01/01/2024
Weather Rant by Professor Art Horn, Meteorologist AMS
“The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.” – Bertrand Russell, “An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish”
Published at theartofweather.net
Monday January 1st, 2024
Science vs. Sensationalism
Below is a good but somewhat technical article from The Week That Was (TWTW). It is my opinion that after reading this story many of you will gain some insight into the climate change issue no matter what your background in science, if any, is.
Also, in the short term, the weather simulations that are the dominant tool used to predict the atmosphere’s future tantrums are strongly hinting that a radicle change in temperature and precipitation type is imminent across the mid-latitudes including the United States. The last three winters have been dominated by the La Nina phenomena along the equatorial Pacific Ocean. Historically most la Nina winters are not snowy in southern New England. This winter will be different due to the change from La Nina to El Nino.
The El Nino phenomena along the equatorial Pacific Ocean has historically produce a strong low latitude Jetstream that blows from west to east across the Pacific Ocean waters from Hawaii to northern Mexico eastward to the Atlantic Ocean and Beyond. This El Nino is no different. There is also a northern Jetstream that exhibits considerable variability in its latitudinal and Longitudinal meanderings. When the two of these strong rivers of wind in the upper atmosphere combine or what we call phase together in meteorology, the impacts here in the northeast can be dramatic!
It appears such a phasing of the two streams is becoming more likely in January of 2024. The timing and degree of the phasing is never predicted exactly by the simulations. This is true especially in the longer time frames but the simulations are valuable in that they give us clues as to what is possible over a period of a week to 10 days into the future. As the forecast period grows shorter the simulations become more capable of determining the important specifics of individual storms.
So get ready for some coastal storms (Nor’ Easters) that will have significant impacts beginning as early as next weekend (the 6th and 7th,). The specifics of these storms will not reveal themselves until the middle to later days of this week but keeping an ear to the ground is recommended especially if you have travel plans.
The story below is brought to you by the Science and Environmental Policy Program. It’s titled as The Week That Was (TWTW). It’s worth your time.
Scope: Physical science advances in several ways. One major type of advance is by improvements in understanding nature, A second type is dispelling false concepts with physical evidence. This TWTW will focus on what may be the most significant improvements in understanding the role of greenhouse gases in influencing temperatures covered in TWTW in 2023. Advances in dispelling false concepts will come in January.
In addition, TWTW will discuss a recent paper by Ross McKitrick demonstrating what statistical experts and econometricians have long known – certain types of statistical techniques can produce biased results including one now fashionable in the climate community.
Greenhouse Gases in the Atmosphere: The greenhouse gases were termed by John Tyndall who used early instruments to measure how different frequencies electromagnetic radiation (light) are affected by certain atmospheric gases in 1859. Since Newton showed that light split into colors by a prism could be recombined to white light, many scientists have explored spectroscopy. However, Tyndall identified that certain gases, particularly water v***r, interfere with the transmission of infrared radiation from the surface to space sufficiently to keep the land masses of Earth from entering a deep freeze at night, killing young life. This answered the question: "Given its distance from the sun, why is Earth warm enough to support diverse, complex life?"
Decades of laboratory experiments ensued and decades of speculation about what was happening in the atmosphere. Perhaps the most influential speculation prevalent today is the speculation that the small amount of warming caused by increasing a minor greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide (CO2), will cause a significant increase in the major greenhouse gas, water v***r (H2O), leading to a significant warming. This speculation was embodied in the influential 1979 Charney Report, which was influenced by modern numerical weather modeling.
Certain theorists speculated that the techniques of numerical weather modeling can be expanded into climate modeling. Later, Chaos Theory showed that long-term weather forecasting is unreliable, even only two weeks out, and forecasting must be updated frequently. This is a requirement that many climate modelers largely ignore in making forecasts lasting decades to centuries.
After World War II, the US Air Force was interested in discovering how greenhouse gases in the atmosphere influence infrared radiation and financed the development of databases combining both laboratory experiments and observations from instruments on weather balloons measuring temperature, barometric pressure, and humidity (which can be used to calculate water v***r). The most detailed of these databases is the high-resolution transmission molecular absorption database (HITRAN). “HITRAN is a compilation of spectroscopic parameters that a variety of computer codes use to predict and simulate the transmission and emission of light in the atmosphere.”
