Earth's Atmosphere May Be More Efficient at Releasing Energy to Space Than Climate Models Indicate, Satellite Data Suggest

[Moontanman]

Earth's Atmosphere May Be More Efficient at Releasing Energy to Space Than Climate Models Indicate, Satellite Data Suggest

 

ScienceDaily (July 29, 2011) — Data from NASA's Terra satellite suggests that when the climate warms, Earth's atmosphere is apparently more efficient at releasing energy to space than models used to forecast climate change may indicate.

 

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/07/110729031754.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Ftop_news%2Ftop_environment+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Top+News+--+Top+Environment%29

[amanda more]

Earth's Atmosphere May Be More Efficient at Releasing Energy to Space Than Climate Models Indicate, Satellite Data Suggest

 

ScienceDaily (July 29, 2011) — Data from NASA's Terra satellite suggests that when the climate warms, Earth's atmosphere is apparently more efficient at releasing energy to space than models used to forecast climate change may indicate.

 

http://www.scienceda...+Environment%29

 

We can't even predict when and where hurricanes will form and when and where they will land. Depending on where you live that is immediate.

 

It is easy to see that there is a wonderful natural feedback that has made it possible to prevent the earth from turning into a Venus for loe all these many billions of years.

 

Just because one observation - a cloud has two impacts on this. It prevents solar load below it- and it holds in greenhouse gases doesn't mean using those variables are useless.

 

This seems like anti-science that because you can't have a crystal ball you can say nothing. Give it a shot and as the hurricane starts to devastate, your scientific predictions then get really accurate.

 

Instead, go ahead. Tell us about hurricanes this year. Are you going to be wrong? yes. Tell us about global warming now? The models aren't going to be 100% accurate. So wait until you grandchildren and greatgrandchildren have the wonderful solace of then knowing science is so accurate they have moved from Florida and live in Oklahoma as a desert.

[swansont]

Not so much, it seems.

 

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/07/29/no-new-data-does-not-blow-a-gaping-hole-in-global-warming-alarmism/

 

The science daily article is basically a reprint of the press release, so (like all press releases) take it with a grain of salt. And wait for the rest of the atmospheric scientists to have a chance to critique the article. It was a rebuttal of another article — which didn't generate headlines, but then, it didn't get a write-up by a conservative think-tank author in Forbes — and will no doubt draw criticism. No single article like this is ever the definitive word.

 

http://www.livescience.com/15293-climate-change-cloud-cover.html

[Essay]

No single article like this is ever the definitive word.

At the risk of taking way too long to say the same thing....

This article, "New NASA Data Blow Gaping Hole In Global Warming Alarmism..." from Forbes, is making the rounds, eh? The "journalist" seems a bit biased, since he makes it sound as if NASA is making this claim. Roy Spencer has manipulated (or modeled) some of NASA's satellite data in a new way. Spencer concludes that, since his results don't match the expected results, the current level of scientific understanding must be wrong. Forbes assumes therefore, something else must be going on, right? And the only headline they {another journalist} can come out with is:

"Earth's Atmosphere May Be More Efficient at Releasing Energy to Space Than Climate Models Indicate, Satellite Data Suggest." [They of course mean Spencer's interpretation of some satellite data suggest that....]

{edit: i mixed up the articles/headlines as I wrote this over several days, but the points remain the same.}

===

 

So...

Earth's atmosphere may be (or it may not be) more efficient at releasing heat into space, but let's wait until somebody reviews this work by Spencer and Braswell... entitled,

On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth's Radiant Energy Balance.

 

I guess these are his musings... on the misdiagnosis of... Earth's energy balance...

 

published by a clearinghouse supporting the chemical industry ...the Molecular Diversity Preservation International (MDPI) platform. ....Wouldn't want to restrict new chemicals, eh?

 

As an industry organization, I'm not sure how they conduct "peer review" for their proliferation of journals, but they claim to do so. Since the advent of online "journals," it would seem that MDPI has become a good place to get any topic published, especially if the industry or policy makers need a citable source.

