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Scarecrow Repair
July 20, 2025 10:41 am
Hmm, first, so I’ll ask something from before which will probably be ignored again, and rightfully so 🙂
I’d like to find a climate modeling system for playing with. Not to study climate science, not to compete with Willis, but to ask questions like, how would global climates change if the Panama Isthmus were opened up to allow circulation between the Pacific and Atlantic? What if Greenland weren’t there? What if the Himalayas were a lot shorter? Accuracy and precision are about the least important factors, but repeatability is nice.
Or what would Tolkien’s climate be like, or any completely made-up science fiction world?
Whether it’s something I install on my own computers (Linux only), or a javascript in-browser crude simulation, or a web interface to some expensive tailorable model, I don’t care. Obviously price matters and free is best, but all possibilities are interesting.
… how would global climates change if the Panama Isthmus were opened up to allow circulation between the Pacific and Atlantic?
This recalls something done by a GCM-simulations team — one of the more recent batches — wherein they attempted to demonstrate that validity of their ‘parameters’ by opening up the interocean passages. [They reported that this failed to show what they wanted, probably something about GHG forcing, given the mi$$ion.] See also attempts to model Ocean-World, i.e. the climate for a hypothetical world without land-barriers.
As to an economical implementation, one might look to algorithms of the 1980s (when computing resources were more limited). Kutzbach & coworkers at Wisconsin-Madison have found simulation-methods that work for the tropics, first for the Holocene and thence to the true paleo era (late Pleistocene), using a variety of tricks.
Opening up the Panama and Tejuantepec Isthmuses / Isthmi(?), and re-running those GCMs, should prove worthwhile … to see whether one can indeed recover the pre-Ice-Age climate of > ~ 2.7 Myr-ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isthmus_of_Tehuantepec
Simulation of the evolutionary response of global summer monsoons to orbital forcing over the past 280,000 years Clim Dyn (2008) 30:567–579. DOI 10.1007/s00382-007-0308-z
Quote from the background / introductory section:
In these simulations, the climate is forced by … seasonal insolation regimes for particular times, such as 6,000, 9,000, or 125,000 years ago (Kutzbach 1981; Kutzbach and Otto-Bliesner 1982; Hewitt and Mitchell 1998, Montoya et al. 2000; Liu et al. 2003). These simulations have provided ‘‘snapshots’’ of the equilibrium climate for a prescribed seasonal insolation regime
‘[They reported that this failed to show what they wanted, probably something about GHG forcing, given the mi$$ion.]’
I’ll bet it did. We actually have real data that show that the Earth was a lot warmer when the Equatorial Seaways were open and that CO2 need not apply for the job of ‘control knob’.
I think I’ll skip trying to implement a 1980s model. I wouldn’t be surprised if any existing code is in FORTRAN, and either translating it to something more modern or implementing it from scratch doesn’t sound like fun. I was hoping for “DIY_AGW for beginners” for only $19.99 on sale now for $14.99 :-O
I can’t help with suggesting a climate model but it sounds like it might be fun to play with.
“What would the Valar have to do cause sea level rise to destroy Beleriand?” 😎
Accuracy and precision are about the least important factors, …
I’m reminded of a story a former colleague told me. Enrollments were down in the geology department at De Anza College (CA) so he was asked to fulfill his contact hours by teaching a ‘bonehead’ class in mathematics. While writing out the solution to a problem on the board, one of the students interrupted him to point out that he had made a mistake. Without missing a beat, he replied, “I may not be very accurate, but I’m fast.” Make what you will of that.
Alternatives:
— I insert these errors to keep you alert. – OR –
— “[As the great poet has said …] ‘One errs, [only] so long as he strives‘”*
Today, [moviemakers say] we are all Prodigal Sons; all are Dr. Faustus
*check source:
“Es irrt der Mensch, solang er strebt” translates to “As long as man strives, he is bound to make mistakes” or “To err is human, as long as one strives.” This quote is from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe‘s Faust, where it signifies that striving and making errors are inherent parts of the human experience. The phrase emphasizes that even with the best intentions and efforts, humans will inevitably make mistakes as they pursue their goals and engage with the world, according to Goethe-Institut London.
*Or try this: I’ll quit making mistakes, only when I quit trying [to teach you this]
how would global climates change if the Panama Isthmus were opened up to allow circulation between the Pacific and Atlantic?
Take the following with a huge pinch of salt – I asked Co-pilot:
If the Panama Isthmus were opened up again, allowing free exchange between the Pacific and Atlantic, it could trigger a cascade of climate shifts across the globe.
Here’s how:
Ocean Circulation Reboot
Thermohaline Conveyor Disruption: The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which carries warm water northward and cools it on return, depends on salinity differences reinforced by the Isthmus. Opening the isthmus could freshen the Atlantic, weakening or even stalling AMOC—leading to cooling in northern Europe and warming in the tropics.
Pacific-Atlantic Salinity Balance: The Pacific is naturally fresher, and the Atlantic saltier due to prevailing ocean currents. Mixing them would reduce that salinity gradient, altering precipitation patterns across continents.
Regional Climatic Shifts
Europe: Likely colder winters due to a weakened AMOC, echoing the kind of chill seen during mini ice ages.
Africa & South Asia: Less monsoonal activity and rainfall due to changes in heat distribution and atmospheric circulation.
Americas: The Gulf Stream may weaken, leading to cooling in eastern North America; meanwhile, Central and South America could face more erratic weather due to altered trade winds.
Flashback: Why the Isthmus Changed EverythingAround 3 million years ago, the closing of the Isthmus transformed Earth’s climate:
It intensified the Gulf Stream, warming Europe.
It reshaped species migration between continents.
It contributed to glacial cycles by altering ocean heat transport.
Opening it back up today would, in essence, reverse many of these effects—possibly dampening the mechanisms that currently stabilize the global climate.
Now THAT’s a ‘GeoEngineering’ Project one can believe in!
An old story:
Geologist discovers a deep aquifer lies below the prehistoric Lake Bonneville
At the press conference Q&A:
Q. ‘How do we get to the waters?’
A. ‘A couple nuclear bombs should do the trick.’
Q. ‘What about the radioactive fallout?’
A. ‘That’s not my field.’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonneville_flood
Or SimClimate with a CO2 control knob that doesn’t do anything;)
Sapper2
July 20, 2025 11:03 am
I would love to know what Mr Trump actually feels about the way the current Government in the UK is destroying what was otherwise known as Great Britain, what with its fervour to destroy industry through its fanatical determination to achieve Net Zero by 2050 and even encourage through little action the humungous arrival on a weekly basis foreigners by both legal but particularly by illegal means at an ever increasing cost to the indigenous British people’s tax demand.
I have no idea what Mr Trump ‘feels’, but am willing to bet that the deleterious effects of Net Zero and Mass Immigration, whether in the UK or domestically, will be emphasized ‘bigly’ in the 2026 election campaigns.
Lee Zeldin is leading the USEPA to do important things that the Trump EO’s have directed. For example, here is the docket for the proposed rule change “Repeal of Greenhouse Gas Emissions Standards for Fossil Fuel-Fired Electric Generating Units” https://www.regulations.gov/document/EPA-HQ-OAR-2025-0124-0001
Here is the lead paragraph.
“In this action, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is proposing to repeal all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions standards for fossil fuel-fired power plants. The EPA is proposing that the Clean Air Act (CAA) requires it to make a finding that GHG emissions from fossil fuel-fired power plants contribute significantly to dangerous air pollution, as a predicate to regulating GHG emissions from those plants. The EPA is further proposing to make a finding that GHG emissions from fossil fuel-fired power plants do not contribute significantly to dangerous air pollution. The EPA is also proposing, as an alternative, to repeal a narrower set of requirements that includes the emission guidelines for existing fossil fuel-fired steam generating units, the carbon capture and sequestration/storage (CCS)-based standards for coal-fired steam generating units undertaking a large modification, and the CCS-based standards for new base load stationary combustion turbines.”
Good. Except that the “alternative” is a non-starter. The whole thing needs to go away.
I need to compose and submit a comment, but I haven’t decided yet which data, argument, or set of arguments would be best. Comments are open until August 7th.
The proposed rule to repeal the 2009 “Endangerment Finding” is expected soon also, but has not been posted yet.
‘Good. Except that the “alternative” is a non-starter. The whole thing needs to go away.’
Absolutely correct, David. And if the EPA really wants to get back to science, they’ll correctly restate the null hypothesis along the lines that CO2 is a beneficial trace gas and then tell the Left to bugger off until they can come up with sufficient data, not models, to disprove that null at an appropriate level of significance.
And while the EPA’s at it, perhaps they can reach out to the modeling community for an explanation as to why the use of radiative transfer models should be considered appropriate for use within the troposphere given that none of these models take into account the conversion of thermal energy absorbed by GHGs into sensible heat via collision with non-GHGs within meters of the Earth’s surface.
Any notion that GHGs play a role in regulating Earth’s energy balance is unscientific nonsense. Everyone knows the ice observed as clouds knock out 30% of incoming solar. It is also well known that Earth’s average radiating temnperature is 255K. The H2O molecule dominates Earth’s emissive power and at 255K, radiative cooling of the H2O causes it to solidify to ice.
A single chart showing the effective radiating temperature above all ice-free ocean reveals the truth: ?ssl=1
No where over oceans emits above freezing.
If there is reference to GHGs in a document, it is a fairy story with no basis in science. Ice regulates Earth’s energy balance and climate. Anyone who has observed the influence of passing clouds realises that. If you do not have a deterministic model of cloud formation, you did not have anything that relates to the real world.
Take a close look at the chart you have linked in your comment below. It gives two extremes. Clear sky and thunderstorm anvil. The latter follows the 210K curve. So any water radiating to the satellites will be in the form of ice. Most of the “clear sky” case shows water emitting at below 270K. That means it will be ice.
Water vapour solidifies to ice below 273K. So even your chart confirms that the H2O is radiating as solid. It is not a gas. Referring to GHGs as being a factor in Earth’s radiation balance demonstrate a lack of understanding about ice formation in the atmosphere. Sure the ice is formed from water vapour but, having formed through the process of losing latent heat, it is then the dominant emitter.
“It is also well known that Earth’s average radiating temperature is 255K. The H2O molecule dominates Earth’s emissive power and at 255K, radiative cooling of the H2O causes it to solidify to ice.” Yeah, that does spark some thinking. But the oceans are not emitting energy at 255K or they would all be below freezing. I have to assume the atmosphere absorbs the energy difference, hence greenhouse effect. Maybe I am misunderstanding.
You should check out: https://arix.org/pdf/2004.00708v1. The title of the paper is: The Saturation of the Infrared Absorption by Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere. The author is: Dieter Schildknecht of Cornell Univ.
The main finding of paper is that when the concentration of CO2 in the air reaches 300 ppmv, the absorption band for out-going longwave IR light from warm or hot surface become saturated. This means that increasing concentrations of CO2 above this level will not result in an increase in the temperature of the air. In 1920, the concentration of CO2 in dry air was 300 ppmv.
