowned polar bear” AIT source under investigation

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Posted on July 28, 2011 by Anthony Watts

"ursus bogus" fake image used in a Science magazine article - click for story

According to AP/Anchorage Daily News, he’s on leave pending results of investigation. It seems everywhere you look, there’s some sort of fakery going on with the polar bear issue. For example, the image at left, where Science magazine used this fake image to hype the issue. And of course, everyone remembers the scene from the 2005 Al Gore science fiction movie An Inconvenient Truth, where Gore had an animated clip of the polar bear in danger of drowning, trying to get onto a tiny ice flow made smaller, presumably by global warming. Gore cited this study about drowned polar bears.

(AP) JUNEAU, Alaska — A federal wildlife biologist whose observation in 2004 of presumably drowned polar bears in the Arctic helped to galvanize the global warming movement has been placed on administrative leave and is being investigated for scientific misconduct, possibly over the veracity of that article.

Full story:

http://www.adn.com/2011/07/28/1989382/arctic-scientist-under-investigation.html

This 2008 World Climate Report essay shows why an investigation is needed:

Where Are All The Drowning Polar Bears?

The Interior Department just announced its decision to list the polar bear as “threatened” under the U.S Endangered Species Act (ESA). The justification behind the decision is that polar bears are highly dependent on sea ice in the Arctic for their livelihood—hunting, mating, birthing, family rearing, etc.—and thus if sea ice declines, so will the overall health of the species.

While this may, in fact, be true in some sense, it also gives short-shrift to the bears adaptive abilities, which must be large, given that they survived the previous interglacial warm period as well as an extended period of warmer-than-present conditions in the Arctic (which undoubtedly were associated with reduced sea ice levels) about 5,000 to 7,000 years ago (give or take a thousand years) (see here fore example). If the bears fare worse this time around, it will mostly likely be because their natural adaptive response may run up against a human roadblock in the form of habitat disruption or other types of difficulties that an increased human presence may pose to the adapting bears. It seems that this is what the intent of the ESA is aimed at tempering, not trying to alter the climate—precisely how the Act should have be applied, despite all the criticism surrounding the decision.

All this renewed attention to polar bears has piqued our interest in just how the bears have been faring recently. Al Gore made movie stars out of drowning bears in his 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth with an animation sequence depicting a small patch of floating ice disintegrating under a struggling polar bear until it was left swimming alone in a vast expanse of open ocean. One couldn’t help to get a little teary-eyed at the notion.

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more at the WUWT website

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