Another Energy Imbalance Paper. – Watts Up With That? Cam_S writes via email: Kevin Trenberth has a new “energy imbalance” paper out. CO2 is causing… Droughtfloods (sic), extreme weather, heatwaves, hurricanes, rising ocean temperatures, sea level rise, and wildfires. Models say so! – – – – – – – – – Knowing the Earth’s energy imbalance is critical in preventing global warming, study finds Distinguished scholar at the National Center of Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and highly cited lead author Kevin Trenberth together with climate scientist and co-author Lijing Cheng have made a new complete inventory of all the various sources of excess heat on Earth. Here is the news release from EurekAlert Knowing the Earth’s energy imbalance is critical in preventing global warming, study finds Peer-Reviewed Publication Understanding the net energy gain of the climate system from all origins, how much extra energy there is and where it is redistributed in the Earth system is vital to inform and thus address the climate crisis.
About IOP Publishing 1. 2. 3. Putting It Into Reverse – Watts Up With That? Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach We have an experiential understanding of the effect of radiation on objects. Oh, not nuclear radiation, that’s something different. I’m talking about things like solar radiation, aka sunshine. In the world of climate science, sunshine aka solar radiation is also known as “shortwave radiation”. This is to distinguish it from thermal “longwave” infrared radiation. Radiation in climate science is distinguished by direction, being either upwelling (headed to space) or downwelling (headed to the earth’s surface).
These types are often referred to by abbreviations. With that as prologue, as I opened by saying, we have an experiential understanding of the effect of radiation on objects. The more radiation absorbed by some object, the hotter it gets. Our experiential understanding of longwave radiation is also simple, exemplified by feeling the heat from a cast-iron firewood stove from across the room. The hotter an object gets, the more longwave radiation it emits. A Balancing Act – Watts Up With That? Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach I’m a visual guy. I understand numbers, but not in tables. I make them into graphs and charts and maps so I can understand what’s going on. I got to thinking again about total absorbed radiation at the surface.
Total radiation absorbed by the earth’s surface is a mix of longwave (thermal) and shortwave (solar) radiation. So, being a visual guy, I created a global map of where this total radiation is being absorbed at the surface. Solar radiation starts out as relatively constant at the top of the atmosphere. Next, at any given time and location, somewhere between a little and a lot of the incoming solar is reflected by clouds and aerosols.
Next, of the remaining solar after reflection at that location, somewhere between a little and a lot of the downwelling solar radiation is absorbed in the atmosphere, mostly by clouds, water vapor, and aerosols (smoke, haze, volcanic aerosols, mineral dust). And as with solar radiation, clouds are the big variable. W. The Multiplier – Watts Up With That? Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach This is a follow-on from my previous post entitled Greenhouse Equilibrium. If you haven’t read it, you might want to, as it introduces many of the concepts I’ll discuss in this post. I got to thinking about the oft-repeated claim that a doubling of CO2 increases top-of-atmosphere (TOA) radiative forcing by 3.7 watts per square meter (W/m2) … and that in turn, the additional 3.7 W/m2 of TOA forcing causes a ~3° warming of the temperature.
In other words, they say that ~ 1.2 W/m2 of additional radiative forcing causes one degree of warming. What set me to thinking was the Stefan-Boltzmann equation. So how much extra energy does it take to raise the temperature of the earth (which is at about 15°C) by one degree C? Per the S-B equation, it requires an additional ~ 5.2 W/m2 to raise the temperature of the earth by one degree C.
Presumably, their claim is that various feedbacks amplify the change in radiative forcing. Figure 1. Figure 2. Hmmm … several points. w. Greenhouse Efficiency – Watts Up With That? Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach Buoyed by equal parts of derision and praise for my last post, “Surface Radiation: Absorption And Emission“, I once again venture into the arena.
I had an odd thought. The temperature has been generally rising over the period 2000-2021. I wondered if there was a way I could measure the efficiency of the greenhouse effect to see if the warming was due to increasing greenhouse gases (GHGs). If the GHGs were the cause, then the greenhouse effect would need to be more efficient in terms of warming the surface. A Prologue: The earth is much warmer than the moon, which receives the same amount of solar energy per unit area. Now, if you don’t think the “greenhouse effect” exists, this is NOT the thread for you. If you are unclear about how the greenhouse effect works, the physical basis of it has nothing to do with CO2 or with the atmosphere at all. This is not that place. Figure 1. So the question, of course, is why did it warm over that period? Figure 2.
W. Surface Radiation: Absorption And Emission – Watts Up With That? Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach In my recent post “Putting It Into Reverse” I discussed the relationship between temperature and total surface radiation absorbed. By “total surface radiation absorbed”, I mean the total of the downwelling longwave radiation from the clouds and the atmosphere, plus downwelling sunlight at the surface, minus the upwelling reflected sunlight.
