Reposted from Dr. Roy Spencer’s blog
June 7th, 2019 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
Abstract: A simple time-dependent model of Earth surface temperatures over the 24 hr day/night cycle at different latitudes is presented. The model reaches energy equilibrium after 1.5 months no matter what temperature it is initialized at. It is shown that even with 1,370 W/m2 of solar flux (reduced by an assumed albedo of 0.3), temperatures at all latitudes remain very cold, even in the afternoon and in the deep tropics. Variation of the model input parameters over reasonable ranges do not change this fact. This demonstrates the importance of the atmospheric “greenhouse” effect, which increases surface temperatures well above what can be achieved with only solar heating and surface infrared loss to outer space.
As a follow-up to yesterday’s post regarding why climate scientists use ~340 W/m2 as the global average solar flux available to the climate system, here I present a model which includes how the incident solar flux (starting with the 1,370 W/m2 solar constant) varies across the Earth as a function of latitude and every 15 minutes throughout the diurnal (day/night) cycle.
I am providing this model to avoid any objections regarding how much solar energy is input into the climate system on average, how that averaging should be done (or whether it is even physically meaningful), whether the nighttime lack of any solar flux should be excluded from the averaging, whether certain assumptions constitute a “flat-Earth” mentality, etc. Instead, the model uses the actual variations of the incident solar radiation on the (assumed spherical) Earth as a function of latitude and time of day. For simplicity, equinox conditions are assumed and so there is no seasonal cycle.
This is not meant to be a realistic model of regional climate; instead, it goes beyond the global averages in the Kiehl-Trenberth energy budget diagram and shows how unrealistically cold temperatures are when you assume there is no greenhouse effect — even in the deep tropics during the afternoon. The model “evolves” the final temperatures, from any starting temperature you specify, based upon a simple energy budget equation (energy conservation) combined with an assumed surface heat capacity. Imbalances between absorbed solar energy and emitted IR energy cause a temperature change which eventually stops (in a long-term average sense) when the daily rate of emitted IR energy equals the daily absorbed solar energy.
The time-dependent model has adjustable inputs: the solar constant (1,370 W/m2); an albedo (for simplicity assumed 0.3 everywhere); the depth of the surface layer responding to solar heating (using the heat capacity of water, but soil heat capacity is similar); and, the assumed broadband infrared emissivity of the surface controlling how fast energy is lost to space as the surface warms. I set the time step to 15 minutes to resolve the diurnal cycle. The Excel model is here, and you are free to change the input parameters and see the results.
Here’s how the incident solar flux changes with time-of-day and latitude. This should not be controversial, since it is just based upon geometry. Even though I only do model calculations at latitudes of 5, 15, 25, 35, 45, 55, 65, 75, and 85 deg. (north and south), the global, 24-hr average incident solar flux is very close to simply 1,370 divided by 4, which is the ratio of the surface areas of a circle and a sphere having the same radius:
If I had done calculations for every 1 deg. of latitude, the model result would have been exceedingly close to 1,370/4.
If I assume the surface layer responding to heating is 0.1 m deep, a global albedo of 0.3, and a broadband IR emissivity of 0.98, and run the model for 46 days, the model reaches very nearly a steady-state energy equilibrium no matter what temperature I initialize it at (say, 100K or 300 K):
Note that even in the deep tropics, the average temperature is only 29 deg. F. At 45 deg. latitude, the temperature averages -11 deg. F. The diurnal temperature variations are very large, partly because the greenhouse effect in nature helps retain surface energy at night, keeping temperatures from falling too fast like it does in the model.
There is no realistic way to remove the very cold bias of the model without including an atmospheric greenhouse effect. If you object that convection has been ignored, that is a surface cooling (not warming) process, so including convection will only make matters worse. The lack of model heat transport out of the tropics, similarly, would only make the model tropical temperatures colder, not warmer, if it was included. The supposed warming caused by atmospheric pressure that some believe is an alternative theory to the GHE would cause (as Willis Eschenbach has pointed out) surface temperatures to rise, making the surface lose more energy to space than it gains from the sun, and there would no longer be energy balance, violating the 1st Law of Thermodynamics. The temperature would simply go back down again to achieve energy balance (we wouldn’t want to violate the 1st Law).
I hope this will help convince some who are still open-minded on this subject that even intense tropical sunshine cannot explain real-world tropical temperatures. The atmospheric greenhouse effect must also be included. The temperature (of anything) is not determined by the rate of energy input (say, the intensity of sunlight, or how fast your car engine burns gas); it is the result of a balance between energy gain and energy loss. The greenhouse effect reduces the rate of energy loss at the surface, thus causing higher temperatures then if it did not exist.
Thanks for taking the time to (attempt to) pound some sense in the anti-GHG, its pressure cowboys.
Embrace the power of AND.
As long as that AND is between heat and work…
“…even intense tropical sunshine cannot explain real-world tropical temperatures. The atmospheric greenhouse effect must also be included.”
And the greenhouse effect is increasing.
Lord_Huron+D,
“And the greenhouse effect is increasing.”
What evidence do you have to support this? According to actual measurements I’ve seen this is not true. E.g Gero/Turner 2011
Richard M:
“Radiative forcing – measured at Earth’s surface – corroborate the increasing greenhouse effect,” R. Philipona et al, Geo Res Letters, v31 L03202 (2004).
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2003GL018765/abstract
Not where I live, and the trend toward cooler temps over the past few decades is inconsistent with an increasing “greenhouse” effect.
Lord Huron-the +D does that reflect your college grade in Science.?
“Greenhouse effect ” keeps the planet alive. Climate change is what puts green($) in to the pockets of people like Algore and the whole warmist industry..
R Shearer, with all due respect, where you live is not relevant to what’s going on globally.
It may or may not be. So far any potential increase is so far below the level of the noise that it can’t be detected.
“I hope this will help convince some who are still open-minded (…)”
See what you did there? You insulted the folk who are not yet persuaded, while confessing that you are _not_ open minded!
I think Roy did a good job with the phrasing, using positive words. No insult.
Are you suggesting that his goal be to persuade closed minded people?
I am open minded, and this post went a long way towards helping me understand the subject matter. If I had already made up my mind (closed it) I would not have been open to the learning.
I do not understand how you found insult.
I can sense some of why you are a hermit, Oldguy.
It takes a mighty weird reading of that statement to conclude that the good Dr. has confessed to being closed minded.
The only insult is to those too closed minded to look at the evidence being presented.
How do you explain the temperature on Venus, when sunlight does not reach the surface, due to its thick, reflective atmosphere?
Maybe E = σ T^4 plus Venus appears larger than Earth as viewed from the sun. Differences in atmospheric density, composition, etc. – many factors here.
Is it possible that the Venus surface temperature is actually cooler than Earth’s?
Assume Earth’s atmosphere at sea level: P ~1.014 bar and T ~287K
Assume Venus’ surface atmosphere: P ~ 92 bar and T ~735K
As a very, very, very rough calculation, I used a diesel engine calculator to estimate earth’s surface temperature if it were compressed adiabatically to 92 bar- equivalent of Venus. The calculator estimated that at a pressure of 92 bar, Earth’s surface temperature would increase to 1384K – nearly twice the surface temperature of Venus. This is hypothetical and does not account for many other factors.
Does your calculation give the temperature immediately following compression, only, or does it include heat loss due to convection to altitude and resultant radiation to space?
Wouldn’t the dynamics of a refrigerator circuit be more applicable? Compression heating, followed by radiative heat loss and expansion cooling?
SR
It’s not a steady state temperature – this exercise just illustrates that comparing gas temperatures at different pressures can be like apples and oranges.
“Is it possible that the Venus surface temperature is actually cooler than Earth’s?”
NO. Russia actually landed a probe on to the surface of Venus. It didn’t last long but it did have enough to take pictures, collect data and send it all back to earth. Venera 14 measured a surface temperature of 465C at a pressure 94 times greater than on earth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera_14
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera
;<)
A day of the surface of Venus (solar day) takes 117 Earth days. Because Venus does not tilt on its own axis, there is no seasonal variation. The Venus atmosphere just like all substances does not reflect heat radiation from the Sun, but absorbs it.
So you do not recognise “Albedo” then?
Sunlight does reach the surface.
Correct. As proven by the Russian landers.
due to its thick, reflective, clouds.
The thick cloud are a surface. And this surface is about 50 km above rocky surface which not warmed at all by any direct sunlight. Well, there is no direct sunlight at rocky surface, and it’s not warmed by any of the indirect sunlight which reaches it, either.
Venus’s surface temperature can only be explained by its very thick atmosphere created by carbon dioxide (96%).
CO2 is plant food, but there are no plants on Venus.
20 W/m² of sunlight, on average, reach the Venusian surface.
16000 W/m² of IR down-welling are needed to explain Venusian surface temperature in terms of the GHGE.
It’s a puzzle.
Looks like we need more CO2.
But those pesky plants and algae keep absorbing it to form the basis of the Earths biosystem. If C02 goes below 150 ppm then life on Earth will be reduced to a few bacteria, deep ocean vents and tardigrades.
Energy transport should take into account the operation of the winter stratospheric polar vortex.
http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/tcc/tcc/products/clisys/STRAT/gif/zu_sh.gif
http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/tcc/tcc/products/clisys/STRAT/gif/zt_sh.gif
It keeps bugging me that to assume no greenhouse effect, you have to also assume that no water exists on the planet. That would change albedo and atmospheric circulation, wouldn’t it?
Would the global air circulation be anywhere close to how is is now?
Absolutely not. The specific gravity of the water vapor is much lower than the specific gravity of the air.
https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/specific-gravities-gases-d_334.html
Likewise, ozone decomposition is important in stratospheric circulation because the ozone molecule has a higher molecular weight than other molecules in the stratosphere.
In the upper troposphere, ozone is not mixed with water vapor.
http://oi66.tinypic.com/33vlx8o.jpg
The second figure very closely models real world observations of clear day total-solar plus terrestrial (downwards infra-red) irradiance, and also surface air temperature at 1.2m (plus many degrees Celsius depending on the season), at several locations in Australia including Alice Springs in the central desert. The curve is affected by cloud and humidity. The greenhouse effect is plainly obvious. The only point in dispute is the amount due to anthropogenic greenhouse gases.
Clouds are a liquid/solid and thus absorb and emit a much broader frequency of photons, in fact they absorb all near and far IR photons. Water vapor has a relatively high heat capacity and thus cools much slower than dry air. Neither of these phenomenon are related to the “greenhouse gas” effect.
What is clear is that pseudoscience has confused the masses into believing that the radiative emissions corresponding to the vibrations of gas molecules controls the properties of atmospheres rather than the laws which actually do.
” the depth of the surface layer responding to solar heating (using the heat capacity of water, but soil heat capacity is similar)”
“Water has an especially high heat capacity at 4.18 J/g*C … Land, on the other hand, has a much lower heat capacity, which is usually less than 1 J/g*C.”
https://geo.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Book%3A_Oceanography_%28Hill%29/04%3A_Properties_of_Water/4.2%3A_Heat_capacity%2C_the_ocean%2C_and_our_weather
Water is also sneaky in that it can hide or release significant amounts of energy by changing phases without a temperature change.
Very important in real models.
Dear Dr. Spencer,
You write: “There is no realistic way to remove the very cold bias of the model without including an atmospheric greenhouse effect.”
Could you maybe seperately quantify the greenhouse effect of H2O, CO2 or any other relevant source to further explain this statement? Since we have to ‘fight’ the greenhouse, according to politicians, we need to know the ‘enemy’.
Best regards,
Scarface
That is an interesting question, and while we all know the science is settled, this question is ‘impossible to answer’. Enter Wikipedia weaseling here.
So in fact the Wikipedia source claims taking all CO2 only out of the atmosphere would take 9% of the GHE away, while eliminating both all methane and CO2 would take at least 12%.
The GHE changes the planet’s albedo via cloud, sea level, plant life, and ice feedback, so this is much irrelevant a number anyway. And I’ll quote wikipeople again: Clouds also absorb and emit infrared radiation and thus affect the radiative properties of the atmosphere.[19]
Today we’re having extreme (well, for me at least, Floridans may disagree)+27C or 80F, and the regulating thunderstorm will most probably hit in the afternoon. There’s the feedback readily available.
Thanks!
Scarface: “Could you maybe seperately quantify the greenhouse effect of H2O, CO2 or any other relevant source to further explain this statement? ”
WR: Table 1 of ‘The Greenhouse Effect and Carbon Dioxide’ is very interesting. See https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/wea.2072
Row 2 gives the downward radiation incident at the surface for the different greenhouse gases for all the named gases, if removed from the atmosphere:
H2O – 208 W/m2 (91.1%)
CO2 – 16 W/m2 (7.0%)
O3 – 2.6 W/m2 (1.1%)
CH4 – 0.8 W/m2 (0.4%)
N2O – 0.8 W/m2 (0.4%)
At the surface the highest concentration of water vapor is found. It is where we measure surface temperatures. It is where the greenhouse effect is most important. Water vapor plays the main role: 91.1%.
