"... the methodology used to develop the Met Office SSU product was never published in the peer-reviewed literature, and certain aspects of the original processing “remain unknown.” Evidently the boffins at the Met didn't bother to write down exactly how they were massaging the raw data to get the results they reported. Indeed, those who did the data manipulation seem to have mostly retired."
http://theresilientearth.com/?q=content/...
The original paper says something similar:
"The World Climate Research Programme’s Stratospheric Temperature Trends Assessment Panel (of which several authors of this study are members) has encouraged the scientists who generated the original Met Office data set to publish the methodology, but they are now retired."
http://www.arl.noaa.gov/documents/Journa...
So there appears to be conflicting data which may be difficult to resolve. And they keep saying the science is settled?
Are you suggesting that the two volcanoes contributed 0.9 K of surface warming? Because if you are that's delusional. Seriously.
For one thing, the warming from the volcanoes was transient, and the stratosphere overall cooled over those two decades, so any change in water vapor was a net decrease over those two decades. For another, the radiative forcing from stratospheric water vapor is tiny compared to the forcing from CO2. It's almost two orders of magnitude lower (see reference below). It simply is not credible that changes in stratospheric water content would lead to such a large surface temperature increase.
The stratospheric temperature trend issue is more likely one of the models not getting the circulation correct rather than there being a huge problem with overall global radiative balance. This is discussed in the Nature paper cited by mike's skeptic blog. Furthermore, overall the stratosphere is a small player in the surface forcing, most of the warming is coming from tropospheric processes, not from things going on in the stratosphere. This is why the models do a relatively good job predicting temperature, even if they don't get the stratosphere correct. Think about it in terms of heat capacity, there isn't much mass in the stratosphere so there isn't a lot of energy stored there. Furthermore there isn't a lot of mass to radiate energy either up or down, plus it's really cold so the radiation is low just by the blackbody effect. If you would pause for a minute and think about this without fear making your donut pucker you would see that believing the stratosphere is causing the warming doesn't make sense.
Y'all want, need really, for there to be a huge problem in the science. But there isn't. So you are left clutching at these straws. What will you do in a decade when the planet has continued to warm and things are really bad? What will you tell yourselves? Will you feel pride that you steadfastly refuse to accept reality?
Unlikely, or we'd all be dead.
Water vapor depletes ozone, and though ozone levels have been decreasing due in part to increasing levels of water vapor, there is no indication of a "flood event" of water vapor (thankfully).
http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/hazards/gas/in...
... water vapor is a big component, but it largely is "reflected" back into the troposphere by the cold tropopause.
Yes the globe cooled due to dimming.
http://geography.about.com/od/globalprob...
It will happen quite frequently, only locally. When Mt. St. Helens erupted, I personally experienced a 9 degree drop in temperature in San Jose for several weeks.
The Stratosphere cooled by 0.4 K from 1981 - 1984 after a spike in temperatures from the El-Chichon eruption. And then by 0.5 K from 1991 - 1994 from the Mt. Pinatubo eruption. With the exception of those events, stratospheric temperatures have been flat if not slightly warming for 15 years. It seems as if the radiative properties of the stratosphere have been altered by the significant warming caused by the massive injections of SO2. Its a fact that ozone was greatly diminished by these events, but new studies say that water vapor changes in the stratosphere are an important climate metric that is not being accounted for by climate models. Is it possible that the heating of the stratosphere during the 80's and 90's altered the humidity of the stratosphere there by allowing more energy ( 0.9 K ) to reach the surface?
ftp://ftp.ssmi.com/msu/graphics/tls/plots/rss_ts_channel_tls_global_land_and_sea_v03_3.png
