Science trumps politics and patronage: Al Gore is 'losing the bet' against scientific forecasting

Go to Willis’s “Steel Greenhouse” article, look at his two layer model, and ask yourself how the surface “knows” it’s supposed to “heat up” when the second layer is added, even though the surface doesn’t “see” the radiation from the second layer:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/17/the-steel-greenhouse/

CO2’s absorption rapidly decreases as you warm from 15 to 10 microns, and CO2 is transparent lower than 13 microns.

Probably a waste of time, but you are doing it again. One doesn’t “warm from 15 to 10 microns”. This is a completely meaningless statement. Microns measure length, not temperature, and in context a sharp wavelength. One might, conceivably, talk about shifting the wavelength peak of the rather wide blackbody radiation curve by some length.
Look, for starters you need to learn about blackbody radiation in general, and in the context of your current nonsense, Wien’s Displacement Law:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation#Wien.27s_displacement_law
To wit:

with K-m. To “warm from 15 to 10 microns” even if you are just talking about the shifting of the peak in a wide distribution that has plenty of integrated power in the wings one has to increase the absolute temperature by 50%. That is, you are talking about warming the surface from 288 K (average) to 288+144 = 432 C.
If you aren’t talking about shifting the peak via Wien’s Law, you aren’t talking about anything, because the Planck curve for thermal radiation from the Earth’s surface, as you show in numerous pictures above, easily runs from 1 to 50 microns. It already peaks in the ballpark of 10, but it has plenty of weight at 15 and 5 and shifting the peak by the tiny bit associated with a whole degree or even two of global warming won’t even make it worthwhile to draw new generic graphs.
Again, I urge you to stop your rants as the terminology you use in the is proof beyond any reasonable doubt that you need to go back and spend a LONG time at the wikipedia blackboard, invest in a copy of Petty for your Very Own, maybe buy a few books on introductory physics and work through the thermo sections and the electromagnetic radiation sections, you know, sort of learn some physics so that you can stop referring to lengths as if they are temperatures at an unbelievably absurd scale. You’d get laughed out of any physics department where you tried to explain this “theory” of No Greenhouse Warming because of some sort of shift in the BB spectrum.
Some of your ideas aren’t wrong, because you are, after all, pulling them off of perfectly good graphs that demonstrate the greenhouse effect overwhelmingly to anyone with the eyes to see it. Water is absolutely the most important greenhouse gas and everybody knows it and nobody denies it. That doesn’t mean CO_2 isn’t the second most important one, and it in no way proves that it isn’t still important enough to cause warming if you double its concentration. Indeed, the warmist camp claims that the CO_2-only warming is likely to be doubled or tripled by the strong positive feedback from still more powerful water vapor. Do you agree with this, because it sure sounds like you do! The thing about water, of course, is “it’s complicated”. Water in the form of clouds strongly cools during the day and can warm or cool at night. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas and pretty much warms. Water vapor also contains latent heat that lifts heat through the troposphere to warm the upper troposphere. This (by the very argument I give below) increases greenhouse-band outgoing radiation by raising the temperature at which it occurs, which in turn drops the surface temperature. All of this makes it difficult even to predict the sign of the total feedback to add or subtract from CO_2-only warming — it could alter it by a factor anywhere from 0.5 to 2 or even 3, although honestly I think the data already soundly contradicts even a factor of 2 at this point. A factor of one — basically no feedback — seems rather likely, actually.
Finally, remember that what matters it the double integral of the curves like the top of atmosphere curves, looking down that you insert above. They have to be integrated over all wavelengths or wave numbers, and they have to be integrated over all the surface area of the Earth (where the function being integrated changes constantly with latitude, longitude, temperature, cloudiness, time of day, etc, etc) and to be picky, one has to integrate over time as well to average out emissions. So you can’t argue that some bite out of the 300 K curve corresponding to surface radiation doesn’t matter because it happens at 15 microns instead of 10 or whatever — any bite implies less outgoing radiation from that part of the surface than one would get without it. Since it is the integral of this curve that has to be an approximate constant equal to incoming radiation similarly integrated, making any part of it lower forces the rest to become higher, and the only thing that raises the basic curve is raising the emission temperature of the surface.
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“Still, no one has answered my question…”
Actually I did, or rather, Willis Eschenbach did some time ago. [shrug] You can lead a horse to water…

Seriously, you big brains, how do TOA radiating gases, which are at around -70 to -80 Degrees Celsius and miles up, heat the surface?

