# Greenhouse Efficiency

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. It’s generally accepted, including by me, that the warmth is from the very poorly named “greenhouse effect”, which has nothing to do with greenhouses.

Now, if you don’t think the “greenhouse effect” exists, this is NOT the thread for you. There are lots of places to make that argument. This isn’t one of them. We know the earth is warmer than expected. Nobody has ever come up with an explanation for that except the greenhouse effect.

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. I explain this in my posts “People Living In Glass Planets“, and “The Steel Greenhouse“.

To reiterate: PLEASE do not post your opinions here on why the greenhouse effect isn’t real, or why there’s no such thing as downwelling radiation, or that scientists don’t understand the instruments that measure IR. The web is a very big universe. Somewhere out there is the perfect place to make those arguments.

This is not that place.

To return to the question at hand, which is the efficiency of the greenhouse effect, here’s the temperature change during the period of the CERES satellite data.

Figure 1. Surface temperature changes, CERES data. It is a conversion of the CERES surface upwelling longwave data to units of degrees Celsius using the Stefan-Boltzmann equation. It agrees well with e.g. the MSU lower tropical temperature, with a residual standard error of about a tenth of a degree C.

So the question, of course, is why did it warm over that period?

I thought, well, what the greenhouse effect does is to increase the surface temperature. The greenhouse effect starts with a certain amount of energy entering the climate system, and it ends with the surface being warmer and thus emitting more thermal radiation than would be expected if one were to look at say the moon, which gets the same energy from the sun as does the earth.

So … I figured that I could express the efficiency of the greenhouse effect by comparing the upwelling longwave radiation from the surface with the amount of solar energy entering the system. This measures the “end-to-end” efficiency of the entire system, including all feedbacks and interactions. I’ve chosen to express it as a “multiplier”—for every W/m2 of solar input, how many W/m2 of upwelling surface radiation do we get?

The amount of solar energy at the top of the atmosphere is about 340 watts per square meter (W/m2). However, about 100 W/m2 is reflected by the clouds and the surface. This means that the solar energy entering the system is on the order of 240 W/m2.

Upwelling longwave from the surface, on the other hand, is on the order of 400 W/m2. This means that the average greenhouse multiplier is approximately:

400 W/m2 / 240 W/m2 ≈ 1.66

In other words, for every watt per square meter of solar input, we get ~ 1.7 watts per square meter of upwelling surface radiation.

Now, we can run this calculation for each month, looking at the amount of thermal radiation emitted by the surface divided by the solar energy entering the system. Figure 2 shows that result. Remember that for increased greenhouse gases to be responsible for the warming, the greenhouse multiplier needs to increase.

Figure 2. Greenhouse multiplier. The multiplier is calculated as upwelling longwave surface radiation divided by incoming solar radiation (after albedo reflections). A multiplier of 2 would mean that the surface would be radiating two W/m2 of energy for each one W/m2 of solar energy actually entering the system. This shows that the greenhouse has increased the incoming solar radiation by about two-thirds, as measured at the surface.

Now, this is a most interesting finding. The efficiency of the planetary greenhouse has decreased slightly over the period—not significantly, but not increasing either.

In fact, the stability over the period is of interest in itself. Note that the standard deviation of the multiplier is 0.004 W/m2. Over the period, the end-to-end efficiency of the entire greenhouse system hardly varied at all. I’ve written before about the amazing stability of the system. This is another example.

So given the evidence above that the increase in upwelling surface radiation cannot be due to a change in greenhouse efficiency from increased CO2 or any other reason, what is the cause of the temperature increase? Here are the graphs of the two datasets that make up the greenhouse multiplier—the upwelling surface radiation, and the incoming solar radiation.

Figure 3. Upwelling surface thermal radiation (yellow, left panel), and incoming solar radiation after albedo reflections (red, right panel). Blue/black lines are LOWESS smooths of the data.

In Figure 3, we can see why the efficiency of the system hardly varied—the upwelling surface longwave was increasing pretty much in lockstep with the incoming solar energy actually entering the system.

Conclusions: We have observational evidence that the temperature increase from 2000-2021 was not due to an increase in greenhouse gases, or any increase in the efficiency of the greenhouse effect from any cause. The efficiency has been very stable over the period, with a standard deviation of 0.2% and no significant trend.

On the other hand, the change in incoming solar energy is both adequate to explain the increase in warming, and has the same shape as the change in surface radiation (blue LOWESS smooths in both panels in Figure 3). While there are undoubtedly other factors in play, the main cause of the warming is clearly the increase in the amount of solar energy after reflections from the clouds and the surface.

