The first modern theoretical estimates of ECS, the equilibrium climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide, were reported in 1979 in the so-called “Charney Report” (Charney, et al., 1979). They reported, on page 2, a theoretical ECS of 1.5°C to 4.5°C per doubling of the CO2 atmospheric concentration. This estimate included an estimate of water vapor feedbacks, the effect of ice and their assumed uncertainties. Absent any water vapor feedback their computed value was 1°C per doubling of CO2. They also supply a likely value of 2.4°C on page 9, although on page 2 they offer a value “near 3.0.” The page 9 value is not far off from the empirical estimate of 2°C made by Guy Callendar in 1938, but significantly higher than the 1.2°C to 1.95°C (17% to 83% range, best estimate 1.5°C) given by Nic Lewis and Judith Curry (Lewis & Curry, 2018).
The IPCC, in their AR5 report (Bindoff & Stott, 2013), estimate ECS as lying between 1.5°C and 4.5°C and provide no best estimate. This range is precisely the same as the Charney Report made 34 years earlier. While the empirical, observation-based, estimates have narrowed significantly, the theoretical range has not changed, despite thousands of government-funded scientists spending billions of dollars trying to do so. The data is very much the same today and churning it faster with more powerful computers and billions of dollars doesn’t seem to matter. It works the same way with manure.
Digging deeply into the AR5 internals, as Monckton, et al. did in MSLB15, a paper entitled, “Why Models run hot: results from an irreducibly simple climate model” (Monckton, Soon, Legates, & Briggs, 2015), we see that the elements of the AR5 theoretical calculations suggest that the range is narrowing in a downward direction. Given the political environment at the IPCC, one can easily suspect that the politicians do not want to admit the theoretical risks of CO2-caused climate change are lessening. As more empirical estimates of the CO2 effect appear and more theoretical work is done, one wonders how long the politicians can support the clearly inflated range of 1.5°C to 4.5°C?
Estimates of ECS have been declining for a long time, as shown in 2017 by Nicola Scafetta and colleagues. Figure 1 is from their paper:
The 1980s was when the catastrophic man-made (or anthropogenic) global warming catastrophe (CAGW) idea was developed. The alarmists have been beating the drum year-after-year ever since. In the United States, a Senate committee meeting, hosted by Senator Tim Wirth, on CAGW took place in the Washington, DC Dirksen Senate Office Building on June 23, 1988. It was a hot and humid day in swampy Washington, DC. The meeting was a watershed moment, in no small part due to Dr. James Hansen of NASA. In his presentation to the Congressional committee, he said:
“It is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements.”
“Altogether the evidence that the earth is warming by an amount which is too large to be a chance fluctuation and the similarity of the warming to that expected from the greenhouse effect represents a very strong case. In my opinion, … the greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.”
“The present observed global warming is close to 0.4 degrees C, relative to ‘climatology,’ which is defined as the thirty-year (1951 – 1980) mean. … we can state with about 99 percent confidence that current temperatures represent a real warming trend rather than a chance fluctuation over the 30-year period.” (Hansen, 1988)
ExxonMobil believed that natural variability was ±0.5°C. They thought that a change had to be larger than that to be significant. Obviously, Hansen somehow narrowed this natural range. The world cooled globally from 1944 to 1977, then began warming in 1978. An increase of 0.4°C is not much, so using that to determine that the “greenhouse effect” has been detected after a long period of cooling should have raised eyebrows and questions. Notice Hansen says, “greenhouse effect,” when he means “human-caused greenhouse effect” or “enhanced greenhouse effect.” There is a natural greenhouse effect, caused by natural CO2 and other greenhouse gases, especially water vapor. This is the beginning of a deceptive tactic commonly used by the alarmists. To ignore natural causes of climate change, they equate “greenhouse effect” with “human-caused greenhouse effect.” Also, they use “global warming” as synonymous to “human-caused global warming” and “climate change” is synonymous with “human-caused climate change.” This sort of deceptive and manipulative language is still used today.
