Trenberth's game of Whack-a-Mole aint over yet

[IanC]

oh-oh! a new paper shows clouds cause cooling not warming. will Trenberth call for the head of another journal editor? hahaha.

how many lances have to go in before the bull of settled science goes down for the count? its already haemorraging badly and the recent exaggerations and follies like the Times-Atlas and NASA's vengeful aliens arent helping CAGW either.

Im on my phone so you'll have to get the abstract (or whole paper) from WUWT.

 

[ScienceRocks]

If it is about Spencer modeling the enso then this is laughable. Spencer was way off in modeling it.

Trenberth, Fasullo, and Abraham Respond to Spencer and Braswell
Here is the others side refuting it with there idea's lining up with the real data. That is what is important in science. If you disagree then seriously, why?

 

[IanC]

nope, just another paper on clouds

Richard P. Allan


Abstract: Satellite measurements and numerical forecast model reanalysis data are used to compute an updated estimate of the cloud radiative effect on the global multi-annual mean radiative energy budget of the atmosphere and surface. The cloud radiative cooling effect through reflection of short wave radiation dominates over the long wave heating effect, resulting in a net cooling of the climate system of -21 Wm-2. The short wave radiative effect of cloud is primarily manifest as a reduction in the solar radiation absorbed at the surface of -53 Wm-2. Clouds impact long wave radiation by heating the moist tropical atmosphere (up to around 40 Wm-2 for global annual means) while enhancing the radiative cooling of the atmosphere over other regions, in particular higher latitudes and sub-tropical marine stratocumulus regimes. While clouds act to cool the climate system during the daytime, the cloud greenhouse effect heats the climate system at night. The influence of cloud radiative effect on determining cloud feedbacks and changes in the water cycle are discussed.

 

[IanC]

I dont really want to start a thread on this, and actually it is only meant for you Matthew.

you seem to have fallen into a love affair with skepticalscience and I want to point out to you that they arent quite the fine upstanding independent and neutral educators that you think they are. here are two versions of one of their articles. I can understand adding to an article or rewriting it but I certainly cant understand totally changing an article but keeping the original comments to falsely mock comments made in response to the original is a bit over the top dontcha think? are you going to follow in Old Rocks footsteps and defend indefensible lack of integrity?

Antarctica is cooling/gaining ice
The skeptic argument...The amount of ice surrounding Antarctica is now at the highest level ever measured for this time of the year, since satellites first began to monitor it almost 30 years ago. All of the IPCC’s models of Antarctica in the twenty-first century forecast a gain in ice, as a warmer surrounding ocean evaporates more water, which subsequently falls in the form of snow when it hits the continent. Other studies, such as Peter Doran’s in Nature in 2003, show actual cooling in recent decades. It’s simply too cold for rain in Antarctica, and it’ll stay that way for a very long time. The bottom line is that there is more ice than ever surrounding Antarctica (source: Patrick Michaels).

What the science says...

Antarctic cooling is a uniquely regional phenomenon. In fact, the case of Antartica cooling is a great case study on how the media and global warming skeptics seize upon a study and interpret it inappropriately. The original study observed regional cooling in east Antarctica. The hole in the ozone layer above the South Pole causes cooling in the stratosphere. This increased circular winds around the continent preventing warmer air from reaching east Antarctica and the Antarctic plateau. The flip side of this is the Antarctic Peninsula has "experienced some of the fastest warming on Earth, nearly 3°C over the last half-century".

While East Antartica is gaining ice due to increased precipitation, Antartica is overall losing ice. This is mostly due to melting in West Antarctica which recently featured the largest melting observed by satellites in the last 30 years. As well as melting, Antartic glaciers are accelerating further adding to sea level rise.

Further readingTamino compares and analyses the long term trends in sea ice data from the Northern and Southern Hemisphere in Sea Ice, North and South, Then and Now.
Comments1.Quietman at 10:38 AM on 12 March, 2008
I suppose that the volcanic activity that they discovered recently has nothing to do with this?
2.Wondering Aloud at 01:36 AM on 1 April, 2008
Another one of those issues the more you investigate the less convincing it becomes.
3.Quietman at 12:02 PM on 22 April, 2008
"Computer models have predicted that energetic particles hitting the top of the atmosphere in polar regions may change temperatures by stimulating the production of nitrous oxides (NOx)."

"NOx destroys ozone in catalytic reaction cycles; and when you change ozone in the stratosphere, that... can then feed down to surface temperatures."

