Dessler on Spencer and Braswell

Thanks to Anthony for forwarding me the Dessler comment on response to Spencer and Braswell. I'll post the same excerpts as AW has so that readers here can discuss.

Cloud variations and the Earth’s energy budget
A.E. Dessler
Dept. of Atmospheric Sciences
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX

Abstract: The question of whether clouds are the cause of surface temperature changes, rather than acting as a feedback in response to those temperature changes, is explored using data obtained between 2000 and 2010. An energy budget calculation shows that the energy trapped by clouds accounts for little of the observed climate variations. And observations of the lagged response of top-of-atmosphere (TOA) energy fluxes to surface temperature variations are not evidence that clouds are causing climate change.

Introduction
The usual way to think about clouds in the climate system is that they are a feedback — as the climate warms, clouds change in response and either amplify (positive cloud feedback) or ameliorate (negative cloud feedback) the initial change [e.g., Stephens, 2005]. In recent papers, Lindzen and Choi [2011, hereafter LC11] and Spencer and Braswell [2011, hereafter SB11] have argued that reality is reversed: clouds are the cause of, and not a feedback on, changes in surface temperature. If this claim is correct, then significant revisions to climate science may be required.

…

Conclusions
These calculations show that clouds did not cause significant climate change over the last decade (over the decades or centuries relevant for long-term climate change, on the other hand, clouds can indeed cause significant warming). Rather, the evolution of the surface and atmosphere during ENSO variations are dominated by oceanic heat transport. This means in turn that regressions of TOA fluxes vs. ΔTs can be used to accurately estimate climate sensitivity or the magnitude of climate feedbacks. In addition, observations presented by LC11 and SB11 are not in fundamental disagreement with mainstream climate models, nor do they provide evidence that clouds are causing climate change. Suggestions that significant revisions to mainstream climate science are required are therefore not supported.

Acknowledgments: This work was supported by NSF grant AGS-1012665 to Texas A&M University. I thank A. Evan, J. Fasullo, D. Murphy, K. Trenberth, M. Zelinka, and A.J. Dessler for useful comments.

Dessler, A. E. (2011),

Cloud variations and the Earth’s energy budget, Geophys. Res. Lett., doi:10.1029/2011GL049236, in press. [Abstract] [PDF paywalled] (accepted 29 August 2011)

Update on Sep 6, 2011 by Bishop Hill

A copy of the paper has been posted here.

Comments

[Mac]

6 weeks from submission to publication !!!!!

Wow, even for the Team that must be a record.

All I can say is well done to the authors for highlighting how corrupt the peer review process has become on climate change.

[Breathe of Fresh Air]

Well 9/11 allowed a short study on the effect of contrails.

http://articles.cnn.com/2002-08-07/tech/contrails.climate_1_contrails-cirrus-clouds-david-travis?_s=PM:TECH

[Viv Evans]

Brief recap of my lenghty response at WUWT:

How can Dessler et al state that over 'relevant' decades and even centuries, clouds can 'significantly' increase warming, when they don't, in their opinion,cause 'significant' climate change in a decade?

Do they have data on clouds going back a century? Or even a few decades? One sure would like to know ...

One reason why I became a 'sceptic' was the total lack of data on clouds and their influence, in the various models. 'Albedo' just isn't sufficient.

[Barry Woods]

And So It Starts:

extracts from a 'professional scientist blog. Scot Mandia (AGW_Prof, twitter)
http://profmandia.wordpress.com/2011/09/06/roy-spencer-wants-you-to-believe-the-magician-really-cuts-her-body-in-half/

"Global Warming: Man or Myth?
A blog to supplement my global warming site

--- Roy Spencer Wants You to Believe the Magician Really Cuts Her Body in Half ----

"Alas, the paper was fundamentally flawed and used by Spencer to make false claims. So much so that the Editor-in-Chief of Remote Sensing recently resigned. His resignation letter can be read here. An excerpt appears below:"

"Because they think we have nothing to worry about, SMCL are the darlings of the climate science deniers. For his part, Spencer thinks clouds cause climate change instead of the other way around."

"His latest paper (Spencer & Braswell, 2011) published in the obscure journal Remote Sensing caused quite a splash in the science denier world."

