Comparison of RSS to BoM temperature for Tasmania

Is Tasmania burning? Not according to satellite temperature for the lower troposphere derived by Remote Sensing Systems.  This is in response to  this tweet from a Green.

Tasmania is burning. Supporters of coal like Scott Morrison have effectively struck the match that started these fires. He is not welcome in our state until he ends his love affair with coal.

— Nick McKim (@NickMcKim) 24 January 2019

Hemispherical analysis of RSS TLT temperature uptweaking

I compare RSS TLT differences between version 4 and 3.3 for northern and southern hemispheres. RSS have updated their satellite temperature lower troposphere and released a new version called 4.0.

Carl Mears of remote sensing systems is a staunch warmist and has recently produced a new version of TLT that just so happens to comply with the global warming theory. Below shows the strange difference between northern and southern hemisphere uptweaking.

Why ocean warming can not be caused by global warming

Recent ocean warming over the past century and a half can not be caused by alleged CO2-induced global warming for three main reasons:

1) Most of the warming occurred before the time of significant atmospheric CO2.

2) The warming occurs 100s of metres deep down – too deep for that warmth to have come from the surface – and is so disparate from ocean to ocean as to suggest local or natural causes, not a global one like AGW.

3) The magnitude of the ocean warming is some 45 times that of the air in energy terms. If you believe that a change in air temperature can produce a 45 times larger change in ocean heat content then you believe CO2 is a magic molecule, which climate scientists do. (Officially climate scientists say about 1/5 of that 45x is due to humans but it's a sheer guess).

What the above suggests is that the oceans are very influential in 20th century warming rather than AGW.

A 3C rise in temperature is just a 1% energy rise

With no phase changes the energy content of the air is proportional to its temperature. Earth's pre-industrial average temperature is 15C. Under a high estimate for CO2 warming of 3C the final temperature is 18C. Convert to absolute temperature and the difference is just 1.04%:

(273 + 18) - (273 + 15) / (273 + 15) = 1.04%

Warmists don't like facts laid bare like this (_1, _2). 1% is not enough to notice any difference in any climate metric such as hurricanes or tornadoes. Instead they insist on expressing the energy increase in joules or Hiroshima atomic bomb equivalent. This is more useful for their scare narrative. But when this energy is spread out over a large area it's nothing. This is why warmists hate the percentage value.

The true significance of ocean warming

AGW believers use ocean warming as their number one excuse for the atmospheric warming pause going on 19 years now – a pause during the time of highest CO2 rise. Their refrain is that the oceans are warming because they're absorbing the "missing AGW heat". [1, 2, 3] 

But a new paper by Trenberth et al (link, mirror) published in March 2017 suggests that ocean warming is coming from deeper layers, especially the 700 to 2000m layer, and is surely therefore due to natural factors not global warming.

GRACE satellite Greenland data is too negative-biased

Despite the DMI institute showing quite a mass gain for Greenland in 2016:

..The GRACE satellite data showed a continued mass decline.

Outgoing Longwave Radiation – the fuller story

For a couple of years or so I have been claiming [1, 2] that outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) should be decreasing if infrared was being curtailed by increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as per AGW theory. But there is more to the story.

On a spectral line near 700 wavenumber (14.3 µm) there is indeed quite a reduction in radiation expected to be caused by an increase in CO2.

The following chart (data via the Modtran simulator) shows a deepening of the groove that appears around 700 to 770 wavenumber with surface temperature kept constant and atmospheric carbon dioxide increased from 150 to 1000 ppm.

How to load .nc files into Matlab

Much climate data comes in the form of NetCDF files which have an .nc suffix.

This post is as much for my own reference in case I forget how to do it, as it is for anyone else interested in opening a NetCDF file in Matlab.

Here's a list of the current climate NetCDF files I am interested in:

• ·       Satellite Temperature Lower Troposphere

http://www.remss.com/measurements/upper-air-temperature

↳

ftp://ftp.remss.com/msu/data/netcdf

↳

uat4_tb_v03r03_anom_chtlt_197812_201509.nc3.nc

(Note that the name suffix changes slightly with each month)

•     NCEP Reanalysis 2 of Upward longwave radiation flux at nominal top of atmosphere

Why the "missing heat" of AGW can't be going in the ocean

The reason "missing heat" can't be going in the ocean is that the ocean is warming. A warmer ocean makes it less likely that heat will be drawn in from the atmosphere, not more.

Here is the global sea surface temperature anomaly, and it's on the rise:

(Source. Many more graphs here. Also here.)

Circular axis unfairly weights more recent years

In the latest deception by Team Consensus, Ed Hawkins converts temperatures that are normally displayed on an X-Y plane to a circular axis.

