'Correcting' Trenberth et al.

Convection carries water vapor above the densest layer of Greenhouse gases, where it is more likely to radiate into space. Hadley cells circulate a large percentage of the entire atmosphere in an up and down cycle.

Sorry but this post is nearly completely incorrect and extremely confused.

Interesting conjecture. Do you have the calculations and the physics to support it?

trenberth’s, wilde’s, posma’s….which of the theoretical models contrasts better with empirical data or measurements…or is it we have not yet enough data to assess them, as prof. Freeman Dysson explained …

If a normal everday person looked at this they would be lost.
I even find it confusing.

If you work out what happens, starting with a cold planet and allowing its temperature to rise until there is equilibrium between incoming energy (primarily in the visible wavelengths) and outgoing energy (in the long infra red), you find that all the warming is done by the incoming sunlight. Back radiation is there, but all the warming was caused by the incoming light. So no need to cause confusion by talking about back radiation warming things

“If a GHG molecule is too warm for its height then DWIR back to the surface dominates but the molecule rises away from the surface and cools until DWIR again equals UWIR.
If a GHG molecule is too cold for its height then UWIR to space dominates but the molecule then falls until DWIR again equals UWIR.”
Why? Let’s say mean free path length for an IR photon at 15 micrometer, in the CO2 absorption / re emission band is 25 m at 1 atmosphere. Meaning it gets emitted and re absorbed and re emitted multiple times on its way until it reaches either surface or open space (or a water droplet in the atmosphere, which acts as a blackbody). Each re-emission happening in a random direction.
In all cases this should result in the atmosphere being an opaque fog on this frequency , “shining” roughly the same amounts of IR on this frequency back to Earth and the other half to outer space.
I am assuming Local thermodynamic equilibrium, allowing for the application of Kirchhoff’s Law. As a GHG molecule travels in a parcel of air with the same temperature (to find its correct height), this should hold most of the time.
The climate modelers seem to think that GHG molecules swallow IR photons, not re-emitting them, leading them to call them “heat-trapping gases” and modelling a tropospheric hotspot that has not been observed in reality. At least I think that’s one of their mistakes.

“The 24 Wm2 for thermals needs to be corrected to zero because dry air that rises in thermals then warms back up to the original temperature on descent.”
I am afraid you are not correct here. This does have a net transfer of energy, as in thermal circulation the air warms to be warmer than the surrounding air then rises. The cooling in rising is adiabatic, so there is no energy transfer, as is the warming during sinking. So the warm air rising is taking energy it has absorbed from the ground. Once aloft it moves towards the cooler air column (which has lower pressure at altitude) and cool, thus sinking again.

Just realised that al I needed for the last comment was “what DirkH says”.

I know, let’s start by not having a flat Earth and have a spherical one, then we can add … I know, I know … a day/night cycle with planetary rotation … yes and then we could have … maybe just maybe … a Sun that actually provides 1370 W/m2 of energy to the top of atmosphere on the day side of the planet. Let’s try that and see how we go.
This is a cartoon, not a diagram and Trenberth’s most important piece of equipment seems to have been crayons. It does not matter what you do to it, you are still not going to end up anywhere useful.
Try this for a realistic diagram:
http://tinypic.com/usermedia.php?uo=fNkd6hpTbcMU7xs0vRLosYh4l5k2TGxc#.U0PyR156PRo

What I would love to see is the error bars around each of the energy budget terms. After all, apparently 3.3 W/M2 is going to bring civilization as we know it to an end. /sarc

You can assume away about anything you like and maintain a “net” radiation budget, but the actual errors in the Trenberth and others Earth Energy Budgets are a bit more subtle. One that is often overlooked is the Atmospheric Window of 40 Wm-2. That is closer to 20 Wm-2 and depends on what “surface” you are using. There is a big difference between a sea level “surface” and a 2 meter “surface”. Stephens et al. did a good job of showing what a more realistic Earth Energy Budget should look like.
What is interesting about the “window” error is that it is primarily due to mixed phase clouds. That is both energy and mass that has an impact on the which ever “surface” budget you choose. Water vapor that converts to ice then gets stored at the poles or high altitudes produces a budget deficit and if the energy of fusion is released closer to the poles than source of evaporation is more easily transferred to space. Mass transfer in the stratosphere (water vapor and ozone) accounts for roughly 8 Wm-2 of the Stephens et al. estimated +/- 17 Wm-2 of “surface” uncertainty.

Ah, energy. Where does it come from? The Sun. Where does it go? in all directions.
What happens to the Earth? It is rather like what happens when you put your hand out in the sunlight. Your hand gets warm and the space behind your hand (the shadow) gets cold. Does your blood boil? No. All kinds of stuff happens, your hand gets a little warmer, and the energy absorbed gets released in various ways.
Thus the Sun shines on the Earth, the Earth gets a little warmer, and that heat is then radiated away (in all directions). The problem is that the system has to balance: over time the energy in equals the energy out (remember: energy cannot be created or destroyed). Earth gets a little warmer–more energy released. Earth gets a little colder–less energy released. All kinds of negative feedback here. Guess what? The single most important factor is the slight variability of Solar Flux (all wavelengths). Proof: the Maunder minimum.
Were there any positive feedback, the Greenland ice cores would show much larger swings. But they don’t.
Sorry, AGW fanatics. This has been going on for a LONG time. And the flux predates humanity by some billions of years. We didn’t do it, we are not doing it, we can’t do it.
I doubt that we are even minor actors in the drama.
You can’t escape the laws of thermodynamics. You just can’t. Entropy always wins. Better go look again at the energy budgets for Mercury, Venus, the Moon, and Mars. Everything out there balances. So do we.

I have to agree with Dr. Spencer. Very sad to see this here.

Its nonsensical. Even with my understanding of movement and momentum, I am supposed to see no involvement of Brownian movement. I understand the radiation input, powering the system, and the radiation of molar body, by to lay a flat assumption that the molecule goes up? Illogical. Simplistic, yes. Reality no.

