Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Once again, the crazy idea that downwelling longwave radiation (DLR, also called infra-red or IR, or “greenhouse radiation”) can’t heat the ocean has raised its ugly head on one of my threads.
Figure 1. The question in question.
There are lots of good arguments against the AGW consensus, but this one is just silly. Here are four entirely separate and distinct lines of reasoning showing that DLR does in fact heat the oceans.
Argument 1. People claim that because the DLR is absorbed in the first mm of water, it can’t heat the mass of the ocean. But the same is true of the land. DLR is absorbed in the first mm of rock or soil. Yet the same people who claim that DLR can’t heat the ocean (because it’s absorbed in the first mm) still believe that DLR can heat the land (despite the fact that it’s absorbed in the first mm).
And this is in spite of the fact that the ocean can circulate the heat downwards through turbulence, while there is no such circulation in the land … but still people claim the ocean can’t heat from DLR but the land can. Logical contradiction, no cookies.
Argument 2. If the DLR isn’t heating the water, where is it going? It can’t be heating the air, because the atmosphere has far too little thermal mass. If DLR were heating the air we’d all be on fire.
Nor can it be going to evaporation as many claim, because the numbers are way too large. Evaporation is known to be on the order of 70 w/m2, while average downwelling longwave radiation is more than four times that amount … and some of the evaporation is surely coming from the heating from the visible light.
So if the DLR is not heating the ocean, and we know that a maximum of less than a quarter of the energy of the DLR might be going into evaporation, and the DLR is not heating the air … then where is it going?
Rumor has it that energy can’t be created or destroyed, so where is the energy from the DLR going after it is absorbed by the ocean, and what is it heating?
Argument 3. The claim is often made that warming the top millimetre can’t affect the heat of the bulk ocean. But in addition to the wind-driven turbulence of the topmost layer mixing the DLR energy downwards into lower layers, heating the surface affects the entire upper bulk temperature of the ocean every night when the ocean is overturning. At night the top layer of the ocean naturally overturns, driven by the temperature differences between surface and deeper waters (see the diagrams here). DLR heating of the top mm of the ocean reduces those differences and thus delays the onset of that oceanic overturning by slowing the night-time cooling of the topmost layer, and it also slows the speed of the overturning once it is established. This reduces the heat flow from the body of the upper ocean, and leaves the entire mass warmer than it would have been had the DLR not slowed the overturning.
Argument 4. Without the heating from the DLR, there’s not enough heating to explain the current liquid state of the ocean. The DLR is about two-thirds of the total downwelling radiation (solar plus DLR). Given the known heat losses of the ocean, it would be an ice-cube if it weren’t being warmed by the DLR. We know the radiative losses of the ocean, which depend only on its temperature, and are about 390 w/m2. In addition there are losses of sensible heat (~ 30 w/m2) and evaporative losses (~ 70 w/m2). That’s a total loss of 390 + 30 + 70 = 490 w/m2.
But the average solar input to the surface is only about 170 watts/square metre.
So if the DLR isn’t heating the ocean, with heat gains of only the solar 170 w/m2 and losses of 390 w/m2 … then why isn’t the ocean an ice-cube?
Note that each of these arguments against the idea that DLR can’t warm the ocean stands on its own. None of them depends on any of the others to be valid. So if you still think DLR can’t warm the ocean, you have to refute not one, but all four of those arguments.
Look, folks, there’s lot’s of good, valid scientific objections against the AGW claims, but the idea that DLR can’t heat the ocean is nonsense. Go buy an infrared lamp, put it over a pan of water, and see what happens. It only hurts the general skeptical arguments when people believe and espouse impossible things …
w.
