'Correcting' Trenberth et al.

I read the first few sentences/paragraphs, and decided, I couldn’t follow the detail narrative, closely enough to track the argument. But some comments come to mind.
evidently, some folks think that “latent heat” is some source of energy that is available to “heat” (aka ‘raise the temperature of’) the atmosphere.
NO !! Latent heat is energy that must BE LOST BY a vapor, TO A COLDER SINK, BEFORE it can change phase to a liquid or solid. It raises the temperature of nothing, so any moisture/solid precipitating out, does not bring a host of heat energy back to earth with it.
Secondly Trenberth’s ENERGY BUDGET, which has been mischaracterized (including by me mistakenly) as a RADIATION budget, is in fact NOT an energy budget at all.
It is a POWER budget, or more strictly a POWER DENSITY (area) budget.
POWER; P = dE / dt is an instantaneous differential quantity, it is a RATE of energy flow / change / conversion /usage/ arrival / whatever.
An ENERGY budget for a climate consideration, would be given in Petajoules or some larger unit involved in perhaps some 30 year climate relative time frame; an INTEGRAL OF THE POWER BUDGET.
Why this is important, is because the real universe does not average anything, it responds instantly to any and all happenstances, as they happen, without any delays to compute some average.
As a result, the actual rate of radiant energy loss from the earth, is substantially greater than Trenberth’s numbers, because the major energy losses, occur from the earths HIGHEST TEMPERATURE zones, and NOT from the earth’s COLDEST TEMPERATURE zones.
Ice and snow at the poles INHIBIT the cooling of the earth; they DO NOT ENHANCE the earth’s cooling rate.
Urban heat islands are wonderful for radiating large quantities of energy back into space during the heat of the day.
In any case, I don’t see where Stephen is going with this.
Trenberth, is a bit confused, in that he includes in his ersatz “energy” budget, completely internal to the earth system fluxes of “heat energy” that cannot cross the earth / space boundary line. Yet he then goes on to completely ignore, totally astronomical amounts of other earth internal “heat energy” fluxes that are going on in the earth’s oceans and ocean currents, from tropics to poles. And once transported to the poles, these energies become trapped, by the abysmally low thermal radiative power available at polar temperatures.
Kevin, if you want to know why you can’t account for the “missing heat”, maybe it’s because you totally ignore the ocean “heat energy” fluxes, in your “earth energy budget.”
Nature does not average power.
TSI is 1362 or 1366 W/m^2 all over the sunlit half of the earth’s intercept circle, and it has that value for each and every atto-second of time, give or take some noise, and solar goings on, that Leif can educate us on; plus of course some well understood orbital ellipticity change during a year.
I defy anyone in a normally inhabited zone to go out on a clear sunny day, near noon, and point a radiometer towards the sun, and get within 10%, maybe even 25 % of 342 W/m^2 or maybe it’s 250 W/m^2 Trenberth thinks you will read. You won’t; you’ll get a number closer to 1,000 W/m^2.
Which is why earth is hotter than Trenberth thinks it should be.

Trenberth’s papers are no longer as linked.
Try, instead, http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/staff/trenbert/trenberth.papers/KiehlTrenbBAMS97.pdf

since the IR wave leaves the earth headed towards the colder body(space) i have yet to see anyone explain how co2 could possibly REVERSE that flow of the wave? no force is required to push it away from the earth that is its natural movement and some force would be required to reverse that movement and send it back to earth, co2 has no such power…….sorta like insulation on a house, it does slow heat loss but it does NOT REVERSE the flow and send heat back into the house.

Willis Eschenbach says:
April 8, 2014 at 11:18 am
commieBob says:
April 8, 2014 at 10:43 am
None of the numbers in the diagram are direct measurements. They are all based on calculations. The budget, as illustrated, is a hypotheses.
Oh, not true in the slightest. The origin of each of the numbers is different. Their basis is described in the underlying document, Earth’s Global Energy Budget. People commenting without having read that are just guessing …

There is no instrument that will directly give any of the numbers in the illustration. They are ALL based on some kind of calculation. All the calculations are based on assumptions and all the measurements on which they are based have tolerances.
As an example, I give you one of the less problematic measurements: upwelling infrared. The instrument is in a satellite. It sees a small portion of the planet’s surface. The global number is based on integrating all the measurements taken as the satellite orbits the planet. So, we have a bunch of measurements taken at varying times. Even assuming that the instrument is perfect (it isn’t) we still have a mess of assumptions to sort out. We integrate the data over what period … a day, a week, a year, a decade? I guarantee that each will produce a different result, different enough that three significant digits is not warranted.

