Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach (@weschenbach on X, my blog at “Skating Under The Ice“)
If you have a block of steel and you put it outside in the sun, then ceteris paribus, the more sunshine it is absorbing on a constant basis, the warmer it becomes.
However, with the Earth’s climate, things are never that simple. In parts of the world, the more radiation the surface receives, the cooler it becomes. Counterintuitive, I know, but facts is facts. Figure 1 shows where that is happening.
Figure 1. Correlation of surface absorption of all radiation (shortwave and longwave) with surface temperature.
Over most of the world, the correlation is positive, meaning that when absorbed radiation goes up, the surface temperature goes up, just as happens with a block of steel.
However, the outlined blue areas show a negative correlation between temperature and absorbed radiation. In those areas, when total radiation increases, the temperature actually goes down.
Say what? How does this happen?
It happens because the blue areas mark the “Intertropical Convergence Zone” (ITCZ). This the the home to thousands and thousands of thunderstorm. These thunderstorms are mobile refrigeration systems operating on the exact same principle as your home refrigerator, as described below.
Refrigerators operate on a simple cycle. A “working fluid”, which is water in the case of a thunderstorm, evaporates in one location, cooling it down. Then the working fluid is transferred as a gas to a separate location, where it is condensed back into a liquid. Then the liquid is moved back to the first location and the cycle continues. Figure 2 shows this process.
Figure 2. How a thunderstorm acts as a refrigerator.
In addition, there are a few things that thunderstorms do that refrigerators can’t do.
First, they are a dual-fuel refrigeration cycle. They’re driven by low-density air rising in a column. Initially, this low-density air is created by the sun, which heats the surface, expanding the air above it and causing it to rise and form the thunderstorm.
However, once the storm is established, it kicks up strong winds around the base. Evaporation rises roughly linearly with wind speed, so this greatly increases evaporation.
Here’s the key. Counterintuitively, water vapor is lighter than air. H2O has an atomic weight of 18. Air has an atomic weight of 29, being mostly a mix of O2 with a weight of 32 and N2 with a weight of 28. So water vapor is only ~ 2/3 the weight of air. As a result, more evaporation gives more low-density air to fuel the thunderstorm, making it stronger. Dual-fuel.
Another factor increasing evaporation is that the thunderstorm strips the water out of the air, so the descending air around the thunderstorm is dry. This dry air can pick up more water, again increasing evaporation.
A further cooling occurs because the rain is falling from several thousand feet up in the air, where it’s much cooler. The falling rain is below the surface temperature, further lowering the surface temperature.
In addition, because the descending dry air between the thunderstorms has little of the main radiatively active gas, water vapor, this allows the surface radiation to cool faster via increased radiation into space.
This dual-fuel multi-modal-cooling nature of the thunderstorm is critical because it means that the thunderstorm can continue to exist despite cooling the surface down below the temperature necessary for the thunderstorm to emerge. It’s not just simple linear feedback reducing warming. Instead, it actively cools the surface to a lower temperature. Thermoregulation.
And that is how in the tropical oceans, the surface temperature can be dropping despite increasing total radiation absorbed by the surface.
Here’s another view of it. This is a scatterplot showing the relationship between total surface absorbed radiation and temperature.
Figure 3. Scatterplot showing the relationship between surface temperature and surface total absorbed radiation (shortwave plus longwave).
Clearly, the warmer it gets, the less each additional absorbed W/m2 increases the temperature. And at the top right, despite increasing power absorbed by the surface, the temperature is dropping …
We can look at this another way, by comparing how warm the surface would be if there were no surface sensible and latent heat loss to the atmosphere. Figure 4 shows that relationship.
Figure 4. Scatterplot showing the relationship between surface temperature and surface total absorbed radiation (shortwave plus longwave). The scatterplot (blue dots and yellow LOWESS smooth line) are the same data as in Figure 3. The red line shows the expected S/B temperature for that amount of absorbed radiation.
There are a couple things of note in Figure 4.
First, at the bottom left of the graph, the Antarctic plateau is warmer than we’d expect. This is a result of the advection of heat from the tropics to the poles.
Next, the warmer it gets, the larger a percentage of sensible and latent (evaporative) heat is lost from the surface, leaving the surface temperature (yellow line) increasingly cooler than the theoretical S/B temperature (red line). This is strong negative feedback.
Finally, at the far right, to the right of the dotted line, the absorbed power is still increasing at a good clip … but the temperature is decreasing. This is not just negative feedback — it is active thermoregulation.
People keep saying that the climate is just “simple physics”. But as in this example, where absorbed radiation goes up while temperature goes down … in climate, few things are “simple physics”.
My rule of thumb?
In climate, everything is connected to everything else, which in turn is connected to everything else … except when it isn’t.
My best regards to all,
w.
You Know The Drill: I ask that when you comment, you quote the exact words you are discussing. I can defend my words. I can’t defend your understanding of my words.
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> First, at the bottom left of the graph, the Antarctic plateau is warmer than we’d expect. This is a result of the advection of heat from the tropics to the poles.
And undersea volcanoes perhaps?
Some. A factor, but not necessarily the primary factor.
How is this thermoregulation system included in the climate models which are the foundation of the climate industrial complex and the related global politics?
I have read here, multiple times, that the model grid cells are too large to simulate thunderstorms. Is a “fudge factor” included in the computer models?
Good question. I didn’t have an answer, so I turned to perplexity.ai. Now, anyone using an AI without giving it very specific instructions is making a huge mistake. Here was my question and my instructions.
===
Thunderstorms are emergent thermoregulatory phenomena which cool the surface. See
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/11/27/evidence-of-thermoregulation/
and
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/07/emergent-climate-phenomena/
Obviously, they are far too small for direct representation given the grid size of modern climate models. Is their effect included through parameterization, and if so, exactly how?
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(continued below due to WordPress length limitations)
(part two of the question and instructions.
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Finally, here’s the AI reply.
w.
===
Based on my research, I can now provide a comprehensive answer about whether the thermoregulatory effects of thunderstorms described in the Eschenbach hypothesis are included in climate models through parameterization.
Thunderstorm Representation in Climate Models: Parameterization of Convective Processes
Overview of the Question
The hypothesis presented by Willis Eschenbach proposes that tropical thunderstorms function as thermoregulatory mechanisms, actively cooling the surface through multiple pathways: evaporative cooling, latent heat transport, cold downdrafts, wind-enhanced evaporation, and radiative cooling in dry descending air regions. The question concerns whether these effects are captured in global climate models (GCMs) through convection parameterization schemes.