Willis Eschenbach @ur momisugly August 15, 2011 at 9:21 pm
Willis, I’m shocked! Putting aside just where you get your numbers from, they are somewhat similar to those in the Trenberth et al 2009 cartoon of energy balance. Do you NOT understand that EMR (radiation) IS A DIFFERENT FORM OF ENERGY TO HEAT? Radiation whizzes around in ALL directions but it is not HEAT. The net global average HEAT loss via radiation from the surface according to Trenberth is a mere 66, not 400 W/m^2, and the incoming averaged solar is 181 W/m^2. But, of course the annual global diurnal/ seasonal/ regional averages etc on that cartoon are a nonsense anyway, if you would like to proceed to a more complicated discussion
From tallbloke on August 16, 2011 at 12:38 am:
Dang it, tallbloke, I thought you were smarter than that. Guess you’re just not living up to your billing.
You’re examining two individual molecules. The top one passes a photon to the lower one, making the lower one “warmer.” Then what? Why would the lower one rise higher than the other? They are both affected by the same gravity, they have the same mass. Arguably, by acquiring that photon’s worth of energy and thus that much virtual mass, the lower one is infinitesimally more massive. So why would it rise?
Warmer water rises above cooler water because it’s less dense, there is less mass per unit volume. Density is an aggregate quality, takes more than one identical molecule each for two equal volumes to say one is more dense than another.
And why is warmer water less dense that cooler water (assuming both are above 4°C for fresh water and equal pressure)? Collisions. The warmer water has molecules that are more energetic, knocking the fellow molecules they impact farther away, leading to greater spacing than with cooler water. When thermal energy is transferred by collisions that’s known as heat conduction. The possibilities for conductive transfer of energy far outweigh those for radiative transfer in a liquid medium. If one molecule would gain energy by a radiative transfer, chances are excellent it will soon lose that energy to a cooler molecule by conductive transfer.
You’re looking at an unlikely form of energy transfer that effects a highly temporary energy increase, while arguing a molecule will rise above another identical molecule when acted on by gravity. I think you need some more thought about that mechanism you’ve proposed that “disproves” what Willis has said.
Not quoting any of your words Willis on this post
but after reading ALL of http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/08/14/its-not-about-feedback/
and visiting the website on buoys data I would suggest speaking with the pilots & or HQ of Mission Aviation Fellowship.
I am sure they would have much experience and comment for your current thesis.
PS the reason for suggesting this is that I flew as a passenger with them over 30 years and they know their industry and environment.
I’m with Bob_FJ.
I must say thogh I don’t ‘get’ the argument that a blanket around a human body simply slows cooling. That would be so if the body was set at an initial temperature and no longer warmed. But the body generates heat which it loses to the environment. A blanket will help prevent that loss true, but the air it traps and the blanket’s interior surface will be heated by the heat of the body. If the external temperature is ‘cold’ then the interior temperature will be warmer. That is warming, not slowing cooling.
Willis Eschenbach says:
August 15, 2011 at 2:15 pm
Still unclear on how a so-called “greenhouse” actually works?
The glass stops the hot air rising! Remove a pane from the roof and most of the heat escapes.
steven mosher says:
August 16, 2011 at 1:52 am
Hmm Tallbloke. Rather than trust a magazine about how reflective insulation works or does not work I think I trust the stuff I built for DOD. And I’ll use my thermos to keep my coffee from cooling faster than it would. And If I have to go near a wacking hot fire i’ll also wear a reflective suit
Hi Mosh. It’s all about relative scale of effects. Reflectivity becomes useful when the temperature differential between the two surfaces is high, like in the fire situation you mention. In the case of a cragfast climber at 37.5C whose outer layering is radiating at 10C into an ambient temperature of 3C, the benefit the space blanket gives in terms of preventing convective loss is far greater than the benefit of it reflectiing the emitted long wave from a 10C jacket with a 0.7 emissivity back onto the jacket. This is doubly true when the wind is blowing.
@mosher,
Thank you for the thermos analogy, I’d always assumed they worked by ‘trapping heat’ ;). Would a more suitable analogy for greenhouse gasses with regard to reflected DLR and the oceans not be a flask covered with a thin layer of soggy toilet paper? Sure, it would slow down heat loss through IR reflection, but to any remotely significant degree? Not making a point, just askin’. It would be nice to see Tallbloke’s points addressed with something other than snark too..