The IPCC Reports
The first IPCC report (FAR), chaired by Bert Bolin, determined that global warming to 1992, when the report was published, fell within the range of “natural climate variability” and was not necessarily due to human activities (IPCC, 1990, p. XII). They thought the unequivocal detection of a human influence was “not likely for a decade or more.” Bert Bolin thought James Hansen’s congressional testimony in 1988 had exaggerated the significance of recent global warming.
The second report, SAR, published in 1996, found that “The balance of evidence suggests a discernable human influence on global climate.” (IPCC, 1996, p. 4). But this was based upon unpublished and unreviewed work by Benjamin Santer and colleagues. His study suggested that climate model predictions about warming in the troposphere and cooling in the stratosphere, were like what was occurring. He called this a “fingerprint” of human influence on climate (Santer, et al., 1996a). After the paper was published, it was found that Santer had cherry-picked his fingerprint (Michaels & Knappenberger, 1996). The study was dismissed, and the IPCC humiliated. This humiliation was compounded by the fact that the politicians in charge of the IPCC were caught changing the scientific reports within SAR to match their political Summary for Policymakers (Seitz, 1996).
The third report, TAR, published in 2001, found that “most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.” (IPCC, 2001, p. 10). They based this decision on the “hockey stick,” which was later shown to be flawed. By the time the fourth report (AR4) was published in 2007, numerous investigations of the hockey stick showed it was incorrect and showed too little variability. This was acknowledged in the fourth report, AR4, by Keith Briffa, who wrote, somewhat euphemistically, that the hockey stick was too sensitive to particular proxies (tree rings) and the statistical methods (principal components) used to construct it (IPCC, 2007b, p. 436). Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas demonstrated that the hockey stick did not reflect the data used to build it (Soon & Baliunas, 2003). The hockey stick turned out to be an elaborate fiction created solely from a flawed statistical procedure and a poorly selected set of temperature proxies (National Research Council, 2006, pp. 112-116) and (Wegman, Scott, & Said, 2010, pp. 4-5, 48-50).
By the time AR4 was published in 2007, the leadership of the IPCC had given up on finding any direct evidence that humans dominate climate change. They had tried Santer’s “fingerprint” and Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” and failed to convince the public with either. So, in AR4, they tried to use climate models to convince the public that, “Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.” (IPCC, 2007b, p. 10). They present no observational evidence, just model results. The fifth report, AR5, was just a repeat of AR4. Same two models, same result. As already mentioned, deep in the AR5 internals, MSLB15 (Monckton, Soon, Legates, & Briggs, 2015) showed that the newer AR5 model results suggested IPCC headlines are overstating the sensitivity of the climate to CO2, but this result was not explained or acknowledged in the report.
So, while empirical calculations of the climate sensitivity to CO2 now show ECS to be between 1.1°C and 2.45°C (see Table 1), the theoretical estimates have remained 1.5 to 4.5, except for AR4 when it was changed to 2.0 to 4.5. The ranges in Table 1 are all 5% to 95% ranges as far as I can tell.
Table 1. Various estimates of ECS. All are theoretical calculations except for Lewis and Curry, their estimate is based on observations.
Thus, thousands of scientists and billions of dollars later, we still have the same theoretical uncertainty about the impact of CO2 on climate. The one empirical estimate of ECS shown is about 1.5°C. Most such empirical estimates are less than 2°C and cluster around 1.5°C to 1.6°C (Lewis & Curry, 2018). Guy Callendar’s empirical estimate was 2°C (Callendar, 1938) and Arrhenius’ theoretical estimate (Arrhenius, 1908) was 4°C, so it can be said all the work and money spent since 1938 to attribute climate change to humans was wasted.
Is it getting any better? What about the latest generation of theoretical models, CMIP6? Early indications are that the results are getting worse, not better, as reported by Ron Clutz and John Christy. While most of the new models show absurdly inflated values for ECS, it is interesting that the latest version of the Russian model, INM-CM4, referred to in my previous post, now predicts an ECS of 1.83. So, except for INM-CM4, we’ve seen no progress since 1938. As my late Grandmother Marie McCartney would say, “now isn’t that just dandy.”
This is a condensed excerpt, with minor modifications, from my new book, Politics and Climate Change: A History.
To download the bibliography, click here.