So does Stephen Wilde need to be humiliated? The lack of humility was the first thing that made me suspicious of CAGWing blogs.

Seems to me that the Earth is a mechanism for reducing the power of sunlight by turning it into longwave IR.
As the planet is blocking the sunlight that would normally pass through a given region of space, there is an imbalance, the energy can’t just fly straight through like neutrinos do, so it has to be absorbed and then emitted again at lower power.
As the planet is a sphere, at most it can emit half of what one hemisphere receives from each hemisphere (otherwise there would be no energy available for the shaded hemisphere to emit while the lit one was absorbing) and it does so in a less than perfectly efficient fashion.
What happens when you have a section of machinery or circuitry with lower efficiency than other parts?
Yup, it gets warmer.
It’s not as complicated as it is presented, as long as you remember everything flows downhill you can get the right answer eventually.

Andy: I think articles like these provide credibility to critics who claim that WUTW is “anti-science”. Steve Wilde’s gross mistakes in this article are his responsibility, but to some extent they become WUTW’s when you host them. Gross mistake = not understanding the difference between the energy flux provided by convection (100 W/m2) and the radiative energy flux provided by convection (0 W/m2).
If you feel it is appropriate to expose your readers to radical ideas like these, perhaps you should sponsor a debate between Steve Wilde and some other contributor, or include a rebuttal from some other contributor. Posts like this give knowledgable skeptics a bad name.

–One difficulty with these claims is that the author is looking at a different thing than Kiehl/Trenberth were looking at. The K/T budget is looking at the heat transfer from the surface to the atmosphere. Steven Wilde, on the other hand, seems to be looking at heat transfer within the atmosphere.—
Yes it seems no one is being clear about it.
–For example, when the surface is warmer than the atmosphere, it is constantly losing energy to the atmosphere through conduction/convection. This is not affected in the slightest by the fact that Steven mentions, which is that air warms when it descends. So what? The surface will still be losing heat to the atmosphere as long as it is warmed by the sun.–
But does diagram show this?
You could arrows going down in same location as the arrows going up. Wilde’s point is they balance out to zero. Regionally they cool but not globally. Or they are negative in tropics and positive elsewhere.
–The same is true about evaporation. When water on the surface evaporates, it cools the surface. Period. 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.–
What do mean? Of course it returns energy to surface.
I would say the formation of water droplets does allow heat to be radiated it space. Though such droplet aren’t selective in terms radiating to space. So they radiate and they absorbs energy. But terms of gas until such time as returns to returns to liquid state, the latent heat is stored.
–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. That’s like claiming that humans aren’t cooled when our sweat evaporates, because of adiabatic lapse rate mumble mumble mumble …-
Ultimately for for energy to leave Earth it must be radiated. And H20 Gas converts it’s energy as gas when becomes a liquid. Though as H20 gas it transfers it’s kinetic energy to other gas molecules. And it absorb and re-radiate IR radiation as gas molecule.
What find bizarre is idea that light can increase the kinetic velocity of gas molecules in any way one could call significant- and it is increasing or decreasing the kinetic energy of gas is warming or cooling gases.
—The adiabatic lapse rate is a separate issue—the obvious reality is that both humans and the planetary surface are cooled by evaporation no matter what the lapse rate does. To claim otherwise reveals a serious, profound misunderstanding of the processes involved.–
Lapse rate is altered significantly because H20 as it is not as ideal gas at Earth temperature and pressure- as H20 has transitions between gas and liquid phases. H20 is sticky molecule.

I thought for a while this was for April 1
Trenberth’s diagram is KRAPP because it ignores the reality of a rotating sphere with both water, earth, ice, etc. in 3D. Trenberth tries to model something which is inherently dynamic with a static model. The climate of the earth would be unrecognizable in the absence of the constantly moving terminator between sun and darkness which moves both daily and annually and gives us a habitable planet. Take the average of light and dark and you don’t have anything meaningful.
However, the criticism of the model is full of ad hoc assertions about molecules not being at their proper height — sounded pre-Maxwellian