More Recovery Response Stuff

This is kind of cool.  The Kaplan Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation with the Oppo Indo-Pacific Warm Pool Reconstruction.  When I first came across the Oppo reconstruction I noticed that the binning seems to have a decade off due to the 50 year average of the samples.  I could be wrong, but in this chart Oppo 2004 is shifted one bin (10years) and the noisy AMO has 21 year smoothing which seems to match pretty well.

Oppo 2004 is a 2000 year reconstruction but I am just using from 1400 in the plot to show the gradual decline into the Little Ice Age and the gradual recovery.  There is only about 0.8 C of depression based on the 50 year smoothed and 10 year binned Oppo data.  The monthly AMO data in the back ground shows the huge range of variability for such a small 21 year averaged trend. From the period 1400 AD to 2012 AD, there is very little trend.

If I highlight just the AMO from 1910 to 2009 it is easy to see the century trends.  The secular trend, 0.2C per century based on the 1856 to 2012 AMO data is a close match for the Oppo data from 1700 AD.  Depending on your choice of smoothing, the natural variability trend can be up to 0.7 C per century and if you are really anal, you can take the trend from 1976 to 2010 and eke out 0.8C in 34 years or a century trend of 2.4C.  There is basically a factor of 10 range available for those that wish to manipulate data and public opinion.  We of course don't know anyone that might be so inclined.

"Well, that is just the AMO!" they cry.

Is it just the AMO?  Share this with a Minion of the Great and Powerful Carbon you may know and love. 

Some Guys are Just so Silly

When I discuss the impact of asymmetry with some of the guys on line, there are a few so totally clueless they can grasp the concept.  When I extend the discussion on the impact of asymmetry to the radiant "shells", they get totally lost.  First, the radiant shell is just a shape with uniform temperature which can be considered an isothermal "layer", but it has a real shape, not an assumed flat surface or disc that can be integrated over a surface of any assumed shape.  A black body cavity is a chamber where all radiant energy that enters is internally reflected until the entire cavity is at a single uniform temperature.  So a black body cavity is perfectly uniform in temperature and the shell containing the cavity would be at a perfectly uniform temperature.  No ideal black body or shell exists, it is just a "model" of perfection.  There is a difference between the two that needs to be understood.  The source of the energy in the cavity is not critical, only the temperature.  For the shell, exactly the same amount of energy that enters must leave or the shell is not stable.  Micheal Fowler with the University of Virgina has a nice tutorial for those inclined.

Since the oceans on Earth are the closest thing we have to an ideal black body cavity, the energy actually absorbed by the oceans which would have very long absorption path lengths with critical internal reflection, just like a black body, needs to be considered differently than energy that is reflected from the surface or absorbed but not deep enough to experience the critical internal reflection that leads to maximum absorption.

So consider this case where the tropics and mid latitudes are low albedo oceans and the upper latitudes are either reflective or absorptive, but the energy is not directly transferred into the oceans.  If the ocean extends from 45N to 45S, 70.7% of the energy can be absorbed versus only 50% if the oceans extend to the poles.  If the Ocean extended to 60N and 60S, because of the angle of incidence, more of the solar energy would be reflected as you approach 60 degrees. 

Consider this case where all of the oceans are below the equator and all of the land is above the equator.  The oceans would absorb less than half the energy in the first case even with roughly equal areas.  The lower portion of the blue ocean here, 60S to 90S would have high reflection due to incidence angle.  Assuming a uniform surface when there is not, would leads to error.

 These are extreme examples, but Earth has ideally a 7:3 ocean land ratio.  In the first example because the extreme polar regions receive such a small amount of solar insulation, the effective ratio can be 4:1 with ice having roughly the same specific heat capacity as land.  With another orientation, the ratio could approach 1:1 if all the land is near the equator.  You have two extreme limits.

In HVAC, system components like fans can have  regions of instability.  With the same RPM and Total Static Pressure and fan can deliver 5000 or 7500 Cubic Feet per Minute of air flow.  Limiting the "system performance curve" to one or the other operating point simply requires limiting the airflow through the system at some stable static pressure.   If you don't, the system can operate at a stable RPM and CFM with the static pressure oscillating between the two extremes which has been known to destroy a few things.  So it is a good idea to know the limits before setting up the system/problem.