Thank you!
The surface temperature in medium and high latitudes depends on the height of the tropopause (convection height).
http://oi68.tinypic.com/2j0hy1g.jpg
For comparison, the current temperature in Idaho.
Kudos, ren. What we mistake for the greenhouse effect is actually the heat of compression the air receives as it descends from the radiating altitude to the surface. Any model that ignores this is simply wrong.
pochas,
Correct.
Maybe you are confusing GHE and work of expansion or compression of a gas volume as it’s pressure changes, which manifests itself as the temperature lapse rate of the atmosphere. Certainly different. Both contribute to warmth at low altitudes.
For every unit of air that is descending, there is a unit of air rising.
For the air falling to gain more heat than the air rising loses, conservation of energy would have to be violated.
Compression on the night side is not ‘descending’.
As relaxation on the day side is not ‘rising’.
Of course, the main greenhouse gas is water. Anyone who has lived in an arid climate can attest to that. link The days are blistering hot and the nights are freezing.
In the vicinity of Lake Ontario the night time sky feels like a comforting blanket. In North Dakota, the night time sky feels like the cold of outer space.
Exactly, so why are we not seeing in this model very hot temperatures in the equitorial/tropical regions during the hours say 10 am through to 6 pm?
In the tropics, it does show a 60F swing between day and night. That’s the kind of swing you can expect in a desert. link For a dessert to have that kind of swing it would have to be something like a baked alaska. (Am I a real commie or am I just a Groucho Marxist?)
Where does it show a 60F swing?
The graph titled “No-Greenhouse-Effect Model Temperatures at Different Latitudes”. The top curve is the area near the equator.
And you actually believe it drops to zero degrees F every day?
I don’t know what that graph purports to show, but it can’t be Tropical temperatures.
baked alaska — am I just a Groucho Marxist?)
That’s the best dessert I ever hoard…..(tapping cigar)
“Anyone who has lived in an arid climate can attest to that. The days are blistering hot and the nights are freezing.”
This is one of those tired, often repeated “facts” that has little real evidence. Ever been to Phoenix or Las Vegas in summer at midnight? Even then, the A/C has difficult keeping up. Drier atmosphere do lose heat more quickly than humid ones, but just because 85° “feels” cold after a 110° day doesn’t mean it’s “freezing cold”.
Both the Phoenix and Las Vegas areas are artificially humid. And then there is the heat island effect at night.
you might be interested in seeing these results:
https://documentcloud.adobe.com/link/track?uri=urn:aaid:scds:US:6011cd61-5241-4597-af0c-60fe397eb4a4
1) note how in Las Vegas where they changed a desert into an oasis, minimum T has increased by 5K since 1974.
2) note howin Tandil (ARG) where they chopped all the trees, minimum T has decreased by 2K since 1974.
Your example proves my point. Diurnal temperature ranges may have dropped somewhat, but the “blazing in the day and freezing at night” idea is in everyone’s heads. I’ve lived in dry deserts and in colder, higher elevations. Fifty miles outside Phoenix or Yuma are still really, really warm at night.
Failing to include magnetic flux from solar wind, geophysical torsion from the pair-body Lagrange (moon earth neutral point offset from axis of rotation), cosmic radiation and solar tidal thermal input make the “model” nothing more than a joke.
It “models” nothing at all. It is simply an input chart that occludes all other energy sources.
Please provide your better model, as you clearly can do more than a joke. Or then just shut up.
A couple comments Prjingo –
There is not other energy source? The energy is retained by items like water and dirt and air, but those are not sources, unless you want to model the residual heat of the planet, or possibly the small amount from cosmic radiation?
It models a simple black body radiation to and back from an earth sized sphere and a sun, placed like ours are, in defense of those who would say the current models used use a flat earth instead of a round one.
It makes a very clear example of exactly that, but only that, since that is what he wanted to model.
Prjindigo says: “It is simply an input chart that occludes all other energy sources.”
Sort of like climate models occlude natural variability of the sun, oceans, etc. etc, etc.
Prjindigo you don’t seem to undestand what a model is at all.
Changes in circulation in the lower stratosphere and upper troposphere depend on changes in ionizing radiation at these atmospheric levels.
http://cosmicrays.oulu.fi/webform/onlinequery.cgi?station=OULU&startday=08&startmonth=05&startyear=1989&starttime=00%3A00&endday=08&endmonth=06&endyear=2019&endtime=00%3A00&resolution=Automatic+choice&outputmode=default&picture=on
The greenhouse effect reduces the rate of energy loss at the surface, thus causing higher temperatures then if it did not exist.
Oh. Not the insulating effect of air mass, cloud cover…water vapour…
I suppose you call those greenhouse effects…and then conflate the ‘greenhouse effect’ as being ONLY carbon dioxide?
Isn’t that what is called ‘bait and switch’?
Dr Roy,
I must be a bit slow but are you actually saying that a disc and sphere receive the same amount/intensity of light energy – allowing for the sphere to rotate and assuming equinox and dividing by 4?
Clearly the angle drops off toward the poles so despite rotation around the axis, there will still be less strength of insolation per area of a sphere than a disc. You only have to stand at a lower latitude or see long afternoon shadows to observe light rays spread over a larger area when the sun is at a low angle.
The sun never gets overhead here but of course it did when I lived above one of the tropics.
I know, this can’t be what you mean though.. I guess? 😉
The area of a disc is pi.r^2. Half the sphere of the Earth is sunlit at all times & shows an area of pi.r^2 to the sun. The surface area of the sphere is 4.pi.r^2 so that energy emitted from the surface is spread over four times the area of the incoming.
Of course but I did think I was stating the obvious! The point I was making is that the relevant climate issue comes about as a result of geometric shape presented to the sun, the not surface area! And yes, a static hemisphere receives half the light of a disc with the same surface area. What matter’s to climate is the uneven insolation of this 3D geometry compared to the even illumination of a disc. Averaging conceals this important difference, particularly as it is the very reason we have climates – plural – as apposed to one singular and global climate!
“Instead, the model uses the actual variations of the incident solar radiation on the (assumed spherical) Earth as a function of latitude and time of day. For simplicity, equinox conditions are assumed and so there is no seasonal cycle.”
Judging by the best long temperature record (CET), almost of the warming took place in the winter months.
http://www.vukcevic.co.uk/CET-SW.htm
I’m no expert any of these matters, but the above modelling looks to me at best to be incomplete, at worst to be wrong.
The albedo is mainly a function of clouds, but given that we know that the sunlit side of the moon has a temperature nearer 127 degC, and it reaches this temperature very quickly, how can the afternoon temperatures in the equitorial/tropical regions of the planet reach at best about 7 to 10 degrees for a few hours?
There must at best be something very wrong with this model.
If the temperatures predicted by this model were to be correct, there would be little oceanic evaporation and hence very little in the way of clouds, and hence the albedo would not be 0.3 as suggested.
No wonder climate science is in so much trouble, when this type of model is put forward as a way to explain things or identify processes.
It is a very good explanatory device that Dr. Roy is using here. Albedo is stated to be 0.3, unlike the moon at 0.12. The moon rotates once a month, Earth once a day. This article improves the climate science knowledge of many interested people.
I think if you are doing a grid and measuring flux by latitude, you MUST also ,include reflectivity by latitude because that changes with angle of incidence. Especially over water. Albedo is a great general term when looking at the disc of the earth, but when you look at absorbtivity and reflectivity over the arc of the globe, it most definitely changes from equator to pole (ok, this is assumption since I don’t have the numbers, but I cannot see how it would not).
I see that in Roy’s thread our contributor Philip Mulholland has posted this:
Philip Mulholland says:
June 7, 2019 at 4:24 PM
“Dr.Spencer thinks convection is a purely cooling effect which is the same mistake as Trenberth et al. in that they miss out the release of Kinetic Energy in the descent phase.
The reason for that being important is extensively described here:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/06/02/modelling-the-climate-of-noonworld-a-new-look-at-venus/
from which one can see that convective overturning delays energy loss to space without any need for GHGs and thus accounts for the greenhouse effect.”
I cannot post at Roy’s blog because he banned me several years ago when I tried to explain to him that at any given moment half the troposphere is moving on an upward trajectory within low pressure cells and half on a downward trajectory within high pressure cells. A basic meteorological principle that he disagrees with, apparently, and is prepared to ban someone forever for pointing it out.
Thus I will have to contribute here instead if anyone still thinks that Roy is right in light of Philip’s work.
The truth is that the greenhouse effect is a direct consequence of convective overturning causing a delay in radiative emission to space and radiant gases are nothing to do with it.
That simple fact needs to be out in the wider world as soon as possible.
Stephen,
I agree with what you say but it is also true that without a greenhouse effect providing resistance to the flow of radiant heat through the atmosphere there would be no vertical circulation. The two effects work together with the lapse rate to produce the temperature profiles we see in the troposphere.
Bernie.
Bernard
If there is a lapse rate there will be convection because the surface is always unevenly heated leading to temperature and density variation in the horizontal plane.
Radiative material in the atmosphere is not needed.
The greenhouse effect that raises the surface temperature is convection. Conduction and convection provide that resistance to outward radiation because they operate more slowly than the speed of light.
If there were no convection then the atmosphere would behave like a rigid solid, conduction would filter upwards and the atmosphere would become isothermal with no lapse rate with all energy to space going out from the top.
The lapse rate is caused solely by the conversion of KE to PE with height and that conversion requires convection alone.
Convection cannot be suppressed if there is uneven surface heating as there must be on a rough surface on a sphere illuminated from a point source.
Convection is present in all gases because of the weak bonds between molecules which is why we need the Gas Laws
Stephen,
If the atmospheric gases cannot radiate heat, which requires GH gases, then it cannot transfer heat away from the planet and convective overturning will not occur. The GH gases are essential for the atmospheric heat engine to work and the lapse rate determines the temperature gradient in the troposphere. Without GH gases in the atmosphere the plant’s surface would radiate directly to space and much colder as Dr Spencer points out.
Ocean vaporization in the tropics provides convection.
http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/tcc/tcc/products/clisys/STRAT/gif/zt_nh.gif
If there are no GHGs then anything emitted from the surface goes straight to space. Anyone who doubts the greenhouse effect should inspect Earth’s radiation spectrum, which is quite clear about the question.
A convecting non GHG atmosphere would still use surface energy to fuel convection so less would radiate to space or are you saying that the same parcel of kinetic energy at the surface can be in two places at once or carry out two tasks at once ?
The fact is that one must apportion surface KE between convection and radiation when there is a convecting atmosphere interposed between surface and space.
Read the link to Philip Mulholland’s article.
I have some questions for all those that say that CO2 is responsible for Warming the Atmosphere and therefore the Planet’s Surface.
Only a percentage of the warmth in the Atmosphere is provided by LWIR, especially in the tropics where most of the sunlight stikes causing Convection.
If the only Heated gas in any quantity in the upper Atmosphere that Radiates LWIR is CO2 what do you call the other heated gases (Nitrogen & Oxygen) that hold their heat and do not radiate LWIR.
The only Gas that can remove that heat from Convection that is present in the Atmosphere is CO2, so what do you call it?
“so what do you call it?”
Water vapor. Water vapor is the only important greenhouse gas. If you’re an alien who sees infrared looking at the earth, what you see is not a blue marble, but a fuzzy ball that looks like Venus, which is water vapor doing its job of cooling the planet. And, since water vapor can make it rain, it is doing a powerful job of stabilizing the earth’s temperature as well.
A minimum atmospheric temperature, or tropopause, occurs
at a pressure of around 0.1 bar in the atmospheres of Earth1
,
Titan2
, Jupiter3
, Saturn4
, Uranus and Neptune4
, despite great
differences in atmospheric composition, gravity, internal heat
and sunlight. In all of these bodies, the tropopause separates
a stratosphere with a temperature profile that is controlled
by the absorption of short-wave solar radiation, from a region
below characterized by convection, weather and clouds5,6
.
However, it is not obvious why the tropopause occurs at the
specific pressure near 0.1 bar. Here we use a simple, physically
based model7
to demonstrate that, at atmospheric pressures
lower than 0.1 bar, transparency to thermal radiation allows
short-wave heating to dominate, creating a stratosphere. At
higher pressures, atmospheres become opaque to thermal
radiation, causing temperatures to increase with depth and
convection to ensue. A common dependence of infrared
opacity on pressure, arising from the shared physics of
molecular absorption, sets the 0.1 bar tropopause. We reason
that a tropopause at a pressure of approximately 0.1 bar is
characteristic of many thick atmospheres, including exoplanets
and exomoons in our galaxy and beyond. Judicious use of this
rule could help constrain the atmospheric structure, and thus
the surface environments and habitability, of exoplanets.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.465.8585&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Without GHGs, it maters not where the energy is ultimately released in the earth/atmosphere system, Stephen. Convection just moves it higher to be released.
I am appalled by many of the comments on this Thread. Dr. Spenser made a toy model with the sole purpose of showing the necessity of GHGs to obtain earth’s temperature regime, nothing else.
