By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Joel Shore, who has been questioning my climate-sensitivity calculations, just as a good skeptic should, has kindly provided at my request a reference to a paper by Dr. Andrew Lacis and others at the Goddard Institute of Space Studies to support his assertion that CO2 exercises about 75% of the radiative forcings from all greenhouse gases, because water vapor, the most significant greenhouse gas because of its high concentration in the atmosphere, condenses out rapidly, while the non-condensing gases, such as CO2, linger for years.
Dr. Lacis writes in a commentary on his paper: “While the non-condensing greenhouse gases account for only 25% of the total greenhouse effect, it is these non-condensing GHGs that actually control the strength of the terrestrial greenhouse effect, since the water vapor and cloud feedback contributions are not self-sustaining and, as such, only provide amplification.”
Dr. Lacis’ argument, then, is that the radiative forcing from water vapor should be treated as a feedback, because if all greenhouse gases were removed from the atmosphere most of the water vapor now in the atmosphere would condense or precipitate out within ten years, and within 50 years global temperatures would be some 21 K colder than the present.
I have many concerns about this paper, which – for instance – takes no account of the fact that evaporation from the surface occurs at thrice the rate imagined by computer models (Wentz et al., 2007). So there would be a good deal more water vapor in the atmosphere even without greenhouse gases than the models assume.
The paper also says the atmospheric residence time of CO2 is “measured in thousands of years”. Even the IPCC, prone to exaggeration as it is, puts the residence time at 50-200 years. On notice I can cite three dozen papers dating back to Revelle in the 1950s that find the CO2 residence time to be just seven years, though Professor Lindzen says that for various reasons 40 years is a good central estimate.
Furthermore, it is questionable whether the nakedly political paragraph with which the paper ends should have been included in what is supposed to be an impartial scientific analysis. To assert without evidence that beyond 300-350 ppmv CO2 concentration “dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system would exceed the 25% risk tolerance for impending degradation of land and ocean ecosystems, sea-level rise [at just 2 inches per century over the past eight years, according to Envisat], and inevitable disruption of socioeconomic and food-producing infrastructure” is not merely unsupported and accordingly unscientific: it is rankly political.
One realizes that many of the scientists at GISS belong to a particular political faction, and that at least one of them used to make regular and substantial donations to Al Gore’s re-election campaigns, but learned journals are not the place for über-Left politics.
My chief concern, though, is that the central argument in the paper is in effect a petitio principii – a circular and accordingly invalid argument in which one of the premises – that feedbacks are strongly net-positive, greatly amplifying the warming triggered by a radiative forcing – is also the conclusion.
The paper turns out to be based not on measurement, observation and the application of established theory to the results but – you guessed it – on playing with a notorious computer model of the climate: Giss ModelE. The model, in effect, assumes very large net-positive feedbacks for which there is precious little reliable empirical or theoretical evidence.
At the time when Dr. Lacis’ paper was written, ModelE contained “flux adjustments” (in plain English, fudge-factors) amounting to some 50 Watts per square meter, many times the magnitude of the rather small forcing that we are capable of exerting on the climate.
Dr. Lacis says ModelE is rooted in well-understood physical processes. If that were so, one would not expect such large fudge-factors (mentioned and quantified in the model’s operating manual) to be necessary.
Also, one would expect the predictive capacity of this and other models to be a great deal more successful than it has proven to be. As the formidable Dr. John Christy of NASA has written recently, in the satellite era (most of which in any event coincides with the natural warming phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation) temperatures have been rising at a rate between a quarter and a half of the rate that models such as ModelE have been predicting.
It will be helpful to introduce a little elementary climatological physics at this point – nothing too difficult (otherwise I wouldn’t understand it). I propose to apply the IPCC/GISS central estimates of forcing, feedbacks, and warming to what has actually been observed or inferred in the period since 1750.
Let us start with the forcings. Dr. Blasing and his colleagues at the Carbon Dioxide Information and Analysis Center have recently determined that total greenhouse-gas forcings since 1750 are 3.1 Watts per square meter.
From this value, using the IPCC’s table of forcings, we must deduct 35%, or 1.1 Watts per square meter, to allow for negative anthropogenic forcings, notably the particles of soot that act as tiny parasols sheltering us from the Sun. Net anthropogenic forcings since 1750, therefore, are 2 Watts per square meter.
