Earth Surface Cooled from 1982 to 2006 According to Satellite Data

As is now generally known, there has been no warming of the Earth's surface since 1998 at least.  Prior to that time, we were informed that there had been a rapid warming of the Earth's surface and that it was caused by increasing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere due to man using fossil fuels.  The 2007 IPCC 4th Report still insisted that for 25 years the Earth had been warming.  A newly published study using satellite temperature sensing specifically for detecting the Earth's surface temperature and minimizing that of the atmosphere above the surface, shows that the Earth's surface, contrary to reports, actually cooled from 1982 to 2006!

The paper is entitled Meteosat Derived Planetary Temperature Trend 1982-2006 by Andries Rosema, Steven Foppes, and Joost van der Woerd and was published in Energy & Environment, Vol. 24, No. 3 & 4 2013.  They were very surprised to find the cooling trend they reported.

Earlier satellite data analyses, originated by investigators at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, used microwave sensors to infer the temperature from microwave emissions from oxygen molecules.  Microwaves of different energies originated from various layers of the atmosphere.  One set of data originated from an altitude of about 17 km.  Another at an altitude of about 3 - 4 km.  Then by looking at data taken at oblique angles of incidence, they inferred a temperature from an altitude of about 0.8 km.  However, none of this data actually the Earth's surface temperature.  Initially, this data on the lower atmosphere had shown a small cooling effect, but after many corrections were applied, the data yielded an increase of temperature of about 0.1 C/decade in the troposphere.  The troposphere is the bottom about 10 to 11 km of the atmosphere and its temperature is not at all necessarily in direct proportion to the surface temperature.  Indeed, increased cloud cover, water vapor, and CO2 in the atmosphere may cause an increase in the troposphere temperature even as it cools the surface temperature.

The Rosema, Foppes, and van der Woerd study used the infra-red radiation at 10.5 to 12.5 micrometers wavelength to directly measure the surface temperature of the Earth.  The copy of the paper incorrectly says mm instead of micrometers.  This infra-red radiation is in the mid-infra-red part of the electromagnetic spectrum, but close to the beginning of the far infra-red.  The atmosphere is highly transparent at these wavelengths, provided there are no clouds.  There is a minor effect due to water, but none due to CO2.  The minor water absorption does add a small temperature component from the lower atmosphere to the larger component directly from the Earth's surface.  This is nonetheless a huge improvement over the oxygen emission microwave emissions which have no surface component at all.  The effects of clouds were filtered out of the data.  The daily planetary temperature was approximated as the average of noon and midnight temperatures.

Such satellite measurements are critically important.  The land surface temperature record is highly contaminated by urban heat island effects and by the bad sites chosen for weather station measurements.  Very mysterious and undocumented changes to the raw data have been made to various time period sets of data.  See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, for instance.  The authors of this study note that 10% of their own country, the Netherlands, is now hardened surface.  Changes to ground cover, vegetation, or water surface coverage do have local effects on the surface temperature.

Indeed, they point to data for the area of the confluence of the Euphrat and Tigris Rivers in SE Iraq which showed a sudden warming when Saddam Hussein drained the extensive marshes there.  With less water in this warm area, less evaporative cooling occurred and water vapor absorbed less incoming solar insolation up in the atmosphere, so the average temperature increased.  They found another small area with warming in NW Tanzania.  There, they believe that major mining increases led to a decrease in vegetation and then a reduction in evapotranspiration.  The loss of that cooling caused surface temperatures to increase.  They also noted a cooling effect near Lake Chad and Lake Nasser in their data which they attribute to the growing size of those lakes.

From 1982 to 2006, an ocean location west of France showed a temperature decrease of 0.78 C/decade.  A location west of Senegal in the Atlantic showed a temperature decrease of 0.48 C/decade, which is less a decrease because of ocean upwelling in this area.  More generally, they report that the Atlantic Ocean, Africa, and Europe show a negative surface temperature trend from zero to 2 C/decade.  They observed that the greatest temperature decreases were in regions with greater cloud cover.  In particular, the temperature decrease over desert areas was smaller.

Increased cloud cover is correlated with increased humidity of the air.  More water vapor and more clouds both result in a lower surface temperature.  While it is harder to separate out the effect of CO2 from the overwhelming effects of water vapor, increased atmospheric CO2 probably will also increase the cooling of the surface, as I have argued.  In any case, the IPCC claim that a small surface temperature increase due to added CO2 will cause a much larger temperature increase due to more water vapor, is absolutely and clearly nonsense.

Is the Earth Still Warming?

