Spencer: strong negative feedback found in radiation budget

Arguably the single most important scientific issue – and unresolved question – in the global warming debate is climate sensitivity. Will increasing carbon dioxide cause warming that is so small that it can be safely ignored (low climate sensitivity)? Or will it cause a global warming Armageddon (high climate sensitivity)?

The answer depends upon the net radiative feedback: the rate at which the Earth loses extra radiant energy with warming. Climate sensitivity is mostly determined by changes in clouds and water vapor in response to the small, direct warming influence from (for instance) increasing carbon dioxide concentrations.

This can be estimated from global, satellite-based measurements of natural climate variations in (1) Earth’s radiation budget, and (2) tropospheric temperatures.

These estimates are mostly constrained by the availability of the first measurement: the best calibrated radiation budget data comes from the NASA CERES instruments, with data available for 9.5 years from the Terra satellite, and 7 years from the Aqua satellite. Both datasets now extend through September of 2009.

I’ve been slicing and dicing the data different ways, and here I will present 7 years of results for the global (60N to 60S) oceans from NASA’s Aqua satellite. The following plot shows 7 years of monthly variations in the Earth’s net radiation (reflected solar shortwave [SW] plus emitted infrared longwave [LW]) compared to similarly averaged tropospheric temperature from AMSU channel 5.

This from the comments ....gives a nice net of what this is about:

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GregO says:

May 7, 2010 at 2:28 pm

Everybody. Read Dr Spencer’s book because he lays it on the line. I am relatively new to this climate catastrophe thing known as “Man-Made Global Warming” and “Settled Science”. Only got interested after Climategate; but since then I have been searching for a magic bullet indicator to tell if there is anything at all of value in the CO2 thermal forcing claims. Hmmmmm Arctic Ice? Just fine thank you. Antarctic? Same. Ocean temperatures? Dropping according to Argos; sea level rise ditto. Localized awful, awful droughts/floods/famines/four horsemen/you-name-it – either easily explained by natural phenomenon; accidents or lame leadership.

Warming? To me Dr Spencer’s explanation tells all: global warming as measured is a fraction of the modelers predictions and the entire Man-Made Global Warming meme as presented by Hansen/Gore/Mann/Jones/Briffa/Trenbeth et al is nothing but Piltdown Man writ large.

From Dr Spencer himself:

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Roy Spencer says:

May 7, 2010 at 3:59 pm

a few answers:

Ice near the poles won’t melt if most of the global atmosphere at lower latitudes does not warm. Atmospheric feedbacks kick in faster than ice-albedo feedbacks. And, has been mentioned, the satellite data are not as good at the high latitudes, anyway.

If I give more of the technical details to support my conclusions, people complain they don’t understand. If I don’t include the details to keep it simple, they complain that I’m not justifying my claims. Look, my articles are not peer-reviewed science, people. I’m just keeping people abreast of progress in research they are paying me to do. :)

The global cloud cover data are not good enough to do long-term trends with. Until the Terra MODIS data started in 2000, we could not be confident of any long-term cloud changes people think they see in the satellite data. Only a 2% change is needed to cause global warming or cooling. Long-term cloud changes on a regional basis can fool you because an increase in cloudiness in one region is usually compensated for by a decrease in an adjacent region.

Yes, it’s only 7 years of data. But the fact that none of the climate models show the negative feedbacks the satellites show when those are computed the same way — on the same time scale — from climate model output strongly suggests something might be wrong with those models’ feedbacks….

…does this all sound like “the science is settled”?

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NOT TO ME!!!

The thing that nailed AGW for me was a paper by Miklós Zágoni revealing a flaw in the underlying assumptions for the math models that gave us “Settled Science”. (See Researcher: Basic Greenhouse Equations "Totally Wrong") The paper correctly predicts the negative feedback now showing up in the physical data - before Climategate started all the double-takes.

I deal with models based on differential equations every day and it pays to know that sometimes the engineering assumptions built in to the equations might lead back generations - hidden from you unless you follow their build-up from first principles.

If only I were smart enough to explain it to learned people like Lindsey Graham.

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Strong Negative Feedback from the Latest CERES Radiation Budget Measurements Over the Global Oceans