We multiply 2 Watts per square meter by the pre-feedback climate-sensitivity parameter 0.313 Kelvin per Watt per square meter, so as to obtain warming of 0.6 K before any feedbacks have operated.
Next, we apply the IPCC’s implicit centennial-scale feedback factor 1.6 (not the equilibrium factor 2.8, because equilibrium is thousands of years off: Solomon et al., 2009).
Accordingly, after all feedbacks over the period have operated, a central estimate of the warming predicted by ModelE and other models favored by the IPCC is 1.0 K.
We verify that the centennial-scale feedback factor 1.6, implicit rather than explicit (like so much else) in the IPCC’s reports, is appropriate by noting that 1 K of warming divided by 2 Watts per square meter of original forcing is 0.5 Kelvin per Watt per square meter, which is indeed the transient-sensitivity parameter for centennial-scale analyses that is implicit (again, not explicit: it’s almost as though They don’t want us to check stuff) in each of the IPCC’s six CO2 emissions scenarios and also in their mean.
Dr. Lacis’ paper is saying, in effect, that 80% of the forcing from all greenhouse gases is attributable to CO2. The IPCC’s current implicit central estimate, again in all six scenarios and in their mean, is in the same ballpark, at 70%.
However, using the IPCC’s own forcing function for CO2, 5.35 times the natural logarithm of (390 ppmv / 280 ppmv), respectively the perturbed and unperturbed concentrations of CO2 over the period of study, is 1.8 Watts per square meter.
Multiply this by the IPCC’s transient-sensitivity factor 0.5 and one gets 0.9 K – which, however, is the whole of the actual warming that has occurred since 1750. What about the 20-30% of warming contributed by the other greenhouse gases? That is an indication that the CO2 forcing may have been somewhat exaggerated.
The IPCC, in its 2007 report, says no more than that between half and all of the warming observed since 1950 (and, in effect, since 1750) is attributable to us. Therefore, 0.45-0.9 K of observed warming is attributable to us. Even taking the higher value, if we use the IPCC/GISS parameter values and methods CO2 accounts not for 70-80% of observed warming over the period but for all of it.
In response to points like this, the usual, tired deus ex machina winched creakingly onstage by the IPCC’s perhaps too-unquestioning adherents is that the missing warming is playing hide-and-seek with us, lurking furtively at the bottom of the oceans waiting to pounce. However, elementary thermodynamic considerations indicate that such notions must be nonsense.
None of this tells us how big feedbacks really are – merely what the IPCC imagines them to be. Unless one posits very high net-positive feedbacks, one cannot create a climate problem. Indeed, even with the unrealistically high feedbacks imagined by the IPCC, there is not a climate problem at all, as I shall now demonstrate.
Though the IPCC at last makes explicit its estimate of the equilibrium climate sensitivity parameter (albeit that it is in a confused footnote on page 631 of the 2007 report), it is not explicit about the transient-sensitivity parameter – and it is the latter, not the former, that will be policy-relevant over the next few centuries.
So, even though we have reason to suspect there is a not insignificant exaggeration of predicted warming inherent in the IPCC’s predictions (or “projections”, as it coyly calls them), and a still greater exaggeration in Giss ModelE, let us apply their central estimates – without argument at this stage – to what is foreseeable this century.
The IPCC tells us that each of the six emissions scenarios is of equal validity. That means we may legitimately average them. Let us do so. Then the CO2 concentration in 2100 will be 712 ppmv compared with 392 ppmv today. So the CO2 forcing will be 5.35 ln(712/392), or 3.2 Watts per square meter, which we divide by 0.75 (the average of the GISS and IPCC estimates of the proportion of total greenhouse forcings represented by CO2) to allow for the other greenhouse gases, making 4.25 Watts per square meter.
We reduce this value by about 35% to allow for negative forcings from our soot-parasols etc., giving 2.75 Watts per square meter of net anthropogenic forcings between now and 2100.
Nest, multiply by the centennial-scale transient-sensitivity parameter 0.5 Kelvin per Watt per square meter. This gives us a reasonable central estimate of the warming to be expected by 2100 if we follow the IPCC’s and GISS’ methods and values every step of the way. And the warming we should expect this century if we do things their way? Well, it’s not quite 1.4 K.
