New NASA data challenges global warming theory
July 29, 2011
Volcanic particles in upper atmosphere slow down global warming, says NASA (credit: USGS)
NASA satellite data show the Earth’s atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than current computer models have predicted, according to a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing.
Data from NASA’s Terra satellite shows that when the climate warms, Earth’s atmosphere is apparently more efficient at releasing energy to space than models used to forecast climate change have been programmed to “believe.”
The result is climate forecasts that are warming substantially faster than the atmosphere, says Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist in the Earth System Science Center at The University of Alabama in Huntsville.
In research published in the journal Remote Sensing, Spencer and UAHuntsville’s Dr. Danny Braswell compared what a half dozen climate models say the atmosphere should do to satellite data showing what the atmosphere actually did during the 18 months before and after warming events between 2000 and 2011.
“The satellite observations suggest there is much more energy lost to space during and after warming than the climate models show,” Spencer said. “There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans.”
Not only does the atmosphere release more energy than previously thought, it starts releasing it earlier in a warming cycle. The models forecast that the climate should continue to absorb solar energy until a warming event peaks.
Energy lost, not gained: satellite data
Instead, the satellite data shows the climate system starting to shed energy more than three months before the typical warming event reaches its peak.
“At the peak, satellites show energy being lost while climate models show energy still being gained,” Spencer said.
Applied to long-term climate change, the research might indicate that the climate is less sensitive to warming due to increased carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere than climate modelers have theorized. A major underpinning of global warming theory is that the slight warming caused by enhanced greenhouse gases should change cloud cover in ways that cause additional warming, which would be a positive feedback cycle.
Instead, the natural ebb and flow of clouds, solar radiation, heat rising from the oceans and a myriad of other factors added to the different time lags in which they impact the atmosphere might make it impossible to isolate or accurately identify which piece of Earth’s changing climate is feedback from manmade greenhouse gases.
“There are simply too many variables to reliably gauge the right number for that,” Spencer said. “The main finding from this research is that there is no solution to the problem of measuring atmospheric feedback, due mostly to our inability to distinguish between radiative forcing and radiative feedback in our observations.”
For this experiment, the UAHuntsville team used surface temperature data gathered by the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Great Britain. The radiant energy data was collected by the Clouds and Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) instruments aboard NASA’s Terra satellite.
The six climate models were chosen from those used by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The UAHuntsville team used the three models programmed using the greatest sensitivity to radiative forcing and the three that programmed in the least sensitivity.
Comments (33)
by Ryan Russon
Please add a disclaimer to this article, as a matter of integrity. The study cited is so remarkably flawed and questionably motivated that the editor of Remote Sensing (the publishing journal) apologized and resigned for letting it through. See: http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/3/9/2002/pdf It is nothing more than an oil industry shill creating FUD to confuse the masses.
by Frazer
Dear editor,
please adjust the title of this article so that less critical readers will not be mislead if they do not read the comments.
While the atmosphere may release heat faster than current models predict, this does not mean that global warming is not an issue. The polar caps are melting, and arctic tundra is releasing tonnes of methane as it melts, the levels of carbon in the atmosphere are skyrocketing and more so every year. Articles like this are dangerous. Yes, it is comforting to know that our climate may release some heat faster than previously thought, but this does not mean the issue will go away, and the way the data is presented in this article is totally misleading.
I wonder how this article even got posted on a high calibre website like this one, perhaps it is even beyond hope to be edited to something close to accurate and should just be taken down.
by devosr
So much emotion on the question. There are so many that are vested in the concept and many other scientists that withhold their unbiased opinions to avoid the debate of green religion. Having analysed the data, I choose not to debate religion and live satisfied that the world will not end on this issue. Please consider the bigger sustainability issue of finding jobs for the current rate of population growth.
If Singularity teaches us anything, it is that the population develops disruptive and unexpected technologies on a regular basis to advance the race.
by AGW Controversy, Part 2
[...] current climate models and thus the predictions for future warming could be over-stated. You can read an unbiased article about the research here. Contrast the tone of the first link with this one posted at Livescience. It appears that the [...]
by daveeclark@comcast.net
I have long believed man made global warming was a politically motivated hoax. As I learned more about RGGI and cap and trade, the Copenhagen summit I believe it is a hoax and a subversive tactic to re-distribute US wealth through carbon taxes on producing nations such as the United States.