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
August 16, 2011 at 2:52 am
From tallbloke on August 16, 2011 at 12:38 am:
Radiative transfer is a quantum operation according to theory, a water molecule can’t pass part of a photon. If a water molecule emits a photon to it’s neighbor below and drops to a lower vibrational state it becomes ‘cooler’ that the molecule below, which will rise to displace it.
You’re examining two individual molecules. The top one passes a photon to the lower one, making the lower one “warmer.” Then what? Why would the lower one rise higher than the other?
It’s true I oversimplified the argument, but in the end I think we agree. Groups of molecules which have warmed each other up by collisions after having radiative energy imparted to them will be less dense per unit volume, and that’s why they are more buoyant against gravity than surrounding groups of cooler molecules and will rise.
The possibilities for conductive transfer of energy far outweigh those for radiative transfer in a liquid medium.
Your conductivity argument shows how ineffective conduction is in heating the ocean bulk, since the ocean surface is cooler than the water below. 2nd law and all that… So if conduction is more likely than radiative transfer, and conduction is limited by the fact that the surface is cooler than the subsurface, I think the general thrust of what I’m saying stands, despite the oversimplification you correctly pointed out.
Thanks for the response.
Willis your reply to my post was a question relating to chalk on blackboards. I had actually asked if you had any links to empirical evidence of IR radiation around the 15 micron band heating oceans. Sadly I must conclude from the nature of your reply that you do not have links to any such evidence.
After reading over 170 comments I am starting to believe that for all the money spent on AGW promotion, no one has actually done the simple experiment required.
A tank of sea water at a known temperature.
Air at a known temperature, humidity and wind speed.
IR source emitting only between 10 and 20 microns with a spectral peek around 15 microns.
A few accurate thermometers.
Who cares about chalk on blackboards? Has no one done this very simple empirical test?
(And no, Mr. Mosher the RC link is no where close to what is required. Scattered data points from a ship at sea. Measured emission not just backscattering of clouds and only looked at ocean skin temperature. And as to isolated testing of the 15 micron frequency totally useless.)
Note that radiation and absorption are reciprocal. If it cannot absorb, it cannot cool by emission. If you run your recording backwards, most of the basic laws of physics work exactly the same–emission becomes equivalent to absorption. As the concentration of water vapor in the atmosphere near the surface is quite high when compared to that of CO2, I expect that most of the local greenhouse effect near the surface is due to photons emitted from the water vapor in the air. This is often referred to as ‘back-radiation.’ I believe the argument being made is that this radiation is being rejected (perhaps reflected) while the normal LWIR radiation emitted from surface is being allowed to pass. I don’t think nature is that selective.
Yes, something is warming the oceans–sunlight. As far as I could tell; that was not the issue; it was the misconception that LWIR from local greenhouse gas molecules could not return heat to the ocean even though these same molecules had been heated by similar LWIR photons emitted from the surface of the ocean.
Willis:
I do not dispute your argument, but I write to point out what I think to be a significant omission from your article: i.e. consideration of how the back radiation inhibits loss of heat from depths of the ocean surface layer. However, some of your responses in the thread suggest to me that you are aware of the point.
I write to explicitly state the point.
The backradiation is IR so only heats the upper ~1 mm thickness of the ocean surface layer. Little of this heat can be moved to lower depths because it adds so much heat to so small a volume that most of the absorbed IR energy is removed by increased evapouration from the surface.
However, solar energy in visible wavelengths penetrates to many meters below the ocean surface and is absorbed at those depths. This heat from visible wavelengths can move up and down. That which reaches the surface will increase evapouration from the surface and, thus, not be available to add heat to lower depths of the ocean.
The heating of the surface layer by back radiation inhibits the heat from visible wavelengths reaching the surface and being removed by evapouration.
In effect, the heating of the ~1 mm surface layer by back radiation acts as an insulator which inhibits heat from below that thin layer reaching the surface. And this ‘insulant’ effect results in more heat absorbed from visible wavelengths being available to add to ocean heat content.