Shown in the chart (See below) are plots of temperatures at the Furnace Creek weather station in Death Valley from 1922 to 2001. In 1922, the concentration of CO2 was ca. 303 ppmv (0.6 g of CO2/cu. m.), and by 2001, it had increased to 371 ppmv (0.73 g of CO2/cu. m.), but the was no corresponding increase in the air temperature at this at this remote desert. This is because the absorption band at ca. 660 wavenumbers is saturated (See second reply below)
The chart was obtained from the late John Daly’s website:
“Still Waiting for Greenhouse” available at http://www.john-daly.com From the homepage, page down to the end and click on “Station Temperature Data”. On the “World Map”, click on “NA”, and page down to U.S.A.-Pacific. Finally, scroll down and click on “Death Valley”. John Daly found over 200 weather station located around the world that showed no warming up to 2002.
These charts falsify the hypothesis that increasing concentration of CO2 in the air causes an increase in surface air temperature. They also falsify the claims by the IPCC that CO2 causes global waring and is the control knob of climate change.
I sent this comment to EPA last week but I received to acknowledgement or comment on it.
A doubling of CO2 gives 0.5 C increase, but so far we went from 280 to 420, about 50% increase, or much less than 560 required for doubling, and therefore much less than 0.5 C has been the effect, more likely 0.3 C has happened due to CO2, since 1850
Could you post the link to the Leckner paper? I can send this info to the EPA.
How can we use this info to convince the politicians that we do not need to control the emission of CO2?
Can you imagine what ever Gov. Gavin N. of CA and Gov. Kathy H. of NY will do if the CO2 endangerment finding is rescinded? They will have to abandon their climate plans. And hopefully all the environmental NGO’s will go bust, and Oz will be liberated.
RE: The essay ” Climate Change Reexamined” by Joel M. Kauffman.
The essay is 26 pages and can be downloaded for free.
Shown in Fig. 7 (See below) is the infrared absorption spectrum of a sample of Philadelphia inner city air from 4000 to 400 wavenumbers (wns). There are some additional absorption peaks of H20 down to 200 wns which are below the spectrometer cutoff of 400 wns.
Only peaks from 400 to ca.750 wns are involved in the greenhouse effect. In 1999,the concentration of CO2 at the MLO in Hawaii was ca 380 ppmv. One cubic meter of this air contained ca. 0.64 g of CO2 and ca 22 g of H2O. Since the sample was inner city air, it is likely that the concentration of CO2 was greater than that at the MLO.
Kauffman first published the spectrum in the paper “Water in the Atmosphere” in Journal of Chemical Education Vol. 81 No. 8 1229-1230.
Unfortunately, the paper is behind a paywall.
The gas cell was an 7 cm Al cylinder with KBr windows. The absorbance of CO2 peak is 0.025. If the cell was 700 cm long, the absorbance would be ca. 2.5 and 99+% of the IR light would be absorbed. 700 cm is ca. 23 feet and the IR absorption is saturated at this distance.
You should also check out Fig. 10. which slows a plot CO2 concentrations in Northern Europe from 1810 to 1965. In 1820, the concentration of CO2 450 ppmv. You do a search on E.G. Beck He has published a review on CO2 in Energy and the Environment.
Please keep in mind that 71% of the earth is covered by H2O, the one and only greenhouse of importance.
Marty
July 20, 2025 11:33 am
This morning I watched on television the CBS talking head news show “Face the Nation.” As they were interviewing one of the guests, they had the block announcement at the bottom of the screen that said something like “Trump baselessly says…” This is a program masquerading as a news program. Yet they have to write on the bottom of the screen that what Trump said was “baseless.” Just one more of the continuous examples of news media propaganda. They could have simply reported what Trump said and left out their opinion that it was “baseless.”
I have never seen the news media more biased than it is now. Even a respected publication like the Wall Street Journal ran their anti-Trump Epstein story after being told by Trump that the reported birthday card was a fake. I understand that newspapers like the Los Angeles Times refuse to even print any letters that cast doubt on global warming.
At least the tax support for PBS and NPR is coming to an end. Our cousins in Britain need to do the same thing to BBC.
Maybe in time the free market will correct things.
“I have never seen the news media more biased than it is now. Even a respected publication like the Wall Street Journal ran their anti-Trump Epstein story after being told by Trump that the reported birthday card was a fake.” Yes but to be fair Trump says many many things that are complete nonsense. He has said he “never wrote a picture in my life” … that’s, false charities have sold pictures done by him. He said he has never been on Epstein’s plane… a lie, the logs show at least seven trips. He is now saying the Epstein thing is a hoax by the Democrats. That’s also a lie. Trumps dodgy relationship with Epstein goes back to the 80’s.
So I think Trump is fair and sensible to fact check much of what the liar in chief says, particularly if he is being criticised. He hates that.
Derg, I have made this same point in many comment treads –
the Dems showed in many ways that they were pulling every piece of ammunition out of their arsenal to throw at Trump since 2015.
And even creating charges & evidence that didn’t exist (with lotsa help from manipulations of the NY legal system).
So fast forward to these past 4 years when the Dems controlled every agency, all of which were more than sympathetic & supportive of the Biden govt, and they had all the available records & docs on the Epstein broohaha.
Yet they supposedly pulled their punches on releasing any Trump involvement with Epstein’s criminality?
“lol if Democrats had anything on Trump and Epstein they would have used it long ago.” Maybe. Or maybe there are some high profile people of all political persuasions in there.
Epstein’s lawyer has said, and has recently repeated, that there IS no “list”. He has also said that there are two judges who have placed gag orders on pretty much everything. This is something I haven’t heard previously but I have little reason to doubt him. So if you want things released, take it up with the judges.
As I understand it, Trump has demanded the release of grand jury transcripts and other information, subject to judicial review – so it’s in the judge’s hands now.
I think that Simon will never be satisfied. No matter what comes out, if Trump isn’t connected, he will claim some sort of malfeasance.
All big shots in politics are “bad boys” when they have the opportunity. Better to pay attention to his actual policies-such as protecting the borders, working to stop the climate scam, building up the military, firing useless burro-crats, stopping funding for the commy PBS and NPR, etc.
“Yep.
Sometimes a junkyard dog is needed to clean up the ‘hood.”
As long as that’s what he does that instead of eating all the dog food. Trump is good at yelling “look over there” while he does the very thing he accuses others of. The Epstein thing a good example. He wanted it all out in the open before he was elected…. now not so keen.
Better than a nice guy at the helm who can’t get things done. Yuh, I know, you’ll say that’s why some people support dictators. Well, Trump ain’t no dictator.
The Biden admin had complete control of all Epstein files for 4 years. Throughout that time they “trumped” up every legal charge they could think of including finding dubious ways to circumvent statute of limitations. Do you really think there is anything at all in the Epstein files that is legitimately incriminating for Trump? If there’s anything in those files now that would hurt you should assume that it’s a fabrication of Biden the DOJ/FBI.
“Do you really think there is anything at all in the Epstein files that is legitimately incriminating for Trump? ”
There may be a few names here that involve high level people on both sides. What we do know is 1000 girls (according to Pam Bondi) were abused and no one except the two at the top have been held accountable. You can’t tell me that makes sense. Who knows who these sex offender pedophiles are, but I want to see them held to account. An independent special council investigation the only way.
Fair enough. I have to question my sanity to be agreeing with Simon on something but I intend to maintain intellectual integrity.
Obviously Clinton is implicated and who knows how many others on both sides of the partisan divide. It’s been hypothesized that Hillary suicides people who can reveal such information so I concede that a MAD scenario could have been in play.
If Bill Clinton was one of the scumbags who feasted on the innocence of these young girls, then I have no problem having his name read out. Nor should anyone who is genuinely wanting accountability on this.
The other way to look at this is if we let the rich and powerful get away with this, then more girls are at risk to this sort of abuse going forward.
Finally Trump may or may not have been directly involved in this, but he sure as hell knows the names of those who are. At the very least his latest bouts of denial and trying to make it go away says he wants the names kept hidden. That’s not right.
Look if they are guilty throw them in jail. I do not care whether they are left or right. But… I have no idea who you are talking about. Maybe supply me with some evidence of their crimes?
Would you support releasing names if they included leaders if countries with shaky governments? Countries subject to being thrown into civil wars if there were a power vacuum? Would you be in favor of releasing names if we were using the info to….convince….the leaders of some countries not to be aggressive, not to develop nuclear devices, or not to commit genocide on peoples within their country? Would you be in favor of releasing names if they included high-ranking officials of adversaries who were providing us important intel?
Consider that the greater good could be the reason neither party wants to expose everything. The Biden administration ignored the issue. Trump was in favor of releasing the docs. Now he seems uninterested. Just maybe he’s learned things we are not privy to.
Regardless, considering all the actions on other issues Trump has been taking I’m willing to trust him on this one. Knowing who Epstein entertained on his island just isn’t that important to me.
Simon, your derangement blinds you to reason. Look at the absurd lengths that Democrats went during the Autopen Administration to gin up offenses which are both misdemeanors raised to felonies and beyond the statute of limitations. If they had something solid against him in the Epstein files, what plausible reason can you propose for not releasing it and instead turning to lawfare abuse?
TDS runs both ways. Those who attack and defend Trump use any possible weapon to hit the opposition.
Now take a neutral point of view and just a point system.
As far as the Epstein case is concerned it seems clear that there are good reasons from all sides for the important parts of the Epstein files NOT to come out.
As far as Trump’s lying is concerned: it is clear the man is a chronic lier. That does not mean that everything the msm says is correct. Or that excessive lawfare is fair nor that Trump is innocent of all crimes/ misdemeaners.Trump is a classic case of Truth being perferted to suit a need but this is what all presidents do. Trump is just an extreme example. He just calls everything he doesnt like ‘fake’ and dismisses it. His supporters do the same and that is subsequently used by the opponents to state more accusations. That is why TDS runs both ways.
Trump’s motivations are far from pure, often contradictory and non effective. I do believe most of the anti green policy corrections are good and needed. But for the rest the Big Hope has turned into a major disappointment. Diminishing returns excellerating..
Trump and his supporters are transactional. Most people intuit that he has a yuge beautiful closet packed with skeletons, but as long as he does what he promises, part of the tacit agreement is that we pretend he never did anything wrong in his younger version.
Most of you will hate this, but I don’t care. I don’t have a tribe or a team.
The question that conservatives faced was whether the ends justified the means. We thought that it was worth overlooking and avoiding seeing the evidence of bad character so long as the border is closed, illegals are deported, conservative judges get appointed, the Swamp is drained, the deficit reduced, the endless wars ended, and the Green New Scam slashed.
Let’s stipulate that Trump and Epstein were close and that things Trump said to shock jocks before he was a candidate were not far from the truth. In other words he was a sexual predator 30 years ago. I’m not saying it’s certain, I’m just saying assume for the sake of argument. We know that he’s indisputably at least a two-time adulterer. He’s not a candidate for canonization.