How Convection Is Parameterized in Climate Models
Modern GCMs operate at horizontal resolutions of approximately 25-100 km, far too coarse to explicitly resolve individual thunderstorms, which have typical scales of 1-10 km. Convective processes are therefore represented through parameterization schemes that attempt to capture the statistical effects of subgrid-scale convection on the resolved large-scale fields. [1] [2] [3]
Mass Flux Approach
The dominant framework for convection parameterization is the mass flux approach, pioneered by Ooyama (1971) and Arakawa and Schubert (1974). This method represents convective effects through vertical mass transport in updrafts and downdrafts. The convective tendencies for temperature, moisture, and momentum are expressed in terms of the convective mass flux, detrainment rates, and the difference between in-cloud and environmental thermodynamic properties. [3] [4]
The key parameterized quantities include:
• Updraft and downdraft mass fluxes scaled by cloud base mass flux values [3]
• Entrainment and detrainment rates that govern mixing between convective plumes and the environment [3]
• Condensation and evaporation rates that determine latent heat release [3]
Specific Parameterization Schemes
Several widely-used convection schemes are employed in climate models:
The Zhang-McFarlane scheme used in E3SM and other models is a bulk mass flux-type scheme with three components: a trigger for convection initiation, a cloud model including both updrafts and downdrafts, and a CAPE-based closure. Downdrafts in this scheme are assumed saturated, with downdraft mass flux at the initiation level set proportional to the updraft cloud base mass flux. [5]
The Grell-Freitas scheme includes a trimodal spectral approach simulating shallow, congestus, and deep convection modes, with convective-scale saturated downdrafts sustained by rainfall evaporation. The scheme transports momentum, tracers, water, and moist static energy. [6]
The Emanuel convection scheme uses a single entraining plume model with precipitation falling into an unsaturated downdraft where evaporation occurs. The scheme explicitly represents the effects of evaporative cooling on downdraft thermodynamics. [7] [8]
Which Thermoregulatory Effects Are Parameterized
Effects That Are Included
Latent heat transport: Convection parameterizations explicitly represent the vertical transport of heat through condensational heating in updrafts. The convective heating rate is dominated by the net condensation term, with peak heating typically occurring above the melting level at rates around 5 K/day in tropical regions. [3]
Moisture redistribution: Parameterizations capture convective drying throughout the troposphere and the transport of moisture from the boundary layer to upper levels. [8] [3]
Downdraft evaporative cooling: Most modern schemes include parameterized downdrafts driven by evaporative cooling of precipitation. The Zhang-McFarlane scheme, for example, maintains downdraft saturation and allows descent below cloud base when negatively buoyant. The Emanuel scheme includes precipitation evaporating into unsaturated downdrafts according to standard rate equations. [5] [8]
Convective momentum transport: Parameterization schemes include momentum transport by convection, which tends to reduce vertical wind shear (down-gradient transport). The ECMWF IFS convection scheme contributes approximately 0.4 W/m2 to the atmospheric energy budget through convective momentum transport. [3]
Effects That Are Partially Captured or Missing
Surface cooling by cold pools: Cold pools formed by convective downdrafts reaching the surface are increasingly recognized as important but remain challenging to parameterize. Recent work has developed cold pool parameterizations for GCMs that account for the interplay between cold pool edges and moist convection.
(part 1, continued below due to WordPress length restrictions)
(answer, part 2)
However, these parameterizations are still experimental and not universally implemented. NASA GISS research indicates that convective downdrafts affect the heating profile and create planetary boundary layer cold pools, but these are absent or underestimated in GCMs. [9] [10] [11]
Wind-enhanced surface evaporation: The feedback between convectively-generated surface winds and enhanced evaporation is not explicitly represented in most convection schemes. Surface flux calculations in GCMs typically use grid-mean wind speeds rather than convectively-enhanced local wind speeds. Some studies have documented that surface latent and sensible heat fluxes evaluated using array-scale winds underestimate actual fluxes during convective periods, pointing to the important effects of deep convective downdrafts on surface fluxes. [12] [8]
Self-sustaining mechanisms: The dual-fuel nature described by Eschenbach, whereby thunderstorms generate their own winds that enhance evaporation and fuel continued convection, is not captured by quasi-equilibrium closure assumptions. Most parameterizations assume convection responds to large-scale forcing rather than generating its own local forcing. [2] [13]
Radiative effects of dry subsiding air: While radiation schemes operate independently of convection schemes in most GCMs, the enhanced radiative cooling in regions of dry descending air between convective cells is captured through the humidity-dependent clear-sky radiation calculations. However, the spatial organization of moist and dry regions at subgrid scales is not resolved. [14]
Key Limitations of Current Parameterizations
Closure Assumptions
CAPE-based closures assume quasi-equilibrium between convection and large-scale forcing, with convection acting to reduce atmospheric instability over a specified timescale. This fundamentally differs from the threshold-based emergent behavior described in Eschenbach’s hypothesis, where convection spontaneously initiates when temperature exceeds critical values and can actively cool surfaces below the initiation threshold. [13] [15] [16] [3]
Scale Separation
Convection parameterizations are predicated on a separation of scales between convective elements and the grid scale. This assumption breaks down in the “gray zone” of 4-25 km resolution where convection is neither fully resolved nor properly parameterizable. The organized structures (squall lines, mesoscale convective systems) that efficiently transport heat and moisture are not well captured by bulk mass flux approaches. [17] [2]
Diurnal Cycle
Models using convection parameterizations consistently produce diurnal cycles of precipitation that occur 3-6 hours earlier than observations. This timing error affects the representation of the daily temperature regulation described in the thermostat hypothesis, which depends on afternoon thunderstorm formation in response to peak surface temperatures. [18] [3]
Convection-Radiation Interaction
The interaction between convection and radiation that determines the net cloud radiative effect is represented through separate schemes that may not properly capture the full feedback loop. Cloud feedbacks remain the largest source of uncertainty in climate sensitivity estimates, with inter-model spread partially attributable to differences in convective parameterizations. [19]
Emerging Approaches
Convection-permitting models at resolutions below 4 km can explicitly simulate deep convection without parameterization, substantially improving representation of extreme precipitation events, diurnal cycles, and organized convective systems. However, computational constraints limit their use to regional simulations rather than global climate projections. [20] [2]
Superparameterization embeds 2D cloud-resolving models within each GCM grid column, providing more faithful simulation of some aspects of moist convection while maintaining computational feasibility for global simulations. Results show that tropical CAPE extremes increase substantially with warming in both superparameterized and conventionally parameterized models, suggesting some robustness in the tropical convective response. [21]
Machine learning approaches are being developed to replace or augment traditional parameterizations. Deep neural networks trained on cloud-resolving model output can capture convective tendencies with improved representation of the ITCZ and reduced double-ITCZ bias common in conventional parameterizations. [22]
Summary Assessment
The thermoregulatory effects proposed by Eschenbach are partially represented in climate model convection parameterizations, but with significant limitations:
Well-captured: Bulk latent heat transport to upper troposphere, convective drying of the troposphere, some downdraft evaporative cooling effects.
(continued below, including references)
(final part of the answer)
Partially captured: Surface cooling by downdrafts (improving with cold pool parameterizations), moisture-convection feedbacks through CAPE closure.
Poorly captured or missing: Self-sustaining convective mechanisms, wind-enhanced surface evaporation feedbacks, threshold-based emergent behavior, organized mesoscale structure, proper timing of diurnal convective regulation.