Some of you excoriate Dr. Spenser because his model fails to list all earth processes, totally misunderstanding its purpose.
Some of you are pressure cowboys, ignoring real science.
You all need to get a grip; you are not helpful in the real climate debate.
Dave,
Roy accepts that convection upwards cools the surface but then he omits the thermal effect of returning warmth to the surface in descending air.
That is a clear accounting error and fatal to his model.
It is true that the two processes net out to zero but nonetheless they cause a retention of additional energy in the system since convection is slower than radiation.
That causes the surface temperature to rise higher than S-B.
Philip Mulholland shows clearly via a mathematical model that the effect occurs even if no GHGs are present.
How strong is the calculated effect, especially as compared to the measured effect of GHGs?
Also, you are going to have to explain the reasoning behind: “It is true that the two processes [Rising and falling air masses?] net out to zero but nonetheless they cause a retention of additional energy in the system since convection is slower than radiation.”
Miskolczi stated his conclusions as: –
New relationships among the flux components have been found and are used to construct a quasi-all-sky model of the earth’s atmospheric energy transfer process. In the 1948-2008 time period the global average annual mean true greenhouse-gas optical thickness is found to be time-stationary. Simulated radiative no-feedback effects of measured actual CO2 change over the 61 years were calculated and found to be of magnitude easily detectable by the empirical data and analytical methods used.
The data negate increase in CO2 in the atmosphere as a hypothetical cause for the apparently observed global warming. A hypothesis of significant positive feedback by water vapor effect on atmospheric infrared absorption is also negated by the observed measurements. Apparently major revision of the physics underlying the greenhouse effect is needed.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/05/23/an-analysis-of-the-earths-energy-budget/?fbclid=IwAR0rDkmPm0HLFVau7-aZ8rl80De2SzTIl7798jNj7y7aQMN9mz06TdkHW6o
Then revise physics for us, ren.
Exactly, any model of an atmosphere that does not include convection and gravitational potential energy is not a model of an atmosphere, but rather the model of a simple radiator in a fantasy world. This “model” is literally ignoring all physical processes that are keeping the atmosphere aloft in the first place.
Yes, gases are opaque to certain narrow frequencies of IR, so what? Emission and absorption by the gas molecules in these frequencies contribute near zero energy to the translational kinetic energy of the gas in nature because the vectors of these photons are random and equal in all directions, thus cancelling each other out.
Star heats surface, fraction of the surface receives enough energy to become volatile, volatile molecules receive further energy from collisions with the surface and spread that energy to other volatiles via collisions, a force called buoyancy creates the structure of the atmosphere, and now an energy reserve exists above the planet surface which stores solar energy that irradiated on the planet in the form of kinetic and gravitational potential energy.
Once you quantify those processes, which are basically scientific laws, then you can move on to quantifying noise variables, like the insignificant emissions from the atmosphere itself, but something tells me that climastrology will continue to persist bassackwards.
That basically would argue for the at WUWT mostly unwelcome hypothesis of Nikolov and Zeller. The atmosphere in its whole would be heating the planet, not trace gases. Gravitational force is converted into pressure, pressure causes heating. Gravitation plus atmosphere generates the “greenhouse” effect.
Gravitation is a steady force of matter, so it works steadily on the atmosphere. It thereby does not generate additionally energy in terms of W/m2 incoming solar irradiation but it amplifies its heat by applying a constant force of contraction on the atmospheric mass that is expanding due to solar irradition resulting in pressure generating heat or how radiationists like to phrase it, IR.
The problem of the radiative nature of the “greenhouse” theory is that it neglects the energy transfer by other mechanisms than radiative transfer that all work in the atmosphere thereby generating heat through pressure by atmospheric mass and gravity.
In a hypothetical comparison of open convective atmospheres of planets, temperature would be therefore equal at the same pressure height in the atmospheres independent of total atmospheric mass and total incoming solar irraditaion just through the classical ideal gas law PV = nRT; and as far as we know from measurements of interplanetary probes that seems to be the case.
If one thinks again about the term “heat trapping”, then it does not sound so wrong anymore – though it’s not CO2 trapping the heat, it’s the atmosphere as a whole through pressure.
Now you only have to bring in the different greenhouse forcings around the world. In the tropics it is high but at the poles and in the deserts it is very low because of low water vapor contribution.
“The lack of model heat transport out of the tropics, similarly, would only make the model tropical temperatures colder, not warmer, if it was included.”
Sure, that is true, but:
Polar region is much colder, with less outgoing IR radiation. Polar region IR energy loss is about half of the tropical region in the real World. In your model this effect is even more significant. Heat radiation at the pole according to your model is about 30% of that at the tropics. This means, that any energy transported from tropics to poles will retarded for a significantly longer time, which would cause rise of the global average temperature of your model.
How can this model be right given:
1. what we know about temperatures on the moon?
2. what we know about temperatures in deserts where the main greenhouse gas, water vapour, is all but absent?
Roy has explained to us why weather changes temperature, so that for instance clouds make it warmer in winter. Although they make it cooler in summer. What goes on in the atmosphere changes surface temperature. This fact is trivial.
“Greenhouse” is of course a bad name for it since the heating in a glass greenhouse is nothing to do with radiation. The greenhouse warming hypothesis is highly inductive, assumption built on assumption built on assumption. That inductive approach allows you to construct whatever hypothesis you want.
The only way to do science however is by deduction. What does the evidence say – does it refute a conjecture or not. The palaeoclimate record refutes the CO2 warming conjecture. CO2 increases in response to warming, not the other way around, in all history before humans. Ignoring this deductive evidence and sticking to a purely inductive narrative is misleading and falls short of science.
+100
It’s even worse than that. There are well understood theories and physical laws that could act as a starting point for climate models rather than working backwards from a grossly pseudoscientific assumption. And in fact there are those that have done this and have accurately modeled rocky planet atmospheres based on these well accepted laws but the climastrology community ignores them.
“The palaeoclimate record refutes the CO2 warming conjecture. CO2 increases in response to warming, not the other way around, in all history before humans.”
err no.
C02 is both a cause of warming, and a response to warming.
Second. The paleo record, ice cores, show Both. as predicted
What are the mechanisms that have caused a flux of CO2 in the atmosphere prior to humans and within the time contained in ice core records?
Seriously, can competent scientists argue that the ~100 ky and ~40 ky glacial cycle were controlled by some magical phenomenon that causes minor fluctuations of CO2 in quasi-regular patterns?
Seriously, can competent scientists argue that the ~100 ky and ~40 ky glacial cycle……
—————–
Robert W.
Seriously, no matter what, “glacial cycles” do not even exist.
Simply a matter of colloquial messing around with terminology, as per means of
forcing silly assumptions…
Glacial periods, or Glacial seasons, very much proper to consider than.
Same as in consideration of Winter periods,
or Winter seasons versus “Winter cycles”… where Winter cycles do not really even exist… unless colloquially considered as per such, as per child talk…
Just saying that “glacial cycles” terminology very lose and most probably very misleading, if not careful.
just saying.
cheers
“What are the mechanisms that have caused a flux of CO2 in the atmosphere prior to humans and within the time contained in ice core records?”
Look up Mr Milankovitch.
Yep, every time CO2 is at its highest levels we re-glaciate.
The climate editors at work:
In 1991
CO2-climate relationship as deduced from the Vostok ice core: a re-examination based on new measurements and on a re-evaluation of the air dating
J. -M. BARNOLA P. PIMIENTA D. RAYNAUD Y. S. KOROTKEVICH
Tellus, Volume43, Issue2
April 1991, Pages 83-90
Abstract
Interpretation of the past CO2 variations recorded in polar ice during the large climatic transitions requires an accurate determination of the air-ice age difference. For the Vostok core, the age differences resulting from different assumptions on the firn densification process are compared and a new procedure is proposed to date the air trapped in this core. The penultimate deglaciation is studied on the basis of this new air dating and new CO2 measurements. These measurements and results obtained on other ice cores indicate that at the beginning of the deglaciations, the CO2 increase is either in phase or lags by less than about 1000 years with respect to the Antarctic temperature, while it clearly lags the temperature at the onset of the last glaciation.
In 1999:
Ice Core Records of Atmospheric CO2 Around the Last Three Glacial Terminations
Hubertus Fischer, Martin Wahlen, Jesse Smith, Derek Mastroianni, Bruce Deck
Science 12 Mar 1999:
Vol. 283, Issue 5408, pp. 1712-1714
Abstract
Air trapped in bubbles in polar ice cores constitutes an archive for the reconstruction of the global carbon cycle and the relation between greenhouse gases and climate in the past. High-resolution records from Antarctic ice cores show that carbon dioxide concentrations increased by 80 to 100 parts per million by volume 600 ± 400 years after the warming of the last three deglaciations. Despite strongly decreasing temperatures, high carbon dioxide concentrations can be sustained for thousands of years during glaciations; the size of this phase lag is probably connected to the duration of the preceding warm period, which controls the change in land ice coverage and the buildup of the terrestrial biosphere.
Stauffer B. Climate change: Cornucopia of ice core results.
Nature. 1999 Jun;399(6735):412.
News and Views
Petit et al.1 report that, within the uncertainties in the record, the increases in Antarctic temperature, CO2and CH4were in phase during all four transitions.
By contrast, based on measurements on the same core, Fischer et al.2 have claimed that for the last three terminations there was a time lag of 500 to 1,000 years between the temperature increase and the CO2increase. The question of lags and leads in climate change is obviously a highly important one. But identifying a 500-1,000-year time lag is taking the current data and state of knowledge to its limits. Uncertainties stem not only from the limited sampling frequency but also from the problem of assigning dates to the air-containing bubbles in the core3 (air becomes enclosed in bubbles only at about 100 m below the snow surface, and so air and ice at the same level are of different ages).
Even if there does indeed turn out to be a time lag, CO2can still be an important amplifier for the temperature increase during the glacial-interglacial transition, which itself lasts several thousand years. However, whether amplification by greenhouse gases was responsible for 50% of the temperature increase, as Petit et al. speculate, also remains a hypothesis for the moment.
In 2012
Shakun JD, Clark PU, He F, Marcott SA, Mix AC, Liu Z, Otto-Bliesner B, Schmittner A, Bard E. Global warming preceded by increasing carbon dioxide concentrations during the last deglaciation.
Nature. 2012 Apr;484(7392):49.
Abstract
Here we construct a record of global surface temperature from 80 proxy records and show that temperature is correlated with and generally lags CO2 during the last (that is, the most recent) deglaciation. Differences between the respective temperature changes of the Northern Hemisphere and Southern Hemisphere parallel variations in the strength of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation recorded in marine sediments. These observations, together with transient global climate model simulations, support the conclusion that an antiphased hemispheric temperature response to ocean circulation changes superimposed on globally in-phase warming driven by increasing CO2 concentrations is an explanation for much of the temperature change at the end of the most recent ice age.
In 2013
Synchronous Change of Atmospheric CO2 and Antarctic Temperature During the Last Deglacial Warming
F. Parrenin, V. Masson-Delmotte, P. Köhler, D. Raynaud, D. Paillard, J. Schwander, C. Barbante, A. Landais, A. Wegner, J. Jouzel
Science 01 Mar 2013:
Vol. 339, Issue 6123, pp. 1060-1063
Abstract
Here we propose a revised relative age scale for the concentration of atmospheric CO2 and Antarctic temperature for the last deglacial warming, using data from five Antarctic ice cores. We infer the phasing between CO2 concentration and Antarctic temperature at four times when their trends change abruptly. We find no significant asynchrony between them, indicating that Antarctic temperature did not begin to rise hundreds of years before the concentration of atmospheric CO2, as has been suggested by earlier studies.
“The job’s a good-un.”
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
Study #1: CO2 lags.
Study #2: CO2 lags.
Study #3: CO2 lags. Many uncertainties. CO2 driving temperature is speculative; remains a hypothesis.
Study #4: Did not identify the 80 proxies used. AMOC changes, superimposed on their climate model’s speculation that CO2 drove temperature changes “… is an explanation for much of the temperature change at the end of the most recent ice age.”
Study #5: “Here we propose a revised relative age scale …” Has anyone verified this revision in the six years since this study? Or does this study have the quality of typical CliSci studies: not reproducible?
Conclusion? There is no “The job’s a good-un.” if this is all you can find. Wrong Weed Patch.
None of this crap has anything to do with proving CAGW. Currently, temperatures are not following UN IPCC climate model speculation.
David
You missed the sarcasm in my post.
Ice core data with CO2 lagging temperature did not fit the CAGW hypothesis.
So instead of changing the hypothesis they changed the data.
This is absolute fraud.
The Shakun paper in particular is a disgrace.
He trawled for the worst possible proxies he could find – some of his biological proxies barely resolved the Holocene from the last glacial maximum.
Mixing 80 such proxies together and adding in a false start to the Holocene in the form of the Bolling-Allerod and Younger Dryas, plus a sprinkling of inter hemispheric bipolar seesaw, Shakun conjoured up an outcome to please the Climagisterium – faked evidence that CO2 change preceded temperature change.