From an article by BBC News "More doubt on cosmic climate link By Richard Black, Environment correspondent, BBC News website, Vienna" under the subhead Local change
[ Response: I did see that article earlier today. The section on Antarctica is interesting although the phenomena they're describing seems to be regional and shows no long term trends - it's a localised, short term effect. However, what did get my attention was the section on cosmic rays as I've actually been preparing a post on that very topic - cloud cover during Forbush events. This new study covers the same material using different data so I contacted the author this morning hoping to get more info. More on this soon, I hope. ]
4.Quietman at 06:26 AM on 23 April, 2008
John
I noticed the ozone portion because it rang a bell fro what I had read previously in Mackeys paper.
5.AnthonySG1 at 20:25 PM on 9 May, 2008
OK smarties. If Antarctica is overall losing ice, then how do you explain the data?

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.area.south.jpg

The Arctic doesn't seem to be doing so bad anymore, also:

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.area.jpg
[ Response: Funny you should ask, the last few weeks, I've been preparing a series of posts on Antarctica and the Arctic. First one next week. Stay tuned... ]
6.Second order skeptic at 22:45 PM on 24 June, 2008
AnthonySG1: Your images are concerned with the ice _area_ . Ice _mass_ on the other hand is shrinking.
Antarctic Ice Loss Speeds Up, Nearly Matches Greenland Loss - NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
7.PaulM at 22:48 PM on 4 September, 2008
The misinformation on this site is astonishing.
Antarctic ice is increasing.
In addition to the cryosphere link provided Anthony,
This is confirmed by NSIDC,
Sea Ice Trends & Climatologies from SMMR & SSM/I - Total Antarctic
by NCDC,
State of the Climate | Global Analysis | April 2008
and by numerous scientific papers, including
Cavalieri and Parkinson, J. Geophys. Res. 113, C07004 (2008),
Comiso and Nishio, J. Geophys. Res. 113, CO2S07 (2008).

You have managed to find one paper that finds a decrease - but that only covers a 3 year period! Obviously you cannot get a significant trend from 3 years data.
8.Mizimi at 04:51 AM on 6 September, 2008
"NASA Finds VAST Regions of West Antarctica Melted in Recent Past 05.15.07
A team of NASA and university scientists has found clear evidence that EXTENSIVE areas of snow melted in west Antarctica in January 2005 in response to WARM TEMPERATURES. This was the first WIDESPREAD Antarctic melting ever detected with NASA's QuikScat satellite and the MOST SIGNIFICANT MELT observed using satellites during the past three decades. Combined, the affected regions encompassed an area as big as CALIFORNIA."

My caps. - just look at the map and tell me the use of those words is justified. The ACTUAL area involved is a FRACTION of the ice sheets, even the IPCC reckon it would take over 1000yrs to melt if the worst of their predictions materialised.
9.Kuni at 15:30 PM on 21 December, 2008
Increase in sea ice a bad thing

Does growing sea ice in Antarctica bode well for the future? - By Brendan I. Koerner - Slate Magazine
. . . No one's entirely sure what's causing the expansion of sea ice in Antarctica, but the likeliest explanation is a disturbing one. According to a 2005 NASA-funded study, warmer temperatures have caused greater snowfall around the continent's edges, where the open oceans provide plenty of raw material for precipitation. (Warmer air absorbs moisture more readily.) The weight of that excess snow pushes sheets of sea ice down into the water, causing more water to freeze.

The incremental expansion of Antarctica's sea ice has coincided with some more troubling changes. Four of the continent's largest glaciers (whose fates are largely unrelated to that of sea ice) are retreating rapidly, and researchers blame increases in ocean temperature. The diminishment of such massive glaciers means that, despite the slow creep forward of the continent's sea ice, the total mass of all Antarctic ice—which includes inland ice—has experienced a marked decrease. And a continuation of that trend could lead to significant rises in global sea levels. Furthermore, snow is melting much farther inland than ever, as well as high up in the Transantarctic Mountains. . .

from the wayback machine- Antarctica is cooling/gaining ice

 

[ScienceRocks]

Clouds do cause a negative forcing, so there is no doubt about it that without clouds a far higher percentage of "solar input" would get to the surface of the earth. What I'm saying is out of the 174 pw of solar input, clouds reflect 35 pw back to space. So of course they are a negative on the system, but what scienctist are saying is that the negative becoming slightly less. Stratus clouds cover a much larger area and reflect solar input off there tops back into space, but if you decrease them and increase the convective clouds that have smaller "areas" that is going to lead to a lessing of the huge negative that clouds cause on the climate system.