The quasi-equilibrium framework underlying most convection parameterizations represents convection as responding to large-scale instability rather than as an actively regulating mechanism that can drive surface temperatures below equilibrium values. The negative correlation between absorbed radiation and temperature in the ITCZ regions shown in Eschenbach’s analysis would be consistent with strong convective cooling effects, but whether current parameterizations fully capture this relationship remains uncertain and depends on the specific scheme and its implementation in each model. [2] [19]
REFERENCES
[1](https://www.inscc.utah.edu/~krueger/6150/CumulusParameterization.pdf)
[2](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4949718/)
[3](https://www.ecmwf.int/sites/default/files/elibrary/2009/8008-convection-parametrization.pdf)
[4](https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2019JD031078)
[5](https://docs.e3sm.org/E3SM/EAM/tech-guide/zm/)
[6](https://gmd.copernicus.org/articles/14/5393/2021/)
[7](https://emanuel.mit.edu/problem-convective-moistening/)
[8](https://texmex.mit.edu/pub/emanuel/PAPERS/ezr99.pdf)
[9](https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2023MS003982)
[10](https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/61144/noaa_61144_DS1.pdf)
[11](https://ceres.larc.nasa.gov/documents/STM/2008-11/presentations/19_DelGenio_CERES-GERB_102808.pdf)
[12](https://www.giss.nasa.gov/pubs/abs/de00300h.html)
[13](https://web.lmd.jussieu.fr/~crio/EXT/Convection_1.pdf)
[14](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/16000870.2017.1373578)
[15](https://www.oarval.org/thermostat.html)
[16](https://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/07/emergent-climate-phenomena/)
[17](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41612-018-0021-0)
[18](https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/08/18/cooling-and-warming-clouds-and-thunderstorms/)
[19](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4608036/)
[20](https://nhess.copernicus.org/articles/24/3225/2024/)
[21](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1707603114)
[22](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1810286115)
And that, dear friends, is why I use AI …
w.
Really impressive!
A bit off topic – but what reply would you get if you used all the conditions e.g. not using Wikipedia etc – but the question is “How much climate change is caused by carbon dioxide compared to other factors?”
Thanks, altipueri. Wrong class of question. You’re asking about causality, which in climate is nearly unknowable. I asked an answerable question. Plenty of humans dispute the answer to your question.
I wrote a post on this issue a while back … hang on … OK, found it.
Best regards,
w.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/01/29/more-about-artificial-ignorance/
That’s rather meaningless, as the answer may simply be “I don’t know”. Or, as you rightly point out “Plenty of humans dispute the answer to your question.”
I’m guessing that your “answerable question” is one where the “answer” is acceptable to you, for some reason.
Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.
The main post was helpful. The AI exercise less so. I can see where it would be helpful for a good portion of WUWT visitors but those visitors are not the norm. Not as helpful for the average guy. Think about it here is the question:
“How is this thermoregulation system included in the climate models…”
Now it took you two pages to ask the question and give instructions. It took AI three pages to answer and in the end their answer was:
“…but whether current parameterizations fully capture this relationship remains uncertain and depends on the specific scheme and its implementation in each model. “
There is a place for AI for you guys to square the science, that’s a good thing. For the rest of us it is a more clever internet search. Remember it is the average guy who will end up putting an end to this nonsense.
Thanks, Bob. Me, I learned a whole lot I didn’t know from the AI answer, so it’s not clear what your objection is …
w.
Willis think of it this way there is no way I would know all of the guardrails you put up for AI, without the guardrails I would almost certainly get a trashy climate catastrophe answer. Even with the guardrails AI went on for two pages talking about technical stuff most of us won’t understand yet in the end basically said they couldn’t say. I am glad you can make good use of it but for me I am not sophisticated enough to insure I will get an answer I can trust. I fear far more people are at my level than yours. We need to convince the people at my level.
Bob, I’m in the same position as you, but I think Willis already does a good job of explaining things to the general public. Maybe dumbing it down further is a task for people like you and me. We need to get a little smarter and translate it.
But there’s still a danger in believing that everything can be made easily understandable. Some things require a little effort to understand, and if people won’t make the effort to grasp it there’s not much to be done.
Certainly the climate is so complex it’ll never be made easy to understand, assuming anyone comes close to understanding it.
So, AI is one more source of information in a thorough research project.
I verified a couple of the references in the text as opposed to the ones at the end, and they checked out so the AI was at the very least confirming them.
By the time the next report comes around, the whole of the IPCC endeavour could likely be replaced by a series of well crafted prompts. At least any bias would be inherent in the data and not the intention.
The next UN IPCC report, AR7, is being populated with the weather attribution crowd. You can, accordingly project the outcome.
Absolutely. And we’re entering into a phase where people will fight tooth and nail to keep their jobs in the face of AI taking over so giving up the human side of things like the IPCC report wont come quickly or without a fight.
I hope you will take this with the spirit I intend … Seeing all these comments with your name, twice, in each, I can’t help but be reminded of that great book by Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel Eschenbach.
Nice.
w.
It might help to understand that Hofstadter wrote the book called “Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid” which won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 1979.
So, a play on the words Escher, Bach vs Eschenbach 😐
Wills,
You might be interested in this Jo Nova article from yesterday:
What if some inner-city leftist activists are neurologically broken, deluded like an AI trained on AI material? « JoNova
The article on the iterative degradation of AI quality when it feeds on itself is fascinating. I wonder if it is affecting the answers that you have so thoroughly documented here, to the extent that they should be treated with caution. It is too soon for me to have thought it through.
Geoff S
Thanks, Geoff. A fascinating article. I treat every claim with caution, AI or not …
w.
Geoff, obviously one can spend hours crafting prompt the AI response you want, or you could just use the AI as a powerful search engine, and use your experience to sort fact from fiction.
Not always easy – Nature abhors a vacuum, phlogiston, the luminiferous aether – all these were accepted as fact.
Just for fun, I asked Google AI “does adding CO2 to air make thermometers hotter”.
The response –
Ah, CO2 only makes thermometers hotter if there is a heat source to make the thermometers hotter!
10 seconds later (same AI – with 5 words added to the original prompt.)
On subsequent queries, which “fact” will the AI use? Maybe this one –
So CO2 makes thermometers hotter without using heat, does it?
Complete rubbish, but believed by the ignorant and gullible who boast about being smarter than a rat!
Presumably, the “specific instructions” are to ensure that you get the response you want. How do you the response is correct if you don’t know the answer in advance?
If you know the answer in advance, then forcing the AI to provide the answer you want is an exercise in self-aggrandisement, isn’t it?
In any case, any scientific hypothesis needs to be testable. Assuming that the inclusion of an untestable hypothesis in some mad pseudoscientific “model” somehow gives your untested speculation some validity might be an assumption too far.
If you are seeking recognition as a “citizen scientist”, I suggest you follow the scientific method. Many have done this before, and many scientific advances have come about due to the efforts of the self funded “amateur”.
Feel free to ignore any suggestion of course.
Willis didn’t “force” the AI model to do anything. He simply limited the AI to including only scientifically valid information.
And, of course, Willis decides what’s valid.
Pretty much at the beginning –
It gets worse later on. Willis has claimed that he is matter than a rat. I give him credit for being more cunning that one, too.
Whoops, typo. Apologies.
Wllis has claimed that he is smarter than a rat, not matter than a rat.
Oh well, it doesn’t really matter, does it?