Just to throw something else into the melting pot, infrared photons can do different things:
A: IR-photon + CO2 –> IR-photon + CO2
B: IR-photon + CO2 + (N2 or O2) –> CO2 + (N2 or O2)
Type A interaction could be said to provide back-radiation (some of the IR-photons return to Earth).
Type B interactions provide a direct heating effect on the atmosphere, no back-radiation.
We’ve probably already had most of the heating from Type A. It is Type B that is still growing, from the “wings” of the CO2 absorption bands, mostly due to pressure-broadening, but how big is this new heating? My gut feeling says not very big at all, but quite tricky to calculate …

Note that rising air cannot lose energy with altitude other than by radiation to space.
Instead, KE at the surface is converted to PE off the surface and PE does not register as heat. The air loses heat but not energy as it rises adiabatically and gains heat but not energy as it falls adiabatically.
The adiabatic component of convection returns heat to the surface on descent by converting PE back to KE. That heat is not radiated back to the surface so including it as an addition to the underlying back radiation of 222 to make that back radiation 324 is wrong.
The non adiabatic (diabatic) portion is then dealt with in overall atmospheric emission of 165 from the atmosphere and 30 from clouds.
The accuracy of the individual components doesn’t matter for current purposes. The Trenberth diagram successfully shows how the system achieves overall balance by juggling the components.
The point I am making is that his treatment of some of the components is incorrect and if one takes proper account of the return of energy to the surface on adiabatic descent then the back radiation figure need be no higher than the figure for radiation from the surface.
If both figures are equal then there can be no surface warming from back radiation. All the action goes on off the surface.
For a balanced system the amount of energy stored and the rate at which energy is shed depend on mass, gravity and insolation but the method of shedding is shared between surface and atmosphere in variable proportions depending on the radiative characteristics of the atmosphere.
If the atmosphere had no radiative capability at all then radiative emission from the atmosphere would be zero but the Atmospheric Window would release 235 Wm2 from the surface.
If the atmosphere were 100% radiative then the Atmospheric Window from the surface would be zero and the atmosphere would radiate the entire 235 Wm2.
The difference between the two scenarios would be in the rate of convective overturning. Fast for a non radiative atmosphere and slow or near zero for a 100% radiative atmosphere.
One cannot prevent convection in a non radiative atmosphere due to uneven surface heating and the decline in temperature with height caused by the conversion of KE to PE with height.

Eliminating convection from the energy budget??? I think some correction to Trenberth’s energy budget may be in order, but I don’t think this post is helpful.

Kudos to Anthony for running this……. but sigh. Maybe we can have the interpretive dance next?

ferd berple has it right.

288K is not the surface temperature. It is the surface AIR temperature. There’s a substantial difference and it matters in these global scale budgetary considerations.

The more I look at this post, the less there is to like.
This is the third post in about a week that hurts the reputation of this blog and skeptics in general.
Skeptics are winning by sticking to the facts and questioning the consensus.
We do not need people using narrative to explain away physics.
We do not need conspiracies about governments buying up Australian farms.

This might show up my ignorance, but shouldn’t there be two energy budget diagrams, one for daytime/sunnyside and one for night time? The dynamics of each must be so different as to make it impossible to combine the two. The transfer mechanisms change, obviously, there’s nothing coming in on the dark side, but there’s still stuff going out…

What?

I cannot believe people are taking this for anything other than the hilarious satire that it is.
FWIW, Mr. Wilde, I think you should add a conclusion that this shows 97% statistically significant agreement with CAGW, but that more funding is needed. Then, take your pick of publishing offers, professorships, and conference keynotes.

Nylo said:
“If you want to add it in the higher layer (good luck with the demosntration), then substract it from the lower layer.”
Adding it at the surface is just fine. It soon gets conducted and convected to the air to replace what is lost by the air so no double counting.

@ henryhank
thanks for response
I suppose what I’m thinking is that the complex nature of this energy budget will not be served by this simplification, as different scenarios, day and night will have differnet variable changes attributable to different phenomena/causes in each. If one is trying to distinguish the changes and attribute them to, say CO2, water vapour, whatever, then the fundamental conditions must be considered. The simplified single energy budget diagram will hide this, or at least obscure it. (I am convinced that inc temp result in inc CO2 anyhow). So to try and attribute cause and effect in the simplified diagram, is, like trying to work with an average of two numbers and say what one of them is from that – but in a much more complex and chaotic system – just not possible.
Not sure I put the analogy very well, but

Nylo,
Your reading of my words is confused.
Anthony,
All posts here are good target practice for someone.
If you thought it was only good for the hopper then I would have preferred you had said so and not bothered to use it.
As things stand so far the objections are either sweeping generalisations without substance or appear to result from misreading.
An established fact is that air does warm as a result of the non-radiative adiabatic processe as it descends, some have accepted as much. That causes problems for radiative theory.
REPLY: My opinion on the backradiation and lapse rate silliness is well known, you should have known better than to submit it. If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen. Hopefully you’ll learn something from the comments. – Anthony

There is nothing special about new label’s for radiation! “cAGW” past present and future will not change what radiative physics has always been. Here are with 17 years of no warming while the Slayers obfuscate by making up back radiation to be a new boogie man. How many angels can dance on radiations pin head?

Box of Rocks says:
April 8, 2014 at 5:14 am
I have a sens that the original idea from Trenberth is incorrect, I at this point in time can’t put my finger on it.

Consider the idea that ‘backradiation’ is twice as bright as the Sun as a candidate.

