Why did the researchers base their volcanic study on a model?

In an article at WUWT today, Eric Worrall asks what he claims is an obvious question (archived here), but wasn't - at least not to me (see below). He was writing about an article published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmosphere. The paper was by a team led by Thomas J Aubry from the University of British Columbia. The scientists were exploring the impact of global warming on future volcanic eruptions.

Eruption at Eyjafjallajökull April 17, 2010. Credit: Árni Friðriksson

What the authors found was that under two of three Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP4.5 and RCP8.5, but not so much under RCP2.6), global warming will likely have the effect of reducing the cooling effect of volcanoes.

The reason for this is, as the authors write: "the critical mass eruption rate required to reach the tropopause will increase as a consequence of:

• a decrease in the heights of tropospheric plumes driven by a decrease of the tropospheric temperature lapse rate; and 
• an increase of the tropopause height."

Anthony Watts denies volcanic forcing

In another fit of Dunning-Krugeritis, conspiracy blogger Anthony Watts is touting Wondering Willis Eschenbach as an expert on volcanoes and climate. Sheesh.  He has picked up a cutesy intro to his copy and pastes of press releases, inserting the words "maybe they should have" in under his "claim" headlines. He's done this for three of his most recent articles. This time (archived here) it was:

Claim: NASA simulation indicates ancient flood volcanoes could have altered climate
From NASA/GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER and the “maybe they should have checked with Willis first” department comes this modeling claim: 

Rather than scientific experts asking Willis anything, Willis should be reading more science before putting digits to keyboards. Willis wrote an article a couple of weeks ago in which he was using volcanic eruptions to argue that the climate is self-correcting. He got it mostly wrong as usual. Perhaps an article for another day. (Among other errors, Willis confused forcings and feedbacks.) About the only things his article (archived here) had in common with this new paper were the words "climate" and "volcano" - proving (yet again) that:

• Anthony doesn't read the press releases he copies and pastes, or if he does he doesn't understand them
• Anthony Watts doesn't understand his blog articles from his "guest" essayists (that is, the freeby articles written by his fans), and probably doesn't read them
• Willis Eschenbach once got one thing right: even if Anthony had a year to digest the articles he posts on his blog, he wouldn't be able to tell if it was pseudo-science crap or the real thing
• Anthony Watts promotes fake experts (the No. 1 Telltale Technique of climate science denial).

Wondering Willis Eschenbach makes more mischief with volcanoes

Wondering Willis Eschenbach has a well-earned reputation for wandering off on a tangent and avoiding scientific research. He's done the same today at WUWT (archived here, latest here). He decided that two recent papers relating to volcanic forcing are "wrong". Not because he took any notice of the content of the papers - he didn't. Not because he took any notice of the observations reported. He didn't. He decided to reject the months of hard work by multiple scientists, on the basis of his own five minutes of "research".

Climate models and volcanic forcing

The two papers found evidence of volcanic forcing, coming from two different perspectives:

• Observed increase in Stratospheric Aerosol Optical Depth (SAOD) since 2005 (Ridley14)
• Multiple signals of volcanic forcing in sea surface temperature, atmospheric water vapour,  net clear-sky short-wave radiation, and elsewhere (Santer14)

One of the main points the scientists emphasised was that the CMIP5 models mostly assumed there was zero change in stratospheric volcanic forcing after 2000. They show that this assumption is not valid. Since 2005 in particular, there has been significant volcanic forcing, based on observations.

Wondering Willis Eschenbach has gone nuts about volcanoes at WUWT

Wondering Willis Eschenbach has a new article at WUWT (archived here). It's not at all clear what he is wondering about this time. He's ostensibly writing about an icelandic volcano that began erupting on June 8, 1783 and continued until Feb. 1784. His article is full of contradictions and false claims. It's more evidence that Willis has gone around the twist. He says of the volcano:

It is claimed to have caused a very cold winter in 1783-1784

No, Willis - the scientists you cite say the complete opposite

The problem is that he doesn't say who claims that. The only scientific paper he cites is D’Arrigo et al (2011), which doesn't make any such claim. In fact, that team is arguing that the very cold winter of 1783-84 was not connected to the Laki eruption. From the abstract:

Data sources and model simulations support our hypothesis that a combined negative NAO‐ENSO warm phase was the dominant cause of the anomalous winter of 1783–1784, and that these events likely resulted from natural variability unconnected to Laki. 

