A little book ‘Rough Guide to Weather’ by Robert Henson states that:
1. The most prevalent greenhouse gas is water vapour
2. As temperatures rise, the oceans warm up and release extra water vapour
3. This water vapour then absorbs energy and radiates some of it to the ground, thus helping global temperatures to rise even more
So the idea is that the warming effects of carbon dioxide will be amplified by increasing water vapour.
But this is NOT what the latest data from the latest satellite shows.
Data from NASA’s Aqua Satellite, which was only launched in 2002, shows that water vapour and high altitude cloud cover don’t necessarily increase when there is warming. Rather weather processes limit the total greenhouse effect in proportion to available sunlight. This can happen in a variety of ways through the hydrological cycle, for example low level clouds release water vapour from the atmosphere when it rains.
The new data from the Aqua Satellite was probably the most important issue discussed at the recent ‘2008 International Conference on Climate Change’. The new findings were part of a presentation by Roy Spencer who leads the team analysing all the data from NASA’s Aqua Satellite.
I have previously mentioned these findings in a blog post and a recent article in OLO but the importance of the finding for climate change science and policy seems to not be understood – or ignored.
These findings are not being disputed by the meteorological community and will require an overhaul of current UN IPCC climate models.
I will talk about this issue this afternoon in an interview with Michael Duffy on ABC Radio National’s Counterpoint at 4pm Sydney time (about 5 hours from now). Those in other parts of the world can listen through the internet - find out how at the Counterpoint link here.
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My first blog post on ‘global warming for dummies’ was posted some time ago and was also about the temperature record:
October 26, 2005
Global Warming for Dummies
Jennifer: I reckon the obvious global posting on March 20 of this latest Spencer article failed to lock in the mainstream media and that is quite at odds with the stream of other climate papers available recently.
Spencer et al "Cloud and radiation budget changes associated with tropical intraseasonal oscillations"
Found the feedback to be - 6.1W/K.
IPPC claims ~3K /2xCO2
BB sensitivity (atmosphere is close to black body if not exactly) found by differentiating Stefan-Boltzmann
dQ/dT = [sigma]T^3/4 = 5.67E-8*288^3/4 = .339 W/K
ie 1.01 W/2xCO2 which is the positive feedback (IPCC claims 3.7 W/m^2/2xCO2 which is not really a coherent result)
so net feedback will be ~ 5.1 W/K which is still negative though reduced from the original and a little warming may result but not a lot. Then of course the human impact is a fraction of that.
sorry the above link is missing an '8' from the end, it should be:
http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm?aid=828
Posted on Mar. 20, 2008
By Roy W. Spencer
The Sloppy Science of Global Warming
back to topic thread:
This is about a simply theory which has been articulated, incorporated into models and has now been proven wrong.
To recap, this time from a new article by Roy Spencer:
"By analyzing six years of data from a variety of satellites and satellite sensors, we found that when the tropical atmosphere heats up due to enhanced rainfall activity, the rain systems there produce less cirrus cloudiness, allowing more infrared energy to escape to space. The combination of enhanced solar reflection and infrared cooling by the rain systems was so strong that, if such a mechanism is acting upon the warming tendency from increasing carbon dioxide, it will reduce manmade global warming by the end of this century to a small fraction of a degree. Our results suggest a “low sensitivity” for the climate system."
Read more here: http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm?aid=82
toby: I have paddles splashing on both sides of this boat
ALL DEPENDS ON YOUR BIAS...... EH GAVIN
!!