Now we go back to that discrepancy we noted before. The IPCC says that between half and all of the warming since 1950 was our fault, and its methods and parameter values seem to give an exaggeration of some 20-30% even if we assume that all of the warming since 1950 was down to us, and a very much greater exaggeration if only half of the warming was ours.
Allowing for this exaggeration knocks back this century’s anthropogenic warming to not much more than 1 K – about a third of the 3-4 K that we normally hear so much about.
Note how artfully this tripling of the true rate of warming has been achieved, by a series of little exaggerations which, when taken together, amount to a whopper. And it is quite difficult to spot the exaggerations, not only because most of them are not all that great but also because so few of the necessary parameter values to allow anyone to spot what is going on are explicitly stated in the IPCC’s reports.
The Stern Report in 2006 took the IPCC’s central estimate of 3 K warming over the 20th century and said that the cost of not preventing that warming would be 3% of 21st-century GDP. But GDP tends to grow at 3% a year, so, even if the IPCC were right about 3 K of warming, all we’d lose over the whole century, even on Stern’s much-exaggerated costings (he has been roundly criticized for them even in the journal of which he is an editor, World Economics), would be the equivalent of the GDP growth that might be expected to occur in the year 2100 alone. That is all.
To make matters worse, Stern used an artificially low discount rate for inter-generational cost comparison which his office told me at the time was 0.1%. When he was taken apart in the peer-reviewed economic journals for using so low a discount rate, he said the economists who had criticized him were “confused”, and that he had really used 1.4%. William Nordhaus, who has written many reviewed articles critical of Stern, says that it is quite impossible to verify or to replicate any of Stern’s work because so little of the methodology is explicit and available. And how often have we heard that before? It is almost as if They don’t want us to check stuff.
The absolute minimum commercially-appropriate discount rate is equivalent to the minimum real rate of return on capital – i.e. 5%. Let us oblige Stern by assuming that he had used a 1.4% discount rate and not the 0.1% that his office told me of.
Even if the IPCC is right to try to maintain – contrary to the analysis above, indicating 1 K manmade warming this century – that we shall see 3 K warming by 2100 (progress in the first one-ninth of the century: 0 K), the cost of doing nothing about it, discounted at 5% rather than 1.4%, comes down from Stern’s 3% to just 0.5% of global 21st-century GDP.
No surprise, then, that the cost of forestalling 3 K of warming would be at least an order of magnitude greater than the cost of the climate-related damage that might arise if we just did nothing and adapted, as our species does so well.
But if the warming we cause turns out to be just 1 K by 2100, then on most analyses that gentle warming will be not merely harmless but also beneficial. There will be no net cost at all. Far from it: there will be a net economic benefit.
And that, in a nutshell, is why governments should shut down the UNFCCC and the IPCC, cut climate funding by at least nine-tenths, de-fund all but two or three computer models of the climate, and get back to addressing the real problems of the world – such as the impending energy shortage in Britain and the US because the climate-extremists and their artful nonsense have fatally delayed the building of new coal-fired and nuclear-fired power stations that are now urgently needed.
Time to get back down to Earth and use our fossil fuels, shale gas and all, to give electricity to the billions that don’t have it: for that is the fastest way to lift them out of poverty and, in so doing, painlessly to stabilize the world’s population. That would bring real environmental benefits.
And now you know why building many more power stations won’t hurt the climate, and why – even if there was a real risk of 3 K warming this century – it would be many times more cost-effective to adapt to it than to try to stop it.
As they say at Lloyds of London, “If the cost of the premium exceeds the cost of the risk, don’t insure.” And even that apophthegm presupposes that there is a risk – which in this instance there isn’t.
The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley
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Part 1 of Sense and Sensitivity can be found here
In Australia there is a army of green activist public servants clustered into many previous admirable institutions and environmental regulators.
These activists can often been seen posting subtle rhetoric, please be on the lookout for them.
By the way, discourse classifies petitio principii under rhetoric.
Climate science will not take a step forward until it ditches the use of models.
A paper based upon a proclamation made by a model is not evidence of anything; it is simply opinion writing which rests upon the assumptions and suppositions of the programmers of the model.
Given that the models have yet to show ant predictive skill and given the divergence problem exhibited by all the models currently used, one would have thought that a genuine scientist would be very wary at putting their name to any statement which rests upon model proclamation and would wish to enter a suitably worded caveat explaining the uncertainties and pointing out that to date the model has not exhibited a reasonable degree of predictive skill.