For some reason this is a totally foreign concept in Climate Science where finding upper limits appears to be an after thought and lower limits are disregarded.  For example, water vapor is assumed to be a constant with respect to temperature.  If temperature rises then water vapor rises uniformly while clouds which require water vapor find the absolute worse case in order to produce the maximum possible positive feedback to temperature.  That is an upper limit.  Where do they assume water vapor doesn't optimize but minimize the impact of rising temperature?  That is a perfectly logical assumption, that water vapor, clouds and precipitation produce negative feedback to temperature in order to maintain stability.  Since water vapor can, the "sensitivity" range should include the full possible range of water vapor feedback.

The current "pause" was completely missed by all the climate models because they share a common flaw, poorly defined limits. 

Consider that the water vapor extends or expands the liquid water black body cavity.  Now the atmospheric water, ice and water vapor absorb a portion of the energy provided by both the sun and the surface.  The current ratio is approximately 2.2:1 ocean atmosphere for the solar energy absorption.  You now have a black body cavity containing a black body or a near perfect black body cavity, the liquid oceans and a less than perfect black body cavity with a porous "shell".   The total energy emitted from the porous shell is approximately 315Wm-2, the effective energy of water at its fresh water freezing point.  That means the total energy of the cavity has to be twice or 630 Wm-2.  If there is only 480Wm-2 entering the porous shell, then 150Wm-2 of energy must be provided by the inner more ideal black body cavity.  If you want to rotate the system just divide the energy by 2, but the inner black body still has to provide 150Wm-2 based on the peak absorption rate since the black body cavity stores energy until an equilibrium is reached then the atmospheric shell begins to form to maintain that energy.  If the oceans did not have the ability to change phase, there would be no clouds and atmospheric water vapor and the surface would be have an ideal emission of 340Wm-2 and a subsurface energy of 680 Wm-2, because the measured emission is always half of the total energy.


Since the actual total energy is 630Wm-2 versus and ideal 680Wm-2, the Earth black body and water vapor shell is 630/680 = 0.9264  or 92.64% efficient plus or minus a touch, just like the Stefan-Boltzmann correction or fudge factor for real black bodies. 

You can divide by two for rotation, but the percentage remains the same.


I don't expect the Minions of the Great and Power Carbon to understand that, after all it is their models that are screwing the pooch, but they love their pooch and will defend it forever despite its obvious flaws, but there may be some that find this more than just "word salad".   

Solar Mysteries

Solar impact on climate is both obvious and mysterious.  Without the sun there would not be a climate debate, but the solar cycles vary so little in terms of total energy that it is hard to explain anything but a small impact.  "Global" temperatures of the past correlate well with solar until recently leading many to ignore the Sun's contribution in favor of more tangible "forcing" elements that can be made to "fit" different periods using different metrics.  There are Eureka moments almost daily as someone finds a new pattern that appears to match a new data source at a different location looked at in a slightly different way.  Welcome to a chaotic system, it aims to please.

The reality is that a complex system has so many feedback functions with varying amplification factors that anyone can get completely lost in the noise.  In trying to explain, I have used a variety of static models that indicate you can only get so close with the information available and that it is probably better just to accept the limits and focus on longer and longer time frames to reduce some of the noise.  The Three Compartment Ocean Model indicates that there are likely settling time frames or constants of at least 500 years with shorter pseudo-cyclic patterns on the order of 62.5 years just due to the size and limited flow rate between ocean basins.  Near the surface of the oceans, shorter time frame settling noise with periods of 5 to 10 years produce much of the "weather" which may be isolated from climate, zeroing out over a limited period, or an indication of longer term climate, awfully hard to tell one way or the other.  Still, chaos theory implies that there is self similarity of the patterns on all time scales.  Theories are theories though, not laws, just suggestions.

To figure out how small variations in solar can impact climate I have played with the TSI data from Sorce and the satellite data.  There is an obvious solar impact, but correlations never are completely convincing.

For example the solar TSI and lower stratosphere data provided by UAH show an obvious correlation, less than perfect, but obvious at least to my eye.  The lower stratosphere from what I have been able to determine tracks the ocean heat content well, but the stratosphere doesn't have the thermal mass to impress most climate junkies.