Here’s a graphic from that post. If you haven’t read it yet, you might do so as an intro to this post. Not necessary, however, as this one stands on its own. Original Caption: Figure 1: Gridcell by gridcell correlation of surface absorbed radiation (shortwave + longwave) and surface temperature. Gridcells are 1° latitude by 1° longitude. I focus in this post on the radiation balance at the surface—how much radiation is absorbed versus how much is emitted. This gives a global 24/7 average of just over 500 W/m2, about half a kilowatt/m2, of radiation absorbed by the surface. But only about 400 W/m2 are radiated away. Yr. W. Into The Black Box – Watts Up With That? Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach Through what in my life is a typical series of misunderstandings and coincidences, I ended up looking at the average model results from the Climate Model Intercomparison Project 5 (CMIP5).
I used the model-by-model averages from each of the four scenarios, a total of 38 results. The common period of these results is 1860 to 2100 or some such number. I used the results from 1860 to 2020, so I could see how the models were doing without looking at some imaginary future. The CMIP5 analysis was done a few years ago, so everything up to 2012 they had actual data for. So the 163 years from 1860 to 2012 were a “hindcast” using actual forcing data, and the eight years from 2013 to 2020 were forecasts. Figure 1. There were several things I found interesting about Figure 1. Given that horrible inter-model temperature spread in what is a hindcast up to 2012 plus eight years of forecasting, why would anyone trust the models for what will happen by the year 2100?
W. Outside The Black Box – Watts Up With That? By Ad Huijser After reading “Into The Black Box” (ref. 1), once again a great and very informative contribution by Willis Eschenbach, I wasn’t so much surprised by the conclusion that a “one-liner climate model” could generate a result similar to that of the most complicated GCM’s. However, I was puzzled that he stopped his analysis there. The recurrent relation he applied, between temperature change and forcing, is a straightforward consequence of how the surface temperature T(t) dynamically restores the imbalance between incoming and outgoing radiation at TOA as induced by a time dependent forcing F(t).
And being based on the fundamental principle of the conservation of energy, this is not just another 1-D climate model; it is conditional for all climate models. So, he shouldn’t have just used it to curve-fit the outcomes of GCM’s, but should have used it to check the quality of GCM’s. Tn+1 = Tn + λ (Fn+1 – Fn)(1 – exp (-1/τ)) + (Tn -Tn-1) exp(-1/τ) Ad Huijser February 20, 2022 Related. Restoring The Equilibrium – Watts Up With That?
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach In this post, I will both provide additional data for and also correct an error and a claim in my post entitled Where Is The Top Of The Atmosphere. Let me start by recapping the main point, which is the theory of why increasing CO2 must perforce lead to surface warming. • The amount of atmospheric CO2 and other greenhouse gases (methane, CFCs, etc.) is increasing. • This absorbs more upwelling longwave radiation, which leads to unbalanced radiation at the top of the atmosphere (TOA). This is the TOA balance between incoming sunlight (after some of the sunlight is reflected back to space) and outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) from the surface and the atmosphere. • In order to restore the balance so that incoming solar radiation equals outgoing longwave radiation (OLR), the surface perforce must, has to, is required to warm up until there’s enough additional upwelling longwave to restore the balance.
Figure 1. So that was the claim … what about the error? W. Physicists: Climate Model Error Overestimates CO2 Impact On Global Temps By Factor Of 5. By Kenneth Richard on 22. November 2021 A new study suggests CO2 molecules have little consequential impact affecting outgoing radiation, and that climate models attribute global temperature effects to CO2 that are fundamentally erroneous.
Russian physicists (Smirnov and Zhilyaev, 2021) have published a peer-reviewed paper in the Advances in Fundamental Physics Special Issue for the journal Foundations. They assesses the role of CO2 molecules in the standard atmosphere and assert “we have a contradiction with the results of climatological models in the analysis of the Earth’s greenhouse effect.” Key points from the paper include the following: 1. 2. 3.
Image Source: Smirnov and Zhilyaev, 2021 The discrepancy between the greenhouse gas effect of water vapor molecules relative to CO2 has been addressed elsewhere. Image Source: Lightfoot and Mamer, 2014 and Lightfoot and Mamer, 2017. Radiative energy flux variations from 2000 – 2020. By Fritz Vahrenholt and Rolf Dubal The warming of the last 20 years has its essential cause in the change of the clouds. We have investigated the Earth’s radiation balance over the last 20 years in a peer – reviewed publication in ” Atmosphere”. The net radiation flux, i.e. the difference between solar irradiation and long- and short-wave radiation, determines the change in the energy content of the climate system.
