Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
The “CO2 Roolz Temperature” theory goes like this:
• The amount of atmospheric CO2 increases.
• This absorbs more upwelling longwave radiation, which leads to unbalanced radiation at the top of the atmosphere (TOA). This is the TOA balance between incoming sunlight (after some is reflected back to space) and outgoing longwave radiation from the surface and the atmosphere.
• In order to restore the balance so that incoming radiation equals outbound radiation, the surface perforce must, has to, is required to warm up until there’s enough additional upwelling longwave to restore the balance.
Now, I’ve mentioned before that this theory is untrue because there are several other ways that the TOA radiation balance can be changed or restored. These include:
• Increased cloud or surface reflections can reduce the amount of incoming sunlight.
• Increased absorption of sunlight by the atmospheric aerosols and clouds can lead to greater upwelling longwave.
• Increases in the number or duration of thunderstorms move additional surface heat into the troposphere, moving it above some of the greenhouse gases, and leading to increased upwelling longwave.
• A change in the fraction of atmospheric radiation going upwards vs. downwards can lead to increased upwelling radiation.
• Increased advection (horizontal movement) of heat from the tropics to the polar regions can increase the amount of upwelling longwave radiation
When you think of a top-of-atmosphere (TOA) radiation balance, it’s normal to imagine that all over the earth, the TOA is pretty much in balance everywhere. However, nothing could be further from the truth … here’s the TOA imbalance as shown in the CERES satellite data.
Figure 1. Top-of-atmosphere (TOA) average radiation balance, March 2000 to February 2021. Positive values show an imbalance where there is an excess of incoming solar radiation compared to outgoing longwave (thermal) radiation, and vice-versa regarding negative values.
As you can see, the only place where incoming and outgoing radiation are equal is shown by the black/white lines. In the tropics, there’s much more net incoming solar radiation (after reflections) than outgoing longwave radiation. And outside of that region towards both poles, there’s much more outgoing longwave radiation than incoming solar radiation.
This is the result of the “advection” mentioned above, the polewards horizontal transfer of energy via ocean currents and atmospheric movements. And this is a gigantic movement of energy. It is a constant flow of about 15 petawatts (1015 watts) across the black/white lines above.
How much energy is that? Well, if you put a 1-gigawatt nuclear power plant every three meters along the black/white lines above that circle the earth at about 40°N/S of the Equator … that’s how much energy they’d generate in total.
Or to look at it another way, it’s more than a thousand times the ongoing total primary energy consumption of all the people on the planet.
With that as background, let me return to the question of the TOA balance. Increasing CO2 absorbs more upwelling longwave, leading to less outgoing longwave at the TOA. This makes the TOA balance more positive.
And in theory, increasing surface temperature should increase the amount of outgoing longwave at the TOA. This would make the TOA balance more negative. In short, when the surface temperature goes up, the TOA balance should go down …
In considering this, I realized I’d never actually looked at this relationship. Here, again from the CERES dataset, are the two variables in question—surface temperature and TOA imbalance.
Figure 2. Change in surface temperature, March 2000 – February 2021
This is in good agreement with other global surface temperature reconstructions, such as Berkeley Earth and HadCRUT, although each of these global temperature datasets differs slightly from the others.
Next, I looked at the change in the TOA imbalance.
Figure 3. Change in TOA radiation imbalance, March 2000 – February 2021
When I saw that, I said something that sounded very much like “YIKES!!”.
Why?
Well, if you recall from above, as temperature goes up, TOA imbalance is supposed to go down … but it’s not. The TOA imbalance not even staying level. It’s going up.
To investigate this further I created a scatterplot of the TOA imbalance versus surface temperature … and here’s that chart.
Figure 4. Scatterplot, top-of-atmosphere (TOA) radiation imbalance versus surface temperature, March 2000 – February 2021
Same problem, only worse—there is NO statistically significant relationship between surface temperature and the TOA radiation imbalance.
Curious … clearly, the conclusion from this has to be that the other factors that affect the TOA balance have much more effect than the change in surface temperature.
To me, this isn’t a surprise. I see the climate system as a giant natural heat engine that is ruled by the Constructal Law discovered by Adrian Bejan. According to the Constructal Law, flow systems far from equilibrium must constantly change and evolve in order to persist … and as a result, as in this case, the simplistic assumptions of modern climate science simply don’t pan out. Here’s Figure 1 of an analysis of the climate by Bejan and Reis entitled “Thermodynamic optimization of global circulation and climate” …
Note how the climate system naturally evolves to have a high-temperature area AH and a low-temperature area AL … compare that to Figure 1 at the top of this post. The Bejan/Reis paper is most fascinating. I cannot recommend it enough to anyone seriously interested in climate. The Constructal Law is the first new law of thermodynamics in over a century, and it applies to a wide variety of natural systems. Further information on the Constructal Law is available at constructal.org, along with an excellent article on the subject in Forbes magazine here.
Further thoughts on the matter gladly accepted …
w.
