From Dr. Roy Spencer’s Global Warming Blog
by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
A new paper by Santer et al. provocatively entitled “Exceptional stratospheric contribution to human fingerprints on atmospheric temperature” goes where no serious climate scientist should go: it has conflated stratospheric cooling with global warming.
The paper starts out summarizing the supposed importance of their work, which is worth quoting in its entirety (bold emphasis added):
“Differences between tropospheric and lower stratospheric temperature trends have long been recognized as a “fingerprint” of human effects on climate. This fingerprint, however, neglected information from the mid to upper stratosphere, 25 to 50 km above the Earth’s surface. Including this information improves the detectability of a human fingerprint by a factor of five. Enhanced detectability occurs because the mid to upper stratosphere has a large cooling signal from human-caused CO2 increases, small noise levels of natural internal variability, and differing signal and noise patterns. Extending fingerprinting to the upper stratosphere with long temperature records and improved climate models means that it is now virtually impossible for natural causes to explain satellite-measured trends in the thermal structure of the Earth’s atmosphere.“
The authors are taking advantage of the public’s lack of knowledge concerning the temperature effect of increasing CO2 in the atmosphere, making it sound like stratospheric cooling is part of the fingerprint of global warming.
It isn’t. Cooling is not warming.
The researchers’ first mistake is to claim they are reporting something new. They aren’t. Observed stratospheric cooling, even in the middle and upper stratosphere, has been reported on for many years (e.g. here). Lower stratospheric cooling has been evident in our Lower Stratosphere (LS) temperature product for over 30 years (first published here). Why haven’t we heard about this before in the news? Because it has virtually nothing to do with the subject of global warming and associated climate change.
So, why mention stratospheric cooling in the context of climate change?
Climate researchers have been searching for “human fingerprints” of climate change for decades, something measurable that cannot be reasonably explained by natural variations in the climate system.
I will agree with the authors that stratospheric cooling (especially in the mid- to upper-stratosphere) is probably the best evidence we have of a human fingerprint, at least up where there is very little air, where no one lives, and where there are no observable resulting impacts on weather down here where life exists. Water vapor remains an uncertainty here, because more water vapor would also cause cooling, and our understanding of natural variations in stratospheric water vapor is quite poor. But for the sake of argument, I will give the authors the benefit of the doubt and agree that most of the observed cooling is probably due to increasing CO2, which in turn is likely mostly due to burning of fossil fuels.
Infrared radiative cooling by water vapor and carbon dioxide has long been known to be the primary way the stratosphere (and even higher altitudes) lose heat energy (gained from sunlight absorption by ozone) to outer space. This cooling mechanism is part of the so-called greenhouse effect: greenhouse gases warm the lower altitudes of planetary atmospheres, and cool the higher altitudes. In fact, without the greenhouse effect, weather as we know it would not exist. The greenhouse effect is energetically analogous to adding insulation to a heated house in winter: for a given rate of energy input, the inside of the house becomes warmer, and the outside of the house becomes colder.
The stratospheric cooling effects of CO2 and water vapor was first described theoretically by Manabe and Strickler (1964). Adding more CO2 to the atmosphere enhances upper atmospheric cooling, lowering temperatures. The temperature effect up there is large, several degrees C, meaning it is easier to measure with current satellite methods, as the authors of the new study correctly point out.
But what then happens in the troposphere (where we live) in response to more CO2 is vastly more complex. Theoretically, adding more CO2 should warm the lower troposphere radiatively. This warming then gets mixed throughout the depth of the troposphere from convective overturning (basically, “weather”).
But just how much tropospheric warming will be caused by increasing CO2?
After 30 years and billions of dollars expended on the effort in research centers around the world, the latest crop of climate models (CMIP6) now disagree on the expected amount of tropospheric warming more than ever before. This is mostly because of the insufficiently understood effects of water, especially the response of clouds (the climate system’s sunshade) and precipitation processes (which limit the most abundant greenhouse gas, water vapor) to warming.