Voters were not presented with a question of choosing a morally pure Hillary vs evil Trump. It was a question of choosing between two political agendas, each represented by candidates of questionable moral character.
Voting for Hillary would no more have lead to justice for abused teenagers than voting for Trump. It would certainly not achieve any of the goals previously mentioned. It was a no-brainer in 2016, no moral qualms considering Hillary’s record. In 2024, having seen the cultural devastation of the Autopen Administration, it was equally a no-brainer.
Here we stand now, confronting our long-repressed demons. Am I supporting a child molester? Is there such a thing as redemption? Do the ends justify the means? Should we stand on moral principle at this late date when doing so quite possibly destroys our hopes of achieving the ends? How easy to empathize with the Democrats who pretended not to see the vegetable at the podium, shaking hands with ghosts, getting lost in the jungle, falling up stairs. He has a stutter vs Epstein hoax.
If we made our deal, to unsee the sleaze in return for the deliverables, then let’s at least get all the deliverables! Yes, the border is closed for the moment, there are conservative judges, and the Green New Scam is wounded, maybe. A lot of illegals have been deported or have self-deported, not nearly enough.
But the Swamp is not remotely drained, the deficit is increased, the endless wars are being funded, not ended. It’s a fundamental question, is Epstein a blackmailing operation controlling our Deep State? Do we really benefit enough gaining those deliverables but leaving the zombie Deep State in place?
It would be tough to live if we spent much of our time caring about people’s suffering. We do when it gets close to us. If we don’t know those people you refer to- we aren’t going to give it much thought.
Super-Expensive Wind/Solar Agenda of Democrats Gave Northeast Has Highest Electricity Prices in US https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/super-expensive-wind-solar-agenda-of-democrats-gave-northeast-has
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Reeling from their 2024 election loss, Democrats are scrambling to reconnect with the working class—yet
1) their ruinous strategy of embracing socialist and communist candidates,
2) doubling down on un-American woke ideology,
3) shielding criminal illegal aliens, and
4) supporting dark-money NGOs that fuel paid insurrectionist riots, violence, etc., like the Los Angeles riots—isn’t a comeback plan but just political suicide.
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The party of leftist social justice warriors is cracking under the weight of its own failures.
Obama’s woke culture is finally imploding, “green” energy fantasies are backfiring.
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Nowhere is this more evident than in the Democrat stronghold states of the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, where the forcedretirement of perfectly operating, affordable, reliable, STEADY, 24/7/365 fossil fuel power to be replaced by unreliable solar and wind is driving up energy costs to the highest in the nation this summer and breaking the pocketbooks of working-class families they claim to champion.
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Governments proclaimed: Go Wind and Solar, Go ENERGIEWENDE, go Net zero by 2050, etc., and provided oodles of subsidies, and rules and regulations, and mandates, and prohibitions to make it happen.
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Net-zero by 2050 to-reduce CO2 is a super-expensive suicide pact, to 1) increase command/control by governments, and 2) enable the moneyed elites to become more powerful and richer, at the expense of all others, by using the foghorn of the government-subsidized/controlled Corporate Media to spread scare-mongering slogans and brainwash people, already for at least 40 years.
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CO2, just 0.042% in the atmosphere, is a weak absorber of a small fraction of the absorbable, low-energy IR photons.
CO2 has near-zero influence on world surface temperatures.
CO2 is a life-giving molecule. Greater CO2 ppm in atmosphere is an absolutely essential ingredient for: 1) increased green flora, which increases fauna all over the world, and 2) increased crop yields to better feed 8 billion people.
. At About 30% Annual W/S Electricity on the Grid, Various Costs Increase Exponentially
The W/S subsidies uglify the countryside, kills birds and bats, whales and dolphins, fisheries, tourism, view-sheds, etc.
The weather-dependent, variable/intermittent W/S output, often too-little and often too-much, creates grid-disturbing difficulties that become increasingly more challenging and more costly/kWh to counteract, as proven by the UK and California for the past 5 years, and Germany for the past 10 years, and recently in Spain/Portugal.
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All have “achieved” near-zero, real- growth GDPs, the highest electricity prices/kWh in the EU, and stagnant real wages for almost all people, while further enriching the jet-setting elites who live in the poshest places.
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Their angry, over-taxed, over-regulated native populations are further burdened by the elites bringing in tens of millions of uninvited, unvetted, uneducated, inexperienced, ghetto-area, crime-prone, poor folks from all over, who are sucking from the multiple, government-program tits, while making minimal efforts to produce goods and services; a chaotic, culture-destroying burden the native populations never voted for.
. Energy policies should balance three key objectives: affordability, reliability, and environmental sustainability — often referred to as the “energy trilemma.” Yet Democrats rammed through climate policies that torched two objectives, affordability and reliability for the environment. According to the latest EIA Short-Term Energy Outlook for July, the average summer wholesale power prices across the PJM, NYISO, and ISO-NE grids are the highest in the nation. These prices now far exceed those in Texas’ ERCOT, the U.S. average, and even the traditionally high-cost West Coast markets. The blame is squarely focused on the Democrats’ initiative to decarbonize power grids.
Australia leads the world in wind and solar penetration. A single chart can show what that has done to the little Aussie battler: https://abcbullion.com.au/products-pricing/gold
Particularly since Labor won the Federal election in 2022 and went all in on “renewables”.
If you own a roof in Australia, you do not need to buy much electricity and the price does not matter much so enough voters are not being harmed by the high cost of electricity. They are yet to connect the dots that high electricity costs hit every sector of commerce and is the reason for the rampant inflation in just about everything.
If California had its own currency is would be showing a similar decline in value as the AUD.
Tom Shula
July 20, 2025 1:09 pm
I went through an exercise with Perplexity AI a few days ago. I treated it as a conversation with a GHE “believer” in order to understand the “mainstream” narrative that the AI was trained with.
It is in two parts, and each part is quite long. It will require patience and attention in order to follow and understand it.
Part one establishes a baseline of the AI’s “belief system”, a reflection of its training.
Part two is where I challenge that belief system forcing it to take into account the microphysics of the radiation in the atmosphere.
As a teaser to encourage you to read in detail, here is the conclusion reached by Perplexity:
Final Perspective
While the term “greenhouse effect” is commonly used, it oversimplifies the true processes at work. The real maintenance of atmospheric heat involves the slow, upward movement of sensible and latent heat through convection, with greenhouse gases ultimately enabling energy release to space via radiation only where collisional processes are much less frequent. The concept of “trapping” misses the crucial fact that, for most of the atmosphere, energy is not held back by radiative processes alone, but by the slow pace of convective and latent transport compared to the near-instantaneous movement of energy by radiation at the top of the atmosphere.
Energy in the atmosphere is not trapped in the classical sense by greenhouse gases.Convection and latent heat transport, not radiative trapping, primarily maintain atmospheric temperatures in the regions where collisional processes are dominant.This physical perspective aligns with observed atmospheric dynamics and modern atmospheric science.
I’m super impressed that the AI Wizard determined that most of the heat from the earth’s surface (i.e., sensible heat) is removed by conduction and convection of the warm or even hot air. However, the greenhouse effect still functions when water is present in nominal amounts, e.g., at 70° F and 70% RH. In this air the concentration of H2O is 14,780 ppmv.
One cubic meter of this air contains about 11.9 g of H20.
A desert is a good example of the lack of the greenhouse effect. During the day, the land is heated by sunlight of which about 48% is infrared light. After sunset, the land and air cool very rapidly because there is little H2O to absorbed out-going long wavelenght IR light. In some desert in winter the air temperature drops below freezing.
In tropical jungles which have high RH, the air never cools very much at night. In a jungle at 90° F and 100% RH, the concentration of H20 is 50,800 ppmv. One cubic meter of this air contains 40.8 g of H2O.
At the MLO Hawaii. the concentration of CO2 in dry is currently 439 ppmv. One cubic meter of this air contains a mere 0.862 g of CO2. This small amount of CO2 absorbs little IR light which causes little or no heating of the air, which has a mass of 1.20 kg at 70° F.
We really do not have to worry about this trace amount CO2 in the air.
Thanks for the feedback, Harold. FYI, I live in the desert and it is a common misconception that there is very little water vapor in the desert. If you look at Happer and van Wijngaarden’s simulated spectrum over the Sahara desert, I believe the near surface water vapor concentration there was 21000 ppm. That would have been based on radiosonde measurements for their model.
Low relative humidity is common, but as temperatures increase the capacity for water increases.
I can assure you that the desert only cools rapidly after sunset under very specific conditions. Clear sky, very low humidity. Much more common in winter than summer. Some nights this time of year stay in the 90s.
In the jungle, which I’ve also experienced in SE Asia, it is the latent heat and high humidity with no evaporation that maintains the
Latent heat does not convert to radiation when water condenses. This is a common misconception. It converts to sensible heat.
The heat that radiates to space is radiated by individual water vapor molecules. These molecules are excited by collisions in the mid-and upper troposphere. The radiation can escape to space when the radiative lifetime of the excited state is shorter than the average time between collisions. This occurs higher in the atmosphere where the collision rate is reduced. For water vapor, this from about 2.5-6 km altitude at mid latitudes.
I just checked Death Valley. The RH at Furnace Creek is 5% with a dew point of -2° C. That is pretty dry.
What desert do you live in?
I live in Burnaby, BC, which is contiguous with and east of Vancouver. The climate is a coastal temperate rain forest. We get lots of rain like over a meter per year.
with greenhouse gases ultimately enabling energy release to space
You have not taken it far enough. I have had Chat GPT agree that ice has to dominate the emission of OLR. So little to nothing to do with gasses.
To do that you simply ask it what the average radiating temperature is – should say 255K. What is the dominant molecule in the release of OLR – should say H2O. What is H2O at 255K – should say solid. Not quite that fast but you can get it there. So then you ask why it even mentioned GHGs when it is quite obvious that ice dominates the release of OLR and also regulates incoming solar EMR.
I consider the notion of GHGs to be unscientific. You should be able to get any reasoning bot to agree with that. It is part of the fairy tale and not related to reality.
If you look at all ocean surface on any day you will not find any location emitting with an effective temperature above freezing. So not just an average of 255K but no where over ocean exceeding 273K.
You can also get any bot to agree that lignite used for generating electricity in the vicinity of the mine is the lowest cost source of electricity unless you can get gas or oil below world market price.
“If you look at…ocean surface….you will not find any location emitting at an effective temperature above freezing”
RickWill how did you ever come to such a bizarre statement ?…the ocean surface emits according to Weins law at whatever temperature it is at, energy emission following Planck’s curve.
On the attached graph, the Western Pacific was quite a bit warmer than 273 C freezing according to the satellite’s sensors. Where the sensors mostly see the ocean surface, 8-13 micron band, the atmospheric window, the surface was almost 298 K, or 25C…
The chart below shows the measured daily emitting power over all ice-free ocean surface: ?resize=720%2C539&ssl=1
The highest value is 313W/m^2. That is an effective emission temperature of 272.6K. And that is the highest value.