File:Breakdown of the incoming solar energy.svg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Here is a better take on this paper!
http://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/2011/09/20/net-cloud-effect-cloud-feedback-wuwt-confused/

Well of course clouds keep heat in at night...This is everything we already know about clouds.

 

[IanC]

and now the present version, with demeaning remarks made to imply that the opposing commentors are stupid

Is Antarctica losing or gaining ice?
Link to this pageThe skeptic argument...
Antarctica is gaining ice
"The amount of ice surrounding Antarctica is now at the highest level since satellites began to monitor it almost 30 years ago. It’s simply too cold for rain in Antarctica and it'll stay that way for a very long time. The bottom line is there is more ice than ever surrounding Antarctica." (Patrick Michaels).


What the science says...
Select a level... Basic Intermediate
Satellites measure Antarctica is gaining sea ice but losing land ice at an accelerating rate which has implications for sea level rise.

Skeptic arguments that Antarctica is gaining ice frequently hinge on an error of omission, namely ignoring the difference between land ice and sea ice.

In glaciology and particularly with respect to Antarctic ice, not all things are created equal. Let us consider the following differences. Antarctic land ice is the ice which has accumulated over thousands of years on the Antarctica landmass itself through snowfall. This land ice therefore is actually stored ocean water that once fell as precipitation. Sea ice in Antarctica is quite different as it is generally considered to be ice which forms in salt water primarily during the winter months.

In Antarctica, sea ice grows quite extensively during winter but nearly completely melts away during the summer (Figure 1). That is where the important difference between antarctic and arctic sea ice exists. Arctic sea ice lasts all the year round, there are increases during the winter months and decreases during the summer months but an ice cover does in fact remain in the North which includes quite a bit of ice from previous years (Figure 1). Essentially Arctic sea ice is more important for the earth's energy balance because when it melts, more sunlight is absorbed by the oceans whereas Antarctic sea ice normally melts each summer leaving the earth's energy balance largely unchanged.
......

Comments 1 to 50 out of 103:

Quietman at 12:02 PM on 22 April, 2008
"Computer models have predicted that energetic particles hitting the top of the atmosphere in polar regions may change temperatures by stimulating the production of nitrous oxides (NOx)."

"NOx destroys ozone in catalytic reaction cycles; and when you change ozone in the stratosphere, that... can then feed down to surface temperatures."

From an article by BBC News "More doubt on cosmic climate link By Richard Black, Environment correspondent, BBC News website, Vienna" under the subhead Local change
Response: I did see that article earlier today. The section on Antarctica is interesting although the phenomena they're describing seems to be regional and shows no long term trends - it's a localised, short term effect. However, what did get my attention was the section on cosmic rays as I've actually been preparing a post on that very topic - cloud cover during Forbush events. This new study covers the same material using different data so I contacted the author this morning hoping to get more info. More on this soon, I hope.
Quietman at 06:26 AM on 23 April, 2008
John
I noticed the ozone portion because it rang a bell fro what I had read previously in Mackeys paper.
AnthonySG1 at 20:25 PM on 9 May, 2008
OK smarties. If Antarctica is overall losing ice, then how do you explain the data?

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.area.south.jpg

The Arctic doesn't seem to be doing so bad anymore, also:

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.area.jpg
Response: It's somewhat discouraging that the first point I make is that people often fail to distinguish between sea ice and land ice. They are two separate phenomena. And yet you repeat the error. To clarify, Antarctica is losing land ice at an accelerating rate. Sea ice around Antarctica is increasing. The reasons for sea ice increasing in a warming Southern Ocean are complex and described in detail above.
Second order skeptic at 22:45 PM on 24 June, 2008
AnthonySG1: Your images are concerned with the ice _area_ . Ice _mass_ on the other hand is shrinking.
Antarctic Ice Loss Speeds Up, Nearly Matches Greenland Loss - NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
PaulM at 22:48 PM on 4 September, 2008
The misinformation on this site is astonishing.
Antarctic ice is increasing.
In addition to the cryosphere link provided Anthony,
This is confirmed by NSIDC,
Sea Ice Trends & Climatologies from SMMR & SSM/I - Total Antarctic
by NCDC,
State of the Climate | Global Analysis | April 2008
and by numerous scientific papers, including
Cavalieri and Parkinson, J. Geophys. Res. 113, C07004 (2008),
Comiso and Nishio, J. Geophys. Res. 113, CO2S07 (2008).