In BOLD:
"Climate change is already here and the worst is yet to come. Solutions are going to be put into place. If you do not accept the science and choose not to sit at the solution table, you will have no say in what happens."

Spencer, Monckton, Christie, and Lindzen want you to believe all of this evidence and all of these experts are wrong. C’mon, you know that is not true just like you know that the woman is not really being cut in half.

Trust the evidence and the experts – not the magicians. "

---------------------
I'm not usually prone to strong langueage, but for **** sake. this is a professional scientist communicating. !!!

Right or wrong on AGW, I do not care.. this is pathetic. other scientists SHOULD say so, as it makes them all look bad.

[Phillip Bratby]

The usual way to think about clouds in the climate system is that they are a feedback — as the climate warms, clouds change in response and either amplify (positive cloud feedback) or ameliorate (negative cloud feedback) the initial change [e.g., Stephens, 2005]. In recent papers, Lindzen and Choi [2011, hereafter LC11] and Spencer and Braswell [2011, hereafter SB11] have argued that reality is reversed

Perhaps the "usual"

Usual to whom?

reality is reversed

What reality would that be?

This doesn't seem like the way a proper scientist would introduce a paper.

[Alexander K]

On balance, I suspect Dessler et al have done the sceptical lay public a favour by providing this brilliant example of how they have a fast track through the peer review process to enable them to shout down scientists who do not toe the hockey team's line.
Another own goal, IMHO.

[Bishop Hill]

I'm astonished that the editors at GRL let the "reality is reversed" bit through. This makes them look highly unprofessional.

[Phillip Bratby]

Clouds are not a feedback to the climate. They are the direct result of energy from the sun heating liquid water and converting it to vapour. Convection then inevitably results in a reduction in pressure of the vapour and inevitable condensation to form water or ice droplets, hence couds.

[Harry Dale Huffman]

They are all wrong. Clouds are part and parcel of weather, a merely transient and naturally recurring overlay upon the stable atmosphere, and are neither a cause of long-term climate change nor a "feedback" (which, like all of the consensus concepts, is pure gobbledygook masquerading as substantial scientific thinking). My humble, but competent, analysis of a proper comparison of the temperatures in the atmospheres of Venus and Earth shows this very simply and clearly:

Venus: No Greenhouse Effect

The temperature-vs-pressure curves of Venus and Earth, when just their different distances from the Sun are taken into account, are essentially the same, over the range of Earth tropospheric pressures (from 1,000 mb down to 200 mb), EXCEPT WITHIN THE CLOUDS OF VENUS (between about 600 and 300 mb), where the temperature is about 5°C lower than it would be without the clouds. The only effect of the thick, planet-wide clouds of Venus is within them, they do not affect the overall temperature-vs-pressure curve, or the temperature in the atmosphere well outside of the clouds. The transient and scattered clouds on Earth likewise cannot affect our atmosphere's temperature-vs-pressure curve. This is a planet-sized experimental fact, definitive for climate science, that trumps all current climate theories and demolishes them. Dessler, like all of the silly consensus purveyors, is an incompetent idiot, but then the whole of climate science is shackled by incompetent theories and miseducation about the truth, which my Venus/Earth comparison, which should have been done by them 20 years ago, simply dissolves and resolves.

[Patagon]

I answered too early in another post, so I quote myself from
Sep 6, 2011 at 9:20 AM | Patagon:

The paper starts in typical Teamspeak:

The usual way to think about clouds in the climate system.....
In recent papers, Lindzen and Choi [2011, hereafter LC11] and Choi [2011, hereafter LC11] and Spencer and Braswell [2011, hereafter SB11] have argued that reality is reversed: clouds are the cause of, and not a feedback on

Who decides what is the "usual way of thinking"? Some authors may do so, but it is far from clear that that is the "usual" way. Even so, what is the weight in the argument of something being "usual", "usuality" has no demonstrative weight.

"Reality reversed", so Dessler already knows what's reality, clear example of unbiassed scientific approach.
This text is more appropriate to RC blog than to a scientific journal, I wonder who has reviewed the paper, if it was reviewed at all.

It continues:

LC11 (their Eq. 8) and SB11 (their Eq. 1) both write the Earth’s energy budget as:
C dTs/dt = ∆Rcloud + ∆Focean − λ∆Ts

What SB11 actually says is:

Cp d∆T/dt = S(t) + N(t) − λ∆T

And it is not the same.

