Its obvious you are a doomsday man. You love the “scientists” who continue to be wrong. Not one of their short term predictions have come true. Temperatures are not rising. Storm activity is not increasing. The sky is not falling yet you adimitly defend these people on every comment board. Its hilarious. These so called AGW scientists will not allow any challenges, they do not allow data to be critiqued, they are so defenc=sive it becomes laughable. Not sure why you so vehemently defend them.
I laugh at AGW. Its obvious it is more about politics and funding than it is about science. Any layperson can see that. I have always been open to both sides. My mind is not closed like many on this comment board. I listen, I read, I watch both sides. I simply do not believe people who continue to be wrong over and over and over.
Keep loving your AGW guys, you will only look as foolish as they do/will as they continue to be proven wrong. So much of their budget could actually be going to real causes like pollution, etc.

Granting the simple notion that any gas will absorb and re-emit IR at one or two particular frequencies is a no-brainer. But with the extremely limited response of a translucent gas such as CO2, which will not aggregate in an open atmosphere, the effects are limited, and limited to an initial concentration. Any greater concentration brings almost no increase in re-radiation.

So, some person will bring up the example of Venus (such as Hansen). Well, Venus has a concetration of CO2 that is something like 2,500 times that of Earth. But you don’t suppose the fact that Venus is way, way closer to the Sun has anything to do with it’s surface temp? Maybe? Possibly? CO2 is still an invisible gas. The reason that water vapor has such a larger bandwidth response to radiation and re-radiation is because of it’s opacity and albedo.

No, this whole thing feels like a desire to control Man, no matter what. It is assumed that that CO2 is the culprit, as it is the main gas output of Man. And we had warming from 1979 to 1995 (even Phil Jones from the CRU admits that he can find no statistical warming since 1995, in what records he has left), ergo, it must have been CO2. And we’ve had cooling since 2007 (even Latif, lead author of the IPCC admits that.) In spite of CO2 levels.

So, even when the real world data doesn’t agree with the theory, the theory is cherished and defended. It may be political, religious, or a combination of both, but it certainly isn’t scientific.

And no, I’m not a degreed scientist. I’m just an electrician who can tell his asymptote from a hole in the ground.

If the charges are true, sure. But does this happen at places like CS? Are you maybe a little guilty of this yourself, ADiff?

For instance, when you write “NASA data sets has to be considered flawed until some demonstration the base data set is not tainted” are you being honest, with yourself and us, or have you simply found an automatic fallback whenever you are presented with empirical data you do not like?

In other words, I don’t think you will ever be satisfied with the data sets of anyone but the Warren Meyers of the world. You will simply declare ‘the data sets are tainted’ and then cite some inexpert website with no first hand knowledge of the science in question.

It is far too easy to simply assert, ‘the data sets are tainted so I will not believe them until someone proves otherwise.’ It is not up to NASA (again, an incredibly transparent organization, whether you like it or not) or anyone else to prove they are honest people. It is up to you to prove they are not honest people. Something the deniosphere can only allege.

Wow. There are layers of misunderstanding and ignorance here. It makes it difficult to know where to start.

The climate is not a “long-term stable system”. Even the most cursory glance at the paleoclimate record shows you that. To think otherwise is pure denial. You might as well say the sky is “a long-term red system” – that would make just as much sense.

You seem to think that higher “feedback factor” means less stability. Basic maths shows us that any factor as you define it that is less than unity entails stability.

We know from observations that feedback processes are strongly non-linear and have widely differing time delays. You even talk about this yourself, but you fail to understand that it makes your over-simplified thinking utterly irrelevant.

Interesting that you say “Today will actually be fun, because it involves criticism of some of my writing”. Seems like you don’t find the criticism much fun, as you appear completely incapable of responding to it. I take your silence as tacit admission of unbelievable stupidity.

Lindzen and Choi Unraveled
— group @ 8 January 2010
Guest Commentary by John Fasullo, Kevin Trenberth and Chris O’Dell

A recent paper by Lindzen and Choi in GRL (2009) (LC09) purported to demonstrate that climate had a strong negative feedback and that climate models are quite wrong in their relationships between changes in surface temperature and corresponding changes in outgoing radiation escaping to space. This publication has been subject to a considerable amount of hype, for instance apparently “[LC09] has absolutely, convincingly, and irrefutably proven the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming to be completely false.” and “we now know that the effect of CO2 on temperature is small, we know why it is small, and we know that it is having very little effect on the climate”. Not surprisingly, LC09 has also been highly publicized in various contrarian circles.