I consider it irresponsible to conflate stratospheric cooling with the global warming issue. Yes, strong cooling in the upper stratosphere is likely a fingerprint of increasing atmospheric CO2 (putatively due to fossil fuel burning), but for a variety of reasons, that is not reason to believe climate models in their predictions of tropospheric (and thus surface) warming trends. That is a very different matter, and the models themselves demonstrate they are not yet up to the task, now disagreeing with each other by a factor of three or more.
So now you hopefully understand why entitling such a paper “Exceptional stratospheric contribution to human fingerprints on atmospheric temperature” is essentially a non sequitur on the issue of global warming.
The models still do not work. Perhaps knowing one element better does not deal with the minor little fact that clouds are smaller than the grid size, so simulating clouds is rather impossible.
The models will never work; they screwed up the most basic first principles so no matter how much they add to them, they’ll just never work.
RADIATIVE FORCING BY CO2 OBSERVED AT TOP OF ATMOSPHERE FROM 2002-2019
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1911.10605.pdf
“The IPCC Fifth Assessment Report predicted 0.508±0.102 Wm−2RF resulting from this CO2 increase, 42% more forcing than actually observed. The lack of quantitative long-term global OLR studies may be permitting inaccu-racies to persist in general circulation model forecasts of the effects of rising CO2 or other greenhouse gasses.”
The models are all based on brute-forcing the problem, which is an approach that today’s computer resources cannot handle. It’s a dumb thing to do.
What a deceiving man Santer is and how often he is wrong yet still taken seriously on the latest modeling scaremongering drive, when will people wise up?
Was Santer the guy who took it upon himself to edit an IPCC report to say the opposite of what the panel of scientists had concluded, without consulting any of them?
Yes.he edited the attribution section to the opposite of what the panel wrote, thereby erasing observable natural variation as a climate factor,
My understanding, Rud, is that he did so at the direction of U.S. and IPCC politicians. Any more information on that?
That sounds right, Dave. There may have even been a discussion of that in a post here at WUWT years ago…with links to another website with lots of detail about the changes to the IPCCs Second Assessment Report.
I may also have included a discussion of that one of my short stories. I’ll take a look later tonight and see if I can find a link to that webpage.
Regards,
Bob
Thanks for the interest, Bob.
Sunsettommy, Yes, Santer is a deceiving man. For more evidence, go to climate4you.com then to global temperature then scroll down until you find a “maturity diagram” for Santers MSU RSS showing the changes made to the RSS global temperature chart, the one with the big red blob at the end. You will find large increases in reported temps starting in 1999. Why 1999? Santer may know but doesn’t say. A reasonable person might conclude that he changed his algorithm so his chart would keep up with what GISS and NOAA produce – more extreme warming. There is a comparable diagram for MSU UAH maintained by Dr. Spencer that also shows changes, but these are to correct for altitude, time of day and such as the satellites go round and round. His changes go up and down over the series.
No strong cooling detected, no fingerprint. Santer saunters off to collect his grant money laughing all the way to the bank.
Santer made a logical error. Stratospheric cooling is a fingerprint for additional CO2, and we know from the changing 13C/12C ratio that the relative increase in 12C is mostly from burning fossil fuels, because photosynthesis preferentially sequesters the lighter 12C. No surprises there.
Bur that says NOTHING about whether CO2 is warming the troposphere, or by how much. It should, some, because Tyndall first showed in 1859 that CO2 was a GHG. We know the troposphere is warming as we come out of the LIA. For example, Alpine glaciers are retreating, exposing previously buried tree stumps. But we know that had nothing to do with CO2, because even the IPCC says there was not enough of an increase to matter much until 1960 or so. Climate models attribute the subsequent warming to CO2 and its feedbacks, ignoring provable significant natural variability on multidecadal and centennial time scales in things like Arctic sea ice extent or Alpine tree lines. This attribution problem is a major reason models provably run hot—and made now falsified predictions about sea level rise acceleration, summer Arctic sea ice extent, winter snow cover, and such.