And once again, the clouds rule … go figure …

w.

Math Note: I tend to use “upwelling longwave surface radiation” and “temperature” interchangeably. Yes, I know that radiation varies as the fourth power of temperature, T4. However, the difference is trivial in the narrow range shown in e.g. Figure 3.

Figure 4 shows a comparison of the upwelling longwave shown in Figure 3 and the Stefan-Boltzmann derived temperature. Basically identical in form.

Figure 4. Temperature (yellow, left scale) and surface upwelling radiation (red, right scale)

Policy Note: I was 100% serious about asking people to refrain from commenting about things like how downwelling radiation doesn’t exist and the greenhouse effect isn’t real. Don’t make me tap the sign.

My Usual Request: Misunderstandings abound in communication. When commenting, PLEASE quote the exact words you are discussing, so we can all understand exactly who and what you are responding to.

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Bill Powers
September 2, 2022 10:52 am

That sun. That pesky sun. Now who could have possibly imagined. Certainly not all the brilliant minds at the UN and the best bureaucrats and scientists they could buy with taxpayer money.

Call me a skeptic
Reply to  Bill Powers
September 2, 2022 1:46 pm

They won’t listen, never will. Do the light bulb test. Put a small cloth towel over a light bulb and eureka. Less heat radiates out of the light bulb. You can pump excess CO2 into that room, still less heat radiates from the light bulb. After all climate fraudsters, it’s the sun stupid!

william Johnston
Reply to  Call me a skeptic
September 2, 2022 4:29 pm

No money in that,tho’.

R_G
Reply to  Bill Powers
September 5, 2022 5:29 pm

To be more precise; sun radiations modulated by clouds.

September 2, 2022 10:58 am

Yep, this is a great way to puncture the false arguments that alarmists use to support the hypothesis of CO2 caused warming, Willis. Thanks.

James Rouse
September 2, 2022 11:01 am

Excellent and clear article. Thank you.
Of course the pushback is going to be that what you have measured is a change in albedo of clouds (and Ice) which are feedbacks to temperature increases driven by CO2 radiative forcing.

Rud Istvan
Reply to  James Rouse
September 2, 2022 11:18 am

None other than Dessler himself published a clear sky/all sky analysis that he claimed showed a positive cloud feedback, which NASA then touted officially and loudly. The problem was his r^2 was 0.02! Essentially random no correlation. So observationally there is NO cloud feedback despite what the IPCC and the fancy climate models say. That is one of three main reasons the models run hot. (The others are the parameterization attribution problem, and the now ARGO verified under modeling of ocean precipitation, which causes the modeled water vapor feedback to be too high, which is why the modeled tropical troposphere hot spot doesn’t exist in reality.)

Reply to  Rud Istvan
September 2, 2022 11:36 am

Well put, Rud.

John Tillman
Reply to  Rud Istvan
September 2, 2022 12:39 pm

There is negative cloud feedback, since they cause net cooling of about 5 degrees C with present cloud cover.

DMacKenzie
Reply to  John Tillman
September 4, 2022 7:45 am

If cloud feedback was positive, Earth would have an atmosphere something like Venus only composed of superheated steam instead of CO2, since the dawn of time….

Reply to  Rud Istvan
September 2, 2022 1:00 pm

The models run hot because that is what “management” wants predicted.

They run hot mainly from the exaggerated water vapor positive feedback not limited by increasing cloud cover.

But the reason does not matter — we get the predictions that the programmers are paid to predict — politics not science.

Apparently, that is not true of the Russian INM model that no one seems to care about.

There is insufficient knowledge of all causes of climate change to build a model that is accurate by design. But there is enough knowledge to be “in the ballpark” of observations (reality). if accuracy mattered. But accuracy does not matter. The models are used as science-like props to defend always wrong predictions of climate doom. They will never, as a group, be accurate. The average model represents the consensus on climate change. I’m surprised there are no sanctions to delete the Russian model from the average !

People with good scientific minds, like yourself, think models are intended to make accurate predictions. They are not. Not in modern climate “science” (politics). They are climate computer games intended to scare people. That’s why the CMIP6 models have a higher range than the CMIP 5 models. And CMIP7 models will likely have a higher range than CMIP6 models. This is very predictable if you think like a leftist –delete reason and accountability.

Last edited 1 month ago by Richard Greene
Reply to  Rud Istvan
September 2, 2022 1:31 pm

Talking about Dessler is almost as bad as talking about Al Gore.
Two pretend scientists.

