» Home > In the News

Peter Warlow was right – NASA satellite says so

29 July 2011
Climate change

Peter Warlow, who was due to speak at the 2011 SIS autumn speaker meeting, also gave a talk in 2009, on April 25th at the Harlequin theatre in Redhill, with the title, 'Global Warming Nonsense' and was adamant that the greenhouse theory was flawed. At www.physorg.com/print231155725.html we learn that NASAs Terra satellite has shown climate models are in error – and a greater amount of heat is lost to space than they are programmed to remit. The research itself is published in the journal Remote Sensing (presumably mainstream journals would not touch the paper as it went againt the AGW consensus story thread). Surprisingly, this is the first time scientists have actually looked at radiative balances during the months before and after transient temperature peaks. In the long term the findings suggest climate is less sensitive to warming as a result of higher carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere than climate scientists have previously proclaimed. This is exactly what Peter Warlow told us in his talk 2 years ago. A major lynch pin of global warming theory is that a slight warming caused by greenhouse gases sparks a positive feedback cycle that enhances the warming process – which is what most of the scary alarmism is all about. This now seems unlikely – by observation rather than by modelling.

At http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/07/28/spencer-and-braswell-on-slashdot/ focuses on a report of the above in a rather blunt way, the slashdot headline reads, 'New NASA data casts doubt on global warming models' – and is replete with comments.

On a slightly different tack Dr Roger Pielke Snr, at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/07/29/rationalizing-trenberths-missing-h…, the subject paper being analysed has the headline, 'Tracing the upper ocean's missing heat' (in a way sensitive to AGW theory) by Katsman and van Oldenborgh, Geophysical Research Letters. It seems the upper oceans have not warmed since 2003 which is remarkable as it is expected the ocean should store most of the heat retained by the earth due to increased levels of greenhouse gases. The question then may be asked – where did the heat go instead? The paper tries to show it went deeper into the ocean even though the top layers have displayed no evidence of heating. How could the heat penetrate the top levels without leaving a sign of its passage? Again, observations are at odds with the models – as Pielke makes clear. The answer, as Pielke notes, is that the earth radiates more energy to space than the models allow – which is exactly what the first paper by Spencer and Braswell say they have observed in satellite data.

PS – the same story pops up a day later at www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2011/07/news-flash-nasa-climate-data-chall… which is fair enough but the commenters then suggest Spencer is somehow evil because he is sympathetic to Intelligent Design. This is one religion coming up against the buffers of another religion, christianity versus socialism. They appear to have got their 'evidence' from Phil Plait's blog at http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/07/29/no-new-data-do… but Plait is notorious for defending the orthodox and ridiculing the innovative and maverick ideas that make science move forwards. If Plait was in charge of science we would still be in the backwaters of the 19th century, after all that is when most of consensus science was formulated.

Skip to content