Your analogy about the amount of money in your pocket is just silly. It would be more accurate and complete if it went like this:

I add $1 to my pocket for every minute that I work.

Then if you worked 1 million minutes you would have 1 million dollars. If you worked 1 minute, you would have 1 dollar.

To be explicit, the number of minutes that you work is equivalent to the forcing amplitude. The amount of money in your pocket is equivalent to the amount of TT warming.

So, if you work 1 minute and have 1 dollar, does that contradict your claim?

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You’re all upset that other people have mis-interpreted the RC article, but you seem to be completely unconcerned that your own article is easily mis-interpreted. Whether you like it or not, the word “fingerprint” has a dictionary definition that many/most people will use. Similarly, the word “hotspot” means enhanced warming to many/most people.

The issue of the TT hotspot has been mangled and mis-used many times on the “skeptic” side — are you not concerned that your article will contribute to more mangling and mis-use?

If your goal really is clear and un-ambiguous writing that prevents confusion (an admirable goal), then simply define what *you* mean by “fingerprint” and “hotspot” in your article.

Discussion bumped to new thread – Lucia

I’m not even going to ask what “the issue” is in light of the 500+ posts that have tried to “explain” it already.

Andrew ♫

I still think the analogy is good. If your claim of what is in your pocket is off, that means you miscounted how much was in your pocket. That’s a problem. The process itself (you count only in 3’s, for example) is wrong or the execution of the process (you counted right but forgot you gave some money to your mother ) is wrong. Either way, something needs to fixed.

The question that arises about being “close enough” is subjective. It all depends.

Andrew ♫

The claim that there is no hotspot has neither been confirmed or contradicted. At the moment we don’t know how much is in your pocket.

Any amount other than 1 million makes your claim wrong, wether it be one penny or 10 billion in bailout money.

Make different claim about what is in your pocket that’s accurate/right the next time.

Andrew ♫

You seem to be offended not that the RC post makes any incorrect statements but rather that it brings up a topic in the context of Douglass that you don’t think they should bring up. However, don’t you think that it is they and not you who get to decide what is most relevant for the point they are trying to make?

I’m not offended. I think they are free to bring up what they wish to bring up, and of course they get to decide what to post and did. I also get to decide what I think of what they wrote, and I think I get to comment on things posted at blogs.

And, given that Douglass and co-authors were issuing press releases in which they were drawing all sorts of conclusions in regards to what the (supposed) lack of hotspot says about the mechanism responsible for the observed warming, you seem to be the only one who thinks it is somehow irrelevant to address under what circumstances (i.e., for which warming mechanisms) the models would predict an amplification of the surface temperature trend as you go up in the tropical atmosphere.

But Douglas made no claim about what would happen under hypothetical levels of solar warming. So, yes, I think it is irrelevant to bring up what models predict under hypothetical warming when trying to counter Douglass claims in either their press release of their paper.

It would have been better for RC to limit themselves to countering claims Douglas actually made.

Could you tell me what specific fundamentally-incorrect point you think people reading that Real Climate post would come away with?

Based on comments at other blogs, people have come away with the idea that even the hotspot is never be detected, or if it turns out to be much weaker than predicted, this would not indicate some problem with models and/or our ability to predict the effects of ghgs on climate. The supposed reason is that the fingerprint is not unique, and might be caused by solar forcing. People are saying this in comments at blogs, and linking back to RC to explain their issue.

This may not have been the intention of the authors at RC, but it has occurred. It is now a meme.

Had RC limited themselves to countering the arguments Douglas actually made, this confusion would probably not exist.

(1) The RC post makes it very clear the hypothetical experiment that they carried out (doubling CO2 vs increasing solar by 2%) and subsequently they also discuss how this relates to the actual observations (“If this is what should be expected over a long time period, what should be expected on the short time-scale available for comparison to the satellite or radiosonde records?…”)

The RC posts never points out that the 2% increase in solar is utterly irrelevant to what we would see in actual observations. They make no mention of the fact that, during the observational period considered in Douglas, the relative magnitude of warming due to both causes is such that only the ghg component could possibly cause detectable warming in the troposphere. The level of solar forcing in that figure is irrelevant to comparisons between observations and models.

So, while the RC discussion is long, and describes data uncertainty and what not, and tells us why we might not even be able to detect the level of warming even if had happened as a result of ghgs, it is deceptive in suggesting the contribution hypothetical solar forcing to any hotspot is something we need to worry about when comparing observations to model projections. It is deceptive in liking the idea that the hypothetical forcings are relevant to anything Douglas said in their paper or in their press releases.

2) I agree with you that the estimates of solar forcing, or other forcings, mean that the model predictions are dominated by AGW. However, this is exactly the point of contention with “skeptics” including Douglass et al. I.e., they are arguing that the observed warming is due to something else besides greenhouse gases.

There are three ideas here:
1) You agree with me about the model predictions being dominated by AGW.
2) You complain the skeptics agree with both of us.
3) You think that because the skeptics agree with us, they use the truth of 1 to argue that observed warming is not due to greenhouse gases.

I’m not sure what to say to this. What I think is: When people make incorrect arguments, you identify the specific error, and correct that. So, if #1 is true, you don’t claim 1 is not true (or just shut up about it) simply because skeptics agree it’s true. (Ok. I’m pretty sure you mean something else here. But… I’m trying to figure out what.)

Hence, it makes a lot of sense to consider hypothetical scenarios for warmings caused by other forcings (or simply due to internal variability), particularly if you are trying to convince people who don’t already believe that the modeling assumption that the climate change is dominated by greenhouse gases is correct.

How does the discussion of the hypothetical scenarios convince anyone who doesn’t already believe that modeling assumption is correct?

I think the opposite occurs. By making it appear that countering Douglas’s argument, and data comparison, you have to introduce a discussion of what models predict would happen under fictional scenarios, you lose the audience.

Why not stick to the real difficulties in Douglas: Failure to properly consider uncertainty?

3) RC and Santer et al. (in various papers) have sharpened the debate by making clear both the origin of the tropical tropospheric amplification in the models, by noting the problems with the data (and various analyses and re-analyses thereof), by demonstrating the timescales over which the models and data do seem to agree (at least roughly…modulo the issues that Willis has raised here), and by correctly showing the estimated uncertainty in the model predictions.

RC and may have have clarified something in some venue somewhere . But in that particular article RC introduced an irrelevant idea and distracted from the discussion of problems with the data. Santer may have also clarified something somewhere. But that turn the injection of the irrelevant discussion into the criticism of Douglas “clarifying”.

Santer et all do correctly point out the issues with data quality in Santer et al. That is the major contribution of Santer et. al. Notably, though you credit them with discussing the origin of the tt amplification in models, that discussion about the effects of hypothetical levels of solar forcing falls outside the scope of their paper addressing problems in Douglas et al.

Unfortunately, RC did not reign themselves in as Santer did in his paper.

Douglass et al. have only confused the debate by falsely leading people to believe that the tropical tropospheric amplification is a feature in the models that is unique to the warming being due to greenhouse gases and hence its (supposed) absence provides evidence that the warming is due to some other cause.

Here you are accusing Douglas of two things. They did one but not the other:

1) Douglas never said that hypothetically large solar forcings would not cause the hot spot. They did not lead anyone to believe that tropospheric warming is a feature in models that is unique to ghg’s. That claim is utterly absent from their argument.

2) Douglas does claim absence of the hotspot provides evidence the warming is due to cause other than GHGs.

But heres’ the thing: They don’t use 1) to justify 2).

While (2) is an incorrect claim (in my opinion), the reason you don’t need (2) to claim (1) is that… Get this… they just make claim 2 leaving a big leap with a hole between their analysis and the claim.

We could use our imagination and fill in all sorts of candidate arguments to fill in the gap. But the fact that we can imagine candidates for fill in arguments doesn’t mean that’s an argument advanced by Douglas. Douglas did not claim #1.

They have also confused things by failing to acknowledge the very real problems that exist with the data for the multidecadal trends…and they have also vastly underestimated the model variability by incorrectly considering the standard error rather than the standard deviation to be the correct measure of the uncertainty. How in this climate (pun intended),

Sure. I’ve blogged about this. When I have, I haven’t had people coming in to explain that Douglas didn’t make these mistakes. If people defended Douglas in this way, I’d contradict them.

But this issue is separate from the issue of the uniqueness of the hotspot or whether it is anticipated given realistic forcings. Even though Douglas made data analysis errors, that doesn’t magnically cause models to predict the hotspot for solar forcing levels experienced on earth during the instrumental period. They don’t. It doesn’t mean they made false claims about what models would predict under hypothetical forcings. Their data analysis error doesn’t magically make the RC discussion of the prediction of the hotspot under hypothetical solar forcing levels relevant to Douglas.

The RC discussion was irrelevant in that context.

you can heap blame primarily on the former folks and much less on the latter is beyond my abilities to comprehend!

I’m not blaming RC for Douglas’s errors. I’m criticizing them for making their own errors and sowing their own confusion.

I criticize RC for when I disagree with them. I criticize Douglas when I disagree with them. As I noted: When I did say Santer was correct about the errors in Douglas, I didn’t find people showing up to defend the errors in Douglas. The result was very few comments and less repetition. This has nothing to do with my heaping more blame on one than the other.

You seem to be offended not that the RC post makes any incorrect statements but rather that it brings up a topic in the context of Douglass that you don’t think they should bring up. However, don’t you think that it is they and not you who get to decide what is most relevant for the point they are trying to make? And, given that Douglass and co-authors were issuing press releases in which they were drawing all sorts of conclusions in regards to what the (supposed) lack of hotspot says about the mechanism responsible for the observed warming, you seem to be the only one who thinks it is somehow irrelevant to address under what circumstances (i.e., for which warming mechanisms) the models would predict an amplification of the surface temperature trend as you go up in the tropical atmosphere.

Could you tell me what specific fundamentally-incorrect point you think people reading that Real Climate post would come away with? You make the statement, “The RC figure, which is thrown into a discussion comparing observations to model projections, gives the false impression that something on the scale illustrated in the figure is predicted by models. Since the conversation is grounded in a particular time period, and nothing of that scale is expected, the impression given by RC is false.” However, this seems silly to me for at least a few reasons:

(1) The RC post makes it very clear the hypothetical experiment that they carried out (doubling CO2 vs increasing solar by 2%) and subsequently they also discuss how this relates to the actual observations (“If this is what should be expected over a long time period, what should be expected on the short time-scale available for comparison to the satellite or radiosonde records?…”)

(2) I agree with you that the estimates of solar forcing, or other forcings, mean that the model predictions are dominated by AGW. However, this is exactly the point of contention with “skeptics” including Douglass et al. I.e., they are arguing that the observed warming is due to something else besides greenhouse gases. Hence, it makes a lot of sense to consider hypothetical scenarios for warmings caused by other forcings (or simply due to internal variability), particularly if you are trying to convince people who don’t already believe that the modeling assumption that the climate change is dominated by greenhouse gases is correct. The way you seem to want to discuss “hotspot” basically amounts to a tautology…I.e., of course it will be the greenhouse gases that are expected to produce the hotspot by your definition if they are the forcing that is believed to have dominated. Duh!!! That is hardly a very interesting conclusion. More interesting is to ask what the pattern of the warming would have looked like if different effects were dominant.

(3) RC and Santer et al. (in various papers) have sharpened the debate by making clear both the origin of the tropical tropospheric amplification in the models, by noting the problems with the data (and various analyses and re-analyses thereof), by demonstrating the timescales over which the models and data do seem to agree (at least roughly…modulo the issues that Willis has raised here), and by correctly showing the estimated uncertainty in the model predictions. By contrast, Douglass et al. have only confused the debate by falsely leading people to believe that the tropical tropospheric amplification is a feature in the models that is unique to the warming being due to greenhouse gases and hence its (supposed) absence provides evidence that the warming is due to some other cause. They have also confused things by failing to acknowledge the very real problems that exist with the data for the multidecadal trends…and they have also vastly underestimated the model variability by incorrectly considering the standard error rather than the standard deviation to be the correct measure of the uncertainty. How in this climate (pun intended), you can heap blame primarily on the former folks and much less on the latter is beyond my abilities to comprehend!

When the entire issue relates to the question of who expects “A”, then the definition of what A is matters. When Boris jumps into conversations and decrees “A tropical tropospheric hotspot is expected from any warming”, he does not define what he means by this.

The conversation he jumped into was discussing what a model-data comparisons, and context was what can happen given realistic forcings and what is expected given realistic forcings.

You want to come in afterwards impose a definition does not fit the context of that discussion. This might be fine if you could find a body who has decreed precisely what the term “hotspot” means. However, there is no standard definition.

In contrast, the IPCC glossary does define fingerprint– and they define it the way I use it. But somehow, you don’t like the IPCC definition of “fingerprint” to be used in the context of climate science. So, yes, if you wish to decree the IPCC definition of “fingerprint” is wrong then you might be able to make boris’s statements correct.

You also state explicitly and incorrectly that a model run of hypothetical solar forcing *contradicts* the IPCC image of real solar forcing when the only difference is scale.

Since when doesn’t distorting scales to make wildly exaggerate or minimize an effect not result in contradiction? If I say I have a million dollars in my pocket and you empty my pockets and find only 1 cent, who would not think the evidence in my pocket does not contradict my claim? If I claimed there was no contradiction, it’s only a matter of scale because 1cent and 1 million dollars are both money, people would laugh.

The issue of scale matters to the discussion of whether or not anything that could possibly be called a hot spot exists.

The discussion in the IPCC document and in my blog post both relate to what is expected given forcings that have arisen on the real earth. These are relevant to Douglas. So, yes, because of issue realted to scale, no hot spot is expected to arise as a result of solar forcings when the solar forcing is as small as experienced during the period relevant to Douglas.

The RC figure, which is thrown into a discussion comparing observations to model projections, gives the false impressoin that something on the scale illustrated in the figure is predicted by models. Since the conversation is grounded in a particular time period, and nothing of that scale is expected, the impression given by RC is false.

So, yes. By showing an image with a totally distorted scale, the image contradicts the image in the IPCC which has a scale more appropriate to the discussion in Douglas, and later at CA. Scale does matter.

I attempted to define the question precisely because in my previous attempts at asking you complained that the question was too vague. Precisely defining a question is not word-smithing.

As far as I can tell, you are using definitions of both “hotspot” and “fingerprint” that are not well-accepted. I’ve given up arguing that they’re wrong (although I think they are), buy you have to admit that they’re not well-accepted given the number of people who do not accept them.

Using your definitions of “fingerprint” and “hotspot”, you are probably correct. Using the dictionary definition of “fingerprint” and the “enhanced warming vs surface” definition of “hotspot”, Boris is correct. This whole thing is about word definitions.

Down here in the comments you’re willing to be precise in your definitions. Up in the article you’re happy to leave the impression that enhanced TT warming is a unique and identifying characteristic of GHG-induced warming (when the same enhanced TT warming would appear if the source of warming was solar). You also state explicitly and incorrectly that a model run of hypothetical solar forcing *contradicts* the IPCC image of real solar forcing when the only difference is scale.

Of course, a lack of enhanced warming in the tropical troposphere versus the surface (if confirmed) would definitely be an issue for the models. I’m not saying otherwise.

Please, please, please — slow down, stop trying to score points against Boris and Arthur Smith, and get back to concepts instead of arguing about words.

Boris and Arthur bring up issues, I respond to those issues. Even if you think these points are off topic, I run a more flexible blog, and permit these issues. (I also don’t consider them off topic. In particular the blog post discusses the RC post , their claims specifically. So, how you can think discussing those in comment is a diversion is beyond me.)

Also, if you don’t want discussion about word smithing, why are you asking things like this:

Instead of insisting on “fingerprint” why not use “characteristic” if that’s what you mean?

In answer to your question, read the top of the blog post. I am responding to Boris’s insistance that those at CA can’t use fingerprint in a particular way. He is insisting it can’t be used the way the IPCC defines it!

Obviously, I was not going to edit his quote to use the word “characteristic” when discussing Boris’s desire to decree the IPCC usages incorrect.

I can think of no valid reasons to insist on using “fingerprint” knowing that your definition is not well-accepted.

What’s your definition of “well accepted”, particularly in the context of discussions of climate change? I use the definition in the IPCC glossary. People have posted numerous examples from the peer reviewed literature that use this definition. I should think my usage is well accepted.

Embedded in all your discussion of your views on word definitions, you complain we should stick to concepts. You ask a question and then immediately provide your definition. (That is, you insist on wordsmithing but wish to be the smithy.)

I’ll answer : When discussing what happens in the real world, if the amplification due to a particular forcing (i.e. solar) is so small it’s contribution is enterly dwarfed by another source of forcing (i,e, ghgs), then the smaller forcing (i.e. solar) does not create a “hot spot”.

If solar acted alone at some very low level, then I would not call a spot “hot” in any real application unless we could, at least hypothetically, determine that the solar forcing raised the level of warthm sufficiently to resolve the feature from noise. This would mean that as a practical matter, the whether or not a “hot” spot can be said to be predicted will depend on the level of forcing, the magnitude of heating anticipated, and the natural weather variability.

I don’t consider things that aren’t hot, that aren’t “spot” like and that are undetectable as “hot spots” to be “hot spots”.

I think that given the level of solar forcings experienced in the thermometer record models do not predict a hot spot based on solar forcing. Given realistic forcings, the models predict a hot spot based on GHGs.

I’ve said this many times. I think you understood the concept.

Once again you’ve managed to divert the argument to Douglass vs Gavin. However, your original post was about fingerprints and RC contradicting IPCC.

Let’s back away from Douglass vs Gavin and get back to your original statement:

WHO Expects a Tropical Tropospheric Hot Spot From ANY and ALL Sources of Warming?

Before you answer, let me clarify a little bit. Let’s define “TT hotspot” as “amplification of tropical surface temperature anomalies in the tropical troposphere”. That’s how I’ve always understood it. I’m pretty sure that’s what Arthur Smith and Boris mean as well.

So, the question becomes:
WHO expects an amplification of tropical surface temperature anomalies in the tropical troposphere from ANY and ALL sources of warming?

I do. Do you? If not, would you agree if “ANY and ALL” was replaced by “MOST”?

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I really hope this whole thing is a case of mistaken definitions. Instead of continually starting new fights and going deeper into the nuances of who-said-what, why not use words that everyone can agree on? Instead of insisting on “fingerprint” why not use “characteristic” if that’s what you mean? Similarly, Arthur Smith and Boris could use “identifying characteristic” (per English dictionaries) if that’s what they mean.

I can think of no valid reasons to insist on using “fingerprint” knowing that your definition is not well-accepted.

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Please, please, please — slow down, stop trying to score points against Boris and Arthur Smith, and get back to concepts instead of arguing about words.

By associating their discussion of hypothetical forcing to Douglas, creating the false impression the discussion had something to do with Douglas, and enveloping it in a discussion of comparisons between observations and model projections, the authors of that RC post injected numerous misconceptions about the hotspot and into the discussion about whether or not it has been detected. (It hasn’t.) They also divert attention away from the true significance of our failure to detect the hotspot and try to confuse those who have never taken thermo by incanting “adiabitic lapse rate”.

The true significance: If the hotspot does not appear, then the models are missing something.

I don’t know why you want to try to make their attempts to sow confusion about the meaning of the failure to detect the hotspot ok. Sometimes some seem, the RC authors were motivated by Douglas and Christy making incorrect claims about the meaning of our failure to observe the hot spot.

Douglas did that. But it’s possible to explain that Douglas and Christy made incorrect claims. Instead of doing that, the RC authors wrote their own post that created entirely new misconceptions about what failing to detect the hotspot means about climate change and modeling.

So the mistake Douglas made does not justify RC’s not specifically addressing Douglas &Christies mistake in the press release but discussing an irrelevant issue instead.

Some seem to suggest that the RC post is ok because it happens to make some correct statements of what models would predict under hypothetical circumstances. That would make the post “ok” only if the post were not written as if these observation had something to do with Douglas et al. As it stands the structure makes it appear that these observations contradict something Douglas said. It doesn’t.

Creating that false impression in readers is not justified even though the RC authors correctly report what models predict under entirely hypothetical forcings. Throwing in irrelevant discussion to distract the audience from the main issues is a red herring.

The confusion sown by that article is such that it continues to be used as an excuse to derail any discussion where people compare the model predictions of the TThotspot to data. The article continues to distract people from what failure to find the TT hotspot would mean.

Making the comparison is useful. If the hotspot is ultimately found, that will tend to support models. If it is not found, that will point to a flaw in models.

RC wasted their opportunity to say this by veering off into an irrelevant discussion about the adiabitic lapse rate or what models predict under hypothetical amounts of forcing to understand this.

Of course, you are not required to continue to repeat your views of why introducing the hypothetical ideas into discussion of model-data comparisons is justified, or how RC made some correct observations within the context of their irrelevant discussion. I get every one of these in my inbox (so I can check for spam/ nastiness etc.). Obviously, I’m going to reply from time to time.

I said quite some time ago: I’m surprised we’ve repeated this as often as we have.

They put three (count them) words together- ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’ to make a grandiose but simple claim about something not simple. That something (the climate) takes volumes, computers and long-winded posts to try and begin to describe.

When the sepcifics go bad, AGW’ers can always fall back to the general hypothesis. It’s just words. The hypothesis should be more scientific and specific. AGW is three words designed to get people to support certain politicians. That’s all it is.

Andrew ♫