The wind is another important mechanical process that transports water vapor from the surface of liquid water. The lake effect is an example of the power of the wind to move massive amounts of water vapor from, for example, the Great Lakes onto the nearby land.
Do any of these models take into account the amount of water vapor that the wind transports into the atmosphere?
fenbeagleblog says:
January 16, 2012 at 1:07 am
Excellent!!
TFNJ says:
January 16, 2012 at 1:09 am
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I have seen the point raised by JFD discussed on a number of occassions. However, I do not recall it being alleged that the consequential increase in sea level is as much as 2.6mm/yr. It may be that JFD has this out by a factor of 10.
I consider the point raised to be anthropogenic factor which could be of relevance and is a matter which should be given more consideration.
John Brookes: your argument presupposes that there is substantial direct thermalisation of IR absorbed by CO2.
There may be none with real thermalisation being indirect at cloud droplets and other aerosols.
Cloud droplets getter the local CO2 which in pure water is mostly molecular.
And because real present GHG warming is much less than claimed by the IPCC [~9 K], your water vapour argument is diluted substantially.
The climate sensitivity of CO2 could also be slightly negative because of self absorption when you have IR band saturation [near the earth’s surface].
In essence, the IPCC science is almost totally broken, basically because the people who set it up were arrogant and ignorant of the subtleties of the IR, heat transfer and basic meteorology but couldn’t back down after they went for broke…..
“davidmhoffer says:
January 16, 2012 at 1:27 am
Nothing that adding in the right number of zeros behind the decimal place won’t fix. If JFD thinks that all the irrigation from all the deep acquifers over the next century adds up to 10 cm X the surface area of the oceans, then he’s welcome to think so. He’s also welcome to think that deep acquifers even HAVE that volume of water in the first place. But if he wants to substantiate his opinion with numbers, he’s going to have to make up his own numbers.”
Doesn’t matter what he thinks aquifers fill before runoff to ocean. Unless we don’t get ANY rain over the next century, I recon the aquifers will be O.K.
Moreover, Davidmhoffer, those 10cm’s of aquifers are full in Australasia, the sub continent and large parts of Africa. Don’t be alarmed, the drought over in the Americas will end with the next El Nino. Hopefully, greedily, in Australia, we will enjoy a few more La Nina oscillation bounces before the PDO kinks in and warmer waters move closer to the west coast of America triggering the next El Nino oscillation.
As they say at Lloyds of London, “If the cost of the premium exceeds the cost of the risk, don’t insure.” And even that apophthegm presupposes that there is a risk – which in this instance there isn’t.
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Insurers bank on the collective premium exceeding the collective risk and this is why in the long term they always make a substantial profit. Insurers also rely upon selling to the punter insurance that is not needed and in this manner they scam the punter. Unfortunately, it appaers that governments are scamming the populace by imposing upon them an unnecessary tax and subsidy regime to cover what appears to be a mythical or at any rate low risk issue.
The senesible course for mankind is to adapt, not to try and mitigate. Climate change is not global but rather local or at any rate regional. The effects of Climate change are certainly felt on a local basis.
There can be no doubt that with climate change there will be winners and losers. What is not known is whether the winners will exceed the losers. I personally strongly consider that there will be more winners than losers.
Mitigation is money down the drain IF either claimate change is due to natural variation (in this scenario mitigation will be in effective), or if climate change is net beneficial (in which case bring it on, and in this scenario mitigation would deprive the world of something good). In constrast adaption always works as necessary (it may not be necessary since clkimate change may be beneficial) and it will be targeted to give relief where relief is needed.
Only a fool would argue for mitigation in peference to adaption. Unfortunately, the world is full of fools and regretably politics seems to attract more than its fair share.
cohenite says:
January 16, 2012 at 2:17 am
I don’t understand your rather involved calculation. What is the justification for saying “With e=0.612 the equation becomes:…”. The emissivity of the Earth, in the infrared region where it emits, is close to one, i.e. it approximates to a blackbody. Using your arbitrary figure however, you seem to have produced an answer that would be approximately correct for the non-feedback case.
A more accurate formula for the temperature increase (dT) due to an increase in CO2, say from an initial concentration C1 to a new concentration at C2 is
dt = 1.7ln(c2/c1).