Hmm. When you say that 12C is ‘mostly’ from fossil fuels, we still don’t know how much is from fossil fuels and how much is from 12C emitting plants. When you try to work out what the ratio of 12C to 13C should be, based on estimates of emissions, the numbers still don’t add up.
Assuming that fossil fuels are made of plants, what is emitted by burning of FFs will not and should not change the ratio.
The ratio – NOT the absolute amounts.
What would change the 12/13 ratio is if the living plants were changing.
That the amount of C12 is rising means that there are less plants now on Planet Earth than there were when we started burning FFs
NASA lied – The Earth is NOT Greening.
The shrinking growing season apparent in the Keeling Curve tells all.
Either NASA are gobsmackingly incompetent, liars, dumb and don’t understand their own technology or are acting ‘Under Orders’
Now, which is it to be?.
NASA also lie about the GHGE with the very operation of their OCO2 sputnik .
It effectively measures SOLAR radiation being absorbed by CO2 – which is what Tyndall did. His experiment used the same wavelengths without knowing any different – did Tyndall even know about wavelengths?
NASA also lie about their OCO Sputnik and how it cannot see through the clouds over the big forests.
But it doesn’t even need to while the Greening Sputnik always get a perfect view of everything down on the ground.
Tyndall:
Because effectively, that is what GHGs do. They down-shift the wavelength of the radiation they absorb – without getting hot.
Yes: They absorb radiation and yes they instantly re-emit it BUT: at long wavelengths that cannot do any more heating (on earth) and into the ocean of of thermal noise that Earth and Sun generate anyway
Tyndall also lied. It would have been the simplest thing in the whole world for Tyndall to have attached a thermometer to his experiment to show how much his CO2 was heated in his experiment.
What about Eunice Newton Foote:In 1856 Eunice Newton Foote demonstrated that the warming effect of the sun is greater for air with water vapour than for dry air, and the effect is even greater with carbon dioxide. She concluded that “An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature(From the Wiki, my emphasis)
i.e. She demonstrated that The Sun heats the atmosphere
Do we ever hear a single peep about her work?
Nah – Eunice sounds like A Girl – what do they know about anything.
Meanwhile NASA and everybody tell us Earth’s atmosphere is crystal clear and transparent to solar radiation – because if it wasn’t, the GHGE falls flat at its very first hurdle.
Yet again, the GHGE appeasers are being made into gullible fools and utter laughing stocks…
make what you will of the disregard of ‘Eunice’
Peta, a gentle disagreement. Done mainly for general WUWT enlightenment.
The 13C/12C ratio of our solar system was set long ago by the death of billions of main sequence stars over billions of universe years—where carbon is an intermediate fusion product after hydrogen==>helium and before end energetic fusion death product iron. It cannot vary on our solar systems time scales.
But the atmospheric component can thanks to preferential photosynthetic fossil fuel sequestration of 12C simply because it is atomically one neutron lighter, so more reactive. So, atmospheric 13C became more concentrated as fossil fuels formed. As we burn 12C fossil fuels, it becomes less concentrated.
Now, precision is not to be had, since photosynthesis will incorporate some 13C also. But as a general argument, it holds. The increase in the 12C atmosphere proportion nicely matches measured estimates of CO2 from fossil fuel consumption, and corresponding measured decreases in atmospheric O2, both over the past 10 decades. You can look those references up.
And this general beautiful 13C/12C fact set also sufficiently disproves nutter skeptics like Murray Salby. The Mauna Loa rise in CO2 comes from mostly from fossil fuel consumption, not from Gaia biology. We can be quite certain about that, if not precisely.