You have managed to find one paper that finds a decrease - but that only covers a 3 year period! Obviously you cannot get a significant trend from 3 years data.
Response: Please, people, pay attention! Sea ice is increasing. Land ice is decreasing. Read and reread the post above until you realise they are two separate phenomena.Mizimi at 04:51 AM on 6 September, 2008
"NASA Finds VAST Regions of West Antarctica Melted in Recent Past 05.15.07
A team of NASA and university scientists has found clear evidence that EXTENSIVE areas of snow melted in west Antarctica in January 2005 in response to WARM TEMPERATURES. This was the first WIDESPREAD Antarctic melting ever detected with NASA's QuikScat satellite and the MOST SIGNIFICANT MELT observed using satellites during the past three decades. Combined, the affected regions encompassed an area as big as CALIFORNIA."

My caps. - just look at the map and tell me the use of those words is justified. The ACTUAL area involved is a FRACTION of the ice sheets, even the IPCC reckon it would take over 1000yrs to melt if the worst of their predictions materialised.

from Is Antarctica losing or gaining ice?, while it lasts

 

[IanC]

If it is about Spencer modeling the enso then this is laughable. Spencer was way off in modeling it.

Trenberth, Fasullo, and Abraham Respond to Spencer and Braswell
Here is the others side refuting it with there idea's lining up with the real data. That is what is important in science. If you disagree then seriously, why?

I think it hilarious that Trenberth has the nerve to demand full disclosure of data and methodologies from Spencer (which he has provided I believe) when he is quite happy to let his Team mates to obscure their data and methods as much as they want.
steve McIntyre's take on it-

The review process for Trenberth was, shall we say, totally different than the review process for O’Donnell et al 2010 or the comment by Ross and me on Santer et al 2008. The Trenberth article was accepted on the day that it was submitted:

Received: 8 September 2011 / Accepted: 8 September 2011 / Published: 16 September 2011
CA readers are well aware of long-term obstruction by the Team not simply regarding details of methodology, but even data. Trenberth objects to incompleteness of methodological description in Spencer and Braswell 2011 as follows:

Moreover, the description of their method was incomplete, making it impossible to fully reproduce their analysis. Such reproducibility and openness should be a benchmark of any serious study.
Obviously these are principles that have been advocated at Climate Audit for years. I’ve urged the archiving of both data and code for articles at the time of publication to avoid such problems. However, these suggestions have, all too often, been resolutely opposed by the Team. Even supporting data, all to often, remains unavailable. I haven’t had time to fully parse Spencer and Braswell as to reproducibility but note that Spencer promptly provided supporting data to me when requested (as did Dessler.) In my opinion, Spencer and Braswell should have archived data as used and source code concurrent with publication, as I’ve urged others to do. However, their failure to do so is hardly unique within the field. That Trenberth was able to carry out a sensitivity study as quickly as he did suggests to me that their methodology was substantially reproducibile, but, as I noted above, I haven’t parsed the article.
Trenberth observes that “minor changes” in assumptions yielded “major changes” in results, concluding that the claims in Lindzen and Choi 2009 were not robust:

The work of Trenberth et al. [13], for instance, demonstrated a basic lack of robustness in the LC09 method that fundamentally undermined their results. Minor changes in that study’s subjective assumptions yielded major changes in its main conclusions.
I am not in a position to comment on the truth or falsity of Trenberth’s claims as applied to Lindzen and Choi 2009. However, this sort of argument has been a staple at Climate Audit (and in our published criticisms) of paleo reconstructions. Instead of commending us for such observations in respect to MBH, Trenberth publicly disparaged Ross and I personally for daring to criticize Mann et al. I agree with the principle that Trenberth enunciated here, but not with Trenberth’s hypocritical application of the principle.

Trenberth criticizes Spencer and Braswell for inadequate statistical analysis:

For instance, SB11 [8] fail to provide any meaningful error analysis in their recent paper and fail to explore even rudimentary questions regarding the robustness of their derived ENSO-regression in the context of natural variability.
To a considerable degree, Spencer and Braswell 2011 was a commentary on Dessler 2010. Neither article carried out satisfactory statistical analysis. Dessler 2010 reported a regression with an adjusted r2 of ~0.01 and purported to assert “confidence intervals”. UC carried out the “rudimentary” statistical operation of calculating the slope using the y-variable as regressand for consistency, obtaining different results. Results using CERES clear sky were opposite to results using ERA clear sky. Whatever the merits of CERES versus ERA, this is the sort of sensitivity that should have been reported. This is not to say that the statistical analysis of Spencer and Braswell 2011 was superior to that of Dessler 2010. It wasn’t. Neither article met the criteria enunciated by Trenberth.