Sure you get very narrow bands where the H2O molecule in gas, liquid or solid is not absorbing but there is next to no energy in it.
Ocean surface has plenty of water above it and most of the time that water is ice and the dominant emitter to space. Look at your chart and work what the average emission temperature is. Most of the H2O is in the form of ice because is below 270K. The higher energy, shorter wave length is all ice. And take a look at the thunderstorm anvil. It is radiating at 210K. So any H2O there will be ice as well.
Clearly your chart is based on the two extremes from clear sky to thunderstorm anvil. If you take a look at the thunderstorm situation you will see it follows the 210K curve. My chart looks at every location across the ice-free ocean in a 1X1 grid. Not two relatively rare extremes.
Ice matters. Gasses, including water vapour, are bit playtes in Earth’s radiation balance. Even the climate botherers accept that ice knocks out 30% of the incoming solar. They don’t tell you that ice is by far the dominant emitter as well.
They don’t tell you that ice is by far the dominant emitter as well.
Probably because it’s not true. Matter emits energy with intensity according to the fourth power of the absolute temperature. Ice is not particularly hot, nor is its emissivity extraordinary. Nor does it cover the majority of the surface of the globe.
The point in question is “you won’t see any location emitting at an effective temperature above freezing” which is incorrect. A large amount of surface with an effective temperature higher than freezing gets through the atmospheric window to outer space.
Looking down from outer space, you see a mosaic of surface temperature emissions, some water vapor and CO2 in the upper atmosphere, and cloud tops that cover a significant portion of the planet at about -60.
Look at some GOES imagery especially higher bands…..
Thank you for posting this spectrum. I have been looking for an example like this for a long time. If you could provide the source so that I could download a clean copy to would be much appreciated.
This is a perfect example of how the satellite spectrum is misinterpreted. Apparently I cannot post pictures due to some WordPress glitch. If I could, I would post van Wijngaarden and Happer’s modeled spectrum that shows the “zero CO2 line. I would also post Hermann Harde’s modeled spectrum of water vapor only, without CO2.
Both of these can be seen in my article co-authored with Andy May a few months ago here:
Getting back to the spectrum you posted, the “overlap” as indicated is meaningless. Water vapor is active across the entire spectrum, including a significant portion of the atmospheric window. Look at Harde’s spectrum and this is obvious. It is why the atmospheric window is not a completely flat line but has structure. It is a combination of H2O and atmospheric window emissions. Harde shows this in his paper as well.
The “overlap” of H2O and CO2 is across the entire 15 μm band of CO2. What the spectrums is telling us is that CO2 is partially absorbing the emissions of H2O in this band. It is at an altitude where the CO2 is still being de-excited by collisions which effectively “recycles” part of the water vapor emissions into sensible heat. The energy is not being “trapped”. The sensible heat will excite other molecules (mostly water vapor) and lead to their eventual emission of radiation to space.
A similar, but less prominent feature around the ozone peak occurs as a result of the same process. Almost all of the radiance represented by the area under that curve is due to water vapor.
The excited states that produce the radiation emitted to space are populated not by radiative transfer, but by collisions in accordance with Einstein’s Quantum Theory of Radiation.
Thanks for the comments. I’ll start with what I think are points of agreement. The so-called “greenhouse effect” cannot exist in a convecting atmosphere. It is a tragedy of errors perpetuated by those who think they understand radiation in the atmosphere, but do not. They are obsessed with absorption, when emission is what the IR-active gases bring to the table.
I cannot tell with certainty whether you read my complete conversation with Perplexity, but my impression from your comment, and the quote (from my “teaser” rather than the body of the discussion), is that you did not.
At this point I will digress briefly. I read your article published a couple of days ago. I’m not sure how you convinced ChatGPT that ice is responsible for OLR, but that is not possible. Stay with me though, because while your analysis based on “radiative transfer” is not quite correct you are attempting to explain the most important role of clouds that no one seems to understand. When you read my description of the microphysics of radiation generation in the Perplexity discussion, you will see that you had the right idea but the wrong explanation.
The infrared radiation that escapes to space from the atmosphere is radiated by individual gas molecules. This is clear from the TOA infrared spectra acquired by satellite based instruments. While I might disagree with some on the details, that is well understood.
I see in the additional discussion there are others who have addressed the “ice” issue, so I won’t belabor it here.
On the other hand, your thinking on the relationship of clouds is insightful.
Weather and climate are driven exclusively by water in its various phases. The cooling of the atmosphere is almost exclusively by the radiation of water vapor molecules to space. There is a small contribution by ozone, and an even smaller contribution by CO2.
One other point. It seems that you inferred an “emission temperature” from the OLR data points in your chart. One cannot make that inference from an “inverse Stefan-Boltzmann Law” as it appears you have done. You are not the first to make this error, as the cavalier application of the S-B law in “climate science” has led others to the same incorrect conclusion.
You have the insight that it is water that governs energy transport in the weather/climate, and you also have an inkling into the role of clouds which is not understood, or for that matter even recognized. The reasons are different than what you posit, however.
Low and mid altitude clouds consist mostly of liquid water droplets, not ice. In some cases they may be supercooled, but they are liquid nonetheless. In the neighborhood of these clouds, the humidity is near saturation. That is why the clouds form. This means that around the clouds there are copious free water vapor molecules.
Now it would be helpful if you read part 2 of my conversation where I discuss the microphysics of the radiation in the atmosphere. Contrary to the “radiative transfer/equilibrium” narrative that creates the “greenhouse effect”, radiation in the atmosphere is not propagated from the surface to the top of the atmosphere. The excited states of IR-active gases (aka “greenhouse gases”) are populated not by absorption of radiation, but by collisions with other molecules of sufficient energy to create the excited states. Likewise, the de-excitation of these states occurs primarily not by emission of radiation, but by collisional de-excitation which converts the vibrational energy of the excited IR-active molecule into kinetic energy of the collision partner. This process occurs continuously throughout the atmosphere from the surface to the mesopause. Again, this is discussed in my Perplexity AI conversation if you should choose to read it.
The combination of collisional excitation and de-excitation prevents any radiation from escaping to space until a specific set of conditions is met. The excited states are unstable and have a “radiative lifetime”, a statistical measure of the lifetime of the excited state. There will always be some emission throughout the atmosphere, but in the dense lower atmosphere most of these emissions will be absorbed by another molecule.
Higher in the atmosphere the collision rate drops. At sea level, each air molecule experiences about 7,000,000,000 collisions/sec.
When the time between collisions is greater than the radiative lifetime of the excited molecule, that is when the radiation escapes to space. This occurs in the mid- to upper-troposphere for water vapor, the stratosphere for ozone, and near the mesopause for CO2.
In the neighborhood of clouds, there are copious quantities of free water vapor molecules. Collisional excitation of these at altitudes means that above clouds water vapor emits tremendous amounts of radiation. One cannot see this in a static spectrum. Most of the modeled spectra are “clear sky”, and in the satellite spectra it isn’t possible to separate H2O emissions near clouds from the background.
It is well understood that clouds block incoming solar during the day, reducing heating. Likewise, they scatter and reflect surface radiation at night, slowing cooling.
The process I described above regarding radiation by H2O near clouds is not discussed at all because of the obsession with “absorption” and “radiative transfer. It likely accounts for all of the so-called “trapped heat” attributed to the “greenhouse effect.”
I have additional comments regarding the spectrum posted by D Mackenzie that I will make in a separate post.
One more thing. If you want to see this radiation from clouds, (and also from land where it “blooms” when subject to insolation) look at GOES band 16. It is called the “CO2 Band” by NASA. (Their quotes, not mine.) It shows water vapor radiating vigorously across the planet.
It is my understanding that AI systems do not ‘learn’ anything and just start again every time using available data. You can steer it by posing more intricate questions. That does not mean it has learned from the experience. It is just another data point. Most data are logically heavily biased to support the majority of inputs. But put an AI in ‘thinking’ mode and you DO get different answers by carefully stating explicit questions and directions. Then the AI will do the thinking for you again using available data which might give you the answers you wanted. This does not change anything. The opposition will claim you have misused AI much like a lawyer would w evidence.
It is a handy tool but i wouldnt put much faith in it..or claims of Truth.
A more interesting discussion could ensue if you read the conversation and responded with comments/critiques.
The AI systems are not perfect, but they have the advantage that they can reason dispassionately and look up sources to confirm or refute claims without being influenced by the ideologies that infect so many humans.
Proper use requires knowledge and skill. I invite you to read my linked conversations and provide an assessment of how you think I did.
Osprey Tree Service of the Victoria BC area claims summers there are now much drier rather than traditional ‘rain forest’.
Reality is climate there has always had wet winters and dry summers, people refer to it as ‘Mediterranean style’ (just not as hot as there). I’ve lived through +30C summers in the large region and summers I wished for that.
Some summers are warmer than others, some types of tree crack in heat.
(Page A20of the Goldstream Gazette of July 16, 2025.)
While a fool claims the region is no longer a rain forest because as a child her parents kept sprinkler on for hours so she could play in the water, but today people are being admonished to conserve water. Apart from her parents profligacy when water is not metered, population has grown but water system may not have increased as much. The Bookless Club: Are you a good water steward? | Vancouver Sun
(Nearby Victoria BC meters water and spent to expand the water supply reservoir yet still forbids watering lawns much of the time – being cautious as a spate of drier than average summers could occur.)
I get discouraged.
Pat Smith
July 22, 2025 11:18 pm
If warmer seas hold less CO2, causing outgassing, how are they more acidic due to increased CO2?
Hmm, first, so I’ll ask something from before which will probably be ignored again, and rightfully so 🙂
I’d like to find a climate modeling system for playing with. Not to study climate science, not to compete with Willis, but to ask questions like, how would global climates change if the Panama Isthmus were opened up to allow circulation between the Pacific and Atlantic? What if Greenland weren’t there? What if the Himalayas were a lot shorter? Accuracy and precision are about the least important factors, but repeatability is nice.
Or what would Tolkien’s climate be like, or any completely made-up science fiction world?
Whether it’s something I install on my own computers (Linux only), or a javascript in-browser crude simulation, or a web interface to some expensive tailorable model, I don’t care. Obviously price matters and free is best, but all possibilities are interesting.
This recalls something done by a GCM-simulations team — one of the more recent batches — wherein they attempted to demonstrate that validity of their ‘parameters’ by opening up the interocean passages. [They reported that this failed to show what they wanted, probably something about GHG forcing, given the mi$$ion.] See also attempts to model Ocean-World, i.e. the climate for a hypothetical world without land-barriers.
As to an economical implementation, one might look to algorithms of the 1980s (when computing resources were more limited). Kutzbach & coworkers at Wisconsin-Madison have found simulation-methods that work for the tropics, first for the Holocene and thence to the true paleo era (late Pleistocene), using a variety of tricks.
