From the “settled science” department comes this new revision of Earth’s entire radiation budget. Many WUWT readers can recall seeing this radiation budget graphic from Kenneth Trenberth in 2009:
![erb[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/erb1.jpg?quality=83)
That figure in a slightly different form also appeared in the 2007 IPCC AR4 WG1 report with different numbers:
![faq-1-1-figure-1-l[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/faq-1-1-figure-1-l1.png?quality=75)
Source: http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/fig/faq-1-1-figure-1-l.png
Note that in Trenberth’s 2009 paper, the energy from “back radiation” (from GHG action) value went up from 324 w/square meter cited by the IPCC in 2007 to 333 w/square meter. The net effect of that is increased energy back to Earth’s surface, making it warmer.
It seems odd that would increase so much, so quickly in two years. Even more surprising, is that now, the value has been revised even higher, to 340.3 w/square meter, while at the same time, the “Net Absorbed” value, that extra bit of energy that we get to keep from the sun on Earth, thanks to increased GHG action, has gone DOWN.
I know, it doesn’t make much sense, read on.
Alan Siddons writes in an email:
Reviewing NASA’s Earth Radiation Budget (ERB) program this week, I noticed a graphic depiction I hadn’t seen before, at
http://science-edu.larc.nasa.gov/energy_budget/pdf/Energy_Budget_Litho_10year.pdf .
It was drafted with the assistance of Kevin Trenberth and contains some notable differences from the last effort of his that I’d seen, so I’ve inserted NASA’s new values over it.
Cooler sun than before but a warmer surface. Less albedo and air absorption. Non-radiative cooling is higher than before but surface emission is higher too. “Net absorbed” refers to radiant energy going in but not yet being radiated – a ticking time bomb.
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Note that somehow, between 2009 and the present, it was decided (presumably based on CERES measurements) that the Net Absorbed value (which is the extra energy absorbed that would result from increased GHG’s) would go DOWN from 0.9 w/square meter to 0.6w/square meter – an decrease of one third of the 2009 value.
This isn’t a typo, since many of the other numbers have changed as well.
With all the talk of the “settled science” that is certain about increases in Greenhouse gases, it seems that with such a revision, there’s still some very unsettled revisionist work afoot to get a handle on what the “real” energy budget of the Earth is. Perhaps the recent published works on climate sensitivity, coupled with observations of “the pause” have had some affect on these numbers as well. Meanwhile, according to the Mauna Loa data, CO2 concentration has risen from 388.16ppm in November 2009 when we had the big Copenhagen COP15 meeting that was supposed to change everything, to 397.31ppm in November 2013.
So with GHG’s on the increase, their effect has been reduced by a third in the NASA planetary energy budget. That’s quite remarkable.
So was Trenberth’s 2009 energy budget wrong, running too hot? It sure seems so. This is what NASA writes about that diagram:
The energy budget diagram on the front shows our best understanding of energy flows into and away from the Earth. It is based on the work of many scientists over more than 100 years, with the most recent measurements from the Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES; http://ceres.larc.nasa.gov) satellite instrument providing high accuracy data of the radiation components (reflected solar and emitted infrared radiation fluxes).
This energy balance determines the climate of the Earth. Our understanding of these energy flows will continue to evolve as scientists obtain a longer and longer record using new and better instruments (http://clarreo.larc.nasa.gov).
Source: http://science-edu.larc.nasa.gov/energy_budget/
It seems to be a clear case of observations trumping Trenberth.
So with the retained energy (the net absorbed figure) resulting from GHG’s like CO2 dropping by one third since 2009, can we now call off some of the most alarming aspects of global warming theory?
Related posts:
CERES Satellite Data and Climate Sensitivity
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UPDATE:
Alan Siddons writes in with some further research. Commenter John West also noted this in comments. Siddons writes:
Well, let me tell you what I found while tracking down that IPCC illustration. I did find it on an IPCC document, Regional Changes of Climate and some basic concepts , but it looked shabby there too, so I surmised that it was a careless copy-paste of somebody else’s work, not a product of the IPCC itself. On that basis I searched for “radiation budget” or “energy budget” and added the illustration’s particular figures to my search demand.
Bingo. The illustration actually came from a May 2013 American Institute of Physics paper, A new diagram of the global energy balance , by Martin Wild, et al.
Here’s a small version for your records.
Other notes by Wild, Decadal changes in surface radiative fluxes – overview and update , yield some insight into his perspective — for instance, this panel,
which seems to indicate that less sunlight creates more compensatory back-radiation but a weaker terrestrial emission, while more sunlight “unmasks” the greenhouse effect. Wild’s conclusions are also notable.
- Still considerable uncertainties in global mean radiation budget at the surface.
- Models still tend to overestimate downward solar and underestimate downward thermal radiation
- Strong decadal changes observed in both surface solar and thermal fluxes.