What Shakun et al did to paleo climate data to force it to confess the primacy of CO2, is the same as what Ramsey Bolton, in the Game of Thrones, did to Theon Greyjoy to turn him into “Reek”.
I think the key point missing in this discussion is where the actual cooling of the planet takes place. In a model without GHGs the cooling can ONLY take place at the surface. This means it does not allow for a lapse rate to increase the temperature from a point higher in the atmosphere.
Hence, the need for GHGs. But, what if there was something else? Let’s assume we have a special molecule that acts exactly like a GHG except for one difference. It only radiates away from the surface towards space. It still interacts with other molecules and transfers energy back and forth kinetically.
Hence, we now have a mechanism to raise the point where the Earth cools. This allows the the formation of a lapse rate higher in the atmosphere just like we get with GHGs. So, what would the temperature of the surface be with this model? What would be the difference between it and the GHG model?
My own guess is that the temperature would be almost identical to the GHG model. But note, there is no back radiation. All energy transfer back to the surface would be via convection and conduction. Thoughts?
Richard
A non GHG atmosphere would still have a lapse rate because convection cannot be prevented for an unevenly illuminated surface and once convection starts the conversion of KE to PE with height causes a lapse rate.
Convection removes KE from the surface in one location and returns it to the surface in another and the time delay in emission to space caused by that delay results in extra energy within the system and thus a higher surface temperature.
There is no way around it.
Convection causes the greenhouse effect.
Sorry Stephen, I’ve seen you make this claim many times. It misses the point. Sure, you can get convection, but that cannot raise the elevation of the radiating surface because without GHGs there is nothing to radiate away the energy above the surface.
In your example the warmest place is still at the surface where the energy is radiated away. If it wasn’t then it would violate the 1st law.
Of course all radiation is from the surface for a non GHG atmosphere but that does not preclude a lapse rate.
Descending air returns KE to the surface which then radiates it to space so as to maintain hydrostatic equilibrium.
Read Philip Mulholland’s article.
I keep repeating my claims because nobody has yet rebutted them in a way that does not breach the Laws of Thermodynamics.
Philip has created a working model that effectively demonstrates my claims.
Anyway, if the incorrect science is constantly repeated then my correct science must also be repeated.
Stephen, I agree you would still have a lapse rate. However, the surface temperature would still be at the S-B value for the solar radiation. For Earth, that would be -18 C. It would then get cooler above the surface.
Hence, this cannot raise the average surface temperature as we see today. The output energy MUST be equal to the input energy. If the surface temperature were elevated then the planet would radiate more energy than it is receiving. No can do.
Sorry, there is no way around it. You MUST elevate the radiating surface above the physical surface to have the physical surface warmer than the input energy would dictate. To do that you MUST have radiating gases in the atmosphere.
Now, the real question I presented above is whether back radiation is necessary for this to occur. If not, then it is pretty easy to see that adding in more CO2 (or any radiating gas) may not be what determines the temperature.
My own feeling is N&Z got is partially right. A planet’s temperature is determined by the ideal gas law (IGL), the atmospheric mass and energy received. However, you still need radiating gases to allow the radiation altitude to be lifted. And, most importantly, once you achieve the IGL determined temperature there is no way that can be increased. This is why more CO2 can not have any real effect on the global temperature.
Richard
The surface beneath a convecting atmosphere will not be at the S-B temperature.
It will be as warm as necessary to provide both radiation to space AND the energy required to support convective overturning.
S-B should not be applied to a surface beneath a convecting atmosphere.
Philip’s model demonstrates that by apportioning surface energy between radiation to space and conduction / convection to the atmosphere (both beneath rising and descending columns of air where the sign is equal and opposite) one can calculate the various thermal characteristics of every planet with a convecting atmosphere.
The simplest verbal description is as follows:
“i) Start with a rocky planet surrounded by a non-radiative atmosphere such as 100% Nitrogen with no convection.
Assume that there is no rotation to confuse matters, ignore equator to pole energy transfers and provide illumination to one side from a nearby sun.
On the illuminated side the sun heats the surface beneath the gaseous atmosphere and, since surface heating is uneven, gas density differentials arise in the horizontal plane so that warmer, less dense, Nitrogen starts to rise above colder, denser, Nitrogen that flows in beneath and convective overturning of the atmosphere has begun.
After a while, the entire illuminated side consists of less dense warm rising Nitrogen and the entire dark side consists of descending, denser and colder Nitrogen.
The Nitrogen on the illuminated side, being non-radiative, heats only by conduction from surface to air and cannot assist cooling of the surface by radiating to space.
There will be a lapse rate slope whereby the air becomes cooler with height due to expansion (via the Gas Laws) as it rises along the line of decreasing density with height. That density gradient is created by the pull of gravity on the individual molecules of the Nitrogen atmosphere.
At the top of the rising column the colder denser Nitrogen is pushed aside by the warmer more buoyant and less dense Nitrogen coming up from below and it then flows, at a high level, across to the dark side of the planet where descent occurs back towards the surface.
During the descent there is warming by compression as the Nitrogen moves back down to the surface and then the Nitrogen flows along the surface back to the base of the rising column on the illuminated side whereupon the cycle repeats.
Thus we have a very simplified climate system without radiative gases consisting of one large low pressure cell on the illuminated side and one large high pressure cell on the dark side.
ii) The thermal consequences of convective overturning.
On the illuminated side, conduction is absorbing energy from the surface the temperature of which as observed from space initially appears to drop below the figure predicted by the S-B equation. Instead of being radiated straight out to space a portion of the kinetic energy at the surface is being diverted into conduction and convection. Assume sufficient insolation to give a surface temperature of 255K without an atmosphere and 33K absorbed from the surface into the atmosphere by conduction. The surface temperature appears to drops to 222K. Those figures are illustrative only since there is dispute about the actual numbers for the scale of the so called greenhouse effect.
On the dark side the descending Nitrogen warms as it falls to the surface and when it reaches the surface the cold surface will rapidly pull some of that initially conducted energy (obtained from the illuminated side) out of the descending Nitrogen so that the surface and the Nitrogen in contact with it will become warmer than it otherwise would have been, namely by 33K.
One can see how effectively a cold, solid surface will draw heat from the atmospheric gases by noting the development of radiation fog above cold surfaces on Earth. The cold surface quickly reduces the ground level atmospheric temperature to a point below the dew point.
That less cold Nitrogen then flows via advection across the surface back to the illuminated side which is then being supplied with Nitrogen at the surface which is 33K warmer than it otherwise would have been.
That describes the first convective overturning cycle only.
The key point at that stage is that, as soon as the first cycle completes, the second convective cycle does not need to take any further energy from incoming solar radiation because the necessary energy is being advected in by winds from the unlit side. The full effect of continuing insolation can then be experienced once more so the surface goes back up to 255k from 222k.
ADDITIONALLY the air moving horizontally from the dark side to the illuminated side is 33K warmer than it otherwise would have been so the average temperature for the whole sphere actually rises to 288K
Since that 33K flowing across from the dark side goes straight up again via conduction to fuel the next convective overturning cycle and therefore does not radiate out to space, the view from space would show a radiating temperature for the planet of 255K just as it would have done if there were no atmosphere at all.
In that scenario both sides of the planet’s surface are 33K warmer than they otherwise would have been, the view from space satisfies the S-B equation and radiation in from space equals radiation out to space. Radiative capability within the atmosphere not required.”
Stephen, your “correct science” seems to ignore the fundamental reality of GHGs.
Dave,
GHGs radiate and have a thermal effect but it is neutralised by convective changes and those changes in convection are so small that one could never discern them within natural variability.
I don’t get it, Stephen. You say (unmeasured) changes in convection neutralizes GHG thermal effects. After “neutralizing” GHG’s thermal effects, are you saying that changes in convection then exactly duplicate the otherwise supposed warming effect of GHGs?
Stephen, sorry to break it to you but your description is not valid. Adding in a dark side simply cools the average temperature. Any air movement to the dark side would warm that underlying surface slightly and that would start to radiate. It just wouldn’t radiate at the same temperature as the light side.
Eventually your system would reach equilibrium and the dark side would probably develop a gradient from the light side to the furthest point away.
The light side would also develop a gradient to the furthest point from the dark side.
The airflow would be pretty consistent. The temperature on the light side would be warmer than the dark side but still not above the S-B temperature. Sorry.
The average temperature would probably end up at the S-B temperature of the light side divided by 2.
Incorrect.
Read the link relating to the model built by Philip Mulholland.
The descending air on the dark side feeds energy to the surface on the dark side at the same rate as ascending air on the lit side draws energy from the surface via conduction and convection.
Equilibrium is reached whereby radiation in from space equals energy out to space whilst energy from surface to air on the lit side balances energy from air to surface on the dark side.
To provide the energy for both processes to run in parallel one needs extra kinetic energy at the surface which for Earth produces a temperature enhancement of about 33k,
GHGs not involved.
“but that cannot raise the elevation of the radiating surface because without GHGs there is nothing to radiate away the energy above the surface.”
All matter radiates energy, even N2 and O2 gas, which are responsible for radiating most of the heat that is retained within the atmosphere. They emit energy corresponding to the molecules internal degrees of freedom, just like any other gas.
“even N2 and O2 gas, which are responsible for radiating most of the heat that is retained within the atmosphere.”
But what do they radiate?
How much of it?
So are you saying that CO2 is no different to the other gases other than it absorbs LWIR and mostly imparts that energy to the other gases via collisional kinetic energy?
Robert W Turner,
I believe the amount of radiation from non-GHGs (O2 and N2) is so small that it can essentially be ignored. If it isn’t then I would just add them to the list of GHGs. All the arguments remain the same.
Over 1 year ago, I developed a spreadsheet model of the Earth’s daily temperature cycle, at different latitudes. The output is very similar to Dr Roy Spencer’s.
But I wanted to make it more realistic. So I added a simple Greenhouse effect. I did this by returning a fixed percentage of the outgoing energy back to the surface. I kept increasing the percentage until I got an average temperature of 15.0 degrees Celsius for the Earth.
The percentage of returned energy gave me an estimate of how strong the greenhouse effect is. And I tried increasing the percentage, to see what would happen with higher levels of CO2.
It is a fairly simple model. but it produces quite realistic results.
I find this fascinating as to me it mirrors what happens in modern closed circuit steam generating plants which operate at constant pressure and temperature. An increase in energy input to the boiler results in an equivalent increase in energy output, with the pressure and temperature remaining constant.
It is the way the Rankine Cycle operates and this shows that that is way the Hydro Cycle reacts to any increase in energy input, such as the GHE or otherwise.
The pressure is determined by gravity and is thus more or less constant and the temperature that results is locked into the thermodynamic behaviour of the water which again is not a variable. Hence this thermostat type reaction to variable heat input.
As an aside it it worth noting that there is no increase in the quantity of working fluid (water), being a closed system. All that happens is an increase in the mass flow rate; so looking for an increase in atmospheric water content is not necessarily relevant.
As in all natural systems the equilibrium position is the point about which they oscillate giving rise to weather type situations rather than long term climate stability. A matter which can only be determined by honest statistical methods if long term projections are to be made.
I am also busy with an investigation setting the speed of warming/cooling in K/annum as it happened at 52 weather stations from 1974 [i.e. the derivative of the least square regression equation] out against latitude.
So far it looks quite interesting.
It is going to take a few weeks still but I will keep you informed of the results.
THIS ALSO SERVES AS A LITMUS for measuring bias and emotional angst. As a retreat to “first principles” of energy it is useful, and even at a glance I gain interesting nuggets like in the deep tropics, the average temperature is only 29 deg. F. At 45 deg. latitude, the temperature averages -11 deg. F. and the fascinating steady state chart that demonstrates only in the tropics does temp rise (then then fall) past the magical 32F phase change of water.. So from this foundation the first credible “amplification effect” of our Goldilocks Planet seems to be the fact that water can change phase somewhere on its surface, daily. Or at least that is how it strikes me.
Some commenters bring in surface temperatures on the Moon for comparison, and what surprises me is they are saying there is something wrong with this model instead of just going with it for a moment and musing out loud, “so if this is true there must be something else too, such as” to suggest the NEXT layer of the model. Well we all know there is something else, many things, and though I don’t know much about Science Book I’d be tempted to suggest air pressure (atmosphere) and moisture (since we now know there is phase change and UV triggers evaporation directly).
Please know I’m not singling anyone out, I’d like to see this simple model built upon with contributions from all. I’d like to see an exploration of the idea that daily capability of water phase change somewhere on the planet might set an Earthlike climate system in motion, given [2] and [3]. What are 2 and 3, and (the main discovery to be made) how much further until we have a comparable model?
Hocus Locus, go get one of the UN IPCC climate models.