Opening up the Panama and Tejuantepec Isthmuses / Isthmi(?), and re-running those GCMs, should prove worthwhile … to see whether one can indeed recover the pre-Ice-Age climate of > ~ 2.7 Myr-ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isthmus_of_Tehuantepec
Quote from the background / introductory section:
‘[They reported that this failed to show what they wanted, probably something about GHG forcing, given the mi$$ion.]’
I’ll bet it did. We actually have real data that show that the Earth was a lot warmer when the Equatorial Seaways were open and that CO2 need not apply for the job of ‘control knob’.
https://youtu.be/pj-Iu1i317E
I think I’ll skip trying to implement a 1980s model. I wouldn’t be surprised if any existing code is in FORTRAN, and either translating it to something more modern or implementing it from scratch doesn’t sound like fun. I was hoping for “DIY_AGW for beginners” for only $19.99 on sale now for $14.99 :-O
I can’t help with suggesting a climate model but it sounds like it might be fun to play with.
“What would the Valar have to do cause sea level rise to destroy Beleriand?” 😎
Exactly! Extend this peninsula, add some very active volcanoes, see if shallow coastal areas matter, a 1000 mile diameter lake around Iowa …
I’m reminded of a story a former colleague told me. Enrollments were down in the geology department at De Anza College (CA) so he was asked to fulfill his contact hours by teaching a ‘bonehead’ class in mathematics. While writing out the solution to a problem on the board, one of the students interrupted him to point out that he had made a mistake. Without missing a beat, he replied, “I may not be very accurate, but I’m fast.” Make what you will of that.
Alternatives:
— I insert these errors to keep you alert. – OR –
— “[As the great poet has said …] ‘One errs, [only] so long as he strives‘”*
Today, [moviemakers say] we are all Prodigal Sons; all are Dr. Faustus
*check source:
*Or try this: I’ll quit making mistakes, only when I quit trying [to teach you this]
Take the following with a huge pinch of salt – I asked Co-pilot:
If the Panama Isthmus were opened up again, allowing free exchange between the Pacific and Atlantic, it could trigger a cascade of climate shifts across the globe.
Here’s how:
Ocean Circulation Reboot
Regional Climatic Shifts
Flashback: Why the Isthmus Changed EverythingAround 3 million years ago, the closing of the Isthmus transformed Earth’s climate:
Opening it back up today would, in essence, reverse many of these effects—possibly dampening the mechanisms that currently stabilize the global climate.
Now THAT’s a ‘GeoEngineering’ Project one can believe in!
An old story:
Geologist discovers a deep aquifer lies below the prehistoric Lake Bonneville
At the press conference Q&A:
Q. ‘How do we get to the waters?’
A. ‘A couple nuclear bombs should do the trick.’
Q. ‘What about the radioactive fallout?’
A. ‘That’s not my field.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonneville_flood
SimEarth
Or SimClimate with a CO2 control knob that doesn’t do anything;)
I would love to know what Mr Trump actually feels about the way the current Government in the UK is destroying what was otherwise known as Great Britain, what with its fervour to destroy industry through its fanatical determination to achieve Net Zero by 2050 and even encourage through little action the humungous arrival on a weekly basis foreigners by both legal but particularly by illegal means at an ever increasing cost to the indigenous British people’s tax demand.
This article might throw some light on the background to the UK Labour Party’s government ideologies.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-world-economic-forum-and-the-volk-movement/
I have no idea what Mr Trump ‘feels’, but am willing to bet that the deleterious effects of Net Zero and Mass Immigration, whether in the UK or domestically, will be emphasized ‘bigly’ in the 2026 election campaigns.
Lee Zeldin is leading the USEPA to do important things that the Trump EO’s have directed. For example, here is the docket for the proposed rule change “Repeal of Greenhouse Gas Emissions Standards for Fossil Fuel-Fired Electric Generating Units”
https://www.regulations.gov/document/EPA-HQ-OAR-2025-0124-0001
Here is the lead paragraph.
“In this action, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is proposing to repeal all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions standards for fossil fuel-fired power plants. The EPA is proposing that the Clean Air Act (CAA) requires it to make a finding that GHG emissions from fossil fuel-fired power plants contribute significantly to dangerous air pollution, as a predicate to regulating GHG emissions from those plants. The EPA is further proposing to make a finding that GHG emissions from fossil fuel-fired power plants do not contribute significantly to dangerous air pollution. The EPA is also proposing, as an alternative, to repeal a narrower set of requirements that includes the emission guidelines for existing fossil fuel-fired steam generating units, the carbon capture and sequestration/storage (CCS)-based standards for coal-fired steam generating units undertaking a large modification, and the CCS-based standards for new base load stationary combustion turbines.”
Good. Except that the “alternative” is a non-starter. The whole thing needs to go away.
I need to compose and submit a comment, but I haven’t decided yet which data, argument, or set of arguments would be best. Comments are open until August 7th.
The proposed rule to repeal the 2009 “Endangerment Finding” is expected soon also, but has not been posted yet.
‘Good. Except that the “alternative” is a non-starter. The whole thing needs to go away.’
Absolutely correct, David. And if the EPA really wants to get back to science, they’ll correctly restate the null hypothesis along the lines that CO2 is a beneficial trace gas and then tell the Left to bugger off until they can come up with sufficient data, not models, to disprove that null at an appropriate level of significance.
And while the EPA’s at it, perhaps they can reach out to the modeling community for an explanation as to why the use of radiative transfer models should be considered appropriate for use within the troposphere given that none of these models take into account the conversion of thermal energy absorbed by GHGs into sensible heat via collision with non-GHGs within meters of the Earth’s surface.
Any notion that GHGs play a role in regulating Earth’s energy balance is unscientific nonsense. Everyone knows the ice observed as clouds knock out 30% of incoming solar. It is also well known that Earth’s average radiating temnperature is 255K. The H2O molecule dominates Earth’s emissive power and at 255K, radiative cooling of the H2O causes it to solidify to ice.
A single chart showing the effective radiating temperature above all ice-free ocean reveals the truth:
?ssl=1
No where over oceans emits above freezing.
If there is reference to GHGs in a document, it is a fairy story with no basis in science. Ice regulates Earth’s energy balance and climate. Anyone who has observed the influence of passing clouds realises that. If you do not have a deterministic model of cloud formation, you did not have anything that relates to the real world.
Re Chart 6
So incredibly far from factual….
see
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/07/20/open-thread-153/#comment-4095849
Take a close look at the chart you have linked in your comment below. It gives two extremes. Clear sky and thunderstorm anvil. The latter follows the 210K curve. So any water radiating to the satellites will be in the form of ice. Most of the “clear sky” case shows water emitting at below 270K. That means it will be ice.
Water vapour solidifies to ice below 273K. So even your chart confirms that the H2O is radiating as solid. It is not a gas. Referring to GHGs as being a factor in Earth’s radiation balance demonstrate a lack of understanding about ice formation in the atmosphere. Sure the ice is formed from water vapour but, having formed through the process of losing latent heat, it is then the dominant emitter.
“It is also well known that Earth’s average radiating temperature is 255K. The H2O molecule dominates Earth’s emissive power and at 255K, radiative cooling of the H2O causes it to solidify to ice.”
Yeah, that does spark some thinking. But the oceans are not emitting energy at 255K or they would all be below freezing. I have to assume the atmosphere absorbs the energy difference, hence greenhouse effect. Maybe I am misunderstanding.
You should check out: https://arix.org/pdf/2004.00708v1. The title of the paper is: The Saturation of the Infrared Absorption by Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere. The author is: Dieter Schildknecht of Cornell Univ.
The main finding of paper is that when the concentration of CO2 in the air reaches 300 ppmv, the absorption band for out-going longwave IR light from warm or hot surface become saturated. This means that increasing concentrations of CO2 above this level will not result in an increase in the temperature of the air. In 1920, the concentration of CO2 in dry air was 300 ppmv.
Shown in the chart (See below) are plots of temperatures at the Furnace Creek weather station in Death Valley from 1922 to 2001. In 1922, the concentration of CO2 was ca. 303 ppmv (0.6 g of CO2/cu. m.), and by 2001, it had increased to 371 ppmv (0.73 g of CO2/cu. m.), but the was no corresponding increase in the air temperature at this at this remote desert. This is because the absorption band at ca. 660 wavenumbers is saturated (See second reply below)
The chart was obtained from the late John Daly’s website:
“Still Waiting for Greenhouse” available at http://www.john-daly.com From the homepage, page down to the end and click on “Station Temperature Data”. On the “World Map”, click on “NA”, and page down to U.S.A.-Pacific. Finally, scroll down and click on “Death Valley”. John Daly found over 200 weather station located around the world that showed no warming up to 2002.
These charts falsify the hypothesis that increasing concentration of CO2 in the air causes an increase in surface air temperature. They also falsify the claims by the IPCC that CO2 causes global waring and is the control knob of climate change.
I sent this comment to EPA last week but I received to acknowledgement or comment on it.
Top link doesn’t seem to work.
Leckner found a very similar thing using emissivity..
… that CO2 “Forcing” (what a silly unscientific word), levels out around 280ppm, as opposed to the IPCC “log” model.
This works https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.00708
Thanks 🙂
How did you find that address?
A doubling of CO2 gives 0.5 C increase, but so far we went from 280 to 420, about 50% increase, or much less than 560 required for doubling, and therefore much less than 0.5 C has been the effect, more likely 0.3 C has happened due to CO2, since 1850
I didn’t enter the url correctly. The address should be:
https://arixiv.org/pdf/2004.00708v1. I left out the “iv”.
Could you post the link to the Leckner paper? I can send this info to the EPA.
How can we use this info to convince the politicians that we do not need to control the emission of CO2?
Can you imagine what ever Gov. Gavin N. of CA and Gov. Kathy H. of NY will do if the CO2 endangerment finding is rescinded? They will have to abandon their climate plans. And hopefully all the environmental NGO’s will go bust, and Oz will be liberated.
RE: The essay ” Climate Change Reexamined” by Joel M. Kauffman.
The essay is 26 pages and can be downloaded for free.
Shown in Fig. 7 (See below) is the infrared absorption spectrum of a sample of Philadelphia inner city air from 4000 to 400 wavenumbers (wns). There are some additional absorption peaks of H20 down to 200 wns which are below the spectrometer cutoff of 400 wns.
Only peaks from 400 to ca.750 wns are involved in the greenhouse effect. In 1999,the concentration of CO2 at the MLO in Hawaii was ca 380 ppmv. One cubic meter of this air contained ca. 0.64 g of CO2 and ca 22 g of H2O. Since the sample was inner city air, it is likely that the concentration of CO2 was greater than that at the MLO.
Kauffman first published the spectrum in the paper “Water in the Atmosphere” in Journal of Chemical Education Vol. 81 No. 8 1229-1230.
Unfortunately, the paper is behind a paywall.