"Unconnected to Laki" is what they wrote. So what is Willis going on about? It's a very mixed up article by Willis. He's been getting increasingly ratty (erratic) of late. Denialism isn't good for one's mental health is my guess. Cognitive dissonance causes brain farts.

Difficulties in denial at WUWT: Oceans are getting warmer, no they aren't, yes they are...

WUWT-ers must get mightily confused at times. Then again, one thing about deniers, especially those prone to conspiracy ideation, is that they can happily hold two contradictory notions simultaneously. (This article isn't as thorough as usual because I've got a few other things on my plate. Feel free to fill in the gaps in the comments.)

The oceans aren't warming - much, sez Christopher

Yesterday Christopher Monckton wrote (archived here) that he was sent a paper by Willie Soon, that rejects the rising seas. (Isn't there a biblical lesson there somewhere?) Christopher didn't link to the paper but I think this is the one. It's by another science denier called Beenstock.  Christopher didn't link to the paper itself, and none of the commenters asked him for the paper or a link to it either! This is probably the paper - it's by Michael Beenstock et al and it hasn't been published anywhere that I can find. Michael is apparently a Professor of Economics and a climate science denier so I guess he knows all about tide gauges - umm.

Anyway, that's settled. The tides aren't rising so the seas aren't warming, if you listen to people like Michael and Christopher and WUWT.  Christopher even drags up the name of Nils Axel-Morner.  Who can forget Nils Axel-Morner's chart that he presented to a UK Parliamentary Committee to "prove" that seas are not rising:

Source: UK Parliament written submission from Nils Axel-Morner

Citizen's Challenge has an article about Nils and his claims.

Yes they are, sez Anthony

Wait a sec. Now the oceans are warming so much they are causing climate change. It's undersea volcanoes!!

In another article just today (archived here), Anthony goes and muddies the (ocean) waters by arguing that climate science is wrong because it doesn't count undersea volcanoes.  Is he arguing that global warming is caused by a sudden explosion of new volcanoes under the sea that weren't there before and no-one knows about because they are hidden and no-one knows about them?

No. Anthony doesn't go quite that far.  The expert he calls upon is a man by the name of John Reid, who wrote an article for that renowned non-peer reviewed literary unscientific right wing magazine Quadrant. A favourite publication of all the science deniers who can't get their silliness published in a science journal and don't even try.  This time Anthony does put a link to the article - I've archived it here.  John Reid isn't an oceanographer or a climatologist - he's a retired physicist who, from the look of it, gave up physics for climate science denial.

This "undersea volcanoes" meme pops up from time to time at WUWT. Yes, there are volcanoes under the oceans, like on the land, but there aren't suddenly a whole rash of new volcanoes that are heating up the earth and making the oceans boil. Nothing's changed.

Yes, the seas are rising and the oceans are warming

The oceans are warming but they aren't warming from below. They are warming from above. It's because of all the CO2 in the air that's warming the earth as a whole.

From the WUWT comments

Like I said, I'm short of time.  This will have to do :)

drumphil says:

May 3, 2014 at 10:02 pm
Gawd, Christopher has actually found a place where people with call him “Lord” with a straight face?

A volcano in Antarctica melts the ice at WUWT

A group of scientists discovered volcanic activity under the ice in West Antarctica and reported it as a paper in Nature Geoscience.  The press release is a nice description of the processes involved in the discovery and interpretation of signals found by the research team.