Comparing the northern hemisphere oceans, the detrended Atlantic tropics (0-20N, 20E-80W) minus Pacific tropics (80W-20E) indicate why the solar/climate relationship is so hard to quatify, threshold sensitivity.  The "pause" or plateau is an actual solar plateau at -0.25 Wm-2 roughly based on this scaling.  The differences between ocean basins settle quickly, ~2 to 3 years, but there is a response when the threshold is crossed.

Kind of interesting.  A longer term "staycation" on either side of the threshold should cause a gradual change in "climate" as far as surface air temperature and sea surface temperature are concerned.  Only one problem, solar reconstructions of the past are worse than most of the temperature reconstructions.

At the start of the IPCC series of reports, the solar "constant" was about 1366 Wm-2 and reconstructions by scientist like Judith Lean indicated that past solar variability was enough to drive climate until roughly 1950.   Since then, the solar "constant" has become 1361.1 +/- 0.1 Wm-2 and past variation is only +/- 1 Wm-2, about the same as then maximum estimated energy imbalance.  With the new and improved data, solar just can't do the job.  ENSO though, that natural internal variability can have some impact on climate but no one can agree on how much and since ENSO is an "oscillation", it doesn't much matter anyway, it will average out.  However, the comparison of of solar TSI and the imbalance between the northern Atlantic and Pacific oceans seems to indicate that solar can cause about 0.4C of variability with just the 11 years cycle so a prolonged solar minimum or modern solar maximum should be able to do about the same thing. 

The typical way that solar impact is determined is TSI/4 since the Earth is a rotating sphere.  The tropics though don't require half of that 4 divisor,  about 1.414, the square root of two is more relevant to the tropics.  In day mode, the ~1 Wm-2 of solar variation would be felt as ~0.7 Wm-2 of change at the ocean surface in the 30N to 30S latitude band.  That is still a small amount, but compared to an ocean only imbalance of ~0.3 to 0.6 Wm-2, significant.  "Proving" that solar drives ENSO or more realistically the tropical ocean regional imbalances is not a slam dunk, but there is enough evidence and close enough energy available to mark a fair argument to that effect.  So what is the major malfunction?

Well, comparing two of the Solar "TSI" reconstructions, we don't have an agreement on what "Top of the Atmosphere" and "Surface" really is.  The Svalgaard TSI reconstruction used above is scaled to the mean of the Bard et al. 1810 to 1966 mean value.  The blue line is the "modern" mean and the orange would be the past 1200 year mean.  Svalgaard's mean is actually 1361 Wm-2 +/- a touch which would be below the minimum chart value.  The Solar "Constant" has dropped nearly 5 Wm-2 since the start of the CO2 mania.

The Bard et al. estimated "TSI" is based on "surface" impact of solar variation using Carbon 14 and Beryllium 10 isotope ratios, per the Bard et al. abstract:

ABSTRACT: 
Based on a quantitative study of the common fluctuations of 14C and 10Be 
production rates, we have derived a time series of the solar magnetic 
variability over the last 1200 years.  This record is converted into 
irradiance variations by linear scaling based on previous studies of
sun-like stars and of the Sun's behavior over the last few centuries.  
The new solar irradiance record exhibits low values during the well-known
solar minima centered about 1900, 1810 (Dalton), and 1690 AD (Maunder).  
Further back in time, a rather long period between 1450 and 1750 AD is 
characterized by low irradiance values.  A shorter period is centered 
about 1200 AD, with irradiance slightly higher or similar to present 
day values.  It is tempting to correlate these periods with the 
so-called "little ice age" and "medieval warm period", respectively.
An accurate quantification of the climatic impact of this new 
irradiance record requires the use of coupled atmosphere-ocean 
general circulation models (GCMs).  Nevertheless, our record is 
already compatible with a global cooling of about 0.5 - 1 C during 
the "little ice age", and with a general cooling trend during the 
past millennium followed by global warming during the 20th century 
(Mann et al. 1999). 

So one measures "surface" impact of solar variation and the other a "constant" at some point in the atmosphere that has changed for whatever reason since 2000.  I am sure both groups are competent at their jobs, but which is more relevant to climate science, actual surface impact or potential impact at some not all that well defined "surface"?