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A place for discussion
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September 13, 2026 2:10 am
The proposed Amendment to the Fifth National Climate Assessment was released for public comment on August 25th. The comment period is now closed. There were 106 comments, but none have been posted yet.
Here is my comment, which presumably will be posted soon along with all the others.
“This comment is in support of the stated objectives of this Amendment to NCA5, including the emphasis on Gold Standard Science. In addition to the issue of the implausible emissions scenarios, the Amendment should also inform the public that there are large unresolvable uncertainties in ANY of the time-step-iterated climate projections, under ANY emissions scenario.
The May 23, 2025 Executive Order 14303 entitled “Restoring Gold Standard Science” includes a requirement under Sec. 4: “(c) When using scientific information in agency decision-making, employees shall transparently acknowledge and document uncertainties, including how uncertainty propagates throughout any models used in the analysis.”
The investigation of Earth’s climate system response to anthropogenic influence, mainly through rising concentration of CO2 and other IR-active gases, has relied on computer simulations of the earth system. These models are time-step-iterated computed representations of the land, oceans, and atmosphere in which incident solar radiation is absorbed or reflected, and in which the surface and the atmosphere (including clouds) end up emitting longwave radiation back to space. The climate state resulting from the computation at each time step is passed to the next. The evolution of a global average surface air temperature is regarded as a key metric. Therefore the propagation of uncertainty must be addressed. The practice has been to pre-stabilize the simulations in a pre-industrial control exercise, and then to apply pre-determined time-scheduled “forcing” scenarios. But this approach does not negate the inherent problem of accumulating uncertainty in the statistical sense of the reliability of the result.
To illustrate the critical issue arising from the use of such models for policy guidance, a prompted analysis by the Grok 3 AI agent was performed. The analysis uses the published uncertainty (best case – even if unrealistic) of the geometric average value of Total Solar Irradiance. This uncertainty is +/- 0.13 W/m^2. [1] The external value of TSI is posed in this exercise as the only source of uncertainty as the time steps proceed. The model is otherwise assumed to be perfect in computing a surface temperature response. The resulting uncertainty after only one year of iteration is about +/-4C on a 95% confidence basis. For the details, please see the attached document. This unresolvable buildup of uncertainty is inherent to the time-step-iterated computation and therefore cannot be ignored. It is orders of magnitude too large for reliable diagnosis or prognosis of the hypothesized surface temperature response being investigated. The honest conclusion must be, in this writers view, that none of the time-step-iterated models produces, or has ever produced, any objectively valid policy-actionable information relevant to anthropogenic warming from GHGs.
[1] Loeb, et al, 2018 https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/clim/31/2/jcli-d-17-0208.1.xml referenced here https://ceres.larc.nasa.gov/data/documentation/
P.S. The simplified exercise described herein suffices to demonstrate the issue. But also, in the published literature, this 2019 paper stands out on this topic -“Propagation of Error and the Reliability of Global Air Temperature Projections” by Patrick Frank. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/earth-science/articles/10.3389/feart.2019.00223/full
Thank you for considering this comment.
Attachment: Grok_X_Propagation of Uncertainty_081925-2.pdf”
The attachment will be linked in a reply.
Here is a link to the attachment. Notice that Grok goes straight to JCGM 100:2008 (the “GUM” guide for uncertainty in measurement) to process the request.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1j56NA0qRZvVMdosxjzOkLoXvwbKg9Ds1/view?usp=drive_link
Even more importantly, “downwelling long wave radiation” from colder clouds to warmer surface does not exist.
The fundamental flaw is not appreciating the difference between “radiance” and electro-magnetic radiation.
Trenberth’s “energy budget” is best described as a cartoon. It has no relationship to anything that physically occurs in Earth’s atmosphere.