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As a civil engineer I use two “models”for accessing pipe flow.
1. Colebrook White for smaller smoother pipes,
And
2. Manning’s for larger rougher pipes.
Thus I accept you can have more than one Model.
BUT why have 15-20 climate models.
Most must be WRONG and must be discarded.
The Russian model seems to be closest to observational data. Throw the rest away.
A leftists friend said the “Russian model” is colluding with Trump.
Or so he heard.
But maybe he meant a Russian fashion model.
I’ll get back when I find out for sure
Awww’ now you went and done i!. TWO models? Unthinkable! That might mean that fluid flow(everywhere in the atmosphere and oceans) may change with scale. That kind of throws all the modelling into the waste basket.
I look quite a bit at airfoils for planes, boats, etc. There are quite a few computer models out there for evaluating the flow around an airfoil. Every one fails at some point when the flow becomes turbulent.
ALL airfoils have a nearly straight gain in lift in a straight line to about 11 degrees. Then the lift flattens out, the airfoil stalls, and the plane or whatever stops doing it’s business. Always.
Many pilots and many passengers have tested these observations and many died doing so. As a result the biggest, fastest, costliest designs can be designed on paper. But every plane designed that can afford it also does a backup wind tunnel test to verify the design before committing a plane to the air.
The climate is not understood at the level to do this with models at all. Red herrings like Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity were developed to give a target to shoot at, so to speak, but don’t actually model the climate. Given the sun so close by spewing out radiation and lots of charged particles modelling the Top of Atmosphere radiation flow is highly questionable. When is the weather broadly settled enough to be at “equilibrium”?
Never.
“Every one fails at some point when the flow becomes turbulent.”
Those darn Navier Stokes equations 😉
Hi
Can someone help?
Is there a table that describes the key elements and differences in the various climate models?
Thanks in advance
Ron Clutz has a good one in this post:
https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2020/01/26/climate-models-good-bad-and-ugly/
The only table you need is that all the models predict warming climate based on increasing Co2. Humans only emit 20ppm of Co2 per year…THAT is what global warming is based on. One Co2 molecule per 50000 ‘air’ molecules. And people buy into that.
I don’t believe it is science if it is based upon an estimate.
So why can’t climate scientists look at the historical climate over the last few million years or so, or over a period of time where the climate swung back and forth a few times from hot to cold to hot to cold to………, examine the CO2 levels, and then figure it out.
This would be more realistic than relying on the phony-baloney climate models that cannot even reproduce the climate over the last 30 or 40 years.
By the way, in the past when CO2 levels were two or three times higher than today – and presumably it was warmer than today – what caused all that CO2 to “disappear” that then, presumably tossed the climate into a period of cold?? Where did all the CO2 go to? What caused it to diminish?
And once the climate got very cold – presumably due to very low CO2 levels – how was it ever again possible for the earth to ever warm up again?
From where, all of a sudden (geologically speaking) did all this CO2 come, that caused, yet again , the earth to warm??
Surely an “ice covered” earth can’t be the engine for a resurgence of CO2, can it?
The most basic and obvious questions about climate elicit ZERO answers from the AGW zealots.
Why?
Because they , nor anybody else, know the answers.
Yet they presume to tell us they can model the future climate.
They are so FOS.
They can. When they use temperature and CO2 estimates with compatible resolution, they get about 1.3 °C per doubling. However, most of the paleoclimate publications used much lower resolution CO2 estimates than the temperatures. This yields a higher ECS.
The CO2 was mineralized by the silicate-carbonate rock weathering cycle.
Changes in the Earth’s orbit cause cyclical variations in solar insolation (Milankovitch cycles). Over the past 2 million years, the Earth has cycled between glacial (ice ages) and interglacial stages. Colder oceans suck the CO2 out of the atmosphere during glacial stages. Warming oceans outgas the CO2 back into the atmosphere during interglacial stages.
“Colder oceans suck the CO2 out of the atmosphere during glacial stages. Warming oceans outgas the CO2 back into the atmosphere during interglacial stages.”
In other words, CO2 does not lead temperatures and cause temperatures to rise and fall, CO2 follows temperatures.