A major eruption would be needed for it to punch through the ice.  However it's likely that a normal eruption will melt water and maybe speed up ice loss - as described in the press release from Washington University in St Louis:

... a subglacial eruption and the accompanying heat flow will melt a lot of ice. “The volcano will create millions of gallons of water beneath the ice — many lakes full,” Wiens said. 

This water will rush beneath the ice toward the sea and feed into the hydrological catchment of the MacAyeal Ice Stream, one of several major ice streams draining ice from Marie Byrd Land into the Ross Ice Shelf.

By lubricating the bedrock, it will speed the flow of the overlying ice, perhaps increasing the rate of ice-mass loss in West Antarctica.

From the WUWT comments

Anthony Watts reported the research straight from the press release, with no snark and not giving any hint to his readers as to how to interpret it.  Different readers took various different slants (archived here).

Gerry Dorrian seems to expect that all the ice in Antarctica should have melted by now and says:

November 17, 2013 at 6:25 pm
The climos tell us our activities are melting the ice…so how come there’s still a kilometre of ice over a volcano?

Brent Walker talks of "outgassing liquid" CO2 and says:

November 17, 2013 at 6:31 pm
Any carbon dioxide outgassing under that thickness of ice would be in liquid form and would therefore increase the ice flow to the Ross Ice Shelf.

John L asks if there is anyone who still doesn't think "it's volcanos" and says:

November 17, 2013 at 6:32 pm
If newly discovered volcanoes are to be found, above sea level, just imagine the untold number yet to be discovered at the ocean floors, especially in the Pacific Ocean. Is there anyone still refusing to believe that the heat from within is not influencing the ocean temperatures, which rise and later transfer this heat energy to the atmosphere?

Jer0me is a bit more realistic and says:

November 17, 2013 at 6:52 pm
Dos this have any effect on the ‘warm spot’ in West Antarctica, I wonder? I suppose under kms of ice it would not.

u.k.(us) is uncomfortable with uncertainty and says:

November 17, 2013 at 8:17 pm

“By lubricating the bedrock, it will speed the flow of the overlying ice, perhaps increasing the rate of ice-mass loss in West Antarctica.”

================
That’s what I always tend to bet my future on…a “perhaps”.

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Lough et al (2013); Seismic detection of an active subglacial magmatic complex in Marie Byrd Land, Antarctica; Nature Geoscience (2013) doi:10.1038/ngeo1992

Denier weirdness: Wondering Willis Eschenbach builds a strawman out of volcanic dust

Update: New material added below.

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Wondering Willis Eschenbach writes another post about volcanoes, which he's done before on Anthony Watts' fake sceptics' blog, wattsupwiththat.  When he's not speculating that occasional landings at remote airports are causing global warming, Willis is a proponent of a type of Gaia hypothesis.  I believe he calls it his "thunderstorm hypothesis" or "thermostatic hypothesis".  He thinks that the earth is self-regulating when it comes to climate and that it's regulated by tropical thunderstorms or some such thing. I won't go into the detail of his mathturbations in his article (archived here - updated WUWT archive here), but I will make a few observations.

Wondering Willis builds a strawman

First up Wondering Willis builds a strawman.  He talks about an urban legend.  He doesn't state which urban area has this legend but anyone who has read climate science would know that it's not a city in which climate research is carried out. He writes:

The amazing thing to me is that this urban legend about volcanoes having some big effect on the global average temperature is so hard to kill. I’ve analyzed it from a host of directions, and I can’t find any substance there at all … but it is widely believed.

The only volcanoes that have "some big effect on the global average temperature" or indeed any effect that's discernible enough to be measured are quite big volcanic eruptions, especially those that occur closer to the equator (but see update below).  But from what I've read - in the main it takes a lot of detailed analysis to separate the signal of a single volcano from the noise in the temperature record.  Dr Hansen and his colleagues on Pinatubo:

With a single volcano it may be hard to identify a climate "signal" among the large amount of weather and climate "noise", that is, the unforced chaotic fluctuations of the atmosphere and ocean. So the Pinatubo team first looked at the average climate response after the five largest volcanos this century. They found (Figure 1) that there was a small cooling, about 1/4°C (1/2°F), which peaked 1-2 years after the eruption. This tends to confirm that volcanos do cause a small global cooling.