The gas cell was an 7 cm Al cylinder with KBr windows. The absorbance of CO2 peak is 0.025. If the cell was 700 cm long, the absorbance would be ca. 2.5 and 99+% of the IR light would be absorbed. 700 cm is ca. 23 feet and the IR absorption is saturated at this distance.
You should also check out Fig. 10. which slows a plot CO2 concentrations in Northern Europe from 1810 to 1965. In 1820, the concentration of CO2 450 ppmv. You do a search on E.G. Beck He has published a review on CO2 in Energy and the Environment.
Please keep in mind that 71% of the earth is covered by H2O, the one and only greenhouse of importance.
This morning I watched on television the CBS talking head news show “Face the Nation.” As they were interviewing one of the guests, they had the block announcement at the bottom of the screen that said something like “Trump baselessly says…” This is a program masquerading as a news program. Yet they have to write on the bottom of the screen that what Trump said was “baseless.” Just one more of the continuous examples of news media propaganda. They could have simply reported what Trump said and left out their opinion that it was “baseless.”
I have never seen the news media more biased than it is now. Even a respected publication like the Wall Street Journal ran their anti-Trump Epstein story after being told by Trump that the reported birthday card was a fake. I understand that newspapers like the Los Angeles Times refuse to even print any letters that cast doubt on global warming.
At least the tax support for PBS and NPR is coming to an end. Our cousins in Britain need to do the same thing to BBC.
Maybe in time the free market will correct things.
From post:”…something like “Trump baselessly says…”.
This similar to Leslie Stahl telling Trump there was no evidence he was spied on.
“I have never seen the news media more biased than it is now. Even a respected publication like the Wall Street Journal ran their anti-Trump Epstein story after being told by Trump that the reported birthday card was a fake.”
Yes but to be fair Trump says many many things that are complete nonsense. He has said he “never wrote a picture in my life” … that’s, false charities have sold pictures done by him. He said he has never been on Epstein’s plane… a lie, the logs show at least seven trips. He is now saying the Epstein thing is a hoax by the Democrats. That’s also a lie. Trumps dodgy relationship with Epstein goes back to the 80’s.
So I think Trump is fair and sensible to fact check much of what the liar in chief says, particularly if he is being criticised. He hates that.
“Yes but to be fair
TrumpSimon says many many things that are complete nonsense.”Your comment just needed a minor edit for accuracy.
No need to thank me this time, but try not to make a habit of such egregious bullshit in the future.
So no sensible retort then? Can’t deny any of the points I made about Trumps lies so you attack me. Predictable but still sad and telling.
lol if Democrats had anything on Trump and Epstein they would have used it long ago. Unsealing the grand jury testimony would be a great thing.
Derg, I have made this same point in many comment treads –
the Dems showed in many ways that they were pulling every piece of ammunition out of their arsenal to throw at Trump since 2015.
And even creating charges & evidence that didn’t exist (with lotsa help from manipulations of the NY legal system).
So fast forward to these past 4 years when the Dems controlled every agency, all of which were more than sympathetic & supportive of the Biden govt, and they had all the available records & docs on the Epstein broohaha.
Yet they supposedly pulled their punches on releasing any Trump involvement with Epstein’s criminality?
GIVE ME A BREAK!
“lol if Democrats had anything on Trump and Epstein they would have used it long ago.”
Maybe. Or maybe there are some high profile people of all political persuasions in there.
We agree, unsealing will be awesome.
Epstein’s lawyer has said, and has recently repeated, that there IS no “list”. He has also said that there are two judges who have placed gag orders on pretty much everything. This is something I haven’t heard previously but I have little reason to doubt him. So if you want things released, take it up with the judges.
As I understand it, Trump has demanded the release of grand jury transcripts and other information, subject to judicial review – so it’s in the judge’s hands now.
I think that Simon will never be satisfied. No matter what comes out, if Trump isn’t connected, he will claim some sort of malfeasance.
Speaking of statements that make no sense, what does this actually mean –
So I think Trump is fair and sensible to fact check much of what the liar in chief says,
Who are the parties you are referring to?
Did you use Trump’s name mistakenly here when you meant someone else?
Maybe The Wall Street Journal?
In which case, that might make it clear that by “the liar in chief”, you were referring to Trump.
As it stands, you might be suggesting that Trump should be fact checking someone else that he regards as “the liar in chief”.
?
Yes Trump is well known as the “liar in chief.” They are all well documented. I noted three recent ones that you seem to agree with.
You are aren’t very bright…you had no idea Joe had dementia in office.
All big shots in politics are “bad boys” when they have the opportunity. Better to pay attention to his actual policies-such as protecting the borders, working to stop the climate scam, building up the military, firing useless burro-crats, stopping funding for the commy PBS and NPR, etc.
Yep.
Sometimes a junkyard dog is needed to clean up the ‘hood.
Nobody wants to pet the horrible, menacing mongrel, but they’re glad that all the undesirables are having to find somewhere else to hang out.
“Good boy, Donnie, good boy!”
“Yep.
Sometimes a junkyard dog is needed to clean up the ‘hood.”
As long as that’s what he does that instead of eating all the dog food. Trump is good at yelling “look over there” while he does the very thing he accuses others of. The Epstein thing a good example. He wanted it all out in the open before he was elected…. now not so keen.
So forgive the sins if you get what you want? Yep I’d say that is a good summary of the kind of hardcore people who support Trump.
It’s called Realpolitik. Look it up.
Better than a nice guy at the helm who can’t get things done. Yuh, I know, you’ll say that’s why some people support dictators. Well, Trump ain’t no dictator.
Oh dearie me, Simon has misplaced his tin foil hat again….
… and all the crap and nonsense spewed by the left-wing media is being regurgitated.
The Biden admin had complete control of all Epstein files for 4 years. Throughout that time they “trumped” up every legal charge they could think of including finding dubious ways to circumvent statute of limitations. Do you really think there is anything at all in the Epstein files that is legitimately incriminating for Trump? If there’s anything in those files now that would hurt you should assume that it’s a fabrication of Biden the DOJ/FBI.
“Do you really think there is anything at all in the Epstein files that is legitimately incriminating for Trump? ”
There may be a few names here that involve high level people on both sides. What we do know is 1000 girls (according to Pam Bondi) were abused and no one except the two at the top have been held accountable. You can’t tell me that makes sense. Who knows who these sex offender pedophiles are, but I want to see them held to account. An independent special council investigation the only way.
Fair enough. I have to question my sanity to be agreeing with Simon on something but I intend to maintain intellectual integrity.
Obviously Clinton is implicated and who knows how many others on both sides of the partisan divide. It’s been hypothesized that Hillary suicides people who can reveal such information so I concede that a MAD scenario could have been in play.
If Bill Clinton was one of the scumbags who feasted on the innocence of these young girls, then I have no problem having his name read out. Nor should anyone who is genuinely wanting accountability on this.
The other way to look at this is if we let the rich and powerful get away with this, then more girls are at risk to this sort of abuse going forward.
Finally Trump may or may not have been directly involved in this, but he sure as hell knows the names of those who are. At the very least his latest bouts of denial and trying to make it go away says he wants the names kept hidden. That’s not right.
You are willing to throw moderate Bill Clinton under the bus but are you willing to accuse fellow socialist Barry O for his pizza and hot dog parties?
We heard nary a peep out of you about justice for sex trafficking victims during Democrat administrations. It seems a bit opportunistic Simon.
Look if they are guilty throw them in jail. I do not care whether they are left or right. But… I have no idea who you are talking about. Maybe supply me with some evidence of their crimes?
Would you support releasing names if they included leaders if countries with shaky governments? Countries subject to being thrown into civil wars if there were a power vacuum? Would you be in favor of releasing names if we were using the info to….convince….the leaders of some countries not to be aggressive, not to develop nuclear devices, or not to commit genocide on peoples within their country? Would you be in favor of releasing names if they included high-ranking officials of adversaries who were providing us important intel?
Consider that the greater good could be the reason neither party wants to expose everything. The Biden administration ignored the issue. Trump was in favor of releasing the docs. Now he seems uninterested. Just maybe he’s learned things we are not privy to.
Regardless, considering all the actions on other issues Trump has been taking I’m willing to trust him on this one. Knowing who Epstein entertained on his island just isn’t that important to me.
Given Trumps rocky relationship with truth…. I wouldn’t trust him on anything. I always verify what he says.
Simon, your derangement blinds you to reason. Look at the absurd lengths that Democrats went during the Autopen Administration to gin up offenses which are both misdemeanors raised to felonies and beyond the statute of limitations. If they had something solid against him in the Epstein files, what plausible reason can you propose for not releasing it and instead turning to lawfare abuse?
“what plausible reason can you propose for not releasing it and instead turning to lawfare abuse?”
See above…..
TDS runs both ways. Those who attack and defend Trump use any possible weapon to hit the opposition.
Now take a neutral point of view and just a point system.
As far as the Epstein case is concerned it seems clear that there are good reasons from all sides for the important parts of the Epstein files NOT to come out.
As far as Trump’s lying is concerned: it is clear the man is a chronic lier. That does not mean that everything the msm says is correct. Or that excessive lawfare is fair nor that Trump is innocent of all crimes/ misdemeaners.Trump is a classic case of Truth being perferted to suit a need but this is what all presidents do. Trump is just an extreme example. He just calls everything he doesnt like ‘fake’ and dismisses it. His supporters do the same and that is subsequently used by the opponents to state more accusations. That is why TDS runs both ways.
Trump’s motivations are far from pure, often contradictory and non effective. I do believe most of the anti green policy corrections are good and needed. But for the rest the Big Hope has turned into a major disappointment. Diminishing returns excellerating..
Trump and his supporters are transactional. Most people intuit that he has a yuge beautiful closet packed with skeletons, but as long as he does what he promises, part of the tacit agreement is that we pretend he never did anything wrong in his younger version.
Most of you will hate this, but I don’t care. I don’t have a tribe or a team.
The question that conservatives faced was whether the ends justified the means. We thought that it was worth overlooking and avoiding seeing the evidence of bad character so long as the border is closed, illegals are deported, conservative judges get appointed, the Swamp is drained, the deficit reduced, the endless wars ended, and the Green New Scam slashed.
Let’s stipulate that Trump and Epstein were close and that things Trump said to shock jocks before he was a candidate were not far from the truth. In other words he was a sexual predator 30 years ago. I’m not saying it’s certain, I’m just saying assume for the sake of argument. We know that he’s indisputably at least a two-time adulterer. He’s not a candidate for canonization.
Voters were not presented with a question of choosing a morally pure Hillary vs evil Trump. It was a question of choosing between two political agendas, each represented by candidates of questionable moral character.
Voting for Hillary would no more have lead to justice for abused teenagers than voting for Trump. It would certainly not achieve any of the goals previously mentioned. It was a no-brainer in 2016, no moral qualms considering Hillary’s record. In 2024, having seen the cultural devastation of the Autopen Administration, it was equally a no-brainer.