The full paper is an attack to SB11, and as such the appropriate thing is to publish it in Remote Sensing and ask the authors of the original paper to answer Dessler critics. But, well, we are in the era of peer-review re-definition.

I have searched Dessler (rather impatiently) and found not a single mention of short wave or albedo, yet they claim to have debunked the effect of clouds as feedbacks. I am afraid not

[TerryS]

If this had been published as a comment, in Remote Sensing, of Spencer and Braswell's paper then Spencer and Braswell would have had an automatic right to a response.

Spencer and Braswell have no such right with this. Does anybody seriously believe that after the brouhaha over the original paper that any journal will publish any response from Spencer and Braswell, irrespective of its merits?

[ZedsDeadBed]

"Dessler, like all of the silly consensus purveyors, is an incompetent idiot"
Sep 6, 2011 at 11:53 AM | Harry Dale Huffman

This blog hosts the most charming comments.

[Patagon]

@ Phillip Bratby

We don't really know. If it were as simply as that, cloud would be an excellent buffering mechanism: sun heats ocean, clouds form, clouds block the sun, ocean cool down.

But reality is far more complicated. We do not know yet the ingredients for cloud droplet condensation, condensation and convection are triggered by many other factors (providing heat and moisture are available), such as orographic lifting, global atmospheric circulation, colliding air masses, etc. Heat and moisture are not uniformly distributed, nor it is ocean heat.

We can not be sure if they are the origin or the cause, nor to what extent they can be both, and to complicate things even more, clouds can both warm and cool, depending on their altitude and location.

[Bishop Hill]

Patagon

Indeed - argumentum ad populam.

[Patagon]

What Dessler says:

Eq. 1 of SB11 according to D11:
C dTs = ∆Rcloud + ∆Focean − λ∆Ts

The formulation of Eq. 1 is potentially problematic because the climate system is defined to include the ocean, yet one of the heating terms is flow of energy to/from
the ocean (∆Focean). This leads to the contradictory situation where heating of their climate system by the ocean (∆Focean > 0) causes an increase of energy in the ocean
(C(dTs/dt) > 0), apparently violating energy conservation.

What Spencer and Braswell wrote:

Much can be learned about the interaction between radiative forcing and feedback through a simple time dependent forcing-feedback model of temperature variations away from a state of energy equilibrium,
Cp dΔT/dt = S(t) + N(t) − λΔT (1)
Equation (1) states that time-varying sources of non-radiative forcing S and radiative forcing N cause a climate system with bulk heat capacity Cp to undergo a temperature change with time away from its equilibrium state (dΔT/dt), but with a net radiative feedback ‘restoring force’ (−λΔT) acting to stabilize the system. For the interannual temperature climate variability we will address here, the heat capacity Cp in Equation (1) is assumed to represent the oceanic mixed layer. (Note that if Cp is put inside the time differential term, the equation then becomes one for changes in the heat content of the system with time. While it is possible that feedback can be more accurately diagnosed by analyzing changes in the heat content of the ocean over time [6], our intent here is to examine the problems inherent in diagnosing feedback based upon surface temperature changes.)
Radiative forcings (N) of temperature change could arise, for example, from natural fluctuations in cloud cover which are not the direct or indirect result of a temperature change (that is, not due to feedback) [7]. Examples of non-radiative forcing (S) would be fluctuations in the heat exchange between the mixed layer and deep ocean, or between the mixed layer and the overlying atmosphere. Importantly, satellite radiative budget instruments measure the combined influence of radiative forcing (N) and radiative feedback (−λΔT) in unknown proportions.

I'll keep searching when I recover the stomach for it.

GRL used to be a journal with a high reputation, why on earth are they doing this to themselves?

[Shevva]

'rather than acting as a feedback in response to those temperature changes' - If clouds are created by temp. changes then what is the impact on a cloud created in the arctic to a cloud created in the tropics? (Sorry if this is a basic question but I'm trying).

[PaulM]

Patagon is right - Dessler has misrepresented the equation in the S&B paper.

Another straw man is "Suggestions that significant revisions to mainstream climate science are required are therefore not supported."
S&B made no such claim.

