## Thursday, August 18, 2011 ... /////

### Lindzen-Choi 2011 published

WUWT brings us some good news and the final version of the Lindzen-Choi 2011 article published in the Asia-Pacific Journal of Atmospheric Sciences:

On the Observational Determination of Climate Sensitivity and Its Implications (full text PDF)
This is an updated version of their 2009 article - so the basic strategy was kept.

Tge ERBE satellite

However, the 2009 article was criticized not only via bogus pseudo-arguments emitted by the folks who didn't like the results but also by numerous legitimate observations.

I think that Lindzen and Choi are very generous when it comes to those critics - many others would include such criticism into invisible minor footnotes. At any rate, all the criticisms that Lindzen and Choi have become aware of are corrected in the new paper.

You may be interested in single result: the climate sensitivity (warming from CO2 doubling) is 0.7 °C or, with a 99-percent near-certainty, between 0.5 °C and 1.3 °C.

This interval - which doesn't even overlap with the IPCC's 2.0-4.5 °C interval - would mean that the man-made contribution to the global temperature change between now and 2080 when CO2 will be near 560 ppm is approximately 0 °C while the interval is between -0.3 and +0.7 °C at the 99 percent confidence level. (I subtracted the warming that has already occurred, and assumed that the non-CO2 contributions were approximately zero.) The error margin is just the uncertainty of the CO2 greenhouse contribution. There will surely be other contributions so the total warming by 2080 is more likely than 1% to be outside this interval.

Their paper is based on a more careful analysis of some observational data. Which data?

They observe the surface sea temperature (SST) in the tropics and the energy outgoing from the top-of-atmosphere (TOA), especially in tropics, as measured by ERBE satellite. (When the same analysis is done globally, they get roughly the same results but with a stronger noise. Recall that Richard has concluded that the tropics are the "mother" of the Earth's climate and nothing changes about that in this paper.)

The basic mechanism is that when the sea is getting warmer, the Earth emits more radiation. The change in the radiation may take some time - so the "best response" may be obtained after a 1-month delay. (The dependence of the response on the lag expressed in months is an important technical issue in the paper.)

Of course, the question is how strongly the outgoing energy depends on the sea surface temperature. An IPCC-like high sensitivity - the Earth is going to fry - means that the energy flows don't change much when the temperature changes by 1 °C; consequently, small changes of energy flows correspond to a huge change of the temperature.

If the Earth were just a black body, the warming by 1 °C would lead to $3.3\,\,{\rm W}/{\rm m}^2/{\rm K}$ increase of the outgoing energy. This is also the slope that a simple linear regression (interpolating a straight line in between points in the SST-flux plane) would produce from the ERBE data.

However, this simple regression overemphasizes the long-term changes of SST and long-term changes of the fluxes where one of the quantities or both may be perturbed by various kinds of noise that arises from the complexity of the climate system or other drivers; or by the instability or drift of the measurement apparatuses that measure the energy flows over long timescales.

So instead, Lindzen and Choi cleverly and rightfully focus on well-defined periods in which the SST and the flux are changing sufficiently monotonically and quickly over a short enough period of time. In the 2011 paper, these intervals are chosen according to objective criteria in which various criticisms have been incorporated.

When the regression is applied to these data that are dominated by fast changes where the signal apparently exceeds the noise more sharply, they obtain a slope that is twice as large, $6.0\,\,{\rm W}/{\rm m}^2/ {\rm K}$. This may be translated to their resulting climate sensitivity that is very likely to be smaller than 1.2 °C, thus showing that the net feedback is negative (and may actually be strongly negative).

Lindzen and Choi discuss the source of the difference between their results and those of Dessler 2010 or Trenberth et al. 2010. Lots of methods are also chosen from Spencer and Braswell 2010 etc.

At any rate, this is how climate science should look like. The paper looks nice enough to me but I am not going to expect that it is a "holy scripture". New imperfections may be found in the 2011 paper as well. However, I am kind of confident that they're new imperfections. The new paper is a big step towards clarifying a more accurate value of the climate sensitivity.

I am hoping that as the climate hysteria and politically imposed "consensus" is dying away, the legitimate and rational process in this direction will continue and strengthen, crisper results about the climate will be found in the near future, and those people among various Desslers who will stay in the research will recognize themselves as occasionally helpful assistants to the real leader of their field such as Richard Lindzen.

And that's a wish of mine.

Another recording of the same question is available, too. In this other version, it's much more clear that the person who asked the question is a smug alarmist jerk.

Rick Perry doesn't buy into the AGW panic

As the video above shows, the new and (instantly) top GOP presidential candidate George Bush III :-) realizes that many climate scientists have manipulated the data in order for extra grants to be rolling into their wallets. By the way, when he says how much money has been wasted because of that, I assure him it's way closer to "trillions" than "billions". ;-)

A random Christian woman (who just happens to lead the NRDC eco-terror fund featured in Michael Crichton's State of Fear) tried to dismiss Perry as another climate denier at Huff Post. Nothing shocking.

Remarkably enough, however, the by-far most up-voted comment under the article, one by "superuser" Marchmont, is skeptical, acknowledges that global warming has become a politicized arena in which people push their interests as well as their naive and "sincere" belief in incorruptibility of science, and says that climatology can't be viewed as immune against criticism.

The influence of the first carbon billionaire Gore has been particularly pernicious, the user confirms.

Back to frontrunner Perry. I agree with the voices that he's the man to beat. As a governor of Texas, he created lots of jobs of exactly the kind that the U.S. economy needs - low-paid jobs that are back to the basics. He may enjoy both a mainstream status as well as the support from the evangelicals and hasn't been contaminated by any support for various socialist healthcare programs and global warming hysterias.

And I would add, he is both a natural continuation of the Texas governors in the White House, as well as a refreshing change in this chain (his surname cleverly differs from that of the previous two Bushes). :-)