Mother Nature causes the Earth’s temperatures to decline, which causes CO2 levels in the atmosphere to be reduced as CO2 is absorbed by the cold oceans, and then Mother Nature warms the Earth’s oceans and the oceans outgas CO2 into the atmosphere. The cold and the warm changes come before changes in CO2 levels in the Earth’s atmosphere.
Tylenol:
You’ve got ir wrong
Real science studies the PAST climate.
The future climate can’t be predicted, they say.
Forget about those losers.
“Modern climate change” predicts the FUTURE climate.
And it will either be bad news, or worse than bad news.
The future climate can never be good news.
The only PAST climate of any interest to climate howlers,
er … climate changers … was on June 6, 1755 at 3:06 pm
— The climate was perfect then.
— If it gets warmer than that, then we have a climate crisis.
— If it gets colder than that, then we have a climate crisis.
— Funny thing is people living then thought it was too cold.
But what would they know?
Today we know the exact temperature
and CO2 level on June 6, 1755 at 3:06pm,
from enormous ice cubes, sometimes called ice cores,
which are accurate to four decimal places.
Four decimal places is real science.
Three decimal places is malarkey.
Just an observation…
If we extend the vertical scale down to zero, and then extend the linear trends for both ECS and TCR it appears they would both reach zero about 2030. So if we wait another ten years the CO2 climate problem will be solved.
“they would both reach zero about 2030”
And guesswork will finally catch up with REALITY ! 🙂
BINGO!
So assuming that the additional CO2 added to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels causes a measurable amount of warming, what amount would be acceptable?
Remember that most of this warming occurs to areas that are cold, and mostly at night. Does anyone really care that northern Montana warms by 1.5C in deep winter at night? Or that the same place warms by 0.5C in high summer in the day? Could we reliably even measure that given the high variability in weather?
If the “climate sensitivity” eventually reaches 2.0 or lower, I don’t know that anyone cares anymore. This will put a lot of pressure on activists to keep the numbers higher through any means necessary – propaganda, intimidation, any means necessary to elect the right officials, etc. If the public awakens to this scam, the activists lose their money and then their influence.
If things continue at this rate, by 2032, the sensitivity will be zero, which I suspect is very close to the correct answer.
[[Thus, thousands of scientists and billions of dollars later, we still have the same theoretical uncertainty about the impact of CO2 on climate. The one empirical estimate of ECS shown is about 1.5°C. Most such empirical estimates are less than 2°C and cluster around 1.5°C to 1.6°C (Lewis & Curry, 2018). Guy Callendar’s empirical estimate was 2°C (Callendar, 1938) and Arrhenius’ theoretical estimate (Arrhenius, 1908) was 4°C, so it can be said all the work and money spent since 1938 to attribute climate change to humans was wasted.]]
I could have saved them all that work and money. The true ECS is ZERO, zilch, nada. The scientists kept by the leftist-run U.N. IPCC are a government bondoggle clown show looking for a pony in the manure and regularly announcing a hoof clipping or tail hair, when they’re just chasing unicorns.
For the umpteenth time, there is no physical way that atmospheric CO2 can melt an ice cube with its 15 micron radiation that has a Planck radiation temperature of -80C like dry ice. Like most leftist witch hunts, there is no ‘there’ there. All along, the IPCC has based its entire CO2 AGW hoax on computer climate models that are no more than video games on government funding that aren’t searching for the truth but are pure garbage in garbage out, regurgitating the results wired-in.
https://www.quora.com/Are-The-Global-warming-climate-change-theory-models-oversimplified-and-or-corrupted-by-data-that-is-not-accurately-representative-of-reality-the-main-reason-for-their-dismal-track-record-on-their-predictions-could/answer/TL-Winslow
The entire CO2 AGW edifice relies on the hoax that without atmospheric CO2’s back radiation the Sun couldn’t keep the Earth from freezing, which is supposed to prove the heating power of CO2 back radiation without further ado. How do they get that? They reduce the Earth to a flat disk 1/4 the surface area of the globe then reduce the Sun to 1/4 power, claiming that everything about Earth’s climate can be derived from pure instantaneous but static radiation radiation shining on a fixed static flat Earth, allowing long-term averages to be easily calculated but bearing no resemblance to reality. As if the Sun doesn’t shine only half of each day on most of the surface, and as if the Earth doesn’t have a thick atmosphere that turns solar energy into work to power thermals, wind, and storms by acting as a Carnot heat engine, which doesn’t work instantaneously like radiation and modifies all calculations with energy storage. That’s why they put out values for solar radiation and CO2 back radiation in watts per square meter for the whole disk, as if a flat Earth model has any physical validity whatever. They have literally turned Science back to the Flat Earth days. But like Galileo said, “But it still moves”.
