3) The models predict that cloud cover should be decreasing, and, in fact, such a decrease is crucial to amplify the greenhouse effect so it becomes the "enhanced" greenhouse effect. All measurements show cloud cover is increasing. ***
I did a quick Web search.
From What happens if we double CO2 in a climate model? (from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change site)
"In most models cloud cover increases in a warmer climate. This affects the energy budget in two opposing ways. Clouds reflect sunlight, reducing the amount of energy reaching the surface. They also act as a "blanket", reducing the earth's energy losses to space. As the total cloud cover increases, the first effect acts to reduce the warming (a negative feedback) while the second effect acts to increase it (positive feedback). Clouds are a major source of uncertainty. If clouds are allowed to change (and changes in sea-ice are suppressed), different climate models give answers ranging from 1.5 to 4.5 C for the warming due to doubling CO2. If the effects of cloud feedbacks are eliminated, this range is reduced to 1.7-2.3 C."
It's old (dated 1993). Did the models change that much in four years that "most" of them predict the opposite of what they predicted in 1993? That's hard for me to believe.
Look at figure 1 in this PDF paper:
Cloud representation in climate models:
It shows 10 models responding to a doubling of CO2. Five models show a decrease in top-of-the-atmosphere cloud radiative forcing, five show an increase. (The increases predicted are greater than the decreases, in general.) I'm not sure how increase or decrease in radiative forcing translates to increase or decrease in actual cloud cover, but clearly there's no majority agreement in the models!
So this quick survey indicates to me that point 3 is questionable. If you can find some additional support for the statement of that point, feel free. But as it stands it doesn't appear to reflect the state-of-the-science.
More next week.
So this quick survey indicates to me that point 3 is questionable. If you can find some additional support for the statement of that point, feel free. But as it stands it doesn't appear to reflect the state-of-the-science.
As far as I can determine, the Holtz statement may have been rooted in a limited set of models as his chart of scoring results, refers to cloud cover being inconsistent among the models instead of generally one direction.
I'll go with Richard S. Lindzen's overall assessment(2000) of the GCM's as more representative the the current-state-of-the-science.
From Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (March 2000) &
an interview with Tech Central Station (March 5, 2001, www.techcentralstation.com),
The biggest uncertainty in climate science is how feedbacks affect the climate. Global warming theory posits that a rise in atmospheric CO2 will only cause a slight warming of the atmosphere, on the order of about 1 degree centigrade. This small amount of warming, according to standard global warming theory, speeds up evaporation, increasing the amount of water vapor, the main greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. This positive feedback is where most of the predicted warming comes from.
A new study in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (March 2000) shows that the reverse is true. The authors find a negative water vapor feedback effect that is powerful enough to offset all other positive feedbacks. Using detailed daily observations of cloud cover from satellites in the tropics and comparing them to sea surface temperatures, the researchers found that there is an "iris effect" in which higher temperatures reduce the warming effect of clouds.
According to a NASA press release about the study, "Clouds play a critical and complicated role in regulating the temperature of the Earth. Thick, bright, watery clouds like cumulus shield the atmosphere from incoming solar radiation by reflecting much of it back into space. Thin, icy cirrus clouds are poor sunshields but very efficient insulators that trap energy rising from the Earth’s warmed surface. A decrease in cirrus cloud area would have a cooling effect by allowing more heat energy, or infrared radiation, to leave the planet."
The researchers found that a one degree centigrade rise in ocean surface temperature decreased the ratio of cirrus cloud area to cumulus cloud area by 17 to 27 percent, allowing more heat to escape.
In an interview with Tech Central Station (March 5, 2001, www.techcentralstation.com), Dr. Richard S. Lindzen, the lead author, said that the climate models used in the IPCC have the cloud physics wrong. "We found that there were terrible errors about clouds in all the models, and that that will make it impossible to predict the climate sensitivity because the sensitivity of the models depends primarily on water vapor and clouds. Moreover, if clouds are wrong, there’s no way you can get water vapor right. They’re both intimately tied to each other." Lindzen argues that due to this new finding he doesn’t expect "much more than a degree warming and probably a lot less by 2100."
Five models show a decrease in top-of-the-atmosphere cloud radiative forcing, five show an increase.