On March 3, AMO physicists William van Wijngaarden and William Happer posted their “Atmosphere and Greenhouse Gas Primer” since renamed to “The Role of Greenhouse Gases in Energy Transfer in the Earth’s Atmosphere” using the HITRAN database. Discussed in several TWTWs starting last April 1, this paper is likely the most significant new work in climate science discussed by TWTW in 2023.
Among the important issues discussed in this paper and largely ignored by the climate community are the role of water v***r in convection, the sharp reduction in water v***r with altitude (in the idealized atmosphere), and the importance of saturation and the extent to which water v***r interferes with the ability of other greenhouse gases to block infrared radiation.
Water v***r, H2O, has a molar mass of 18 grams/mole (g/mol), while the dominant gas in the atmosphere which is nitrogen, N2, has a molar mass of 28 g/mol and the second most dominant gas oxygen, O2, has a molar mass of 32 g/mol. Even argon which less prevalent than water v***r has a molar mass of 40 g/mol. Water v***r is buoyant, leading to convection in the atmosphere which transfers heat absorbed on the surface when water ev***rates into water v***r (latent heat) to the upper troposphere where it condenses into clouds releasing sensible heat and eventually falls as rain. Even though radiation transfer occurs at all levels in the atmosphere, convection is the most important mechanism in the troposphere. At higher altitude, water v***r freezes out. In their paper van Wijngaarden and Happer have a simplified model showing this. The altitude at which water freezes out is called the tropopause which is about 60,000 feet (18km) above the equator, 20,000 feet (6 km) above the poles and averages about 36,000 feet (11 km).
In the standardized atmosphere, water v***r drops from about 7750 parts per million (ppm) at sea level to about 4 ppm above the tropopause. [TWTW thinks 7750 ppm is far too low and it may be closer to 17700 ppm.] Thus, water v***r's importance as a greenhouse gas declines with altitude. Carbon dioxide concentration does not decline in the atmosphere. However, it is secondary to water v***r until above 36,000 feet (11 km), where the atmosphere is thin, and the warming effect of blocking infrared radiation is greatly reduced. This reduction in blocking also applies to minor greenhouse gases such as nitrous oxide (N2O) and methane (CH4). Only ozone (O3), created by solar radiation, increases with altitude, with greatest concentration from 20 to 40 km (65,000 to 130,000 feet).
In their calculations Van Wijngaarden and Happer demonstrate the concept of saturation over the hundreds of thousands of frequencies. If a frequency is already saturated, adding more greenhouse gas does not influence the blocking in that frequency. Water v***r covers the broadest range of frequencies, greatly reducing the effectiveness of carbon dioxide, and largely eliminating the effectiveness of methane and nitrous oxide. Thus, efforts to eliminate livestock as producers or methane, and artificial fertilizers as a source of nitrous oxide, are destructive and have no value in preventing greenhouse gas warming.
Carbon dioxide has a limited range of frequencies in which it is an effective greenhouse gas. Adding more CO2 to today’s atmosphere has a minor impact on temperatures. Ozone, which is formed by the sun high in the atmosphere, has a negligible impact in warming the atmosphere. See link under Challenging the Orthodoxy – Radiation Transfer and TWTWs from April 1 to April 15
https://www.sepp.org/twtwfiles/2023...
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UAH Temperature Trends Confirmed: The bulk of the greenhouse effect occurs in the lower and mid-troposphere, where water v***r dominates. Researchers Roy Spencer and John Christy have compiled atmospheric temperature trends of the lower and mid-troposphere covering the last 45 years, since December 1978.
The calculations are based on satellite measurements of the changing brightness of Earth’s atmosphere. Organizations such as NASA dismiss satellite measurements because the data has been compiled from more than 16 different satellites, subject to orbital drift, declining altitude. This complicates the calculations required to convert the measurements into temperature readings. (Spencer and Christy took note of these problems and have been correcting for the effects since the 1980s.) However, if the observations are consistent and the calculations have are verified, satellite observations provide the most comprehensive measurements of Earth’s temperature trends ever compiled.
With changing instrumentation and changing instrument locations, with no calibration or standardization periods from one dataset to another, surface observations are neither consistent nor comprehensive.
On March 3, JGR Atmosphere published a paper from NOAA atmospheric scientists led by Cheng-Zhi Zou of the Center for Satellite Applications and Research “Mid-Tropospheric Layer Temperature Record Derived From Satellite Microwave Sounder Observations With Backward Merging Approach.” The abstract states:
“We present a new version (v5.0) of the NOAA Center for Satellite Applications and Research (STAR) mid-tropospheric temperature (TMT) time series. This data set uses a backward-merging approach to intercalibrate 16 satellite-based microwave sounding records. The instrument observations included those from the Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU) during 1979–2004, Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit-A (AMSU-A) during 1998–2017, and Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder (ATMS) from 2011 to present.
