Kevin Kilty
This final part of the series explores the issue of regulation of Earth’s climate in light of a small, continuing imbalance between energy input from Sol, and outgoing LWIR – the so-called Earth Energy Imbalance (EEI). To reiterate important points from Parts I and II, we are told there is a small imbalance of magnitude 0.76 W/m2, but the certainty of this number appears too optimistic. Even by the estimation of its proponents it doesn’t include all sources of bias. The so-called components of feedback into the climate system, which are responses to this imbalance, may not be any better known or understood than EEI itself; the list of likely responses is possibly incomplete.
Does a physical principle demand there be a physical climate regulator?
This is difficult to answer. It’s true that certain graphs of climate behavior during the latter Pliocene and Pleistocene suggest the operation of a regulator. Many people suggest from general physical principles that there must be one. Let’s look at this item first.
When the topic of stability of Earth’s climate arises, some people respond by invoking Le Chatelier’s principle – a principle they say applies to the general stability of complex mechanical systems. What they mean, presumably, is the atmosphere will show a limited response to increasing amounts of CO2 because a physical principle says so. A search just at WUWT produces a surprisingly large number of such references to Le Chatelier. Two dozen at least.
While it would be nice to have a general universal principle guarantee that fears of catastrophe are imagined, I am doubtful about Le Chatelier’s principle providing this.
Problems with this principle began immediately upon Le Chatelier announcing it in 1884. His first effort was difficult to explain. In attempts to clarify matters, he produced versions that were less correct, but which were so generally appealing that they were readily adopted and spread widely. Here is LeChatelier’s principle as Colina and Olivera-Fuentes translate it.[1]
“In a homogeneous mixture in chemical equilibrium, an increase in the concentration of one of
the reacting components displaces the equilibrium in the direction in which the reaction tends
to decrease the concentration of the same species.”
The first thing a person should notice is, it’s a chemical principle, not a mechanical one. Unfortunately, the original confusion led over time to increasingly hazier and more general application. Temptation arose to apply it to everything. De Heer [2] derided its “almost metaphysical interpretations”. Samuelson suggested in 1947 that it even applied to economics. As he saw things,
“The vague and often teleological Le Chatelier’s principle of thermodynamics can be formulated as an unambiguous mathematical theorem concerned with elements of definite matrices associated with maximizing problems.”[3]
No textbook I have examined in mechanics, thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, or solid or fluid mechanics make any mention of the principle at all. It is mentioned in some textbooks on chemical thermodynamics, but not all. Some suggest it is merely a “qualitative” guide. The GSA’s Handbook of Physical Constants, which contains a wealth of thermo-chemical information about chemical systems in mineral and rock forming systems, doesn’t mention it. Probably most striking is that while some chemists insist it is among the most important concepts in chemistry,[4] it isn’t found anywhere in the 2,000+ pages of Perry’s Handbook of Chemical Engineering.
Why this principle applies specifically to chemical equilibrium is this.
The Gibbs free energy achieves a minimum at chemical equilibrium. The minimum condition itself demands that derivatives of G with respect to its independent variables (temperature, T, pressure, P, or chemical species concentration, n) are zero at equilibrium – i.e. dG/dP=0. This later condition suggests an implicit function, F(P,T,n)=0 say, exists between P or T and n. From this implicit function one can use calculus to find the behavior of n on change of P (dn/dP). Details are available in [4].
It’s difficult to see how something similar applies to Earth’s climate which is perpetually out of equilibrium and shows all manner of transport processes. The operation of climate and weather is a mix of thermodynamics and mechanical elements. Maybe, if the mean state of the climate (if one exists) is not too far from equilibrium, a principle like minimum rate of dissipation might apply.[5] Roy Spencer has mentioned in a note to a list server that I occasionally get messages from, that the issue of energy imbalance is essentially one of vertical heat transport from surface to tropopause. I think there are reasons to disagree with this. An occasional commenter on threads here has, parameterized for lack of a better term, vertical transport by all heat transport means, and argues that convective-radiative equilibrium is hopelessly deficient as well as difficult to establish by observations.
The topic is so complex that a separate essay is needed to even explain it. Let’s put this topic aside for now. If there is a regulator we should find it in observations.
Are there valid reasons to see the EEI as a non-problem?
My opinion is a qualified “yes”. Yes because Earth has experienced periods of far greater average temperature, and much higher levels of both CO2 and water vapor. Qualified because the current rate of advance is possibly unlike past natural changes; if so, it could lead to trouble with natural systems that can’t keep pace. But this has been true of much of Earth history and is an explanation for some extinctions – during both periods of rapid warming and cooling.
Table 1 below summarizes some of the ranges of conditions believed to exist in various Cenozoic epochs.
| Epoch | Time frame (mya) | Highest Average Temperature | CO2 (ppm) Maximum Variation | δO18 (0/00) | Notable events |
| Eocene | 33.9-55.8 | +(4-12C) over present | 1000-3000+ | 0-2 | Climate optimum; ends in an Ice age |
| Oligocene | 23-33.9 | ? | 500-1000 | 2 | Ends in an Ice age |
| Miocene | 5.3-23 | +8C over present | 200-1000 | 1-3 | Climate optimum |
| Pliocene | 2.6-5.3 | 2-3C over present | 150-600 | 3-3.5 |
Table 1. Data drawn from; Antarctic Climate Evolution (Second Edition), 2022 Chapters 8 and 9. [7] The Cenozoic CO2 Proxy Integration.[7] Zachos et al.[8]
What one notices is that the era is marked by a general decline in temperature and CO2 levels, punctuated with brief excursions into hothouse climates and ice ages along with occasional spikes, positive and negative, in CO2 concentration. Tipping points, as researchers like to call them, seem endlessly in supply. They occur, mostly, as changes in the trend of climate rather than sudden disastrous shifts that a term like tipping point implies.
The Eocene epoch saw a very warm and moist climate. Even polar regions were subtropical. Yet, the Eocene–Oligocene transition was the Cenozoic era’s largest cooling event; the climate switching from greenhouse to icehouse. It coincides with δ18O isotope records signaling a peak in glaciation in Antarctica. The climatic and biotic changes lasted for 500 kyr. Possibly a contributor to this cooling was a marked decrease in atmospheric CO2 from 1000-1500 ppm late in the Eocene to near present day levels during the Oligocene.
This defies current thinking. In addition to the drop in atmospheric CO2 levels, orbital forcing, changes in circumpolar ocean currents, and even volcanism are other possible contributors to climate change at the transition from Eocene to Oligocene. Ice-climate feedback, also thought to be a contributor to climate change, mainly follows climate and simply reinforces change already underway.