No consistency, for lack of sufficient physical basis from which to derive a model. That at it's heart is the problem with the whole UN/IPCC approach of justifying political action on the basis of incomplete and poorly understood physics.
Climate Models Fail to Reproduce Natural Temperature Fluctuations
Climate models that serve as the basis for global warming predictions fail to reproduce correctly the fluctuations in atmospheric temperatures over time scales of months and years, according to new research appearing in the July 8 [2002] issue of Physical Review Letters.
The study explains that large-scale atmospheric and oceanic dynamics are solved in the models using highly sophisticated numerical solutions, but that there are also "subgrid-scale processes" that are too small to be modeled. These are handled by "parameterization schemes," which amounts to little more than arbitrarily assigning a value to the particular process being considered. Some of these subgrid-scales includes, surprisingly enough, the roles of various greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide and the effect of aerosols.
In earlier research, the authors discovered a universal mathematical relationship, known as a scaling law, which describes the correlations between temperature fluctuations. What they found was that temperature variations from their average values exhibit persistence that decays at a well-defined rate. "The range of this persistence law exceeds ten years, and there is no evidence for a breakdown of the law at even larger timescales," according to the study.
Using this scaling law, the researchers tested seven general circulation models, including the U.S.-based model at the National Climate for Atmospheric Research, against historical atmospheric temperature data from six representative sites. What they found was that the models, "fail to reproduce the universal scaling behavior observed in the real temperature records."
The researchers explain that, "It is possible that the lack of long-term persistence is due to the fact that certain forcings such as volcanic eruptions or solar fluctuations have not been incorporated in the models." But they cannot "rule out that systematic model deficiencies (such as the use of equivalent CO2 forcing to account for all other greenhouse gases or inaccurate spatial and temporal distributions of sulfate aerosols) prevent the [climate models] from correctly simulating the natural variability of the atmosphere."
They conclude, "Since the models underestimate the long-range persistence of the atmosphere and overestimate the trends, our analysis suggests that the anticipated global warming is also overestimated by the models."
From What happens if we double CO2 in a climate model? (from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change site)
And what does doubling have to due with any reasonable for the future?
http://www.pacificresearch.org/pub/cap/2003/cap_03-02-20.html
"The Economist, which provides the best environmental reporting of any major news source, carried a small story last week about a simple methodological error in the latest U.N. global warming report that has huge implications. The article, "Hot Potato: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Had Better Check Its Calculations" (February 15 print edition), reviews the work of two Australian statisticians who note an anomaly in the way the IPCC estimated world carbon dioxide emissions for the 21st century."
......
"The IPCC's method has the effect of vastly overestimating future economic growth (and, therefore, CO2 emissions) by developing nations. The fine print of the IPCC's projections, for example, calls for the real per-capita incomes of Argentina, South Africa, Algeria, Turkey, and even North Korea to surpass real per-capita income in the United States by the end of the century. Algeria? North Korea? The IPCC must be inhaling its own emissions to believe this."
& Hot Potato Revisited:
A lack-of-progress report on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
As well as the fact that doubling CO2 concentration simply does not lead to the results that the demonstrably flawed UN/IPCC models(Global Warming Score Card) would have us believe:
Re-cycling of Infra-Red Energy
According to Dr Hugh Ellsaesser's IPCC submission, "The direct increase in radiative heating of the lower atmosphere (tropopause level) due to doubling CO2 is 4 wm-2. At the surface it is 0.5 - 1.5 wm-2". Schlesinger & Mitchell (1985), estimated this surface flux at 2 wm-2. Thus, depending on the model, or modeler, the estimates for increased surface flux following a CO2 doubling, varies between +0.5 and +2 wm-2. An above-averaged figure of +1.5 wm-2 will be assumed here for purposes of analysis and comparison.
At the current surface temperature (288oK) Doubling the atmospheric CO2 concentration from 340ppmv can only add 1.5w/m2 at the surface for a total surface radiative forcing of
390.08+1.5 = 391.58w/m2
providing a
(391.58/5.67*10-8)0.25-288oK = 0.277oK (C)increase in surface temperature for doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration.
A result well within any reasonable expectation of our rough estimate of 0.27oC associated with CO2 doubling demonstrated in the paleo CO2-temperature record of my prior replies.