http://www.historyscoper.com/howmuchdoesthesuncontributetoglobalwarming.html
Using instantaneous radiation to/from a flat Earth makes it seem natural to use the Stefan-Boltzmann T^4 Law that gives the total power output of a surface keyed to the 4th power of temperature, and is derived from the more general Planck Radiation Law that gives a temperature to radiation via its peak power wavelength keyed to temperature. Like all leftist bait-and-switches, using only T^4 for all calculations, one can probably prove that a block of dry ice in an unplugged microwave oven can cook a turkey, because total power freed from wavelength distribution makes dry ice as hot as a blowtorch.
How convenient for Marxists whose mentality is to make everybody equal, why not photons? They never mention that photon energy is inversely proportional to wavelength, so all photons aren’t equal, and the longer the wavelength the weaker the photon and less able it is to override a molecule’s kinetic energy and increase its temperature.
All these T^4 equations should be towed out to sea in a barge and sunk, and climate science refounded using the full Planck Radiation Law, where only wavelengths of 12.986 microns (-50C) down to 8.967 microns (+50C) (roughly 13 to 9 microns) are carrying the burden of shedding Earth’s surface heat, and radiation of 15 microns wavelength (-80C) isn’t even capable of interfering with it and is thus irrelevant to climate. Alas, to discriminate on the basis of wavelength makes it necessary to junk their precious S-B 5th grader calculations and confuse their Marxist social-racist justice minds. 🙂
It’s sad that the scientists at the top must have known this all along and used the S-B Law purposely to fool their own students as well as the public, which is why the bastard pseudoscience or junk science field called climatology is a giant government boondoggle and should be defunded ASAP, while real physicists like moi and a few of the readers hired in their place. Fat chance under the global Marxist U.N. IPCC octopus that has infiltrated every human society, especially the scientific ones. I take it back. Top IPCC scientists like Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann are probably total physics flunkouts and can’t even be trusted to understand anything about radiative physics. No wonder Joe Biden just chose him for his climate advisor 🙂
But cracks are showing. Lately I’ve seen the IPCC hoaxers deemphasize CO2 back radiation and shift focus to water vapor as an alternate “greenhouse gas”. What a sick attempt to keep the money pouring in. First, humans have no control of the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, and they certainly don’t need to shut down the fossil fuel industry because of it. Second, the only reason there’s water vapor in the sky is that it has already cooled the surface via evaporation, taking a lot of solar heat energy with it, and no radiation it could supposedly emit could replace that lost heat, much less warm the surface more than the Sun originally did. Then there’s the thermodynamic lapse rate of 9.8C/K (18.8F/mi.), which causes the water vapor to quickly grow frigid with height, so that when it drops precipitation it will cool the surface more than the Sun already did, and never warm it at all. That’s why Jehovah covered the Earth in a water vapor layer so that Adam and Eve didn’t need air conditioning. 🙂
Then there’s water vapor’s radiation problem. First, water vapor is a mixture of gas and liquid, and gas can’t emit Planck distribution radiation, only liquids and solids. Water is a weakly polar molecule and can absorb and emit some radiation on a photon by photon basis, never a complete Planck power-wavelength curve that can raise the temperature of the Earth’s surface, but since it’s embedded in liquid, the latter will likely catch all of it, and yes, water can emit Planck radiation. But the Planck radiation power-wavelength curve makes frigid sky water or ice unable to raise the temperature of anything higher than itself, which might be 0C or lower, meaning no global warming would be possible. Only ground fog might be able to block convection and slow surface cooling, but never warm it higher than the Sun did, and that’s weather not climate.