“If a GHG molecule is too warm for its height then DWIR back to the surface dominates but the molecule rises away from the surface and cools until DWIR again equals UWIR.
If a GHG molecule is too cold for its height then UWIR to space dominates but the molecule then falls until DWIR again equals UWIR.”
More of the intelligent radiator theory. It’s amazing that individual molecules have the intellectual capacity to know which direction to throw off a photon. Or even what its current altitude is, or its thermal relationship to its surroundings, or its orientation. Do you suppose that all GHGs have GPS AND thermal sensing equipment too, WITH gyroscopes?. And where do they get their signals with which to compare and correct? And what material is used for the thrusters? Now, if you put enough of these smart molecules together, there is no telling what sort of ingenious things they could make. Do you suppose they could gang up with one another and make a climate model that works?

“… never 50% except at the immediate surface. ” Well, not unless the earth is flat.

Don’t forget the epic Part 2 of Slaying the Slayers, Anthony.

Alec Rawls said:
“the dominant energy transfer, is that heat is being removed from the surface by evaporation and released in the upper atmosphere by condensation. That energy transport cannot be ignored just because it is not via radiation!”
That is part of the adiabatic process and is covered by the radiative losses from atmosphere to space at 165 and clouds at 30. Therefore it is not being ignored.
That ‘leakage’ from within the atmosphere is constantly being replaced by incoming shortwave heating of the surface which then warms the air by conduction.
The adiabatic part comes back to KE at the surface again on descent. and it is that adiabatic part which is net zero but AGW theory has that in as a net cooling effect as well as the diabatic part.

Michael D Smith said:
“More of the intelligent radiator theory. It’s amazing that individual molecules have the intellectual capacity to know which direction to throw off a photon. Or even what its current altitude is, or its thermal relationship to its surroundings, or its orientation.”
Density differentials in the horizontal plane do it just fine.
Do you think the molecules in a thermal uplift make a conscious decision ?
If they are too warm for their height relative to the lapse rate slope they will rise and vice versa. Do you think radiative molecules ‘know’ when to resist ?

[ http://www.amazon.com/Slaying-Sky-Dragon-Greenhouse-Theory-ebook/dp/B004DNWJN6 ]
I looked, and I don’t see any association of the Slaying the Sky Dragon book with the author of the post, who is being falsely asserted to be associated with it.
I see Tim Ball and Alan Siddon’s names associated with the book – and they’re some of the most respected people in Climate debate, having been responsible for several prominent global warmers’ decided undoings.
Kiehl-Trenberth isn’t a scientific document and is fatally flawed from several directions: no mention anywhere of the mandatory 324 W/sq/meter up inherent to all consensus climate belief is first.
This omission alone means it isn’t legitimate scientific dialog, nor is it real documentation of science.
No matter how many scientifically failed, richly, and thoroughly humiliated wannabes, point to it as the flag they prefer to be laughed out of history’s serious scientific discussions flying.

I disagree with Stephen’s analysis, but I don’t see the snarky comments, without any attempt to bring clarity to the issue, as being particularly helpful, or reflecting any particular understanding from those who make them.
Nylo @ April 8, 2014 at 4:50 am hits the flaw that I see, though I think there is a nuance which he has not pointed out. Photon emission can increase, as well as decrease, the translational kinetic energy of radiating atmospheric particles, so the net change in translational energy amongst all those particles returning to the surface should be effectively nil. However, they now have unexcited degrees of freedom which will then get filled, due to equipartition, resulting in a net cooling effect.
The problem with Trenberth’s diagram, as with so many of the half-baked analyses relating to this problem, is that it is static. If you increase the “back-radiation”, there is no opposite reaction from Thermals and Evapo-transpiration, or from Clouds.
The casual GHE effect is explained in purely radiative terms. However, convection provides another path for heat to flow to radiating elements in the upper atmosphere, which can short circuit the radiative transfer effect. That convection increases with increasing temperature, too, providing a negative feedback.
I have previously made analogy to an automobile’s cooling system. The radiator actually blocks air flow and radiative transfer from the engine. If you look at the radiation alone, you would conclude that the radiator actually heats the engine above what it would otherwise be.
However, that misses completely the overwhelming advection of coolant from the engine to the fins of the radiator, which cools the engine.
The so-called GHGs in the atmosphere are radiators. They are the major cooling outlets for the atmosphere. If you pipe heat to them, in whatever form, they will eliminate it to space. They are like the fins of the radiator in an automobile. If you add to them, it is like making the fins of the automobile radiator larger.
Yes, they will block more direct radiation from the engine. But, they will more efficiently eliminate heat transferred to them by other means. The net effect can easily be zero. And that, indeed, is that the data are telling us. There is no discernible surface temperature sensitivity to rising CO2. The global temperature record shows a steady rise since the LIA, established well before rising CO2 could have had an effect, overlaid with a ~60 year cyclical component. There is no identifiable secular component which correlates to atmospheric CO2 concentration.

Wow! 342 w/m-2 incoming solar radiation gets magnified to 492 w/m-2 at the surface. That’s a cool thermodynamic trick!

Willis Eschenbach says:
April 8, 2014 at 11:18 am
“Their basis is described in the underlying document, Earth’s Global Energy Budget. People commenting without having read that are just guessing …”
Willis,
I tried your link but it seems to have been disconnected.
I think I found the paper here http://www.geo.utexas.edu/courses/387h/PAPERS/kiehl.pdf
Is that correct?
[Try here … w.]