This last point seems to imply that changes to the Radiation Budget are not merely a result of improved measurements but reflect rather sudden changes in our thermal environment.
================================================================
This leads me to wonder, why did NASA choose the values from Wild et al as opposed to Trenberth from the National Center For Atmosphereic Research?
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This is not surprising given the tiny fraction of the “imbalance” relative to the total incoming energy.
It would be remarkable if reliable measurements could be made to this level of accuracy given all the variables involved.
Expect to see this number changed again and again.
What is the uncertaity of these figures +/- ? Maybe net absorbed due to CO2 is zero?
Winding down the theoretical effect of so called GHG’s is patently obvious to be a staged cop-out in order to correlate with the latest accurate readings…
More and better thermometers will fix it.
We have always been at war with Eastasia. What on earth are you talking about?
Models and model outputs. Fools and politicians taken in by climate court jesters. Anyone that has worked with very complex models (physical or economic) knows such models as kith and kin of astrology. It is fun to play with, but don’t stake your 401k, IRA on their predictions. Instead it is best to bet the world economy on them (sarc). What would be useful would be believable Holocene exit predictions, but that will be forthcoming only with 20-20 hindsight models.
How accurate are those measurements?
The result is 0.2% of the measurements.
If each had a 0.1% accuracy, the error could be up to 0.7 w/m2
The warm is turning (under the rock).
But to be serious, reading between the lines, there is clearly considerable back pedalling going on. Another few years of temperatures going no place or even falling, and it will all be over at an academic level. The politics will take a lot longer, and activism longer still because it will have to find another object.
Professor Curry’s latest testimony to Congress is excellent by the way – balanced, judicious, reasonable, evidence based, and above all, skeptical.
From the “It’s worse than we thought” department the imbalance has been tweaked up from a christmas light to a small torch bulb.
It’s funny, I don’t see the kinetic and potential energies of gigatonnes of water being raised to 3Km, nor the energy extracted via photosynthesis, wind, lightning (EM, Sound), waves, weathering, rain, sound (from expansion/contraction), endothermic bio chemical processes, melting of ice, entropic processes or at least a dozen other processes that convert heat to other energy forms. Just this climate near perpetual motion machine, they are claiming has as an efficiency of 99.9%. (a Loss 0.9 watts in a thousand)
There’s no science in that chart.
It’s similar to the 2012 attempt “An update on Earth’s energy balance in light of the latest global observations” by Graeme L. Stephens, Juilin Li, Martin Wild, Carol Anne Clayson, Norman Loeb, Seiji Kato, Tristan L’Ecuyer, Paul W. Stackhouse Jr, Matthew Lebsock and Timothy Andrews
http://judithcurry.com/2012/11/05/uncertainty-in-observations-of-the-earths-energy-balance/
Those are not really measurements, bug guesstimations of the global values based on a statistic of local measurements. The error bar is probably huge, way bigger than the assumed imbalance.
Anyway, even when real measurements are involved, with no proper controls one can really get into troubles. Just look for the history of the electron charge. Millikan claimed 0.2% uncertainty. The reported value was 1.592*10^-19 coulombs. The current value is 1.602*10^-19.
The evolution of the value is interesting. Feynman described it nicely.
Precision to 4 significant figures for numbers which cannot be measured. How do they do that?
I have seen that Trenberth agreed in an email to Dr Noor Van Andel that the radiation window was actually 66 W/m2. If one adds to that 86 by evaporation and 18 by convection (likely to be wrong and much higher) that accounts for all (within a margin of error) the energy absorbed by the surface through radiation from the sun. All the rest is nonsense. There is no missing heat. The diagram and Trenberth’s original diagram are cartoons (to be laughed at) made by people who do not understand heat and mass transfer or thermodynamics (which are both engineering subjects).
I bet Trenberth does not know what a Schmidt number is similar to Gavin Schmidt. On the otherhand, I bet some of those NASA engineers with real experience from the space program who signed a letter about NASA losing its way understand Reynolds, Prandtl and Nusselt numbers. Fourier as long ago as 1841 said an atmosphere changes simple concept of radiation due to convection.
Yes, and you would have thought by now that they would have realised that recycled radiation (back radiation) cannot add heat to the surface from which it originated in the first place.
bobl says: @ur momisugly January 17, 2014 at 1:31 am
………….There’s no science in that chart.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
John Kehr, a Chemical Engineer by schooling and Research and Development Process Engineer by profession, has a few interesting thing to say about Trenberth’s cartoon. (Chem. Engineers are the guys who take all the thermo courses in college and then are expected to make all those formulas work in real life as Process Engineers.)
His other essays in the Energy Balance category are HERE.