Ken
September 2, 2022 11:04 am

Great article. Elegant proof that albedo and solar irradience plays a major role in temperature. It’s intuitively obvious that CO2 has a negligible effect at 400 ppm compared to solar input.

Rud Istvan
September 2, 2022 11:10 am

WE, another nice post. I was curious about what the ‘settled science’ says the result should have been with the CO2 control knob changed over your CERES time interval.
Turns out did not even have to work it out myself. There is a ‘calculator’ available at scied.UCAR.edu. That is pretty official—UCAR is a major hub of settled climate science. I used it and the ‘official’ ECS (UCAR default) value of 3.0 (the calculator lets you input more or less ECS). The calculator runs in increments of 10 ppm CO2.
The CO2 in 2000 was 372 (annual average taking out seasonality). 370>>14.4C.
The CO2 in 2021 was 416. 420>>14.9C.
UCAR says you should have seen about a 0.5C increase in surface temperature from the GHE alone. You saw none (Fig 2). So much for UCAR’s settled climate science.

Reply to  Rud Istvan
September 2, 2022 1:05 pm

Except UAH is up over +0.5 degrees C. from 2000 to 2020.

Johne Morton
Reply to  Richard Greene
September 2, 2022 3:41 pm

From 2002 through July 2022, the trend is pretty small, ~0.2⁰ using the 12 month running mean (you can’t look at individual months). Even starting in the post-1998 La Niña dip, it’s less than 0.5⁰. Also, how do you explain the excellent correlation to solar activity?

Reply to  Johne Morton
September 2, 2022 4:14 pm

Of course you can look at individual years — 2020 is about +0.5 degrees C warmer than 2000. These are not linear data so a linear trend line is not necessary. Did increased solar energy cause +0.5 degrees C. in 20 years. I’m not even close to being convinced the global warming in the past 20 years was caused by solar energy. And few others are convinced, for good reasons.

Maybe the CERES measure of solar activity is wrong.
There is a lot of calculating involved:
Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) FluxByCldTyp Edition 4 Data Product in: Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology Volume 39 Issue 3 (2022) (ametsoc.org)

And correlation is not causation

Other CERES related publications in 2022:
Publications – CERES (nasa.gov)

Knowledge comes from study of a variety of sources, not just one WUWT article.

Richard M
Reply to  Richard Greene
September 2, 2022 6:18 pm

Did you read Dubal/Vahrenholt 2021? Their data matches very closely to what Willis is reporting here.

Johne Morton
Reply to  Richard Greene
September 3, 2022 2:49 pm

Well, I mentioned individual months, not years. Also, annual changes thanks to ENSO and other factors makes the year-to-year data noisy. Also, I’m not talking about a linear trend line, but the running mean. I could just as easily say that, thanks to the supposed increase in GHG concentrations and (non-existent) GHG efficiency, the temperature should never, ever go down. That would be silly, too.

Richard M
Reply to  Richard Greene
September 2, 2022 6:16 pm

Willis explained why the temperature increase occurred. It was due to increased solar energy absorption. This was also reported in Dubal/Vahrenholt 2021. I’ve commented on this many times. They also used the CERES data.

Their work and now this work by Willis actually demonstrates the enhanced greenhouse effect, that is, that future warming is caused by CO2 increases that 1) increase DWIR warming the surface and 2) raising the effective radiation altitude, is shown to be false.

The reason increased DWIR does not lead to warming has to do with what I call boundary layer feedback. The reason the effective radiation altitude does not change is due to radiation exchange equilibrium in the atmosphere.

Jeff Alberts
Reply to  Richard M
September 2, 2022 7:13 pm

There is no “the temperature”. This is all navel gazing.

Richard M
Reply to  Jeff Alberts
September 2, 2022 8:55 pm

I think “the temperature” is fairly well defined and useful. Maybe a different name could be used, but that would probably lead to even more confusion.

Jeff Alberts
Reply to  Richard M
September 8, 2022 6:43 pm

No it’s not well-defined or useful.

Reply to  Richard M
September 2, 2022 10:15 pm

I never claimed Willie E, is misinterpreting CERES data. I do not believe his conclusion — that’s all. Nor do many climate scientists around the world.

Richard M
Reply to  Richard Greene
September 3, 2022 7:53 am

Willis has been a luke-warmer for a long time. His admission that the data shows no greenhouse warming is a step forward. He should be congratulated for following the data. If you have another explanation feel free to express it.

Keep in mind that the very same lack of greenhouse effect increase was documented in Miskolczi 2010 using NOAA data since the 1940s.