Way before human sourced CO2 came alone, weather pattern variation was just as likely to occur. The major teleconnected systems; 1) current continental positions, 2) orbital mechanics, 3) atmospheric short and long term systems, and 4) oceanic top, middle, and deep currents, are bound to create weather pattern variations on short and long term time spans. These variations nudge overall climate this way and that until something overwhelmingly major happens. Human sourced CO2, a tiny nearly not there part of our world, doesn’t have a chance in hell of being even a minor player in warming or cooling nudges to the climate, let alone epic changes. The best it can do is add to the non-human CO2 fertilizer in teeny amounts. I perspective, I would bet that insects give off way more CO2 than human do.
1-4: Good summary. Perhaps 3 and 4 could change position as atmospheric systems are adapting more quickly to oceans as the reverse.
To be clear here, the dominant GHG would be water vapor everywhere except the driest of deserts, isolated from a moist maritime air mass.
Also I note that even though this is an equinox, seasonless simulation, the ~46-day lag is also in play at solstices. Which tells us every Northern European knows; that is, you go to the Med on holiday in the first half of August for the best chance of warmth.
“All heat is friction”
Heat is always at its highest temperature near the heat source. Determine the mechanism, then evaluate the resistance to cooling by insulating factors like clouds/CO2. Carbon dioxide is 4/100 of 1% of our atmosphere and is insufficient in quantity to be an effective insulator. One out of 2500 air molecules.
Water vapor H402 (not H2O as many mistakenly believe) covers much of the planet, 30% more or less, continuously and has unique properties. It has six atoms in the molecule that expand so much that is it absorbs a great deal of the IR spectrum. This prevents solar heating as well as slowing down heat loss from the ground by reflection and insulating. Not a greenhouse, just a vapor barrier.
Water vapor always cools, just as evaporation from your skin or evaporation from the ocean has a cooling effect.
When water freezes, it expands. It becomes more buoyant and floats. Water vapor expands so large that it floats on oxygen and nitrogen even though it’s four hydrogen atoms heavier. This displaces air which results in a lower air pressure. A storm cyclone. When water vapor condenses into rain, it is no longer buoyant resulting in a vacuum and lower air pressure generating wind which always blows towards the low pressure system to fill that void.
The drop in air pressure has a cooling effect, always. Just like going to the top of a mountain, or up in a plane. The drop in atmospheric pressure always cools.
Hi pressure is associated with heat. The deeper the air column, the higher the barometric pressure, the greater the heat. (death valley is below sea level) Reproducible in every environment, on every planet with an atmosphere. The deeper the atmosphere the greater the pressure, the higher the frictional heat generated. This is why the earth is 100° warmer on average than the moon, even though we are both in the green zone.
The dry Chinook winds that flow down the mountain causing the deserts, spontaneously heat 5.4° for every thousand feet it descends. All extreme temperature weather records are associated with the Chinook winds, even in Antarctica. The odd part is, I’ve never seen it mentioned in any of the global warming models.
This effect is true even for the sun itself. The higher you float up above the 10,000° photosphere, the cooler the Suns atmosphere becomes. That is until you reach the chromosphere and suddenly the temperature jumps 200 times that of the photosphere to 2,000,000°
The suns interior is believed to be 50,000,000°. Talk about a violation of the laws of thermodynamics! That’s like putting a cube of ice in a oven on maximum for 1000 years and the ice cube has grown bigger!
Everything you think you know is about to change.
If water vapour was H4O2 (which it is not), water vapour would be more dense than air (which it is not). Most of the rest is incorrect too (obviously)
This model is possibly correct for a planet with a pure nitrogen/noble gases atmosphere and no oceans.
However there is apparently no heat transfer between surface and atmosphere, which will occur even with a completely non-GHG atmosphere, albeit more slowly. I am also uncertain whether convection would really net cool the surface with a non-GHG, non-condensing atmosphere, it seems to me that it would only move heat from hotter to colder parts of the surface.
In any case a completely non-GHG atmosphere is probably impossible in the real universe.
Some moons in the solar system appear to have tenuous atmospheres (if they qualify as such) consisting of pure O2. Water vapor from their icy surfaces is immediately ionized into H and O molecules, with the low mass H2 promptly being lost to space.
Jupiter’s Europa is one and Saturn’s Dione another. The latter’s is so wispy that some call it an exosphere. Saturn’s second largest moon, Rhea, sports a mostly O2 atmosphere, but with some CO2, in about a 5:2 ratio. Saturn’s Enceladus, by contrast, has “air” of 91% water vapor.
Jupiter’s largest moon Ganymede (most massive of all solar system moons) also proably has an almost pure O2 atmosphere. But it could include ozone, a GHG. Its and Europa’s “air” might also include trace amounts of sodium.
Jupiter’s atmosphere is about 89% hydrogen and 10% helium.
Those figures are for Jupiter’s upper atmosphere by volume, not mass, for which it’s more like 75% hydrogen and 24% helium.
One of the greatest steps of climate science evolution would be to get rid of the phrase, “greenhouse”, altogether.
Just start over without this really poor choice of terminology. Rewrite all the books, the lectures, the internet sites. Just get rid of it. It’s the wrong word to use.
I am sure we had these discussions before…
….a large portion of earth’s albedo consists of radiation from the sun deflected off from earth by the GH gasses.
I called that the anti-greenhouse effect.
so, if GH gases increase, how do we know that the netto effect is that of warming rather than cooling?
Clouds are not GHGs, henryp.
No. Clouds, snow and ice are parts of earth’s albedo not meant by me…
Without going back and searching, IIRC, you said GHGs reflect (some of?) the Sun’s radiation, henryp. Please correct me if I remember incorrectly or was confused as to what you said/meant.
Yes, Dave
that is what I said.
GhG’s, especially O3, HxOx and N-oxides are responsible for a lot of radiation being deflected off from earth. In fact, we can quantitatively determine CO2 on other planets by measuring its deflection of sunlight in a certain UV band.
In the near IR we can even measure the deflected radiation coming off from earth from the GHG’s via the moon…so it went: sun-earth – e.g. CO2 (green line fig 6 bottom) – moon – earth
http://astro.berkeley.edu/~kalas/disksite/library/turnbull06a.pdf
So which is more and where is the report showing me how much radiation (heat) is deflected off from earth by each GHG versus how much it traps on earth?
So, henryp, which is stronger: CO2 sun reflection cooling or CO2 GH warming?
Dave
with the absorptions of CO2 in the UV, & in the near- and far IR, 0-5 um, I am thinking that the cooling effect might be bigger than the warming effect. Did you measure it? [it is so small????}
As you can see from my comment elsewhere there is some man made warming caused by more man made vegetation [vegetation has increased by about 30-40% in the past 40 years or so but that could also be due to more CO2]
Strangely enough, in my country I could not find any warming, let alone man made warming. You can read my report on that or look here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/h7944heslj7gg7q/summary%20of%20climate%20change%20south%20africa.xlsx?dl=0
Dave, how does that fit in your picture of AGW?
Absorption is not reflection, henryp. Atmospheric absorption of the Sun’s radiation would lead to atmospheric warming.
With the absence of a tropical tropospheric hot spot, I don’t think one can conclusively prove significant AGW. Any significance of AGW depends on unproven strong water vapor feedbacks.
I remain, however, agnostic as to AWG. That said, I firmly dispute CAGW and the accuracy of UN IPCC climate models.
sorry Dave
absorption was the wrong word that I know is now being used to explain that 25% of incoming radiation is being ‘thermalized’
That is nonsense.
The Gh and anti GH effect is where radiation is send back in the direction where it came from, mostly.
…..the correct word for absorption is extinction.
I’m sorry, henryp, but your explanation is incoherent.
I really don’t understand “The Gh and anti GH effect is where radiation is send back in the direction where it came from, mostly.” And “…..the correct word for absorption is extinction.” seems to violate the physical laws of energy transference.
Forgive me if this is a stupid question, but aren’t the flux measurements just indications of rates of energy coming in at each latitudinal angle, for each square meter, for one second, and there is no indication of how many seconds this occurs or how much energy results from this to actually create the surface temperature?
How is an instantaneous measure of solar flux a temperature resulting from this flux’s being applied throughout the entire day at a given latitude? Shouldn’t we be looking at how this flux enables the temperature at the respective latitude to evolve, instead of considering this flux alone AS the temperature resulting from its application throughout the day?
The earth’s global ocean surface has average temperature of 17 C.
This is [or causes] Earth global average temperature of 15 C.
What if the earth average ocean surface temperature was 3.5 C, rather than 17 C?
good point.
it is always the elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about….
he has been travelling lately, faster this last 100 years than before,
north -east if we go by the magnetic north pole
The amount of energy that the oceans can retain is determined by the weight of the atmosphere bearing down on the ocean surface because that weight in turn determines how much energy is required to effect the phase change from liquid to vapour.
The ocean then determines the air temperature of a water planet.
In the end it is all about atmospheric mass.
Variations in the internal flows of the oceans serve exactly the same functions as variations in the pattern of air circulation around the globe.
Those variations are the global thermostat in action in their successful attempts to keep the system in hydrostatic equilibrium.
GHGs are irrelevant because atmospheric mass is all that matters.
Stephen, please direct me to a climate science textbook that surmises “GHGs are irrelevant because atmospheric mass is all that matters.”
Well I recall that as being the consensus view in the mid 20th century but I’ve been unsuccessful finding a text book from that period and the novelty of the internet tends to omit stuff from before its inception.
But atmospheric mass it is whether you like it or not.
OK then, Stephen. Good bye.
You don’t need a climate science textbook to show this. The atmospheric mass are hugely relevant and a lot more so than composition of greenhouse gases.
Mars
95.97% carbon dioxide
1.93% argon
1.89% nitrogen
0.146% oxygen
0.0557% carbon monoxide
Surface temp.min mean max
Kelvin 130 K 210 K 308 K
Celsius −143 °C −63 °C 35 °C
Fahrenheit −226 °F −82 °F 95 °F
Surface pressure
0.636 (0.4–0.87) kPa 0.00628 atm
Venus
96.5% carbon dioxide
3.5% nitrogen
0.015% sulfur dioxide
0.007% argon
0.002% water vapour
0.0017% carbon monoxide
0.0012% helium
0.0007% neon
trace carbonyl sulfide
trace hydrogen chloride
trace hydrogen fluoride
Surface temp. mean
Kelvin 737 K
Celsius 462 °C
Fahrenheit 864 °F
Surface pressure
92 bar (9.2 MPa)
Very little difference in composition of CO2 gases between them, but 527k difference.
I weep, Matt. Show me a textbook; I don’t have the time to screw around with you zany ideas.
Zany???
That is science mate.
A C, I’m forced to the same response I gave Stephen: Goodbye.
Stephen Wilde
Man has always known about it. That is why the Sun was a god.
good point.
it is always the elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about….
he has been travelling lately, faster this last 100 years than before,
north -east if we go by the magnetic north pole
Gosh this thread went off the rails quickly. I appreciate Dr. Spencer producing these simple models in an attempt to explain foundational points. Yet, why is this necessary?
There are many engineers, working and retired, who post here. No reasonably competent engineer can seriously dispute the “greenhouse” effect of CO2 and H2O, especially after having taken a heat transport course. It is not possible to calculate heat transport in combustion, for example, without considering the infrared properties of these gases.
On the other hand, admitting there is a greenhouse effect takes one not very deeply into the totality of this very important debate–climate, climate history, energy supply, economics, etc. Alarmists who think the debate is over once I admit a greenhouse effect have no clue.
Kevin
Is it a ‘foundational point’ to acknowledge conversion of KE to PE in rising air and then ignore the reverse process in descending air ?
Surely that is a ‘foundational’ accounting error ?
Stephen
I have read through your commentary here to try to gain an idea of what this conversion of KE means. I admit to not figuring it out.
The heat capacity of air is about 1 kiloJoule (kJ) per kilogram per degree (C) change in temperature. This is about equal to the KE of a kilogram of sea level air moving at 42 meters per second (m/s). One degree C temperature change is small as temperature changes go; while a 40m/s air speed is pretty large regarding wind speed. In other words KE is not very important as a determinant of temperature.
With regard to changes in PE; indeed as air falls in elevation it warms at 10C/km because the atmosphere is doing work on it, and as long as it loses no heat though other processes it cools at 10C/km when it gains elevation because it now does work against the atmosphere. This is a major factor in explaining why Death Valley is hot and Laramie is cool; but it is not the entire story. Heat transfer is the rest of the story, and the thermal radiation properties of certain trace gases is part, an important part, of that story.
It is CliSci abuse of assumed/speculated feedback effects that has led us here, not GHG theory. UN IPCC climate models have been proven to be insufficient to fundamental alter our society, economy and energy systems.
With all due regard, the CliSci preoccupation with celebrity and left-wing politics has done more.
“There are many engineers, working and retired, who post here. No reasonably competent engineer can seriously dispute the “greenhouse” effect of CO2 and H2O, especially after having taken a heat transport course.”
No reasonably competent engineer would ignore the 10 tons of atmosphere per square meter which is not greenhouse gas which causes the atmospheric greenhouse effect.