Is the Earth still warming?  The answer depends upon whether one examines the surface temperature or whether one determines the heat content of the subsurface.  Because the oceans cover 70% of the Earth's surface and water has a very high specific heat, the oceans hold a very large amount of heat. But, if the sea surface is warmed, it takes a good time for that heat at the surface of the ocean to percolate downward to substantial depths.

Over the last 17 years the surface temperatures have been nearly constant, though the recent trend actually appears to be a slight cooling.  This cooling makes good sense given the solar activity cycle.  That solar cycle is imposed on a long term near linear warming which has been ongoing since the end of the Little Ice Age.  The long warming since the end of the Little Ice Age is because the oceans have been slowly warming to greater depth since the surface temperatures increased after the Little Ice Age.  Contrary to some claims, the Little Ice Age was a worldwide event, though there are some interesting differences between the northern and southern hemispheres in the timing of the coldest periods, perhaps due in large part to the greater ocean coverage in the southern hemisphere.

To see our recent history of surface temperatures, the following graph is worthy of presentation again:

Figure 1.  The surface temperature since the end of the Little Ice Age showing a near linear long term increase in the temperature with the variations in the solar cycle superimposed upon that linear increase.  The red dot with the green arrow pointing at it was the temperature recently.  That temperature is consistent with the expected effect of the solar cycle heading toward its normal cooling phase.  Superimposing a sinusoidal wave on a positively sloped line will produce a nearly flat sum when the sinusoidal curve is early in its decreasing mode.

The Australian Climate Commission just released a claim that the Earth continues to warm.  Clearly the surface temperature is not continuing to warm, so what is the basis of its claim?  It is that the heat content of the subsurface ocean is continuing to increase.  Well, of course it is.  Since the surface temperatures are almost constant for the last 17 years and it takes a long time for the heat in the shallow depths of the ocean to work its way deeper, this is just what one expects.  Indeed this gradual long term warming of the ocean to deeper depths is the basis of the linear long term temperature increase since the end of the Little Ice Age.

Ocean temperature data to greater depths is being added to the heat content studies of the oceans.  Let us examine one such study's results.

The heat content of the oceans to a depth of 2000 meters is shown with the red line.  It has been rising generally since about 1969, though that rise paused from about 1979 to 1990.  If you examine the black line measuring the heat content between 700 m and 2000 m, it shows no significant rise until about 1993.  Basically, this tells us that the increasing heat content in the 0 to 700 m depth from 1969 on did not substantially cause warming in the oceans at the deeper depths from 700 m to 2000 m until after 1990.  The time lag is a couple of decades.  So, if the surface warming stopped 17 years ago, that does not mean that the ocean will not continue to increase its heat content for more than 20 years afterward.

Suppose the surface temperature had been at a certain constant temperature for a long time and then increased to a higher temperature for a substantial period of say 30 years.  For about 20 years the first 700 m depth of ocean water would warm, but greater depths would not.  Then the water deeper than 700 m would start to warm.  Throughout this entire time the heat content of the oceans would be increasing. 

This would be useful in moderating the cooling coming on as the solar cycle goes into its next cooling cycle.  It would be even more beneficial if the solar cooling cycle were entering a 206 year more dramatic cooling cycle such as we saw during the last 1500 years or so.  Since we had terribly cold weather from about 1810 to 1820, we are about due for the start of another very cold cycle.  Many solar scientists have become very concerned that this present solar cooling cycle will be anomalously cold.

The continued warming of the oceans to greater depths is no evidence of any unnatural effect and it most certainly is not evidence of man-made global warming due to the use of fossil fuels as is being claimed by the Australian Climate Commission.  Such claims are scientifically so bogus that they can only be interpreted as attempts to mislead the People with fallacious arguments.  This is a matter of scientists and the politicians, who provide scientists with almost all of their research money, conning the People.  There is a great deal of power, wealth, and prestige in being able to con the People.

CO2 Increases Lag Temperature Since 1982

It has long been known that over the last 400,000 years CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere broadly lagged temperature changes by hundreds of years.  This made sense, since it took long periods of time to warm the oceans to considerable depth and as the oceans warmed CO2 became less soluble.  The warmed oceans emitted CO2 into the atmosphere.  More recently then, it is reasonable to suspect that the increase in atmospheric CO2 since the end of the Little Ice Age has been largely or almost entirely due to the gradual warming of the oceans since then.

Catastrophic man-made global warming advocates have claimed that while this may have been the case in the past, since 1975 the warming has been caused by, and therefore preceded by, increases in atmospheric CO2 due to man's use of fossil fuels.  However, actual evidence that the general temperature increase since 1975 was actually caused by increases in atmospheric CO2 was severely wanting.