A TMT time series during 2002–present based on satellite microwave observations in stable sun-synchronous orbits was used as a reference in the backward merging process in which earlier satellites were adjusted and merged to the reference. Observations from earlier satellites were recalibrated to remove their calibration drifting errors relative to the reference using sequential overlapping observations. This included removal of spurious warming drifts in the MSU observations onboard NOAA-11, NOAA-12, and NOAA-14 and a spurious cooling drift in the NOAA-15 AMSU-A observations. Temperature changes resulting from diurnal sampling drifts were corrected using an observation-based semi-physical model developed in this study.
Other adjustments included channel frequency differences between MSU and AMSU-A companion channels and instrument blackbody warm target effect on observed radiances. These adjustments resulted in inter-consistent TMT records spanning MSU, AMSU-A, and ATMS. The merged time series produced a global mean TMT trend of 0.092 ± 0.043 K/decade during 1979–2021 and a total tropospheric trend of 0.142 ± 0.045 K/decade after removal of a stratospheric cooling effect in TMT. Remarkably, the total tropospheric trends during the latest half period were nearly doubled the earlier half period over the global ocean.”
The paper verifies the calculations by Spencer and Christy that for the entire satellite record the temperature trend in 0.14°C (0.25°F) per decade from all sources including greenhouse gases and increasing water v***r from El Niños and submerged geothermal activity. Therefore, there is no climate crisis brought on by greenhouse gases; and models used to forecast future warming due to greenhouse gases fail miserably.
Interestingly this paper received little notice except for frivolous criticism which has been refuted by statistician Ross McKitrick. Except for Paul Homewood and McKitrick, few climate commentators mentioned it. As McKitrick titled an article in the Canadian Financial Post: “The important climate study you won't hear about challenges trends in climate simulations.”
Plate Tectonics: TWTW considers diverse video presentations particularly significant; one by Geoscientist Tom Gallagher and the second by Professor Wyss Yim of University of Hong Kong. Both dealt with physical evidence showing that plate tectonics changes climate.
On September 11, 2020, the journal, Science, by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) published an article written by Thomas Westerhold and over 20 European scientists titled, “An astronomically dated record of Earth’s climate and its predictability over the last 66 million years.” The data is based on using different isotopes of oxygen (O16 and O18) to estimate temperature and different isotopes of Carbon (C12 and C13) to estimate sources of change in carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. The abstract of the paper states:
“Much of our understanding of Earth’s past climate comes from the measurement of oxygen and carbon isotope variations in deep-sea benthic foraminifera. Yet, long intervals in existing records lack the temporal resolution and age control needed to thoroughly categorize climate states of the Cenozoic era and to study their dynamics. Here, we present a new, highly resolved, astronomically dated, continuous composite of benthic foraminifer isotope records developed in our laboratories. Four climate states—Hothouse, Warmhouse, Coolhouse, Icehouse—are identified on the basis of their distinctive response to astronomical forcing depending on greenhouse gas concentrations and polar ice sheet volume. Statistical analysis of the nonlinear behavior encoded in our record reveals the key role that polar ice volume plays in the predictability of Cenozoic climate dynamics.” The Cenozoic Period goes from today to 66 million years ago. Isotopes of oxygen are commonly used to estimate surface temperature of oceans and ice sheets, such as Greenland and Antarctica. Having fewer neutrons, thus less dense, O16 ev***rates more easily than O18 which has two more neutrons. Similarly, O18 condenses more rapidly than O16 and falls out earlier as rain or snow. Thus, temperature trends can be determined by ratios of O18 to O16.
Isotopes of Carbon are used to determine the likely source. Volcanoes have a higher ratio of C-13 to C-12 than plants (wood) or fossil fuels. Thus, one can determine if the source of carbon dioxide is volcanic or from fires. [Carbon 14 is ignored because, although it is regularly created in the atmosphere by protons ejected from the sun, it has a half-life that is noticeably short compared to geologic time.]