I cannot quantify this ‘insulant’ effect, but I suspect it is greater than the direct ocean heating from the back radiation.
Richard
I cannot really see why this has anything to do with climate change. The top mm of the ocean considering the opacity for short wave radiation is relavant for both absorbtion and emission. The temperature of the atmosphere – of which both the weather and climate are attributes – is determined by the ocean absorbtion, emission and evaporation, so whatever happens to the top layer is what determines weather and climate. .
Willis Eschenbach says:
August 15, 2011 at 11:46 pm
So the lower molecules, although warmed by the upper molecules, will be cooler than the upper molecules. As a result, despite the fact that they are warming, they won’t “head upwards” as you claim.
Hi Willis,
What I’m saying is generally true. It may get a bit more complex in the ‘skin layer’, see my reply to KD Knoebel above.
These basic points stand.
1) The ocean surface is cooler than the water below. So if your heat conducted from the surface where the water can be excited by back radiation leaves the surface warmer, it doesn’t stay that way for long. Moreover, within a very few iterations of your mechanism, representing only a short distance, the amount of energy available for more downward propagation will be negligible anyway.
2) The second law of thermodynamics says that heat won’t flow from cooler to hotter: So conduction is not going to work to heat the ocean bulk. It will work to cool it though, as heat flows from the warmer subsurface to the cooler surface.
3) The overall radiative flux cools the ocean at a rate of ~66W/m^2
The core point you’re claiming seems to be this:
The additional co2 in the atmosphere causes an increase in the downward component of the radiative flux, therefore the ocean will cool slighty slower than before, thus getting warmer because it can’t get rid of solar energy as fast as before.
Please let me know if you feel I’ve mischaracterised this from your point of view.
I haven’t done the calcs yet, but I’d like to know by how much you believe the downward component of the radiative flux will have theoretically increased from when co2 was at 270ppm.
If the ocean surface is 0.5C warmer than when co2 was at 270ppm, then we also need to know how much the upward component of the flux has increased due to the ocean surface radiating at a higher temperature. We can apply the Stefan- Boltzmann Equation to obtain that.
We need to know this because the key figure is the net figure obtained by subtracting the downward component from the upward component of LW radiation.
Once we have this change in net flux, we can compare that to the estimated forcing caused by the reduction in tropical cloud cover allowing greater insolation to the surface of the ocean 1980-1998 to see which is more likely to have caused most of the warming in the late C20th.
Agreed?
Willis
Regarding your comment@Willis Eschenbach says:August 15, 2011 at 10:27 pm
commenting upon my comment richard verney says:August 15, 2011 at 6:18 pm
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I have more than 40 years sailing experience. I am well acquainted with the sea first hand.
I have reviewed many thousands of ships logs covering deep ocean voyages, and leaving aside passages through the doldrums,, I can assure you that the times when a ship on a deep ocean voyage experiences weather conditions of BF4 or less is probably less than 10%. Indeed, it is not uncommon to see just a few days of BF4 or less on a deep ocean voyage. The number of days when a ship experiences BF2 or less is probably 2 or 3% (or even less). Of course, this is just an average and I accept that every voyage will be different, and the same voyage will experience different weather conditions from month to month (depending when the voyage takes place) and even if the same voyage is performed in the same month, there will be differences from year to year according to the then prevailing weather.
You have to bear in mind that we are dealing with microns. Even at BF 2, these few microns are wind swept.
When we see spray (white horses), we are observing visible effects. This is much more than the top few microns of the ocean. We are seeing millimetres if not centimetres of turbulence.
Unfortunately, the human eye does not have the resolution to see microns of turbulence. If it did have that resolution, it would see that the top few microns is wind swept even at BF2.