Electro-magnetic radiation is full described by Maxwell’s theory of the electrocmagnetic field:
A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field
Author(s): J. Clerk Maxwell
A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field
And please take note of the title “the Electromagnetic Field”
Only one field so energy transfer in that field is unidirectional at any point and time. There are no “net” fluxes. Just one flux driven from high pressure source to lower pressure sink.
Also equation (71) determines that the speed of travel of an EMR wave in a vacuum is given by the electrical and magnetic properties of the field. Maxwell worked that out in 1865 and we still see unscientific nonsense where radiance is confused with radiation energy flux.
Radiance is more closely related to EMR pressure than energy transfer. Big difference that not many in climate science understand. Michael Mishchenko spent most of his distinguished career at NASA GISS trying to rectify this gross misunderstanding. However we are still left with ARGO buoys being the fundamental basis for determining Earth’s radiation energy budget. The CERES stuff is a wet finger approach with errors as high as 20W/m^2.
Corrected links. I hate it when that happens. Somehow additional characters get added when pasting into the comment box.
For this one.
https://ceres.larc.nasa.gov/data/documentation/
And this one.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/earth-science/articles/10.3389/feart.2019.00223/full
September 13, 2026 2:43 am
Hello everyone, I hope you’re doing well.
I haven’t posted on an Open Thread for quite some time! What’s new in France?…
It seems that the fear of a total AI Apocalypse (confirmed by Geoffrey Hinton, Nobel Prize winner in Physics and “grandfather of AI,” as they say) has, for a while, replaced the fear of the climate Apocalypse as the “sum of all fears.” This suits the media, who copy one another and sometimes pick up AFP (Agence France Presse, the official body for checking media compliance, which has an established presence, and certainly does not make France proud!) dispatches.
I looked into Jacob Coxon’s “revelation,” and the synchronicity of retweets by public figures and media coverage. It’s all too perfect and precisely timed not to have been premeditated. Lots of people are delighted to exclaim that “James Cameron warned us with Terminator 2” (I suppose they forget that there is a Terminator 1…) Do they expect an Austrian bodybuilder with a titanium skeleton and a leather jacket to come and massacre us all against a backdrop of blues-rock? It would certainly be quite a spectacle, but I have my doubts. Humanity has nevertheless proven, through its addiction to technology, that it was “Bad to the bone”!
Well, what else… Ah, yes: Fabien Roussel, national secretary of the French Communist Party, defended the Cuban regime on television (on a public-service channel, paid for by French taxpayers.) How can anyone still doubt the record of an ideology whose staggering atrocity can be measured in piles of tens of millions of corpses?
The Bretons are also fighting against a wind-farm project that threatens the landscape harmony of a commune home to the “Valley of the Saints,” a very singular and very strange place populated solely by tall statues. I went there a long time ago. It’s worth seeing!
(A link showing images of the place:
September 13, 2026 3:29 am
In Argentina, one week before official start of Spring, the pass to Chile, Cristo Redentor, is closed again for snow and ice. The new record for consecutive days closed was 34 days, and the total is about 50 days closed, making new records by 8 days and 10 days. It snowed yesterday in Mendoza, Argentina, and this years wine grape crop is damaged. Is this widely reported? NO? That’s because a hot day is Climate, and a cold day is Weather.