OK, back from class, bored, I’ll give you an answer directly.
a) Earth is heated primarily with the visible and near UV and IR band of ~6000 C blackbody radiation from the face of the sun. The cloud-free atmosphere is substantially transparent to this energy, transmitting maybe 2/3 to 3/4 of it to where it is absorbed by the surface. That which isn’t transmitted is predominantly REFLECTED by high albedo clouds, snowpack, and to a lesser extent land and water surface.
b) All of the heat it absorbs (as opposed to reflects without first “thermalizing” it in some inelastic degree of freedom(s)) must, on average, be lost as outgoing thermal radiation when the planet is in (approximate) dynamical equilibrium. If it absorbs more than it emits, it warms and output thermal radiation increases until ins balance outs. If it emits more than it absorbs, it cools until again, ins balance outs. The time required to achieve balance is not simple or necessarily small as the Earth is complex and stores and moves energy around in many places and ways.
c) Although it is vastly oversimplified, we can consider the outgoing thermal radiation to come from two sources:
d) One is direct outgoing thermal (250-320 K, average ballpark 288 K) radiation from the ground, that is not absorbed by the atmosphere and once emitted goes straight out to space. This outgoing radiation is emitted at integrated rates that are roughly proportional to the fourth power of the temperature of the surface in degrees kelvin or absolute.
e) The other is the outgoing thermal radiation from the surface that was almost instantly absorbed (within a few meters of the ground) by various greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, predominantly water and carbon dioxide but with additional, relatively insignificant fractions absorbed by ozone and argon and methane and so on. This energy is almost instantly shared with the surrounding N2 and O2 atmosphere. As always, if this atmosphere is not in thermal equilibrium with the ground temperature, it absorbs more than it re-emits or otherwise conveys both back to the ground or upward if it is too cool, absorbs less than it emits if it is too warm. Note well — some fraction is indeed returned to the ground, but the argument doesn’t really depend on this per se. Note that over 2/3 of the thermal radiation emitted by the ground is absorbed by the greenhouse gases, the opposite fraction to that which the atmosphere transmitted in the visible/6000 K band.
f) Eventually through many processes, heat is conveyed up through the atmosphere to where it finally becomes transparent to radiation emitted at its lapsed temperature. This temperature is, as you have so cleverly noted, much cooler than the ground. It therefore gives off less integrated energy per square meter in the absorption/emission bands of the greenhouse gases in these bands and doesn’t radiate at all in the bands where it is transparent (Kirchoff’s Law).
g) I reiterate — the total outgoing thermal radiation rate (power), integrated over all wavelengths and all the surface area of the Earth, must on average equal the total incoming thermal radiation rate (power) integrated over all wavelengths and all of the surface area of the Earth, and any imbalance causes heating or cooling until ins equal outs. That is specifically the sum of the outgoing thermal radiation from the surface that was not absorbed by GHGs plus the thermal radiation from the upper troposphere that is emitted by GHGs has to balance the total incoming power.
h) And here it is — the bone simple punch line. Anything that decreases the emission rate from GHGs in the upper troposphere must cause the surface to warm until emissions from the surface compensate, assuming constant input. Really. That’s all there is to it. The only question then is:
i) Does increasing the GHG concentration of the atmosphere on average, all things being equal, raise the emission height in the troposphere? The answer is almost certainly yes. Increasing the concentration of e.g. CO_2 reduces the mean free path of photons in its emission/absorption bands, and one has to go higher, to lower absolute pressures and atmospheric density, to reach the point where the mean free path for upward directed photons reaches infinity. Higher is higher up in the ALR, and colder. Colder means less integrated emissions. End of story
j) Of course one can say “Wait a minute, it absorbed LOTS of thermal energy in the CO_2 band down where it is warm, but only gives off a comparatively LITTLE up at 6 to 9 km. What happened to the difference?” You won’t like the answer, of course. It was returned to the surface by IR radiation from the greenhouse gases that are in rough thermal equilibrium with the surface temperature down at the surface. The net heat transfer to CO_2 at the surface in this (oversimplified) picture is equal to the rate energy is eventually lost to space at the top. All the rest eventually makes it back to the surface. But we already took that into account in the argument above by noting that it radiates so and so much energy, and thus and such of a fraction escapes directly and the rest is absorbed. The energy that escapes directly plus the energy that escapes from the GHG bands is what has to balance incoming absorbed solar — all of the backradiation bookkeeping is already implicit in this simple statement as it relies on the absolute loss rate, not the details of what happens to the energy in between. The latter simply doesn’t matter. Ins must balance outs, and the only way for energy to escape the earth (outside of a tiny loss to outgassing) is in the form of photons, electromagnetic radiation.
To conclude, all that matters is the spectra from Petty’s book that were reproduced above. Any physicist that sees those figures goes “yup, the GHE is real” because one can very clearly see emission from the warm ground more or less at the predicted blackbody intensities as a function of wavelength according to the temperature of the ground where the atmosphere is transparent, plus greatly reduced intensities that still follow blackbody curves, but ones corresponding to the much colder temperatures of the atmospheric height where it became transparent to the GHG absorption/emission band radiation. The fact that Petty also publishes bottom of the atmosphere spectrographs at the same locations/times looking up and observes the complementary pattern in the downwelling radiation representing the missing ground thermal radiation in the absorption bands is just icing on the cake.