Here we stand now, confronting our long-repressed demons. Am I supporting a child molester? Is there such a thing as redemption? Do the ends justify the means? Should we stand on moral principle at this late date when doing so quite possibly destroys our hopes of achieving the ends? How easy to empathize with the Democrats who pretended not to see the vegetable at the podium, shaking hands with ghosts, getting lost in the jungle, falling up stairs. He has a stutter vs Epstein hoax.
If we made our deal, to unsee the sleaze in return for the deliverables, then let’s at least get all the deliverables! Yes, the border is closed for the moment, there are conservative judges, and the Green New Scam is wounded, maybe. A lot of illegals have been deported or have self-deported, not nearly enough.
But the Swamp is not remotely drained, the deficit is increased, the endless wars are being funded, not ended. It’s a fundamental question, is Epstein a blackmailing operation controlling our Deep State? Do we really benefit enough gaining those deliverables but leaving the zombie Deep State in place?
“Our cousins in Britain need to do the same thing to BBC.”
Same with the ABC in Australia. !
More than 100 people are still missing in Texas from the flooding!
J K, you’re behind in the news. According to ABC and CBS, the number of people missing is down to 3.
Regards,
Bob
Ah that’s great news, but sad that more than 130 people died
And?
Pal it does not make you look good not caring about people’s suffering..
And the millions dying from Vitamin A deficiency, why do you not tell us about them?
How many people are dying every day in Gaza and Ukraine? I care about that and about victims of natural disasters in Texas.
I suspect that the question that Alan M posed was anticipating that you are trying to link this to Climate Change ™ when there is no connection.
It would be tough to live if we spent much of our time caring about people’s suffering. We do when it gets close to us. If we don’t know those people you refer to- we aren’t going to give it much thought.
Natural disasters can do disheartening and destructive things.
It is a great pity so many lives were lost.
Warnings were given, and either not heard or were ignored.
But what’s that got to do with the price of fish ??
Simon do you still believe in Colluuuusion even with Tulsi’s documents release?
If you do, then I compel you to find that pee pee tape…lol
I am inclined to believe that doc dump more than the opposite, but putting credence in any politician is not wise.
Of course he does, silly question.
Super-Expensive Wind/Solar Agenda of Democrats Gave Northeast Has Highest Electricity Prices in US
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/super-expensive-wind-solar-agenda-of-democrats-gave-northeast-has
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Reeling from their 2024 election loss, Democrats are scrambling to reconnect with the working class—yet
1) their ruinous strategy of embracing socialist and communist candidates,
2) doubling down on un-American woke ideology,
3) shielding criminal illegal aliens, and
4) supporting dark-money NGOs that fuel paid insurrectionist riots, violence, etc., like the Los Angeles riots—isn’t a comeback plan but just political suicide.
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The party of leftist social justice warriors is cracking under the weight of its own failures.
Obama’s woke culture is finally imploding, “green” energy fantasies are backfiring.
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Nowhere is this more evident than in the Democrat stronghold states of the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, where the forced retirement of perfectly operating, affordable, reliable, STEADY, 24/7/365 fossil fuel power to be replaced by unreliable solar and wind is driving up energy costs to the highest in the nation this summer and breaking the pocketbooks of working-class families they claim to champion.
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Governments proclaimed: Go Wind and Solar, Go ENERGIEWENDE, go Net zero by 2050, etc., and provided oodles of subsidies, and rules and regulations, and mandates, and prohibitions to make it happen.
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Net-zero by 2050 to-reduce CO2 is a super-expensive suicide pact, to 1) increase command/control by governments, and 2) enable the moneyed elites to become more powerful and richer, at the expense of all others, by using the foghorn of the government-subsidized/controlled Corporate Media to spread scare-mongering slogans and brainwash people, already for at least 40 years.
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CO2, just 0.042% in the atmosphere, is a weak absorber of a small fraction of the absorbable, low-energy IR photons.
CO2 has near-zero influence on world surface temperatures.
CO2 is a life-giving molecule. Greater CO2 ppm in atmosphere is an absolutely essential ingredient for: 1) increased green flora, which increases fauna all over the world, and 2) increased crop yields to better feed 8 billion people.
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At About 30% Annual W/S Electricity on the Grid, Various Costs Increase Exponentially
The W/S subsidies uglify the countryside, kills birds and bats, whales and dolphins, fisheries, tourism, view-sheds, etc.
The weather-dependent, variable/intermittent W/S output, often too-little and often too-much, creates grid-disturbing difficulties that become increasingly more challenging and more costly/kWh to counteract, as proven by the UK and California for the past 5 years, and Germany for the past 10 years, and recently in Spain/Portugal.
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All have “achieved” near-zero, real- growth GDPs, the highest electricity prices/kWh in the EU, and stagnant real wages for almost all people, while further enriching the jet-setting elites who live in the poshest places.
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Their angry, over-taxed, over-regulated native populations are further burdened by the elites bringing in tens of millions of uninvited, unvetted, uneducated, inexperienced, ghetto-area, crime-prone, poor folks from all over, who are sucking from the multiple, government-program tits, while making minimal efforts to produce goods and services; a chaotic, culture-destroying burden the native populations never voted for.
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Energy policies should balance three key objectives: affordability, reliability, and environmental sustainability — often referred to as the “energy trilemma.”
Yet Democrats rammed through climate policies that torched two objectives, affordability and reliability for the environment.
According to the latest EIA Short-Term Energy Outlook for July, the average summer wholesale power prices across the PJM, NYISO, and ISO-NE grids are the highest in the nation.
These prices now far exceed those in Texas’ ERCOT, the U.S. average, and even the traditionally high-cost West Coast markets.
The blame is squarely focused on the Democrats’ initiative to decarbonize power grids.
Australia leads the world in wind and solar penetration. A single chart can show what that has done to the little Aussie battler:
https://abcbullion.com.au/products-pricing/gold
Particularly since Labor won the Federal election in 2022 and went all in on “renewables”.
If you own a roof in Australia, you do not need to buy much electricity and the price does not matter much so enough voters are not being harmed by the high cost of electricity. They are yet to connect the dots that high electricity costs hit every sector of commerce and is the reason for the rampant inflation in just about everything.
If California had its own currency is would be showing a similar decline in value as the AUD.
I went through an exercise with Perplexity AI a few days ago. I treated it as a conversation with a GHE “believer” in order to understand the “mainstream” narrative that the AI was trained with.
It is in two parts, and each part is quite long. It will require patience and attention in order to follow and understand it.
Part one establishes a baseline of the AI’s “belief system”, a reflection of its training.
Part two is where I challenge that belief system forcing it to take into account the microphysics of the radiation in the atmosphere.
Part one is here:
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/5a692855-17a4-490c-ab24-d38501789952
Part two is here:
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/19e17ddc-0624-462d-8da6-d3f677238d2b
As a teaser to encourage you to read in detail, here is the conclusion reached by Perplexity:
Final Perspective
While the term “greenhouse effect” is commonly used, it oversimplifies the true processes at work. The real maintenance of atmospheric heat involves the slow, upward movement of sensible and latent heat through convection, with greenhouse gases ultimately enabling energy release to space via radiation only where collisional processes are much less frequent. The concept of “trapping” misses the crucial fact that, for most of the atmosphere, energy is not held back by radiative processes alone, but by the slow pace of convective and latent transport compared to the near-instantaneous movement of energy by radiation at the top of the atmosphere.
Energy in the atmosphere is not trapped in the classical sense by greenhouse gases.Convection and latent heat transport, not radiative trapping, primarily maintain atmospheric temperatures in the regions where collisional processes are dominant.This physical perspective aligns with observed atmospheric dynamics and modern atmospheric science.
I’m super impressed that the AI Wizard determined that most of the heat from the earth’s surface (i.e., sensible heat) is removed by conduction and convection of the warm or even hot air. However, the greenhouse effect still functions when water is present in nominal amounts, e.g., at 70° F and 70% RH. In this air the concentration of H2O is 14,780 ppmv.
One cubic meter of this air contains about 11.9 g of H20.
A desert is a good example of the lack of the greenhouse effect. During the day, the land is heated by sunlight of which about 48% is infrared light. After sunset, the land and air cool very rapidly because there is little H2O to absorbed out-going long wavelenght IR light. In some desert in winter the air temperature drops below freezing.
In tropical jungles which have high RH, the air never cools very much at night. In a jungle at 90° F and 100% RH, the concentration of H20 is 50,800 ppmv. One cubic meter of this air contains 40.8 g of H2O.
At the MLO Hawaii. the concentration of CO2 in dry is currently 439 ppmv. One cubic meter of this air contains a mere 0.862 g of CO2. This small amount of CO2 absorbs little IR light which causes little or no heating of the air, which has a mass of 1.20 kg at 70° F.
We really do not have to worry about this trace amount CO2 in the air.
Thanks for the feedback, Harold. FYI, I live in the desert and it is a common misconception that there is very little water vapor in the desert. If you look at Happer and van Wijngaarden’s simulated spectrum over the Sahara desert, I believe the near surface water vapor concentration there was 21000 ppm. That would have been based on radiosonde measurements for their model.
Low relative humidity is common, but as temperatures increase the capacity for water increases.
I can assure you that the desert only cools rapidly after sunset under very specific conditions. Clear sky, very low humidity. Much more common in winter than summer. Some nights this time of year stay in the 90s.
In the jungle, which I’ve also experienced in SE Asia, it is the latent heat and high humidity with no evaporation that maintains the
Latent heat does not convert to radiation when water condenses. This is a common misconception. It converts to sensible heat.
The heat that radiates to space is radiated by individual water vapor molecules. These molecules are excited by collisions in the mid-and upper troposphere. The radiation can escape to space when the radiative lifetime of the excited state is shorter than the average time between collisions. This occurs higher in the atmosphere where the collision rate is reduced. For water vapor, this from about 2.5-6 km altitude at mid latitudes.
I just checked Death Valley. The RH at Furnace Creek is 5% with a dew point of -2° C. That is pretty dry.
What desert do you live in?
I live in Burnaby, BC, which is contiguous with and east of Vancouver. The climate is a coastal temperate rain forest. We get lots of rain like over a meter per year.
You have not taken it far enough. I have had Chat GPT agree that ice has to dominate the emission of OLR. So little to nothing to do with gasses.
To do that you simply ask it what the average radiating temperature is – should say 255K. What is the dominant molecule in the release of OLR – should say H2O. What is H2O at 255K – should say solid. Not quite that fast but you can get it there. So then you ask why it even mentioned GHGs when it is quite obvious that ice dominates the release of OLR and also regulates incoming solar EMR.
I consider the notion of GHGs to be unscientific. You should be able to get any reasoning bot to agree with that. It is part of the fairy tale and not related to reality.
If you look at all ocean surface on any day you will not find any location emitting with an effective temperature above freezing. So not just an average of 255K but no where over ocean exceeding 273K.