The data was taken from the multinational Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) running from 1985 to 2004. It was funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and 22 international partners with the purpose of conducting basic research into the history of the ocean basins. The summary of one segment, called Leg 198, begins:
“The mid-Cretaceous (~125-85 Ma) and early Paleogene (~65-34 Ma) were characterized by some of the most equable climates of the Phanerozoic and are among the best known ancient “greenhouse” climate intervals. In addition, these intervals contain some of the most abrupt and transient climatic changes in the geologic record, including the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), the mid-Maastrichtian deepwater event (MME), and the early Aptian Oceanic Anoxic Event (OAE1a). These critical transitions involved dramatically modified oceanic circulation patterns, profound changes in geochemical cycling, and abrupt turnover in marine biotas.
Recent ocean drilling efforts have led to profound advances in our understanding of the ocean and climate dynamics of a warm Earth; however, we have yet to gain a firm knowledge of how atmospheric or deep-ocean circulation operates in the apparent absence of substantial thermal gradients, how rapid removal of important elements such as nutrients in some of these events is maintained for a long period of time, and exactly how environmental changes cause extinction and speciation of marine biotas.”
The data has recently been criticized as not giving precise estimates of temperatures. However, that is not the issue. What is the issue is consistency of the data. If the data are consistent then generalizations can be developed from them. These are the most consistent data TWTW has seen covering the past 67 million years of Earth’s history. Gallagher unravels the data and develops a better explanation for changing climate than changing carbon dioxide. For periods of tens of millions of years, temperatures were roughly constant while CO2 concentrations changed dramatically.
Gallagher explains the four distinct periods in the Westerhold paper as Four Climate States:
• Hot house: 56 to 47 million years ago (Mya) more than 10 C above today
• Warm house: 66 to 56 Mya and 47 to 34 Mya
• Cool house 34 to 3.3 Mya Warmer than today
• Icehouse: 5 C below with beginning of the Pleistocene (closing of the Panama seaway 3.3 million years ago).
In short, the changing land masses caused the current Thermohaline Circulation. He points to the age of the ice masses as evidence of the Icehouse Earth. The oldest ice found in various locations is:
• Rockies, Alps, New Zealand, Patagonia, and Alaska, mostly Little Ice Age (1000 years old)
• Canadian Arctic and Greenland, 120,000 years
• Himalayas 600,000 years.
• Antarctica 800,000 to 1.2 million years
It was not until the Panamanian Seaway was blocked, that the Earth experienced dramatic changes in glaciation, coinciding with the Milankovitch Cycles. The ice record over the past 900,000 years shows that the dominant periods of the cycles have changed, with maximum duration of severe ice stretching from about 41,000 years long to 100,000 years long.
To Gallagher, the following cause Climate Change:
• Solar cycles – The sun controls the energy system; Solar cycles govern longer-term timing of climate change.
• Oceans control energy storage • Water in all phases drives the energy cycle of Climate.
• Continental Drift has shaped major steps in climate change over the past 67 million years.
• CO2 and Temperature proxies do not correlate in paleoclimate data.
• Until recently, CO2 was produced by volcanoes and oceans, with volcanoes heavy in C-13
• Catalysts such as Clouds (Albedo) and vegetation modify cycles.
What is important here is that the global climate models start about 1850 or 1870. Their construction includes no prolonged cold periods, which have been Earth’s dominant climate condition for the past 3 million years.
Current Plate Tectonics: In November Professor Wyss Yim, University of Hong Kong gave a talk to a group in Australia detailing recent submarine volcanic activity which, in the Pacific has all too frequently been confused with El Niños, due to the surface water warming. Submarine volcanic activity in the Atlantic off El Hierro in the Canary Islands dramatically warmed a small area of water there, prompting Al Gore to declare that carbon dioxide is causing the oceans to boil, which is absurd. A more complete discussion of Yim’s presentation is in the December 2 TWTW,
Statistical Games: A very influential paper in the climate community was one in 1999 by Allen and Tett that claimed it met the conditions of the Gauss Markov theorem for making reliable assessments of probability, namely, they are BLUE – Best, Linear, Unbiased, Efficient (close to true value), estimates. In 2021 Ross McKitrick published a paper in the same journal, Climate Dynamics, showing that the Allen and Tett paper does not meet the conditions of the Gauss Markov Theory. TWTW has not seen any publication refuting McKitrick’s assertion.
Now McKitrick has had a paper published in Environmetrics challenging the use of Total Least Squares which creates biased results in making assertions that weather events are caused by changes in carbon dioxide. It is amazing that given the hundreds of millions being spent on climate change studies, organizations fail to include statisticians and econometricians who have dealt with statistics and biased statistics for hundreds of years.