So has the recent increase in atmospheric CO2 preceded or followed the recent increase in temperature?  A relatively recent paper by Humlum, Stordahl, and Solheim entitled The phase relation between atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperature published in Global and Planetary Change, Vol. 100, January 2013, p. 51-69 answers this question.

They found that since 1982, atmospheric CO2 concentration changes lagged:

• global sea surface temperature changes by 11 to 12 months.
• global surface air temperature changes by 9.5 to 10 months.
• global lower troposphere temperature changes by 9 months.

They also found that while the correlation with changes in ocean temperature and atmospheric CO2 concentrations was high, ocean temperature did not explain all of the CO2 changes.

Figure 1.  The upper panel plots the 12-month change in CO2 (NOAA, green) for each month minus that same month 12 months earlier compared to the same 12-month change in sea surface temperature (HadSST2, blue) and the 12-month change in global surface air temperature (HadCRUT3, red).  The lower graph plots the difference of a 12-month average with the previous 12-month average for the same CO2 concentration, sea surface temperature, and global surface air temperature series.  It is clear that the changes in CO2 come after the changes in temperatures.

If atmospheric CO2 increases lag temperature increases both in the recent warming since 1982 and warming periods over the last 400,000 years, then increased CO2 in the atmosphere is caused by the warming.  There is no case for the hypothesis that increased atmospheric CO2 is the cause of warming.

Adding this observation to the failure of temperatures to increase over the last 13 years even as atmospheric CO2 concentrations have increased must be very disturbing to the climate alarmists.  The settled science of catastrophic man-made global warming due to CO2 emissions is becoming so unsettled that we have to conclude that the hypothesis has failed.  That it has failed comes as no surprise given the basic physics of the climate which I have recently explained here.

There is no case based on climate catastrophe for forcing man to stop using reliable and inexpensive fossil fuels in favor of unreliable and very expensive energy sources such as biomass, wind generation, and solar photovoltaic or concentration plants.  This is no excuse here for destroying the coal industry and killing coal-fired power plants, discouraging oil pipelines and drilling for oil and natural gas, and condemning commercial and residential consumers to spending much more on energy that is much less reliable.

Was the Warming of the Late 20th Century Unprecedented?

Those who claim that the effects of man's emissions of carbon dioxide on climate are catastrophic, have commonly said the high temperatures of the late 20th Century and the rate of their rise was unprecedented.  All of the extensive evidence of warm periods in Europe and around its periphery is often said to be only due to local effects, without a worldwide analog.  Over the last 10 years more evidence that these warm events existed in places such as China and South America has been found, but the non-European evidence is not so voluminous that those who make the claim of unprecedented warming recently have been quieted.  A new study of sea surface temperatures in the East China Sea over the last 2700 years adds to that evidence that the recent history has precedents.


Weichao Wu of Peking University and 4 other colleagues of various universities in China collected a sediment core from the sea floor in the Southern Okinawa Trough over which the warm Kuroshio current flows.  "The researchers analyzed the top 10 meters of the sediment core, corresponding to 2,700 years of sedimentation and from it were able to resolve 25-yr averages. To determine the SST, they used the “relative number of cyclopentane isoprenoid GDGTs in marine crenarchaeota (Thaumarchaeota)” which “increases with increasing growth temperature.”""  "...they identified a tracer in the sediment layers that is a measure of the relative abundance of a tiny marine organism whose number is sensitive to the sea surface temperature. The more crenarchaeota that are evident in the sediment layer, the higher the ocean temperature."

The temperature history from this proxy reconstruction is shown in the graph below with data points for each 25-year average and a running three-point mean line. 



Their sea surface temperature reconstruction clearly shows the Roman Warm period (RWP), the Dark Age Cool Period (DACP),  the Sui-Tang dynasty Warm Period (STWP),  the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), the Little Ice Age (LIA), and the Current Warm Period (CWP). The warm period from 500 to 350 BC was when Persian and Greek civilizations arose.  The highest temperature data point for this period is higher than any for the recent CWP.  The rate of rise at its start is also faster.  The highest temperature in the RWP is also higher, as is the rate of initial rise in temperature for the RWP, compared to the CWP.  The STWP seems to have displaced a longer Dark Ages Cool Period in Europe.  The highest temperature in the MWP in the East China Sea is higher than the recent warming also, though the MWP in Europe was more substantial than that in the East China Sea.

The important thing is that higher temperatures and higher rates of temperature increase, as well as higher rates of temperature decrease, have occurred in the past in other areas of the world with a significant correlation to the events of Europe and its surroundings.  The temperature proxy data used to construct the hockey stick temperature record of the last IPCC assessment report was very limited.  As pointed out by Ian Plimer in Heaven and Earth global warming the missing science, there actually is much information from around the world that indicates how misleading that hockey stick temperature plot really was.