The “Skydragons” have a point that Trenberth’s figures are oversimplified, not showing a day/night difference. To take care of that, check “Newton Cooling” out at wiki,
and take into consideration that the earth is NOT asymptotically cooling to 0 K at night, but to the higher temperatue of the atmosphere.
I did a rough calculation of daily cooling of the atmosphere.
mass atmosphere = 5* 10^18 kg=5*10^21gm
temp atmosphere 255K (effective radiating temp to space- underestimates heat content)
specific heat 1.01 joules/gm C
5* 10^21*1.01*255= 1.288 * 10^24 joules
radius earth = 6400km= 6.4*10^6 meters.
area earth = 4 pi r^2 =514,718,540,364,021.76
240 watts/sq meter = 240 joules/sec per square meter
60 sec/min*60 min/hr*24hr/day=86,400 secs per day
5.147* 10^14 sq meters*240 joules/sec/sq meter *8.64*10^4 secs/day= 1.067*10^22 joules per day radiated away
1.067*10^22/1.288*10^24 = 0.83%
So the atmosphere as a whole cools by less than 1% over the course of a day. That figure makes sense when you figure that the earth’s surface temperature my change by 10 C or more overnight far more than average changes over a week, but weather patterns persist for several days, and that’s why meteorologists can predict daily highs out a week or so. That cooling is obviously mostly from the
earth’s surface and air near the surface ,leaving most of the atmosphere unchanged.

The problem when you introduce nonsense like this is that other weirdoes chip in with their own brand of competing nonsense. AlecM for instance with his own nonsensical brand of physics that only he pretends to understand.
Willis Eschenbach April 8, 2014 at 11:18 am
I can’t follow your link. I get object not found. Is this problem at my end or is the link incorrect? Would like to see it, thanks.

dbstealey says:
April 8, 2014 at 10:30 am
Duster says:
… the inward or down-welling LIR is never 50% of the reradiated IR…
That has been my understanding for a long time now. Greenhouse gases radiate in all directions, therefore a CO2 molecule at, for example, a 20 km altitude would re-radiate an IR photon that it absorbed from the surface in all directions, therefore far less than 50% of the re-radiated photons would return to heat the earth. Most would proceed into outer space. It is only at the surface that a photon has a 50% chance of warming the planet. The rest of the photons radiate into space, cooling the planet.
That is just one of several arguments falsifying the greenhouse gas conjecture.
I don’t think it falsifies the greenhouse conjecture. The interaction between GHGs and LIR is a laboratory fact. I do think that there are a great many folks who are thinking about the same problem in such profoundly different terms that they don’t understand each other and, instead a “come again” and a “please explain your first-principles assumptions more clearly,” there is a great deal of “no, no, you’re wrong.” A lot of the argument hinges upon the semantics of the words “greenhouse effect,” which has been admitted to be a misnomer for years.
Off hand I would far rather hear a “slayer’s” opinion than that of a believer in CAGW, if only because the CAGW believer has divorced him- or herself from empirical reality and demonstrable geological history in favour of computer games (-ah computer models, models, I meant models) and scary numbers. The CAGW faithful are in their own minds heroically defending the planet from the rest of us – drama, not science.

MikeB: prove to the other readers using standard physics that anything i have written here is wrong. You won’t be able to. I measured coupled convection and radiation in plants and lab for decades and made optical pyrometers from scratch. The literature is immense, as is the experimental data; the theory is still being developed but it’s tough.Then along comes Climate Alchemy and claims a Radiation Field (aka Irradiance) is a real energy flux rather than the potential energy flux of that emitter to a sink at absolute zero. This is a basic failure of what to me was 1st year degree physics.
Engineers are taught to calculate the two S-B equations and the difference of RF is the predicted real IR flux. Trenberth adds the DOWN RF to the net real IR flux and gets the UP RF, claiming it’s a real rather than a potential energy flow. This was and is an appalling scientific mistake and the fudges are worse. All process engineers I have spoken too, agree this Energy Budget is wrong.
When ‘back radiation’ aka ‘IR Forcing’ increases, net surface IR emission decreases. To get the net heat transfer, surface temperature must increase to increase the other heat transfer modes. There can be no creation of energy. You can prove this by MODTRAN, written by professionals. it sets real total heat transfer from surface to lower atmosphere for 15 deg C surface temperature consistent with the right OLR as between 100 and 170 W/m^2 or so if you do some simple runs.
What climate Alchemy does is to force extra imaginary heat into the base and cools the top, apparently to prove the imaginary extended GHE exists when it can’t.

Trenberth, besides being caught in lies about hurricanes and global warming (Climategate), is a science goof. He calls the diagram, “The global annual mean Earth’s energy budget”, when all the “flows” are in terms of power, not energy. The First Law of Thermodynamics relates to the conservation of “energy”, not power.

Steven Wilde is not a Slayer and his “physics” doesn’t follow what the Slayers criticize about the K&T Model. The problem is an ontological one: taking solar flux which impinges only in real time and over a hemisphere as a cosine distribution, but averaging it linearly over the entire Earth instead, produces a numerical value of temperature forcing (-18C) which wouldn’t even be able to melt ice, and is hence not physically meaningful. Hence the K&T style diagram isn’t physically meaningful nor is any physics it purports to demonstrate, or invent, physically meaningful. It is not ontological. The light bulb test is a really good one though, but you have to be careful about interpreting the results, scientifically.

Commie Bob: The amount of heat convected upwards is one of the simplest energy fluxes to measure. Simply take the amount of rain that falls on the earth in a year and calculate how much energy is released into the atmosphere when water vapor condensed to produce that rain. The only instrument you need is a meter stick to measure rainfall and the heat of vaporization of water that has been determined through numerous well-controlled laboratory experiments (not difficult, uncontrolled, non-transparent measurements in the atmosphere). It turns out that average precipitation is very close to 1 m per year. (Deserts get almost nothing, tropical rainforests 2+ m; so the mean must lie somewhere near 1 m). The power need to vaporize 1 cubic meter of water in one year is roughly 80 J/s (W), which is how Trenberth’s value was calculated. (The actual number is higher, because some precipitation falls as frozen water, which releases about 10% more heat than rain.)
There are thousands of independent measurements of radiative fluxes made with a variety of instruments. Sensible heat WAS not measured by Trenberth – it was chosen to produce an energy imbalance of about 1 W/m2 a guesstimate from how fast the planet is warming. In later work, he had to reduce the imbalance, because ARGO showed less heat flowing into the ocean than previously estimated. Trenberth claimed his value was in line with estimates from reanalysis, but he doesn’t use those number directly. Sensible heat is basically a fudge factors that doesn’t appear unreasonable.