The final conclusion of S&B was "the presence of time varying radiative forcing in satellite radiative flux measurements corrupts the diagnosis of radiative feedback".

BH: the post text 'comment on' is a bit misleading, as pointed out by others. The normal approach in such situations is to write a 'comment on' in which the authors reply at the same time. The team have adopted an alternative approach to deny the right to reply.

[Viv Evans]

@ Barry Woods, Sep 6, 2011 at 11:27 AM:

Thank you for this quote.
This sentence caught my eye:

"If you do not accept the science and choose not to sit at the solution table, you will have no say in what happens."

It reminded me forcefully of what a former German chancellor said in an interview yesterday, where, in regard to a unified Eurozone (financially and in regard to taxation), that the Poles simply have to comply, or join the euro, then they could influence matters ...

So here we have the same mind-set: accept the 'science' (no sceptics, please, it's settled!), and accept that 'we must do something now', then you can have your say as well.

What would be the right expression for this attitude?
Dictatorial? Or even tyrannical?

Great example for what lies behind the mask of bonhomie and reasonableness of some climate scientists!

[golf charley]

Am I the only one to have noticed that on hot days the sun is shining, and cooler days are cloudy?

Proof that cold creates cloud, or cloud creates cold?

:-)

gc

[Frosty]

In the tropics there is a change of 5 W/m2 in reflected energy for each 1% change in cloud cover, seems to me we should be ruling out changes there before we look at CO2 to cause the "consensus" figure of 1.6 W/m² for the proposed net anthropogenic forcing.

[HaroldW]

Dessler's response to SB11 is available in full here.
.
Mac:"6 weeks from submission to publication !!!!! Wow, even for the Team that must be a record."
GRL reports "Received 11 August 2011; accepted 29 August 2011." Turnaround of 18 days, which is fast. However, I looked at the most recent twenty of GRL's papers-in-press and found another with an equal turnaround, and two more with turnaround of 1 and 2 days respectively. (!) So the speed is not unprecedented.

[Mac]

Another CAGWist example of cause and effect.

We must remember that editor-in-chief of GRL, Eric Calais believes that global warming causes earthquakes, and it has been argued by many CAGWists that the Haiti earthquake was directly caused by global warming.

How long would it take to submit a paper linking earthquakes to man-made global warming and have it published in warmist journals like GRL?

How long would it take to submit and have a paper published that discredits any link between earthquakes and man-made global warming in a similar journal?

You would have to concede that 'Consenus' science however barmy has a much greater chance of being published than any sceptical science of note.

That is the current level of corruption in climate science.

[HaroldW]

Patagon: "the appropriate thing is to publish it in Remote Sensing and ask the authors of the original paper to answer Dessler." PaulM makes a similar comment.

On a previous thread, Jonathan Jones wrote that "rebuttal papers could very well be sent either to the original journal or to somewhere completely different; there are no hard and fast rules."

[Mac]

HaroldW, "So the speed is not unprecedented."

When you consider how peer review is meant to work, i.e. a considered review and criticism of the submitted science, how can it be possible to submit, review and publish in days without seriously impacting on accepted scientific standards, performance and credibility?

The answer is it can't.

No one can say that the Dessler paper has been properly peer-reviewed in a journal that by reputation fast tracks papers.

If Eric Calais was a man of integrity he would have resigned as editor-in-chief of GRL by now and forwarded an apology directly to myself on this blog.

[Patagon]

@ HaroldW

Ok, Let's say that would have been the polite thing to do, especially if you want to find a solution to a scientific problem of allegedly such an importance for the planet. However, if what they want to do is shouting louder than the others, then let them pick their choice.

[Frosty]

"These calculations show that clouds did not cause significant climate change over the last decade"

Which significant climate change over the last decade are they referring to?

[HaroldW]

Patagon -
Prof. Jones makes another point there, that Comments are sorely constrained in length.

As you point out, Comments allow the original authors a Reply, and this system is certainly more "polite" -- well I might have used the word "collegial" -- than what is occurring. "Shouting louder than the others" seems to sum it up well.

[Frosty]

News at 10: Clouds did not cause the moon to turn into blue cheese over the last 10 yrs, S&B are clearly refuted

/sarc

[Josh]

Hard to keep up.

Yesterday we needed 17 years of data, today it is only 10. And pick a decade with no warming then the clouds can be shown to have no effect.