This has the effect of increasing the area occupied by recent years and cramming past years into a little dot in the middle. The resulting spiral, made scarier by employing a violet to red rainbow colour, gives the impression of an out of control temperature rise.

Spiralling global temperatures from 1850-2016 (full animation) https://t.co/YETC5HkmTr pic.twitter.com/Ypci717AHq

— Ed Hawkins (@ed_hawkins) 9 May 2016

AGW water-vapour-feedback theory disproved by satellite observations

AGW theory says that CO2 can cause some warming, for example 1C for a doubling of CO2; but that the resulting water vapour feedback will cause an extra 2C or so of warming, which is where the real AGW danger comes from. (Scared yet?)

Climate models [1, 2, 3] and observations show that each 1C of warming causes about a 7% increase in water vapour, which in turn causes a further 2C of warming.

Well, water vapour did just increase by about 7% over course of the year of 2015, but little happened to earth's average temperature; maybe a 0.2C warming at most over the same period:

Deforestation has same 'fingerprint' as fossil fuel combustion

Several climate metrics are claimed to be fingerprints showing that human fossil fuel combustion caused the recent atmospheric carbon dioxide rise [1, 2]. These are:

1) Rising CO2 and falling oxygen
2) Falling 13C/12C ratio
3) CO2 is highest in ~800,000 years

Decline in 13C/12C ratio not keeping pace with fossil fuel combustion emissions

One of the key "fingerprints" of human influence in the rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide is the declination in d13C, the ratio between 13C/12C.

Fossil fuels are supposed to have more of the carbon-12 isotope in comparison to the carbon-13 isotope compared to what's "average" in the atmosphere prior to burning. Hence burning fossil fuels should decrease the 13C/12C ratio. And this is what's found.

But while human emissions of CO2 from fossil fuel combustion are only increasing with time (you should see what China's doing)...

Teasing the data to get the trend you want

"The cherries are picked mainly on the plains..."

Feldman et al 2015 (link) [1, 2] is supposed to be one of these 'smoking guns' of CO2-induced doom Team Consensus likes to refer to [3, 4]. Here's a graph from that paper.

At first glance a few things seemed odd:

Harries et al 2001 corrected graphs

The labels were switched on graph 1a. So I switched them back to correct them. You can verify that the graph is now correct considering the difference graph figure 1b:

Source

The broken pea shooter

I've been looking into so-called smoking gun of greenhouse gas absorption: Harries et al 2001, and came across a rather hard to obtain, obscure 2003 follow-up paper by Harries co-authored with Brindley that basically nullifies the 2001 finding.

The paper is called Observations of the Infrared Outgoing Spectrum of the Earth from Space: The Effects of Temporal and Spatial Sampling by Brindley and Harries (hereafter B & H 2003).

Turns out sampling limitations (etc) in the later 1997 IMG instrument gave rise to errors that effectively nullify the following graph (as depicted on the SkS website):

RSS Satellite Temperature Lower Troposphere Australia

=========================
UPDATE 10 March 2017: I got the longitude wrong by 180 degrees. Explanation here:

http://planetaryvision.blogspot.com.au/2017/03/rss-temp-anomaly-for-australia.html

Graph should look like this:



It was still close enough though. There is no warming in Australia during satellite period.

END UPDATE.
=========================

Now that I can open NetCDF files in Matlab I can look at various climate-related data files and reveal data by longitude and latitude, kind of like Steven Goddard does only not as good.

You can get the data for RSS TLT here:

http://www.remss.com/measurements/upper-air-temperature
↳
ftp://ftp.remss.com/msu/data/netcdf

Using the file:
"uat4_tb_v03r03_anom_chtlt_197812_201509.nc3.nc" I can dial in any latitude and longitude or area.

First, for comparison sake here's what I get averaging the whole earth:

Difference in longwave radiation between top and bottom of atmosphere

I downloaded data from 1979 to today of NCEP reanalysis-2 of upward longwave radiation from this page. Look for the files that are about 30MB in size.

Slightly updated OLR graph

At first these NetCDF files with extensions like .nc and .cdf were a bit of a mystery to me. These files won't open in everyday programs I'm used to like Excel or text editors.  But I'm making progress manipulating them in Matlab.

A website I often refer to for OLR graphs is Ole Humlum's Climate4You.com's temperature page here (excerpt with just the OLR graphs here).

But I guess that page needs to be manually updated and was last updated 2011; the data stops around 2010. Here's the first OLR graph from that page with global coverage using NOAA satellites that started measuring in June 1974:

Upper troposphere warming slower than lower

In AGW theory higher layers of the troposphere are supposed to warm faster than lower ones. But the hotspot is missing: as you move up in the troposphere RSS satellite shows the warming rate is less.

At the lowest level, TLT, the warming rate is 0.121K/decade and gets less as you move up: