Climate Change from Space with Gavin A. Schmidt

NASA interest in climate change goes back decades, and the now 50-year long record of remote sensing has provided clear evidence of ongoing change, as well as process-based information that inform the climate models that help us explain what is happening (and what will likely happen in the future). This talk will review the highlights of NASA’s work in this area across multiple methods as well as some of the ongoing challenges.

Gavin A. Schmidt is the Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and was the acting Senior Climate Adviser to the NASA Administrator in 2021. He currently works on the simulation of climate in the past, present, and possible futures and has over 150 peer-reviewed publications. He was the author with Joshua Wolfe of “Climate Change: Picturing the Science” in 2009, and in 2011 was the inaugural recipient of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Climate Communication Prize. He is a fellow of the AGU and American Association for the Advancement of Science and his 2014 TED Talk on climate modeling has been viewed over a million times.

[joehopfield]

They said Fermi was the "last man who knew everything".
Gavin is the Fermi of modern climate science.
I want a Gavin Schmidt t-shirt.

[dspncr]

28:28 "There's a twist"

[martiansoon]

Wondering specially what has happened druing Covid shutdowns and what happened after sulphur emission ban on shipping? Aerosl effects seems to raise temperatures way more than 0, 6C that is in current IPCC model.

At this moment we see that northern seas have been warmed rapidly and we have no science that explains it. These areas are near the shipping routes, so one guess is mainly sulphade driven aerosol cooling has dropped due to ban on sulphates and it has been warming ocean surfaces rapidly. More accurate science over this issue is needed asap.

Hansen et al. has released a study on these issues that says: with aerosol effects taken out, our current temperature is 2, 55C. So, instead of 0, 6C aerosol effect it would be 1, 35C... And that's a huge difference. Also effect is growing exponentially while IPCC has stayed on same numder for years.

[Timlagor]

7:20 really not a fan of using a post 1850 baseline. It doesn't matter where your data starts, people expect a pre-Industrial baseline for global temperature and labelling only goes so far.

[grindupBaker]

What you see with CERES black square at 50:14 (I understand that Argo is close enough to the net) is that the surface-air warming has wiped out the LWR to space deficit that humans have caused to date with increased GHGs (overdone it by 0.23 w/m**2) by sending 3.2 w/(m**2.degree) more to space but that same warming has caused surface (ice-snow) & air (cloud) +ve feedbacks totalling 0.7 w/m**2 so now those +ve feedbacks will roll until whatever their +w/m**2 ends up as is equalled by more LWR to space. I realize that the iffy human pollution effect on clouds makes it inaccurate to know.

[glenndavis]

It’s wonderful that they can measure the radiative energy of earth atmosphere from space. Quite accurately.

Only problem, there is no evidence that the energy measured is CAUSED by thermal radiation.

The earth atmosphere touches what is a 120C dayside on the moon, and contains that energy around the planet so we do not experience the-130C nightside moon temperature.

And it radiates that huge amount of thermal energy.

The radiative forcing from the bottom of the earth surface has not increased planetary temperature for the billions of years that it has also radiated in that direction.

The bottom of a frying pan radiates equal energy to the top.

[TheDalaiLamaCon]

I hope the illustrious Mr Gavin is right!
Imagine N Canada and Siberia as vast CO2 absorbing productive food areas, and the Sahara a wetland again.
AGW will save Humanity!

[mikeheath]

@5:57 Where is the acceleration ice melt? (Debunked), @7:01 The delta 1910-1950 is the same as 1965 onward to now accelerating (Debunked Models, don't make me laugh, show me One model that matched the historic readings. You say the models are never finished, then how can you say the science is settled. While I am sure the planet has increased in temperature, any increase cannot exceed the energy received from the sun in UV that is radiated back IR, which although slightly variable is in principle fixed. One could be forgiven for thinking that Climate Change is suing used simply as a vehicle to get even more funding. If NASA had any concerns abut the planned heating, wouldn't one practicle solution be to stop launching rockets every week! Joking aside It cannot help

[grindupBaker]

I don't know that I'll ever find time to read the CERES of Fortunate Events Posting but of course the LWR imbalance is countered to whatever extent by the Planck feedback as the surface and air warm but the surface ice-snow albedo feedback & cloud change feedback perhaps being less reflective from above as the air warms have nothing to balance them because Earth doesn't manufacture its own SWR. So a portion of the "failure" of LWR to be the dominant energy to space reduced in accordance with the 0.38 w/ (m**2.decade) forcing (it being SWR to space that's reduced) is definitely due to warming Planck feedback but perhaps also it's because the surface & air albedo ve feedbacks are kicking in, not because global warming is caused by forest clear-cutting like the "Macias Shurley" keeps claiming anyway.

[grindupBaker]

Ironically at 53:11 Gavin's "carbon dioxide .. becomes a better emitter" is a statement that CO2 isn't relegated to only "absorbing & re-emitting" radiation that left the ocean at 10 microns (0 to 1, 000 microns) below the ocean surface as incorrectly described in every "greenhouse effect" (ahem) "explanation" I've come across in 7 years except Andrew Dessler's, yet Gavin's aunt Agnes who does the site moderation deleted my complaint about that on Realclimate July 2021. Talk about favouritism. This isn't trivial semantics on the Front Line away from Academia because it relates massively to the "surface warming itself with its own radiation LOL" popular meme for years/decades.