He also regularly ignores his own rules. Particularly this one:
“For each claim, clearly distinguish between:
Directly observed facts (with measurement uncertainties)”
None of his claims about EM radiation have followed this rule. They’re all just fantasies and hallucinations.
How long did it take to respond? It would be interesting to present your question, in full, to a college class.
But.. Averages!
I am very bemused by your list of instructions. Why do you need to tell an AI that the UN hates Jews? Why not just tell it not to use such sources?
Incidently if you ask ChatGPT if the UN hates Jews this is it’s answer:
“No. The United Nations as an institution does not “hate Jews.” The UN is not a single person or government with a single opinion. It’s a political body made up of 193 nations (including Israel). Different member states have very different agendas, alliances, and voting blocs, which is why debates about Israel, Palestine, and antisemitism inside the UN can be extremely heated.
Why Saying “the UN Hates Jews” Is Incorrect1. The UN was partly founded after the Holocaust
Its creation was deeply shaped by the genocide of Jews and other groups. The UN’s genocide convention and human-rights frameworks were influenced by Jewish legal scholars like Raphael Lemkin.
2. The UN recognized Israel as a state in 1947
Israel’s existence as an independent country was supported by a UN vote.
3. The UN actively fights antisemitism
Various UN bodies track and condemn antisemitic violence worldwide, and UNESCO has programs to protect Holocaust education.
How to Understand the Real ProblemThe issue isn’t “hatred of Jews.” It is:
It’s possible to criticize UN policies toward Israel without concluding that the UN hates Jews as a people.”
Of course there is a lot of bold text there which is another one of your peeves.
Izaak, if you trust anything the UN says about Jews or the Middle East, more fool you.
UNRWA is a wholly owned subsidiary of Hamas. The UN, through UNRWA schools, has been teaching vulnerable Palestinian kids for decades to hate Jews and want to kill them. The UN doesn’t even admit that there were women raped on October 7th. The UN has lied about “genocide” in a war with the lowest civilian to soldier deaths in history. The UN has lied about famine in Gaza, improperly lowering the famine standards to support the lie. The UN has passed dozens and dozens of Resolutions against all things Jewish, while ignoring other nations doing the same things.
You’re free to be blind to all of that and more. Me, I live with my eyes open. I’m simply telling the AI the truth.
The UN hates Jews.
Every instruction in my set is the result of the AI coming up with some bogus answer. In this case the AI kept coming up with total lies about the Gaza War coming from various branches of the UN, so I put in that instruction.
Don’t like it? Fine. Leave it out of your instruction set. Done.
Best to you and yours,
w.
How exactly do you define famine? Israel deliberately ensured that less food entered Gaza than was needed to feed the population for several months. Remember that it is in charge of all of the entry ports and had complete control over all the aid entering Gaza. It also know how many people were living in Gaza and how much food was available after deliberately destroying the farms and preventing the Palestines from fishing. So while that might not be famine it is using hunger as a deliberate tactic in war on a civilian population which is certainly a war crime and as well as a crime against humanity.
Boy, you just sucked up all that propaganda like ice cream.
Do you not believe that Hamas stole the vast majority of aid of any kind after it entered Gaza?
[. . . ]
That was 2012 You can look up the most recent “starvation” submission put to the Israeli Government for yourself.
Who cares? Rabbi Yaacov Perrin claimed that even one million Arabs are “not worth a Jewish fingernail”, while celebrating Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli doctor who managed to murder 29 Palestinians and wounded 125, after opening fire in a mosque, before being beaten to death by the ungrateful Arab survivors.
Probably just more Arab propaganda. They should be grateful for being exterminated by Israelis – they only have starvation, sickness, oppression and misery to look forward to.
Ungrateful buggers.
As opposed to Hamas using food and hunger to control the population?
UN reports 83% of the food it sent in never made it to distribution centers with the bulk being confiscated by armed Hamas units and unarmed groups (no evidence Hamas set that up, but it is plausible if not likely).
What a silly response! Inducing famine in the enemy camp has been a part of warfare as long as warfare has been organized, and used as recently as the British naval blockade of Germany in WWI, and the responding German U-boat blockade of Britain in WWII. The insistence that Israel feed and care for the enemy “civilian population” (and, of necessity, its military) is yet another idiocy promulgated by the UN, which has never seen a war that it didn’t want to prolong by insisting on “proportional” (rather than overwhelming) response, and “ceasefires” every time one side gets an advantage!
The claim that it is “the lowest civilian to solider death in history” is also false. Internal IDF documents show that up until May 83% of the deaths in Gaza were civilians. See for example:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2025/aug/21/revealed-israeli-militarys-own-data-indicates-civilian-death-rate-of-83-in-gaza-war
This makes it one of the most deadly conflicts for civilians in recent decades and there is no way it is the lowest in history. On top of which the civilian death rate is only likely to have increased since May.
Civilian deaths were counted by Hamas. That’s all you need to know
In May, ana analysis of the Hamas Health Ministry data noted a few key changes.
First, the number of child deaths decreased significantly in the latest report.
Second, the ratio of male to female & children reversed with now ~70% of the reported deaths being in the group of males of military age.
Third, many of the reported deaths were from news articles and a website that did not vet claims.
It is a terrible situation and people are dying.
The real tragedy is we are being lied to and we do not know who we can trust.
Ask yourself why this conflict started in the first place, and why there were any civilian deaths at all.
Whacky stat interpretation Izaak, if there were no military….wouldn’t 100% of the deaths be civilian ?
Clarification.
The UN hates Jews.
No. The UN is not a living entity.
What is true is many, many prominent UN officials hates Jews, Israel, etc. and make erroneous unfounded hateful comments.
We must be precise and not use generalizations. I am sure you appreciate this given the AI rules of engagement you imposed.
“The UN recognized Israel as a state in 1947″
That was a very very very different UN. If you think that UN has any bearing on today’s, you are truly gullible.
Izaak, you say “Of course there is a lot of bold text there which is another one of your peeves.”
Nope. Not peeved at all.
You could have asked why that instruction is in there. It has to do with a peculiarity of the Perplexity interface. When you press the “Copy” button to copy an answer, it leaves out the spaces before and after bold text … I couldn’t find a workaround, so I just told it to leave out the bold text.
However, rather than ask, you made an assumption and it ended up biting you on the asparagus …
Sadly,
w.
Izaak, the UN is infested with Groupthink on just about every social matter.
It wasn’t always this way, the Un abided its purpose and charter for its first couple of decades (say 1948 until 1970), but since then, it got captured by “progressives” who infiltrated it as they moved on or got kicked out of leftist governments.
Now the UN is no more than a refuge for far left idiots and bigots.
The charter purpose of the UN was to prevent wars and to end them when they occurred.
I am at a loss to identify any the UN, in and of itself, prevented. Possibly a couple they helped end, but I am at a loss on that bit of history too.
Google AI.
Or, re the Stern Gang –
One man’s glorious freedom fighter is another man’s anti-British ant-Arab terrorist, seeking alliance with Nazi Germany.
Who cares? Opinions are worth what you are prepared to pay for them. Occasionally, I have been lucky enough to have been rewarded for mine.