Atmospheric CO2 concentration appears to rebound rapidly following the Oligocene-Miocene transition, with some proxy estimates as high as 1000 ppm by the earliest Miocene.
The transition from the Oligocene to Miocene epochs also involves a significant ice age. These ice age interludes in an otherwise warm period with high levels of CO2 are difficult to understand. Naish, et al. say of the Oligocene-Miocene transition that it “…challenges our current understanding of orbitally-paced, ocean-atmosphere carbon exchange and associated feedbacks in the climate system.”[6] But possibly these ice ages are difficult to understand only because people for decades now have relied too much on the idea of CO2 being the control knob of climate.[7]
No less enigmatic than these glacial ages are the hot house interludes, Zachos, et al, state that a feature common to them all, whether transient or long-lived, is exceptionally warm poles. In fact, high temperatures are substantially too high for models to simulate without unreasonably high levels of CO2. Obviously climate dynamics, especially poleward heat transport, are not understood well enough to model accurately.[8]
On to the Pleistocene
The Pleistocene epoch, which began about 2.6 Mya, is an epoch composed of alternating cold/warm periods (glacials/stadials) in which climate has become colder, continental ice volumes grown larger, and CO2 levels fall deeper, with each cycle. The top panel of Figure 1 shows that when these cycles first appeared during the early Pleistocene they did so as an oscillation with a roughly 40kyr period – a period suggestive of orbital obliquity. If ice volumes equate to global temperature then the warmest episodes of the Pleistocene epoch fall short of those in the Pliocene. The cycles of the early Pleistocene also appear somewhat symmetrically shaped. Symmetry may only reflect poor time-resolution of data, though.
About 1.3Mya this pattern changed (Mid-Pleistocene Transition or MPT) to deeper glacial periods and much greater asymmetry of cooling versus warming periods. As Dawson said, “The overall pattern that the oxygen isotope exhibit is characterized by incessant switches between global cooling and warming.”[9]
Indeed, Figure 1 shows this switching from panel a through c at increasingly finer time resolution. Intense cold with warm period, and cool periods with the warmer, and warmer periods within cooler down, like a Weierstrass curve, down to the finest time resolution the ice cores allow.
During Pleistocene glacials, polar circulation cells expanded to 50 degrees north/south and even further south on the North American continent. With expansion of polar cells, the remaining weather and biomes this weather supported were compressed into a more restricted range. Tropical biomes retreated into refugia separated by broad dry savannas. The climate became dry and dusty.
In contradiction to these mapped conditions, low-resolution GCMs of the 1970-80s suggested that ocean temperatures and atmospheric levels of water vapor were not hugely different from today. In fact, they suggest some oceanic regions were even warmer than today.
While the 41kyr cycle of Pleistocene ex ante 1.3mya seems to implicate the cycle of Earth’s obliquity as a climate driver, the MPT occurred without any significant change in orbital elements. Even considering that possibly the 100ky cycles of the late might involve cycle skipping (i.e. skipping 2 or 3 cycles of obliquity), experiments done with climate models have shown that orbital elements only, or even orbital elements in combination with reductions in CO2, are insufficient to initiate a glacial period at the most opportune times for one.[10]
The work of Rind, et al, repeated by more than a dozen other investigators over the next 12 years, and cited even a quarter century later was seen as definitive in this regard.[11,12] Thus, some internal climate dynamics seem to be involved.
Energy Balance and Escape from a Glacial
Figure 1, Panel C, suggests the Earth climbed out of the most recent glacial period in around 7,500 years time. The rapidity belies that a persistent energy imbalance of perhaps only 0.5-0.6W/m2 is indicated – nearly equal to present energy imbalance estimates.
How does Earth escape the grip of a glacial when almost everything works against it?
The SB feedback always works against change. A small net positive imbalance to raise temperature, and SB radiates 60-80% of this imbalance away. The reduced concentrations of water vapor and CO2 push this figure closer to 80% than 60%. Both ice-albedo and vegetation-albedo follow changing climate rather than initiate it, and now help maintain the cold, mean atmospheric state. A dry and dusty atmosphere seems like an augmentation to the other albedo feedbacks despite making snow and ice a bit less bright.
Perhaps transport processes could do the task, although the North Atlantic conveyor of warm water was probably reduced at the time by 40% of its current value (11SV versus 18SV at present, SV=106 M3/s). Feedback from changes in clouds are about all that is left to consider, which is why I said in Part II that cloud feedback being estimated as positive from the present mean climate state is possibly correct, and possibly a good thing.
Figure 1. Uppermost panel is from Bolton et al (2012)[]. Oxygen ratios are stated using the typical carbon isotope ratio measure for carbonates (VPDB), Other two panels were constructed by author Kilty using data available from NOAA with isotope ratios stated relative to VSMOW, the usual measure for benthic forams. An approximate conversion is VPDB(δ18O) = 0.97×VSMOW(δ18O) − 30‰. Note that at each finer scale of resolution there appear shorter, yet significant climate variations.
Low Dimensionality Climate Regulator?
As presently practiced, climate science now seems no more than applied computer modelling. Ditlevsen argues that more insight might be gained by pursuing dynamical models with only a few degrees of freedom.[13] In effect, this is how Stommel explained the current state of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning [14] and the method Lorenz employed to demonstrate the problem of weather prediction.[15] People have used this method to explain ENSO dynamics, as well.
Ditlevsen favors a fold bifurcation model of Pleistocene climate. Eschewing catastrophe theory for now, a fold bifurcation is effectively an On/Off controller, like your home HVAC, with positive hysteresis. Figure 2 shows the comparison.
Panel A shows the fold catastrophe, with the dotted portion of the fold indicating a forbidden region which demands that transitions between two distinct states take place at different values of the controlling parameter (horizontal axis). Panel B shows the essence of an On/Off controller like a building HVAC. The controlled parameter is temperature. The controlling state is the furnace or boiler being on or off. The distance in units of the controlled variable is the hysteresis in the system, which is needed to prevent chattering.
Panel C shows time behavior for an example system that cools according to a time constant equal to the time constant governing heating. The system displays an oscillation governed by whatever dynamic or set of parameters contributes to EEI.
This Ditlevsen On/Off controller appeared out of the Pliocene world when atmospheric CO2 levels dropped below about 350 ppm, but one shouldn’t see CO2 as its critical feature.
Figure 2. Fold bifurcation compared to an On/Off controller.