[grindupBaker]

For the models being above GMST observations since ~1997 I have this old from 2014. *** PART 1 OF 2 ***
Quote: "Atlantic warming turbocharges Pacific trade winds Date:August 3, 2014 Source:University of New South Wales. New research has found rapid warming of the Atlantic Ocean, likely caused by global warming, has turbocharged Pacific Equatorial trade winds. Currently the winds are at a level never before seen on observed records, which extend back to the 1860s. The increase in these winds has caused eastern tropical Pacific cooling, amplified the Californian drought, accelerated sea level rise three times faster than the global average in the Western Pacific and has slowed the rise of global average surface temperatures since 2001. It may even be responsible for making El Nino events less common over the past decade due to its cooling impact on ocean surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific. "We were surprised to find the main cause of the Pacific climate trends of the past 20 years had its origin in the Atlantic Ocean, " said co-lead author Dr Shayne McGregor from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science (ARCCSS) atthe University of New South Wales."

Quote: "The record-breaking increase in Pacific Equatorial trade winds over the past 20 years had, until now, baffled researchers. Originally, this trade wind intensification was considered to be a response to Pacific decadal variability. However, the strength of the winds was much more powerful than expected due to the changes in Pacific sea surface temperature. Another riddle was that previous research indicated that under global warming scenarios Pacific Equatorial Trade winds would slow down over the coming century. The solution was found in the rapid warming of the Atlantic Ocean basin, which has created unexpected pressure differences between the Atlantic and Pacific. This has produced wind anomalies that have given Pacific Equatorial trade winds an additional big push. “The rapid warming of the Atlantic Ocean created high pressure zones in the upper atmosphere over that basin and low pressure zones close to the surface of the ocean, ” says Professor Axel Timmermann, co-lead and corresponding author from the University of Hawaii. “The rising air parcels, over the Atlantic eventually sink over the eastern tropical Pacific, thus creating higher surface pressure there. The enormous pressure see-saw with high pressure in the Pacific and low pressure in the Atlantic gave the Pacific trade winds an extra kick, amplifying their strength. It’s like giving a playground roundabout an extra push as it spins past.” Many climate models appear to have underestimated the magnitude of the coupling between the two ocean basins, which may explain why they struggled to produce the recent increase in Pacific Equatorial trade wind trends. While active, the stronger Equatorial trade winds have caused far greater overturning of ocean water in the West Pacific, pushing more atmospheric heat into the ocean, as shown by co-author and ARCCSS Chief Investigator Professor Matthew England earlier this year. This increased overturning appears to explain much of the recent slowdown in the rise of global average surface temperatures. Importantly, the researchers don’t expect the current pressure difference between the two ocean basins to last. When it does end, they expect to see some rapid changes, including a sudden acceleration of global average surface temperatures. “It will be difficult to predict when the Pacific cooling trend and its contribution to the global hiatus in surface temperatures will come to an end, ” Professor England says."

Recent intensification of wind-driven circulation in the Pacific and the ongoing warming hiatus
Nature Climate Change 4, 222–227 (2014) doi:10.1038/nclimate2106 Received 11 September 2013 Accepted 18 December 2013 Published online 09 February 2014 Corrected online 14 February 2014
Matthew H. England, Shayne McGregor, Paul Spence, Gerald A. Meehl, Axel Timmermann, Wenju Cai, Alex Sen Gupta, Michael J. McPhaden, Ariaan Purich & Agus Santoso
"Here we show that a pronounced strengthening in Pacific trade winds over the past two decades—unprecedented in observations/reanalysis data and not captured by climate models—is sufficient to account for the cooling of the tropical Pacific and a substantial slowdown in surface warming through increased subsurface ocean heat uptake."
In early 2013 when my studying started a Skeptical Science (SKS) bloke suggested working out ENSO adjustments to GMST for a few decades but instead I plotted GMST annual points 1966-2013 with separate symbols for El Nino, La Nina & ENSO-neutral with big volcanoes to exclude them and ran 3 separate trends by eye ball through those 3 ENSO types. There was no doubt that La Nina & ENSO-neutral were warming at the same rate but El Nino was "pulling away", warming faster, than La Nina & ENSO-neutral and this "pulling away" maybe increased in 1995 but El Ninos come in too much variation and not enough years sampled to be certain. My trends eye balled from 1995 are at the end of this comment. The +0.23 for El Ninos 1995-2013 has low accuracy confidence. The +0.165 degrees / decade for La Nina & ENSO-neutral years have high accuracy confidence, good clean fits. 12 months later I came across a wind speed plot for Pacific Equatorial easterly trade winds showing that they'd increased a huge 30% (1 metre / second faster) from 1995 to 2014 though they'd been non varying for many decades before that, so now I knew why my El Nino "pulling away" from 12 months earlier was almost cartainly correct but not the underlying cause. Some months later I came across the underlying cause from scientists quoted below and their new published paper. I say it's a classic Power Amplifier and it all started 1995. Equatorial Pacific Ocean is 2.8 times as wide as Equatorial Atlantic Ocean and that's practically the definition of the basis of a Power Amplifier ---- apply a relatively small signal (Atlantic) to the base and get a huger signal (Pacific) through the collector-emitter pair. Circa 2015 I saw a Kevin Trenberth talk about warming with GMST global pictorial and it clearly showed the vast eastern tropical Pacific Ocean having COOLED from 1982 to 2014 while practically everywhere else except 2 small Cold Blobs had warmed. That clinched it. It's obvious what has happened. Pacific Equatorial Ocean easterly trade winds had increased a huge 30% (1 metre / second faster) from 1995 to 2014 due to warming Atlantic Ocean surface, a Power Amplifier.

[markschuette]

slow but steady. that 3.5" in 27 years is not huge but it is significant and we do not want it to continue.