I remember reading about how humans were going to have to live under glaciers in Popular Science in the 1970′s because the earth was cooling.
My college heat transfer professor studied global temperatures in the late 1970′s and examined ice core data that goes back about a million years. He concluded that the earth’s temperature could be modeled with our IBM 370 by using a random number generator function.
by Nuevos datos de la NASA cuestionan la teoría del calentamiento global - Ecoperiodico
[...] Noticia e imagen: Kurzweil AI. [...]
by petersmith
The fact is that this contribution is in a scientific peer reviewed publication. It stands or falls on its merits not on the religous beliefs of its author. Lindzen I think did some similar work. The fact that the temperature has stopped rising for ten years while CO2 emissions are booming seems to be consistent with negative feedback. Is it not? We need to keep an open mind and not bow to scientific conventional wisdom – often that has been astray in the past. In fact the progress of science consists in discarding flawed theories. I sometimes think some people are a little too eager to embrace man-made global warming, as though that has become a new religion.
by RoboSocrates
Check your facts. Global temperatures have been rising continuously:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.pdf
by Liopleuridon
Amara, I understand and respect that you posted this article, but it would be appropriate to also post its refutation otherwise you may give the mistaken impression that KurzweilAI is advocating the religious views of its author. Thanks for all your work!
by Editor
Agreed. I’m watching for a credible science-based refutation.
by aradzak
discover magazine : http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/07/29/no-new-data-does-not-blow-a-gaping-hole-in-global-warming-alarmism/
which, if nothing else, elucidates that Roy Spencer is funded by ExxonMobil, which clearly has vested interest in debunking global warming. Just as we should not take seriously a Phillip Morris funded study disconnecting smoking from cancer, so to should we not take this data seriously.
by RoboSocrates
Here’s one, written by climate scientists Fasullo (http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Staff/Fasullo/index.html) and Trenbert (http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/trenbert.html). Cutting to the chase:
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. Most of what goes on in the real world of significance that causes the relationship in the paper is ENSO. We have already rebutted Lindzen’s work on exactly this point. The clouds respond to ENSO, not the other way round [see: Trenberth, K. E., J. T. Fasullo, C. O'Dell, and T. Wong, 2010: Relationships between tropical sea surface temperatures and top-of-atmosphere radiation. Geophys. Res. Lett., 37, L03702, doi:10.1029/2009GL042314.] During ENSO there is a major uptake of heat by the ocean during the La Niña phase and the heat is moved around and stored in the ocean in the tropical western Pacific, setting the stage for the next El Niño, as which point it is redistributed across the tropical Pacific. The ocean cools as the atmosphere responds with characteristic El Niño weather patterns forced from the region that influence weather patterns world wide. Ocean dynamics play a major role in moving heat around, and atmosphere-ocean interaction is a key to the ENSO cycle. None of those processes are included in the Spencer model.
Even so, the Spencer interpretation has no merit. The interannual global temperature variations were not radiatively forced, as claimed for the 2000s, and therefore cannot be used to say anything about climate sensitivity. Clouds are not a forcing of the climate system (except for the small portion related to human related aerosol effects, which have a small effect on clouds). Clouds mainly occur because of weather systems (e.g., warm air rises and produces convection, and so on); they do not cause the weather systems. Clouds may provide feedbacks on the weather systems. Spencer has made this error of confounding forcing and feedback before and it leads to a misinterpretation of his results.
The bottom line is that there is NO merit whatsoever in this paper. It turns out that Spencer and Braswell have an almost perfect title for their paper: “the misdiagnosis of surface temperature feedbacks from variations in the Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance” (leaving out the “On”).
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/07/misdiagnosis-of-surface-temperature-feedback/
A few others:
“He’s taken an incorrect model, he’s tweaked it to match observations, but the conclusions you get from that are not correct,” Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, said of Spencer’s new study.
http://www.livescience.com/15293-climate-change-cloud-cover.html
Note that @waveman’s link actually had links to the above.
So now that you see a few science-based refutations:
The burden of proof isn’t on the scientific community to disprove the work of a single scientist (who, it so happens, literally has a “faith-based” skepticism of climate change).
To the contrary – a scientist must prove their claims, with extra rigor and support in cases where it goes against the prevailing view, as it does here. Ex., I could claim that the world is populated by undetectable flying elephants, and no one would be able to disprove it, but that does not make it true, it does not make it science, and it does not make it worth reprinting.