 

I can't wait to read some of these articles:

mdpi.com

MDPI - Open Access Publishing

MDPI is a publisher of peer-reviewed, open access journals since its establishment in 1996.

 

Religions — Open Access Journal

Religions (ISSN 2077-1444), an international and interdisciplinary open access journal on religions and theology, is published by MDPI online quarterly.

- free for readers, free publication for well-prepared manuscripts submitted in 2011 and 2012.

Rapid publication: accepted papers are immediately published online.

 

---Article: Spirituality as a Resource to Rely on in Chronic Illness: The SpREUK Questionnaire

Religions 2010, 1(1), 9-17; doi:10.3390/rel1010009

Received: 28 September 2010; in revised form: 13 October 2010 / Accepted: 22 October 2010 / Published: 29 October 2010

 

---Arndt Büssing and Harold G. Koenig

Article: Spiritual Needs of Patients with Chronic Diseases

Religions 2010, 1(1), 18-27; doi:10.3390/rel1010018

 

---Roberto Cipriani

Article: Diffused Religion and Prayer

Religions 2011, 2(2), 198-215; doi:10.3390/rel2020198

 

---Liyakat Takim

Article: The Ground Zero Mosque Controversy: Implications for American Islam

Religions 2011, 2(2), 132-144; doi:10.3390/rel2020132

 

---Jeanne Halgren Kilde

Article: The Park 51/Ground Zero Controversy and Sacred Sites as Contested Space

Religions 2011, 2(3), 297-311; doi:10.3390/rel2030297

 

---Rebecca Y. Kim

Review: Religion and Ethnicity: Theoretical Connections

Religions 2011, 2(3), 312-329; doi:10.3390/rel2030312

 

---Khari Brown

Article: The Connection between Worship Attendance and Racial Segregation Attitudes among White and Black Americans

Religions 2011, 2(3), 277-296; doi:10.3390/rel2030277

 

"Rapid publication: accepted papers are immediately published online." Well, maybe they are "peer reviewed" after they are "immediately published."

===

 

But seriously, Spencer's "well-prepared manuscript" only says stuff such as:

 

"The sensitivity of the climate system to an imposed radiative imbalance remains the largest source of uncertainty in projections of future anthropogenic climate change."

Well at least he's not a denialist, and does acknowledge anthropogenic change in climate.

 

"Here we present further evidence that this uncertainty... is ...probably due to natural cloud variations."

Wow! Stop the presses! ...and be sure to call an industry journalist.

 

"It is concluded that atmospheric feedback diagnosis of the climate system remains an unsolved problem, due primarily to the inability to distinguish between radiative forcing and radiative feedback in satellite radiative budget observations."

Good call, but overall climate still changes. Let's work on those details and see how it changes our understanding, okay? Thank goodness we have science to sort it out.

see: http://www.realclima...ature-feedback/

 

Figure: Lagged regression analysis for the Top-of-the-atmosphere Net Radiation against surface temperature. The CERES data is in black (as in SB11), and the individual models in each panel are in red. The dashed lines are the span of the regressions for specific 10 year periods in the model (so that the variance is comparable to the 10 years of the CERES data). The three panels show results for a) a model with poor ENSO variability, b) a model with reasonable ENSO variability, and c) all models.

===

 

Consequently, our results suggest that there are good models and some not so good, but rather than stratifying them by climate sensitivity, one should, in this case, stratify them by ability to simulate ENSO. In the Figure, the model that replicates the observations better has high sensitivity while the other has low sensitivity. The net result is that the models agree within reasonable bounds with the observations.

 

To help interpret the results, Spencer uses a simple model. But the simple model used by Spencer is too simple (Einstein says that things should be made as simple as possible but not simpler): well this has gone way beyond being too simple (see for instance this post by Barry Bickmore). The model has no realistic ocean, no El Niño, and no hydrological cycle, and it was tuned to give the result it gave.

 

"...and it was tuned to give the result it gave."

