Open Thread

For decades, the “heat” “trapping” misconception about rising concentrations of CO2 has been pushed relentlessly to oppose the use of natural hydrocarbons as fuel.
  
Here a time lapse video of Band 16 visualizations from GOES East for the full disk of the planet is revisited. In my opinion, this helps to counter the line of misdirected persuasion using the static “warming” tendency from radiative transfer computation. First posted in 2023.

https://youtu.be/Yarzo13_TSE
Here are the key points, copied and pasted from the text description at the Youtube video:
***************
Readme: Are emissions of non-condensing greenhouse gases (GHGs) such as CO2 a risk to the climate system? Watch from space to see whether the concept of a radiative heat “trap” explains the observed result.

This time-lapse video captures 7 recent days of hourly images generated by NOAA from high resolution full-disk radiance data from the GOES East geostationary satellite for Band 16.
NOAA calls this the CO2 Longwave IR (infrared) band. It is centered at a wavelength of 13.3 microns, at the edge of the “atmospheric window” part of the infrared spectrum. The “brightness temperature” color scale for visualization is such that the radiance at 50C on the scale (red) is 13 times the radiance at -90C (white.) It is in this narrow band of wavelengths that a significant part of the claimed static warming effect of incremental CO2 concentrations is computed.

So what? The emitter output is obviously not that of a passive radiative insulating layer. The motion of the atmosphere is a response to absorbed energy and to the rotation of the planet. These dynamics change everything about where to expect the energy involved in the static warming effect (i.e. the GHG “forcing”) experienced at the surface to end up. The formation and dissipation of clouds dominates the overall result, and the overturning circulations at local, regional, and global scale produce highly variable emitter outputs over time and location. It is all strongly self-regulating as the motion delivers just enough absorbed energy from the surface to high altitude and from the tropics to the poles to be more easily emitted to space as longwave radiation.

The atmosphere is the authentic model of its own performance as an emitter and as a controller of longwave emission from the surface. What do we see and learn from watching it perform? The visualization helps us grasp that heat energy cannot be made to accumulate on land and in the oceans to harmful effect by what increasing concentrations of non-condensing GHGs do in the atmosphere. And for whatever warming has been experienced and measured down here, the minor effect of increasing GHGs cannot be isolated for reliable attribution.

So as I see it, is there risk of harmful warming from GHGs? No. We can see from space that it doesn’t work that way.

[Remainder omitted, as the color scale relation to “brightness temperature” and to radiance is given below.]
**********
Radiance vs “Brightness Temperature” used by NOAA for the visualization. I plotted the equation from the user manual and matched up the color scale to it.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qy4QnSkaJZeLIeC4R7-600ZuctPEUwaz/view?usp=sharing

The significance of Band 16 to the computed incremental static warming effect of 2XCO2 (i.e. 560 ppmv vs 280 ppmv) is shown in magenta in this plot I generated using MODTRAN.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/175qnVngPPfZJKUPUH13u6t5wolTBl0qi/view?usp=sharing

In short, the performance of the longwave emitter is all about the motion-driven formation and dissipation of clouds, along with the highly time-dependent rise and decay of emission to space from the skin surfaces of land and oceans under clear skies.

That is all for now.