Climate change and the global hydrological cycle

Aug 3, 2012
NASA Goddard

The Ocean is essential to life on Earth. Most of Earth’s water is stored in the ocean. Although 40 percent of Earth’s population lives within, or near coastal regions- the ocean impacts people everywhere.

Without the ocean, our planet would be uninhabitable.

This animation helps to convey the importance of Earth’s oceanic processes as one component of Earth’s interrelated systems. This animation uses Earth science data from a variety of sensors on NASA Earth observing satellites to measure physical oceanography parameters such as ocean currents, ocean winds, sea surface height and sea surface temperature.

These measurements, in combination with atmospheric measurements such as surface air temperature, precipitation and clouds can help scientists understand the ocean’s impact on weather and climate and what this means for life here on Earth.

NASA satellites and their unique view from space are helping to unveil the vast… and largely unexplored… OCEAN. NASA Earth Observing System Data and Information Systems (EOSDIS) EOSDIS is a distributed system of twelve data centers and science investigator processing systems. EOSDIS processes, archives, and distributes data from Earth observing satellites, field campaigns, airborne sensors, and related Earth science programs. These data enable the study of Earth from space to advance scientific understanding.

For more information about the data sets used in this animation please visit,http://earthdata.nasa.gov This video is public domain and can be downloaded at: ‪http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/goto?11056

Well, you want to point over to ocean temperatures?
Going there I find:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f4/1880-_Global_average_sea_surface_temperature_-_global_warming.svg

which actually shows the 2016 ‘hiatus’. I certainly am surprised by this one. I had thought that the momentum; the thermal mass; of the ocean is so large that it would filter this out. Well then is that how slowly the water mixes? And this then gets you to ten percent in the atmosphere? Ten seems terribly large given that it is a gas.

All the while the dodge is on here. Saturation and amplification are not getting any discussion. We’ve already got a NASA guy admitting it, but claiming amplification, but what; is it just too complicated to understand? Perhaps this explains your dodge of the issue.

It gets even more complicated if we want to claim that global warming has peaked as of 2016.
In fact it has. As we play with statistics and conveniently hide longer term trends then integrity is lost.
It will be very big news if 2016 marks the turnaround to water feedback and cloud albedo; even as the rains melt away the icecaps. I fear a whole other form of global warming when the ice is gone and the regulatory effect of the ice cube in the drink runs out. It may not be possible to tend the icecaps, but still, the butterfly in Brazil actually leaves the possibility open. Imagine wind turbines set to torque off a weather front to a relatively dry area, setting off an evening shower, followed by partly cloudy skies the next day… That’s a bit more than a butterfly, yeah? As to who is controlling the steerage of the tails; at some level it is a local concern, but we are anticipating being water rich, aren’t we? Could we steer water to deserts in the atmosphere? Greening them? Somebody is going to be worried about the lizards as they save the planet. As well, Canada has quite a rosy future in this gambit. Little wonder that Uncle $am will be holding them down. Alaska just isn’t enough. We want more. This really is an effective national motto. Really, it’s a good point to be accusing you of being on the take. This is how inhumane your discussion is.

Your dodge is right in that title Ocean SURFACE temperature.

Excuse me Lausten, but this character is either stunningly stupid, or stunningly dishonest.

I’ll let others figure out the difference between surface temperatures and total ocean heat content.

As for surface temperatures, they are easer to measure and calculate, but the fact remains they are surface temperatures, and a year to year fluctuations always happened. I notice Timb isn’t up to sharing this years record breaking events.

Global ocean surface temperature hit a record high for May, which marks the second-consecutive month where ocean surface temperatures broke a record. On June 8, NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center announced an El Niño Advisory alert status; weak El Niño conditions emerged in May as above-average sea surface temperatures strengthened across the equatorial Pacific Ocean. El Niño conditions are now present and are expected to gradually strengthen into the Northern Hemisphere winter 2023–24.

Now please grasp the difference between OCEAN SURFACE TEMPERTURES
and
OCEAN HEAT CONTENT
it gets complicated.

Rising amounts of greenhouse gases are preventing heat radiated from Earth’s surface from escaping into space as freely as it used to. Most of the excess atmospheric heat is passed back to the ocean. As a result, upper ocean heat content has increased significantly over the past few decades.