The Dubal/Vahrenholt 2021 paper, which essentially shows the same result from CERES data, has been denied for the past year. Climate scientists are in denial likely for the same reasons you express. That would mean they have the physics wrong which in their minds is “inconceivable”.

?q=50&fit=crop&dpr=1.5

Marty Cornell
Reply to  Richard Greene
September 2, 2022 7:34 pm

The UAH plot does not reflect attribution.

Reply to  Marty Cornell
September 2, 2022 10:16 pm

UAH reflects a decent measurement methodology and I strongly doubt that solar energy was the cause of all warming from 2000 to 2020.

Ron
Reply to  Richard Greene
September 4, 2022 9:28 am

Solar energy IS the cause of all warming if not from geothermal sources.
It’s just a matter of debate how and to what degree the energy delays it’s emission into space.

Smart Rock
Reply to  Rud Istvan
September 2, 2022 2:39 pm

Rud – I think you spoke too soon. What Willis’ fig 2 shows is no increase in greenhouse efficiency. His fig. 1 gives surface temperature from CERES, which shows ~0.5°C increase over the period (by my patented “eyeball” method of curve fitting).

As we see more studies coming in, it does appear that the (as yet unexplained) decrease in cloud cover is the culprit behind recent warming.

Thanks to Willis for another neat piece of work, explained as always with exemplary clarity. I’ve been complimented over the years for the clarity and readability of my technical writing, but Willis’ clarity and readability are Olympic gold medal standard.

Rud Istvan
Reply to  Smart Rock
September 2, 2022 5:15 pm

Nope. The issue is, IF the GHE is potentiating because of increased CO2, then his ‘efficacy’ should increase. It didn’t. I just supplied a separate ‘proof’.

Barry Malcolm
Reply to  Rud Istvan
September 2, 2022 6:07 pm

Potentiating? Wtf does that mean, EXACTLY?

John Witten
September 2, 2022 11:17 am

Willis,

As always, this is a very interesting explanation. As a interested non-expert, I always learn something reading your articles. If you could please indulge my technical ignorance, how is the CERES data for incoming solar radiation adjusted for albedo reflection in Figure No. 3 actually obtained? I assume that incoming solar is measured by satellite. Is it also possible to measure short-wave reflection by satellite measurement? Or, is this a calculated number?

Just wondering. Your observations always seem to make so much common sense that is hard to believe that no one else seems to be making the same observations.

Rud Istvan
Reply to  John Witten
September 2, 2022 12:02 pm

Not Willis, but the answer is simple. Inbound solar is measured looking ‘up’ (away from Earth). Albedo reflected outbound solar is measured looking ‘down’ toward Earth. CERES simply uses two opposed sensors.

Gary R Wescom
September 2, 2022 11:17 am

What I gather then is that energy received at the surface to produce 400 watts upwelling IR is a combination of 240 watts from solar radiation and 160 watts downwelling IR. Did I miss something?

leitmotif
Reply to  Gary R Wescom
September 2, 2022 2:45 pm

But you cannot add radiations. It is sophistry.

240W/m^2 equivalent to 255K or -18C
160W/m^2 equivalent to 230K or – 43C
400W/m^2 equivalent to 290K or +17C

There is no way the first 2 could produce the third.

Macha
September 2, 2022 5:00 pm

Yep. The CO2 is already at the air temperature from energy absorbed on the way down. On the way up, its transparent..in/out without surface-air temperature change.

leitmotif
September 3, 2022 2:33 pm

???

Gary R Wescom
September 2, 2022 7:11 pm

Leitmotif – It was a simple watt in vs watts out question. Willis answered satisfactorily.

leitmotif
Reply to  Gary R Wescom
September 3, 2022 2:28 pm

No such thing as watts in v watts out question. Power is joules/sec i.e. energy/sec.

Willis mixing up energy with flux.

It’s a common ploy or mistake.

Jim
September 4, 2022 7:19 pm

Power is not energy ; energy is power over a given time such as a kilowatt hour.

AndyHce
September 2, 2022 9:16 pm

Radiation is something real. Rain is something real, they are not the same but both exist in some quantity. Quantities of the same thing add quite properly.

leitmotif
September 3, 2022 2:32 pm

So two power jets of water at the same pressure will remove grime as effectively as one jet with twice that individual pressure?

Never worked for me.

September 3, 2022 6:59 am

But you cannot add radiations. It is sophistry
========
If you cant add radiation how do you calculate an average?

leitmotif
September 3, 2022 2:29 pm

By using sophistry.