Hey! That's just what the denialist often accuse science of doing; so I guess this is more evidence, eh?

===

 

So what else does Spencer write on the MDPI blog?

 

"We have shown clear evidence from the CERES instrument that global temperature variations during 2000–2010 were largely radiatively forced."

EXTRA!! EXTRA!! Read all about it!! Heat affects climate!

 

"This behavior is also seen in the IPCC AR4 climate models. A simple forcing-feedback model shows that this is the behavior expected from radiatively forced temperature changes, and it is consistent with energy conservation considerations."

So far, so good; but where's the "gaping hole?"

 

"More recent work which attempts to minimize non-feedback influences [14] might well provide more accurate feedback estimates than previous studies."

Yep, that's usually the case.

 

"Finally, since much of the temperature variability during 2000–2010 was due to ENSO [9], we conclude that ENSO-related temperature variations are partly radiatively forced."

Wow, what daring conclusion.

 

"We hypothesize that changes in the coupled ocean-atmosphere circulation during the El Niño and La Niña phases of ENSO cause differing changes in cloud cover, which then modulate the radiative balance of the climate system."

That sounds reasonable; where is this going?

 

"What this might (or might not) [their qualifying parenthetical] imply regarding the ultimate causes of the El Niño and La Niña phenomena is not relevant to our central point, though...."

Wait! What? So what is the central point?

 

 

"[O]ur central point, though: that the presence of time varying radiative forcing in satellite radiative flux measurements corrupts the diagnosis of radiative feedback."

===

 

Oh.

So Spencer thinks the diagnosis of feedbacks may be off? Gosh, thanks Roy! Sounds like a good point. We'd better get right on teasing out those signals, so we better understand why our models work. How does that come to sound like a NASA satellite shooting down GW theory?

Agenda-based journalism?

How did that Forges piece get into these ScienceFora, with the same "perspective" perpetuated? Why not go to Spencer's actual musings "On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks...." Sheesh, talk about a gaping hole, or ...mountain out of a molehill.

 

For instance....

Why does Forbes think this "New NASA Data Blow Gaping Hole In Global Warming Alarmism..." - Forbes

It's not the NASA data, but Spencer's model of that NASA data, that suggests a problem with "diagnosis of radiative feedback." That's not a gaping hole, is it? What do other models say? Well, whatever....

 

I guess their "gaping hole" is the new way "Earth's Atmosphere May Be... Releasing Energy to Space..."

...or "May [Not] Be... Releasing Energy to Space...."

 

Despite how the industry interprets his new model, I'm gonna wait for the scientific community to see if there is a "gaping hole."

 

~ 30

Edited July 31, 2011 by Essay

[John Cuthber]

"We can't even predict when and where hurricanes will form and when and where they will land."

 

Actually, from my point of view, we can.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Alley

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_hurricane_season

 

As imperfect as it is, our model of the weather is already useful. Sure they need to refine it, but it already tells me where to avoid when booking a holiday.

 

Finding that the model is more complex than we thought is a good thing.

It still doesn't affect the fact that adding CO2 to the atmosphere will increase it's ability to absorb IR and so affect climate.

[Brainteaserfan]

"We can't even predict when and where hurricanes will form and when and where they will land."

 

Actually, from my point of view, we can.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Alley

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_hurricane_season

 

As imperfect as it is, our model of the weather is already useful. Sure they need to refine it, but it already tells me where to avoid when booking a holiday.

 

Finding that the model is more complex than we thought is a good thing.

It still doesn't affect the fact that adding CO2 to the atmosphere will increase it's ability to absorb IR and so affect climate.

That seems a lot like saying, "I predict that it will precipitate more in April than December."

 

Useful, but not quite what I would consider predicting.

[Moontanman]

All I can say is WOW! I had no idea I had fallen into the trap of AGW denialists, lol It just looked like an interesting article about how the Earth exchanges heat with space....