You can also get any bot to agree that lignite used for generating electricity in the vicinity of the mine is the lowest cost source of electricity unless you can get gas or oil below world market price.
“If you look at…ocean surface….you will not find any location emitting at an effective temperature above freezing”
RickWill how did you ever come to such a bizarre statement ?…the ocean surface emits according to Weins law at whatever temperature it is at, energy emission following Planck’s curve.
On the attached graph, the Western Pacific was quite a bit warmer than 273 C freezing according to the satellite’s sensors. Where the sensors mostly see the ocean surface, 8-13 micron band, the atmospheric window, the surface was almost 298 K, or 25C…
The chart below shows the measured daily emitting power over all ice-free ocean surface:
?resize=720%2C539&ssl=1
The highest value is 313W/m^2. That is an effective emission temperature of 272.6K. And that is the highest value.
Sure you get very narrow bands where the H2O molecule in gas, liquid or solid is not absorbing but there is next to no energy in it.
Ocean surface has plenty of water above it and most of the time that water is ice and the dominant emitter to space. Look at your chart and work what the average emission temperature is. Most of the H2O is in the form of ice because is below 270K. The higher energy, shorter wave length is all ice. And take a look at the thunderstorm anvil. It is radiating at 210K. So any H2O there will be ice as well.
Clearly your chart is based on the two extremes from clear sky to thunderstorm anvil. If you take a look at the thunderstorm situation you will see it follows the 210K curve. My chart looks at every location across the ice-free ocean in a 1X1 grid. Not two relatively rare extremes.
Ice matters. Gasses, including water vapour, are bit playtes in Earth’s radiation balance. Even the climate botherers accept that ice knocks out 30% of the incoming solar. They don’t tell you that ice is by far the dominant emitter as well.
Probably because it’s not true. Matter emits energy with intensity according to the fourth power of the absolute temperature. Ice is not particularly hot, nor is its emissivity extraordinary. Nor does it cover the majority of the surface of the globe.
What do you base your statement on?
The point in question is “you won’t see any location emitting at an effective temperature above freezing” which is incorrect. A large amount of surface with an effective temperature higher than freezing gets through the atmospheric window to outer space.
Looking down from outer space, you see a mosaic of surface temperature emissions, some water vapor and CO2 in the upper atmosphere, and cloud tops that cover a significant portion of the planet at about -60.
Look at some GOES imagery especially higher bands…..
Where did you get that graph?
Just search “Earth’s emission spectrum” then select ”images”. You’ll get many. That one is on Clive Best’s site, not sure where it originated.
Thank you for the info. I’ll check it out.
Thank you for posting this spectrum. I have been looking for an example like this for a long time. If you could provide the source so that I could download a clean copy to would be much appreciated.
This is a perfect example of how the satellite spectrum is misinterpreted. Apparently I cannot post pictures due to some WordPress glitch. If I could, I would post van Wijngaarden and Happer’s modeled spectrum that shows the “zero CO2 line. I would also post Hermann Harde’s modeled spectrum of water vapor only, without CO2.
Both of these can be seen in my article co-authored with Andy May a few months ago here:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/03/09/beyond-co%E2%82%82-unraveling-the-roles-of-energy-water-vapor-and-convection-in-earths-atmosphere/
Getting back to the spectrum you posted, the “overlap” as indicated is meaningless. Water vapor is active across the entire spectrum, including a significant portion of the atmospheric window. Look at Harde’s spectrum and this is obvious. It is why the atmospheric window is not a completely flat line but has structure. It is a combination of H2O and atmospheric window emissions. Harde shows this in his paper as well.
The “overlap” of H2O and CO2 is across the entire 15 μm band of CO2. What the spectrums is telling us is that CO2 is partially absorbing the emissions of H2O in this band. It is at an altitude where the CO2 is still being de-excited by collisions which effectively “recycles” part of the water vapor emissions into sensible heat. The energy is not being “trapped”. The sensible heat will excite other molecules (mostly water vapor) and lead to their eventual emission of radiation to space.
A similar, but less prominent feature around the ozone peak occurs as a result of the same process. Almost all of the radiance represented by the area under that curve is due to water vapor.
The excited states that produce the radiation emitted to space are populated not by radiative transfer, but by collisions in accordance with Einstein’s Quantum Theory of Radiation.
Splitting into two parts. Here’s part one
Thanks for the comments. I’ll start with what I think are points of agreement. The so-called “greenhouse effect” cannot exist in a convecting atmosphere. It is a tragedy of errors perpetuated by those who think they understand radiation in the atmosphere, but do not. They are obsessed with absorption, when emission is what the IR-active gases bring to the table.
I cannot tell with certainty whether you read my complete conversation with Perplexity, but my impression from your comment, and the quote (from my “teaser” rather than the body of the discussion), is that you did not.
At this point I will digress briefly. I read your article published a couple of days ago. I’m not sure how you convinced ChatGPT that ice is responsible for OLR, but that is not possible. Stay with me though, because while your analysis based on “radiative transfer” is not quite correct you are attempting to explain the most important role of clouds that no one seems to understand. When you read my description of the microphysics of radiation generation in the Perplexity discussion, you will see that you had the right idea but the wrong explanation.
The infrared radiation that escapes to space from the atmosphere is radiated by individual gas molecules. This is clear from the TOA infrared spectra acquired by satellite based instruments. While I might disagree with some on the details, that is well understood.
I see in the additional discussion there are others who have addressed the “ice” issue, so I won’t belabor it here.
On the other hand, your thinking on the relationship of clouds is insightful.
Weather and climate are driven exclusively by water in its various phases. The cooling of the atmosphere is almost exclusively by the radiation of water vapor molecules to space. There is a small contribution by ozone, and an even smaller contribution by CO2.
One other point. It seems that you inferred an “emission temperature” from the OLR data points in your chart. One cannot make that inference from an “inverse Stefan-Boltzmann Law” as it appears you have done. You are not the first to make this error, as the cavalier application of the S-B law in “climate science” has led others to the same incorrect conclusion.
You have the insight that it is water that governs energy transport in the weather/climate, and you also have an inkling into the role of clouds which is not understood, or for that matter even recognized. The reasons are different than what you posit, however.
Low and mid altitude clouds consist mostly of liquid water droplets, not ice. In some cases they may be supercooled, but they are liquid nonetheless. In the neighborhood of these clouds, the humidity is near saturation. That is why the clouds form. This means that around the clouds there are copious free water vapor molecules.
Now it would be helpful if you read part 2 of my conversation where I discuss the microphysics of the radiation in the atmosphere. Contrary to the “radiative transfer/equilibrium” narrative that creates the “greenhouse effect”, radiation in the atmosphere is not propagated from the surface to the top of the atmosphere. The excited states of IR-active gases (aka “greenhouse gases”) are populated not by absorption of radiation, but by collisions with other molecules of sufficient energy to create the excited states. Likewise, the de-excitation of these states occurs primarily not by emission of radiation, but by collisional de-excitation which converts the vibrational energy of the excited IR-active molecule into kinetic energy of the collision partner. This process occurs continuously throughout the atmosphere from the surface to the mesopause. Again, this is discussed in my Perplexity AI conversation if you should choose to read it.
Part two to follow
Part two
The combination of collisional excitation and de-excitation prevents any radiation from escaping to space until a specific set of conditions is met. The excited states are unstable and have a “radiative lifetime”, a statistical measure of the lifetime of the excited state. There will always be some emission throughout the atmosphere, but in the dense lower atmosphere most of these emissions will be absorbed by another molecule.
Higher in the atmosphere the collision rate drops. At sea level, each air molecule experiences about 7,000,000,000 collisions/sec.
When the time between collisions is greater than the radiative lifetime of the excited molecule, that is when the radiation escapes to space. This occurs in the mid- to upper-troposphere for water vapor, the stratosphere for ozone, and near the mesopause for CO2.
In the neighborhood of clouds, there are copious quantities of free water vapor molecules. Collisional excitation of these at altitudes means that above clouds water vapor emits tremendous amounts of radiation. One cannot see this in a static spectrum. Most of the modeled spectra are “clear sky”, and in the satellite spectra it isn’t possible to separate H2O emissions near clouds from the background.
It is well understood that clouds block incoming solar during the day, reducing heating. Likewise, they scatter and reflect surface radiation at night, slowing cooling.
The process I described above regarding radiation by H2O near clouds is not discussed at all because of the obsession with “absorption” and “radiative transfer. It likely accounts for all of the so-called “trapped heat” attributed to the “greenhouse effect.”
I have additional comments regarding the spectrum posted by D Mackenzie that I will make in a separate post.
One more thing. If you want to see this radiation from clouds, (and also from land where it “blooms” when subject to insolation) look at GOES band 16. It is called the “CO2 Band” by NASA. (Their quotes, not mine.) It shows water vapor radiating vigorously across the planet.
It is my understanding that AI systems do not ‘learn’ anything and just start again every time using available data. You can steer it by posing more intricate questions. That does not mean it has learned from the experience. It is just another data point. Most data are logically heavily biased to support the majority of inputs. But put an AI in ‘thinking’ mode and you DO get different answers by carefully stating explicit questions and directions. Then the AI will do the thinking for you again using available data which might give you the answers you wanted. This does not change anything. The opposition will claim you have misused AI much like a lawyer would w evidence.
It is a handy tool but i wouldnt put much faith in it..or claims of Truth.
A more interesting discussion could ensue if you read the conversation and responded with comments/critiques.
The AI systems are not perfect, but they have the advantage that they can reason dispassionately and look up sources to confirm or refute claims without being influenced by the ideologies that infect so many humans.
Proper use requires knowledge and skill. I invite you to read my linked conversations and provide an assessment of how you think I did.
The Green Industrial Complex: Power, Panic, and ProfitsJohn Stossel
Story Tip:
German Electric Grid Costs Doubled over Past Decade as a Result of Green Transition
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2025/07/20/german-electric-grid-costs-doubled-over-past-decade-as-a-result-of-green-transition/
The rot spreads:
Osprey Tree Service of the Victoria BC area claims summers there are now much drier rather than traditional ‘rain forest’.
Reality is climate there has always had wet winters and dry summers, people refer to it as ‘Mediterranean style’ (just not as hot as there). I’ve lived through +30C summers in the large region and summers I wished for that.
Some summers are warmer than others, some types of tree crack in heat.
(Page A20of the Goldstream Gazette of July 16, 2025.)
While a fool claims the region is no longer a rain forest because as a child her parents kept sprinkler on for hours so she could play in the water, but today people are being admonished to conserve water. Apart from her parents profligacy when water is not metered, population has grown but water system may not have increased as much.
The Bookless Club: Are you a good water steward? | Vancouver Sun
(Nearby Victoria BC meters water and spent to expand the water supply reservoir yet still forbids watering lawns much of the time – being cautious as a spate of drier than average summers could occur.)
I get discouraged.
If warmer seas hold less CO2, causing outgassing, how are they more acidic due to increased CO2?