http://blogs.smh.com.au/…
Roy W Spencer made the announcement when he gave testimony before the US Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on 22 July 2008. He has a PhD in Meteorology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and has been
involved in global warming research for close to twenty years. He has numerous peer-reviewed scientific articles dealing with the measurement and interpretation of climate variability and climate change. He is Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and the U.S. Science Team Leader for the AMSR-E instrument flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite. Data obtained from Aqua is the basis for much of the following.
Here are excerpts from his full testimony.
“Regarding the currently popular theory that mankind is responsible for global warming, I am very pleased to deliver good news from the front lines of climate change research. Our latest research results, which I am about to describe, could have an enormous impact on policy decisions regarding greenhouse gas emissions. … we now have new satellite evidence which strongly suggests that the climate system is much less sensitive than is claimed by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).”
“Another way of saying this is that the real climate system appears to be dominated by “negative feedbacks” — instead of the “positive feedbacks” which are displayed by all twenty computerized climate models utilized by the IPCC. …If true, an insensitive climate system would mean that we have little to worry about in the way of manmade global warming and associated climate change. And, … it would also mean that the warming we have experienced in the last 100 years is mostly
natural. Of course, if climate change is mostly natural then it is largely out of our control, and is likely to end — if it has not ended already, since satellite-measured global temperatures have not warmed for at least seven years now.”
“The support for my claim of low climate sensitivity (net negative feedback) for our climate system is two-fold. First, we have a new research article in-press in the Journal of Climate which uses a simple climate model to show that previous estimates of the sensitivity of the climate system from satellite data were biased toward the high side by the neglect of natural cloud variability. It turns out that the failure to account for natural, chaotic cloud variability generated internal to the climate system will always lead to the illusion of a climate system which appears more sensitive than it really is. …”
“The second line of evidence in support of an insensitive climate system comes from the satellite data themselves. While our work in-press established the existence of an observational bias in estimates of climate sensitivity, it did not address just how large that bias might be. But in the last several weeks, we have stumbled upon clear and convincing observational evidence of particularly strong negative feedback (low climate sensitivity) from our latest and best satellite instruments. That evidence includes our development of two new methods for extracting the feedback signal from either observational or climate model data, a goal which has been called the “holy grail” of climate research. …”
Not including clouds in the simulations invalidates the result? No shit? Funny… skeptics have been saying that for years. I spent my lunch yesterday explaining that and other reasons to question the “consensus” on global cooling global warming global climate change.
The last episode of Penn and Teller’s Bullshit (S06E06) was on the this topic. I recommend watching it though I warn you that what you witness may cause your brain to hurt.