September 13, 2026 3:31 am
Pursuant to the continuing Theme of Magic Numbers [like unto Maria G Mayer’s famed ‘26p’ & ‘34p’, of 1950]
YES there must be such, as these are the Prime Characteristics (aka ‘Adiabatic Invariants) of our SpaceShip Earth’s Tropical Lower-Troposphere’s Rainy Season (aka ‘Monsoon’);
[So …] Turning our attention firmly toward a ‘Limited Picture‘, i.e. away from ‘Weather‘ & its never-ceasing stormy excesses-statistical-noise; these are, vis:
— epsilon = 1.652 (is Eschenbach’s empirical efficiency ratio), or its (fourth)root, 1.133 ~ 17/15, reflecting the magic [critical & absolute] temperatures, denoted in standard-units by
— T ~ 30 C (86 F) aka 303 K, as the (sustained) Sea-Surface+ Temperature, never to be exceeded in the open ocean’s mixing (surface) layer, at pressure 100–kPa (hereafter %) and zero(km)altitude;
— the pure number 24, being the total of one (1) H2O molecule for every (23) dry-air molecules;
— T = negative (-) 6 C (21 F) aka 267 K, being the so-called frost-point, at ~ +5–km aloft, the ratio to which is (303/267) <=> 17/15 or 1.133, as stated at top. The residual (2/15 ~ 0.1333) representing the [Carnot] efficiency of the perpetual primary ‘heat engine’-tropospheric, empowering the ‘ionic wind’, driving the ocean & sky currents, building a whole new-world biosphere, one molecular assembly unit at a time.
But what (else) sustains & characterizes the eternal-perpetual tropical maelstrom? Soon, or rather below, these shall be specified by …
the entropy (conserved / isentropic) and entropy-changes, associated with the ‘heat-transfers‘ at sea-level (ground) & at ceiling-level (55-kPa, +5-km), as related to (intrinsic) enthalpy & (internal-)energy changes, associated to the discrete & quantized count(s) of hydrogen (H-) bonding interactions …
… in a way that is immensely satisfying … in bounding (limiting) the thermal-EM-radiation (heat, infrared) quanta in association with the condensed phases (frost aloft, liquid sea-spray below).
But let us not digress too deeply thereinto, for the moment.
— Electrical aka ionic (charges) & their structures, are neither primarily molecular, nor vaguely aerosol, but rather discrete-supramolecular units, magic numbers 30-32-126 [-2] of quantized charge (2 fundamental, e-, units); these not only move freely, according to Electrophoretic Law, but also form the structural web of the ~ rigid walls of the cells — convective ascending & descending.
Tho’ few in number (ratio) they are essential in structure & function, not to say electrical-mechanical-function, essential to the stability & rate-characteristics of the steam-frost-ion Heat-Engine of the tropical-troposphere, primary in the Global sense.
They are met, high in the Sky’s kilometer-thick ‘frost-layer’, by descending positive (+)-charged cluster ions, namely certain ‘hydrates’ of the hydronium (H3O)+ ion.
Only upon the neutralization reaction, whereby a single (30,32;126)^[-2] ion meets two (2) such cations (H3O+) — a reverse electrolysis, in electrochemical terms — do they become neutralized,
Hence impervious to the immense electric-fields everywhere imposing, and secondly overcome their mutual inter-repulsion & inducing the special Condensation known as Precipitation
… per R. B. Fuller’s glorious dictum: ‘Condensation is Electrolytic‘…
via the descending (convective) cells of that immense (laterally) field of cells.
And thus one may note the cooling-rains (+15 C) as experienced at turbulently-spraying tropical sea-level.
But what of this magic-numbers {30,32}, so close in magnitude to the magic {26p,30n) of the nucleon counts of super-abundant 56Fe?
Thirty (30) is the count of cations, mainly sodium, Na+, seldom ammonium NH4+ (and ~ never hydronium);
Thirty-two (32) represents the count of anions, mainly chloride (Cl-) & bromide (Br-) but adventitiously substituted by molecular anions bicarbonate (HCO3-, containing demonic CO2 in basic form) or bisulfate (HSO4- the SO2,3 content) or even organic acid (formate, acetate of natural origin).
These are so arranged, in conjunction with the ‘tetra-hydrate‘ uniquely 126-fold associated water (H+)2(O^-2) elements, so as to attain a gemstone-like rigidity & permanence.
Indeed, the discovery of this unique structural element is a revelation to the aficionados almost beyond their comprehension, yet it is an essential, seemingly MAGICal characteristic of the structure & functions (ion-pumping, electrophoretic-driven winds & surf & sea) of the whole enchilada.