Even so, the effect of a single volcano is temporary because aerosols eventually dissipate.

Willis' inexplicable weirdly low "climate sensitivity"

Another weird thing Wondering Willis writes is this - that climate sensitivity is 0.2 degrees Celsius.  He says:

 ...At the end of the day, what we have is a calculated climate sensitivity (change in temperature with forcing) which is only about two-tenths of a degree per doubling of CO2.

Now that is truly weird.  It's even odder because Willis himself in the very same article put up a chart of global temperature anomalies.  He showed monthly anomalies of HadCRUT4.  I'll show annual anomalies:

Data source: UK Met Hadley Centre

Over that period, global temperatures rose by around 0.8 degrees Celsius while carbon dioxide rose by around 40%.  It has a way to go before it doubles.  Willis inexplicably leaves a rise of around 0.7 degrees Celsius unexplained!

My question to Willis is - what has caused global surface temperature to rise by 0.8 degrees Celsius well before CO2 has doubled, if the climate sensitivity is only 0.2 degrees?  (Willis has stated he is using climate sensitivity to mean the rise in global surface temperature from a doubling of CO2.)

The weirdest thing of the lot (not really, given it's WUWT) is that no-one at WUWT asks him this question.  Not a soul.

How does Willis Eschenbach explain ice ages?

Short answer? He doesn't!

In the comments someone asks a good question.  How does Willis Eschenbach reconcile glaciations and deglaciations with his "thermostatic" hypothesis:

Thomas says:

September 22, 2013 at 10:30 am
Jim S, the emissions from individual eruptions is pretty much negligible. Overall volcanoes emit around 1% of the amount from fossil fuels.

Maybe Eschenbach has written about it before, but I’m a bit confused on how he can reconcile “I hold that changes in forcing only marginally and briefly affect the temperature. Instead, I say that a host of emergent thermostatic phenomena act quickly to cool the planet when it is too warm, and to warm it when it is too cool” with the existence of ice age cycles. Whatever thermostat the Earth has doesn’t seem all that good.

In WUWT-land ice ages are caused by a "snap" and "flip" called "hits the rails"?

Greg Goodman comes to Willis' aid with a sciency explanation (WUWT-style): "we don't know" - but says it could be caused by a magic "snap" and "flip" called "hits the rails":

September 22, 2013 at 10:43 am
Thomas: ” Whatever thermostat the Earth has doesn’t seem all that good.”

what happens at glaciation and deglaciation is clearly different from what happens in between.

There is apparently two stable states ( attractors ) for the climate system. A positive feedback seems to make it snap form one state to the other. We don’t really know what triggers the change-over.

Assuming Willis is basically correct there are limits to the tropical storms range as a feedback mechanism. It cannot go beyond totally clear skies or fully cloud covered tropics. May be when it hits the rails the climate state flips?

I don’t see glaciation as being a major argument against what Willis is proposing.

Greg says that the pseudo-scientists at WUWT "don't really know" what causes ice ages!

In other words, Greg is saying that Wondering Willis' "thermostatic" or Gaia hypothesis is bunkum.  Either that or he thinks that there is some huge sudden impact that has happened at the start of a glaciation and deglaciation.  He doesn't know what this is.

Later in the thread, Willis directly responds to Thomas' question by avoiding it - and in the process shows he can't read his own chart.  Willis says, after quoting Thomas' comment above:

The planet’s temperature varied by ± 0.3°C over the last century. This is a regulation to within about ± 0.1% … on a free-running system which is regulated by nothing more substantial than wind and water.  If you know anything about heat engines, you’ll agree that that is a fantastic governor …September 22, 2013 at 1:10 pm

Willis has shrunk the observed temperature range in his own chart, which is a rise of 0.8 degrees Celsius to a mere ± 0.3°C.  Wondering Willis has a very severe case of confirmation bias!