Especially after seeing the author’s history, I’d want to see lots of science-based *confirmations* of his work before disseminating it like this.
One last note about the headline: the NASA *data* doesn’t challenge Global Warming Theories. That is yet another sleight of hand — intentional or not — that makes this author’s claims sound more legitimate. “Well, if the data refutes it… and it’s from NASA…” The 2 scientists posted above have reviewed the same data and shown how the models do in fact fit the data — exactly the opposite conclusion from the same data. It is *Roy Spencer* — not the data — that challenges Global Warming models, as he has done incorrectly many times before. He has no credibility. And after this incident, Kurzweil AI will have lost some credibility too.
So the headline should read “New Paper By Global Warming Skeptic With A History of False Claims Now Alleges That NASA Data Challenges Global Warming Models”
by Daniel
Instead of the religious views of the true believers in AGW? Oh my, can’t have that…tsk tsk.
by sustaina
Declaration signed by Roy Spencer: “We believe Earth and its ecosystems — created by God’s intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence — are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory. Earth’s climate system is no exception.” Such people are out there to maintain their preconceptions at any cost, regardless of the contrary evidence. They also sell a lot of books. The presents of this article here wouldn’t be so bad if it were balanced by a representative proportion of scientists on the other side of the fence – say two or three thousand.
by RoboSocrates
Faith-based “science”…
by Editor
Comments noted and slanted word “alarmist” removed. (I don’t have an opinion on this subject; just sloppy editing on my part.) – Amara
by RoboSocrates
Kudos for the tweak. Unfortunately it’s still a misleading title, as my comment above notes. The NASA *data* does NOT challenge global warming models. The alleged challenge is from an *interpretation* of the data based on poor models and faulty statistics from a biased source.
by New NASA Data Challenges Climate Change Alarmism | AI Revolution
[...] to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, according to… Source: http://www.kurzweilai.net, via KurzweilAI » Essays [...]
by dwork
I’d like to know if KurzweilAI.net has an editorial policy of being hostile to the idea of global warming being a real and large threat.
The use of the words “alarmism” and “alarmist” as descriptors of predominant global warming scientific research is, in fact, alarming. The definition of “alarmist” is “a person who needlessly alarms or attempts to alarm others, as by inventing or spreading false or exaggerated rumors of impending danger or catastrophe.”
The NASA data is useful data to include in analysis, but by itself it in no way proves that the threat of global warming is false or exaggerated.
Is this just an unfortunate slip by a thoughtless editor? Or does this in fact represent Kurzweil’s editorial policies?
by Liopleuridon
This article does not belong on a serious website such as KurzweilAI without full disclosure. For shame!
by BoswellsJohnson
Dr. Roy Spencer is a member of the Heartland Institute, a front for corporate propaganda. The Institute works for the oil industry at the moment, and worked for Philip Morris in the past. This article is bunk.
by FutureTimeline
“Some scientific conclusions or theories have been so thoroughly examined and tested, and supported by so many independent observations and results, that their likelihood of subsequently being found to be wrong is vanishingly small. Such conclusions and theories are then regarded as settled facts. This is the case for the conclusions that the Earth system is warming and that much of this warming is due to human activities.”
– The National Academy of Sciences
by waveman
Nothing to see here, move along
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/07/29/282584/climate-scienists-debunk-latest-bunk-by-denier-roy-spencer/
by Shawn Kameron
I have studied global warming in school, and I’ve never understood the willingness of climate scientists to make sweeping claims from their computer models. I recently graduated with an economics degree, and in some of my classes we were presented with models that the best economic minds in the world had come up with to explain the economy. We were shown how time after time what seemed plausible turned out to be wrong, often with disastrous consequences for the economies involved. In the end, we were basically told that no one really understands why some economies grow and others do not.
My point is that while I understand that man made global warming is a great hypothesis, I do not think it makes sense to base society altering decisions on these computer models. Economists have hundreds of years of data from over a hundred countries, while climate scientists only have 150 years of accurate data from one planet running a never before seen experiment, the release of large amounts of carbon dioxide (and I think economies are probably less complex than planets). Why should the first models that they come up with (climate science is pretty young) be given so much weight? It just does not make sense.