Stephen Wilde says:
April 8, 2014 at 10:25 am
Willis said:
“It doesn’t matter that “the moist adiabatic lapse rate during ascent is less than the dry lapse rate”. That’s true … but it doesn’t return energy to the surface, that would be a violation of the Second Law”
It doesn’t return energy to the surface. It reconverts PE to KE as it approaches the surface. No violation.”
That interesting part of it.
How much?
I mean is largely to do with nighttime temperature and does it add a degree or 2 to night time temperatures [globally]?
-It does matter that the dry rate is greater than the moist rate because there is then more warming on the descent than there was cooling on the ascent for the same distance of travel.-
So, it’s more significant in drier regions??
-In the hydro cycle it is primarily radiation from condensate that reaches space and not radiation from the bulk air mass.-
“I find it quite bizarre that Steven Wilde claims that the earth’s surface doesn’t lose heat by either conduction/convection or evaporation, but purely by radiation. That flies in the face of all common sense as well as physics.”
-The surface both loses and regains heat from conduction / convection. That is the point that has been missed.
First KE is taken up and converted to PE and then it is brought down and converted back to KE. The adiabatic portion is net zero because no new energy enters or leaves. There is a diabatic portion too but that is replaced by new incoming solar energy.-
So could say it this way, tropics with higher troposphere- this height matters?

Box of Rocks, there are better ones:
Showing uncertainty:

Showing more than one atmospheric layers:

Showing net heat flows:

[Thanks, John. I’ve brought the images inline. The middle of the three is mine, with two layers. It is the simplest model which can be energy-balanced (output at each atmospheric layer equals input, with half going up and half going down). -w]

I don’t trust analyses that examine lots of details. It’s too easy to overlook something critical. (Cutting to the essentials omits detail that might be useful in modelling dynamic changes with time, but it is less prone to error and gives good steady-state insights.) For example, there is one error in this paper that seems to be critical:

… if a molecule at the surface is at the correct temperature for its height. If it is not at the correct surface temperature it will simply move towards the correct height by virtue of density variations in the horizontal plane (convection).

This is incorrect. The temperature gradient determined by the adiabatic lapse rate represents a maximum gradient. Molecules on the ground level that are hotter than the lapse rate wrt the layer above will convect upwards, but colder molecules will sit there just fine, unless conduction or radiation intervene. Think of it like a pile of sand: too steep, sand grains roll downhill, but too shallow? It doesn’t heap itself up.
Does this mistake invalidate the whole paper? I don’t know, but it isn’t my job to find out. The author should fix this mistake and all the others people suggest and put up a revised version. That’s a tall order given the many details involved, but it is to the author’s credit for making the attempt, and to Anthony’s that he posted it despite his personal misgivings.

“””””…..joeldshore says:
April 8, 2014 at 4:43 pm
ferd berple says:
if GHG is radiating 324 inwards, it must be radiating 324+ outwards.
This is the sort of argument that sounds reasonable but is false. For an infinitesimally-thin layer so that there is never more than one absorption event, it would be true. However, when there are multiple absorptions and re-emissions, it is false. ……”””””””
Joel, while I generally agree with your statement, I don’t think you have presented it very well.
For any arbitrary atmospheric layer, that is radiating, however you want to explain how that happens, the radiation spectrum, depends on say the H2O or CO2 line frequencies, and the effects of density and Doppler broadening due to local Temperature. That radiation is isotropic, so half goes up, and half goes down.
The upward proceeding LWIR radiation, encounters a less dense atmosphere, and a colder one, so the GHG absorption spectrum lines are less broadened.
The downward proceeding radiation, encounters a denser warmer atmosphere which has broader GHG absorption lines, so the downward radiation is more likely to be re-absorbed, than is the upward, which continues to get a less blocked passage to freedom as it proceeds towards space.
So yes; multiple re-absorption / re-emission does occur, but the atmospheric gradients favor the escape route, over the return to surface route.

Can I ask a really dumb global warming theory question ? The earth is about 4 billion years old. The suns been warming the planet for all this time ‘green house gases’ have existed in our atmosphere for millions of years. Why isn’t the planet much hotter?
If the mechanism presented for the theory is correct. Greenhouse Gases have been present in our atmosphere for millions of years.
Why haven’t we already overheated ?

Ron C. says:

“The process by which increasing GHGs increases the surface temperature is not by increasing the lapse rate. It is by raising the effective radiating level (i.e., roughly speaking, the level in the atmosphere at which a photon has a better than even chance to escape to space without being absorbed).”
You and others keep saying this, yet radiosonde data contradicts this notion. What is true: your theory or the data?

How does radiosonde data contradict this? Hint: If you are thinking about the lack of a so-called “hot spot” in the troposphere, that has absolutely nothing to do with what I am talking about.

JustAnotherPoster says:

Can I ask a really dumb global warming theory question ? The earth is about 4 billion years old. The suns been warming the planet for all this time ‘green house gases’ have existed in our atmosphere for millions of years. Why isn’t the planet much hotter?

Because as the planet heats up, it emits more energy back into space.
In other words, the question to be asked is: “How warm will does the temperature of the Earth have to be in order that it emits back into space the same amount of energy as it receives from the sun?” (So that it neither warms nor cools globally.) And, the answer is that how warm it has to be depends on various factors, including the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The Earth has to be about 33 deg C warmer because of the effects of greenhouse gases than it would be without those effects (assuming all else, including albedo, remain the same).