Where ln is a natural logarithm. So for a doubling of CO2, everything else being equal, we get a temperature increase of
1.7 * ln( 2 ) = 1.7 * 0.693
= 1.18 deg.C
NB: Formula is only valid for starting temperatures around 15 deg.C
The temperature increase since the pre-industrial era, using Lord Monkton’s figures of 280ppm to 390 ppm gives us
dt = 1.7 * ln( 390/280 ) = 1.7 * 0.33
= 0.56 deg. C
Dave Wendt says:
January 15, 2012 at 11:21 pm
Thanks for the link. A very useful paper.
From an earlier comment about the CSIRO and Cane Toads:
“Sir David Rivett, Chief Executive Officer of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research”
With that name….obviously the man for the job.
Posted:
“So, even though we have reason to suspect there is a not insignificant exaggeration of predicted warming inherent in the IPCC’s predictions (or “projections”, as it coyly calls them).”
Wonderful isn’t it. The Groupthink filters down to government funded whackos worldwide.
During launch of The Australian Climate Commission it’s Critical Decade : Health Impacts, 2011, report, none other than our illustrious commissioner Tim Flannery looks into the camera during the TV gab and say’s ” We’re not calling them predictions, they are projections.”
Just too smug for words.
“…Furthermore, it is questionable whether the nakedly political paragraph with which the paper ends should have been included in what is supposed to be an impartial scientific analysis…”
Alas! Questionable it may be, impartial it certainly is not, but it is a sine qua non of modern science. Unless you make some ritual obeisance to the status quo, you may write papers, but you won’t get paid for them.
And for those of us who make their living writing papers, this is a fact of life…
Monckton’s writing is toooo wonderful. When my eyelids get heavy trying to parse some impossible sentence, somewhere, Monckton is a joy to read. The acerbic asides are like
bon-bons!
(But he does have William Buckley eyes, albeit lacking the strange lizard tongue Buckley used so oft.) ….Lady in Red
“…..because water vapor, the most significant greenhouse gas because of its high concentration in the atmosphere, condenses out rapidly, while the non-condensing gases, such as CO2, linger for years.”
Ratio H2O:CO2 @ur momisugly 20 deg C = 66
Mass transfer in the lower atmosphere maitains water vapour humidity at 0.015 independently of precipitation. The above ratio is always maintained giving water vapour its dominant role. Precipitation occurs at saturation and does not affect the high concentration ratio found below 100% RH.
It is rather silly to say that because wv condenses it is less effective than CO2, the background humidity is always maitained. CO2 pales into insignificance compared with H2O and billions of $US should not be wasted reducing emissions of this gas, 350ppm is sod all.
Minus 8C in Central England last night and will be again tonight. Where has all the CO2 forcing gone????
I went to Tokyo once, on route to Hachinohe, and of course back again for the return journey. Quite honestly its not all its cracked up to be.
and, of course, let us not forget that in the make-believe world of climate science, carbon dioxide can stay in the atmosphere for thousands of years, and yet be diving into the sea and turning it acid already!
“scepticalwombat says:
January 16, 2012 at 12:17 am
Nevket240 and Patrick Davis attempt to smear CSIRO.”
Smear? I can’t smear what is already done. Still, it’s nice to ingore factual history.
Maybe this has already been asked, but how does one determine the “residence time” of any of the atmospheric gasses?
If in a given year, 25% of a gas is added and 25% is removed, then isn’t its “residence time” only 4 years? Of course, the actual time the gas resides in the atmosphere is somewhat “continuous” since it is always there, although its actual ratio may fluctuate over periods of time.
Is this not correct: for atmospheric CO2 there is about 750 GT in the atmosphere and about 90 GT is added/removed each year, giving an average “residence time” of about 8 years?
A specific molecule of a gas, say CO2, could only remain in the atmosphere for a very short time – maybe a few seconds if I exhale it while walking under a tree and the tree “breathes it in” as I walk by – or theoretically forever if in its rambling around in the atmosphere it never becomes removed. However, in general, why isn’t the “about 8 years” (since the amount in the atmosphere at any time and the amounts being exchanged aren’t exact) a reasonable working number?
Moreover, if CO2 has increased 100 ppm over the last century or so, what other atmospheric gas or gasses decreased that 100 ppm? After all, there are only 1 million parts per million.
“scepticalwombat says:
January 16, 2012 at 12:17 am”
I never stated the CSIRO introduced the toad. I stated the CSIRO (In fact the CSIR) was INVOLVED with the introcuction of the cane toad. Try to re-write history if you like, the facts remain.