They might also notice that 70% of earth surface is transparent liquid, and wonder why anyone would base a model on a blackbody surface.
Show us the textbooks, gbaikie. Anybody can create a semi-plausible mathematical model.
–Dave Fair June 9, 2019 at 2:21 pm
Show us the textbooks, gbaikie. Anybody can create a semi-plausible mathematical model.–
I suppose some textbook will mention that tropical ocean is heat engine of world.
Some might mention the gulf stream adds a considerable amount to average temperature of Europe.
Oh seems some are arguing against the textbooks:
“Generations of schoolchildren have been raised on the belief that the mild British winters and cool summers are due to the moderating influence of the Gulf Stream, a warm ocean current flowing from the Gulf of Mexico to the shores of western Europe.
Without the Gulf Stream, our teachers told us, Britain’s winters would be as cold and ice-bound as a frozen port in Newfoundland and its summers as hot and stuffy as a Moscow August.
But the text books have got it wrong, according to scientists who have just finished a study of what makes western Europe cool in summer and mild in winter.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/forget-about-the-gulf-stream-britain-is-really-kept-warm-in-winter-by-the-rocky-mountains-118560.html
I think I am still going to believe the textbooks and I have doubts about the rocky mountains have much effect upon Europe.
A slight problem with the analysis in my view. If you want to rewrite natural law then anything is possible but totally meaningless in a real world sense. On the other hand, if one accepts the dictates of natural law then no green house gases means not only no CO2 but also no water vapour. No water vapour means no clouds and that implies the albedo of earth would be far lower so insolation would be far higher. Once that is done the average temperature comes out at around +5C using stefan boltzmann law. To consider the impact of one effect of water vapour without also considering the other effects is simply disingenuous. This has been the whole crux of the issue, if water vapour causes warming and clouds cause cooling then what is the total impact? More importantly, what is the INCREMENTAL impact. In this context it is important to consider that the warming effect of water vapour is logarithmic like all green house gases but the cooling impact of clouds is much more likely to be close to linear since we are nowhere near saturation point for clouds (well under 100% average cloud cover). So cloud cooling will rise much faster than GHG warming with increasing water vapour.
The combination of a linear plus non linear effect from a feedback parameter is a quite common situation in control systems. It acts to establish an operating point maintained by negative feedback which is exactly what sceptics are claiming.
Another point, people keep assuming that without green house gases, weather on earth would still exist just colder. Consider, the atmosphere does work, it generates wind and raises water to higher altitude. We harvest some of that energy in wind turbines and hydroelectric stations and we experience some of that work in hurricanes. But where does that energy come from???? Simple, the atmosphere is a heat engine converting thermal energy into mechanical work and thus like all heat engines it must obey carnot’s laws. That means there has to be a hot junction where heat energy is absorbed and a separate cold junction where heat energy escapes from the system. 100% efficiency is impossible. Well the hot junction is pretty obvious – its the surface where heat energy is absorbed form the hot surface but where is the cold junction. It must be a location where heat energy escapes from the SYSTEM and that means in this case – escapes to space. That’s also obvious, its the tropopause (or lower stratosphere) – the coldest region of the atmosphere but how does heat energy escape??? It radiates to space but the only species capable of radiating energy at the temperature of the tropopause are the green house gases (oxygen and nitrogen do not radiate in the thermal infrared, if they did they would be green house gases and the entire global warming discussion would be moot). Without green house gases the atmosphere could not lose energy to space so there would be no cold junction, thus no carnot cycle and thus the atmosphere could not do work ie: there would be no atmospheric convection, no weather, no lapse rate, no rain, no wind and no life at least on dry land.
Michael
“Without green house gases the atmosphere could not lose energy to space so there would be no cold junction”
Most of what you say is right, but this isn’t. Any temperature difference can drive a heat engine, and tropics to poles, or even day to night will do.
Hi Stephen,
nice talking to you again!
I am thinking about what you said. I agree with the last statement, i.e. GH gasses are irrelevant to global T, as IMHO they make only 0.5% of the atmosphere and cannot contain much heat because there is no mass. The re-radiated light from GH gases are permeable in O2 and N2 – so it cannot not heat the O2 and N2.
I am a bit skeptical about the atmosphere being the main reason why the oceans have as much heat as they do. Most evaporation is coming from the UV hitting the top layers of molecules causing instant boiling point. IR makes the water a bit warmer also. But don’t you think that most heat from the oceans came from its origin = i.e. inner earth and is still being maintained by its [moving] origin?
That could also explain why some places on earth get warmer whilst other places get cooler. [I am still working on that investigation]
Hi Henry
Hope you are keeping well.
Heat from the interior appears to be negligible.
It gets absorbed pretty quickly near any geothermal hotspots and is rapidly dissipated. There are short term regional disturbances from large heat releases but they soon get neutralised by convective changes within the oceans.
The bottom of the ocean is cold which would not be the case if geothermal heat were any sort of driving force.
As regards atmospheric pressure do note that the higher the pressure the more energy is required to achieve the phase change. The boiling point is pressure dependent as confirmed by the lower boiling point at high elevations.
Atmospheric mass controls the surface temperature with or without oceans.
Stephen,
interesting discussion.
you say
Heat from the interior appears to be negligible
I am just not sure about that. You forget that there are a lot of active volcanoes in the middle of the atlantic and in the pacific oceans. Most recently a volcano exploded just off the coast in Indonesia. I think they said it was equivalent to 20 Hiroshima bombs all going off at once…
Go with me in a gold mine here, just one or 2 km down and quickly notice the sweat on you face??? Ja, how big is the elephant in the room, exactly?
In fact, looking at 1) the places where earth quakes recently occurred and 2) the movement of the magnetic north pole, I can even predict where the next big earth quake is likely to occur.
USA west coast…
And what exactly is the influence of the change in earth’s magnetic field on the weather? How do I explain that since 1974 average temperature here in South Africa has not changed whilst minimum temperatures have dropped by 0.8K?
So far, my investigations show the following [preliminary results]
1) warming is greater at the higher [latitudes]
2) warming is lower or even negative (i.e. cooling) at the very low [latitudes]
3) warming is higher in the NH than in the SH
Go figure. [AT THE VERY LEAST: AGW theory does not fit in?]
But I am not saying that I reject your theory that the oceans are insulated from cooling off too fast by the atmosphere pressing down on them. Thanks for the comment, I am adding it to my list….
I am just not ready to disregard any source of heat to explain the currently observed warming.
Charles TM, Roy Spencer
What I miss in the model’s description of the GHE-free planet is why the albedo still is at 0.3, and not at 0.12 like on the Moon, i.e. on a water-free, rocky planet.
I understand this 0.3 value as being valid for an Earth where the planet as it is now – i.e. with water vapor, clouds, liquid oceans and CO2 – has moved due to harsh cooling into an ice ball (which has by accident a 0.3 albedo as well).
I suppose such a situation is reached when Earth reaches the bottommost position within one or more Milankovitch cycles, thus having reached least solar irradiation.
All water vapor constituents in the atmosphere have precipitated, and all oceans are frozen. Atmospheric CO2 concentration goes down to a minimum as well.
Otherwise I don’t understand the model. Did I miss something? Correction(s) welcome!
Since clouds cover 60% of earth’s surface at any one time and they are responsible for 85 % of the DWIR through reflection, clouds are much more important then the GHG’s. Clouds can make a difference of 11 C at night .
If the radiative greenhouse gas hypothesis is valid it must cause higher temperatures during the day as well as night. If the main components of the greenhouse effect are water vapour and clouds a comparison of day temperatures at places with high or low levels of these two components should be instructive.
For example, Singapore is on the equator, is calm, surrounded by very warm ocean waters, has extremely high levels of humidity (water vapour) and is often cloudy but a top day temperature of only 37C. If the average greenhouse effect of 33C is deducted, the top temperature reduces to just 4C. Is this plausible?
On the other hand hot deserts have very low levels of water vapour and clear skies but maximum day temperatures can be as high as 50C, eg Oodnadatta, Australia 50.7C in 1960 and Furnace Creek USA 56.7 in 1913. Day temperatures at numerous places in dry inland Australia often reach the high 40C’s.
Phoenix and Atlanta USA have the same latitude and nearly the same altitude but vastly different climates. Atlanta is sub-tropical and humid while Phoenix is dry desert. Despite having much lower levels of humidity compared with Atlanta, in every month of the year the average day temperatures are much higher at Phoenix.
At face value it would seem higher levels of water vapour in the atmosphere may lead to lower, not higher, day temperatures.
Exactly.
The oceans together with the water vapour and rain it creates are distributors of warmth from hotter areas to cooler. Water vapour on average reduces the gravitational dry lapse rate of 10ºC/km to 6.7ºC/km which results in an increase in potential temperature of 3.3ºC/km.
The 33ºC warming from water vapour that I see is that of the average increase in potential temperature of 3.3ºC/km which at a 10km tropopause equals a number 16.5ºC warmer than it would be otherwise at the expense of a cooling at the surface by the same amount.
The deserts are hot because of the global average temperature.
The global average temperature is relate to average temperature of most of the area of Earth.
70% of Earth surface is ocean. The average surface temperature of the ocean surface is 17 C.
And average surface temperature of land is about 10 C.
Making the average global temperature of about 15 C.
If average global temperature was 10 C, then the temperature of entire atmosphere would be colder- or 10 tons per square meter of atmosphere would be 5 C colder.
If entire atmosphere was colder, the deserts would be colder.
But what is warming the atmosphere is air above the ocean surface which average 17 C.
But what warms the world, what heats the world, is the tropical ocean which is 40% of the ocean and has average temperature of about 26 C.
And in terms of deserts, water vapor of tropics rises, and dry air falls on the horse latitude. When falls the air becomes warmer and less water vapor. Or wet warm air goes up and when falls it’s as warm but drier. So Deserts even if at night are 0 C, are starting with warmer air. And to get temperatures near 50 C in day, one needs weather [high pressure systems] which over days of time become warmer.
Simple rule, land gets the higher surface temperatures, ocean can only warm to about 35 C due to evaporational cooling. But in terms of global temperature, ocean warm the world and land cools the world.
Hypothetical setup here: suppose you had a 20 foot long cylinder a bit wider than a tennis ball with ordinary tennis balls spaced a foot apart and a foot from either end, and this whole setup is in zero G.
What happens if you start to accelerate the cylinder along the long axis at 1 G?
Where would you expect to find most of the tennis balls at any given time?
Where would you find the most energetic tennis balls?
Now, we know they would stop bouncing eventually unless we put some nut with a racket at the top end but that’s just absurd.
What if the tube had originally had evenly dispersed gas molecules instead of tennis balls, and one end had a really bright lamp?
If you leave it floating in zero G and turn the lamp on the gas will end up heating evenly through the tube eventually right?
What if you turned the lamp on and accelerated the tube so the lamp end was the front and/or new top locally?
Why is it so strange to expect the gas to pile up and warm up near the non-lamp end as the more energetic molecules bounce up and off of the lamp before returning?
I mean, gravity isn’t something you can abstract away as though the lapse rate was just a quirky factoid, something is keeping these gases piled up down here near the surface right? Something keeps them from fully escaping–besides those pesky kids hydrogen and helium–and lets us enjoy a nice warm and dense soup of air despite the sun regularly kicking them full of energy all the damn time.
Distribute a cloud of gases as massive as our atmosphere around a model planet as massive as ours at T=0, spread them out evenly up to say the top of our stratosphere.
Now if you let them fall as you start the day/night input/output cycles rather than assuming they were just arbitrarily arranged a certain way, what do you think would happen?
Stephen,
interesting discussion.
you say
Heat from the interior appears to be negligible
I am just not sure about that. You forget that there are a lot of active volcanoes in the middle of the atlantic and in the pacific oceans. Most recently a volcano exploded just off the coast in Indonesia. I think they said it was equivalent to 20 Hiroshima bombs all going off at once…
Go with me in a gold mine here, just one or 2 km down and quickly notice the sweat on you face??? Ja, how big is the elephant in the room, exactly?
In fact, looking at 1) the places where earth quakes recently occurred and 2) the movement of the magnetic north pole, I can even predict where the next big earth quake is likely to occur.
USA west coast…
And what exactly is the influence of the change in earth’s magnetic field on the weather? How do I explain that since 1974 average temperature here in South Africa has not changed whilst minimum temperatures have dropped by 0.8K?
So far, my investigations show the following [preliminary results]
1) warming is greater at the higher [latitudes]
2) warming is lower or even negative (i.e. cooling) at the very low [latitudes]
3) warming is higher in the NH than in the SH
Go figure. [AT THE VERY LEAST: AGW theory does not fit in?]
But I am not saying that I reject your theory that the oceans are insulated from cooling off too fast by the atmosphere pressing down on them. Thanks for the comment, I am adding it to my list….
I am just not ready to disregard any source of heat to explain the currently observed warming.
Your point does of course raise a question. Is the volume of the atmosphere variable over time/latitude leading to a change in pressure?