Quite bizarre.
In 1945 the US, Britain, Russia and China wee staunch allies, Japan and Germany and Italy were enemies. Which has what to do with the UN today? Nothing.
UNRWA on the other hand has ben providing welfare services for Gaza and west bank since 1949. Their number one goal had been to suppress nation building as then UNRWA wouldn’t be needed anymore, keep the populace in a continuous stage of hatred to produce terrorists from one generation to the next. this practice my have been started in 1949 but its triumphs have been spattered on the new on a regular basis.
Not everyone in the Nazi part wanted to kill all he Jews.That doesn’t change the fact that Nazis hated Jews, just as rhe UN and UNRAW hate them today
I accept you have an opinion. Like me, you might consider that your opinion is superior to opposing one’s.
That’s life.
My opinion is based on easily verified facts.
But you don’t understand how radiative physics and CO2 work either so not a surprise.
I could be flippant and say that you don’t have to hate people to kill them, but I won’t.
You appear to be complaining that I accept that you value your own opinion, but you haven’t quoted anything that I said, so I don’t really know.
That’s your opinion. Inferior to mine, in my opinion.
so I don’t really know.
No surprise there.
That’s your opinion. Inferior to mine, in my opinion.
How is it that PhD physicists on both sides of the debate disagree with you, yet you remain convinced that they are both wrong? If you can prove them wrong, you would win a Nobel prize. So what are you waiting for? Do some experiments, write up the results and submit them for publication. Save the world Mr Flynn, if you are so smart, stop yammering away with the same arguments day after day after day on WUWT. Do the work and publish. Put up or shut up.
I don’t know. How could I? You haven’t named these physicists, nor quoted anything I’ve said that these unnamed PhD physicists “disagreed with”.
Why should I? I accept the results of the experiments of people like Tyndall, Einstein, Feynman, and so on.
Tyndall, in particular performed experiments that showed that adding CO2 to air makes thermometers colder, not hotter. Einstein and Feynman’s experiments confirm their theoretical work, which in turn explain Tyndall’s results in terms of current physical knowledge.
Adding CO2 to air does not make thermometers hotter. If you feel like proving me wrong, just provide experimental results. As Einstein said “No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right, a single experiment can prove me wrong.”
If you don’t like me regarding you as being ignorant and gullible, demonstrate that you’re not. A single experiment should do it.
You are deluded.
Tyndall performed experiments showing that introducing CO2 in between an infrared source and a thermometer resulted in a lower thermometer reading proving that CO2 absorbs infrared radiation. This does not mean that CO2 makes thermometers cooler because in these experiments the thermometer was never in contact with the CO2.
Tyndall couldn’t put the thermometer directly into the CO2 as then the infrared source would be heating up both the thermometer and the CO2 and it would be impossible to tell how much of the temperature rise was due to CO2 and how much directly by the thermometer. So he let the thermometer get to equilibrium temperature and then introduced CO2 in between the source and the thermometer to see if CO2 intercepted some of the IR or not.
So Tyndall never even did the experiment that you claim he did and the experiment that he did do shows that CO2 absorbs IR.
Get your facts straight.
Of course it does, reducing the amount of IR available to heat a thermometer more distant from the heat source! Read what Tyndall wrote, if you wish.
Well, he could have put his thermometer anywhere he wanted. He certainly managed to, in other experiments. But he didn’t, because wanted to see (and measure) the amount of radiation “blocked” by gases, liquids, – and solids! His thermopile can operate in a vacuum without any problem
He had to depend on wealthy patrons to donate suitable solids which were “IR” transparent for the ends of his tube, as he discovered that glass is relatively opaque to IR, resulting in much less energy even reaching the gases in his tube, and almost none reaching his thermometer.
You don’t seem to understand the thrust of Tyndall’s experiments.
Maybe you could consider the matter further, before making up your mind whether adding CO2 to air makes thermometers hotter – or not.
You obviously haven’t decided yet. At least ToldYouSo has, and has stated so.
Since you mention me by pen name, I have this input for you to consider:
You have repeatedly made the simple-minded, derisive, unfounded claim accusing me and other WUWT commenters that “You believe adding CO2 to air makes thermometers hotter.”
Well, you yourself are now forced to explain your first comment paragraph following your pasted in quote. To avoid any possible confusion, here, I’ll repeat it for you verbatim, with my bold emphasis added:
” ‘. . . the experiment that he did do shows that CO2 absorbs IR’.
“Of course it does, reducing the amount of IR available to heat a thermometer more distant from the heat source!”
Well, there we have it! Your own admission that YOU believe adding CO2 to air makes thermometers colder than they would otherwise be without CO2 content in air.
I await (although not anxiously) your explanation, based on accepted radiation physics and thermodynamics, how this can happen . . . in other words, where does the IR energy entering the atmosphere and being absorbed by CO2 (your admission) go if not into increasing the energy (as reflected in measurable temperature) of the atmosphere?
I accept facts – nothing extraordinary about that, is there? Well, there you go!
I’m glad you now agree that adding CO2 to air does not make thermometers hotter, but colder, in fact.
You claim that you have even said so repeatedly – you wrote
Now you agree that adding CO2 to air makes thermometers colder, if I understand your current views correctly.
Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.
“Now you agree that adding CO2 to air makes thermometers colder, if I understand your current views correctly.
Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.”
You are WRONG! I clearly stated that, by your own words, YOU assert that adding CO2 to air makes thermometers colder. I never stated or implied that I agreed with that conclusion.
I do realize that your strong confirmation bias leads you to make unsubstantiated claims about how others must think, but in such cases you are likewise just wrong.
Can a piece of paper make a thermometer cooler?
Of course it can – so can a cloud, or a Stevenson screen, or CO2 . . .
What a silly question! Why ask me? Do you think I am smarter than anybody else you could ask?
I’m a little surprised that you are appealing to my authority, but it takes all types, I suppose.
Ask Google AI “can a piece of paper make a thermometer cooler by blocking a heat source”. The answer is “Yes, . . ”
I don’t really blame you for not trusting AI, and asking me instead because I know more, but in this case Google AI happens to be correct.
How about a brick?
Are you stupid? Don’t you know how to ask a question of so-called artificial intelligence?
You appear to about as thick as a brick – or maybe two, if you consider I underestimated your thickness.
Humour me.
How about a brick?
Yes or no?
“A brick walks into a bar . . . ”
Humorous eniough?
That is neither a yes nor a no response.
Can a brick make a thermometer cooler?
yes or no.
You are not terribly bright, are you?
So you’re unable to answer the question then? I thought you were really smart?
I did answer it. Don’t blame me if you can’t read English.
Thank you for your kind thought, I am really smart. Willis Eschenbach claimed to be smarter than a rat. I suppose you’ll claim you’re smarter than Willis?
Do you think Willis will acknowledge that you are smarter than him? Otherwise, you might have to settle for being dumber than Willis, and possibly dumber than a rat.
Check with Willis and get back to me.<g>
I did answer it. Don’t blame me if you can’t read English.
Could you quote the exact words where you answered the question? I don’t believe you did.
“yes or no.” – as per your precise request for a “yes or no” answer.