Another view of this warrants consideration, however. Badly behaving On/Off controllers can develop negative hysteresis and become locked to one or the other of their controlling states. Before the MPT the climate system behaved as an On/Off controller producing symmetric excursions warm to cold and back again. At the mid-Pleistocene transition, the On/Off controller suddenly acquired negative hysteresis which locked the controller in its cold state.
Which positive feedback put us there? The climate system contains many possibilities. Zhisheng An, et al,[16] proposed that the transition is suspiciously coincident with an abnormal growth of the Antarctic ice sheets to something approaching 120% of their current extent. This in turn, pushed climatic zones north making more water vapor available to grow Northern hemisphere ice. They did not term this a positive feedback, but it certainly functions as one.
Occasionally, when orbital elements and some major feedback mechanisms work in unison, the Earth manages to return to a warmer period that cannot be maintained because the inputs are too wimpy to reach the warmer state or there is no warmer state to reach. Interglacials rapidly give way to another stadial. In this view, Earth is permanently in the colder branch of an ice age.
Pleistocene to Holocene
I have calculated that the energy imbalance bringing Earth out of its icy state at 20kya to the present warmth took place over 7,500 years was a mere 0.5-0.6 W/m2. Closer inspection of global temperature [7] shows it grew mainly in two separate pulses totaling 6ky in duration indicating perhaps as much as 0.7 W/m2 of effective imbalance. By effective imbalance I mean after all feedbacks are considered, but in either estimate, an imbalance not much different from the current one. An inspection of Figure 1 shows that an imbalance of approximately this magnitude characterizes the entire Pleistocene. This leads me to see the current imbalance as nothing especially unusual.
Shakun, et al, [7 ]maintain that CO2 increases prior to temperature rise in high quality proxy records implicate CO2 as the global element of change, particularly in the emergence from LGM. Yet, they point to a small temperature rise prior to the rise of global CO2. Moreover, some causative agent caused CO2 to rise in the first place. They note an anticorrelation between strength of the AMOC and periods of most rapid CO2 rise; implicating internal climate dynamics.
Reinforcing this view, Dawson [9] states that the last glacial ended with the Laurentide ice sheet being thinned on its western flank as early as 17,000 ya, before other North American glaciers. This occurred even as lobes of ice continued to grow on its southern and southeastern flanks, indicating the importance of regional climate change in the emergence from the LGM rather than a global influence like CO2 or other greenhouse gasses.
By coincidence, a weather summary from Windy.com on the 27th of January shows one climate dynamic, working even nowadays, that could cause such a thing. Figure 3 shows flow of warm, moisture-laden Pacific air pushed over the Canadian Cordillera, warmed in its descent to the east, and making places even in the Yukon and Northwest Territories warmer than the central Rockies.[17]
Figure 3
Summary
From the Eocene through Pliocene epochs:
- Both the Eocene and Oligocene sported climate optima that are difficult to explain even at the highest possible CO2 concentration.
- Both the Eocene and Oligocene terminated with glacial episodes at CO2 levels above the presently theorized levels which will tip Earth into global boiling.
- Statements such as “ Warm polar regions are substantially too warm for models to simulate without unreasonably high levels of CO2.” or epoch to epoch transitions challenge “…our current understanding of orbitally-paced, ocean-atmosphere carbon exchange and associated feedbacks in the climate system”, admit without saying so that there is far more to the climate system than CO2.
The Pleistocene to Holocene epochs:
- Modeling suggests that Initiating a glacial period requires an ocean so cold that Earth is already in a glacial sort of state.
- Detailed oxygen isotope records show persistent energy imbalance of the order of 0.5 W/m2, plus or minus, throughout the epoch – higher still in the transition to the Holocene.
- Figure 1 demonstrates clearly that the “Mean State” of the atmosphere is one in name only. The mean state changes constantly throughout the Pleistocene – there is constant energy imbalance and lack of equilibrium.
- Climate fluctuations within the holocene are smaller than those within the Pleistocene, yet even it displays substantial variability that is difficult to explain with current paradigms.
References:
[1]-Colina, Coray & Olivera-Fuentes, Claudio. (2009). A re-examination of Le Chatelier’s Principle. Available at URL https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236998554_A_re-examination_of_Le_Chatelier’s_Principle
[2]-J. De Heer, J. Chem. Educ. 34 (1957) 375-380.
[3]-P. Samuelson, “An Extension of the LeChatelier Principle,” Econometrica, Vol. 28, No. 2, 1960, pp. 368-379. doi:10.2307/1907727, or P. Samuelson, “Foundations of Economic Analysis,” Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1947
[4]-Smith, William R. “A precise, simple and general Basic Le Châtelier Principle based on elementary calculus: What Le Châtelier had in mind?” Journal of Mathematical Chemistry 58.8 (2020): 1548-1570.
[5]-Prigogine, 1967, Introduction to Thermodynamics of Irreversible Processes, 3rd Ed. Interscience Publishers.
[6]-Tim R. Naish, et al. Antarctic Ice Sheet dynamics during the Late Oligocene and Early Miocene: climatic conundrums revisited, Chapter 8, Antarctic Climate Evolution (Second Edition)
2022, Pages 363-387. And G.S. Wilson, et al, Developments in Earth and Environmental Sciences, Volume 8, 2008, Pages 369-400, Chapter 9 The Oligocene–Miocene Boundary – Antarctic Climate Response to Orbital Forcing. Also, The Cenozoic CO2 Proxy Integration Project (CENCO2PIP) Consortium, Toward a Cenozoic history of atmospheric CO2, Science, 8 Dec 2023 Vol 382, Issue 6675 DOI: 10.1126/science.adi5177
[7]-Shakun, et al, 2012,Global Warming preceded by increasing carbon dioxide concentrations during the last deglaciation, Nature, 484, p.49.
In speaking of uncertainties regarding dust and vegetation,”uncertainties notwithstanding, we suggest that the increase in CO2 concentration before that of global temperature, is consistent with CO2 acting as a primary driver of global warming,…”
[8]-James C. Zachos, et al, An early Cenozoic perspective on greenhouse warming and carbon-cycle dynamics, Nature, v 451, 17 January 2008
[9]-Alastair G. Dawson, Ice Age Earth, Routledge, 1992.
[10]-Rind, et al, Can Milankovitch Orbital Variations Initiate the Growth of Ice Sheets in a General Circulation Model? Journal of Geophysical Res., Vol. 94, No. D10, Pages 12,851-12,871, September 20, 1989
Rind, et al, ran many experiments with the GISS global climate model (GCM) in which they set insolation values to those of 106-116kya, then adjusted a number of boundary conditions. They even gave ice a head start by planting ten meter layers of ice where ice domes existed. Yet ice sheets failed to grow.