World Atmospheric CO2, Its 14C Specific Activity, Non-fossil Component, Anthropogenic Fossil Component, and Emissions (1750-2018)
AbstractAfter 1750 and the onset of the industrial revolution, the anthropogenic fossil component and the non-fossil component in the total atmospheric CO2 concentration, C(t), began to increase. Despite the lack of knowledge of these two components, claims that all or most of the increase in C(t) since 1800 has been due to the anthropogenic fossil component have continued since they began in 1960 with “Keeling Curve: Increase in CO2 from burning fossil fuel.” Data and plots of annual anthropogenic fossil CO2 emissions and concentrations, C(t), published by the Energy Information Administration, are expanded in this paper. Additions include annual mean values in 1750 through 2018 of the 14C specific activity, concentrations of the two components, and their changes from values in 1750. The specific activity of 14C in the atmosphere gets reduced by a dilution effect when fossil CO2, which is devoid of 14C, enters the atmosphere. We have used the results of this effect to quantify the two components. All results covering the period from 1750 through 2018 are listed in a table and plotted in figures. These results negate claims that the increase in C(t) since 1800 has been dominated by the increase of the anthropogenic fossil component. We determined that in 2018, atmospheric anthropogenic fossil CO2 represented 23% of the total emissions since 1750 with the remaining 77% in the exchange reservoirs. Our results show that the percentage of the total CO2 due to the use of fossil fuels from 1750 to 2018 increased from 0% in 1750 to 12% in 2018, much too low to be the cause of global warming.
Are there any polyatomic atmospheric gases that aren’t “greenhouse” gases?
Yes. SO2 is one such. Pollutant but not a GHG. CO is another.
“Santer made a logical error.”
These people don’t make errors, they make propaganda.
That’s right. Santer lied to the whole world when he claimed the IPCC had found a human fingerprint connected to climate change.
He’s a bald-faced liar. He rewrote the IPCC report to show a human fingerprint when the actual report does not show a human fingerprint.
It’s Climate Change Fraud.
Santer is another of the main architects of the pain the West is feeling over the Nut Zero insanity.
Human-caused Climate Change is built on blatant lies. This latest “contribution” by Santer is just more of the same.
I followed a tweet from Judith Curry on an article by The Conversation and according to them (see below) climate models are pretty good. Also you’re all paid up members of the fossil fuel lobby.
After reading the article I have to agree with Judith, it is the most inane article.
1. Science denial
This is the type of denial we are all familiar with: that the science of climate change is not settled. Deniers suggest climate change is just part of the natural cycle. Or that climate models are unreliable and too sensitive to carbon dioxide.
Some even suggest that CO₂ is such a small part of the atmosphere it cannot have a large heating affect. Or that climate scientists are fixing the data to show the climate is changing (a global conspiracy that would take thousands of scientists in more than a 100 countries to pull off).
All these arguments are false and there is a clear consensus among scientists about the causes of climate change. The climate models that predict global temperature rises have remained very similar over the last 30 years despite the huge increase in complexity, showing it is a robust outcome of the science.
You mean the robust CMIP6 models that (with one exception, produce a tropical troposphere hotspot that does not exist in fact? That produce an ECS twice what observations infer? That predicted sea level rise would accelerate when it hasn’t? That predicted via Arctic amplification that summer Arctic sea ice would vanish ~2014, when it didn’t? You appear to either have a reality problem or to have forgotten a sarc tag.
Yes, I forgot the sarc tag but as I said, like Judith Curry, I also found the Conversation article inane.
I understood your sarcasm; it might’ve helped to add quote marks.
“The climate models that predict global temperature rises have remained very similar over the last 30 years despite the huge increase in complexity, showing it is a robust outcome of the science.”
No, 30 years of robust groupthink stuck on CO2 as climate driver.
Yes I should have added quote marks and italics but I’m doing this on an 8″ Android tablet where the communication box is tiny and without access to text tools. So I would suggest that I’m not being paid by Bill Gates or oil industry, I’m just interested in the climate debate.