Slartibartfast says:
“I’d be happier if “Back radiation” or “Backradiation” were erased from the GW lexicon. It’s just radiation. There isn’t anything special about it that merits a new name.
Except it’s been “used”, maybe. But radiation doesn’t care who had it next to last.”
“REPLY: That’s a good idea, really the only thing that is happening is retarding the escape of energy to space – Anthony”
With respect,
“retarding” is a very poor word choice.
A
better choice might be: “Slowing the velocity of the energy escaping to space”. However that is clearly incorrect since the energy (LWIR in this case) is speeding away from the surface at close to the speed of light in a vacuum, and accelerating as the atmosphere diminishes and transitions into a vacuum. While doing so the surface is left bereft of the energy that just left.
Then of course some (less than 50%) of that packet of energy returns for another try at warming the surface. This time its velocity decreases as the atmosphere becomes denser. And it again heats the surface which then cools. This effect (GHE/Backradiation, whatever you want to name it) simply delays the flow of energy through the Sun/Earth/Atmosphere/Universe system by causing some of the energy to make multiple passes through the system. It alternates as thermal energy (when absorbed by water/rocks/gases) and light when propagating between absorptions.
This creates a simple hybrid optical/thermal delay line. A similar effect happens inside an optical integrating sphere. It should be noted that when the energy input is “steady state” like sunshine this effect cannot be observed with the tools (FLIR/Radiometers, etc.) currently available.
This “delay line” effect only amounts to a few tens of milliseconds of delay to the energy flowing through the system. This is an important distinction from an effect that slows the velocity of (i.e. retards) energy flowing through a system like common thermal insulators (fiberglass, etc) do.
This slowing of velocity can (under the right circumstances; i.e. every other velocity in the system is faster) result in a higher retention of energy (i.e. a higher temperature).
So please go ahead and educate me about radiation flowing through a system, I’d love to hear your ideas.
Oh, and the light bulb experiment is both a poor theoretical example (the surface of the earth is not like a light bulb for purposes of energy flow considerations) and poorly executed by many folks. A light bulb is only a portion of an illumination system and it does interact with all other portions of the system (power supply AC/DC, reflectors, ambient temperatures, gases, the material used in the envelope, etc. etc.). It’s easy to set one up and measure it, it is quite another thing to properly understand what the measurements are telling you.
The missing heat is currently traveling away from the Earth as a spherical LWIR wavefront that is “X + d” light years away. In this equation X is the elapsed time since the energy arrived (100 years for sunlight from 1914) and “d” represents the slight delay from the “GHE”. This delay is of course a statistical distribution since some photons will bounce many times (Earth/Atmosphere/Earth/Atmosphere/Earth/Universe) and others will directly exit with no delay. “d” likely averages 5 milliseconds.
There, allow the comment if you wish, I’ll take my lumps.
Cheers, Kevin.

I think it’s commendable that Anthony publishes articles that he doesn’t agree with- but one could
say this is what this site does all the time. So if warmist or slayers it’s all grist.
But I don’t think the Earth surface absorbs any heat from back radiation. Nor do I think anyone can make something which can harvest this magical source of constant energy. It would wonderful solution to global energy if it were possible. 300 watts per square meter 24 hours a day at 20% efficiency would be great. Or if could get a portion of 300 watts times 24 hours: 7.2 kilowatts per day it would be an impressive compared to solar energy. When consider solar capital of world, Germany, which only gets average of 2 kilowatts per day of total flux of sunlight.
So question is, does average surface of Earth absorb 324 watts per square meter, or are areas of earth which get this much or more energy.
And if not an average of 324 watts per square meter, what is the more correct answer?

Stephen 6:50pm: “…balance at 222 Wm2. The logic and the physics are sound.”
Not sound logic. If your logic were sound then sun would not be able drive gliders & certain birds to be able to soar as they do with the 24 flux and the sun would not be able to drive the hydrological cycle as it does with the 78 flux. Both effects are observed and needed in the energy flux balances per the scientific method. Meaning 24 and 78 cannot be zeroed out by sound logic in nature.
The circulation changes commensurate with surface Tmean changes as observed.

Watching the amateurs circle the drain of the scientific discourse they invaded and sought to hand over to scientific piracy is just one of those things that has to happen.

gbaike said:
“And it follows if you were to have less reflection, there would be a warmer world??”
Yes, which is why I consider the effect of solar variability on tropopause height, the length of the lines of air mass mixing along the jet stream tracks, global cl;oudiness and consequent variations in the amount of solar energy able to enter the oceans as important for climate changes. Alter global albedo and you effectively alter insolation which, along with more mass or stronger gravity can affect system energy content.
Trick said:
“If your logic were sound then sun would not be able drive gliders & certain birds to be able to soar as they do with the 24 flux and the sun would not be able to drive the hydrological cycle as it does with the 78 flux. Both effects are observed and needed in the energy flux balances per the scientific method. Meaning 24 and 78 cannot be zeroed out by sound logic in nature.”
Gliders don’t rise under a descending air column and birds need to be selective as to where they soar. Solar heat at the surface drives the hydrological cycle but what goes up must come down. No solar heating, no convection.
The 24 and 78 only represent the adiabatic reversible component of the convective cycle. Due to the separate diabatic component ( increased when the atmosphere has radiative capability) and the fact that water vapour is lighter than air the strength of convection (both ascent and descent) is stronger than one would expect from those numbers alone.
Note that I do not necessarily subscribe to the K & T raw numbers. I just appreciate the neat way they have divided up the elements of the system for illustrative purposes.
That said, I have explained how it should be made better and why.

Mann was first flushed when McIntyre got his hands on his faked data.
He’s circled and circled, avoiding total flush.
He is being kept from leaving it right now by Dr. Timothy Ball, one of the authors of the book Slaying the Sky Dragon as well as the other man he messed up and tried to ruin.