[11]-Reader, et al, 2002, On the causes of glacial inception at 116kyrBP, Climate Dynamics, 18,
383-402.
Reader, et al, repeated some of Rind, et al’s, experiments using three coupled models to establish initial conditions for an atmospheric GCM of intermediate complexity. Beyond their own efforts they summarize the results of fifteen other computer experiment investigations which verified that orbital elements alone, orbital elements plus lowered CO2, could not not initiate a glacial period. What is needed is a sufficiently cooled ocean. In other words, initiating a glacial period requires circumstances almost like a glacial period to start.
[12]-R.G. Johnson, 2014, Past and future ice age initiation, ESDD 5, 545–584. Online at: https://esd.copernicus.org/preprints/5/545/2014/esdd-5-545-2014.pdf
[13]- Peter Ditlevsen (2022) The Pleistocene Glacial Cycles and Millennial-Scale
Climate Variability, Atmosphere-Ocean, 60:3-4, 233-244, DOI: 10.1080/07055900.2022.2077172
[14]-Stommel, H.: Thermohaline convection with two stable regimes of flow, Tellus, 2, 244–230, 1961.
[15]-Lorenz, E. N.: Deterministic nonperiodic flow, J. Atmos. Sci., 20, 130–141, 1963a.
[16]-Zhisheng An, et al, Mid-Pleistocene climate transition triggered by Antarctic Ice Sheet
growth, Science, 1 Aug 2024, Vol 385, Issue 6708 pp. 560-565 DOI: 10.1126/science.abn4861
[17]-Some of the temperature contrast of southern Wyoming and central Colorado being colder than the Yukon, is the work-related cooling that goes with raising air to greater altitude. Southern Wyoming and central Colorado are the highest average terrain in the US48.
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What was the middle part again?
Part II, you mean? Part I examined the estimates of energy imbalance. Part II I had a critical look at feedback.
For some reason the WUWT website’s HTML code (/ AI LLM invokation ?) interacted with my browser’s programming to only include “Part I” (from last September) of this series in the “Related” line of (3) links (just after the end of the article text), but not the more recent (February) “Part II”.
Checking my browser’s “History” database gave me the following two URLs.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/09/16/the-earths-energy-imbalance-part-i/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/02/24/earths-energy-imbalance-part-ii/
.
“You must realize that the computer has it in for you. The irrefutable proof of this is that the computer always does what you tell it to do.” — Original source unknown
Where’s Anakin Skywalker when you need him.
His Midichlorian count is off the charts.
Surely HE could bring “Balance” to the Forcings.
One mechanism for thermoregulation at the high end is the vapor pressure of water roughly doubling with every 10ºC. rise in temperature. The National Hurricane Center states that SST’s of 26ºC or higher are needed to sustain a hurricane, which suggests that tropical storms may help keep temps under control.
Tipping points seem to happen when the earth goes into an ice age, or coming out of an ice age, which goes along with a bifurcation of temperature response.
The only balance that really matters is for a planet to maintain sufficient kinetic energy at the surface to create enough upward pressure gradient force to balance the downward force of gravity so that the mass of an atmosphere is neither lost to space nor falls to the ground.
Whenever anything seeks to disturb that balance then the presence of the lapse rate ensures that the speed or location of convection changes to neutralise any net thermal effect.
Otherwise atmospheres would not be so common.
Everything else is just akin to discussing how many angels could fit on the head of a pin
It is the amount of kinetic energy required at the surface to achieve that task which determines the surface temperature beneath an atmosphere.
It follows that ice ages and interglacials are primarily a result of a redistribution of energy across the surface caused by orbital changes, solar variability, and variations within the oceanic thermohaline circulation.
In cooler times the atmosphere will shrink somewhat and in warmer times it will expand but changes in the rate at which the atmosphere is lost to space will be mitigated by changes in the speed of convective overturning.
The height of the upper levels hardly changes but the turbulence of the lower levels will change as necessary to retain long term balance.
Chaos in action. You don’t even need external factors. Overall the Earth is losing around 44 TW – cooling, in other words.The surface varies between 90 C and -90 C, so “average” cooling is meaningless in practical terms.
Weather, and hence climate is unpredictable in any useful sense. We hope the sun rises tomorrow, but who knows?
Kevin, I mean no offense, and your hobby is your business. I have some comments on –
“Earth’s climate” is “climate science” jargon. As is “Earth Energy Imbalance”.
Fourier pointed out that the Earth loses to space all the energy it receives from the sun, plus a little of its internal energy. After four and a half billion years of continuous sunlight, the Earth is cooler, not hotter.
Adding CO2 to air does not make it hotter.
A reduction in “outgoing LWIR” results in slower cooling. Slower cooling is not heating. Just more pseudoscience in action. Misleading word salad.
It is not possible to predict future climate states.
Just a few facts in case the ignorant and gullible GHE cultists are hoping for more similarly inclined ill-informed scientific illiterates to join their band of fools.
Milankovic orbital variation is, of course, not a complete theory of climate change.
Other factors, particularly albedo, play a large role. However, atmospheric O2 bubbles from ice cores, delta 18O ratios from calcite in caves, and the first derivative d(18O)/dt from LR04, and later, benthic data, all, vary in phase with the predictions of Q-bar (65 N solstice) from both Berger and Lasker’s Milankovic orbital analyses for the period of the data’s mutual overlap. These proxies all have in common that the isotopic variation reflects the current atmospheric composition without multiple physical processes intervening.
Milankovic theory is thus, a first order, or at least, a zeroth order, solution to climate variability since the MPT. Longer than that, tectonics and external processes begin to shape the climate, as well.
Climate models provide little more than misinformation on the 10 to 15 thousand year time scale. Their back-predictions do not agree with multiple proxies for that period. The tell is that all EMIC models, even using very different individual forcings, arrive at the same CO2-temperature profile – a clear sign of the ‘Popper effect’.
CO2 is, of course, a greenhouse gas, but the weakest. Its GH effect is 1 by definition, and all other GHGs are at least an order of magnitude larger. Only by knock-on effects does CO2 variation have any significance in determining climate, which brings up the question as to WHY we are destroying our energy system for fear of CO2.This is obvious from the huge range of CO2 and the small temperature changes over the epochs noted above. CO2 abundance does affect plant life dramatically, and thus albedo, may raise the temperature slightly, increasing specific humidity slightly, and thus modifies hardiness zones and again the distribution and type of plant life and its attendant albedo, and other effects on climate. Those are complex processes, and are not included in iterative climate models presently.