The surface of ocean temperatures constantly releasing energy remove this cold bias without the need for greenhouse effect, unless you count the ocean as the elephant in the room regarding it. The incident solar flux when comes in contact with water is able to accumulate energy with high specific heat capacity. The air in not able to achieve anything remotely close to this.
The atmosphere warms from below not from above because the solar flux is transparent to greenhouse gases. This causes the very lapse rate we see in the atmosphere and regions least influenced by surface ocean water move closer to the incident solar flux. eg. Antarctica.
The difference in incident solar flux and greenhouse house gases in the atmosphere do not explain the behaviour of seasonal Arctic and Antarctic regional temperatures.
I have 3 main scientific objections to the greenhouse gas effect.
1. There’s never been any direct observations nor controlled experiments to show it. Given a Nobel prize probably awaits the scientist who empirically demonstrates it and refutes the Laws of Thermodynamics, why is this?
2. It is not a scientific concept nor theory. It has no scientific definition, and no falsification criteria. It is not science.
3. It’s one of those ‘how long is a piece of string?’ ideas. It seems to be infinitely flexible for predicting the end of the world. And end which never arrives; and cannot.
Carbon Dioxide Absorption Power and the Greenhouse Gas Theory
Eddie Banner
Global warming is certainly happening and much has been written about the Greenhouse Gas effect and it’s claimed warming of the Earth’s surface. The ideas have been based on the ability of molecules of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere to absorb infrared photons of 15 micron wavelength, but very little, if anything, has been published about the power which can be handled by the atmospheric carbon dioxide. Nevertheless, GHG advocates claim a “radiative forcing” of about 2 Watts per m2 at the Earth’s surface. The following calculations show that this GHG theory cannot be correct.
Consider a standard column of the Earth’s atmosphere, based upon an area of 1 square metre of the Earth’s surface.
The number of molecules in this column (1) is 2.137*10^29
So at the current concentration of carbon dioxide, 400ppm, the number of molecules of carbon dioxide is (400*10^-6 )*(2.137*10^29 ) = approx 8.5*10^25
From the HITRAN database (2), the ability of the CO2 molecule to absorb a 15 micron photon is given by its absorption cross-section, which is 5*10^-22 m2 per molecule. (Note that this database gives the value in cm^2 ).
So, in an area of 1m^2 the number of molecules required to absorb 1 photon is 1/(5*10^-22) ; that is 2*10^21 CO2 molecules per m^2
But there are 8.5*10^25 molecules of CO2 in the column.
So the number of photons which can be absorbed is (8.5*10^25) / (2*10^21)
= 4.3*10^4 photons per m^2
Now, the energy of a 15 micron photon (3) is 1.3252*10^-20 Joule
So the energy absorbed by all the CO2 in the column = (1.3252*10^-20) * 4.3*10^4 Joule
= 5.7*10^-16 Joule per m^2
This process can be repeated many times per second because the excited CO2
molecule can release its energy by collision with any molecule in the atmosphere, ready to absorb another photon of the right energy. The mean free path in air at atmospheric pressure (760 torr) is about 0.1 micron, and the molecular velocity is 465 m/sec, and so the mean time between collisions is about 2*10^-10 second. So the process can be repeated about 5*10^9 times per second.
Therefore, the maximum power which the carbon dioxide (at 400ppm) can handle is (5*10^9)*(5.7*10^-16) Joule per second per m^2, that is approx. 3*10^-6 Watts.m^-2
Whereas the Greenhouse Gas theory requires about 2 W.m^-2 , which is about 700,000 times the power available. This seems to show that the Greenhouse Gas Theory is not valid.
References
(1) http://www.theweatherprediction.com/habyhints3/976/
(2) http://vpl.astro.washington.edu/spectra/co2pnnlimagesmicrons.htm
(3) https://www.pveducation.org/pvcdrom/properties-of-sunlight/energy-of-photon
“Whereas the Greenhouse Gas theory requires about 2 W.m^-2 , which is about 700,000 times the power available. This seems to show that the Greenhouse Gas Theory is not valid.”
Most believers regard CO2 as acting like insulation.
They says it acts as a blanket.
The more confused believer think back radiation increases temperature rather decreases heat loss.
But I don’t think even if added 5 watts per square meter, it would cause much increase in global temperature as there are other factors involved.
Our Southern Hemisphere gets more sunlight as compared to Northern Hemisphere because the Southern Hemisphere is tilted towards the sun when Earth is closer to the sun during our Perihelion.
Sunlight, wiki:
Earth: [AU distance 0.9833 1.017} Watts: 1,413 1,321
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight
And Earth’s Southern Hemisphere is about 1 C cooler than compared to Northern Hemisphere.
Or there is other factors other than watts which affect global temperature.
Which version of the Greenhouse effect are you talking about?
* climate consensus version?
* 23% of the primary effect is CO2?
* 5% of the primary effect is CO2?
* 66% of it is due to positive feedback?
* Primary effect is halved due to negative feedback?
* it’s an already saturated greenhouse gas effect?
* its strangely stopped 17 years ago
* it’s still happening, but is only warming the oceans?
So many different theories, but none have testable falsification criteria. A bit like string theory and grand unification; an almost infinite variety of possible theories with no way to test them against reality. No falsification criteria.
–Mark Pawelek June 9, 2019 at 4:58 pm
Which version of the Greenhouse effect are you talking about?
* climate consensus version?
* 23% of the primary effect is CO2?
* 5% of the primary effect is CO2?
* 66% of it is due to positive feedback?
* Primary effect is halved due to negative feedback?
* it’s an already saturated greenhouse gas effect?
* its strangely stopped 17 years ago
* it’s still happening, but is only warming the oceans?
So many different theories, but none have testable falsification criteria….–
If one asserted that back radiation warmed the surface, then that could be easily falsified.
And therefore such idea tends not to favored by the professional “climate scientists”
That is the best pice of “Science” that I have seen which totally demolishes the CO2 “control knob” theory.
I have long been asking the question about energy of CO2 photons compared to Solar Radiation and you are the first person to give an answer.
Everybody who believes in the CO2 back radiation believe that all photons are the same, which I have never been able to understand.
Thank You.
I am going to bookmark your post.
Roy posted this on facebook and I commented:
Fresh asphalt midday at the equator should reach nearly 110°C with 6% atmospheric scattering reduction and no shortwave absorption from water vapour.
Roy replied:
I don’t know what point you are trying to make. You are assuming unrealistic conditions. Just put numbers into the spreadsheet model and see what you get. Here, I did it for you. For a 2 inch thick layer of asphalt (albedo = 0.05) the afternoon temperature reaches 150 deg. F, but drops below 0 deg. F at night! The 24 hr average is 61 deg. F, which is still too cold for tropical Earth, even though you have assumed 0.05 (not a realistic 0.3) albedo. But the real Earth albedo isn’t that low. I’m talking about using real-world global average values of solar flux, albedo, etc., and showing that the resulting temperature are unrealistically cold with a greenhouse effect. If you think the results sound not too bad for Sahara temperatures, well, its albedo is 0.4, which gives a 24 hr average temperature of only 8 deg. F!
To which I replied:
Well you quoted temperatures without a greenhouse effect, which means no water vapour and no clouds. So the only reductions in that case are atmospheric scattering and the asphalt albedo.
394K maximum, minus 6% scattering, minus 16% atmospheric shortwave absorption, and minus 30% albedo, is 339.7K or 66.5°C (your 150°F).
Are you actually adding the surface albedo to the global mean albedo of 0.3?
—————————————————————————————————
So I got a maximum of 65.5°C with 0.3 albedo, and Roy got 65.5°C with 0.05 albedo. I haven’t heard back from him yet.
Roy, I am absolutely appalled by how many scientifically illiterate postings there are on this Thread. No wonder skeptics get a bad name.
Earlier, I asked one of the pressure cowboys to cite a textbook supporting his theories. His response was that he saw one mid-20th Century, but couldn’t remember where or by whom.
From now on, I’ll insist that theories presented on WUWT and other blogs be supported by textbook citations or references to replicated studies. CliSci pseudo studies don’t count; sociology affects climate, feminist glacieology, 97% consensus, hide the decline, 3X water vapor feedback, invalidated UN IPCC climate models and etc. FCS!
We need to name and shame pseudo skeptics.
You have been given a perfectly clear description of the process involved supported by a mathematical model from Philip Mulholland and another poster has pointed out that the observations support the pressure based approach.
And yet all you want to do is close down the debate without making any attempt to rebut the description, the model or the observations.
Show me the textbooks, Stephen. I have neither the time nor the specialized expertise to rebut every far-out scheme described on WUWT.
The current text books all deal only with the radiative theory but here we are discussing Roy’s ‘model’ which accepts cooling by upward convection but then omits warming by downward convection with continuous recycling between the two.
A clear accounting error which you and apparently he do not wish to address.
It is Roy’s model that is ‘far out’.
Dr. Spencer’s model is not exhaustive; it is meant to illustrate a principle.
”The current text books all deal only with the radiative theory but here we are discussing Roy’s ‘model’ which accepts cooling by upward convection.”
No cooling by upward convection Stephen:
See top post: “If you object that convection has been ignored, that is a surface cooling (not warming) process, so including convection will only make matters worse.”
If the surface cooling by upward convection were included, surface warming by downward convection would offset the cooling exactly over the 4-12 annual periods these have been measured for the surface energy balance. What goes up by convection, comes down by convection as hi-lo pressure cells offset each other.
Trick,
Spencer is only able to ignore convection because he replaces the effect of convection with downward IR.
The time delay between the cooling effect of upward convection and the warming effect of downward convection causes an accumulation of energy within the system which must heat the surface.
The surface has to be hot enough to both maintain radiative equilibrium with space AND maintain ongoing convective overturning.
Convection must not be ignored.
Those are all unfounded claims Stephen. You simply make them up. Convection simply moves existing thermodynamic energy around in the system for no net change in multi-annual mean surface temperature.
Stephen, Philip Mulholland’s post assumed no radiation then of course concluded radiation has no effect.
Dave Fair is correct, you’ve never been able to cite the basis of your claims. It is not Dave that needs to step up his debate, it is you – Stephen needs to up his game and the modern sources are readily available to do so.
You’ve been trying for over a decade to sell your theories with very little success which should indicate to you those theories need to be improved. Your theories CAN be improved by some hard work/study where you learn just enough pre-req. basics about calculus, Planck radiation to discover how radiation DOES work in a planetary atm. It’s not that easy but completely impossible for one that hasn’t yet accomplished the pre-req.s such as yourself which you continually demonstrate.
Dr. Spencer just couldn’t take your comments anymore with all your unfounded claims. He has a couple of recent posts up that you should try to follow in detail; where you don’t understand the detail – work on your own or with a tutor to acquire the knowledge to understand. And….AND learn to experiment to back your claims.
I did not make any unfounded claims to Roy Spencer. In my opinion he saw the implications of the well known mundane truths that I put to him and simply closed his mind.
If the numbers work without radiation then radiation has no effect on the baseline surface temperature but it is acknowledged that it would have an effect on the surface distribution of energy because it is the surface distribution of energy that responds to radiative imbalances in order to neutralise their thermal effect.
“In my opinion…”
Yes, most all of your claims are unfounded Stephen & are only your opinions. You are welcome to your own opinions but not your own facts.
I mean, aren’t there text books which describe the ideal gas law and acceleration due to gravity out there? Sure getting a solid explanation of both in one text might be less common I suppose, but dang, are text books so different nowadays that they just leave this kind of stuff out?
I mean, I know the Feynman Lectures cover both to more than a satisfactory level but would you really care if I bothered to go and dig up the exact ones?
Fighting a comfortable belief with prickly facts doesn’t really work unless someone wants to ask why they believe something, I’ve never had much success trying. Just seems strange to run around with so much certainty about something to the point you’re willing to ostracize others for doubting it. I like questioning what I think I know and updating my knowledge when it is found to be flawed, which science is great at, but there is little comfort to be found in varying degrees of informed doubt, it just seems better than reinforcing a cherished belief in a pet idea to me.
No, Max. I develop my scientific opinions over years of observation and study. It takes more than pet theories and elaborate mathematical calculations by random blog commentators to change them.
If you want to change my opinion, come forward with credible, scientific sources. As an example, Christopher Monckton’s ECS calculations are interesting, but I’m waiting for critical, creditable and detailed analyses before I could agree.
Maxwell’s Theory of Heat States it clearly pp330 to 350. NASA data from spacecraft show it clearly. Brett Keane
Which NASA data, Brett?
Dave, the solar system atmospheric data read in place by many satellites starting with venera and Voyager.
I gave you the salient pages. Seek and find if you really want to know.
Study IGL deeply including how it heats stars to fusion. Ask Roger Tattersall on Tallbloke’s Blog.
We live on Earth, Brett.
Oh, and what part of “Maxwell’s Theory of Heat” applies to the topic here under discussion?