Our initial reading of their article had us independently asking, how we could have missed such explicit evidence of the cloud feedback as shown in LC09? Why would such a significant finding have gone undiscovered when these feedbacks are widely studied and recognised as central to the projections of climate change? We discovered these common concerns at a meeting last year and then teamed up to address these questions.

With the hype surrounding the manuscript, one would think that the article provides a sound, rock solid basis for a reduced climate sensitivity. However, our examination of the study’s methods demonstrates that this is not the case. In an article in press (Trenberth et al. 2010 (sub. requ.), hereafter TFOW), we show that LC09 is gravely flawed and its results are wrong on multiple fronts. These are the major issues we found:

• The LC09 results are not robust.
A goal of LC09 was to quantify the cloud feedback by examining variability in top-of-atmosphere (TOA) radiative fluxes in the tropics as it relates to variability in mean sea surface temperature (SST). To do this they examine only tropical data. In general, they find that during periods of higher-than-normal SST, the radiation emitted and reflected to space by the earth goes up as well, cooling the Earth and amounting to an overall negative climate feedback. To show this, they select intervals of warming and cooling (in a time series of monthly averaged values) and compare fluxes at their endpoints (see Figure). They didn’t provide an objective criterion for selecting these endpoints and in some instances (see their Fig. 1), the selection of these intervals actually appears to be quite odd.

The result one obtains in estimating the feedback by this method turns out to be heavily dependent on the endpoints chosen. [edit] In TFOW we show that the apparent relationship is reduced to zero if one chooses to displace the endpoints selected in LC09 by a month or less. So with this method the perceived feedback can be whatever one wishes it to be, and the result obtained by LC09 is actually very unlikely. This is not then really indicative of a robust cloud feedback.

• LC09 misinterpret air-sea interactions in the tropics
The main changes in tropical SST and radiative fluxes at TOA are associated with El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and are not necessarily indicative of forced variability in a closed system. ENSO events cause strong and robust exchanges of energy between the ocean and atmosphere, and tropics and subtropics. Yet LC09 treat the tropical atmosphere as a closed and deterministic system in which variations in clouds are driven solely by SST. In fact, the system is known to be considerably more complex and changes in the flow of energy arise from ocean heat exchange through evaporation, latent heat release in precipitation, and redistribution of that heat through atmospheric winds. These changes can be an order of magnitude larger than variability in TOA fluxes, and their effects are teleconnected globally. It is therefore not possible to quantify the cloud feedback with a purely local analysis.

• More robust methods show no discrepancies between models and observations
In TFOW, we compute correlations and regressions between tropical SSTs and top-of-atmosphere (TOA) longwave, shortwave and net radiation using a variety of methods. LC09 found the observed behavior to be opposite from that of 11 atmospheric models forced by the same SSTs and conclude that the models display much higher climate sensitivity than is inferred from ERBE. However, in our analysis comparing these relationships with models, we are unable to find any systematic model bias. More importantly, the nature of these relationships in models bears no relationship to simulated sensitivity. That is, the metric developed by LC09 is entirely ineffective as a proxy for simulated sensitivity.

• LC09 have compared observations to models prescribed with incomplete forcings
The AMIP configuration in the model simulations used by LC09 have incomplete forcings. The AMIP protocol started off a test only of how an atmospheric model reacts to changes in ocean temperatures, and so models often only use the ocean temperature change when doing these kinds of experiments. However, over the period of this comparison, many elements – greenhouse gases, aerosols, the sun and specifically, volcanoes changed the radiative fluxes, and this needs to be taken into account. Some models did this in these experiments, but not all of them.
For instance, the dominant source of variability in the reflected solar flux arises from aerosols associated with the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in June of 1991 yet all but 2 model simulations examined by LC09 omit such forcings entirely. Other radiative species are absent from the models altogether. It is thus obviously inappropriate to expect such model simulations to replicate observed variability in TOA fluxes.