[Slayer sophist, whatever – you’ve been told you aren’t welcome here when you link to such things (link removed) Feel free to be as upset as you wish. – Anthony]

Willis and Alec.
Your questions are reasonable so I’ll try and clarify. I didn’t want the original post to become even more detailed, I just wanted to start with the broad brush approach.
Energy certainly leaves the surface during uplift whether that be induced by heating of dry air at the surface or by creation of water vapour that is lighter than air at the same temperature.
Until the air returns to the surface on the descent half of the convective cycle there is a cooling of the surface to a temperature lower than it would have been otherwise (but not lower than 255K).
When it does return to the surface then the cooling stops and the temperature rises to 288K because the energy being taken up is matched by the energy being brought down.
That does not involve back radiation to the surface so if one has also added back radiation of the same amount (as Kiehl and Trenberth did) then there is double counting.
In the middle there is radiative loss to space from GHGs and particulates including condensation and that reduces the energy available to be converted back to KE on the subsequent descent. However, new solar energy is still flowing to the surface to replace that by first heating the surface and then conducting to the air so the air above the surface remains at 288K.
That loss is already in the diagram in the numbers 165 and 30 going out to space so the other figures of 24 and 78 can only be the adiabatic element that stays in the system and returns to the surface. An adiabatic process with no new energy added or energy lost is fully reversible.
Latent heat of evaporation, when released by condensation, is absorbed by the bulk of atmospheric mass when it is released and that bulk mass is largely non radiative so it cannot be radiated to space from height. Instead it goes to accelerated uplift and turns to PE which is later recovered as KE on the descent.
Since the uplift is accelerated the air has further to fall subsequently and that extra distance of fall recovers the additional PE created by the previously released latent heat.
In any event the only losses are the radiative ones covered by 165 and 30.The rest returns to the surface as KE recovered from PE.
Note that all this has to be averaged globally. The situation locally is chaotic, especially within individual convective cells, as Willis correctly notes.
Nonetheless it works as I say and this would not have been so new or radical 50 years ago.
Here is a link to information on adiabatic warming:
http://apollo.lsc.vsc.edu/classes/met130/notes/chapter6/adiab_warm.html
You can readily see that air with a temperature of 10C at 700 mb warms to 25C at 1000 mb with no energy added or removed. It is all done from reconversion of PE to KE.
It is important to realise that the descending warmed air need not heat the surface or reduce the rate of surface cooling.
All it has to do is offset the cooling that would otherwise have occurred from continuing uplift elsewhere.
That is why the surface is at 288K and not 255K

Further to my last crit.. The transfers on the right of the diagram, the GHG interactions(?), seem to have no negative feedback control. All systems have negative feedbacks to stop criticality running amoke. Here there are none so how are the GHG interactions controlled? What is to stop the feedbacks, as shown, not running to uncontrolled increasing warming?
Why, in light of past ice ages with very high CO2 atmospheric content, did the ice ages actually start?
And why are dry deserts HOTTER than very humid tropical rainforests? This theory claims the opposite.

Leonard Weinstein said:
“If there are absorbing gases and clouds and aerosols, this effective average location of radiation to space occurs at higher altitude, and adiabatic heating below that altitude assures the ground will be hotter than without the absorbing atmosphere, as on Venus and Earth.”
It is that assumption that the surface would be hotter in the presence of absorbing gases and clouds which is the issue.
With no radiative gases the effective radiating height would be the ground and with 100% effective radiation the effective radiating height would be at the top of the atmosphere so it is true to assert that absorbing gases and clouds raise the effective radiating height.
But does it follow that the surface is any hotter ?
Only if one sticks slavishly to the lapse rate slope as it would be with no absorbing gases or clouds.
If they change the slope then changed height need not change surface temperature.
I would say that, because the system is not being supplied with any additional energy from outside, the rise in height is INSTEAD OF a rise in surface temperature because with absorbing gases and clouds more of the energy absorbed and emitted can be dealt with by the atmosphere without involving the surface.
What would happen in practice is that for dry air the lapse rate slope would change away from the ideal slope on the ascent part of the convective cycle and change the opposite way on the descent part of the cycle so each would cancel out.
We can see from the vertical thermal profile of Earth’s atmosphere that radiative gases do distort the lapse rate slopes. The reversed slope in the stratosphere is a prime example which is due entirely to the powerful radiative presence of ozone.
Convection would change so as to net out the changed slopes on both the ascent and the descent and in doing so would regulate the rate of energy flow through the system so as to offset the thermal effect of the absorbing gases and clouds.
We can see with water vapour that the slope on the ascent and the slope on the descent need not be the same.
Convection would juggle the proportions of energy flowing to space from the atmosphere itself and through the Atmospheric window from the surface which is something I pointed out above.
But this is going way beyond the point of my essay which was to draw attention to the fact that adiabatic warming on descent should be shown as an offset to Thermals and Evapo-transpiration in the K & T diagram which means that the extra 102 Wm2 of DWIR constitutes double counting.
The aversion here to considering adiabatic warming on descent as an offset to cooling on ascent will be seen as a major error in due course.

Stephen 7:36pm: ”Gliders don’t rise under a descending air column…what goes up must come down. No solar heating, no convection.”
Good; then you accept the notion top post cartoon is correct after all since the 24 and 78 flow observed go up for gliding and hydrological as shown in the cartoon then 24 and 78 observed come down as shown in the cartoon. No correction to zero for 24 and 78 flow needed after all. In non-adiabatic reality also need to comply with entropy consideration.

pochas
You can’t accept that air warms on the way down ?
Here is a link to information on adiabatic warming:
http://apollo.lsc.vsc.edu/classes/met130/notes/chapter6/adiab_warm.html
You can readily see that air with a temperature of 10C at 700 mb warms to 25C at 1000 mb with no energy added or removed. It is all done from reconversion of PE to KE.
It doesn’t retain the energy lost by radiation but that gets replaced by new solar energy arriving at the surface.
Most of the conducted energy is in the adiabatic exchange as PE and the higher you go the more is in PE form which does not radiate so only a portion leaks out to space via radiation.