Averaged over Earth’s surface, the 1993–2021 heat-gain rates were 0.37 (±0.05) to 0.44 (±0.12) Watts per square meter for depths from 0–700 meters (down to 0.4 miles), depending on which research group’s analysis you consult. Meanwhile, heat gain rates were 0.17 (±0.03) to 0.29 (±0.03) Watts per square meter for depths of 700–2,000 meters (0.4–1.2 miles). For depths between 2000–6000 meters (1.2–3.7 miles), the estimated increase was 0.07 (±0.03) Watts per square meter for the period from September 1992 to January 2012. According to the State of the Climate 2021 report, “Summing the three layers (despite their slightly different time periods as given above), the full-depth ocean heat gain rate ranges from 0.64 to 0.80 W m−2 applied to Earth’s entire surface.”

There’s plenty more explanatory information in those two links.

Then the next lesson to happen is that global warming happens at the top of the atmosphere, 24/7/365, simple physics doesn’t do hiatuses. Really!

In terms of hiatus analysis, we’ve got three since the low of 1910; the 2012 event not being one of them(or was it 2006?); they are easily spotted on this graph:
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v4/graph_data/Global_Mean_Estimates_based_on_Land_and_Ocean_Data/graph.png
The most impressive is the 1943 hiatus, technically lasting until 1979 under the lowess smoothing function, but inside of it is another peak at 1960 going until about 1978, which I would argue is a second ‘hiatus’ type of event. Now we have just entered a third as of 2016, though under the lowess smoothing it shows at 2018 as a new peak, and this is the first time that we see a descending curve since the 1960 hiatus.

According to the GISS software: “The annual mean graphs are paired with a lowess smooth, i.e. a non-parametric regression analysis that relies on a k-nearest-neighbor model. In order to evaluate the function, we use a fraction of data corresponding to a ten year window of data, giving an effective smoothing of approximately five years.”

I’m pretty sure since we are getting close to a decade away from 2016 that this dip will not disappear like the dastardly deed that you so readily vilify, and which doesn’t even quite come out flat on this graph. If a prediction of a cynical nature could occur here, it would be that the lowess parameters are about to change at NASA. Of course this presumes that political scientists and scientific politicians have their hands in the machinery. What a shame and a sham it is to see our scientific and justice institutions so badly failing us in this modern time.

I’ve attempted to find simple annual figures of cloud cover and albedo like the annual charts of temperature and find none. Pretty clearly they will as well show trends, right? Increasing cloud cover has to be afoot! I could almost do the analysis myself as a simple sum. Why isn’t it available? Could it be that an inconvenient truth awaits us? Call this a beginner’s prediction. It’s a funny business digging into this stuff, where the future data matters so much. And of course the present data, too. Then to see reports back from 2016 which have not been updated since: there are times to read between the lines, but I’ll admit that proof like I’d like to find is not available there. In the current climate, where independent journalists are coming to the populace the ability of a frustrated scientist to spill the beans is fully available. Some do, and we witness what happens to them. I suppose that is one for another thread, though.

You are still ignoring the fact that it’s what’s happening at the top of the atmosphere that determines how much heat is held within the global heat and moisture distribution engine.

You point out fluctuations on graphs, with out understanding the graphs themselves.
Worst you don’t want to learn. Those are natural fluctuations that are to be expected in surface temperatures. What you want to call “hiatus”, is most easily explained as reflecting the myriad of complex heat exchanges paths ways.

What would you do with that? You don’t have any actual climate science knowledge!
You can’t even admit that it’s what happening in our atmosphere that is the driving factor in Anthropogenic Global Warming.

The Right Wings fixation on short term weather, though only when it shows them something they like, is delusional, (as in seeing what’s not there). That’s objective observation and not a subjective insult, I’ll try keep those to myself.

Rather than short term hiatus bull kacke, do a little fixating on this graph:

Why not worry about real issues, instead of spilling all that ink on 400 words that don’t actually say anything?

You think you can fake it with Science By Rhetoric.
I say this because your words up there are for the most part meaningless non sequiturs.

What’s that mean? What are you suggesting or claiming?

Lausten the double standard is amazing, yet we seem to always fall for it.
Biased opinionated under-education expects be given the same weight, as dedicated hard working intelligent skeptical scientists.
Unfortunately, that contrarian crowd, can’t conceive of hard working and dedicated, let alone an interest in honestly learning and understand what’s happen with the climate our Earth and we depend on. Which becomes transparent after a very little back and forths.