CO2 does not increase before temperature, at least not for the past five glaciation cycles where the Antarctic data is quite good. The ice core profiles show a consistent lag of CO2 versus temperature change, in both directions among the five cycles back to MIS 11c. Many efforts to explain away this datum have been made for the obvious reason. None is very convincing, not to mention that it is purely a coincidence that Greenland CO2 data is viewed as uninterpretable during this same period.
Despite strenuous efforts over the past 50 years or more, a theory of glaciation/deglaciation fully consistent with measurements has not appeared. For the two decades, no dramatic breakthrough has been achieved. This area of climate science is in sore need of better data and new insights because the wheels are spinning on very slick ice at present.
The issue w CO2 is that if we compare today’s levels to those of 100 000 to millions of years ago we rely on ice cores and an average is used which spans at least 3000- 4000 years which is based on compression. Using that timeframe we dont actually know the CO2 levels. There could have been periods with much higher or lower levels. Averaging these out Is like stating the temperature of the moon.
It is of course pretty clear that trying to pin CO2 to temperature in a 150 year timespan needs serious data forcing to make a causal pattern work, especially when the temperature differences are so small.
Well we at least no much lower is not possible or we wouldn’t be here to talk about it
That depends on the 0 point of departure.
Not if you believe that adding CO2 to air makes it hotter, it’s not. You’re not trying to imply that, are you?
The claim….as I understand it….is that CO2 in effect acts as a one way valve to LWIR because the IR frequencies emitted by the sun and those emitted by the earth are not exactly the same….thus the CO2 allows IR in to warm and blocks some IR out to retain some warming. Therefore, the claim is not CO2 makes air hotter.
Warming of what, precisely? The surface?
Would you prefer me to say that adding CO2 to air does not make the air or the surface hotter?
There is no consistent and unambiguous description of the GHE, so there is no claim at all. I’m just pointing out that adding CO2 to air doesn’t make anything at all hotter. No “one way valve”. Nor any other pointless analogies.
The Earth has cooled in spite of four and a half billion years of continuous sunlight.
No one is claiming that CO2 spontaneously makes air warmer. I don’t have any preference regarding this….. the claim that CO2 acts as a one way valve should be something for a lab test……the earth has not steadily cooled….there have been periods of warming before…..the sun will become a red giant and the earth will become very hot.
The GHE claims nothing at all. Pity.
It has cooled. It is now cooler than it was – cooling asymptotically, not steadily. Steady cooling would be silly, wouldn’t it?
No periods of warming – the interior is still glowing hot.
Adding CO2 to air makes nothing hotter.
CO2 isn’t a “one way valve”, although RGHE proponents want you to think it is (i.e. “trapping heat”). Like water vapour, it both absorbs and emits IR energy. So, more like a two-way valve, really, or even an all-way valve. But there is a lot more water vapour in the air than CO2, so I don’t know why anyone would worry about CO2. Unless they had some sort of an agenda they were pushing… what could that be?
Furthermore: GHE is still an unproven hypothesis when applied to Earth’s atmosphere and the so called ‘global mean temperature’ is a nonsense concept. The fact that people try to determine today’s GMT and compare it to the past is a form of idiocy only people involved in computer modeling would go for. Skilled though they are, like this site’s Roy Spencer, to me it just looks a forced system that believes computational power is enough to establish a reliable outcome. But as many have noticed, the more complex and interactive the more uncertain. So, instead they narrow the parameters down so that the game can be played using magic tricks w nice graphs..
I cannot find a consistent and unambiguous description of the GHE. Nobody can definitely state what the “hypothesis” is!
It would be nice if someone who uses the terms “GHE” or “GHG”s, could describe them in any useful way. You can’t disprove something which cannot even be described.
That’s what the ignorant and gullible “climate scientists” depend on.
Fair enough..
This was published many times in WUWT that certain feedbacks (e.g. water vs. CO2 increase, or cooling effects of thunderstorms in the tropics) which were characterized as positive are in effect negative ones. There you go: the tipping points aren’t there, the climate is as stable as a chaotic system can be. Negative feedbacks are the so-called “unknown regulators” that alarmists and the IPCC refuse to acknowledge. If they did, their predictions of catastrophes and “climate change urgency” would just vanish, along with their funding. One should ditch the fudged computer models and start analysing data without preconceived opinions (or biased funding) as per the scientific method.
To begin to understand Earth’s climate, you must first understand how ice forms and disappears on land, on water and in the atmosphere. Grasp that understanding and you are on the way to understanding Earth’s climate.
To form ice on land, water has to be liberated from the ocean surface; transported to land and then condensed over land that is cooler than 0C. Glaciation is an energy intensive process. It requires warm oceans and cold land.
Current glaciation in the NH is a bistable state that depends on the orbital forcing and the ice carrying capability of land.
Last time the Earth was in similar orbital circumstances to now was 400ka. With the July solar EMR at 15N just beginning to increase. Orbital eccentricity was relatively small as observed today:
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Greenland had lost most of its ice as well as the rest of the NH. Earth was primed for NH glaciers tio build again.
25ka, when the solar EMR at 15N last started to increase, the NH had reached its ice carrying limit with ice shelf loss and glacier calving preventing the NH oceans from warming up. Compared to last cycle, this precession cycle, Earth is in a different state with only Greenland in the NH carrying substantial ice. The NH oceans are warming up fast and the atmospheric moisture is rising fast. This is causing year-on-year record snow falls and a clear upward trend in early season snow. The ocean warming has only just begun. The snowfall is mild compared with what it will become. Within 200 years, the permafrost across Canada and Siberia will be advancing south again. Glaciers are already expanding on Greenland and the elevation of the summit is increasing.
Global cooling during glaciation is primarily a function of the lapse rate as the ice mountains elevate and the ocean level recedes. The same reason the ice plateaus of Greenland and Antarctica are cold enough to form ice year round. If you go to peaks near the Equator, you must go above 5000m to find permanent ice.
“experimenting” with current climate models is akin to wanking and expecting a pregnancy. It is such a pointless idea.
There is some good work being done on understanding ice related to convective instability and convective overshooting. That is very important if you want to nail the prime ocean temperature regulating mechanism that limits the ocean surface to a sustainable 30C. But none of it can be incorporated into current climate models in a useful deterministic process. They just run on parameterised junk notions.
At a rough guess, it’s due to cooling from an initial 100 C, when liquid water first appeared, At the moment, the deep waters are mostly around 3 C, or whatever local maximum water density is. Apart from mid-ocean ridges, thermal vents, and crustal hot-spots, of course.
