My OLO article is based in part on a lecture given by Roy Spencer in New York a couple of weeks ago which I attended. The lecture was based on findings from data from the NASA Aqua satellite - Dr Spencer leads the team analysing data from this satellite which was launched in 2002. Some of these findings have been published in GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 34, L15707, doi:10.1029/2007GL029698, 2007 which you can access here
http://www.weatherquestions.com/Spencer_07GRL.pdf
and there is another technical paper in press

To re-explain:

The currently accepted theory is:

1. The most prevalent greenhouse gas is water vapour
2. As temperatures rise, the oceans warm up and release extra water vapour
3. This water vapour then absorbs energy and radiates some of it to the ground, thus helping global temperatures to rise even more

So the idea is that the warming effects of carbon dioxide will be amplified by increasing water vapour i.e. positive feedback.

But this is NOT what the latest data from the latest satellite shows.

Data from NASA’s Aqua Satellite, which was only launched in 2002, shows that water vapour and high altitude cloud cover don’t necessarily increase when there is warming. Rather weather processes limit the total greenhouse effect in proportion to available sunlight. This can happen in a variety of ways through the hydrological cycle, for example low level clouds release water vapour from the atmosphere when it rains.

All the UN IPCC models have water vapour as a positive feedback with warming, but in fact in the real world there is negative feedback with warming.

Jennifer “All the UN IPCC models have water vapour as a positive feedback with warming, but in fact in the real world there is negative feedback with warming.”

As one of the “healthy skeptics”, I appreciate your confirmation to the dangers of relying on uncertain assumptions based on underdeveloped and obviously erroneous models.

Climatology, a very young (= immature) “science”, I suspect has a fair component of subjective assumption (like that on water vapour) and should really be called an “Art”, needs to be held accountable for the accuracy of these models.

Anyone supporting an agenda which relies on the accuracy of models is obviously too gullible to be safe around national or state or local council policy discussions.

Using subjective and barely tested models, computer or otherwise, is a dangerous basis for playing God with the worlds economic system, which again, even after 200 years, no one can produce a definitive model of, although Harold Wilson (ex UK PM) did some interesting stuff with pipes, buckets and coloured water (but I would not trust him to fix a leaky toilet).

Signing up for emotionally driven Carbon emissions reduction Objectives, funded by artificial carbon taxes, expropriated from tax payers on an unfounded proposition and erroneous models, is an abuse of government power. It is nothing more than “Socialism by Stealth”.

Jennifer, if that is the whole hypothesis and the basis of the UN IPCC models, then if true, earth would have overheated long ago just on water vapour. If you have a basic primary school understanding of positive feedbacks then you would know how they make for an unstable situation ...... something like continually pushing someone up on a swing. Crikey, in such an event who would need any CO2? What ridiculous stuff. LOL

Jennifer

Thanks for the link to the Spencer et al paper. Yes, it is very interesting and I understand why Graham would say “If Spencer's research is robust then all the current modelling is nonsense and that makes a huge difference to the issue.”

The qualifying term is IF, but I would not have gone as far as to suggest the current modelling is nonsense, no matter how robust.

The point is; the theory of AGW does not rest alone on computer modeling (contrary to what many people would have us believe) … isotope analysis and attribution studies for example. This is ‘lost’ or not understood by the majority of people.

While water vapour has a relatively short residence time in the atmosphere compared to other more ‘potent’ GHG’s, it is still not entirely understood in terms of its feedback (positive and negative) effects on the planet’s climate system – no genuine scientist would dispute this.

However, the difficulty for the so called sceptics of AGW is to prove that there is a more vigorous driver of the current global warming than CO2 … they have not been able to do this, yet.

We can only encourage Spencer and others to continue to research their hypotheses, studying solar irradiance or cosmic rays or whatever – and publish.

Who knows, maybe one day they will get a Nobel for disproving the theory of AGW?

Q&A Just look at this piccie.
http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/PSB/EPS/SST/data/anomnight.3.13.2008.gif

Just seems the sun is implicated as the driver of this change. Why is the surface cooling across the tropics and mainly on the equator like the Indian and Pacific cooling forming a particularly noticeable band? Why does it appear clearly that the warmer surface is being pushed to the higher latitudes with its leading edge showing as the warmest? Pretty easy to explain Adelaide's hot spell one would think, too.

Plenty of questions and this link offers pretty good thoughts on the matter with Cloud_temp_tropo.pdf at the quite remarkable Erland Happ's place …
http://www.happs.com.au/pages/research.html#anchor

However, my thoughts are the cosmic-ray and cloud-forcing hypothesis. Note i say hypothesis and there may be other ones to explain this cloudy and cooler period across the tropics as we experience an extended solar minimum. Any comment?

One feels that there are always plenty of cosmic rays high in the air, but they and the ions that they liberate are in short supply at low altitudes, so that increases or decreases due to changes in solar magnetism have more noticeable consequences lower down and I suspect at lower latitudes too.