If Trenberth really wants to get into the question of failures to explore “rudimentary questions” of robustness, I invite him to examine the infamous CENSORED directory of MBH98 or to search for the verification r2 results of early steps of MBH98.
Trenberth observes that “correlation does not mean causation” – a principle that is important at Climate Audit:

Moreover, correlation does not mean causation. This is brought out by Dessler [10] who quantifies the magnitude and role of clouds and shows that cloud effects are small even if highly correlated.
Unfortunately, this principle is applied opportunistically in paleoclimate. Team methodology, for example, makes no attempt to verify that 6-sigma bulges in strip bark bristlecone pine are due to temperature (as opposed to a mechanical effect of strip barking itself.) Team methodology accepts Yamal as a temperature proxy without explaining the decline in ring widths in the majority of nearby sites.
Trenberth wildly overstates Dessler 2011 as well by saying that it “quantifies the magnitude and role of clouds and shows that cloud effects are small”. “Quantifying the magnitude and role of clouds” is an enormous undertaking and would take hundreds of pages of analysis. Dessler 2011 is a short little article addressing a narrow issue. It did not pretend to “quantify the magnitude and role of clouds” nor did it do so.

Clouds were the major source of uncertainty in climate models in Charney 1979 and remained so in IPCC AR4 (2007). If Dessler 2011 did in fact show that “cloud effects are small”, this would be an epochal achievement in climate science. Given that a preprint of Dessler 2011 only became available on Sept 2, 2011, there has been little opportunity to analyse its results so far. Whether Dessler 2011 really proves that “cloud effects are small” remains to be seen. If, like Dessler 2010, it makes such assertions based on r2 of ~0.01, I think people could reasonably disagree on whether such far reaching claims had been firmly established.

More Hypocrisy from the Team « Climate Audit

 

[ScienceRocks]

and now the present version, with demeaning remarks made to imply that the opposing commentors are stupid

Is Antarctica losing or gaining ice?
Link to this pageThe skeptic argument...
Antarctica is gaining ice
"The amount of ice surrounding Antarctica is now at the highest level since satellites began to monitor it almost 30 years ago. It’s simply too cold for rain in Antarctica and it'll stay that way for a very long time. The bottom line is there is more ice than ever surrounding Antarctica." (Patrick Michaels).


What the science says...
Select a level... Basic Intermediate
Satellites measure Antarctica is gaining sea ice but losing land ice at an accelerating rate which has implications for sea level rise.

Skeptic arguments that Antarctica is gaining ice frequently hinge on an error of omission, namely ignoring the difference between land ice and sea ice.

In glaciology and particularly with respect to Antarctic ice, not all things are created equal. Let us consider the following differences. Antarctic land ice is the ice which has accumulated over thousands of years on the Antarctica landmass itself through snowfall. This land ice therefore is actually stored ocean water that once fell as precipitation. Sea ice in Antarctica is quite different as it is generally considered to be ice which forms in salt water primarily during the winter months.

In Antarctica, sea ice grows quite extensively during winter but nearly completely melts away during the summer (Figure 1). That is where the important difference between antarctic and arctic sea ice exists. Arctic sea ice lasts all the year round, there are increases during the winter months and decreases during the summer months but an ice cover does in fact remain in the North which includes quite a bit of ice from previous years (Figure 1). Essentially Arctic sea ice is more important for the earth's energy balance because when it melts, more sunlight is absorbed by the oceans whereas Antarctic sea ice normally melts each summer leaving the earth's energy balance largely unchanged.
......

Comments 1 to 50 out of 103:

Quietman at 12:02 PM on 22 April, 2008
"Computer models have predicted that energetic particles hitting the top of the atmosphere in polar regions may change temperatures by stimulating the production of nitrous oxides (NOx)."

"NOx destroys ozone in catalytic reaction cycles; and when you change ozone in the stratosphere, that... can then feed down to surface temperatures."

From an article by BBC News "More doubt on cosmic climate link By Richard Black, Environment correspondent, BBC News website, Vienna" under the subhead Local change
Response: I did see that article earlier today. The section on Antarctica is interesting although the phenomena they're describing seems to be regional and shows no long term trends - it's a localised, short term effect. However, what did get my attention was the section on cosmic rays as I've actually been preparing a post on that very topic - cloud cover during Forbush events. This new study covers the same material using different data so I contacted the author this morning hoping to get more info. More on this soon, I hope.
Quietman at 06:26 AM on 23 April, 2008
John
I noticed the ozone portion because it rang a bell fro what I had read previously in Mackeys paper.
AnthonySG1 at 20:25 PM on 9 May, 2008
OK smarties. If Antarctica is overall losing ice, then how do you explain the data?