I do not dispute that what goes up, at some stage goes down. Most of this wind swept spray evaporates and eventually leads to the cloud formation of your earlier post and in turn some of the evaporated water is returned to the ocean or over land as rain. I accept that some part of the wind swept spray may not be fully evaporated and may re-marry the ocean. However, by the time that it has remarried, it has probably already re-radiated the photon received from the DWR such that it is no longer in an excited state.
Even if you get through that ‘barrier’ you still have the problem that the top mm of the ocean is cooler than the layer immediately below it and whilst the turning of the ocean may be effective to mix heat contained in the top 1/2m or metre of the ocean but it is difficult to see how it can effectively turn over the top few microns. To what extent do ‘eddy’ currents overlap the top few microns of the medium and drag those few microns downwards.
I would like to see your scientific explanation of the processes involved on a micron level.
Any warming by DLWR must be extremely miniscule. There are two beaches near my home both with different types of sand. The sand at Nokomis Beach is cool even at midday in summer. I assume the properties of the sand reflect almost all SWR (the sand looks white) so it does not heat up. The sand a few miles away at Manasota Beach is extremely hot at midday in summer. I assume that the properties of the sand absorb most of the SWR (the sand is grey). This sand gets so hot you can actually burn your feet. However, as soon as the Sun gets lower in the sky, the sand cools off rapidly so that you can walk comfortably on it even before sunset. My point is that if DLWR had any effect the sand at Manasota Beach would not cool so fast. Even if there was a small change in the rate of heat loss due to DLWR it has no discernible effect and is overwhelmed by the changes in other radiations.
John Eggert says:
August 15, 2011 at 2:26 pm
“1: A continuously heated, flat plate at 15 C is on one side, a parallel, continuously cooled plate at -273C is 20 meters away.”
If you told us the capacitance in farads we could work out the size of the plates, which in turn would give us an idea of the magnitude of the radiation window.
Here is a paper with the absorbtion vs temperature spectrum of water
http://www.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/research/borl/homepages/veronica/thesis/chapter5.pdf
‘Back radiation’ [‘DLR’] is Prevost Exchange Energy’: it can do no work because at equilibrium, it’s exactly offset by radiation from the opposite direction. That it appears to be higher under clouds is simply the result of higher emissivity. This, the oldest of the Radiation Laws, appears not to have been considered by IPCC researchers, nor have they apparently estimated gas emissivity from Hottel Charts, something I used to do when planning industrial heat treatment processes.
This and other major errors [‘cloud albedo effect’ cooling is really heating for thicker clouds, palaeo-data show warming of the ocean deeps started 2100 years before CO2 rose at the end of the last ice age, no check on thermochemical data for CO2-O2 mixtures which would have shown much lower CO2 ‘climate sensitivity’ ] should also have been picked up.
Miskolczi was forced to leave NASA in 2004 when he showed ‘back radiation’ is the artefact of a 1922 mathematical mistake. After commissioning work to find why ‘cloud albedo effect’ cooling wasn’t provable experimentally, NASA published a ‘surface reflection’ justification to claim it’s a small droplet effect. There’s no such physics.
A pattern is emerging. The latest claims, extra heat accumulation in the ocean deeps, double imaginary ‘cloud albedo effect’ cooling, appear to me to be a last ditch attempt to protect the high feedback CO2-AGW hypothesis for which there’s absolutely no experimental evidence.
Reportedly the UK Met. Office trying 50% solar, 50% CO2 in its weather forecasting for the UK; a straw in the wind?
Two words: heat conduction.
As Willis suggests, leave all the silly stuff to the other side.
Lets be mindful of our definitions and look carefully at what is happening at different wavelengths of radiant energy. The phrase “Downwelling Longwave Radiation (DLR)” is often used in the context and implied as ‘backradiation from CO2 as a GHG’. The two are NOT identical.
Hence the opening statement – ‘downwelling longwave radiation (DLR also called infra-red or IR, or ‘greenhouse radiation’) – lumps together things which should be considered separately.