Gosh I feel so dim, maybe it is the albedo effect of the cloudiness in my brain.

[alistair]

http://motls.blogspot.com/2011/09/andrew-dessler-clouds-dont-reflect.html#more

'The extent to which the AGW true believers have warped the scientific method to serve their pecuniary and political ends is simply breathtaking. Climate science represents the greatest perversion of the scientific method since the Enlightenment. It is phlogiston, phrenology, and Lysenkoism all rolled up into one big, fat, corrupt boil desperately in need of lancing.'

The breathtaking arrogance of CRU/UEA using a NewsCorp employee and ex senior Norfolk and Met police chief to control the publicity fallout suggests that the influence of Murdochian renewable/environmental interests has played a considerable part of policy making here.

What we need to do here is the same as in the US, carry out an anti-Mafia investigation into climate science.

[Green Sand]

A lot of interesting reading and data at Climate4you:-

http://www.climate4you.com/

"Climate+Clouds"

[Varco]

Isn't the first order draft of WG1 AR5 due to be complete this month? Could the Dressler paper and the WG1 first draft possibly be related?

[golf charley]

We have now spent hundreds of billions trying to detect evidence of climate change and prove that CO2 is the cause. Neither venture has proved successful.

But as there has been no significant climate change, the effort has proved successful, and the taxpayers must keep funding this madness, as it has prevented anything significant happening

[lapogus]

Josh Yesterday we needed 17 years of data, today it is only 10. And pick a decade with no warming then the clouds can be shown to have no effect.

Indeed. The Team are getting so desperate now that they are just making it up as they go along. The media are evidently not wise to the team's malfeasance, so as Barry Woods suggests, it is up to non-climate scientists to speak out on this junk science and abuse of the peer review system.

[Maurizio Morabito]

I believe that "significant revisions to mainstream climate science are required" was a claim made by Fox News. In that case, Spencer is not important: Dessler (and Trenberth, obviously) have just published the first-ever peer-reviewed paper that responds to a statement made by a newsmedia organisation.

IOW in the magical world of peer-reviewed climate change papers, Fox News is now de-facto scientifically relevant.

No wonder Wagner preferred to get his info from "discussions on internet fora".

[gyptis444]

Travesty Trenberth?

I have seen enough mafeasance from the AGW camp to distrust everything they say.
IAC Review of IPCC http://reviewipcc.interacademycouncil.net/
Mann's hockey stick graph
Al Gore's lies - An Inconvenient Truth prohibited from UK schools because of errrors & misrepresentations
Climategate, hide the decline, hide the data, hide the code, suppress publication of any evidence contrary to the CONsensus
The AGW gravy train is coming to an end. The Australian population no longer believes the AGW lies and will crucify the Gillard government at the next election because of her carbon tax policy. The CO2 hypothesis is merely a pretext for governments to rip off their citizens. Cap & trade, ETS, carbon tax is all BS and theft. Don't be fooled.

[Drcrinum]

And in the background we have Svensmark and CERN. I believe the intent of Dressler was to distract the media from making the obvious connection between the current articles of Spencer and CERN. The possibility that clouds could completely overshadow CO2 regarding effects upon climate must be sending chills down the spines of AGW fanatics like Dressler. Just imagine what potentially could happen to the grant-money supply in the future.

[Mike Jackson]

PaulM

Another straw man is "Suggestions that significant revisions to mainstream climate science are required are therefore not supported."
S&B made no such claim.

No, Paul, but a lot of people did. As Maurizio Morabito points out (1.56pm), Fox News leapt on it.
You can hardly blame The Team for wanting to debunk this paper because it is an important contribution to the debate which they would prefer not to get into.
It looks as if Dessler got so carried away with the need to get this paper squashed that he took his eye off the ball. In the quote you reproduce he has suckered himself into responding, in a scientific rebuttal, to a lay claim that was never in the paper at all.
His mis-reading of Spencer's equation and the rather careless suggestion that clouds have not contributed to global warming in a decade when what global warming there has been has been minimal to insignificant betray the speed with which it was felt essential to get this paper out.
Sloppy work.