If it is positive, the Earth is heating up; if it is negative, it means cooling. The NASA-operated satellite-based CERES project has been providing such radiation data for two decades now, as well as data on the development of cloud cover in temporal and spatial resolution. These data are determined both in relation to an altitude of approx. 20 km (TOA = “Top of Atmosphere”), and also in relation to the Earth’s surface. This result is also corroborated by the analysis of the near-surface radiation balance. Like this: Like Loading... Radiative energy flux variations from 2000 – 2020.
Radiative energy flux variations from 2000 – 2020. Deconstructing Wilde and Mulholland’s Analysis of Earth’s Energy Budget – Watts Up With That? Bob Wentworth Ph.D. (Applied Physics) In their 2020 paper, An Analysis of the Earth’s Energy Budget, Stephen Wilde and Philip Mulholland (W&M) examine the energy budget of the Earth. They infer the presence of energy fluxes associated with energy recycling, add the measured and inferred fluxes together to achieve a total energy flux which matches the flux needed to explain the Earth’s mean surface temperature. Based on this analysis, they offer various conclusions. In this post, I’ll deconstruct W&M’s analysis. My prior post Atmospheric Energy Recycling is essential back-ground reading for understanding what I will be offering here.
Regrettably, W&M’s analysis in this paper contains multiple serious errors which render the conclusions meaningless. Let me outline key aspects of their analysis process, as I understand it: Reviewing this, I notice some seeming oddity and vagueness in the way that locations are discussed. This is where vagueness about location becomes problematic. Conclusions. Atmospheric Energy Recycling – Watts Up With That? Bob Wentworth Ph.D. (Applied Physics) Recently, Stephen Wilde invited me to “have a go at deconstructing” the work he and Philip Mulholland have been doing to understand how climate functions. I was curious. So, I began looking at what Wilde and Mulholland (W&M) have written. Today, I’d like to examine a building block concept which impacts their work, energy recycling.
It’s a topic that leads to seemingly endless confusion among people who doubt that long-wave-absorbing gases can warm planets. So, this topic is likely to be of interest beyond its relevance to W&M’s work. This inquiry was stimulated by reading W&M’s 2020 paper, An Analysis of the Earth’s Energy Budget. This figure illustrates how a layer of the Earth’s atmosphere interacts with radiant energy. Solar short-wave radiation, with a mean radiant flux, Fₛ(1-A)/4, is absorbed by the Earth’s surface. A particular layer of the atmosphere is assumed to be at a temperature, T₁. How do W&M apply this diagram? Other key results include: A CO2 Puzzle – Watts Up With That? Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach Back in 1987, V. Ramanathan noted that we can measure the very poorly named “greenhouse effect”. This effect has nothing to do with greenhouses.
Instead, what happens is that some of the upwelling longwave radiation from the surface is absorbed by “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere, mainly CO2 and H2O. This absorbed energy, of course, is added to the thermal energy in the atmosphere, which is then radiated again with about half going to space and about half going back to the ground. What Ramanathan noted is that to calculate the size of the “greenhouse effect”, you simply subtract the longwave emitted to space at the top of the atmosphere (TOA) from the longwave emitted upwards at the surface. Figure 1. The use of a percentage to measure the “greenhouse effect” eliminates one of the variables.
Figure 2. There are a few things of interest here. Figure 3. Now, I entitled this post “A CO2 Puzzle”, and true to my word, here it is. Figure 4. W. PS—Two things. Why CO2 Can’t Warm the Planet. Figure 1. The global annual mean energy budget of Earth’s climate system (Trenberth and Fasullo, 2012.) Recently in a discussion thread a warming proponent suggested we read this paper for conclusive evidence.
The greenhouse effect and carbon dioxide by Wenyi Zhong and Joanna D. Haigh (2013) Imperial College, London. Indeed as advertised the paper staunchly presents IPCC climate science. Excerpts in italics with my bolds. IPCC Conception: Earth’s radiation budget and the Greenhouse Effect The Earth is bathed in radiation from the Sun, which warms the planet and provides all the energy driving the climate system. The schematic in Figure 1, which is based on available observational data, illustrates the magnitude of these radiation streams.
Why This Line of Thinking is Wrong and Misleading Short Answer: Greenhouse Gases Cannot Physically Cause Observed Global Warming. Key Points:Thus greenhouse-warming theory and the diagram above is based on these mistaken assumptions: Summary Like this: The Surface Energy Budget. The Lungs of Gaia. Climate Models Fail from Radiative Obsession. Flawed Models…”Flat Earth” Climate Simulations Overstate CO2, Falsify Sun And Aerosols. A Third Look at Radiation versus Temperature. Earth As A Solar Collector. A Second Look At Radiation Versus Temperature. Radiation versus Temperature. An Analysis of the Earth’s Energy Budget. On the Flat Earth Rants of Joe Postma.