[Vision2020] Snow storms and global warming

Ted Moffett starbliss at gmail.com
Thu Feb 11 14:42:21 PST 2010


Clouds have a complex effect on climate, with both negative and positive
forcings on temperature.  The negative forcing of increased cloud cover
(increased albedo reflecting thermal energy back to space) from increased
atmospheric moisture from anthropogenic global warming does not offset the
radiative forcings and positive feedback effects resulting from
anthropogenic sourced atmospheric CO2 increases, and other human impacts.

What is astonishing and alarming is the fact that rarely in public
discussions of human impacts on climate is the very important negative
forcing from human sourced aerosols (so called "global dimming")
considered.  Human sourced pollution is also having a significant cooling
effect on climate, though the positive forcings from human impacts are
overcoming the negative.  If we stop all atmospheric pollution of all kinds,
global warming should accelerate, as the significant negative forcing from
human sourced aerosols will dissipate quickly.  The irony is that
considering the gigantic global emissions from coal fired plants, while the
CO2 emissions will long term warm the climate, for centuries given CO2
atmospheric lifespan (the time scale that must be considered when
contemplating our impacts on the Earth's climate), they are in the short
term to some extent cooling the climate due to the "global dimming" effect
of aerosols emitted by the coal plants.  The scientific findings in the
research reported at the website below also point out the rarely heard fact
that most of the climate warming from human impacts has been absorbed by the
planet's oceans, which is no surprise, considering the oceans cover 70
percent of the our planet's surface, and are a huge thermal energy storage
system.  For the most part, discussions of warming or not of the Earth's
climate focus on atmospheric temperature, not ocean water temperatures.  A
major oversight.

http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2009/20090909_haze.html

Frm NOAA website above:

September 9, 2009

Scientists have used a new approach to sharpen the understanding of one of
the most uncertain of mankind’s influences on climat

The new observations-based study led by NOAA confirms that the particles
(“aerosols”) have the net effect of cooling the planet—in agreement with
previous understanding—but arrives at the answer in a completely new way
that is more straightforward, and has narrowed the uncertainties of the
estimate. The findings appear in this week’s *Journal of Geophysical
Research - Atmospheres*.

The researchers, led by NOAA scientist Daniel M. Murphy of NOAA’s Earth
System Research Laboratory <http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/> in Boulder, Colo.,
applied fundamental conservation of energy principles to construct a global
energy “budget” of the climate’s “credits” and “debits”—heating and cooling
processes—since 1950, using only observations and straightforward
calculations without the more complicated algorithms of global climate
models. They then calculated the cooling effect of the aerosols as the only
missing term in the budget, arriving at an estimate of 1.1 watts per square
meter. A watt is a unit of power.

The results support the 2007 assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) that estimated aerosol cooling at 1.2 watts per square
meter. But the new study places that estimate on more solid ground and rules
out the larger cooling effects that were previously thought to be possible.

“The agreement boosts our confidence in both the models and the new
approach,” said Murphy. “Plus, we’ve been able to pin down the amount of
cooling by aerosols better than ever.”

e—the effects of atmospheric “haze,” the tiny airborne particles from
pollution, biomass burning, and other sources.
--------------------------------------
Ted Moffett continues comments:

While the increasing snowfall from increased atmospheric moisture from
global warming from might increase albedo, the overall loss of ice and snow
cover from increasing global temperatures, long term, will decrease global
snow/ice albedo; and this is one of the main positive feedback effects that
will add more warming beyond the radiative forcing of increased atmospheric
CO2 and other human impacts.  Consider this large scale weather event from
2008 reported by NOAA, with record setting snows in Eurasia, gone within a
few months to set a record low snow cover.  The snow did not remain very
long to act as a albedo increasing variable, due to record setting land warm
temperatures:

http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2008/20080417_marchstats.html

The global land surface temperature was the warmest on record for March,
3.3°F above the 20th century mean of 40.8°F. Temperatures more than 8°F
above average covered much of the Asian continent. Two months after the
greatest January snow cover extent on record on the Eurasian continent, the
unusually warm temperatures led to rapid snow melt, and March snow cover
extent on the Eurasian continent was the lowest on record.
-----------------------------------
Ted Moffett continues:

How to define a long term climate trend apart from short term weather
variability is a issue that I suspect inspires different answers in the peer
reviewed climate science literature.  But I am certain that one winter or
year, or even 2 or 3 winters and years in a row, do not represent a
sufficiently long period of time to define a long term climate trend. I
offered my non-professional estimate of what would convince me that
anthropogenic warming was "on hold" or being reversed in the following post
to Keely Emerine Mix's blog "Prevailing Winds:"

http://www.keely-prevailingwinds.com/2009/04/global-warming-on-my-deck.html
 Saturday, April 4, 2009
"The 'Global Warming' On My
Deck"<http://www.keely-prevailingwinds.com/2009/04/global-warming-on-my-deck.html>
Isn't it curious that our local pioneer of classical Christian education,
the Don of the Disputatio whose sniping criticism of stupidity in secular
pedagogy has elevated him to the upper ranks of Reformed academia, would be
so cheerfully dense as to continue joking that April snow in Moscow deals a
death blow to the theory of anthropocentric global warming?

I hope this isn't an example of New St. Andrews' announced commitment to
teaching its students "how to think." Perhaps its founder hath decreed that
in matters of public policy, logic, reason, and perspective just get in the
way of a good ol' serrated edge, carelessly whipped out and wielded with a
predictable clumsiness that somehow looks deft, not daft, to his acolytes.

Pity.
-----------

Ted Moffett <http://www.blogger.com/profile/17674616324854644815> said...

As Keely must know, given my numerous posts to Vision2020 on this topic, I
follow the skeptics arguments regarding human impacts on climate change.
Many of the skeptics are not truly skeptics, but dogmatists who reject a
balanced consideration of all the data, theory and expert opinion. They
might apply their skepticism in a more thoroughgoing fashion.

The analysis of global mean temperature by NASA's Gavin Schmidt, quoted at
the bottom, from 12/16/08, reveals that global mean temperatures over the
past decade do not refute that there is a long term warming trend.

No climate scientist expects the temperature trends to be increasing in a
linear fashion, with each year inexorably warmer than the last. Natural
variability will induce warming and cooling trends from year to year.

What would convince me that anthropogenic warming is on hold is a decade or
longer temperature record with the global mean temperatures falling below
the top ten record setting years. This would require explanation that either
reveals natural variability overcoming the anthropogenic greenhouse forcing,
or that indeed, the climate science community has made some serious errors
in their consensus opinion. We shall see!

The two days of record daily cold temperatures Moscow experienced in March,
or the recent April snowstorm, are nothing more than local weather
variability:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/12/2008-temperature-summaries-and-spin/#more-632

"More
robustly, the most recent 5-year averages are all significantly higher than
any in the last century. The last decade is by far the warmest decade
globally in the record."

NASA's Gavin Schmidt
------------
On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 12:33 PM, Paul Rumelhart <godshatter at yahoo.com>wrote:

> I've seen lots of articles on the web that describe how the current
> record-breaking weather on the East Coast does not disprove global warming.
>  Here is a sampling:
>
> http://mediamatters.org/research/201002090032
>
> http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/02/no_the_snow_does_not_disprove.html
> http://thinkprogress.org/2010/01/12/cold-snap-global-warming/
>
> I don't dispute this. I'm pretty sure that global warming is happening on
> larger timescales; I am just skeptical of the anthropogenic component being
> as powerful a forcing as climate scientists and political leaders would like
> us to believe.
>
> It does lead me to wonder about one thing, though.  What kind of a winter
> would it take to disprove global warming?
>
> A mild winter would likely be blamed on the overall temperature increase,
> where a stormy winter would likely be blamed on there being more moisture in
> the air and more energy in the system.  Would a winter that was average in
> all ways be enough?  Since winters vary so much over the years, what would a
> completely average winter look like?  Would it take a winter that lasted all
> year?  If it's likely that no winter that could reasonably be expected to
> occur would disprove it, then is it meaningful to say that the current
> weather was predicted by the AGW hypothesis?
>
> I've also been pondering the role of moisture in global temperature.  If
> the moisture content of the air is indeed increasing, wouldn't that mean
> more snowfall and more clouds?  Both of which change the albedo of the Earth
> a significant amount which would cause more sunlight to be reflected back
> into space.  Would this serve as a negative feedback process?  From what
> I've read, the affect on clouds on global warming is one of the biggest
> open-ended questions out there right now.
>
> Just curious what other people thought.
>
> Paul
>
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