It’s time to drop the very term greenhouse gas and refound climate science on sound physical principles without political aspirations to fool the world into redistributing its wealth for Marxist social-racial justice. If that causes brainwashed leftists to fear losing their warm fuzzy feelings, I don’t care, because I seek truth, and it’s not subject to politics. Back to the lead paragraph, maybe all those billions wasted chasing unicorns was Marxist social justice, make-work projects for unemployable losers. 🙂
http://www.historyscoper.com/thebiglieaboutco2.html
https://www.quora.com/How-does-convection-in-Earth-s-interior-and-conduction-in-the-surface-affect-the-temperature-in-our-atmosphere/answer/TL-Winslow
https://www.quora.com/Disregarding-all-evidence-that-flows-from-the-logical-fallacy-of-correlation-implying-causality-what-evidence-is-there-that-atmospheric-CO2-is-causing-global-warming/answer/TL-Winslow
https://www.quora.com/When-scientific-evidence-of-climate-change-was-first-presented-what-was-the-initial-reason-many-politicians-decided-to-ignore-it-while-listening-to-scientific-evidence-on-other-issues/answer/TL-Winslow
“Back Radiation” is absurd. It plays in Peoria, apparently, but it is not scientific. What does happen from increased CO2 is that the altitude at which the Atmosphere can freely radiate to Space, with no more absorption and re-radiation from CO2 up there, does increase, decreasing the temperature at which the Atmosphere freely radiates to space, increasing the amount of energy retained in the Atmosphere. This is the fundamental physics, has nothing to do with Back-Radiation or Watts/M2 of Forcing. Wow, what a lot of absurd physics Plays in Peoria.
Now to understand this, you have to know that, as you go Higher in the Atmosphere, it gets colder, well anyway until the Stratosphere, which is so light that heat up there changes nothing.
To understand this, one must have been required to pass classes at University in Thermo and Heat Transfer along with the associated labs.
I am 100% Correct, hope to get some back-up from others who understand the physics of this. Mosher finally does, but continues pitching for the other team. Stokes may or may not, will not say either way.
“Back-Radiation” is absurd. The Sky cannot heat the Surface, nor itself.
Really you guys, you have not studied, you are expecting the Sky to heat the Earth? The Sun heats the Earth. CO2 slows the cooling, which is not the same thing as heating. Heating requires a transfer of Energy from a Warm thing to a Cool thing. Slowing the cooling, which CO2 does as it increases, is not Heating. Far different thing, Can a blanket set your house on fire? No it cannot.
This Back-Radiation is a construct to make it simple for the masses. There is none. The Sun heats the Earth, the Earth radiates heat back to Space, CO2 slows that a bit. No one can calculate the magnitude of this effect, all the cartoons with the arrows and the figures are a crock. Clouds determine the amount of heat in the Atmosphere far more importantly than CO2. Measure the Clouds accurately for the last 150 years, tell us how they have changed. You cannot.
Does your jacket heat you? No, it keeps you warmer in cold weather. Your mammalian physique produces the heat that keeps you warm. A jacket helps you keep that heat, so that you do not get cold.
Your jacket does not heat you, it prevents heat loss. Do you end up not shivering? We hope so. So insulation producing heating, not so much. Produces less heat loss.
This seems to be a very important point here, keeps coming up.
The Atmosphere with the CO2 does retain heat that is radiated by the Earth. More CO2 does retain more heat, no one can calculate how much, but it is more. All these cartoons with the various arrows showing the Atmosphere heating the Earth, absurdly non-scientific. Increased cooling is NOT Heating!!!
And no one knows how much, exactly, examine the proxy records, tree rings, various records of atmospheric oxygen isotopes, CO2 from ice. None of this is calculated from First Principles, from which most of Science, except so-called “Climate Science,” can be relied upon.
Let us destroy prosperity because of Bristle-Cone Pines which only grow for six weeks a year, and One Tree in the Yamal Peninsula. No self-respecting Scientist would have anything to do with this.