Patrick Michaels: The Dog Ate Global Warming

The title of Patrick J. Michaels' article is so good, I had to mention it here, even though I have already written on this subject on 19 August 2009 in an entry called Global Surface Temperature Data Lost.  The Dog Ate Global Warming is a very interesting account of the efforts of many scientists to get the original surface temperature data from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia, which was originally funded by the U.S. Dept. of Energy and has received funds from the EPA as well.  Michaels also has knowledge of the foolishness of the CRU claim that they could not keep the data because they did not have enough data storage capacity in the 1980s.  His account is quite entertaining.  He concludes that this episode of shoddy science casts even more doubt on the claims of the global warming alarmists who are pushing the EPA to claim CO2 is a pollutant, with the consequence that the government will be forcing huge increases in energy costs, a reduction in power reliability, and massive increases in unemployment.

Yes, the Dog ate the primary data basis for the claim of catastrophic man-made global warming!  So, what are the consequences?  Our intrepid friend at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) has come up with a great response.  CEI's general counsel, Sam Kazman, has had CEI file a petition to force the EPA to reopen a major global warming proceeding.  This account finishes with:

CEI’s petition, filed late Monday with EPA, argues that CRU’s disclosure casts a new cloud of doubt on the science behind EPA’s proposal to regulate carbon dioxide.  EPA stopped accepting public comments in late June but has not yet issued its final decision.  As CEI’s petition argues, court rulings make it clear that agencies must consider new facts when those facts change the underlying issues.

CEI general counsel Sam Kazman stated, “EPA is resting its case on international studies that in turn relied on CRU data.  But CRU’s suspicious destruction of its original data, disclosed at this late date, makes that information totally unreliable.  If EPA doesn’t reexamine the implications of this, it’s stumbling blindly into the most important regulatory issue we face.”

You may recall that Sam Kazman filed the Freedom of Information Act request for the Alan Carlin and John Davidson report from within the EPA which questioned the EPA's evidence that CO2 was a pollutant.  This report was suppressed by the EPA management.  I discussed this in an entry called EPA Suppression of Endangerment Analysis of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on 1 July 2009.

NOAA's Sea Surface Temperature Data Set in Error Since 1998

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported that the Sea Surface Temperatures in July 2009 were the hottest temperatures ever recorded for the month of July. Dr. Roy Spencer thought that was a suspicious claim and compared several series of Sea Surface Temperature Data Sets based on satellite TRIMM TMI data and on the NASA-Japan joint satellite Aqua AMSR-E data showing them to be very much in agreement. He then compared the longer history TRIMM TMI data set to the NOAA ERSST v3b data. Before the latter part of 2001, the NOAA sea surface temperature data was consistently lower than the TRIMM TMI temperatures, but then after that time it was consistently higher. Dr. Spencer said he did not know why the NOAA data had a sudden jump at that time, but he had done various checks on the TRIMM TMI data that indicated its likely reliability, so he was suspicious of the NOAA data. Note that this NOAA jump in temperatures had the effect of hiding some of the inconvenient temperature decrease which has occurred since 1998.

A commenter at Watts Up With That going by the name Cold Lnyx noted that the NOAA data from 1971 to 2000 had been retabulated in August 2001 with a different baseline average monthly reference temperature than the data has been referenced to since. Obviously, temperatures cannot be referenced to different monthly average temperatures and then compared! This would be completely amateurish. If this is really what NOAA has done, then this is a ridiculous error.

Coming on the heals of NASA GISS using data from Russia from September 2008 and attributing it to October 2008 as well and other consistently high temperature anomalies which I discussed in my entry of 11 January 2009 and the loss of the raw data at the Climate Research Unit in East Anglia, which I discussed on 19 August 2009, this NOAA nonsense has to make one wonder if most of the government-funded surface temperature data is unreliable, except the satellite sea surface temperature data from NASA coming out of Huntsville.

Some of you may have noted that one Ian Forrester berated me for not having a higher opinion than I do of what he calls "real scientists" in a comment to my entry on the lost data at the CRU East Anglia, but perhaps you can see why I give no blank checks to scientists, especially when they are publishing work with strong implications for government activities and they are receiving their research and academic support from that same government. Governments do not do a good job of directing funding to the best and most honest scientists in such cases. Government employed scientists are a very mixed bag, which I know from first-hand experience in working for the Department of the Navy as a scientist for 10 years in the 1980s. Generally, Department of the Navy scientists are better than NOAA scientists, yet even the Navy Department is loaded with incompetent scientists. Why should this be a surprise to anyone? The DMVs, the Post Office, Amtrak, the EPA, the CBO, the GSA, the SEC, the FCC, the FAA, the Education Department, the Labor Department, the Congress, the Interior Department, the Dept. of Agriculture, Health and Human Services Dept., and nearly every other government agency is full of incompetent employees, whom no force on Earth can remove.