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.area.south.jpg

The Arctic doesn't seem to be doing so bad anymore, also:

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.area.jpg
Response: It's somewhat discouraging that the first point I make is that people often fail to distinguish between sea ice and land ice. They are two separate phenomena. And yet you repeat the error. To clarify, Antarctica is losing land ice at an accelerating rate. Sea ice around Antarctica is increasing. The reasons for sea ice increasing in a warming Southern Ocean are complex and described in detail above.
Second order skeptic at 22:45 PM on 24 June, 2008
AnthonySG1: Your images are concerned with the ice _area_ . Ice _mass_ on the other hand is shrinking.
Antarctic Ice Loss Speeds Up, Nearly Matches Greenland Loss - NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
PaulM at 22:48 PM on 4 September, 2008
The misinformation on this site is astonishing.
Antarctic ice is increasing.
In addition to the cryosphere link provided Anthony,
This is confirmed by NSIDC,
Sea Ice Trends & Climatologies from SMMR & SSM/I - Total Antarctic
by NCDC,
State of the Climate | Global Analysis | April 2008
and by numerous scientific papers, including
Cavalieri and Parkinson, J. Geophys. Res. 113, C07004 (2008),
Comiso and Nishio, J. Geophys. Res. 113, CO2S07 (2008).

You have managed to find one paper that finds a decrease - but that only covers a 3 year period! Obviously you cannot get a significant trend from 3 years data.
Response: Please, people, pay attention! Sea ice is increasing. Land ice is decreasing. Read and reread the post above until you realise they are two separate phenomena.Mizimi at 04:51 AM on 6 September, 2008
"NASA Finds VAST Regions of West Antarctica Melted in Recent Past 05.15.07
A team of NASA and university scientists has found clear evidence that EXTENSIVE areas of snow melted in west Antarctica in January 2005 in response to WARM TEMPERATURES. This was the first WIDESPREAD Antarctic melting ever detected with NASA's QuikScat satellite and the MOST SIGNIFICANT MELT observed using satellites during the past three decades. Combined, the affected regions encompassed an area as big as CALIFORNIA."

My caps. - just look at the map and tell me the use of those words is justified. The ACTUAL area involved is a FRACTION of the ice sheets, even the IPCC reckon it would take over 1000yrs to melt if the worst of their predictions materialised.

from Is Antarctica losing or gaining ice?, while it lasts

Grace, Quikscat, MELT all observed melting of "land" ice of Antarctica. Wouldn't you agree Ian? If you don't think so, why? Up until mid 2009 the sea ice around antarctic was increasing, but since mid 2009 by Cryosphere today anomaly map trend, I posted in the arctic sea ice thread does show a decrease....I wish you to look at that Ionc. No scientist have came forward yet outside of my own opinion to say anything about it.

I agree up to 2009 the sea ice around antarctic was INCREASING. I also agree that it would take tens of thousands of years to melt the ice at its current rate.

I care most about who is right be it the pro-warmers side or skeptic side. We will see. I'm no alarmist as I believe that we will only see about 1.2c warming by 2100, but I will be open minded about such. I can understand why some people that get into this go over board and say things that are not the most accurate or attack other people, but I won't. As I believe that either side has some good points; we both know that we don't understand the system good enough to know the full picture yet. Believe me I'm not saying that looking for a lower sensitivity as Spencer and Blackwell are doing are wrong, but there models don't match the observations. The first step towards finding out the truth is finding what fits with real life. Believe me I believe that something is seriously wrong with current thinking, but we haven't found it yet.

 

[IanC]

are you ducking the question Matthew?

you seem to have fallen into a love affair with skepticalscience and I want to point out to you that they arent quite the fine upstanding independent and neutral educators that you think they are. here are two versions of one of their articles. I can understand adding to an article or rewriting it but I certainly cant understand totally changing an article but keeping the original comments to falsely mock comments made in response to the original is a bit over the top dontcha think? are you going to follow in Old Rocks footsteps and defend indefensible lack of integrity?

 

[ScienceRocks]

"I was surprised that this paper was linked to cloud feedback since, as you mention, it attempts to quantify the well known influence of cloud on Earth’s radiation budget (at the top of the atmosphere, at the surface and within the atmosphere and also during day and night) and does not attempt to diagnose cloud feedback.” Allen

 

[Oddball]

The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't.

 

[ScienceRocks]

The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't.