So it is quite simple. Here’s your reading comprehension test. If one increases CO_2 concentration, will the effective temperature of the top of atmosphere outgoing radiation spectra in the CO_2 absorption band most likely:
i) increase
ii) decrease
iii) remain the same?
For bonus points, indicate why.
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P.S. — by concentrating only on outgoing integrated power, one also trumps all questions of lateral and vertical heat transport. So I don’t care that there is latent heat transport vertically, or that heat absorbed at the equator might be lost near the poles, and only care a little bit about energy being stored in the vast heat capacity of the deep ocean, as this is a sign of disequilibration, but one that might take thousands to tens of thousands of years to have any noticable effect. It is the Earth viewed as a black(body) box that matters. Integrated, averaged, input solar power has to be compared to integrated averaged, output radiation. Truthfully all the way to raw TOA incident radiation and including all reflected energy from albedo. There isn’t the slightest doubt what the first order effect of increasing CO_2 should be. Sure, it could be (nearly) cancelled by nonlinear stuff — increasing albedo from increased cloud cover from increased water vapor from the increased temperature — feedbacks could be negative. Or positive. Or mixed, to some smaller net negative or net positive point. And whatever warming survives (or is augmented by) the feedbacks could still be overwhelmed by natural variations. I’m just explaining that the greenhouse effect is real, that increasing CO_2 almost certainly all-things-equal will raise average temperature, and yeah, pointing out that fairly reliable first principles line-by-line computations of the radiation physics suggest a warming per doubling ignoring all feedbacks of ballpark 1 to 2 C (with some slop due to the fact that we have to solve the quantum problem approximately and the fact that the Earth’s dynamical atmospheric state is not homogeneous or constant).
I truly do hope this helps. IMO the entire discussion and skeptical argument on WUWT is significantly improved (and more likely to be taken seriously) when it isn’t laced every ten comments with a comment that goes on about how increasing the concentration of a “trace gas” by 1/3 can’t possibly warm the planet by 0.4 to 0.8C. Yes, it can. It probably has. Increasing it more will probably warm it more. That doesn’t mean that we are due for a climate catastrophe. It doesn’t mean we can predict how much it will warm, or even if it will warm because we do not have any good way to separate out natural variability from CO_2 driven change either empirically or theoretically so our best attempts to assess past data are fraught with uncertainty (as is the past data itself from more than maybe 50 years ago if not even less). The actual physical models for the climate that try to use more detailed treatment of the physics are IMO both a complete waste of time and horribly biased (and diverging from observation as a double consequence). The skeptical argument is not ended by admitting that the greenhouse effect is real — it is made into something to take much more seriously. Even though the greenhouse effect is real, there is little to no evidence that we are headed toward a climate catastrophe!
Even though it is real, so far the changes it has caused have been overwhelmingly beneficial. One billion people ate dinner tonight courtesy of the extra CO_2 and its effect on agricultural plant growth. The world enjoys a very slightly longer, substantially more fruitful growing season pole to pole thanks to the almost unresolvably small warming observed over the last 165 years thanks to the extra CO_2. To be honest, no other climate changes are really resolvable in the data. Drought and flood, storm and nice weather, high and low pressure, heat wave and killing frost — all of this has changed so little that it is not resolvable from no change at all (if it HAS changed at all). Should we fear an extra 2.8 C globally? This corresponds to moving every growing subzone one notch north, so central virginia gets north carolina’s current growing conditions, and west virginia and pennsylvania get virginia’s over a roughly 100 year time span! Who cares?
That doesn’t mean that there are no risks, or that we should not be concerned. It’s just that the risks have to be pretty damned enormous to be even vaguely comparable to the benefits we already enjoy and might expect to enjoy even more should warming continue. Florida might not be plagued by frosts that wipe out the orange crop any more. Texas might not be so darned cold in the winter. England can grow wine grapes once again. Siberia might become even more productive and less deadly in the winter. Sea level rise might eventually be a concern, sure, but empirically it is completely ignorable so far and there is little good reason to think it is going to suddenly accelerate (none at all in the actual data).
And sooner or later, we will get fusion, or get off of our duffs and perfect LFTR, or drop the price per watt of solar power to $0.25 installed, or invent a cheap high density high capacity storage battery, and presto-chango, the miracle of modern capitalism and the pursuit of mere self-interest will guarantee that burning coal to make power is obsolete, almost certainly long before 2050. And then how silly will people feel, for wasting trillions of dollars and hundreds of millions of human lives and condemning billions of the poor to a life of continuing 19th century energy poverty in what should be the energy rich 21st century all because of the deliberate manipulation of the energy market using the specter or a global catastrophe that was never going to happen anyway twice over.
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