If this were not bad enough, there are the university scientists and other academics with their insane, otherworldly love of socialism, government Nanny State interventions, anti-man environmentalism, anti-business biases, anti-Capitalism biases, living Constitution (it means whatever we now want it to mean), and all too often, anti-American biases. These agendas have clearly asserted themselves over and over when these academics evaluate scientific issues with public policy implications. Nowadays, they commonly assert that objectivity is not possible in academia, so they might as well be influenced in their view of their field by all such Progressive biases. We might as well discount many of their opinions therefore. In fact, we should never accept them as authorities. We must believe only what we ourselves have checked out and found to be true.

Roy Spencer Estimates CO2 Effects of Man & Nature

Dr. Roy W. Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, on 11 May 2009 posted a very interesting examination of the sources for the atmospheric CO2 measured at Mauna Loa, Hawaii. He asks if we are sure that all of the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere is due to man-made emissions. Then he does a remarkably simple calculation to show that it is not. Indeed, it is not even remotely the dominant contributor. And, it boggles the mind that after billions of dollars of federally funded climate research and the constant claim that the increasing atmospheric concentrations of CO2 require us to make drastic lifestyle changes and drastically reduce our manufacturing base, that none of these well-funded scientists have previously performed this simple calculation. It turns out that he says that only 10% of the increase in atmospheric CO2 is due to human emissions, while the rest is due to changes in sea surface temperature.

That the effect of man's emissions is small compared to the natural effects is not at all surprising to me. I have long thought that an effect of this scale was most likely. Admittedly, the issue is dependent upon many natural sinks and sources of CO2, but Spencer notes that these natural sinks and sources are about 20 times the size of the anthropogenic source, which I believe to be an underestimate of how much greater those sources and sinks actually are.

The first graph in his post compares the measured rate of increase in CO2 with the increase in man's emissions. The measured rate of increase appears to be about 60% of man's emission increase, so about 40% of man's emissions are very quickly removed from the atmosphere. This is data from the last UN IPCC report of 2007, though it is updated to 2008. So, it seems clear that claims that man's emissions remain in the atmosphere for 50 to 100 years are silly. The measured CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has strong seasonal variations and is strongly affected by warm El Nino and cold La Nina effects. It is clear that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is strongly affected by the ocean temperature.

Next, he shows the Global Average Sea Surface Temperature Anomaly data, which show an average rise since about 1975 and it is plotted from 1958. Since about 2002, there has certainly been no increase in the sea surface temperature. He notes that some of the release of CO2 by the oceans is the "Coke-fizz" effect, but that there is now strong evidence that biological activity also plays a major role. To this, I would point out that the precipation of carbonates from sea salts plays still another important role.

Spencer then shows that the atmospheric CO2 concentration lags the sea surface temperature by about 6 months, which shows that the sea temperature causes the CO2 atmospheric increase, not the other way around.

So, Spencer then tries to apply a very simple model to the change of atmospheric CO2 in which the time dependence of the increase is assumed equal to the sum of a coefficient times the sea surface temperature increase and a coefficient times the man-made emissions increase. He finds a best fit with the man-made emissions increase coefficient equal to 0.1 and shows that it is better than the case with 0.2, for instance. This model explained 50% of the variance of the Mauna Loa measurement.

He observes that the best model fit indicates that the ocean is a net source of CO2 for the atmosphere when the average global sea surface temperature amomaly is -0.2 degrees C in the HadSST2 data set. This implies that the sea became a net source of atmospheric CO2 about 1930.

Dr. Spencer then surmises that the most likely cause of the long-term warming of the oceans has been a decrease in cloud cover over the oceans. He points out that this is hard to show, however, because the ocean cloud cover data over the last 50 to 100 years is not very good. We now know of other factors as well. Among these are dust blown out over the oceans and from volcanic eruptions, both of which produced less dust during the last warming period.

I will add that in addition to terms dependent upon the ocean surface temperature and man's emissions, one needs to add the effect of land mineral and soil absorption and emission of CO2, which will depend upon both temperature and soil water content variations. Adding this effect will explain even more of the variance in the Mauna Loa CO2 atmospheric concentration measurements.