Well, Trenberth has reasons to believe that the energy is with in the deep oceans. You wonder what powers the enso and record Atlantic temperatures?. The oceans hold a thousand plus times more energy as the Atmosphere. In my person opinion, I believe it is a combo of both Treberth's ocean theory and Hansens Aerosals, solar minimum theory...Both work and make sense. Is there any scientific honesty in you people? You can be skeptics, but why do you disagree with these scientist thinking?

 

[Oddball]

Right...The heating disappeared to the depths of the oceans, where nobody can accurately measure or verify the claim.

How'd I miss such an obvious answer?

 

[Oddball]

"We attempted to add all these things up and said, 'Well, they don't actually balance,'" Trenberth said.

Tom Nelson: Settled science: Missing heat must be somewhere in the ocean where we can't measure it

 

[ScienceRocks]

"We attempted to add all these things up and said, 'Well, they don't actually balance,'" Trenberth said.

Tom Nelson: Settled science: Missing heat must be somewhere in the ocean where we can't measure it

Well, that is what he was saying when he "stated" that. The energy that we were observing wasn't quite balancing, which means it was somewhere. He new paper has came out that points to the deep oceans for some of it. Believe me that the earth's climate doesn't change without warming or cooling the oceans as they're the worlds stabilizer. That is why the enso is so powerful on short term climate(1-2 years). It moves slightly more of the "energy" stores to the Atmosphere=nino, and nina is it burying deep within the oceans.

I've noticed something about the nina's/nino's since 1950's...For one case is 1983 nino, well it was a 2.3c within 3.4, but the anamaly globally wasn't even half of the 1998's 2.8c that covered half the Pacific. This tells me that the power of the oceans have increased. Also, during nina years don't have the effect on our climate as they did in the 1950s, 1970s for this reason...Still about -.1 to -.15c on the global anomaly, but 1974-1976 would of caused nearly double this. Of course this is just my opinion. If every year since 2007 wasn't within a nina or super nina we would of had a lot more of the top 3 the past 3-4 years...In fact if most of 2010 wasn't within a super nina it would of had a anomaly of .68c+ if you had the same late year set up as 1998 and 2010 enso early in the year.

I went to see some reasoning before saying that it is bull shit.

 

[IanC]

are you ducking the question Matthew?

you seem to have fallen into a love affair with skepticalscience and I want to point out to you that they arent quite the fine upstanding independent and neutral educators that you think they are. here are two versions of one of their articles. I can understand adding to an article or rewriting it but I certainly cant understand totally changing an article but keeping the original comments to falsely mock comments made in response to the original is a bit over the top dontcha think? are you going to follow in Old Rocks footsteps and defend indefensible lack of integrity?

focus Matthew

your favourite site put up an article. when sceptical commenters pointed out problems with it, it was totally rewritten (without acknowledging it was updated). some of the comments were kept from the original BUT the moderators responces were CHANGED to mock and deride the original posters that led to the article being revamped in the first place.

I dont have a problem with commenters on a site making over the top remarks although a certain amount of censorship is necessary but when the owners of the site redact and replace information to scorn the opposition I worry about the integrity of the site.

the recent fracas over Pielke sr's objection to the slimey treatment of Christy and Spencer also points out that SkepticalScience is not the objective perveyor of neutral science that it claims to be.

 

[IanC]

The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't.

Well, Trenberth has reasons to believe that the energy is with in the deep oceans. You wonder what powers the enso and record Atlantic temperatures?. The oceans hold a thousand plus times more energy as the Atmosphere. In my person opinion, I believe it is a combo of both Treberth's ocean theory and Hansens Aerosals, solar minimum theory...Both work and make sense. Is there any scientific honesty in you people? You can be skeptics, but why do you disagree with these scientist thinking?

and yet the top 700m of the ocean that we are measuring doesnt seem to show the transfer of that missing heat. but it has to be somewhere other than the obvious escape into space, right? otherwise the theory isnt working. maybe someone needs to recalibrate the ARGO buoys. again

 

[ScienceRocks]

are you ducking the question Matthew?

you seem to have fallen into a love affair with skepticalscience and I want to point out to you that they arent quite the fine upstanding independent and neutral educators that you think they are. here are two versions of one of their articles. I can understand adding to an article or rewriting it but I certainly cant understand totally changing an article but keeping the original comments to falsely mock comments made in response to the original is a bit over the top dontcha think? are you going to follow in Old Rocks footsteps and defend indefensible lack of integrity?

focus Matthew

your favourite site put up an article. when sceptical commenters pointed out problems with it, it was totally rewritten (without acknowledging it was updated). some of the comments were kept from the original BUT the moderators responces were CHANGED to mock and deride the original posters that led to the article being revamped in the first place.