The future state of the aquasphere is quite unpredictable, but the current cooling rate of the Earth is around 1-4 millionths of a K per annum. I’m assuming current ocean temps won’t change much in the next few years.
I could be wrong. <g>
And ocean temperatures are local. In local i mean it can still be a relatively big area but it is not global. Quite often local ‘heat’ pockets can arise out of undersea volcanic eruptions.
“And ocean temperatures are local. In local i mean it can still be a relatively big area but it is not global.”
That’s right and is worth pointing out as ocean heating is usually distorted this way, with climate alarmists implying that the entire ocean is getting warmer and warmer, when ocean temperatures are just like local weather: Some places are cool, and some places are warm.
When liquid water first appeared the temperature would have been above 100ºC because the atmospheric pressure at that time would be much higher than now (more like Venus).
because the surface had cooled from a much hotter condition. Are you really as gullible and ignorant as you appear?
Apparently you don’t realize that the boiling point of water at atmospheric pressure is 100ºC!
Phil, you are both ignorant and stupid. Before the coldest part of the initially molten surface cooled to 100 C, there was no liquid water.
But who cares, you still believe that adding CO2 to air makes it hotter! It doesn’t, according to experiments from John Tyndall to the current day.
[ “experimenting” with current climate models is akin to wanking and expecting a pregnancy. It is such a pointless idea. ]
And just as productive – a pool of useless slime, produced by some ill-informed tosser who gets instant gratification, so is driven to repeat the experiment … with the same out cum (;-))
The weather/climate system is chaotic and the strange attractor is a powerful form of stability due to negative nonlinear feedback.
David, the strange attractor is strange because it constantly moves. Aperiodic, non-predictable.
Never heard of that, but you obviously have. What is it supposed to mean? There is no stability in chaos. Many physicists apparently refuse to believe in chaos, or the uncertainty principle.
Nature doesn’t seem to care what they think.
“If there is a regulator we should find it in observations.”
Emergent climate phenomena, per Willis Eschenbach here at WUWT, are plainly observed. Incremental CO2 is not capable of driving the climate state toward a tipping point in a system that promotes such powerful localized overturning and energy conversion. In a thunderstorm, a rainfall rate of 1 inch per hour represents at least 17,600 W/m^2 conversion of the latent energy of water vapor to internal energy. Altitude is given here such that “500” = 50,000 feet.
Yes, these storms regulate temperature and weather, but look at Figure 1 and tell me where is the climate regulator. I don’t think there is one.
When I worked in the electronic materials industry we had vessels meant to maintain a set point temperature which used temperature measurements to decide to increase or decrease heat input. Those were regulators with a feedback loop.
We had other process vessels where the temperature behavior was so well characterized that the temperature could be regulated just as accurately without a feedback loop. Open loop process.
I say it’s possible from Figure 1 that we have, as far as climate is concerned, a poor open loop process.
“…tell me where is the climate regulator. I don’t think there is one.”
My point in relation to the “climate” debate of our modern times is that CO2 concentration can be justifiably ruled out as having anything beyond “wimpy” (I like your word) influence.
I know. Look at Figure 1 and then tell me, Mr. Climate Scientist, about global boiling. It is difficult to explain ice ages during periods when the CO2 concentration was 3 to 4 doubling above what it is now. Sometimes CO2 looks pretty important, at other times it seems a peripheral issue.
Having said that, I had a whole section of this essay that discussed sinks for CO2, and how this vital gas might get back into the atmosphere. There is no regulator of CO2 either. It looks open loop. I deleted that section over the excessive length and plan to bring it back as a standalone essay later.
BTW, I was not referring to you as Mr. Climate Scientist, David, but addressing the generic climate hysteric.
Is Mr. Climate Scientist any relation to Mr. Smarty Pants?
One problem that contributes to mis-communication is the tendency of non-geologists (and some geologists) to conceive of the past as being a level-surface spheroid. Thus, point sampling of proxy, marine geothermometers are assumed to be equal or close to the average water temperatures, or at least for the near-surface. Micro-fossils, derived from near-surface environments, are readily preserved in deep ocean sediments that become black shales. What is entirely missing is any appreciation for the temperature variations with depth in the oceans, and temperatures in the mountains resulting from the lapse rate. It has been suggested that some past mountain ranges were higher than what exists anywhere today. Any fossils that might get preserved in high mountains, in ice or lakes, will get destroyed as erosion reduces the mountains and moves the remnants of the land fossils to the sea. Thus, there is a bias for marine sediments and low-land plants and animals, with the latter being warmer than the former. Our view of the Earth of the past is more like that of a flat-Earth — 2-dimensional.
“Our view of the Earth of the past is more like that of a flat-Earth — 2-dimensional.”
See the flag of ‘The Flat Earth Society’
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse4.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIF.f%252fhNXuk6Eul9qyYvZl3jnA%26pid%3DApi&f=1&ipt=09fc5530b35cebb70fd3e6721b635e9a410fefb0379e957b35bd1287e79ec8cb&ipo=images
There is no one ‘regulator’ for the climate. Nor is there one for temperature except on a local and ground level. But even thermometer or similar readings are just variable numbers. Temperature is never in equilibrium. There is no 0 point and you cannot stack them/ average them out. We furthermore cannot estimate global mean temperature because the concept is clearly nonsense. So the whole idea of warming and cooling of earth’s atmosphere in a narrow bandwidth temperature scale is indistinquishable from noise.
The variances of the temperature profiles vary all over the place. Even if you could average them they would each need to be properly weighted for their contribution to the total – which climate science makes no attempt to do properly.
As I remarked to Kevin, above, the process of fossilization and erosion bias samples against cold alpine plants and animals and particularly in favor of marine organisms thriving in the mixed zone above the marine thermocline, and those that dwell in the abyss. That is, we don’t have the information necessary to properly weight the samples.
Lucky you. Before bugging out for greener pastures, I worked in a plant where the process vessels were somewhat less well regulated, the result often requiring the rodding out of fouled rooftop condensers and the setting up of impromptu car washes in the parking lot.
Sounds challenging…
Excellent article, Kevin, with a lot of material for future reference! Suffice it to say, notwithstanding exogenous shocks from plate tectonics, orbital mechanics, GCRs, etc., we’ll be ok thanks to Dr Planck and the too often ignored fact that the Earth is effectively a water planet.
Hopefully, we don’t annihilate ourselves at some point, and one thing we could do to prevent that is to end the West’s asinine war against CO2.
“…the Earth is effectively a water planet.”
Excellent point. It is insane to “fight” against CO2 as if it has anything to do with a trivially true EEI. I say trivially true because ANY warming for whatever reason must have involved an imbalance.