From Spaceweather 6/4/23:
THE THERMOSPHERE IS HEATING UP: If you’re a satellite, this story is important. A series of geomagnetic storms in 2023 has pumped terawatts of energy into Earth’s upper atmosphere, helping to push its temperature and height to a 20-year high. Air surrounding our planet is now touching satellites in Earth orbit and dragging them down.
“Blame the sun,” says Martin Mlynczak of NASA Langley. “Increasing solar activity is heating the top of the atmosphere. The extra heat has no effect on weather or climate at Earth’s surface, but it’s a big deal for satellites in low Earth orbit.”
Amazing how when the “heat” is from the Sun, it “has no effect on weather or climate at the Earth’s surface.”
Why doesn’t it “reduce the rate of cooling,” thereby causing warming. You know, like the atmosphere, with a pittance of heat capacity compared with the oceans, supposedly heats the oceans?!
Again, amazing how the story changes when there’s no avenue for them to blame it on human energy use.
Please explain your comnent: “you’re all paid up members of the fossil fuel lobby.” I have to admit, the extra cash would come in handy but is singularly lacking to date.
If everyone who was smeared by the climate enthusiasts actually was paid by big oil, it’s hard to see how they could ever turn a profit.
In the Conversation article it was implied that the fossil fuel industry was spending millions on climate disinformation. I would say go and read it but the extract I posted on here tells you all you need to know about how biase it is.
I think most of us have heard it all before. Sorry I didn’t notice the sarcasm but I hope a certain sense of humour comes through in my post. The idea that the fossil fuel industry is, as I pointed out, laughable – there would be no money left. Certain climate enthusiasts keep trying to smear everyone they disagree with on this for years without actually admitting that ‘climate science’ is actually funded by Getty and Rockefeller oil money, among others.
“CO₂ is such a small part of the atmosphere it cannot have a large heating affect”
fixed it “CO₂ is such a small part of the atmosphere it cannot have a large insulating affect”
Coin-sensus of paid self-styled climate computer-gamers… is meaningless.
“Or that climate scientists are fixing the data to show the climate is changing (a global conspiracy that would take thousands of scientists in more than a 100 countries to pull off).”
No, it just took a handful of criminals to bastardize the global climate trend. They are a small clique, and they all talk together and they all stick together, and they have control of all the data and the means to manipulate the data.
Some conspiracies are true. See Climategate for details.
Even with no radiative gases at all there would still be convective overturning, a lapse rate and a warmer surface than in the absence of an atmosphere.
Convection above a sun warmed surface can never be prevented because a sphere illuminated by a point source of heat would always have temperature and density differentials in the horizontal plane.
Thus there would still be weather and if water vapour were the only radiative gas present then the weather would be much the same as on Earth.
Here is something for Stephen Wilde to ponder.
We know precipitation falls out of sky. Only climate models create precipitation from no where. In the real world the rain is made up from water liberated from the surface. A good estimate for the annual global precipitation is 5.22E17kg. This equates to around 77W/m^2 in latent heat.
The water enters the atmosphere at the base of the column and convective mass transport carries it aloft as part of the air mixture. The water vapour does not ride alone. There has to be sensible heat transport as well. I determine the sensible heat to be around 1.7 times the latent heat. That means that heat input to run the water cycle is 131W/m^2 sensible heat and 77W/m^2 latent heat. The column can absorb both short wave and long wave radiation that is converted to sensible heat but radiation is a small player compared with convection so most of the sensible heat will come from the surface.
Figure 7.1 in AR6 shows 80W/m^2 latent heat and 21W/m^2 sensible heat – It is impossible to get that amount of latent heat into the base of the column then transporting the water thousands of metres into the atmosphere with only 21W/m^2 in sensible heat entering at the base.
This is why the climate models should have been built by engineers and meteorologists trained in thermodynamics instead of by statisticians and computer programmers who are creating a program to give a pre-determined outcome.