Even 50-year-old climate models correctly predicted global warming

Study debunks idea that older models were inaccurate

https://www.science.org/content/article/even-50-year-old-climate-models-correctly-predicted-global-warming


January 9, 2020

Study Confirms Climate Models are Getting Future Warming Projections Right

By Alan Buis,
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory


What’s wrong with these climate models?

By Chad Small | December 16, 2022

What’s wrong with these climate models? - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

There are two major questions in climate modeling - can they accurately reproduce the past (hindcasting) and can they successfully predict the future? To answer the first question, here is a summary of the IPCC model results of surface temperature from the 1800s - both with and without man-made forcings. All the models are unable to predict recent warming without taking rising CO2 levels into account . Nobody has created a general circulation model that can explain climate’s behavior over the past century without CO2warming.


What give Tim the right to make such disparaging remarks about real scientists, and expend such effort at implying they are not to be trusted.

No instead it suggests we need “independent” journalism with no specific education, no commitment of focus and honesty to fellow colleagues, the way scientists do; and lots and of of bias to sew doubt and sell articles and convince people of opinions.
WHY NOT ratchet up the crazy until no one, but experts and the few who actually care to do real homework, know what’s up or down.

Tim, you start behaving honorably and I’ll happy show you some respect, trash talk scientists, and misrepresent their data, expect push back !

FYI, I’m not reading most of these long posts lately. Use the @ sign of you want my attention. Or, just take a break, so Tim doesn’t have anything to respond to

I see that .png link did not render. Here is the .html version:
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v4/graph_data/Global_Mean_Estimates_based_on_Land_and_Ocean_Data/graph.html

We happen to be in an el nino year.
" This vast size means that warming or cooling in the Pacific due to El Niño and La Niña can leave an imprint on the global average surface temperature. In general, the warmest year of any decade will be an El Niño year , the coldest a La Niña one." - El Niño and La Niña: Frequently asked questions | NOAA Climate.gov.
but there is no hard rule there. Ah-Waw:
“There is considerable scatter of the data before 1850 when relatively few stations existed. The temperatures for the Northern Hemisphere continents exhibit greater year to year variability than is the
case for the Southern Hemisphere continents. This is not altogether
surprising given that Asia, Europe and North America have an approximately 50% greater area and the climate ranges from the polar
to the tropical. Many of the stations in the southern continents are located near the coast where the oceans moderate the climate. All three
northern continents exhibit a warming of about 0.5 C from 1850 to
the 1940s. This was followed by a cooler period during the 1960s and
1970s. In contrast, temperatures remained relatively constant in the
southern hemisphere. All continents show a marked increase in temperature of about 1 C during the 1990s followed by a levelling off after 2000 which is known as the global warming hiatus.”

So there it is in the words of WAW: your hiatus that you wanted to study. I didn’t mean to pick up the subject until you brought it to my attention. And now in the midst of my response you change topic over to model accuracy, and link to reports with titles like:
“Study Confirms Climate Models are Getting Future Warming Projections Right”
This is practically a leaker here. No doubt he’s had a visit from the OAS or some such; promised a free lunch and a boot. Nope; Alan Buis: a communications guy… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZ055F_1-Dw
Still, even he must have had a chuckle when he came up with that title.

If I was just here to get your ire, which it seems I do virtually every post, I could stick it to you way worse. I’m actually quite interested in the 2016 peak, which nobody will discuss. It happens to be at approximately +1.0 C, and if somebodies model settled on that figure, then they are no doubt jumping out of their seats for the next year’s data, feeling as though they are sitting on a pot of gold. Meanwhile the market says +1.5 is on the way. As to who gets sneered off the stage, or scrooged on funding, well: this is a political problem now that the climate change infrastructure is established. You’ll find politics inside of even a small college institution in one department. This thing is considerably larger. The idea that the truth might be found outside of that bubble: I find it very believable.

Beyond this hiatus topic, I have been having trouble exposing what the term ‘amplification’ entails.
My opinion is that if WAW is wrong, it is because he completely ate the heat of the OCO notch as if it could not escape again. This likewise is mimiced by Schmidt: “If, for instance, CO2 concentrations are doubled, then the absorption would increase by 4 W/m2, but once the water vapor and clouds react, the absorption increases by almost 20 W/m2” But you see, this has to be a false statement: if you absorbed all of the heat already in your simplified model, there is no more to absorb. The problem really is better exposed by back out of this hole, and admitting that the spectral absorption is crude, and that some of that heat will be escaping, and that mechanism needs to be modeled. In effect the net model will be yielding a cooler prediction… +1.0C?

