My comment that was not approved: No increase in drought

My comment that I submitted but was not approved on this article:

http://news.trust.org/item/20160509061041-3lrr7/?source=fiHeadlineStory

In reply to this comment:



My reply:

Recent uptick in AGW concern epitomises ignorance of fears

The recent uptick in polls of the public's concern of AGW epitomise the public's ignorance regarding AGW (and frankly most issues scientific or technical).

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:

2015 is 3rd hottest on satellite record since 1979, not 1st

I put RSS data into calendar year bins & graphed it (Excel file). 2015 is 3rd hottest calendar year since 1979 according to satellite, not 1st hottest ("evah") as some claim.

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:

Outgoing longwave radiation basically follows air temperature

Just tinkering with a few climate-related files concerning outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) for an upcoming post.

Supposedly this OLR portion of earth's outgoing spectrum is curtailed by greenhouse gas "heat trapping" and should go down. Instead the opposite is found.

Basically OLR follows earth's average air temps as you'd expect and there is no CO2-related "heat trapping" evident.

The very existence of the tropospheric vertical temperature gradient nullifies the possibility of a greenhouse effect

Scientists such as Luboš Motl believe a greenhouse effect exists in the atmosphere because of the existence of a negative vertical temperature gradient, which averages -6.5C per kilometer of altitude (adiabatic lapse).

Tropospheric negative vertical temperature gradient (right)