StudentOfClimatology

You are not so secretly a climate change skeptic, by the way. Your game is fairly obvious. Stop trashing your own integrity for the end game.

I'm not a skeptic at all (anymore). This board is just uninformed/out of the scientific mainstream on a lot of topics. It doesn't surprise me that you'd try and pull that one, though.

RATPAC uses several sensors. MSU products use ONE. Yes, color me skeptical when one sensor that requires several post processing techniques is being used to define the future of our planet.

At least now I know you're lying about your remote sensing education. There are 7 different MSU/AMSU satellites used in the UAH/RSS interpretations. Meanwhile, RATPAC uses no "sensors"..it is an aggregated sonde network.

Anyone putting faith in the RATPAC aggregation over the MSU/AMSU satellite networks is horribly misguided re: required homogenization and cross-verification. The former requires sunstantially more quality control despite utilizing only a fraction of the datapoints.

RATPAC has an average gridded spatial resolution 850km. That's horrible, and even getting there requires homogenizing for the lack of radiosonde coverage in remote areas.

There's a reason there are over 900 peer reviewed papers using the AMSU/MSU data for depth-based analyses, and under 50 that use the RATPAC sonde aggregation for the same purpose.

The heat/forcing is there, the satellites are simply not picking it up on the same scale as the surface datasets. You can verify this by reviewing and comparing global and northern hemisphere SST anomalies, which are warmer than 2014 by a significant margin.

At this point, we have way better alternatives to measuring the global energy budget rather than relying on MTT data. More effective metrics on decadal scales include SLR and Ocean Heat Content. As a result, we already know the 2020's will be warmer than the 2010's due to the temporal lag between ocean and land temperatures.

Troposphere temperatures are unreliable/noise-prone and variable (subject to hadley cell dynamics, global wind speeds, etc), particularly in the way UAH assimilates the data.

This is a load of crap. The lower troposphere won't respond until sometime between October and January, as usual.

The 1997-98 Niño didn't spike the TLT until mid-late November. The 2009-10 Niño took until January to do it. The 1982-83 Niño took until mid December.

What's up with the d*ck measuring contest in the sea ice forum? Haven't you guys realized noone cares about your credentials on the internet?

Reading childish stuff like this (below) gets old.

apparently you are some draconian pseudo-denier nutjob.

There are a few select posters who don't seem to add anything outside some hyperbole and half-arsed conjecture.

Lol, I think WeatherGuy#s is Paul Beckwith.

Sounds like you.

The irony in this statement is hilarious.

4 weeks does not a season make.

Let's see how August/September turn out. My guess is we will look back on spring/summer 2015 as more like 2013/14 than 2007-12. And the extent numbers will reflect that.

I'm with you on this one. The pattern going forward looks as good or better than the 2013/2014 patterns did going forward.

Paul Beckwith!

Wasn't he the guy calling for an ice free arctic in 6 months? He's either an idiot or a closer denier trying to shame the science.

I'll have to find it but a paper was written just a few years ago showing that we won't stop the next ice age. We won't even delay it that long. Mostly because we can't sustain our CO2 input into the system. It decays down to negligible amounts within like a thousand years and the power of the weaker sun just overwhelms it pretty quickly.

That's correct. We'll probably delay it by a few thousands years at most.

So, you're back to making things up. Stupid of me to expect otherwise.

Okay, but you said adapting to SLR would be more expensive than stopping it. What you're suggesting would cost trillions upon trillions of dollars that, frankly, no one actually has.

1.) Yes

2.) By abruptly shutting down all CO2 emissions, not even geoengineering can stop bottom melt. It looks like 1-4ft of SLR is locked in.

Abruptly shutting down all CO^2 emissions would cost trillions and would lead to your eventual starvation and death.

There are some extremely alarming things well within the threshold of scientific possibility with climate change. While abrupt methane feedback or sudden sea level rise is not likely in the next 100 years, there is some evidence to suggest there is a modest possibility either could actually occur. Even if that possibility is 2%, should climate scientists just sweep it under the rug? I just don't understand that logic. Why bury earth changing consequences of climate change because they are unlikely or cause "scary" PR? Look at the WAIS. No more than 10 years ago scientists that suggested inevitable collapse were heavily mocked and now that thought is becoming mainstream in literature.

Some on this board treat many of these scientifically feasible CAGW events as alarmist propaganda while other treat them like an absolute certainty. Both are wrong, IMO.

If there's one thing to be worried about, in my opinion, it's the relative dampening of the equator-to-pole thermal gradient. This is what drives keeps the circulatory network stabilized (Hadley/Ferrel/Polar). The paleoclimate data suggests that before we entered the Pleistocene era, the NH was dominated by a single Hadley cell for the majority of the solar year. A broad Hadley Cell is a weak Hadley Cell, so tropical convection and wind speeds are significantly reduced in this scenario (we can already easily this in modern day observations, including ENSO).

This alone would significantly reduce the rate of heat expulsion (latent heat released in the upper troposphere is more readily emitted than surface heat). And unlike CH4 release, an abrupt circulatory shift can occur in a very short period of time. Perhaps in a year or less.

This is the positive feedback loop I'm looking for. I can't say that the developments in 2013 and 2014 have quelled my concern, either.

The "hiatus" never had anything to do with OHC, and it's pretty obvious where the heat was/is going.

Energy flows from the atmosphere/sea surface boundary into the deeper oceans via diffusion and kinematic transport. The amount of heat transported to depth is kept in equilibrium by surface winds, which govern both the evaporative cooling process at the sea surface, and vertical overturning within the upper ocean mixing layer(s). When surface winds slow, as they have, the evaporative process will slow at the sea surface, warming the upper oceans as less thermal energy is converted into latent form and released in the upper troposphere. This spikes OHC and warms the planetary surface.

This is the mechanism behind the warming at the surface/oceans, and the absence of warming in the lower troposphere for the last 15 years.

I think each individual scientific paper needs to be assessed on its merits, in and of itself. I'm not a believer that one can broad-brush a particular journal as low-quality and consequently conclude that articles published in "low-quality journals" are also of low-quality. This was my disagreement in the E&E discussion. A journal's flaws is not necessarily relevant to the science published in a particular paper. There are drawbacks to every journal ranking measure that I've seen. A possible superior measure to the impact factor could be utilizing the h-index, but only in reference to an individual scientist, not to rank journals. However, even that, could be contaminated by politics. An excellent, objective measure of assessing the quality of an individual scientist's work doesn't really exist in my view.

I couldn't agree more with this, overall. You pretty much hit the nail on the head.

That said, it's also okay to acknowledge that E&E has published bulls**t science in the past, due to the very political bias issue you brought up at the end of your post. Therefore, giving E&E additional scrutiny, irrespective of whatever individual publication is in reference, is fully understandable.

The flow of water from the Atlantic through to Pacific only ceased at the Panama Isthmus about 2.7 million years ago....so ocean currents were vastly different before that and this creates the problem of a state-dependent climate sensitivity when we study paleoclimate before that period.

Arguing that the Isthmus closure renders the prior paleoclimate data non-analogous to modern day ESC seems like a stretch to me. Maybe it'd impact TCR-based studies more? Either way, I was putting the majority of my emphasis on the late Pleistocene. The data is pretty solid at this point, from what I know.

Even more recently, we can try and constrain ECS, but we haven't been very effective. I've read conflicting papers based on paleo data...where some claim that we must have an ECS closer to 4C where others using the last interglacial place ECS confidently below 4C with a best estimate somewhere around 2.5C.

Can you refer me to these papers? I suspect they diverge in estimating historical TCR and/or it's degree of variability. It's easy to get a faulty ESC via the paleo-data when using an incorrect TCR, or assuming that's TCR is unchanging.

The problem with paleo data of millions of years old is that it is representing a very different climate system than the current one. More recent within the past few hundred thousand years is preferable since the oceans were closer to the their current geographical state...and of course, we know OHC component is an important part of ECS calculation.

I think you're overestimating the speed of continental drift. Even five million years ago geologic configuration was essentially a copy of today's.

I can see how that argument may have merit on longer geologic scales where planetary geology was different, but not on the scale of a few million years. We have good mineral and ice-core derived data on at least the last 4 interstadials, and the last million+ years of swings into and out of ice ages.

You seem surprised by a lot of things that are debated in here...including the dubious accuracy of satellites. You shouldn't be surprised. There's a reason that error bars are listed as what they are, and it is because there isn't good agreement in the body of scientific evidence that warrants them lower.

I'm surprised at some the foundational debate in here, yes. When I see people arguing for a certain dataset because it's published potential error is 0.05K/decade vs 0.08K/decade, despite the fact that the two datasets are measuring entirely different domains, I'm surprised. The surface vs satellite debate is nothing short of stupid, because potential error does equate to realized error, and the two are not even remotely similar regarding what they're measuring in the first place. If that's not bad enough, some in here are arguing for error via stratospheric contamination and interpolation algorithms when they should be looking at sensor degradation and merging inconsistencies.

I'm not sure what's the point of discussing a paper with an ECS under 1.5C. Unless you don't believe the surface temperature record, any value under that doesn't even match reality. We are currently 0.9C warmer than preindustrial times. Unless you think warming stops now abruptly for decades...

Not just that, but the paleoclimate record also points to a high ESC. We have several million years of solid, high-resolution proxy data suggesting that ESC is at least 2.5C, probably higher. I'm surprised this is still even debated because the observational data is doing exactly what the paleo data suggests it should.

I don't agree. My only take-away from the article is that E&E is being attacked for allowing papers to be published which do not fit the agenda of the accusers. It proves nothing pertaining to the science of paper(s). Furthermore, if anyone truly believes that there aren't journal editors who purposely exclude papers with low sensitivity conclusions, then they're very naïve.

Some of the science that's come out of E&E has been pretty bad. Let's not forget the iron Sun debacle.

Ugh, Energy & Enviroment is not a good publication to cite from.

While I agree, that alone doesn't refute any of the science published there. It's important to critique the science itself, rather than the source.

I've read a few decent papers in E&E myself.

Don't be like that. I'll post quality stuff when you guys talk about real topics.

You've never posted "quality stuff" a day in your life..why start now?

Sounds like the old SOC all over again.

What are you referring to, exactly?

You are underestimating the importance of condensation vs evaporation. Here is a plot of current mean annual temperature vs isotope ratio for samples collected at different locations in Antarctica and Greenland. Note the Antarctic data is Deuterium and Greenland is O18. There is a very good correlation between isotope ratio in current snow samples and the local mean annual temperature. O18 is removed preferentially over the lowest and warmest portions of the ice sheet so by the time water vapor reaches the highest and coldest locations it has been significantly depleted in O18.

That's just because Arctic temperatures tend to track in line with northern hemispheric temperatures. There is scarcely any DO^18 evaporated from polar waters, relatively speaking, and the ratio found in the cores is much higher than what can be physically evaporated from waters above 50N..a good 70-80% of the DO^18 precipitated over polar regions was not locally evaporated.

Similarly when an ice core shows a temperature change of 10C in a short period of time during the Younger Dryas it doesn't mean that the mean global temperature varied by 10C - obviously the oceans can't warm or cool that quickly.

Unfortunately, this is not the case either, because (as has been explained) the isotope ratios in the ice cores depict hemispheric SSTs, not global SSTs or regional SSTs. The Vostok cores, for example, can only depict southern hemispheric temperatures due to the nature of the Hadley Cells..visa versa for the GISP2 cores.

Yes The ice core records are broadly indicative of regional and hemispheric temperatures but are most closely related to cloud temperatures when snow condenses. The measured oxygen isotope ratios in the core are usually converted to temperatures by collecting current ice sheet snow and temperature data and correlating the local isotope ratios and temperatures

The bold is where you make a leap...that's only half of what determines the weight of the ratio. Remember that the temperature at which evaporation occurs determines the initial O^16/O^18 ratio before the precipitation process occurs..polar SSTs are usually too cold to sufficiently evaporate O^18 at the ratio observed in the cores. A good portion of the O^18 that precipitates over the poles has a tropical/subtropical source. These isotopes are subsequently rained out during the condensation process and relatively few are transported to the poles. So, warmer tropical/mid-latitude oceans will lead to more O^18 being transported poleward.

For all intents and purposes, ice cores are hemispheric SST proxies.