The idea that we will hit negative feedback given water and cloud formations is not only desirable, but believable.

Here in this discussion I find that you act like big brother, and yet still have the need to go crying to the babysitter. On top of this little brother has something to say which is getting stifled. I wonder how this is going to work out. Something about status quo power really stinks.

No, it’s not believable - it is fantasy thinking .

Gibberish isn’t helping.

This is where we’re at.

He’s tad long winded with his intro, but what cha gonna do:

Oh but wait, there’s more hot and dry isn’t all that’s bad, hot and wet isn’t the best either.

Oh yeah, we can only thrive within a limited range of conditions, and we are pushing Earth out that range and theirs no easy reverse gear,. especially when most still don’t even understand the simple fundamentals because they’re too busy wrestling with details beyond one’s intellectual abilities.

Unnecessary clause. Both of you, cut it out. Type, then delete. It’s that easy.

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Oh look, another, from the guy who keeps asking me moderate others.

Have you seen that CC actually wants you here? It’s an opportunity to present alternate viewpoints. Didn’t you say you were banned from some other sites?

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These don’t help. Watch that video on debating and use more technical terms to point out debate tactics.

See bookmark 54 about bad actors Discussion about fact based discussion - #5 by lausten
One of the tools is to stop the debate and reset to the conversation we want here. I have those tools. I’m thinking about 3 months to cool off.

I want to apologize for crapping on this thread, whose focus really is the hydrological cycle.
How troubling to those growing crops to know that irrigation systems have emptied aquifers. The best hopes for these places is rainfall. That we may find in the warming such a possibility is too optimistic, perhaps. I am finding that my issues with understanding the system is more to do with thermodynamics:
“In summary heat transport by thermal radiation in Earth’s atmosphere is orders of
magnitude faster than heat transfer by molecular diffusion. Heat transfer by conduction in
air (that is, by molecular diffusion) is so small that it is normally irrelevant compared to
heat transfer by radiation or heat transport by convection.” https://wvanwijngaarden.info.yorku.ca/files/2023/03/GreenhousePrimerArxiv.pdf?x45936
and so it deserves its own thread.

The possibility that absorption by CO2 is saturated seems to be an issue that is tabboo for some. Still others tack on models atop this assumption, as if they are going to get more heat back, which is an extremely peculiar and unlikely analysis for someone who understands the topic at hand. Of course the possibility of my own misunderstanding is present here and again I apologize for my own density.

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It’s not about taboo, it’s scientifically discredited.

8. Is there a point at which adding more CO2 will not cause further warming?

Climate change: evidence and causes

No. Adding more CO2 to the atmosphere will cause surface temperatures to continue to increase. As the atmospheric concentrations of CO2 increase, the addition of extra CO2 becomes progressively less effective at trapping Earth’s energy, but surface temperature will still rise.

Our understanding of the physics by which CO2 affects Earth’s energy balance is confirmed by laboratory measurements, as well as by detailed satellite and surface observations of the emission and absorption of infrared energy by the atmosphere. Greenhouse gases absorb some of the infrared energy that Earth emits in so-called bands of stronger absorption that occur at certain wavelengths. Different gases absorb energy at different wavelengths. CO2 has its strongest heat-trapping band centred at a wavelength of 15 micrometres (millionths of a metre), with wings that spread out a few micrometres on either side. There are also many weaker absorption bands. As CO2 concentrations increase, the absorption at the centre of the strong band is already so intense that it plays little role in causing additional warming. However, more energy is absorbed in the weaker bands and in the wings of the strong band, causing the surface and lower atmosphere to warm further.


A Saturated Gassy Argument

26 JUN 2007 BY GROUP

A guest post by Spencer Weart, in collaboration with Raymond T. Pierrehumbert

The simple physics explanations for the greenhouse effect that you find on the internet are often quite wrong.