[swansont]

Here's more on the subject, and on the over-reach by many news outlets and pundit farms

http://mediamatters.org/blog/201108010025

 

Short version: the paper doesn't claim what many stories assert, and lots of climate scientists have issues with the details.

[swansont]

Update: the editor of the journal that published the paper has resigned, saying it was a mistake to have published it

 

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2011/09/editor_of_remote_sensing_agree.php

[JohnB]

This is an interesting story going around the blogosphere at the moment, where some questions are raised about this unusual action.

 

The editor has resigned because a "bad" paper is published. (If that was the standard I would be surprised if there were any editors left for any journals.) Compare this to the MMR vaccine debacle where a spurious paper was published and the result was lost lives, yet nobody resigned. How many editors have resigned due to not merely bad but positively fraudulent papers being accepted? Retraction Watch is a great place to see the various papers that are retracted and quite often the researchers are being fired for misconduct, yet resigning editors seem in rather short supply, so why this one?

 

As to why the paper is "bad", the editor gives two references in his resignation;

The problem is that comparable studies published by other authors have already been refuted in open discussions and to some extend also in the literature (cf. [7]),

 

What are "open discussions"? Blogs? Are they now to be held as the same standard as peer review? The reference 7 is to Trenberth et.al. 2010 published in GRL. Trenberth is a refutation of Lindzen and Choi, not Spencer and Braswell. I'll leave it to others to decide if refutation "to an extent" is sufficient grounds to call a paper "bad".

 

The editor also makes the rather remarkable claim that;

In other words, the problem I see with the paper by Spencer and Braswell is not that it declared a minority view (which was later unfortunately much exaggerated by the public media) but that it essentially ignored the scientific arguments of its opponents.

 

This paper by Spencer and Braswell is a direct rebuttal to papers by Andy Dressler in GRL. How a rebuttal can be considered "ignoring the scientific arguments of its opponents" is quite beyond me. I note that Dr. Dressler has a rebuttal paper coming out in GRL next week. Since the Spencer paper was published on 25th of July, 5 weeks must be some sort of speed record for writing, submitting, getting the peer reviews, making any changes needed and getting the paper accepted for Dr Dressler.

 

Also from the resignation;

The managing editor of Remote Sensing selected three senior scientists from renowned US universities, each of them having an impressive publication record. Their reviews had an apparently good technical standard and suggested one major revision, one minor revision and one accept as is. The authors revised their paper according to the comments made by the reviewers and, consequently, the editorial board member who handled this paper accepted the paper (and could in fact not have done otherwise). Therefore, from a purely formal point of view, there were no errors with the review process.

 

So there would seem to be nothing wrong with the process of peer review here, and the editor says as much, so why resign? Presumably because a "sceptic" paper got published. So how could that happen?

But, as the case presents itself now, the editorial team unintentionally selected three reviewers who probably share some climate sceptic notions of the authors.

 

Ah, the reviewers were sceptics and therefore biased. But hang on, aren't we constantly told that "97% of climate scientists" are with the consensus? So what would be the odds against drawing 3 top line reviewers that were all sceptics? This doesn't add up.

 

A further and rather more interesting question is why did the editor resign rather than retract the paper? If it's wrong retract it, simple really and happens quite a bit. What we now have is a situation where the paper is supposedly so bad that the editor falls on his sword, but not bad enough to start retraction proceedings. This seems decidedly odd.

 

Another interesting question is why did the editor, aside from resigning, feel it required of him to send a letter of apology to Kevin Trenberth?

 

Roger Pielke has commented on this whole mess. People should note that Dr Pielke is a climate scientist and is not a sceptic per se, although he does think that land use changes have been underestimated.

 

Comment is also at WUWT, but I doubt many would go there, "Verboten" and all that. I know that Judith Curry has become "persona non grata" since she appears to be apostate, but there are so many comments there that a second thread has been started. (At over 1,000 comments, it will take a while to read.)

 

People interested could also do something really strange and go and read what the author of the S&B paper himself has to say. But as those who visit deltoid and RC are aware, Dr Spencer is a christian and therefore obviously deluded, so why bother.

