Tag: radiation

Mathematical modeling illusions

The global climate scare – and policies resulting from it – are based on models that do not work

Dr. Jay Lehr and Tom Harris[note]Dr. Jay Lehr is the Science Director of The Heartland Institute which is based in Arlington Heights, Illinois. Tom Harris is Executive Director of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition.[/note]
CMIP5-73-models-vs-obs-20N-20S-MT-5-yr-means
Tropical Mid-troposphere 20S-20N Models and Observations from drroyspencer.com.

For the past three decades, human-caused global warming alarmists have tried to frighten the public with stories of doom and gloom. They tell us the end of the world as we know it is nigh because of carbon dioxide emitted into the air by burning fossil fuels.

They are exercising precisely what journalist H. L. Mencken described early in the last century: “The whole point of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be lead to Continue reading “Mathematical modeling illusions”

Systematic Temperature Error in the Climate Change Discussion

by Bernie McCune

This whole discussion began with a posting on Watts Up With That by Hartmut Hoecht posted on July 11, 2018.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/07/11/bucket-list-historic-global-ocean-temperature-data-the-missing-pedigree-is-a-comedy-of-errors/

EnclosurePic UofNeb.jpeg
Temperature measurement systems comparison test layout.

It is worth reading the whole thing but I will summarize it here. Various ways of measuring ocean temperatures from long ago until present times are discussed and questions of uncertainty and errors are raised. Recent and even very old reports on sea surface temperature (SST) values are often given in fractions of a degree. In reality, until very recently, the collection process had obvious errors that were greater than one degree.

Cooling periods in the SST records seen in the 1940s and 1970s of 0.3º C were noted in the data with some concern about collection methods but this period is known to be a AMO[efn_note]Atlantic Multi-Decadal Oscillation (AMO) is a climate cycle index that has a roughly 60 year period.  The natural variation of the average sea surface temperature of the North Atlantic Ocean basin from the equator to 80o N is used to produce this index.[/efn_note] (and with less influence PDO[efn_note]Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) is another climate cycle index that also has about a 60 year period.  It is related to the El Nino Southern Oscillation  (ENSO) and is a robust, recurring pattern of ocean-atmosphere climate variability centered over the mid-latitude Pacific basin. The PDO is detected as warm or cool surface waters in the Pacific Ocean, north of 20°N.  It was named by biologist Steven R. Hare in 1997 when he noticed it while studying salmon production pattern results in the North Pacific Ocean. This climate pattern also affects coastal sea and continental surface air temperatures from Alaska to California.[/efn_note]) 30 year cooling period. In order to discern these 0.3º C changes in the data, instruments with an accuracy of 0.1º C must be used. The rule of thumb noted that the instrument must have better than three times the accuracy of the targeted Continue reading “Systematic Temperature Error in the Climate Change Discussion”

Seasonal Radiative Response

 

[This was originally posted in 2013 on Judith Curry’s site and was authored by CASF member, Steve McGee.  We have included it here as part of the CASF Archive.  Posted on December 26, 2013 | 169 Comments]

by Steve McGee

In science, one likes to have more examples than theories. – Dusan Djuric

Those words, spoken whimsically about cosmology, apply to climate science as well. The theory of the sensitivity of climate to the radiative SFCTforcing imposed by a doubling of carbon dioxide suffers from a lack of observed, repeatable examples. Paleo-climate studies carry with them the uncertainty of the proxy data and unmeasured assumptions on which they are based. Studies regarding the forcing from volcanoes and other transient events may not be repeatable for some time. However, Lindzen et. al. 1995 (link ) and Ramanathan and Inamdar in Frontiers of Climate Modeling, 2006 (link ) each have pointed out that the seasonal variation of earth temperature is quite large and possibly a surrogate for climate change. With this in mind, I set out to determine how the seasonal variation Continue reading “Seasonal Radiative Response”