The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled the World's Top Climate Scientists by Roy W Spencer

Author:Roy W Spencer [Spencer, Roy W]
Language: deu
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: 9781594033735
ISBN: 9781594033735
Published: 2010-05-24T15:25:50+00:00

(W/sq. m.)

slope = -0.6

-1.0

Radiative Energy Imbalance

-2.0

-0.4

-0.2

0.0

0.2

0.4

Temperature Change (degrees C)

experience to interpret the subtleties of a c t or m r i scan of the

human body, climate researchers must start probing deeper if

we are ever to decipher what Mother Nature is telling us about the

sensitivity of the climate system to our greenhouse gas emissions.

80

The Great Global Warming Blunder

Cause or Effect?

It turns out that a fundamental mistake has been made in previ-

ous interpretations of the satellite data. The radiative balance and

temperature variations seen in Figs. 1 4 and 1 5 are due not only to

feedback, but also to forcing. In other words, the behavior of the

data is affected not only by temperature causing a change in the

energy balance, but also by energy imbalance causing a temper-

ature change. And since the variations in energy balance are

dominated by cloud activity, what this usually represents is a

mix-up between cause and effect when analyzing clouds and

temperature variations.

This is the issue of causation that I have been emphasizing

throughout this book: the mix-up between cause and effect when

we measure natural climate variations. Returning to the analogy

with the car, what we really want to know is whether the window

opens or closes in response to the interior getting warmer. The

trouble is, from satellite measurements of the Earth we cannot

measure just the heat being lost “through the window.” We can

only measure the total energy being lost and gained by the whole

car, and the feedback signal we are seeking is only a portion of

that measurement. So while the sum of all the energy flows that

we measure from satellites indeed gives us information on how

the Earth’s energy balance varies over time, we do not know how

much of that imbalance is due to forcing versus feedback (cause

versus effect).

To demonstrate what I am saying quantitatively, we will use

a very simple (but elegant) model of the global average climate

system.

A Simple Climate Model

It turns out that you don’t need fancy climate models or super-

computers to do some very good global warming experiments.

While the Keepers of All Climate Knowledge (the IPCC leaders)

have decided that climate prediction is best left to the fastest

How Mother Nature Fooled the World’s Top Climate Scientists

81

computers, the largest number of scientists, and the most com-

plex models, there is a very simple climate model that can be run

in a spreadsheet program on your home computer to simulate

global warming or global cooling.

The model is not my invention, but a simplification of the

global climate system that is widely used to study basic global

temperature behavior. While the model might seem almost too

simple, this is deceptive. If the total feedback in the climate sys-

tem is known, then the simple model can be used to predict how

much manmade global warming will occur in response to the

radiative forcing from more CO₂ in the atmosphere just as accu-

rately as those big expensive IPCC climate models running on

supercomputers.

What the simple model cannot do is determine how the tem-

perature might change in different geographic regions, different

altitudes in the atmosphere, and different depths in the ocean. To

have any hope of doing so, the model’s complexity

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