 

Where parts of this has moved from the bizarre to the surreal is also interesting. The S&B papers are basically saying that cloud cover responds to ocean heat (ENSO) and then temperature then responds to the change in cloud cover. I wouldn't have thought this particularly amazing as cloudy days are cooler than cloudless ones. However in a guest post at RC, Dr Trenberth refutes Dr Spencer saying;

The clouds respond to ENSO, not the other way round

 

Which is exactly what Dr Spencer said in the first place.

 

There are a couple of other points I find odd in all this. When the S&B paper first came out there were complaints that a journal called "Remote Sensing" was inappropriate. I can't work that out. Dr Spencer uses satellites to monitor the atmospheric temperatures, so I would have thought that by definition, this would be "remote sensing".

 

More worrying is the comment in the editors resignation;

The use of satellite data to check the functionality of all sorts of geophysical models is therefore a very important part of our work. But it should not be done in isolation by the remote sensing scientists. Interdisciplinary cooperation with modelers is required in order to develop a joint understanding of where and why models deviate from satellite data.

 

I find it disturbing that he appears to suggest that impirical researchers should get the "cooperation" of modellers before publishing their data and results. The modeller makes and publishes his projections and the impiricist checks those projections against reality. If they don't match then it is up to the modeller to improve the model, cooperation and discussion don't enter into it.

 

At the heart of this debate are two opposing theories represented by Drs Spencer and Trenberth. Dr Trenberth believes that clouds (the big unknown in climate) are driven by temperature (and are therefore a and only a feedback) and claims that this is what the models show. He is however in a pickle because of the "missing heat" problem. (It has apparently gone from the ocean surface to the ocean depths without passing by any of the ARGO bouys.) DR Spencer believes that clouds are both a forcing and a feedback. Temp changes cause cloud cover changes which then cause further surface temp changes and claims that this is what the data shows. If Dr Spencer is right, then the "missing heat" problem goes away because the heat was never there in the first place. (Which would leave Dr Trenberh with a large serving of roast crow)

 

Given the borderline libellous piece by Dr Trenberth in The Daily Climate yesterday, I think he is out to avoid this meal. Those interested can find Dr Pielkes thoughts on this op-ed here.

 

What is disturbing, however, in the Trenberth et al article is its tone and disparagement of two outstanding scientists. Instead of addressing the science issues, they resort to statements such as Spencer and Christy making “serial mistakes”. This is truly a hatchet job and will only further polarize the climate science debate

Edited September 5, 2011 by JohnB

[swansont]

This is an interesting story going around the blogosphere at the moment, where some questions are raised about this unusual action.

 

The editor has resigned because a "bad" paper is published. (If that was the standard I would be surprised if there were any editors left for any journals.) Compare this to the MMR vaccine debacle where a spurious paper was published and the result was lost lives, yet nobody resigned. How many editors have resigned due to not merely bad but positively fraudulent papers being accepted? Retraction Watch is a great place to see the various papers that are retracted and quite often the researchers are being fired for misconduct, yet resigning editors seem in rather short supply, so why this one?

 

If you falsify data, then the reported methodology can be sound and there's nothing the peer-review process will catch.

 

Ah, the reviewers were sceptics and therefore biased. But hang on, aren't we constantly told that "97% of climate scientists" are with the consensus? So what would be the odds against drawing 3 top line reviewers that were all sceptics? This doesn't add up.

 

I don't know how that journal works, but in one journal where I've published they solicit names of possible reviewers; it's not reasonable to think the staff is familiar with all of the researchers in all the areas of research that the journal covers. It could be that this is what happened, and the editor is taking responsibility for not double-checking to see if the reviewers were appropriate for a critical review.

[DrRocket]

Here's more on the subject, and on the over-reach by many news outlets and pundit farms http://mediamatters....og/201108010025 Short version: the paper doesn't claim what many stories assert, and lots of climate scientists have issues with the details.