Como De Costumbre: When you comment please quote the exact words you are referring to. This avoids much of the misunderstandings that plague the intarwebs. I can and am happy to defend my own words. I can’t defend your interpretation of my words.
A Technical Note: Over the 21-year period, the upwelling LW from the surface has increased by ~1.5 W/m2, of which about 1 W/m2 makes it to space without being absorbed by GHGs and redirected back downwards. This should have decreased the TOA imbalance by about 1 W/m2.
And over the same period, the increase in CO2 forcing should have increased the TOA imbalance by about 0.6 W/m2. The net result should have been a 0.4 W/m2 decrease in the TOA imbalance over the period.
Instead, we’ve seen a 0.8 W/m2 increase in the TOA imbalance … which is why I said “YIKES!”.
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Lots of the noise in figures 2 and 3 is changing inversely, but the trends are fairly coincident. You could check that by de-trending both and inverting one of them.
From the article: “This is in good agreement with other global surface temperature reconstructions, such as Berkeley Earth and HadCRUT, although each of these global temperature datasets differs slightly from the others.”
The Berkeley Earth and HadCRUT global temperature datasets and the rest of the data sets, including the UAH satellite data, are in good agreement, with small differnces, for the period from 1979 to the present, but they are science fiction *before* 1979.
I just wanted to make that distinction. It doesn’t negate your findings with the CERES data since the temperature data sets you use for comparison can be considered legitimate. For these purposes anyway.
The atmosphere holds an average around 11Tt of water. It varies on an annual cycle and there are longer term trends. Annually the atmospheric water turnover is estimated to be 522Tt. That means the average residence time for water is about a week. In the month of December, all the water in the atmosphere will be deposited on land and replaced with a little bit more as December is when atmospheric water is at its lowest. Over a year, the water evaporated from oceans and deposited over land is estimated to be around 43Tt (I expect a low side estimate). So the atmospheric water turnover from oceans to land is 4 times each year.
In the current precession cycle, the insolation over water peaked in 1585. Since then the oceans have been getting less insolation and the land a bit more. That is slowing down the water cycle between ocean and land and causing the oceans to warm as well as the land. It is readily observed that ice-free ocean surface is at its coolest in December/January when the ocean insolation peaks and the water transfer to land is at its maximum.
No climate model has predicted the observed decline in the global freshwater runoff from land:
https://www.bafg.de/GRDC/EN/03_dtprdcts/31_FWFLX/freshflux_node.html
This is the consequence of perihelion making a gradual transition from the austral summer solstice in 1585 to the boreal summer solstice in about 10,000 years when the water cycle, ocean to land, will be at its lowest. Slowing the water cycle means the oceans are retaining more heat.
The energy balance on earth is the result of powerful temperature regulating processes that cycle massive amounts of water through the atmosphere on a daily basis at the top end and forms low thermal conducting ice layer on oceans to restrict loss of heat at the low temperature end. It is not some delicate balance upset by a trace gas.
Thanks, Rick, interesting thoughts. Unfortunately, the data source is currently down.
Rats.
w.
Willis
;jsessionid=38ABC1BF1E82A41A2690E5D0E1DA6122.live11314?__blob=poster
I just loaded it from there and checked since you posted this from that link.
This is just the chart:
This is another paper that gives much more detail on the overall water cycle. It is the source for the 522Tt.
https://hess.copernicus.org/articles/24/3899/2020/
It provides a lot more detail on the water cycle including estimates of land water storage.
Rick, there’s lots of stuff available … just not the data. See here for the problem. Thanks for the Koutsoyiannis paper, he’s one of my scientific heroes.
w.
OLR is increasing in any event:
Outgoing Longwave Radiation (OLR) | El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) | National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) (noaa.gov)
Perhaps The Greenhouse Effect and Global Warming will be more robust and durable if we emit less carbon dioxide.
Thanks, Cohenite. Unfortunately, that’s for only a small area of the planet. From your link:
From 160E to 160W is only 40° of longitude, and it’s not clear what “centered on equatorial areas” means.
Regards,
w.
Long time readers will recall I have been punting my favourite engineering prof for years. I think a search of WUWT will even find a mention of the Constructal law.
The guy is a genius and I don’t understand how anyone can write so many text books. My main go-to book is “Convection Heat Transfer”.
Willis, in that book there are several sections on how a fluid like air or water between a lower hot plate and an upper cool plate, near but above, breaks into cells in order to convect the maximum amount of heat. Nature hates imbalance.
Not only do “cells” form in a repeating pattern across the plates, they form as square cells, or hexagon (etc) according to conditions that are well understood (by Bejan).
The Earth’s atmosphere is like a warm spherical plate with a thin fluid above it (air is a fluid , not a liquid) and space represents the cold plate. Thunderstorms should therefore appear in a square pattern or hex, depending on conditions. That might be something worth cloud-searching.
These square and hex patterns are emergent phenomena. We might explain the presence of large hexagonal clouds at the north and south poles of gas giant planets in our solar system.
We can see that every day phenomen when boiling water or while cooking.
Thanks, Crispin. I discuss the Constructal Law in over a half-dozen posts here on WUWT. See here.
w.