[Lord Beaverbrook]

Rebuttals of rebuttals

http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2011/09/06/desslers-spencer-rebuttal-scuttled/

http://motls.blogspot.com/2011/09/andrew-dessler-clouds-dont-reflect.html

[SteveW]

"In recent papers, Lindzen and Choi [2011, hereafter LC11] and Spencer and Braswell [2011, hereafter SB11] have argued that reality is reversed: clouds are the cause of, and not a feedback on, changes in surface temperature. If this claim is correct, then significant revisions to climate science may be required."

See how a few simple changes can make all the difference ->>>>>>>

"In recent papers, Jones, Mann, Trenberth et al. have argued that reality is reversed: carbon dioxide is the cause of, and not a feedback on, changes in surface temperature. If this claim is correct, then significant revisions to climate science may be required."

In the kingdom of the bland, the one idea man is king.

[Pete H]

"In addition, observations presented by LC11 and SB11 are not in fundamental disagreement with mainstream climate models,"

Are they saying empirical agrees with the models? The same models that cannot agree with each other? This is truly getting surreal!

Glad to see we are staying on subject....enough said!

[Pete H]

BTW, how quickly has the CERN results been pushed onto the back boiler...or is that just a coincidence?

[Atomic Hairdryer]

Re Drcrinum

And in the background we have Svensmark and CERN. I believe the intent of Dressler was to distract the media from making the obvious connection between the current articles of Spencer and CERN. The possibility that clouds could completely overshadow CO2 regarding effects upon climate must be sending chills down the spines of AGW fanatics like Dressler.

Agreed. Dessler et al say clouds follow the plough and are temperature dependent. Svensmark et al propose a temperature independent mechanism for cloud formation that has nothing much to do with anthropogenic effects. This is potentially bad news for the cAGW industry. I also think the Santer et al "17 scientists for 17 years" paper is a backstop that will get used to challenge any negative feedbacks because there's insufficient data to challenge the models and modellers per Gleick and Wagner. Quite neat positive feedback loop for the modelling community, if they're allowed to get away with it.

[Mike Ozanne]

""In addition, observations presented by LC11 and SB11 are not in fundamental disagreement with mainstream climate models,"

Are they saying empirical agrees with the models? The same models that cannot agree with each other? This is truly getting surreal!"

May just mean that the error bounds on the models are so wide that any observations "are not in fundamental disagreement..."

[Shona]

"reality is reversed"

What does that mean? My first thought that there was something to do with time travel, or maybe something akin to star Trek's Good Kirk/Bad kirk episode.

And what is "reality"?

It's when you read things like this that you realize that a fast turnover for these papers might not be a good thing.

Also, at first read it seems that Dressler hasn't actually read the paper? Because from the abstract he doesn't seem to be addressing the point SC made that clouds did both, not just one or the other.

[KnR]

Interest fact there is actual no agreed standard for what a 'fundamental disagreement' is in measurable terms , it's that useful ?

[steveta_uk]

http://motls.blogspot.com/2011/09/andrew-dessler-clouds-dont-reflect.html

Wow - very funny, and devastating. Says it all, really.

[Stacey]

I see that Trendberk is involved and thus it has no validity at all. Climate Rapid Response Team my a**e?

[Atomic Hairdryer]

Re Maurizio

IOW in the magical world of peer-reviewed climate change papers, Fox News is now de-facto scientifically relevant.

On which point, if the media like Fox are now scientifically relevant, how are the ratings doing? SB had 56k+ and I wonder how Dessler's doing? I'm assuming they'll be lower as Dessler's is a PPV event. Hopefully ratings won't become a metric scientists are judged by though.

It has been an interesting experiment in outreach as well. I never thought I'd have gone to bed last night eagerly anticipating the release of a new paper the next day. I'm supposed to be anti-science, so WUWT?

[WillR]

And now for a completely different type of Correction... I submit the following for yoru amusement and edification in the fro of a blast from the past......

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monckton/23errors.html

Trenberth’s Twenty-Three Scientific Errors in One Short Article

Kevin Trenberth (Rocky Mountain News, October 24), commenting on Mike Rosen’s
article expressing legitimate doubts about the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore,
makes 23 scientific mistakes, each of which falls in the direction of magnifying the
unjustifiable alarm stoked by panicky politicians and extravagantly-funded
environmentalists in cahoots with a shrinking clique of scientists in denial of
observational climate data.

Enjoy...