Agreed. The aforementioned exogenous shocks establish set points around which the ‘feedbacks’ maintain stasis.
While 70% of the surface of “the planet” is covered with (sea / salt) water, most of the internal volume consists of various types of rock (in the mantle), with a mostly iron and nickel core.
When “playing around with the numbers” (see the table at the bottom of this link) I ended up with a “To scale” image file with an “ocean” only one or two (light blue) pixels wide (attached to the end of this post).
I had to generate a “zoomed in” version to better appreciate the various “heat / energy flows” at the Earth’s “surface”.
It all depends on your “perspective”, I guess.
Editorial note : Right-click on the above “blurry” image, and then select the “Open Link in New Tab” option (or equivalent) to get a “sharp / in focus” version.
The “Ctrl plus +” and “Ctrl plus -” keyboard shortcuts, or “Ctrl + roll mouse scroll-wheel backwards and forwards”, can then be used to zoom in and out.
It surprised me, when I got the oxygen isotope data from NOAA and plotted it, was that an imbalance of 0.5 to 0.7
is always in progress one direction or the other for the past 1.3 million years. That, I think, should temper one’s view of the current imbalance, which just happens to be positive. We really don’t know what might make it go negative again.
I think Dr Clauser had it right with his analogy to home hvac – the ‘system’ has plenty of capacity, but is either on or off at any time.
That’s a ton of research and write-up Kevin. Good job. Breakfast coffee got cold reading this. Thanks for “LeChatelier’s principle as Colina and Olivera-Fuentes translate it.” That’s much more chem-eng rigorous than the usual “sooth-sayers” version people talk about as if the “pirate’s code” was the Magna Carta.
I thought you could have said more about how a 1% increase in surface temperature causing a 4% increase in IR emissions from the same surface by Stephan-Boltzmann, of which about 40% makes it through the atmospheric window to outer space (depending on how you treat cloudiness)….thus SB, cloud albedo, and water vapor as a GHG due to ocean and ice surface temp. control average planet surface temp…..etc, etc,.you know…
I am glad you recognize that I put quite a bit of research and effort into these. SB would be a powerful negative feedback, and it still is, but CO2 and H2O in the atmosphere temper its strength which is a very good thing for us. However, one has to then live with the fact that our figure-of-merit enhancing surface coating (the atmosphere) also blunts the efforts of a surface
attempting to regulate radiation balance.
If folks can stand just a little more on this topic, I think two things are in order to attack in two more short essays. 1) Look at vertical transport in detail — Roy Spencer sort of threw down a gauntlet in this. The poster Quondam has also inspired some thinking in this regard. 2) Look in detail at CO2 and where it has gone over the Cenzoic era. In fact, balancing volatiles, in my understanding, is a challenge.
If you were a planetary MD, looking at Figure 1 as a patient’s control chart, you might say “This planet is in long-term trouble. A regime of a 4ppm supplement of CO2 per year until the declining temperature trend reverses is what I recommend.”
Maybe you would not agree, but it seems to me that Willis Eschenbach has also done a fairly thorough job investigating vertical/ convective heat transport processes. One would think that such processes, which are ubiquitous on earth, cannot help but be significant in “controlling” earth temperature and that these are (of what may be many) mechanisms that climate “models” do not reflect except to be manipulated to get the results the modelers believe they should get.
Does a physical principle demand there be a physical climate regulator?
Perchance temperature itself? By definition, dS=(1/T)dq. 1/T is an integrating factor defining entropy to be an exact differential. Exact differentials have path-independent solutions. Should a thermodynamic system change from state A to state B, changes in thermodynamic properties are path-independent by virtue of the temperature profile and amenable to variational solution. Alas, such systems appear restricted to steady states with a history reduced to entropy.
And of course ‘temperature’ is never a steady state, knows no equilibrium, cannot be averaged and depends on multi factoral interactions.
As you can see, PD, I am wrestling with this topic. I might point out that while dS=0 might be a very useful constraint, the atmosphere is full of transport phenomena that make the constraint dS>0, which I find much less useful. Thus I am pondering Prigogine’s rate of entropy increase as a constraint. But there are so many other avenues to pursue. I am a pretty careful and it takes time for me to nail down everything loose in my mind.
Kevin, for the record, the variational constraint implied is not dS =0 but that its integral from A to B is path-independent. Should state A correspond to equilibrium, entropy is a maximum and dissipation zero. If state B is an arbitrarily small perturbation, the rate of entropy creation increases linearly (Prigogine) and the rate of energy dissipation quadratically (Raleigh). For larger perturbations, it is necessary to assume the properties of state B are independent of state A, a function only of its boundary conditions. Should such a state exist, I have argued dissipation is a minimum wrt internal variations of the temperature profile. ( For the mathematically curious, see the TDV and Onsager Equations pdfs, https://pdquondam.net)
Much ado about nothing!
It can be proven that CO2 has NO climatic effect, apart from decreasing its albedo.
The actual control knob for our climate, now and in the past, is simply the amount of dimming SO2 aerosols in our atmosphere from volcanic eruptions, and after the industrial revolution, also from industrial activity.
An analysis of our climate since about 1950 is illustrative.
Due to the post WW2 increase in industrial activity, the global amount of industrial SO2 aerosol pollution in our atmosphere rose from 56 million tons in 1950, and peaked at 141 million tons in 1979, an increase of 85 million tons.
The cooling that resulted from this decrease in the amount solar radiation reaching the Earth’s surface resulted in fears if a new Ice Age in the late 1970’s.
However, due to Acid rain and health concerns, legislation was passed in the U.S. and Europe in the 1970’s to reduce the amount of industrial SO2 aerosol pollution in our atmosphere, and by 1980, temperatures began to rise as the air became less polluted, falling to 73 million tons by 2022.
Rising temperatures due to decreased atmospheric aerosol pollution is INEVITABLE, but this warming has, instead, been WRONGLY attributed to rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Currently, continued “Clean Air” efforts and “Net-Zero” activities are removing more SO2 aerosol pollution from the atmosphere (now about 70 million tons) and temperatures will continue to increase, probably reaching at least 2 deg. C. above present levels. unless they are halted!
Also see “Scientific proof that CO2 does NOT cause global warming”
https://wjarr.com/sites/default/files/WJARR-2024-0884.pdf
..
Come on Burl….smokestack SO2 washes out with the first rain and unless the air stinks to your sense of smell isn’t strong enough to be considered a GHG. Volcanic eruptions putting SO2 into the stratosphere seem to have a small effect but it could be the dust….