Climate scientists do know what precipitates an ice age

Although WUWT-ers don't know what precipitates ice ages, climate scientists do.  Climate scientists have found that variations in eccentricity, axial tilt and precession of the Earth's orbit, when combined in a certain way, affect earth's energy balance with resulting feedbacks.  A drop in surface temperature will cause atmospheric CO2 to fall which causes a further drop in surface temperature leading to an ice age; while a rise in surface temperature will cause CO2 to rise, which in turn affects global surface temperature causing the ice to melt. (Milankovitch cycles).

We might get another ice age no sooner than 50,000 years from now, depending on how much longer we use our air as a rubbish dump for waste CO2.

Willis' thunderstorms "when the globe cools"

Here is an insight into Willis' thunderstorm hypothesis - if you can call in an insight.  This is what Willis reckons happens "when the globe cools"!

When the globe cools, the tropical clouds form a few minutes later, the thunderstorms form a few minutes later … and that brings the global temperature back up. September 22, 2013 at 2:19 pm

WUWT-ers might think that Willis invented the notion that the hydrological cycle plays an important part in moderating the weather on earth, but of course he didn't.  It's basic thermodynamics.  When water evaporates it cools the surface. When it condenses into clouds the heat is moved to the atmosphere.  But that's no more than an exchange of energy within the system.  It doesn't explain the extra energy being stored on earth as evidenced by the recent very rapid warming.  The only thing that explains that is the huge increase in atmospheric greenhouse gases.

Still, I expect the WUWT-ers will be relieved by Willis telling them that the earth won't have any more ice ages and that David "funny sunny" Archibald has it all wrong!

Update - Willis is "not even wrong" about Super-Volcanoes

Willis Eschenbach shows he doesn't keep up with the latest science when he says "temperature has always recovered" from supervolcanos and that his "hypothesis" explains this but "models" don't.

September 22, 2013 at 6:15 pm
Jim G says: September 22, 2013 at 5:10 pm A true super eruption of a super volcano might be at odds with your “self regulating” surface temperature hypothesis.

We’ve had supervolcanoes in the past, and the temperature has always recovered. Under the models’ view, that wouldn’t happen … with my hypothesis, it would.
w.

Willis is not even wrong!

From the Max-Planck-Institut für Meteorologie (see especially the last point compared to Willis' "a few minutes later" - my bold italics):

The “Super Volcano Project” is a  crosscutting science projects of MPI-M in cooperation with the Univ. of Cambridge. At present the project involves ca 25 scientists from the MPI-M and 7 external scientists.

The major goal of this MPI-M Earth System Modelling (ESM) project is the investigation of the effects  that volcanic super eruptions have on the climate system, employing the coupled MPI-M Earth System model. ...

• Climate effect of larger volcanic eruptions are weaker and smaller than previously thought. 

• The global temperature signal is determined by the strength of the SO2 emission and not by the latitude of the eruption. 

• Post-eruption oceanic and atmospheric anomalies describe a decadal fluctuation in the coupled ocean–atmosphere system. 

• Improved description of processes acting on multidecadal timescales is pivotal to constrain the climate response to the 1809 and Tambora tropical eruptions. 

• Radiative heating from volcanic ash cause rotation of volcanic cloud, which influences the transport in the first days on local scale. 

• Eruption season has a significant influence on aerosol optical depth and clear-sky shortwave (SW) radiative flux anomalies and for large volcanic eruption also on the all sky SW flux anomalies. 

• Annular mode response after volcanic eruption increases logarithmically with increasing eruption magnitude. 

• Deposition of sulphate to the Antarctic polar ice sheet is strongly dependent on eruption magnitude 

• Mt. Pinatubo eruption causes the observed delay of the QBO cycle in 1991/1992. 

• Post-eruption sea ice anomalies show strong hemispheric differences dependent on the magnitude of the eruption. 