I don’t care what you believe, if you’re dumber than a rat. Why should I?
I see. Your answer was “yes or no” meaning you don’t actually know.
EXCELLENT! +42 intergalactic credits.
The UN also authorized a military response to Communist North Korea invading the south on Russia’s behalf, because Russia was having a snit and boycotting the UN. No one calls the UN anti-communist.
Great article, but I think it needs the clarification that wherever evaporation of liquid water takes place—and this is pretty much all over Earth’s surface with the exception of those areas covered by permanent ice (I’ll not digress into heat removal via sublimation of ice)—not just the ITCZ, such evaporation actively cools the underlaying surface, be it water or land. It’s just that in the ITCZ the rate of evaporative cooling coupled with the added effect of increasing cloud coverage EXCEEDS the rate of incoming solar heating as a function of actual cloud coverage.
IMHO, Willis is “spot on” in explaining that Earth’s inherent thermoregulation results from the presence of its liquid water surface (let alone that liquid seawater comprises about 71% of Earth’s total surface area) and that being an inherent part of both its hydrologic cycle as well as being an integral part of its albedo variations via generation of areal cloud coverage.
This is all part of Le Châtelier’s principle as applied to Earth’s global climate, with the consideration of the many negative feedback loops that exist to guarantee the “short term” (i.e., tens of thousands of years) stability of Earth’s climate, allowing for the documented existence of tens-to-hundreds of millions of years duration Ice Ages and the shorter glacial/interglacial cycles on the order of 100,000 year periodicity.
Or you could just accept that a big blob of mostly glowing hot matter, a long way from the Sun, is continuing to cool – very, very, slowly.
But of course you believe that adding CO2 to air makes thermometers hotter, don’t you?
In your humble opinion, of course, which like mine, has no value at all.
But, of course, no matter how many times I have responded to that same simple-minded question from you with the simple answer “No“, you persist in continuing to doing so.
Carry on as you wish.
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
— frequently misattributed to Albert Einstein
Excellent. At least you have stated that you don’t believe that adding CO2 to air makes thermometers hotter.
Hopefully, you also agree that the pseudoscientific paper titled –
is complete nonsense, being based on the premise that adding CO2 to air, does, indeed, make thermometers hotter. Mind you, one of the authors, the mathematician Gavin Schmidt once publicly claimed that a 38% likelihood of a particular event made it more likely than not!
It’s a start. Keep it up.
Correct as far as it goes.
The reason for cooling in the blue area is the fact that the energy taken up by the evaporative phase change for water is greater than the energy required to induce evaporation.
Check out values for the evaporation coefficient of water.
Thus evaporation will always require more energy than the daytime solar input and always takes the deficit from the surrounding water molecules.
Excuse me, but evaporation is a change of enthalpy without a change in temperature (scientifically defined in units of energy per unit mass due to liquid-to-vapor phase change). Thus, without further knowledge/assumptions it simply cannot be related to “solar input” as commonly expressed as power (Watts) or power flux (W/m^2).
The regulation of surface temperature is due to convective overshoot. If the surface temperature of open ocean water exceeds 30C then the updraft that occurs when instability occurs, will drive moisture above 14,000m where it cools to form micron size ice that has very low decent velocity.
The best place to observe the process is over the Bay of Bengal or Arabian see when they first go into convective instability -typically during July. The SST will reach close to 32C before the first instability occurs.
If you look at daily OLR at the onset over these regions then you will find values below 130W/m^2 over tropical ocean that means the average radiating temperature is very low, which requires at least 1mm of ice at very high altitude. The ice is persistent and reflective although not necessarily visible from the ground. So lower surface sunlight for a few days.
Convective overshoot can also be observed over cyclones and in tornados. Both these are due to convective instability but not cyclic events as observed with monsoon in the tropics.
“Bay of Bengal or Arabian see”
I sea what you did there.
Thanks, Rick. And what causes “convective overshoot”???
Thunderstorms.
w.
Not every thunderstorm. Only those that occur over water where the SST is above 30C. It is the 30C is the sustainable limit.
For the condition over ocean at onset of monsoon, overshoot is due to the atmospheric column having an excess of energy below the LFC. More heat in the atmosphere below the LFC than needed to restore equilibrium for a sustainable column, which happens to be 30C.
A column at equilibrium over 30C ocean will have only 1mm of water above 11,000m. When a column is imbalanced, the updraft will carry more than 1mm above 11,000m. Moisture gets carried above 14,000m where air pressure is very low and the saturated air rapidly cools to form fine ice. Too fine to come down with the rain and hail. So it slowly descends. Causes OLR to be very low because it has low radiating temperature and reflects some sunlight although it may bot be even visible.
Here is a map of some cyclone tracks, including long distances over several days over desert land.
How are these cyclones maintained by convective instability when there is dry desert land, not water, below them?
Geoff S
It’s the magic of CO2, doncha know!
The desert is not always dry. Right now the atmospheric water over most of Australia is more than 30mm, which is about the lower limit of supporting convective instability. See attached.
There are next to no South Atlantic cyclones because the Amazon retains enough atmospheric moisture to support convective instability. Australia is getting more Amazonian each year.
Willis,
From my beginnings into “climate science” in 1992, I have tried to rationalize why there is so much emphasis on radiative physics and greenhouse gases, leading to acceptance of math like “climate sensitivity” in terms of doubling greenhouse gases in the air,
Recently, I have been expressing a summary this way:
If a bushfire warms the surrounding air, in time that warming will be sent to space and the earth system will revert to within the narrow range of long-term overall historic temperatures.
If a volcano erupts and heats the surrounding air, in time that warming will be sent to space and the earth system will revert to within the narrow range of long-term overall historic temperatures.
If a greenhouse gas warms the air through radiation, in time that warming will be sent to space and the earth system will revert to within the narrow range of long-term overall historic temperatures.
……………….
So, why put the greenhouse gas effect on a pedestal as if it is something to fear?
There are many mechanisms that can heat and cool parcels of air. The heat from sunlight varies. Clouds moderate temperatures. Your clear example of thunderstorms is another example. At any moment in time, there will be many such storms around the globe. They are not rare, they are part of the way that over a very long time, the natural environment has shaped itself to involve the required mechanisms that follow from the interplay of solid, liquid and gas that is the environment in which we live. The logical result of that interplay is a state resembling a long-term equilibrium, which is what we observe.
…..
Greenhouse gas effects exist, but they are far from the whole explanation of global temperature variations.
Geoff S
Absolutely correct. Just like the internal heat of the Earth, in time. The Earth is cooling – slowly but remorselessly.
Warming is heat, thermal energy.
Thermal energy does not transfer through a vacuum.
Control the language, control the ideas.
The Climate Syndicate wants everyone to believe IR and heat are the same.
Maybe we have a “failure to communicate” here, as the warder said. Sunlight warms me, after travelling through 300,000,000 km of cold, dark, vacuum.
Possibly my reason for avoiding the use of “thermal energy” wherever possible. I’m probably paraphrasing Feynman when I say that scientific language may not necessarily have to be precise, but it needs to be clear.
Probably looks like nit-picking, but I think you might understand what I mean.