¶ The arguments do sound good, so good that in fact they helped to suppress research on the greenhouse effect for half a century. …

¶ Still more persuasive to scientists of the day was the fact that water vapor, which is far more abundant in the air than carbon dioxide, also intercepts infrared radiation. …

¶ Nobody was interested in thinking about the matter deeply enough to notice the flaw in the argument. …

¶ What happens to infrared radiation emitted by the Earth’s surface? As it moves up layer by layer through the atmosphere, some is stopped in each layer. To be specific: a molecule of carbon dioxide, water vapor or some other greenhouse gas absorbs a bit of energy from the radiation. The molecule …

¶ What happens if we add more carbon dioxide? In the layers so high and thin that much of the heat radiation from lower down slips through, adding more greenhouse gas molecules means the layer will absorb more of the rays. So the place from which most of the heat energy finally leaves the Earth will shift to higher layers. Those are colder layers, so they do not radiate heat as well. The planet as a whole is now taking in more energy than it radiates (which is in fact our current situation). As the higher levels radiate some of the excess downwards, all the lower levels down to the surface warm up. The imbalance must continue until the high levels get hot enough to radiate as much energy back out as the planet is receiving.

¶ The breakthroughs that finally set the field back on the right track came from research during the 1940s. Military officers lavishly funded research on the high layers of the air where their bombers operated, layers traversed by the infrared radiation they might use to detect enemies. Theoretical analysis of absorption leaped forward, with results confirmed by laboratory studies using techniques orders of magnitude better than Ångström could deploy. The resulting developments stimulated new and clearer thinking about atmospheric radiation. …

(The moral, it’s the freak’n Air Force scientist of a number of countries, working independently, that discovered Manmade Global Warm, and that’s the simple physical truth of the matter.)

(The article goes on, at length, anyone curious to learn how it really work, should take the time to read and digest the information.)



Nov 09, 2010

Carbon dioxide or water vapor, pick a side in this global warming debate. The fourth myth in the climate change series keeps the conversation going.

By: Cory Leahy

Increased carbon dioxide (CO2) can’t contribute to global warming: It’s already maxed out as a factor and besides, water vapor is more consequential.

(This one is shorter simpler and to the point, RealClimate does get into the scientific weeds.)


This one gets into the molecule, like what really happens to OCO and other greenhouse gases.

====================================

Here we get to the question of whether people have a moral duty to learn from substantive validated information that’s been presented to them?

The mystery of what kind of person refuses to learn and repeats the same stupefying and destructive lies, over and over. After all, this is existential stuff we’ve come unhinged from, is that really okay to ignore?

You were doing so well, up to this point.

Well yeah, we had most of this information well understood by the 1980s, but the public and its leaders were deliberately misinformed. . . look around now we got hell to pay, and we are just starting to feel it, yet most people really believe the next few decades won’t be any different from the past few decades. The deliberate stupefaction is beyond the pale.

And I’m being generous marking the 1980s

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0096340210392966

I know you’ll want to point me to something like this and tell me what sage advice it is, but then I find a line like this:

However, we do mean to say that news coverage, perhaps inadvertently, makes us believe that there are more climate change deniers than there really are. On the individual level, the share of climate change deniers has been decreasing continuously for the past decade (6). On the national level, 131 countries have adopted net-zero pledges (7).

But that’s all politicians talking and making promises, but look around what’s the reality looks like?

So superficially admitting Manmade Global Warming, doesn’t hold much water.

Appeasing deliberate climate science misinformers isn’t helping anything either.
Normalizing deliberate manufacture of misinformation hasn’t helped one bit either.

Sorry Lausten, please note I’m not naming any names.

Seriously CC, I’m one warning away from your 3 month haitus. I am not appeasing anyone and you are not fixing the world with your name calling.

Gotta love the Royal Society…

The process is too slow to warn people of what the end result will be.
It’s like telling people that smoking will kill you in 15 years. A lot of people think that gives them plenty of time to quit smoking and 10 years later they die of lung cancer.

There is this phrase " Not with a bang but a whimper" and that’s how humanity will become extinct.

The Meaning and Origin of ‘This is the Way the World Ends: Not with a Bang but a Whimper’

‘This is the way the world ends’, T. S. Eliot tells us at the end of his 1925 poem, ‘The Hollow Men’: ‘not with a bang but a whimper.’

Pretty sure Godzilla is thinking with a bang. It’s a habit.
In Godzilla Wee Trust
FAFA

“…he told U.S. Senators that there was ‘no radioactive residue’ at the bombed cities and that radiation sickness was a ‘very pleasant way to die.’”

Could this be the dip of the 40’s in the climate record? The grand hiatus? Godzilla is feeling hot and bothered again…

In the video I posted from Big Think, this is a tactic that bad-faith debaters use. Say something incoherent. It’s a mild infraction of the rules, but you do it all the time.