• Bare soil coverage is strongly increasing after a very large volcanic eruption with  fewer trees and more grass. 

• Post-eruption atmospheric CO2 anomalies are explained mainly by changes in land carbon storage in the initial phase. In the longer term, the ocean compensates for the atmospheric carbon loss.

You can also read more on the impact of super-volcanoes here at New Scientist.


Here again is the link to the archived WUWT article that Anthony Watts posted - updated here.

From 1913 - A perspective on volcanoes and ice ages from Prof WJ Humphreys

As appeared in The Queenslander (Brisbane, Qld. : 1866 - 1939) on Saturday 17 May 1913.  Note the reference to the greenhouse effect.

THE ICE AGE.

A Novel Explanation of Glacial Periods was propounded by Prof. W.J. Humphreys, of the Weather Bureau, at the Cleveland meeting of the Astronomical and Astrophyslcal Society of America. Several times in recent years it has been observed that great explosive volcanic eruptions (Krakatoa, Pele, Katmai), by charging the upper atmosphere, in the isothermal region, with fine dust, have markedly diminished the amount of solar radiation received at the earth's surface. It seems evident that the effect of this process must be to reduce the temperature of the air near the earth, since the dust scatters a much greater amount of the solar radiation received from without than of the terrestrial radiation received from within, owing to the greater average wave length of the latter. Thus a period of excessive volcanic activity if long continued would produce the thermal conditions of an ice age. The geological record furnishes evidence that such a period actually began shortly before the last ice age and has continued with diminishing intensity to the present time.

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About Professor William Jackson Humphreys

Excerpts from longer tribute and biography in Science Vol 112:

William Jackson Humphreys

Dr. Humphreys was born in a one-room log house at Gap Mills, West Virginia, February 3, 1862.

His undergraduate training was at Washington and Lee University, where he received the degree of A.B. in 1886, and C.E. in 1888. After a year of further study at the University of Virginia, 1888-1889, he taught at Miller School, near Crozet, Virginia, 1889-1893, then at Washington College, Chestertown, Maryland, 1893-1894. In 1894, he began graduate research in physics at The Johns Hopkins University, studying under the great physicist Henry A. Rowland and other noted men; he received the Ph.D. degree in 1897. His notable contribution to physical science began during his graduate work at Johns Hopkins....

...On July 1, 1905, Dr. Humphreys was appointed meteorological physicist in the U. S. Weather Bureau, a position which he held for 30 years. From 1905 to 1908 he was supervising director of the Mt. Weather Observatory, which had been established for the investigation of physical phenomena of the atmosphere; thereafter he served continuously at the Central Office in Washington, D. C.

He turned his attention from spectroscopy to the physical problems of the atmosphere, and soon provided the explanation of the existence and principal characteristics of the stratosphere, first announced on June 30, 1908, to the Physics Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society. This was followed by a long series of contributions to meteorological physics that brought him international recognition and many honors....

...His textbook Physics of the Air must be reckoned as one of his major contributions; its influence, and the reputation of its author among physicists, were important factors in obtaining for meteorology a wider recognition as a branch of physics. This treatise originated in a series of lectures given during January, 1914 to aviators in training at San Diego, California. The first edition appeared in 1920, the third in 1940, and it is still unique among modern textbooks: it is a systematic treatment of the physical phenomena of the atmosphere arranged according to the traditional subdivisions of mechanics, thermodynamics, electricity, acoustics, and optics. It also includes a long section on geological climates that embodies the author's own original contributions to this problem which, representing the result of careful thought by a competent meteorologist and able physicist, deserve more widespread consideration than they have received.

More here.

A notification of the death of Professor Humphreys by AMS:

Professor Emeritus W. J. Humphreys of George Washington University died November 10, 1949 at the age of eighty-seven years. He had been a member of the Society for twenty-four years.

Photo credit: Harris V. Ewing, Washington D.C., courtesy AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives, W. F. Meggers Collection