Because heat (thermal energy) is the only form of energy measured by a thermometer, the CS sincerely believes that all aspects of “climate” can be measured by averaging a bunch of thermometer readings. All other forms of atmospheric energy are irrelevant!
Boldly declared, but simply wrong. Both the latent heat of fusion (e.g., liquid water transitions to/from ice) and the latent heat of vaporization (e.g., liquid water transitions to/from vapor) are fundamental processes of Earth’s hydrologic cycle and, in particular, the formation and dissolution of visible clouds.
The relatively large changes in enthalpy involved with either type of phase change happen at a constant temperature, and are thus not measurable using a thermometer.
Al Gore and his “run away greenhouse effect” so his investment group could make billions in cap and trade through the Chicago Exchange he helped found after he co-authored the Kyoto Accords.
It fell apart when his push for cap and trade legislation failed to pass Congress.
It was also an official from the Clinton-Gore administration that rewrote, to the great angst of the scientists, the summary to state the anthropogenic signal in the climate was strong, as opposed to the scientists stating there was no signal.
Last report I saw, the investment group via “carbon credit” trading was worth over $11B.
A UN official from the environmental group back in the mid 70s in reference to the coming ice age scare state (words to this effect), “We don’t know if CO2 is the cause, but it is something we can quantify and tax.” The exact reference seems to have been eradicated from the Internet.
No doubt. Unfortunately, nobody seems to be game to say what a greenhouse gas is actually supposed to do, in any useful sense.
No gas, when mixed with air (and not having an exothermic chemical reaction), makes thermometers hotter. That’s just an ignorant and gullible pseudoscientific fantasy.
Global temperature variations are just that – variations. The lithosphere, aquasphere, and atmosphere seem to act chaotically. Variations must be present in any chaotic system, and are unpredictable. Seems there is much ado about nothing, in some ways.
Willis, complete nonsense, as usual. No “heat” gets advected from the tropics to the poles. That’s just stupid – a pseudoscientific fantasy, but apparently widely believed.
As you say –
(Not quite right, but you said what you said)
There are a couple of points here.
I suppose I should explain my “not quite right” statement.
“The more sunshine it is absorbing on a constant basis” is just misleading word salad. There is no “constant basis” for sunlight, and an object left in the Sun will heat up, and promptly cool down after sunset. Even the Earth’s surface has done so, and additionally loses a little internal heat, resulting in the Earth having cooled over the past four and a half billion years.
Some ignorant and gullible people believe that an object not in contact with a heat source will just keep absorbing energy until it is as hot as the source itself! This is one of the premises of your ridiculous “Steel Greenhouse” and completely ignores the inverse square law of radiation intensity, which you imply doesn’t matter “in practice”.
As usual, you say “I can defend my words.”, but you refuse to do so with facts – just more implications, and insinuations. Maybe you can, but you don’t!
You even admit that your rule of thumb is –
In other words, you refuse to be held accountable for anything you say.
Very wise.
Michael, I’m not smart enough to refute your arguments. Maybe you are right and Willis is wrong, I don’t know. But you can’t say he’s unaccountable for the things he says. He spends lots of time here and elsewhere explaining what he says and then defending those statements to people who pose reasonable objections and questions. Attacking his character doesn’t advance the discourse here.
You assume that Flynn’s goal is to advance discourse.
I just did, because it’s true. If you have the time and motivation, you’ll see (on this blog) Willis’ personal attacks on not only me, but others. I’m more convinced by facts, rather than opinions or wishful thinking.
Willis treats anyone who disagrees with him, and produces facts to support their disagreement, as unreasonable, and would prefer that the person be banned. At the very least, Willis refuses to openly acknowledge that he believes that adding CO2 to air makes thermometers hotter (in the context of “climate change”, if anyone wants to play silly semantic games).
He neither confirms – nor denies. Recently, Willis claimed he was smarter than a rat. He may well be, and I’ll agree that he is at least as cunning as your average rat. Willis is free to assert he is neither smarter nor more cunning than a rat, of course.
I value his opinion equally as much as he values mine. That’s fair, wouldn’t you say ? [g]
Given the planet rotates, there is absolutely no way a steel block left in the sun could warm “on a constant basis.”
Heat is a curious word with many common language, context driven definitions.
In scientific precise language, heat is defined as the flow of thermal energy across the temperature gradient (hot to cold) with the transfer mechanism being kinetic interactions of molecules along the transfer path.
One cannot transfer heat by advection or any other means as heat is, by definition, an energy transfer phenomenon.
Control the words, control the ideas. The Climate Syndicate has that training in Chapter 1 of their propaganda manual.
Too many people see the SB equation and incorrectly try to make conclusions from it. That equation is a state equation. It defines a result based on instantaneous values. Those values at a given point in time do not have any relationship to time included. For example, in the SB equation for two bodies, T1 and T2 can vary independently in time. The only way to adequately assess the ongoing changes is to use calculus and time based gradients.
This page has a short, concise definition of radiant heat transfer.
Radiant Heat Transfer | Engineering Library
One should note that it only covers a given state. It does not address the fact the different bodies, i.e., soil and CO2 have different masses and therefore heat transfer over time can differ quite a lot.
We’ve all seen the radiation graphs that have Planck curves drawn in to show what an ideal radiative spectrum would look like. Again, this is at one given point in time. We know that the earth is heated in a sine wave and cools exponentially, which means those Planck curves should be smeared all over the graph if a 24 hour cycle was depicted.
In case you haven’t noticed, my pet peeve is trying to draw conclusions from arithmetic averages that are done on instantaneous measurements of time changing variables. It makes my engineering degree that required hours and hours of calculus to develop relationships for time varying phenomena seem like a waste of time. Why didn’t we just measure maximum and minimum values, average them, and use that as the nominal performance?
A further cooling occurs because the rain is falling from several thousand feet up in the air, where it’s much cooler.
This point deserves debate.
One of the factors related to cold temperatures at high altitude is air density.
Temperature is the average kinetic energy of molecules impacting a thermometer in classical physics.
There are other factors, of course, that cause the high altitude water to be cooler, but it is not just because it is colder up there.
Food for thought: If the kinetic energy of water molecules at the same at high altitude as low, but the density is 10% or 1% it will be colder just due to the paucity of molecules.
Sparta, more complications – the raindrops may be cooler, but of course can’t be all that high – otherwise they would be ice, if above the freezing level, I suppose.
Anyway, the drops fall, gaining energy. When they strike the ground, the kinetic energy is converted to heat. Strangely, initially, IA claims the kinetic energy from a ball hitting the ground is dissipated as heat, while a drop of water cools. Apparently, according to AI, a drop of oil heats up, but a drop of water doesn’t. Friction against the air cools water, but heats anything else.
Finally, Google AI responded –
This is a bit vague, but at least agrees with my thoughts, Willis doesn’t seem to know much about physics, which leads him to jump to some odd conclusions.
Wow, MF is an A**hole.
True, D.
In any case, I’d said:
“A further cooling occurs because the rain is falling from several thousand feet up in the air, where it’s much cooler.”