• LC09 incorrectly compute the climate sensitivity
By not allowing for the black body radiation (the Planck function) in their feedback parameter, LC09 underestimate climate sensitivity. Using the correct equations, LC09 should obtain a feedback parameter and climate sensitivity of -0.125 and 0.82 K, respectively, rather than their values of -1.1 and 0.5 K. In contrast, TFOW results yield a positive feedback parameter and greater sensitivity estimate, though we also caution that this approach is not a valid technique for estimating sensitivity, as a closed and therefore global domain is essential (though not by itself sufficient). Lastly, LC09 fail to account for variability in forcings in estimating sensitivity.
While climate models are known to struggle with many aspects of tropical climate, especially in regards to its coupled variability, the problems claimed by LC09 are not among them. Forster and Gregory [2006] and Murphy et al. [2009] address changes in the energy budget with surface temperatures for a much larger domain and present a much more complete and defensible analysis and discussion of issues. They demonstrate that recent observed variability indeed supports a positive shortwave cloud feedback. So the feedbacks from processes other than the Planck function response are clearly positive in both observations and models, in contrast to LC09’s conclusions. Moreover, it is not appropriate to use only tropical SSTs and TOA radiation for feedback analysis as the transports into the extratropics are substantial. Any feedback analysis must also recognize changes in ocean heat storage and atmospheric energy transport into and out of the tropics which are especially large during ENSO events. While the tropics play an important role in determining climate sensitivity, simplistic and arbitrary analyses of tropical variability can be grossly misleading.

References
Forster, P. M. F., and J. M. Gregory (2006), The climate sensitivity and its components diagnosed from Earth Radiation Budget Data, J. Clim., 19, 39–52
Lindzen, R. S., and Y.-S. Choi (2009), On the determination of climate feedbacks from ERBE data, Geophys. Res. Lett., 36, L16705, doi:10.1029/2009GL039628.
Murphy, D. M., S. Solomon, R. W. Portmann, K. H. Rosenlof, P. M. Forster , and T. Wong (2009), An observationally based energy balance for the Earth since 1950, J. Geophys. Res., 114, D17107, doi:10.1029/2009JD012105.
Trenberth, K. E., J. T. Fasullo, Chris O’Dell, and T. Wong, (2010): Relationships between tropical sea surface temperature and top-of-atmosphere radiation. Geophys. Res. Lett., 37, doi:10.1029/2009GL042314, in press.

This is another response, also somewhat more complicated than the layperson can really follow:

http://sonomae.wordpress.com/2010/03/08/cracks-appearing-in-lindzen-and-choi-2009/

Why does your moniker link back to CS? Just curious.

It seems illogical to think that planets somehow have their own physical laws.

The picture that is emerging of the earth’s climate is an overall negative feedback systems with feedback elements which may be positive or negative along with forcings which are independent of temperature. There may even be feedbacks with linkages between them. This is beyond our simulation capabilities in 2010. As an engineer I can testify that the more complex something is the more likely it is that it won’t work.

If the planet had no feedback a certain amount of warming would produce a given amount of radiation, this is called the “black body” case.

CO2 obstructs the radiation so the body has to warm more to radiate the same amount of heat.

A good analogy is putting a pan of water on the stove and warming it but not to the boiling point. This analogy skips the interactions between feedbacks by using an overall resulting feedback.

If we put a lid on it the pan will warm more without turning the stove higher. [The lid like CO2 hinders radiation]

We cannot heat and cool the earth but it heats and cools itself and we can observe the effects.

If the earth has no feedback the increase in radiation as temperature naturally rises and falls will equal the black body case.

If the overall feedback is negative there will be more radiation per degree warming. This is equivalent to the pan lid getting thinner with temperature.

If the overall feedback is positive there will be less radiation per degree than the black body case. The pan will have to heat more to get the same radiation out.

This experiment was done in 2009 by Lindzen and Choy using satellite measurements of the earth’s radiation vs. the known temperature of the earth.

The overall feedback turned out to be negative. The experiment was replicated by 2 other groups.

Realclimate tried to prove it was an invalid test but the best they could do was claim the feedback wasn’t as negative as claimed because the data had been “adjusted ” .[There is that word gain.]