 

A pparently the paper itself is rather controversial http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-09-editor-remote-journal-resigns-citing.html

 

In any case, here is the paper so one can judge for oneself http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/3/8/1603/pdf

 

Added in edit: Having now had time to read through the paper quickly here is my take.

 

While I am skeptical of a good deal of what has been published regarding global warming, my skepticism extends to both sides. I am not skeptical about the quality of this particular paper -- it is worthless. The single variable, first-order feedback model proposed is ludicrously simple and completely unrelated to basic physics. The satellite data deserves to be compared to climate code predictions, but it must be compared using real physics and mathematical models of sufficient sophistication and to be meaningful.

 

As usual, the popular reporting is laughably sensationalized and inaccurate.

Edited September 6, 2011 by DrRocket

[JohnB]

If you falsify data, then the reported methodology can be sound and there's nothing the peer-review process will catch.

 

Certainly this is true. Fraudulent papers get retracted, bad papers get rebutted, retracted or ignored but there is still a decided lack of resigning editors, wouldn't you say?

 

I don't know how that journal works, but in one journal where I've published they solicit names of possible reviewers; it's not reasonable to think the staff is familiar with all of the researchers in all the areas of research that the journal covers. It could be that this is what happened, and the editor is taking responsibility for not double-checking to see if the reviewers were appropriate for a critical review.

 

It would appear that the journal works in the usual way. To quote Dr Spencer in relation to this matter;

Almost every journal requires a list of suggested reviewers, and except for one reviewer, the identities of the reviewers chosen was unknown to us.

 

So presumably S&B gave a list of reviewers and three were chosen from that list that were, to quote the editor;

three senior scientists from renowned US universities, each of them having an impressive publication record.

 

If we are going to reject reviewers on the basis of possible undefined bias, it is going to get very messy very quickly. I add that in some areas the word "appropriate" means "will do as they are told" and that is the last thing we need.

 

Some more interesting facts have come to light as well. Dr Wagner, the resigning editor, writes his resignation in a way that makes one think he was a bit "naive" about the climate debate and the players involved. This is rather odd since he was on the scientific committee of a symposium sponsored by the ESA on "Environment and Climate". similarly on 3rd of April this year he was the welcoming speaker at a workshop entitled "WACMOS feedback to science community and water cycle roadmap in a changing climate". Theme 2 of the workshop was "Clouds". (The whole day was pretty much on using satellites for climate data) The workshop was at the University of Vienna where Dr Wagner is based and works in the field of climate modelling, although he is involved in soil moisture rather than climate per se. Those of a suspicious mind might make something of the close connections between projects by Dr Wagner and the "Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment" (GEWEX) who last year got a new chairman, one "Kevin E. Trenberth" and the personal apology that went along with the resignation.

 

For an interesting juxtaposition I quote from Dr Wagners announcement of his position as Editor in Chief at Remote Sensing;

Because it is an open access journal, papers published will receive very high publicity.

 

Yet in his resignation Dr Wagner complains;

With this step I would also like to personally protest against how the authors and like-minded climate sceptics have much exaggerated the papers conclusions in public statements, e.g., in a press release of The University of Alabama in Huntsville from 27 July 2011 [2], the main authors personal homepage [3], the story New NASA data blow gaping hole in global warming alarmism published by Forbes [4], and the story Does NASA data show global warming lost in space? published by Fox News [5], to name just a few.

 

While I will certainly grant him on the over hyping of the paper, he is upset that the paper recieved high publicity?

 

He goes on to say;

Unfortunately, their campaign apparently was very successful as witnessed by the over 56,000 downloads of the full paper within only one month after its publication.

 

So the editor of a journal is resigning because his journal published a paper that generated enough interest for it to be downloaded 56,000 times in the first month. I simply can't imagine an editor saying "Wow, circulation is way up, I'd better resign".

 

At this point I have two questions for any publishing scientists reading this;

 

1. Would you be pleased or upset that a paper you wrote generated enough interest from outside your field that 56,000 people actively went looking for it, downloaded it, read it and tried to understand it?