I’m not buying Lacis’ logic. The fact of the matter is that so long as the global ocean presents a liquid surface water vapor is the major greenhouse gas and the very low albedo of the ocean itself ensures it absorbs a maximal amount of solar energy especially if cloud cover lessens. I do however firmly believe that non-condensing greenhouse gases are critical in the rare times geological epics called “snowball earth” where the earth is largely or entirely frozen over for millions of years without respite. During those times volcanic emissions of CO2 and dark ash accumulate over millions of years until the combined effect of darkened the snow and greenhouse gas tips the balance away from growing glaciers to shrinking glaciers.
In other words CO2 is the kindling which ignites the water cycle. But once the water cycle is going the CO2 is no longer needed to sustain it.
You’re right, m’Lord…Lacis is spinning in circular logic.
Spinning downward, I might add.
So let me get this straight.
Lacis contends that if enough CO2 is removed from the atmosphere the earth will become a giant snowball because all the water vapor will freeze out.
And then without missing a beat he advocates lowering the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Is Lacis playing with a full deck?
I’m on my way to Tokyo to help out with AMSR2 (replacement for AMSR-E) so I don’t have time for a full blown critique. But the first dozen or so comments I’ve seen here are exactly what I think. The residence time of water vapor doesn’t really matter, since it is continually being replenished anyway.
ALSO, as I have been saying for many years, we really do not understand the processes controlling precipitation efficiency, which is the SINK for water vapor (evaporation being the dominant source). If precip efficiency were to change, the average temperature of the climate system will change. This was published many years ago by Renno, Emanuel, and Stone.
To believe precipitation efficiency always remains the same (as the GISS folks obviously do) is a statement of faith, not science. Water vapor could be a “forcing” just as much as CO2 is a “forcing”.
The main factor for the Green-House (GH) effect is the thickness of the atmosphere, not so much the concentration of the multi-atomic (> 2 atoms) molecules in the atmosphere.
Mars has, at its surface a co2 concentration 30 times greater than what is on Earth and the GH effect is non-existent because Mars’s atmospheric pressure at the surface is about 1% that of Earth. The CACA (catastrophic anthropogenic climate alteration) advocates say that Mars is so further away from the Sun than Earth. But yet the GH effects on Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus (all with thick atmosphere and much further away from the Sun than Mars) are just as great as it is on Earth.
Applying the principle of microscopic reversibility, a strong radiation absorber is also a strong emitter. In the troposphere (high pressure), GHG molecules warm the atmosphere. In the stratosphere (low pressure), GHG molecules cool the atmosphere. Go back to Mars: the co2 molecules upon absorbing an IR photon will, 99% of the time, emit the photon to the sky before colliding with another molecule. The thicker the atmosphere, the greater the probability to collide with another molecule before emitting. There is always a recoil effect upon absorbing or emitting a photon.
That water is a condensing chemical and co2 is not (at least in ordinary atmospheric conditions) is a non-issue. Water condensation (slow process compared to radiative processes) is an exothermic process and in the troposphere, 99% of the energy released is absorbed by the neighboring oxygen and nitrogen molecules. Only in the stratosphere (low pressure) condensation/crystallization of water vapor is accompanied mostly by emission to the sky (mostly microwave). So whatever latent heat contained in water vapor still remains in the atmosphere after condensation.
michael hammer:
“Thus water vapour exerts 2 effects, green house warming and cloud cooling, the first is logarithmic and the second near linear. ”
Yes, the cloud effects do not get enough consideration. A day’s worth of cloud production at one location with surface water, can be driven by wind to locations without water, affecting their temperatures to the same extent. Thus even deserts, or cold deserts such as the Antarctic, are affectable by clouds which reduce the daily temperature swings. The relatively high CO2 constituent in the IR-active (aka greenhouse) gases at these locations will have minimal effect on the temperatures, because of the dominant incoming cloud cover.
Another effect which tends to get ignored is the nighttime cooling of the atmosphere by IR radiation by the IR-actve gases. More CO2 means more CO2 cooling under these conditions. So CO2 is both a refrigerator gas and a greenhouse gas. If it is to be given a non-scientific name, then refrigerator-greenhouse gas is fine. The correct reference to “GHG’s” will be “RFG-GHG’s”.