In preparing for my climate presentation in Phoenix next week, I went back and read through Lindzen & Choi, a study whose results I linked here.  The study claims to have measured feedback, and have found feedback to temperature changes in the natural climate system to be negative –opposite of the assumption of strong positive feedback in climate models.  I found this interesting, as we often do of studies that confirm our own hypotheses.

Re-reading the study, I was uncomfortable with the methodology, but figured I was missing something.  Specifically, I didn’t understand how an increase in temperature could result in a decrease in outgoing radiation, as Lindzen says is assumed in all the models.   As I have always understood it, the opposite has to be true in a stable system.   With an added forcing, temperature increases which increases outgoing radiation until the radiation budget is back in balance.  Models that assumed otherwise would have near infinite temepratures.   I assumed perhaps that Lindzen & Choi were making measurements during the time the system came back into equilibrium.

Apparently, both Luboš Motl and Roy Spencer have spotted problems as well, and they explain the issue in a more sophisticated way here and here.

But the results I have been getting from the fully coupled ocean-atmosphere (CMIP) model runs that the IPCC depends upon for their global warming predictions do NOT show what Lindzen and Choi found in the AMIP model runs. While the authors found decreases in radiation loss with short-term temperature increases, I find that the CMIP models exhibit an INCREASE in radiative loss with short term warming.

In fact, a radiation increase MUST exist for the climate system to be stable, at least in the long term. Even though some of the CMIP models produce a lot of global warming, all of them are still stable in this regard, with net increases in lost radiation with warming (NOTE: If analyzing the transient CMIP runs where CO2 is increased over long periods of time, one must first remove that radiative forcing in order to see the increase in radiative loss).

So, while I tend to agree with the Lindzen and Choi position that the real climate system is much less sensitive than the IPCC climate models suggest, it is not clear to me that their results actually demonstrate this.

Spencer further makes the point he has made for a couple of years now that feedback is really, really, really hard to measure, because it is so easy to confuse cause and effect.

Spencer by the way points out this admission from the Fourth IPCC report:

“A number of diagnostic tests have been proposed…but few of them have been applied to a majority of the models currently in use. Moreover, it is not yet clear which tests are critical for constraining future projections (of warming). Consequently, a set of model metrics that might be used to narrow the range of plausible climate change feedbacks and climate sensitivity has yet to be developed.”

This is kind of amazing, in effect saying “we have no idea what the feedbacks are or how to measure them, but lacking any knowlege, we are going to consistently and universally assume very high positive feedbacks with feedback factors > 0.7”