This week’s climate cause celebre.
Kerry must be pleased, he’s done his bit to cool something.
Somebody let Trudeau know before he spends all of Canada’s resources on the contrived issue.
story tip
Trudeau Is Betting $9 Billion on a Plan to Clean Up the World’s Dirtiest Oil (yahoo.com)
It’s his standard virtue signalling promise. Search “Trudeau 9 Billion” and you’ll find he’s promised that much money so many times, it’s pretty much got the entire tax revenue promised out….it’s an in-joke when he gets back to the office….if the media is fully represented he pops the amount up to 12 Billion.
“The authors are taking advantage of the public’s lack of knowledge…”
___________________________________________________________
That goes for the entire “Climate Crisis” scam.
They know they are not convincing enough people to give up their liberties peacefully and so they have opened the taps from the sewer plant wide open. Waders will no longer do! One must have a boat to keep their head above the massive excrement that is being pumped out day after day.
I fail to see the problem. Heat moves to cold and no part of the stratosphere is above freezing. How can the stratosphere do anything but cool the troposphere, the part we actually live in, the part that gives us nearly all our weather.
It has to do with the rate at which heat moves from warm to cold. Sorta like how that -20 (on the outside) sleeping bag keeps you toasty warm when you are at base camp….Yes, the stratosphere cools the troposphere….and the sun warms what is immediately below the troposphere.
“…it is now virtually impossible for natural causes to explain satellite-measured trends in the thermal structure of the Earths atmosphere.”
Well it’s virtually impossible for Ben Santer to explain natural causes since his sees only what his mind thinks is there, nothing else, and as long as he’s convinced himself he’s seen it all,
he sees nothing.
Dr. Santer should correct himself for not knowing the ocean temperature sets the lower tropospheric temperature, naturally.
Sunshine warms the ocean that then warms the LT with a 2 month lag.
Is Dr. Santer really that misinformed? This inspires little confidence in CO2 climate science.
The Arabian Sea has been equilibrating its atmospheric column for about 4 weeks. It first hit the 30C control limit a month ago:
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2023/05/04/1200Z/ocean/surface/level/overlay=sea_surface_temp/orthographic=-287.09,9.54,371/loc=65.948,14.800
It is now going into convective overdrive that will pull the temperature below 30C:
https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/ocean/surface/level/overlay=sea_surface_temp/orthographic=-287.09,9.54,371/loc=65.948,14.800
There is a lot of water in an atmospheric column above 30C and it takes a while to work its way up and reach convective instability.
After the convective storm does its job, the surface will sit closer to the 30C limit as cyclic instability takes over. But always potential for more cyclones.
The Persian Gulf will get well above 30C in August and will not experience a convective storm. The dry air off the northern land prevents formation of a level of free convection so there is no cyclic instability.
Confirmation bias prevents santer from exploring anything outside his narrow agenda.
It isn’t. Cooling is not warming.
More Orwellian double-think.
“War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength
Cooling is Warming
Warming is Cooling”
So sayeth Big Brother.
“ the outside of the house becomes colder.”
please say this was a mistake …
the hot house will lose heat to the outside … i.e. the outside of the house will become warmer not colder …
Was gonna mention that.
I sucked in some air when I read this. A house and insulation is primarily conduction and convection and not radiation. One can argue these may have some effect due to water vapor but CO2 has too small a mass to be significant in these processes. Gradients must be used to analyze these type of systems and their “heat” movement. Conductivity becomes the important variable.
In any case, an increase in the Th on the warm side will obviously cause a rise in Tc on the cold side of an insulator absent work to change the gradient.