First – Does inbound sunlight warm the ocean? Well of course. And that Inbound solar radiant energy includes a mix of UV (very short), visible, and longer wave IR. Yes, inbound sunshine contains IR, but there is virtually NO overlap of those IR wavelengths with the ‘greenhouse radiation’ wavelengths. You can’t just lump them together, which is why one must be careful of ‘heat lamp’ experiments that could include wavelengths other than GHG ‘backradiation from CO2’.
Next – In their paper, Kiehl and Trenberth 1997, the authors include the famous figure with 390 W m-2 upward Surface Radiation, and 324 Wm-2 Back Radiation. That gives (390 UP minus 324 Down), for a NET of 390 – 324 = 66 W m-2 UPward. Very difficult to heat a surface, either land or ocean, with a net upward loss of heat toward space. (we lose a little on every sale, but we make up for it on volume ::chuckle::)
CLOUDS – How did K&T 1997 get to 324 W m-2 backradiation”? From their abstract – “We find that for the clear sky case the contribution due to water vapor to the total longwave radiative forcing is 75 W·m-2, while for carbon dioxide it is 32 W·m-2. Clouds alter these values, and the effects of clouds on both the longwave and shortwave budget are addressed.” The backradiation from CO2 is only 32 W·m-2, or roughly 10% of the 324 total backradiation cited by K&T. The lion’s share of the 324 backradiation is from liquid H2O in the clouds. Once again we see that “Downwelling Longwave Radiation (DLR)” is NOT equivalent to ‘backradiation from CO2 as a GHG’. We must be careful of the wavelengths.
Finally, what about some real measurement data? Measured results cited in Evans and Puckring 2005, show CO2 backradiation of 31 to 35 W m-2 for clear sky winter time results (Ontario, Canada), which is a pretty good match for the K&T value. However at that same location, in summer with higher air temperatures and higher humidity, the H2O values went up, but the CO2 backradiation value DROPS to 10.5 W m-2. If the overlap of H2O and CO2 absorption/emission in air caused the CO2 value to drop with summertime humidity in Canada, I can only surmise that the CO2 backradiation over the ocean must be 10 or lower due to the high humidity. Similar backradiation tests in the very low humidity Antarctic showed that CO2 backradiation results there were always 2 to 2 1/2 times LOWER than H2O.
In conclusion – If the H2O as vapor (humidity) in the air is enough to absorb significantly in the CO2 wavelengths, the liquid surface must be an even better absorber, which makes it easy to believe that absorption of the CO2 wavelengths happens in a ‘thin layer’ at the surface.
If the backradiation of CO2 is on the order of 10 W m-2 to the Ocean, it would be difficult to conclude that CO2 as a GHG is doing much to heat the Oceans. And even more difficult to believe that the man-made part of that 10 W m-2 is doing much of anything significant to change the ocean energy balance.
respectfully,
Dave
From tallbloke on August 16, 2011 at 4:33 am:
Before Willis gets worked up into an even stronger “quote my words” rage, I’ll point out a glaring one right now. I’ve checked the original post and every reply Willis has made at this post. CO2 is mentioned nowhere by Willis. Why are you tagging him with that? The DLR comes from the greenhouse gases, of which water vapor is overwhelmingly the predominant one, which Willis is well aware of. Why muddle up an otherwise reasonable discussion by attributing a CO2 statement to Willis?
The nighttime overturning is driven by the temperature difference between the surface and lower levels, once the surface undergoes its normal nocturnal cooling resulting in cooler water over warmer water. With more DLR the surface doesn’t cool as much, the difference is less, thus less overturning, thus less warmth from deeper down is circulated to the surface. For that much of what was stated, the source of the DLR doesn’t need mentioning. Adding in the conjecture that increased CO2 causes the increased DLR, especially when Willis has said no such thing here, isn’t called for and isn’t helpful.
Mosh writes “You note that nobody (except willis) wants to look at the empirical evidence. I posted it up there boys..”
The reference to the Minnett experiment isn’t empirical evidence of anything other than the SST warms relative to the depth of 5cm when the clouds come over. When the DSR induced temperature profile disappears (when the clouds come over) but convection keeps the war water rising for a time what do you think will happen to the SST vs the 5cm depth?
