Thoughts On Karl’s Pause-Buster Paper

By Paul Homewood

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/06/04/noaancdcs-new-pause-buster-paper-a-laughable-attempt-to-create-warming-by-adjusting-past-data/

WUWT has already thoroughly covered the latest NCDC attempt to remove the pause.

Basically, Thomas Karl and co have adjusted sea surface temperatures down prior to around 1998, and up since, so that they now show that SST’s have carried on rising unabated.

But I will just add two comments.

1) It is fundamental physics that when water is warmed up, the rate of evaporation increases. And evaporation is one of the main processes for the transfer of heat from the surface to the atmosphere, as NASA explain:

Surface Energy Budget

To understand how the Earth’s climate system balances the energy budget, we have to consider processes occurring at the three levels: the surface of the Earth, where most solar heating takes place; the edge of Earth’s atmosphere, where sunlight enters the system; and the atmosphere in between. At each level, the amount of incoming and outgoing energy, or net flux, must be equal.

Remember that about 29 percent of incoming sunlight is reflected back to space by bright particles in the atmosphere or bright ground surfaces, which leaves about 71 percent to be absorbed by the atmosphere (23 percent) and the land (48 percent). For the energy budget at Earth’s surface to balance, processes on the ground must get rid of the 48 percent of incoming solar energy that the ocean and land surfaces absorb. Energy leaves the surface through three processes: evaporation, convection, and emission of thermal infrared energy.

The surface absorbs about 48% of incoming sunlight. Three processes remove an equivalent amount of energy from the Earth’s surface: evaporation (25%), convection (5%), and thermal infrared radiation, or heat (net 17%). (NASA illustration by Robert Simmon. Photograph ©2006 Cyron. )

About 25 percent of incoming solar energy leaves the surface through evaporation. Liquid water molecules absorb incoming solar energy, and they change phase from liquid to gas. The heat energy that it took to evaporate the water is latent in the random motions of the water vapor molecules as they spread through the atmosphere. When the water vapor molecules condense back into rain, the latent heat is released to the surrounding atmosphere. Evaporation from tropical oceans and the subsequent release of latent heat are the primary drivers of the atmospheric heat engine (described on page 3).

Towers of cumulus clouds transport energy away from the surface of the Earth. Solar heating drives evaporation. Warm, moist air becomes buoyant and rises, moving energy from the surface high into the atmosphere. Energy is released back into the atmosphere when the water vapor condenses into liquid water or freezes into ice crystals

It therefore follows that, if sea surface temperatures have been increasing since 1998 as claimed, atmospheric temperatures would also be increasing. As we know, of course, they have not, they have actually been dropping.

Quite simply, Karl’s claims don’t stack up scientifically.

http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1998/plot/rss/from:1998/trend

2) We only need to go back to the ClimateGate emails to see the blatant attempts that were made to remove the inconvenient 1940’s blip by tampering with SST’s.

(Note the phrase speculations on correcting SSTs; now compare with the latest Karl paper which mentions using updated and corrected temperature observations taken at thousands of weather observing stations over land and as many commercial ships and buoys at sea. )

From: Tom Wigley <wigley@ucar.edu> To: Phil Jones <p.jones@uea.ac.uk> Subject: 1940s Date: Sun, 27 Sep 2009 23:25:38 -0600 Cc: Ben Santer <santer1@llnl.gov> <x-flowed> Phil, Here are some speculations on correcting SSTs to partly explain the 1940s warming blip. If you look at the attached plot you will see that the land also shows the 1940s blip (as I'm sure you know). So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC, then this would be significant for the global mean -- but we'd still have to explain the land blip. I've chosen 0.15 here deliberately. This still leaves an ocean blip, and i think one needs to have some form of ocean blip to explain the land blip (via either some common forcing, or ocean forcing land, or vice versa, or all of these). When you look at other blips, the land blips are 1.5 to 2 times (roughly) the ocean blips -- higher sensitivity plus thermal inertia effects. My 0.15 adjustment leaves things consistent with this, so you can see where I am coming from. Removing ENSO does not affect this. It would be good to remove at least part of the 1940s blip, but we are still left with "why the blip". Let me go further. If you look at NH vs SH and the aerosol effect (qualitatively or with MAGICC) then with a reduced ocean blip we get continuous warming in the SH, and a cooling in the NH -- just as one would expect with mainly NH aerosols. The other interesting thing is (as Foukal et al. note -- from MAGICC) that the 1910-40 warming cannot be solar. The Sun can get at most 10% of this with Wang et al solar, less with Foukal solar. So this may well be NADW, as Sarah and I noted in 1987 (and also Schlesinger later). A reduced SST blip in the 1940s makes the 1910-40 warming larger than the SH (which it currently is not) -- but not really enough. So ... why was the SH so cold around 1910? Another SST problem? (SH/NH data also attached.) This stuff is in a report I am writing for EPRI, so I'd appreciate any comments you (and Ben) might have. Tom.

http://di2.nu/foia/1254108338.txt