I understand that many people lump “climate science deniers” in with all sorts of ignorant and immoral people, but I was curious if anyone else agrees with my cautious attitude towards the results of climate science, especially when many people use the results of climate science research to justify huge societal and economic changes.
by WKCotton
I came to the article completely open and willing to accept new data but before I could get to any data or information of any kind, I see “allowing far more heat to be released into space than **alarmist** computer models…”
Not ‘previous’ but ‘alarmist’. Adgenda noted.
Best,
~K
by Norm Rhett
“A major underpinning of global warming theory is that the slight warming caused by enhanced greenhouse gases should change cloud …” I haven’t seen changes in cloud cover argued publicly at all, presumably because it is so difficult to predict. Increased methane and CO2 release, decreased ice albedo and increased atmospheric water vapor are widely accepted as positive feedbacks of warming.
by GFreemanPHD
Please check wikipedia, Roy Spencer (scientist) for Spencer’s political and religious bias concerning climate change.
Spencer is a proponent of intelligent design as the mechanism for the origin of species. — Spencer is a signatory of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation’s “An Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming. The declaration states:
“We believe Earth and its ecosystems — created by God’s intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence — are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory. Earth’s climate system is no exception.”
- wikipedia
I find it irresponsible to use the title “New NASA data challenges global warming alarmism” without mentioning the background and bias of the person making this claim.
by Daniel
I find it irresponsible for you to point it out as it is entirely irrelevant. Either the data and argument are valid or they aren’t and they have nothing to do with the ‘belief’ system of the author. Or, when you submit a paper, are you queried about your ‘belief’ system before your paper is considered? Is that what it comes to? Ad hominem as a standard practice among scientists? Is this the manner of your refutation? As an atheist I find Spencer’s personal ‘belief’ system an embarrassment to himself, and totally irrelevant to what he says about AGW if what he is saying is based on the data. And if it isn’t based on the data then that is the point to make, not a reference to his ‘belief’ system.
by RoboSocrates
There are a few theories about why some of the climate models are off (see http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/environment/new-opacity-in-global-warming-slowdown), but we’re talking SMALL modifications. The fact remains that the Earth has warmed at a vastly greater rate over the last century than ever before. From the link:
‘To put the findings in a very long perspective, during the Cretacious period 120 to 90 million years ago, when Earth turned into a “hothouse” as the current issue of Scientific American puts it, warming took place at an average rate of 0.00025 degrees Celsius per 100 years. During the Paeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum about 56 million years ago the warming rate was 1,000 times more abrupt, at 0.025 per 100 years. The current rate is 1-4 degrees/100 years, at least 400 times higher than in PETM.’
All this paper argues is that it’s *difficult* (direct quote — NOT “impossible”) to determine what a *particular* cause of this warming might be. It does not challenge the NASA data showing a clear increase in temperatures (and in the rate of temperature increase) nor does it offer a non-anthropogenic alternative explanation AT ALL.
Reader beware – the research is actually decent, but this post exaggerates and twists the paper’s conclusions to meet the author’s bias.
by Daniel
Try reading The Chilling Stars by Henrik Svensmark for an alternative to the standard AGW hogwash.
by habanerosun
Sepsis, I actually had to look the word up, meaning a blood infection that causes inflammation. I take it you are pro Al Gore Theory? It is funny that the mind of the world thinks it knows more than the great Earth in her majestic beauty. Whether we are destroying the Earth or not we are her children and she will suffer the consequences of our actions. I pray to be one with the Source, God(whatever that may or may not mean to you), Life, the Tao (or original Unborn Mind). That way when the eyes of my spirit open I will know Truth. Until then Peace my friends
by cliffbrodsky
Keep in mind that funding for NASA has been cut and that the ‘scientists” there need to create doubt about Climate Change. All the oil and coal industries are using every possible tactic to weaken the case for Global Heating, because POLLUTION from oil and coal are causing a mass extinction of life here on earth. All the hard data science, factual evidence clearly shows that the planet is getting hotter, caused by human pollution from the past 200 years and its accelerating. Do NOT be fooled by NASA pretending that somehow the atmosphere is releasing more heat. Not true. It was 123 degrees in Minneapolis the other day. Record heat waves all over the world. The hottest on record for the past 10 years. Look at the facts, the evidence, not corporate sponsored propaganda.
by Khannea Suntzu
I meet this article with considerable sepsis and I allege political and corporate activism and shilling.