A serious new law of physics, the “Constructal Law”? I myself happen to be new to the concept, but I’ll take a really quick ‘go’ at it!
Looking back a few years now, in a previous article (as you generally refer to above), say,
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/15/the-constructal-law-of-flow-systems/ , you wrote (about the earth’s climate flow system):
“It maximizes the sum of the work done driving the planetary circulation, and the heat rejected back to space at the cold end of the heat engine.”
So to paraphrase just a bit, the earth’s heat engine is considered as maximizing both some measure of work done, plus maximizing the heat that that this ‘Earth engine’ is able to radiate into space at any given time?
Does this imply that the kind of math solution that would be suggested by this sort of model is then a nonlinear maximization problem, one with dynamic fluctuations (as one might well expect)?
If so, and given that this is a basically *nonlinear* system (with no assurance of nice, reasonable, linear-type behavior), who is to say that such a system might not meander far from life sustaining conditions at any time?
Or, say, the system might throw itself into some sort of furiously fluctuating global weather oscillations at any time?
I’m just not quite seeing how the ‘constructal’ concept of evolving to different configurations helps with the overall stability of certain important things, like the fluctuating — but predictably or within reason — temperatures on the earth’s surface.
Maybe what we’re saying here is that ‘configuration change helping with stability’ is just one more big Guess, Hypothesis or Assumption,
i.e., the kind of Law that you just have to make when you recognize it in enough situations?
But if we look at the last 200Ma Earth’s temperature only went down and brought us the recent ongoing Ice Age (last 3.2Ma).
And don’t greenhouse gases emit in all directions? So more ‘greenhouse’ gases = more long wave radiation out to space cooling the place.
It is hard to think the “broken lines” would be stable in position. More likely to move North and South influenced by the ITCZ.
Thanks to your concise summary of Bejan’s Constructal law:
According to the Constructal Law, flow systems far from equilibrium must constantly change and evolve in order to persist
I think I get what it’s about finally.
Thanks for that! Constant change mandated by the nature of the system – that sounds compelling.
Is there any link between Bejan’s law and “Constructor theory” as proposed by David Deutch and Chiara Maletto from Oxford, as described here on PBS SpaceTime?
https://youtu.be/hYc97J2MZIo
This is a “recipe” for building theory from binary facts (constrained by conservation laws). This originated from John von Neumann’s “universal constructor”. I wont pretend I’m an expert on it, it’s explained in Maletto’s book “The science of can and can’t”.
Does it share anything with Constructal law other than having a similar name?
No clue, Phil. I’ve tried to wrap my head around Constructor Theory without success.
My description of the Constructal Law above is only partial. The Law also describes the direction of the change/evolution. Here’s Bejan:
It doesn’t evolve willy-nilly. It evolves in such a way as to increase the interactions of the currents. Take as an example a river in flat marshy country. It has two flows—the flow of water down the river, and the flow of water all along the river edges from the marshland into the river.
To increase the interaction between these two flows, according to the Constructal Law, the river perforce must lengthen endlessly, growing longer, cutting off oxbow loops, lengthening again, forever.
The ramifications are endless …
w.
Thanks – on reflection I think the two are quite far apart. Constructor theory is about physics and attempts to unify quantum with gravitation, etc. Bejan’s constructal law on the other hand is – IIUC – connected with chaotic nonlinear systems and emergent behaviour. It would be a long stretch from one to the other although maybe not impossible.
I also suspect that Constructal law and emergent climate homeostasis are underpinned by the powerful least action principles (Fermat, Lagrange, Noether). Complex systems such as climate with dissipative heat flow will adapt to changes while minimising “action” such as heating. CO2 warming theory is the opposite of this, something like “most action”.
Can you have a river or current of heat? In the Constructal law sense?
Fascinating to observe the areas of anomalous significant negative radiation imbalance in the NH – anomalous for the latitudes involved. In particular, the desert regions of the Sahara and Arabia, but also Central China. There are hints of similar anomalies in the SH, such as parts of Australia and the area of the Humboldt current off western South America, but nothing as major as in the NH.
The Sahara and Arabia are major desert regions, which may be the cause of the anomaly there, but the area of Central China is by no means a desert region – so what is happening there? Very curious.
Great article with real data!
As I understand it, the TOA imbalance reflects energy-in minus energy-out. If the planet was in a stable situation, the TOA would be zero. If more energy comes in than goes out, the TOA imbalance will be positive. Since the CERES data shows a positive and increasing TOA imbalance over the last 20 years, this means the planet is receiving more energy-in than energy out. Could this be due to melting ice? Has the effect of melting ice been considered? If so, is it ignored because it is too small an effect, or is it significant?
Don, total system ice melt is not really very significant. The uptake of solar energy by Earth system has been reported with 95% confidence nature’s true value lies in the range at 0.03 +/- 0.01 W/m^2 from ice warming and melt and atmospheric and lithospheric warming out of a total “unbalance at the top” 0.71 +/- 0.10 W/m^2 in the period July 2005-June 2015.