The inside of the house doesn’t become “warmer” either. The temperature inside the house is driven by the heat sources in the house. Insulation simply cannot raise that temperature since the insulation is not burning, i.e. it is not a heat *source*. Insulation can slow heat loss but it can’t raise temperatures. Take away the heat sources inside the house and it will eventually reach the temperature outside. It’s why pipes freeze in winter when the inside heat source isn’t working.
glad someone finally started calling GHG’s insulation vs calling them a “heat” source …
and since water vapor and CO2 are essentially identical insulators (same absorption bands) if we imagine an insulation layer around the earth water vapor would be 100 inches thick and CO2 would be 1 inch thick … adding another inch of CO2 (doubling) isn’t going to have much effect on heat loss … (that ignores the saturation effect of course)
on top of the fact that NEITHER water vapor nor CO2 are well mixed gases globally… (water vapor somewhat better than CO2, but CO2 is anything but well mixed … and all the models/calcs assume well mixed gases … GIGO)
But it is creating a current crisis…
story tip
The Other Green-Energy Grid Crisis – WSJ
A lack of transformers has led to a housing shortage, frequent power outages, and dependence on China.
So, it’s published in something called “Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences”.
Is that considered a reputable peer reviewed journal? Just curious- the topic is way over my head.
In whose theory. This nonsense relies on climate phiisics. Something that only happens in climate models that “parameterise” clouds; all free of any testable physics.
Earth’s energy balance is controlled by two ocean surface temperature limits. The lower limit is -1.7C due to the formation of sea ice and its insulating properties. The upper limit of 30C is also controlled by ice but by its reflective properties and persistence above the level of freezing. There is typically overshoot before convection takes control.
The Arabian Sea spiked above 30C for the last month until the convective instability set in and is now going through a major cooling event that will only need to last a few days to rip 3C off the surface temperature:
https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/ocean/isobaric/700hPa/overlay=sea_surface_temp/orthographic=-297.85,18.04,626/loc=64.747,14.134
“This nonsense relies on climate phiisics. Something that only happens in climate models that “parameterise” clouds; all free of any testable physics.”
hit the nail squarely on the head.
Too many people use the blanket analogy without actually investigating all the details that should go along with it. The earth is like someone under a blanket (CO2). Half the day the person exercises under the blanket generating heat thus raising the temperature under the blanket. The maximum temperature under the blanket is determined solely by the heat source, i.e. the person exercising (the sun). All the blanket does is slow down how fast that heat is radiated away. It’s not a heat source that can raise the actual temperature under the blanket. The other half of the day the person is gone to work, i.e. no heat generated. The temperature under the blanket is determined by how fast the heat under the blanket can be radiated away. If the blanket slows the heat loss then the minimum temperature under the blanket winds up being higher at the start of the next cycle. But that doesn’t determine the maximum temperature under the blanket when the person returns and starts exercising. It’s the heat source that determines the maximum temperature, i.e. the person.
The mid-range temperature may go up but it will be due to the minimum temperature being higher, not because the maximum temperature is higher. This gets totally lost in the climate alarmism. Higher minimum temps are, in general, good for humanity. If you’ve ever watched the TV show “Naked and Afraid”, it is when the temps fall at night that the suffering is at its peak, not during the day. I suspect most of the climate alarmists have never experienced a lengthy pull in cold temperatures at night with no heat source except themselves. I have, several times. Mostly while camping with the Boy Scouts over spring break from school. No fires in the tents! It’s a real awakening to the realities of thermodynamics!
In a nutshell, the notion that CO2 (or methane, or oxides of nitrogen, or any of the other “satanic gases”) “TRAPS HEAT” is utter nonsense.
“Global warming” is not about the “climate” getting HOTTER, but rather about the night time LOW temperatures not getting as cold.
Hardly a “catastrophe.”
Ben Santer involved?
Pointless reading further…
The scientific method Santer uses is bias, cherry picked data, false assumptions and circular reasoning. Being a primary gate keeper for climate alarm, empirical reality is not his thing.
Cross out the word “scientific” and you hit the nail on the head. Nothing “scientific” about his “methods.”