That experiment is far from supporting the argument that temperature gradient determines heat loss and therefore supports ocean warming. AFAIK its not even an actual paper let alone a peer reviewed paper.
Empirical evidence? FAIL.
Willis says “Please stop the condescending snarkiness, it just makes you look ugly.”
Ah – so condescending snarkiness is only OK when attacking real scientists then….
Willis
regarding: @Willis Eschenbach says:August 15, 2011 at 10:33 pm commenting on my comment
richard verney says:August 15, 2011 at 7:12 pm
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I understand why to a layman one may give a superficial explanation which concentrates on the overall effect rather than the minute detail of the processes involved.
However, when discussing scientific principles with an audience of scientists, precision is paramount. This is a scientific blog and at least those posting what purport to be scientific articles or discussion of scientific effects, should strive themselves to be accurate.
You dismiss this as a question of semantics, it is not. It is a matter of fundamental (or first) principle going to one of the root issues at the foundation of the AGW theory/conjecture.
One of the reasons why it is so fundamental is that CO2 is not the dominant (so called) green house gas. It is well accepted that water vapour is the dominant greenhouse gas. This is material since over the oceans there is on average much more water vapour in the atmosphere when compared with the atmoshere over land. Any increase in CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere above the oceans is completely dwarfed by the naturally occuring high levels of water vapour immediately above the oceans. This is a significant point which is overlooked and is a significant point which is masked when dealing with average conditions. The warmists tend to concentrate on notional average conditions, and when this is done, one fails to see the proper picture since one is not looking at what ia actually occuring in non average conditions. Materially, at times it is the non average condition which leads the way and is the dominamnt factor which needs to be closely and carefully examined.
It is clear from the above that if DWLWIR does not heat the oceans, the reduction in the rate of cooling is predominatly being controlled by the high levels of water vapour above the oceans not by any increase in concentration of CO2 AND the high levels of water vapour are natural (ie., naturally occuring) being the result of solar energy being received by the oceans, ie the effects of sunlight warming the oceans.
It follows from this that the overwhelming probability as to why the oceans have been warming these lasts 30 or 40 years is due to an increase in solar energy received by the oceans very probably due to a reduction in cloudiness (in passing, it appears that the oceans have not been warming these past 8 years or so).
Whilst I am very sceptical of the entire GHG theory/conjecture, I can envisage that changes in CO2 concentrations may have some modest effect over land, however, over the oceans it has all but no effect, simply because the oceans (unlike the land), as a by product of the solar energy they receive, create their own ‘greenhouse gas’ atmosphere immediately above them (ie. WATER VAPOUR) and this water vapour completely dwarfs the effect that might overwise be observed as the result of a 100ppm rise in CO2 levels.
I will revert seperately on the point you raise in the final paragraph. .
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
August 16, 2011 at 5:39 am
Before Willis gets worked up into an even stronger “quote my words” rage, I’ll point out a glaring one right now. I’ve checked the original post and every reply Willis has made at this post. CO2 is mentioned nowhere by Willis. Why are you tagging him with that? The DLR comes from the greenhouse gases, of which water vapor is overwhelmingly the predominant one, which Willis is well aware of. Why muddle up an otherwise reasonable discussion by attributing a CO2 statement to Willis?
It’s true Willis doesn’t say anything about co2, but the implication is pretty obvious IMO. There is no trend in precipitation so far as anyone knows, so a warming ocean seems to be down to the increase in co2 according to the arguments Willis presented.
I think he’s wrong and that the decrease in tropical cloud cover from 1980-1998 has a lot more to do with the increase in ocean heat content (and thus SST) than increased ‘DLR’ from the atmosphere, whether by co2 or by co2 plus a water vapour feedback.
Anyhow, I’ve invited him to set me straight if he feels I’m mischaracterising the core of the argument, and no doubt he will, in his inimitable style.