 

2. Would you expect a personal letter of apology and the resignation of an editor who published a paper that "sorts, kinda" disagreed with something you wrote in a blog post?

 

Addendum:

 

The Physorg article is factually incorrect on the information available at this stage. There has been no mention that an "internal review revealed that a paper published in his journal by climatic scientists Roy Spencer and William Braswell had not been properly reviewed before publishing." In fact Dr Wagners resignation specifically states that there was no fault in the review process.

Edited September 6, 2011 by JohnB

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

Certainly this is true. Fraudulent papers get retracted, bad papers get rebutted, retracted or ignored but there is still a decided lack of resigning editors, wouldn't you say?

I think swansont's point was that there's nothing to resign over if a fraudulent paper is discovered; the editor cannot be expected to know if data has been improperly manipulated, since he did not perform the experiment himself, and a paper based on falsified data can draw perfectly reasonable conclusions from that data. In this case, however, it is not the data but the methods which are in question.

 

While I will certainly grant him on the over hyping of the paper, he is upset that the paper recieved high publicity?

No. He is upset that overhyped and exaggerated claims received high publicity -- 56,000 downloads. He's not upset that the paper was popular, as your quote should make clear. To add some context, the following sentences:

 

But trying to refute all scientific insights into the global warming phenomenon just based on the comparison of one particular observational satellite data set with model predictions is strictly impossible. Aside from ignoring all the other observational data sets (such as the rapidly shrinking sea ice extent and changes in the flora and fauna) and contrasting theoretical studies, such a simple conclusion simply cannot be drawn considering the complexity of the involved models and satellite measurements.

 

The implication is "I let through a flawed paper which has been widely misconstrued to rebut a well-established theory which it cannot rebut," not "I let through a paper which became popular!"

[DrRocket]

 

1. Would you be pleased or upset that a paper you wrote generated enough interest from outside your field that 56,000 people actively went looking for it, downloaded it, read it and tried to understand it?

 

2. Would you expect a personal letter of apology and the resignation of an editor who published a paper that "sorts, kinda" disagreed with something you wrote in a blog post?

 

 

Instead of debating irrelevant statistics on how many people downloaded the article, why don't you try actually reading it ? The link is in my previous post.

 

As I stated earlier, although I am personally skeptical of much of what has been published on global warming and might be predisposed to accept critical publications, that paper is junk. The editor should resign for publishing it. Anyone with any knowledge of dynamic feedback systems should have summarily rejected it -- no need to even send to referees. And those referees ought to be taken off of the list.

 

GIGO

[JohnB]

Dr Rocket, I have. (Or at least the bits I could understand)

 

One of the difficulties for those of us without the PhD in maths is that quite often what we are presented are two sets of equations that apparently represent two differing versions of reality and have no objective way to tell which is correct. I think those that know me would agree that I have a good grasp of the climate science world, however I make no claim as to being knowledgable enough or qualified to comment on the worth of an actual paper based on the maths involved. It wasn't that long ago that I didn't know what an r² value or correllation coefficient was, let alone its meaning and significance. (I now know enough to understand whether the value is "good" or "bad", but don't ask me to calculate either. )

 

The above doesn't mean I know nothing. I can read and evaluate conclusions and compare those conclusions to other published papers. I have a Mk 1 eyeball that can look at the graphs and see what is there. For example I can look at figure 3 in the paper and see that projections of the 6 climate models are nowhere near the observations. However I'm constantly aware that I'm not knowledgable enough to work out whether figure 3 is correct or not. I have to take it "on faith" that a researcher is acting in good faith and that his figures reflect what he claims the data says. This applies to both sceptic and consensus papers.

 

At the time I made my post I hadn't seen your edit. If you would care to respond in more detail as to why the paper is worthless in your view, or to start a thread in the climate science sub forum, then believe me I would read it avidly. This is in no way a trap. There are things I know and a hell of a lot more that I don't know and more to the point, I know I don't know. I would probably ask questions, but that is how I find out things I don't know.