I dont have a problem with commenters on a site making over the top remarks although a certain amount of censorship is necessary but when the owners of the site redact and replace information to scorn the opposition I worry about the integrity of the site.

the recent fracas over Pielke sr's objection to the slimey treatment of Christy and Spencer also points out that SkepticalScience is not the objective perveyor of neutral science that it claims to be.

I agree that's not right, but unfortunately the world works this way. One side is going to do everything in its power to make the other side feel bad or defame them. Humanity is a evil creature that takes joy out of demeaning people they disagree with. Look at this message board and you will see that trashing the other side is the thing to do for most people here, rather then discuse the science at hand. Same for skeptical science(the other side). Fair, hell no!

My advise is to look at the science and most importantly what matches up with reality. Does Spencer modeling of the ENSO make more sense then Desser? Nope, because a higher sensitivity was found to match closer to reality. Is this what you see to Ionc? That is the way it should work...It should be clear to us all. Everything else is just infighting and hatred of one another.

The question that needs to be asked is why should I believe Spencer? I think he is going down the right road to find the sensitivity in the enso, but that is about all.

Pieke, as far as I can tell supports Spencer, Chirstiy, Watts, ect. Yes, the buttons are wrong, but so does the insults that are on there blogs. So what can you expect? It all goes back to what I said above.

To show that the first comment isn't supported by the data within that thread...

cosmic rays haven't increased or decreased in the past 50 years. So how can they cause a increase in forcing much alike the suns tsi. It doesn't appear to cause the variable z; I've been discussing. It just doesn't explain it.

Where can you disagree?

What do you disagree with on the data on the ice sheets of Antarctica? It's true that the sea ice has increased since 1995, but it appears to me to have stopped the last few years...IMO. The data we get from the satellites is what we have to work with. We go to war with the army we have...Yes, it could have errors, but that is up to the peers of the scientist to point out.

 

[IanC]

OK, you have handwaved away the impropriety of SkepticalScience. just dont hold it up as a source of neutral science in the future.

as yet another indictment of SS, I give you your opinion of the paper SB11. as I pointed out earlier SS created a strawman description of SB11 that neither matched the abstract or content of the paper. you are saying Spencer modelled ENSO when in fact that was not his objective at all.

Abstract: The sensitivity of the climate system to an imposed radiative imbalance remains
the largest source of uncertainty in projections of future anthropogenic climate change.
Here we present further evidence that this uncertainty from an observational perspective is
largely due to the masking of the radiative feedback signal by internal radiative forcing,
probably due to natural cloud variations. That these internal radiative forcings exist and
likely corrupt feedback diagnosis is demonstrated with lag regression analysis of satellite
and coupled climate model data, interpreted with a simple forcing-feedback model. While
the satellite-based metrics for the period 2000–2010 depart substantially in the direction of
lower climate sensitivity from those similarly computed from coupled climate models, we
find that, with traditional methods, it is not possible to accurately quantify this discrepancy
in terms of the feedbacks which determine climate sensitivity. It is concluded that
atmospheric feedback diagnosis of the climate system remains an unsolved problem, due
primarily to the inability to distinguish between radiative forcing and radiative feedback in
satellite radiative budget observations.
Keywords: climate; sensitivity; temperature; feedback; clouds; warming; CERES; models

from conclusions and discussion SB11

Finally, since much of the temperature variability during 2000–2010 was due to ENSO [9], we
conclude that ENSO-related temperature variations are partly radiatively forced. We hypothesize that
changes in the coupled ocean-atmosphere circulation during the El Niño and La Niña phases of ENSO
cause differing changes in cloud cover, which then modulate the radiative balance of the climate
system. As seen in Figure 3(b) for the ocean-only data, the signature of radiative forcing is stronger
over the oceans than in the global average, suggesting a primarily oceanic origin.
What this might (or might not) imply regarding the ultimate causes of the El Niño and La Niña
phenomena is not relevant to our central point, though: that the presence of time varying radiative
forcing in satellite radiative flux measurements corrupts the diagnosis of radiative feedback.

I dont particularly give a crap about the various Spencer or Dessler papers. especially when the r2 for their results are ~0.02. what it does show is that WE DONT KNOW the feedbacks and forcings. the science isnt settled, the mechanisms arent understood at anything like the level to say INCONTROVERTABLE!

Matt did you read this paper or just the opinions of warmists'. did you look at the graph showing just the 3 highest and lowest sensitivities and compare it to the redone one with all 16 models and find a significant difference, or was one just more cluttered than the other. that was the main objection of the paper wasnt it?