My thanks to Sparta for the quotation. He says “There are other factors, of course, that cause the high altitude water to be cooler, but it is not just because it is colder up there.”
I didn’t say there weren’t other factors. There’s the heating of the parcel of water vapor, liquid water, and air from the heat of condensation. However, this additional heat expands the parcel, causing it to rise and cool. Then, as the water drops fall, they are cooled by evaporation into the surrounding dry air, and they are warmed by the descending entrained air which warms as it descends.
It’s a complex relationship, but my point is clear. The rain at the surface, for a variety of reasons, is on the order of 2°C to 5°C colder than the ocean. This is an additional cooling method that does not occur in household refrigerators.
As to MF, he seems unaware that a drop of water cools by evaporation as it is falling (google “virga”), but a drop of oil doesn’t … a huge difference.
w.
How about this, if Velocity = sqrt( 2 * g * height )
So for rain falling from 5000 m (16,400 FT) you get a velocity of 313 m/s.
But terminal velocity of rain 8 m/s and hail is around 43 m/s.
Now those rock stars can “Get their money for nothing and their chicks for free” according to Dir Straits, but most engineers know Changing a masses velocity takes energy and friction is never free.
So does their model leave most of the energy up in the air where is really is and what is the effect on surface temperatures?
And you didn’t say there were. Vague as usual. Another mistake?
perplexity AI –
Google AI
In your mind “heating” is really “cooling”, is it? It looks like even your favourite AI agrees with me. Maybe you could compose a three page prompt, telling it to ignore physical laws? You could always say a tiny amount of cooling is the same as heating, I suppose.
The rain at the surface, for a variety of reasons, is on the order of 2°C to 5°C colder than the ocean
Which surface? Which ocean? Sometimes? Always? You’re being vague again, Willis. Even NASA says –
itself a little vague, so here’s Google AI –
You see that rain is sometimes warmer than the surface. Go on, tell me liquid water falling as rain is colder than ice!
By the way, virga, by definition, is precipitation which doesn’t reach the surface. Are you trying to claim it cools the surface? Sounds like a bit of a red herring to me.
Carry on with the fairytale, Willis. It’s proving entertaining.
Wow, just wow!
Willis, these data compilations and graphs are extremely interesting, and I am amazed at the quantity of work you push out the door, but I just about despair of ever figuring out exactly what they are telling me because there is so much going on in, Figure 4 as an example, that is disconnected from the axes of the plot. By this I mean the following.
Take surface temperature as the independent variable. In addition to temperature it is apparent that latitude, water vapor mixing ratio, and even season of the year are also involved. And then there is the issue of the surface temperature not being measured directly in the Ceres data, but is being modeled. I suspect that neither axis is independent.
I don’t want to make this comment too long, so let me finish by just going back to Figure 4 for a moment. In the text you say this:
The graph heading says “Total surface absorbed radiation”, but the quoted comment is obviously speaking of what temperature would be required to remove all that absorbed radiation from the surface. I know this may seem like a pedantic point, but to truly cool the surface that Stefan-Boltzmann radiation has to leave the planet. However, it doesn’t entirely because even in polar regions there is still water vapor and CO2 in the atmosphere, which returns surface radiation to the surface — in effect under this condition the warmer the surface becomes the more downward travelling LWIR is absorbed at the surface. It’s positive feedback. This is likely why there is so much scatter in the values from continents.
Another way to look at this situation is to say that from some height above the surface the effective emissivity of the surface is not 1.0 (the SB law) but is a fraction. For the Earth as a whole the fraction is 0.6 or so, but locally it is dependent on height, mixing ratio, etc. So, if the red curve is to be interpreted as a “theoretical value” it must be pushed to slightly higher temperatures than what Figure 4 suggests, it can’t be placed on the figure as a sharp curve because there is too much else involved.
For good reason. Willis manages to say nothing definite – at great length. Wills grandly talks about “Climate regulation”, but doesn’t seem to realise that climate is the statistics of weather observations.
Now, even the slightly strange mathematician Gavin Schmidt (who believed that a 38% probability meant “near certainty”) wasn’t that confused, and clearly titled his pseudoscientific fairytale
Temperature, at least, not “climate”. Willis claims that he is smarter than a rat, but Schmidt seems smarter (or at least more knowledgeable) than the ignorant and gullible Willis!
Kevin makes excellent points….the red line on fig 2 appears to be simply SB emission at that temperature from a black body with emissivity of about .97….go way out to the right on the yellow “actual temperature” and you are at about 650 watts. Draw a horizontal line back to the SB curve and you are at about 450 watts. My interpretation is that the “missing” 200 watts is simply about 100 watts or so of evaporation and sensible heat loss from the surface, 50 watts or so of radiative loss through the atmospheric window, plus surface reflection. So the relevance of the graph depends on how good the EBAF folks did their computer modelling…
Thanks, Kevin. You say:
Is surface temperature “independent” of absorbed solar energy? No, it’s not. It has a complex relationship which is demonstrated by the curve in Figure 4.
Actually, the red line on the graph is labeled “Theoretical no-loss S/B temperature.” If there is no sensible or latent heat loss from a surface, then there can’t be an atmosphere, and the outgoing radiation will equal the incoming radiation. Sorry for the lack of clarity.
And no, to “cool the surface”, all you have to do is remove heat from the surface to the atmosphere. Only ~ half of that will return to the surface in that or some other location, so the global surface ends up cooler.
My best to you and yours,
w.
Partly correct, that’s the definition of cooling, more or less, but nobody has to “do” anything, and no, “heat” from the surface doesn’t necessarily go “to the atmosphere”. Sorry about that, but at night the atmosphere cools, as does the surface.
The atmosphere just reduces the rate of heat reaching and leaving the surface, and additionally reducing the amount from the Sun which reaches the surface.
The result is the reduction of the variation in temperature extremes compared with the airless Moon, for example.
I know you don’t want to believe me. Maybe you’ll believe perplexity –
Now, even assuming you will check with perplexity, here’s a follow up about “greenhouse gases”
You don’t have to believe the perplexity AI either. Maybe you’ll can compose a multi page prompt telling the AI to ignore everything you don’t agree with, and just regurgitate opinions that support your own.
I guess you won’t be interested in the last question I asked, but maybe others are. It was “Without greenhouse gases would the atmosphere still prevent temperatures dropping as low as the Moon.”
And perplexity’s answer is true, particularly if water vapour is included as a “greenhouse gas”, as Tyndall pointed out (although he didn’t use the term “greenhouse gas”). No heating, just a reduction in the rate of cooling.
Feel free to quote anything you believe needs correcting. I appreciate any errors being pointed out.
Erps:
“H2O has an atomic weight of 18. Air has an atomic weight of 29, being mostly a mix of O2 with a weight of 32 and N2 with a weight of 28. So water is only ~ 2/3 the weight of air.“
You left out the crucial word ‘vapour’. !
Thanks, RK, fixed.
w.
“In addition, because the descending dry air between the thunderstorms has little of the main radiatively active gas, water vapor, this allows the surface radiation to cool faster via increased radiation into space.”
Less water vapour also means increased heating of the surface, by the solar near infrared which water vapour absorbs, like in the horse latitudes.