Peter Ward says:
January 17, 2014 at 1:39 am
Precision to 4 significant figures for numbers which cannot be measured. How do they do that?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Probably the same way they “KNOW” the global temperature to 4 significant figures.
Anthony wrote: “Note that somehow, between 2009 and the present, it was decided (presumably based on CERES measurements) that the Net Absorbed value (which is the extra energy absorbed that would result from increased GHG’s) would go DOWN from 0.9 w/square meter to 0.6w/square meter – an decrease of one third of the 2009 value.”
Since most of net absorbed heat ends up warming the ocean (supposedly 93%), the Net Absorbed Energy is probably calculated from the amount of warming of the ocean. Increasing amount of ARGO data has allowed a more accurate calculation for Net Absorbed Energy.
Net Absorbed Energy can not be calculated from the other values shown in these diagrams because the uncertainty in these values is far too high to say whether the net is positive (warming temperature) or negative (cooling temperature). DLR and latent heat have changed by 7 and 6 W/m2 – a changes that are 10-fold the net absorbed energy.
SWR, reflected SWR, and escaping LWR are measured from space reasonably well (+/1 W/m2?).
Downward LWR is being measure at some locations, but we don’t have reliable planet-wide coverage. The value shown probably comes from re-analyses made with climate models forced to fit observations, not direct observation. Latent heat can be easily calculated from precipitation (rain and snow). We have more data on precipitation from satellites which probably accounts for the 8% increase in latent heat. There is relatively little information about the amount of energy leaving the surface via thermals. In his 2009 paper, Trenberth chose this number so that there would be a net +0.9 W/m2 imbalance at the surface. He probably did the same thing here.
phillipbratby,
It can’t add heat to the source, but it can slow down it’s cooling, back radiation is simply describing reflective insulation, or in the case of CO2 more diffusive insulation. Thus back radiation (reflected energy)IS able to make things warmer than they would be without the insulation everywhere between the reflective material and the source because the temperature is dependent on the relative rates of heating and cooling, it’s an equilibrium.
JM VanWinkle says: @ur momisugly January 17, 2014 at 12:50 am
…. What would be useful would be believable Holocene exit predictions, but that will be forthcoming only with 20-20 hindsight models.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
A hindsight model of the Holocene exit prediction in 2020! YIKES!
bobl: Of course, all three heat transfer mechanisms affect the way a surface cools. It is exceedingly complex. But that is not what the “greenhouse effect” is all about. The proponents of the “greenhouse effect” claim it is back radiation that heats the surface, not the effect on the heat transfer process (slowing down cooling as you put it).
There is no ‘back radiation’, defined as a real energy flux. It is the atmospheric Radiation Field, the potential energy flux of that emitter to a body at absolute zero.
Furthermore, RFs add vectorially yet the ‘Energy budget’ makes them add as scalars. This is junk science. By wrongly assuming Kirchhoff’s Law of Radiation applies at ToA, they offset the vastly exaggerated IR warming to make the GHG absorption of surface IR about 7x reality. This with the 3x exaggerated GHE gives the imaginary positive feedback.
Because temperature rise is exaggerated, it is offset in hind-casting by using twice real low level cloud optical depth, about 25% increase in albedo. All in all, this is execrable pseudo-science not even worth describing as unprofessional. It must be consigned to the dustbin of History along with the Earth-centric Universe of the holy Roman Catholic Church in Galileo’s time, and Piltdown man.
bobl says: @ur momisugly January 17, 2014 at 2:22 am
….It can’t add heat to the source, but it can slow down it’s cooling….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
A much more accurate way of putting it. Now add in TIME, that is the rate of cooling or better yet rate of energy transfer and how much it has been slowed down and the difference in day vs night. This then explains why the humid tropics are cooler than a desert during the day and warmer than a desert during the night.
The warmists always leave out TIME (nanoseconds) and day and night. As another commenter said they live on a flat earth with the sun always shining at 1/4 energy. They should be careful not to fall of the edge.
Total rubbish AGAIN.
So NASA believes in a NON rotating planet, seems funny given their experience in space, and insolation at a level that would not drive the water cycle. TOTAL NON-REALITY which means a model that assumes an impossible process, the GHE, and no process to actually start that impossible process or any feedback to control it at the levels claimed.
See me after school Kevin.
@Gail Combs: as well as the above, which shows surface IR has been exaggerated about 7x, the next biggest mistake in Climate Alchemy is to fail to understand that there can be no gas phase thermalisation of GHG-absorbed IR. This is simple statistical thermodynamics, the Law of Equipartition of Energy.
So, there can be no ‘back radiation’ and no ‘slowing down’ of cooling. Most heat transfer in the lower atmosphere is convective. The ludicrous radiation physics set up by the IPCC crew is of no consequence. In reality, CO2 as a working fluid controls atmospheric temperatures within a narrow range.