Alas, you are still caught up in the Co2 traps heat folly. No, it does NOT trap anything. First of all 99% of the atmosphere is inert, meaning it doesn’t normally radiate. That’s Nitrogen, Oxygen and Argon. The earth is like a rotisserie, with the sun shining on it 24x7x365. The heat comes from the SUN, not the earth. It cools off at night because the earth radiates, AND the atmosphere radiates. If there were no radiative gases in the atmosphere, it would be FAR warmer, because the ONLY way to remove a day’s heat would be though conduction to the earth’s surface, and subsequent surface radiation, which would HAVE to be warmer to increase the radiation to space. This is pure common sense. More Co2, more radiation to space. If you somehow think 1 molecule of Co2 has the ability to ‘warm’ its surrounding 2500 molecules of inert atmosphere, you simply haven’t though it out. Imagine a container of 2500 white ping pong balls, with one black one. The black one is one photon warmer than the rest. How much heat will be passed to the white ones? None, because they will instead cause the black one to emit it’s excess photon. Doesn’t matter where the photon goes – the heat is gone from that black ball.
John:
Actually ALL substances above zero kelvin radiate … but despite not all absorbing in the IR band, they ALL – including N2, O2 and Ar – absorb heat, eg from conduction and convection (such as wind).
[See pjcarson2015.wordpress.com for more in depth.]
Again, Co2 does not ‘slow the cooling’. It ASSISTS the cooling. It radiates, about half of which goes to space. None of the rest of the atmosphere can radiate, but it STILL must lose its daily load of heat from the sun. If it weren’t for the radiative gases, there is only ONE way the atmosphere could cool – by conduction downward to the surface. That is a slower process, meaning it would not get as cool at night, and would get warmer during the day.
Moon:
[[Really you guys, you have not studied, you are expecting the Sky to heat the Earth? The Sun heats the Earth. CO2 slows the cooling, which is not the same thing as heating. Heating requires a transfer of Energy from a Warm thing to a Cool thing. Slowing the cooling, which CO2 does as it increases, is not Heating. Far different thing, Can a blanket set your house on fire? No it cannot.]]
[[What does happen from increased CO2 is that the altitude at which the Atmosphere can freely radiate to Space, with no more absorption and re-radiation from CO2 up there, does increase, decreasing the temperature at which the Atmosphere freely radiates to space, increasing the amount of energy retained in the Atmosphere. This is the fundamental physics, has nothing to do with Back-Radiation or Watts/M2 of Forcing. Wow, what a lot of absurd physics Plays in Peoria.]]
[[The Atmosphere with the CO2 does retain heat that is radiated by the Earth. More CO2 does retain more heat, no one can calculate how much, but it is more. ]]
Have I taught you nothing? CO2 can’t absorb or emit “heat” radiation, because weak 15 micron photons have a Planck radiation temperature of -80C, and aren’t heat. They’re closer to microwaves, and are completely outside the Earth surface temperature range of -50C to +50C. -80C photons can’t raise the temperature of anything absorbing them higher than -80C, so unless we’re living on, say, Jupiter, where the mean temp is -110C, we can’t talk about CO2 global warming. The hoax relies on lumping 15 microns into the “longwave IR spectrum” and treating it like 9-13 microns, where the real heat lies. Next thing you know they’ll be claiming that atmospheric Einsteinium heats the Earth’s surface with cosmic rays. 🙂
Check my work:
https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/wiens-law
To keep the money coming in, some hoaxers have been trying to claim that a rise in the ceiling of radiation, putting it in a lower temperature region, caused by guess what CO2 forces Earth’s surface to raise its temperature to maintain some kind of balance, as if the downward CO2 back radiation claim has been dumped completely and this scam is the new scam. That this sucks is easily seen because all of the radiation and convection laws are purely local, and the top of the sky can’t tell the surface what to do, or even reach it through miles of cloud-filled atmosphere with a flashlight. Instead, more solar energy alone can punch through the atmosphere and raise the temperature of the Earth’s surface, which is cooled by radiation, conduction-convection, and evaporation, and any “imbalance” is taken care of by the atmosphere’s Carnot heat engine via more wind and storms. Major Tom jokes here 🙂
Back to clouds. They’re so high up that any weak Earth surface radiation that reaches them can’t do much more than keep them from turning to ice a little longer before they let go of their precipitation and cool the surface bigtime. To attempt to call them greenhouse gases is the last gasp of a dying clown show.
