Roy Spencer confesses his deep inner conviction:
- I’m far from a political moderate, but I’ve been tagged as a “lukewarmer” in the climate wars. That’s because, at least from a theoretical perspective, it’s hard (but not impossible) for me to imagine that increasing CO2 won’t cause some level of warming.
- Some level of warming can probably be expected, but just how much makes a huge difference.
- Lindzen and I and a few other researchers in the field think the IPCC models are simply too sensitive, due to positive feedbacks that are either too strong, or even have the wrong sign. But we still believe more CO2 should cause some level of warming.
- If the current lack of warming really is due to a natural cooling influence temporarily canceling out CO2-induced warming, what happens when that cooling influence goes away? We are going to see rather rapid warming return…
But Roy also states that he (and Lindzen) believes that the warming effect of CO2 is smaller than that postulated by IPCC (which is already quite small and smaller in AR5 than in AR4), and thus may well be too small to ever be observed. Roy is not so alone to have this idea as he thinks.
Roy thus can easily imagine a broad spectrum from warming to nothing, but can hardly imagine slight cooling under increasing CO2 like in the present observed hiatus (which he admits is not impossible). A very moderate standpoint, I would say.
I write this as a comment to Roys article since Roy does not want my comments on his blog, but Roy is welcome to comment with hopefully some answer to the title question on this blog.
PS Roy sends the warning::
- The Danger of Hanging Your Hat on No Future Warming
- The Danger of Hanging Your Hat on Future Warming.
Inlägg
All Spencer "knows" is that top-of-atmosphere (TOA) measurements of upwelling longwave (LW, or infrared) radiation--in the specific bands identified as due to CO2--have decreased with time. Over 2 years ago, I responded to David Appell (a fraudulent science "journalist" and "PhD in theoretical physics"), on my blog, that this decrease is obviously--to any competent physicist--the result of increased CO2 in the atmosphere, which we also obviously already knew, from the Mauna Loa measurements of CO2 in particular. But Spencer, and I must assume all those who use the TOA measurements to tout "proof" of the global-warming "greenhouse effect", instead say decreased upwelling radiation, in those specific bands, inescapably implies a rising atmospheric energy level, and increased global mean surface temperature. You and I, on the other hand, at least understand that they have gotten hold of a bad radiation transfer theory--in effect, a false dogma, which they refuse to have questioned--and are really measuring temperature, from various levels in the atmosphere, when they think they are measuring LW radiation intensity spectra at TOA. I haven't put together a re-analysis of those spectra (though I know you have, from your posts here), so I won't get into the details of those spectra--I don't know enough about them to be definitive. I will merely say that as a responsible (and honest) physicist, I have fundamental doubts about every aspect of the consensus interpretation of them, and I caution the public to give them no credibility, in the face of my clear and simple Venus/Earth temperature comparison, which show the Venus/Earth temperature ratio, at points of equal pressure in the two tropospheres, over the full range of Earth tropospheric pressures, is precisely due only to the ratio of their distances from the Sun, and nothing else--which inescapably means they both are warmed by direct absorption of the same physical fraction of the incident solar radiation, not from the planetary surface as all the "experts" here on Earth strangely believe.
SvaraRaderaNot to mention "the Danger of Hanging Your Hat On No Future Cooling!!"
SvaraRaderaKuhnKat