 

Cap'n, I'm afraid I have to disagree. Dr Wagners statement is incorrect in a number of ways. First and foremost, sea ice extent and changes to flora and fauna occur due to changes in climate but are not an indicator as to attribution of cause and I'm frankly surprised that someone who is supposed to know his stuff even brings it up.

 

Secondly, and regardless of the hype, yes you can compare a single data set to the model predictions and make a valid finding, it is possible. The models predict that there will be a radiative imbalnce at the TOA, and that this imbalance will have a certain value. This is definitive and can be checked, and it can only be checked against a single data set, the satellite data. Other data sets are irrelevent to the question. The question is whether or not more energy is coming into the system known as "Earth" than is leaving it. On this basis, what happens inside the box called "Earth" is irrelevent to the question. Surface temps don't matter and neither do Arctic Ice extent. Arctic Ice will effect the outgoing radiation due to albedo but so what? Albedo may explain why there is a difference but is not appropriate for determining whether or not there is a difference. Only one dataset can measure this, the satellite data.

 

Thirdly, and I find this very concerning, he is elevating theory to the level of observation. This tendency was noted during one of the climategate inquiries and was of concern then. Theory and models can certainly guide what one might expect, but nature tells you what is. Obs must always trump theory, or you are going to allow any pseudoscientific claptrap in. If you allow theory to ever even come close to trumping obs, you are practicing religion and not science. You are in effect telling the creationists that their theory should be considered on an equal footing with all the observations confirming evolution. Others might want to open the gats to the creationists and expanding earth theorists, but I do not. If a theory or model makes specific predictions about specific things and those predictions do not match the observations, then the theory and model are at best faulty and at worst wrong. It is up to the modeller and theorist to have their models and theories match reality, and never the other way round.

 

And without buying into the hype surrounding this paper, or any others that are supposedly the final "nail in the coffin", (I really don't know which expression I hate more, that one or the old "It's worse than we thought") the simple fact is that it is the satellites that will tell us what is going on, and it is on their data that GHG theory will stand or fall. If more energy comes in than goes out, then the world will warm, if more leaves than comes in, it will cool. (At least as a first approximation) GHG theory tells us that as CO2 is added to the atmosphere, "trapping" energy, then less will leave and the world will warm. Based on this radiative imbalance the models then tell us by how much and how fast. Theory and models also predict how large the discrepancy should be. Should more energy leave the system than is predicted, then the models are faulty and will predict that temps will rise more and faster than they will in reality. Conversely if less leaves the system than is predicted then the models are reading "cool" and temps will rise more and faster than predicted. It's all about radiative imbalance.

[swansont]

Here's one take on the situation

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/09/resignations-retractions-and-the-process-of-science/

 

He clearly feels as though he, and his fledgling journal, were played in order to get a politicised message to the media. A more seasoned editor might well have acted differently at the various stages and so he resigned to take responsibility for the consequences of not doing a better job, and, presumably, to try and staunch the impression that Remote Sensing is a journal where you can get anything published.

[JohnB]

Yet the only person I've seen having a go at Remote Sensing is Dr Trenberth, so who is creating that "impression"?

[JohnB]

I see that the new editor is remarkably speedy. Kevin Trenberths commentary published in Remote Sensing was

 

Received: 8 September 2011 / Accepted: 8 September 2011 / Published: 16 September 2011

 

Dr Trenberth is also rather quick as reference 25 of the commentary is;

 

25. NASA. CERES EBAF Data Sets. Available online: http://eosweb.larc.nasa.gov/

PRODOCS/ceres/level4_ebaf_table.html (accessed on 8 September 2011).

 

Data accessed, commentary written, submitted and accepted all in the one day. This is of course perfectly normal and is common in other sciences isn't it?

 

And yes, I do realise that a commentary can be virtually finished and just waiting for the final data to complete it, but this all seems rather fast.