about the Iris effect, originally published in 2001. The claimed agreement of existing climate models with reality may be described as curve fitting. There are good reasons to think that there is a couple of important negative feedbacks related to water vapor and clouds that make the CO2 climate sensitivity small.ABC of the iris effect: when the Earth is warming, the rain at places where air flows in the direction up becomes more intense. This reduces the amount of water droplets available for high-altitude cirrus clouds. Warming thus reduces the number of cirrus clouds and because these clouds have a warming effect, the overall impact of this mechanism is a slight cooling which means that the ultimate warming will be smaller than if the iris effect wouldn't exist.A 2007 paper by Roy Spencer et al. on cirrus clouds brought some new evidence for the iris effect. See also
Roy Spencer: Global warming and Nature's thermostat: precipitation systemsIncidentally, NOAA climate models have just obtained the same result about the future hurricane rate
as people who have read at least initial chapters of meteorology textbooks know - although the microscopic details of the explanations are different. (Thanks to Alexander Ač, no kidding.)
You may also read a semi-popular text of a lecture by Prof Lindzen called
about the ways how bias is being introduced to climate science. When Lindzen talks about a "certain kind of errors" that are selectively "corrected", we may think of many examples. Unfortunately, a recent correction of
may be another example. The file above contains the correction (first 5 pages) as well as the original paper (last 15 pages). The authors originally reported that the ocean lost 32+-11 zettajoules of heat (zetta is 10^{21}, after tera, peta, exa) between 2003 and 2005 (it cooled down). In the correction, they don't say what the new numbers and error margins are but they offer a lot of "biases" whose "correction" will probably change their cooling into warming, or at least reduce the cooling.
Given the fact that zetta- doesn't appear in the original paper and the correction systematically misspells zetta- as zeta-, one may conjecture that the correction to the paper was written by a less intelligent but more concerned writer than the original paper.
It's very plausible that there can exist errors and biases but if one looks for them with a particular "big idea" in mind, it is likely that he will get skewed results. And it is hard to avoid the feeling that skewed results are actually the real goal in many cases.
And that's the memo.