Willis said:
“That’s why they’re called net flows and not individual flows, because the one arrow shows the net of the two processes”
You can’t have a net flow within a reversible adiabatic process. The ascent and the descent involve no addition or removal of energy.
You could say that there is a net radiative upward flow incorporated within the adiabatic exchange but those arrows cannot be that because K & T already have the outgoing 165 from the atmosphere and 30 from clouds to space as a separate pair of numbers higher up in the diagram.
Having allocated the 165 and 30 to the radiative flow out to space the 24 and 78 must be the adiabatic portion which must always be net zero. You said yourself that the adiabatic process is ‘a wash’.
And so it is.

Again no one seems to have actually answered the dumb question I asked a while ago…….
Greenhouse gases have existed for millions of years in our atmpsphere. The processes of ‘back radiation’ therefore must have been occurring for millions of years, as posed by the diagram, if that’s the theory on how our atmpsphere works…
Why isn’t our atmosphere already hot and or Venus like ?
All things being equal adding more C02 or other gases into the atmosphere should increase the temperature by the process of ‘back radiation’ according to the GHG theory.
But the problem is…. This should have been occurring for millions of years a these gases and the sun have been running these processes for millions of years.
Why isn’t the planet much much hotter now ?

Willis 10:59am: “Which ever way you do it is correct.” As result but not as a process in either accounting nature or physical nature.
Your CPA will record both $revenue and $expense to calculate the net flow = $pre-tax profit. Both flows are real. Flows may be cash or non-cash but are real and have a sign convention. I would argue if show just the net then material information is lost like checks in the mail – just what was that revenue anyway – didja’ hide some cash income on the side?
Likewise in nature all matter radiates ceaselessly at all frequencies, there is no exception ever found. Even at absolute zero? Absolute zero is unattainable. So your top picture shows the real story in nature when applied to radiation fields & accounting. In physics, the space in between is a photon bath of radiation. This is material, if just show net some photons disappear from universe energy supply for a short time.

Leonard Weinstein said:
“The convection due to buoyancy and turbulent mixing maintain the adiabatic lapse rate (as modified by condensing moisture, i.e., wet adiabatic lapse rate) even with the shift in location in radiation to space”
If you recall, I did say that the convection due to buoyancy and turbulent mixing alter the vertical temperature profile to negate the effects of GHGs.
In doing so, the adiabatic lapse rate overall is indeed maintained as you say but that does not mean that you can automatically back calculate the surface temperature from any new effective emission height using the adiabatic lapse rate.
The slope of the adiabatic lapse rate from surface to space may be maintained overall but you will still get variations in the slopes on the way up through all the various atmospheric layers.
The Earth’s slope is in the form of a large ‘W’ laying on its side which gives lots of scope for layer to layer variability and counterbalancing.
So GHGs can still distort the ambient lapse rate slope and raise the effective emission height where they are present but yet leave surface temperature unaffected because adjustments to the slopes elsewhere in the atmosphere maintain the ‘ideal’ adiabatic slope in the background.
Furthermore they can distort the slope in equal and opposite directions even within their own layer and if that happens you wouldn’t even get a change in the emission height because the distortion on the ascent would be offset by the distortion on the descent.
Warm molecules rising push the effective emission height upwards but cold molecules falling push the effective emission height downwards and that can happen at different locations within a single layer.
You must realise that the atmosphere is a dynamic energy balancing machine of considerable complexity but simple fundamentals using a combination of radiative and non radiative processes which each adjust for variations in the other.
How else could Willis come to perceive that there is a thermostatic mechanism ?
It isn’t just about tropical thunderstorms 🙂

Alec Rawls said:
“I see no reason to think from the diagram that Trenberth is misinterpreting adiabatic warming and cooling as movements of energy. Does he actually say this? ”
Can you make the numbers balance on the basis that the 24 and 78 are just a part of the 165 and 30 ?
On that basis where does the extra 102 Wm2 come from for the DWIR figure of 342 ?
It should have radiated out shouldn’t it ?
Since there is no downward arrow for the 24 and 78 and K&T increase DWIR by exactly the same amount I guess they are saying that the 102 taken up by thermals and Evapo-transpiration is all coming back as DWIR.
But what about adiabatic warming on descent ?
That is a non radiatve process so it cannot be coming back as DWIR but they seem to say it is.
The simplest scenario is this:
i) The radiative exchange between surface and atmosphere is in balance at 222 Wm2.
ii) The adiabatic exchange between surface and atmosphere is in balance at 102 Wm2.
iii) Energy absorbed by surface and atmosphere from space ( 67 + 168) is in balance with energy emitted by surface and atmosphere to space (165 + 30 + 40) which is 235 in each case.
The effect of radiative capability is therefore only to redistribute energy so that 168 absorbed by the surface becomes 40 emitted by the surface and 67 absorbed by the atmosphere becomes 195 emitted by the atmosphere (165 + 30).
Transparency to incoming shortwave and opacity to outgoing longwave simply re-apportions the share of the same amount of energy emitted to space between emissions from surface and atmosphere
What is wrong with that ?

JustAnotherPoster says:
April 9, 2014 at 11:27 am
You are correct that there is a positive feedback loop in there. More back-radiation produces higher temperature, produces more back-radiation, produces higher temperature, and so on. However, the process peters out because the higher temperature also produces more radiation in frequency bands which are not back-radiated. The process reaches equilibrium when the total energy flux in = total energy flux out.
Willis Eschenbach says:
April 9, 2014 at 11:31 am
Yes, walk past a golf course or a large cemetary at night, and you will feel the distinct cooling effect of evaporation from all that watered lawn. That heat gets transported up through atmosphere, where it can be radiated away.
That is precisely the point I was making above. There are more paths to the planet’s atmospheric radiators than mere surface radiation, and that fact means that the cartoon greenhouse effect is a vast oversimplification.

Trick,
Just passing through but your equation is for a blackbody only. It does not apply to matter which has varying emmisivity at different wavelengths (like thin gases).