Pressure continues to be excoriated here. But Astrophysicists rely on it to ignite stars from initially 3 K, with a bit of help where needed from Tunnelling. IGL as per Maxwell and Poisson. Test your beliefs against them then come back here please. Brett Keane
Obviously then Dave Fair, you are just a troll, worthless and dumb. Earth is in the solar system and the proof is found in the congruence. Whether or not CO2 is present, or any other so- called ghg. Again, it is the triumph of gas laws and thermodynamics over lust to get rich destroying Western Civilisation. Good Luck with that and being smarter than Maxwell, or the NASA Living With A Star team. Brett Keane
I’m the Troll, Brett? You deny that the radiative properties of certain atmospheric gases have an effect, along with many other process, on the temperature profiles of Earth’s atmosphere.
You seem to take a few fundamental properties of heat transfer and gas pressure effects and extrapolate them to a whole novel way of accounting for temperature profiles in Earth’s dynamic air/water interactions which, btw, involve massive transfers of energy that are difficult or impossible to measure accurately. It is energy transfers into, around and out of the entirety of the Earth’s sea, land and atmosphere system and its operation that determine the different heat profiles measured.
You have built a sand castle and will not listen to various scientists when they tell you how things actually work. I have dealt with many technical minded people like you that are ultimately bitterly frustrated when their complex, unproven theories are not supported in time by others. I have managed many large scientific, engineering and financial operations and I know of what I say here.
I believe CliSci has exaggerated or misapplied the theory of H2O and its possible feedbacks, that’s all. They believe a minor increase of a trace gas could lead to cascading, serious climate catastrophe. In their frenzy, they will not address valid scientific criticisms. Their reliance on invalidated UN IPCC climate models for temperature, humidity, rainfall and drought evolution, and their exaggerated assumptions as to the biological effects of minor warming are all of great concern. Additionally, their practice of ignoring the positive effects of CO2 is scientifically damming.
Money, power, and ideology of all sorts drive the CAGW hoax. Get off your pet theory if you want to effectively counter the madness.
There is nothing novel in my pressure based description of the mechanical processes involved in convective overturning.
Every component of the description is based on well established observations and thermodynamic principles.
In order to attack my description you must demonstrate that some element of the description does not work as proposed and provide reasons.
My description has been in the public domain for several years now and no one has been able to do that.
Philip Mulholland has successfully created a mathematical model based on the sequence of events set out in my description and it works, even making observationally accurate predictions in the process.
Stephen, I don’t have to demonstrate anything; it has been done many times over the years. Goodbye.
“In order to attack my description you must demonstrate that some element of the description does not work as proposed and provide reasons. My description has been in the public domain for several years now and no one has been able to do that.”
Dave is correct. Elements of Stephen’s description do not work as he proposes as pointed out by many commenters over the years which is why Stephen has to continue to try and sell his views. Stephen never puts numbers behind his work so his work is almost totally unfounded, almost purely imaginary. Phillip Mulholland assumed no atm. radiation thus his conclusion atm. radiation has no effect merely follows from his assumption.
“Pressure continues to be excoriated here. But Astrophysicists rely on it to ignite stars from initially 3 K”
Just an observation, nuclear fusion is well understood. (The difference between a chemical reaction and a fusion reaction is radiation) The energy output of a star requires a great deal of fused elements giving off a very measurable amount of radiation… Our sun radiates “A factor of three” too less gamma radiation then that is required for minimal Solar output. In short, our Sun is not nuclear, and the proof is, we are not all dead.
It is assumed that the weight of a stars atmosphere creates so much heat that fusion is achieved.
With no fusion elements as a by product then we can we assume that the heat and pressure of the atmosphere is all that is required for the dramatic result we are observing.
At some level, the atmosphere turns into plasma from the heat. Because hydrogen becomes superconductive under pressure, The electrical energy flows in the path of least resistance through the photosphere to the chromosphere where it heats and emitts light at the same frequencies and wavelength as a bolt of lightning through a hydrogen atmosphere as shown with spectral analysis. It’s a “Thermal pile effect”.
The same heating technique occurs in relation to gravity on every planet with an atmosphere. Thicker the atmosphere, the more heat generated below it at the surface.
Jupiters transition zone has just been upgraded to more than 16,000°, about seven times higher than the surface of the sun. It has been shown that it’s magnetic field is the result of electrical currents from a atmospheric layer of plasma.
I have a text book written in the late 1800s that says that the sun must be covered with 9 feet of coal every hour over its entire surface to maintain its output. It must be right if it’s in the textbook.
If there really was any greenhouse gas science it would be
1. fairly precise,
2. one version agreed upon among scientists,
3. shown by experiment and observation,
4. posed in language and/or maths which state clear falsification criteria.
You know – like all other science. It’s obvious the greenhouse gas effect is pseudoscience. Post-normal scientists can believe it; responsible scientists cannot. Because we cannot believe on faith. I’d be lying if I said “I believe in, or trust, the greenhouse gas theory”
1. Precision of 1.5C to 6C by 2100.
2. 95% of scientists agree with CAGW.
3. UN IPCC climate models obviate the need for experiment and observation.
4. Climate Denier! You’ve been told what science to believe.
See, Mark. CliSci has your concerns covered.
Laughing at Dave Fair’s answer; he’s a caricature.
There ought to be an article here on why ‘climate scientists‘ are addicted to speculation and contemptuous of empirical research such as rigorous observation and controlled experiment. Why only ‘climate scientists‘ do name-calling and worship fallacies like argument from authority. Note the most important aspect of argumentum ad verecundiam is how it allows the believer to claim belief and understanding of some idea; when all the while without understanding it. Same motivation today as in Socrates time!
How am I a caricature, Mark?
Actually, Mark, you could say I paint a caricature of CliSci.
“3. UN IPCC climate models obviate the need for experiment and observation.”
WOW, the most absurd statement I have seen from Mr Fair.
How many Models are there?
How many different answers do they give?
Have you never heard of GIGO?
The vast numbers of atmospheric gas molecules make collisions much more likely than radiative interactions with trace greenhouse gases. In other words, a carbon dioxide molecule energised by long wave radiation radiated from the surface will almost certainly collide with other molecules raising their kinetic energy. This drives convection, transporting the heat to the upper atmosphere. The probability of collision is huge compared with the emission of a photon.
ABSTRACT
By the line-by-line method, a computer program is used to analyze Earth
atmospheric radiosonde data from hundreds of weather balloon observations. In
terms of a quasi-all-sky protocol, fundamental infrared atmospheric radiative flux
components are calculated: at the top boundary, the outgoing long wave radiation,
the surface transmitted radiation, and the upward atmospheric emittance; at the
bottom boundary, the downward atmospheric emittance. The partition of
the outgoing long wave radiation into upward atmospheric emittance and surface
transmitted radiation components is based on the accurate computation of the true
greenhouse-gas optical thickness for the radiosonde data. New relationships
among the flux components have been found and are used to construct a quasi-allsky model of the earth’s atmospheric energy transfer process. In the 1948-2008
time period the global average annual mean true greenhouse-gas optical thickness
is found to be time-stationary. Simulated radiative no-feedback effects of
measured actual CO2 change over the 61 years were calculated and found to be of
magnitude easily detectable by the empirical data and analytical methods used.
The data negate increase in CO2 in the atmosphere as a hypothetical cause for the
apparently observed global warming. A hypothesis of significant positive
feedback by water vapor effect on atmospheric infrared absorption is also negated
by the observed measurements. Apparently major revision of the physics
underlying the greenhouse effect is needed.
https://friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/E&E_21_4_2010_08-miskolczi.pdf
S
Note the above graph. The yellow marked area is the radiation that does not reach the bottom of earth. The wavelengths of the ‘yellow’ correspond with the absorption spectra of the various GH gases 0-5um. All GH gases only make about 0.5% of the composition of the whole atmosphere. Please explain to me exactly where the amount of [yellow] energy goes that does not reach my hat and what processes you suggest that are involved in the disappearance of this large amount of radiation?
[I will show the relevance to your comment later. I have to go out now.]
The present results show an apparent warming associated with no apparent change in the absorption properties. Change in absorption properties cannot have been the cause of the warming.
The results show that the theoretical CO2-induced virtual increase in true greenhousegas optical thickness greatly exceeds the actual empirically measured change over the
61-year dataset. The fact that the virtual change is about four times the actual change is strong empirical evidence that there is a very strong dynamic compensation that
stabilizes the atmospheric energy transport process against a potential perturbation by CO2 change.
This means that the empirically estimated virtual feedback of water vapor effect on the greenhouse-gas optical thickness is not significantly positive contradicting the IPCC doctrine of it being strongly positive.
It is clear from these data that the increase in surface temperature shown in Fig. 9 cannot in the least be accounted for by any effect
of CO2 on greenhouse gas optical thickness, with or without positive feedback by water vapor.
Merely empirical evidence does not necessarily justify predictions of the future:
for them, in addition to empirical evidence, some logical warrant of generality is needed.
Such a warrant of generality is usually called a physical theory. In order to predict the future, we need a principled physical theory to explain our empirical observations.
The present paper has restricted its attention to the empirical observational testing of the quasi-all-sky model, and has avoided theoretical analysis.
These empirical results could well be challenged by a comparable empirical method.
https://friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/E&E_21_4_2010_08-miskolczi.pdf
I guess blankets do not warm the person laying under them, because the body has to lose energy in order to warm the blanket up, before it begins to warm the body up under it.
Convection may initially cool the surface, but as the entire atmosphere continues to gain energy it eventually begins to warm the surface. Without greenhouse gases, the atmosphere could get very warm as it has a low surface area from which to radiate black body radiation.
All 4 of your points are caricatures.
A range of 400% accuracy is ‘precision‘? That is called imprecision where I come from.
Don’t you mean 97%? that’s the pseudoscience, and cherry-picked statistics normally quoted to support that fantasy. Apart from being bad stats it’s an argument from authority. Socrates, expalined why argument from authority is a crux for intellectual laziness and even incompetence. When using this argument, you’re basically admitting you don’t understand what you claim to know.
IPCC models all claim a water vapour positive feedback factor to treble the, supposed, effect of carbon dioxide. Because they say water’s relative humidity will stay constant but increasing temperature actually means specific humidity will rise. The rise in specific humidity of water vapour is supposed to add additional greenhouse warming.
This is a lie. There is no water vapour positive feedback due to CO2 changes in the climate system. There may be a slight negative feedback effect. It is not bad science, or pseudoscience. It’s an actual lie.
You think your 4th point isn’t a caricature? Silly boy.
Mark, I rarely add “/sarc” to my obviously sarcastic postings. Your post, however, provides great refutations to the “science” of CliSci.
You ought to know by now that climate science and eco-doomongering cannot be sarced because each time say something they outdo each other to mimic their caricature, or self-archetype. Reality out-sarcs any sarcasm.
https://twitter.com/SlowMoneyGreen/status/1138071014133211138
Dave Fair, your fact-free unscientific poor excuse for an answer to my last, just confirms your trolldom. Your contempt extending to Maxwell and Poisson, really piles it up to a large mound of ordure. Never mind, I am a dab hand with a shovel, being in fact one who made his life in the agricultural and marine worlds. Where you live or die by being observant and practical. Still doing it, along with research illuminated by real experience. I note you also insult the Astrophysicists by inference. Do keep it up, this not needing sarc….. Brett Keane
On that note, goodbye Brett.
This is disgraceful.
Stephen Wilde tells us he has been banned from Roy’s blog.
I’ve been on this earth long enough to know that people who try to close down others from debating with them are on the losing side.
Shame on you Roy.
You have no right to call yourself a scientist with that attitude.
Only free and open debate between scientists can make this world progress.
Censorship and banning is going to make progress go backwards.
And shame on you too Anthony for not realising this, your blog would be 1000% better with a more open attitude aligned with scientific integrity as opposed to helping others protect their little non scientific bubbles.
The truth fears no challenge , enquiry or discussion.
I don’t think Anthony should be tarred with the same brush.
I should like to compliment Dr Spencer on a great piece of work and an excellent post, although I am not convinced that it demonstrates the existence of any greenhouse gas effect. It uses an albedo of 0.3 and an emissivity of 0.98, and shows that the temperatures “would be very cold”. This is, indeed, in line with simple calculations with the Stefan-Boltzmann equation, which gives -16.9 deg C.
However, with the same albedo, the pre-anthropogenic temperature of 288 K, (ie. 15 deg C) is obtained from the equation with an emissivity of 0.6146, which is in line with the estimates given in Wiki, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_model which do not involve greenhouse gases.
Now, consider the anthropogenic temperature rise in the Northern hemisphere, nominally nearly 1 deg C over the last 50 years. ie. the temperature becomes 289 K. SB then gives an emissivity of 0.6062, and so the change is (0.6146 – 0.6062), which is a reduction of only 1.37% in the Earth’s emissivity.
So, the question is could this reduction have been caused during the 50 years by human-caused effects? Eg, deforestation, land use, extra concrete, more buildings, pollution and so on?
If such a change in emissivity were possible, then the GHG theory would NOT be required to explain the anthropogenic temperature rise.