The entire Atmosphere radiates. It gets cold up there, and absorbing and re-admitting 15 micron radiation does trap some heat in the Atmosphere.
All matter above Absolute Zero radiates.
Radiametric calculations performed decades ago came up with a climate sensitivity for CO2, not including any feedbacks, of 1.2 degrees C. Based on temperature data since 1850, Moncton’s group found that if all the warming since 1850 were caused by increases in CO2, the climate sensitivity of CO2 including feedbacks cannot be more than 1.2 degrees C. A researcher from Japan, pointed out that these initial calculations failed to include the fact that a doubling of CO2 will cause a slight decrease in the dry lapse rate in the troposphere, which is a cooling effect. This decrease in the dry lapse rate decreases the climate sensitivity of CO2 by more than a factor of 20, from 1.2 degrees C to less than 0.06 degrees C.
Then there is the issue of H2O feedback. According to the AGW conjecture, H2O will cause more H2O to enter the atmosphere which causes more warming because H2O is such a strong greenhouse gas. H2O based heating causes even more H2O to enter the atmosphere which causes even more warming and so forth. But the AGW conjecture completely ignores the fact that besides being the primary greenhouse gas, H2O is a primary coolant in the Earth’s atmosphere. The over all cooling effects of H2O is evidenced by the fact that the wet lapse rate is significantly less than the dry lapse rate. So instead of H2O amplifying any CO2 warming that might happen, it retards it. So instead of multiplying the climate sensitivity of CO2 by a factor of 3 we should divide by a factor of 3 yielding a climate sensitivity of CO2 of .02 degrees C, which is too small to measure.
That is a big If, not scientific at all.
Once again, these are Greenies, trying to defend the Natural Earth against mining and combustion. They do not seem to understand that our prosperity is based on those two things, Mining and Combustion. Imagine life without metals, coal, oil, natural gas, and all the other products of Mining, and then life without Combustion, motors, electricity, shipping, fertilizer, trains, trucking, modern farming, tractors, and most importantly Cars.
They can make their pronouncments, but when the masses understand what they are being asked to do without, the Greenies will suddenly disappear….
Firstly, Earth temperature has varied +/-2C (relative to when measured in 1998) in its current Holocene Epoch, ie past 12,000 years. Its temperature can increase – but unlikely – a further 1.6C to fall outside this natural range.
Secondly, despite much searching, no-one has shown that CO2 has any influence on temperatures; “should err on the safe side!” gives the game away. The reason it can’t be shown is that ALL gases are so-called “Greenhouse Gases” – they all absorb heat, regardless of whether they can also absorb IR – and so, at very minor CO2 levels, it is a very minor absorber of heat.
“Greenhouse Gases” is an appealing but distracting term. Everyone knows what a greenhouse is, and it sounds scientificcy, but just consider the gas inside and outside any greenhouse is the same – air – yet inside is hotter, ie nothing to do with the type of gases involved, but simply that there is gas present to absorb heat.
[See my site for more in depth.]
The Sun partially heats the atmosphere on the way in but mostly heats the surface. Heat from below the ground reaches the surface but a fraction of a w/sq.m. Wind can generate heat from friction but is more about moving & mixing energy where a difference exists. Most of the heat on the surface is radiated towards space or evaporation, some is transformed into plant energy. Water vapour carries heat upwards. Gravity & the weight of the column of mixed gases determines pressure & temperature as you change altitude (it’s higher at the surface than up a mountain). Everything tries to move towards equilibrium but is never achieved as the inputs are constantly changing and feedbacks often overshoot before swinging back again. We don’t have days with the “average” weather/climate far less a year, we have distribution plots around means with significant variations.
We make weather predictions but often miss the exact time & size of movements. The perception of accuracy is achieved by more averaging and updating earlier predictions. Climate is the average of weather so if you don’t understand weather (including meteorology, geography, physics, astrophysics) or can’t accurately predict weather, you can’t be good at making climate predictions.