DMacKebzie:
In the presence of moisture, smokestack SO2 is quickly converted to the SO2 aerosol, micron-sized droplets of Sulfuric Acid, which does wash out if it rains, but it is emitted from essentially constant sources, so that it is quickly replaced and it is ALWAYS present in our troposphere. See attached SO2 “Chem map” image.
(BTW, SO2 aerosols do not have any sulfurous odor)
SO2 aerosols from VEI4 and higher volcanic eruptions typically reduce global temperatures by about 0.2 deg C. for about 2 years, before they settle out, which is not a small effect.
Temperatures drop when CO2 is highest and rise when CO2 is lowest. And climate science can’t explain.
CO2 is called a laggard by many…..temp goes up…..oceans warm….CO2 comes out of solution after the ocean warming.
And biological respiration increases with increasing temperature, particularly bacterial decomposition of organic detritus.
The strong seasonality in the land-dominated Northern Hemisphere, and weak seasonality in the Southern, argues that organic productivity is more important than Henry’s Law, otherwise the effect would be reversed.
Increased greening due to increased CO2 leads to more CO2 being removed from the atmosphere by the increased plant growth….and so it goes….
But as the biomass increases, the seasonal CO2 ramp-up phase, dominated by fungi and bacteria decomposing plant and animal detritus, and boreal respiration, increases. The draw-down phase of the seasonal variation is shorter than the ramp-up phase. Thus, until or if such time as the increasing warmth and CO2 concentration stop, the CO2 increase will lag the warming.
LeChatelier’s principle is Nature’s laziness in action. Alway seeking the optimum path to minimize the work.
“While the 41kyr cycle of Pleistocene ex ante 1.3mya seems to implicate the cycle of Earth’s obliquity as a climate driver, the MPT occurred without any significant change in orbital elements. Even considering that possibly the 100ky cycles of the late might involve cycle skipping (i.e. skipping 2 or 3 cycles of obliquity),”
Glacial cycles of the last 500 kyr have been both warmer and colder than those of 2 million years ago. That suggests a solar variability component to me, one that started at 41 kyr and then shifted 1.5-1.2 million years ago.
Glacial cycles of the last 800 kyr are mostly close to 84600 years, at just over two obliquity cycles, and a couple of short ones just over 31 kyr. Interglacials reach parity with the peaks in obliquity at 9 obliquity cycles. Where there is an interglacial at a peak in obliquity, there is another interglacial 9 obliquity cycles later. Where there is no interglacial at a peak in obliquity, there is no interglacial 9 obliquity cycles later. So the “skipping” involves some kind of harmonic component. Though this ‘rule of 9’ pattern breaks down after the Eemian.
“Feedback from changes in clouds are about all that is left to consider, which is why I said in Part II that cloud feedback being estimated as positive from the present mean climate state is possibly correct,”
With the warm phase of the AMO driving a decline in low cloud cover, and the warm AMO phase being a direct response to weaker solar wind states, via negative North Atlantic Oscillation conditions, that’s an amplified negative feedback, one with considerable overshoot. The corollary is the stronger solar wind states of the 1970’s driving colder ocean phases and an increase in low cloud cover. Every other warm phase of the AMO is during each centennial solar minimum.
From the above article’s lead-in paragraph:
“To reiterate important points from Parts I and II, we are told there is a small imbalance of magnitude 0.76 W/m2, but the certainty of this number appears too optimistic. Even by the estimation of its proponents it doesn’t include all sources of bias.”
True, but it’s not just that.
For any dynamic system that has inherent “capacitance” (not to mention “inductance”, which is more relevant to electrical circuits as opposed to any capacitance-dominated electrical circuit analogue of Earth’s climate), there are necessarily time-phase delays between inputs “signals”and resulting output “signals”.
The major “capacitances” in Earth’s power flux imbalance are mainly due to the thermal energy “tied up” in the mass and specific heat of Earth’s oceans and in considering in the enthalpy differences of phase changes from ice-to-liquid water and from liquid water-to-water vapor (and vice versa). These physical facts insure that the theoretical steady state imbalance of about 0.76 W/m^2 is NEVER realized in practice, a major logic failure in all attempts to model Earth’s “energy imbalance” (actually, a power flux imbalance in terms of W/m^2).
The long-term variations in Earth’s solar insolation (about 0.1% over the approximately 11-year solar cycle) and additional solar TOA insolation variations over Milankovitch cycles coupled with as-yet-unquantified variations in decadal-average global cloud coverage changes insure that knowing an average Earth power flux imbalance to a precision of 0.76 W/m^2 is just impossible.
Excellent points..!
Kevin, you provide a thorough and well-considered analysis. However, one sentence early-on surprises me as being quite incomplete. You say, “The operation of climate and weather is a mix of thermodynamics and mechanical elements.” Should you not also add to “thermodynamics and mechanical elements” radiative and chemical/ biological elements”? Surely, our climate depends on these as much as the two you mention and must be taken into account by any principle as general as Le Chatelier’s?
But, I do agree his principle has been badly used, especially on this website. I would rather say that any system that maintains a certain degree of stability between multiple limits over time MUST have negative (restorative) feedback processes at work. Since earth’s climate, at least in the last ~1 billion years, has evidenced that kind of behavior, one should reasonably conclude such mechanisms are at work–which is not Le Chatelier’s principle as he formulated it. Given such a system as important as earth’s climate to humankind, one would think science ought to focus on determining what they are and how they work.
At its core, Le Chatelier’s principle is based on system stability as defined by restoration to previously existing “steady-state” conditions shortly following a relatively small perturbation of the system under consideration.
However, paleoclimatology-established trending of past global temperatures and global atmospheric CO2 concentration levels (not correlated) as influenced by continent drift and Earth-Sun Milankovitch orbital emphermeris cycles of total solar energy falling on Earth clearly show there really is no long-term (e.g., >100,000 years) steady state condition to which Le Chatelier’s principle can be applied.
Also, consider the Chicxulub asteriod impact on Earth, “only” some 66 million years ago, was of sufficient perturbation magnitude to Earth’s biosphere, that it wiped out an estimated 76% of all life species on the planet, including all nonavian dinosaurs. Most of those life forms went extinct permanently, thus providing a real-world demonstration of the limited extent to which Le Chatelier’s principle can be applied.
I was interested to come across –
I don’t know about the timing, but “two million” years doesn’t seem very rapid. I saw a figure claiming that the end-Cretaceous (dinosaurs) took a very short 32,000 years. Our civilisation only goes back about 12,000 years.
Maybe mass extinction is a drawn out natural chaotic process. Who would know?
Curious to consider.