September 3, 2022 5:41 pm

Of course you can, take one light source (240W/m^2) and another (160W/m^2) and shine them on a target, total incident on the target is 400W/m^2.

mcswell
September 6, 2022 6:59 am

Of course you can add watts (or in this case, watts/ square meter, assuming the place they fall on are the same). What you can’t add is temperatures, which is (are) a derived quantity.

Richard Feynman had a delightful take-down of the New Math (back in the 1960s). One of the word problems asked students to add the temperatures of two stars (one of them allegedly green, but that was a different issue). You can’t do that, except to derive an average.

David Dibbell
September 2, 2022 11:22 am

Interesting and insightful analysis, Willis. Thank you.
A small point. You say, “Note that the standard deviation of the multiplier is 0.004 W/m2.”
If I understand correctly, your multiplier is instead a dimensionless ratio.

DMacKenzie
Reply to  Willis Eschenbach
September 3, 2022 10:05 am

Willis, IR through the IR window, usually claimed to average 40W plotted against incoming solar like your Fig 3 might show some interesting phase shift. This assuming it takes approximately the same amount of time for surface warming to produce enough cloud cover to cool the surface somewhat later and somewhere else….

Monckton of Brenchley
September 2, 2022 11:27 am

This piece by Willis is even more fascinating than ever. A clear, brilliant and compelling analysis using data and not fashionable speculation.

Ian Magness
Reply to  Monckton of Brenchley
September 2, 2022 11:46 am

Seconded.
Well done again Willis.

arjan duiker
Reply to  Monckton of Brenchley
September 2, 2022 2:03 pm

Dear Christopher Monckton, for God’s sake, what else is needed to convince at least some politicians…? As you’ve said many times before, it’s game over. Can this great analysis of Mr. Eschenbach finally be the one that pulls out the plug?

AndyHce
Reply to  arjan duiker
September 2, 2022 9:21 pm

Not a chance.It is somewhat like a US senator once said, during an interview, when writing to your representative was being energetically promoted. ‘We in Washington know why we are there and what we are doing. Yes, sometimes some of us have to pretend to care what the voters say in order to be sure of reelection, but we know what we are really about and that is what we are actually going to do.

leitmotif
Reply to  Monckton of Brenchley
September 2, 2022 3:42 pm

Great praise from one lukewarmist to another, Brench.

And then a reciprocation from the other. Whoooppeee!

Tell me how the DLR or back radiation works, Brench, with empirical evidence (not Feldman et al, 2015) and without reference to Tyndall 1861

Tell me why you believe what warmists believe about the magical warming properties of CO2 but only less so.

And don’t use highfalutin scientific language to describe, say, molecular vibrational modes because I might know more than you think I do, like I know a CO2 molecule does not have a dipole moment.

(You are now in MODERATION) SUNMOD

Last edited 1 month ago by Sunsettommy
RickWill
September 2, 2022 4:20 pm

And you have to love Figure 4 where he compares surface ULR with surface temperature. If he took any notice of what you have previously stated, he would realise this proves that it is an “inferred power flux” based entity on the temperature.

Only climate phiisics has “cool energy” that cannot warm anything.

Rud Istvan
September 2, 2022 5:40 pm

Well actually, folks who know basic physics (including the laws of thermodynamics) know that a colder troposphere IR cannot ever warm a warmer surface IR.  There is a heat exchange. But it ALWAYS goes net hot to net cold. Confusing intermediate states does not reflect well.

RickWill
Reply to  Rud Istvan
September 2, 2022 6:41 pm

But it ALWAYS goes net hot to net cold. Confusing intermediate states does not reflect well.

This indicates you do not understand electro-magnetic radiation. In this field, energy only flows in one direction at any point in time and space. There is no “net”

Mishchenko has a proof of that reality and makes reference here:
https://www.giss.nasa.gov/staff/mmishchenko/publications/2013_AIP_Conf_Proc_1531_11.pdf

Unfortunately, none of the instruments that have ever been used in the disciplines of atmospheric radiation and remote sensing can, strictly speaking, be considered a Poynting meter. Instead, it was demonstrated in [31] that tra- ditional instruments called well-collimated radiometers (WCRs) operate as wavefront angular filters rather than en- ergy-propagation angular filters.

Even more fundamentally, the local instantaneous Poynting vector S(r,t) is a monodirectional vector. This means that even if one assumes that S(r,t) describes the direction and rate of local electromagnetic energy flow, then at any moment this flow occurs in only one direction.

Note that the link is from NASA. GISS employed Mishchenko to achieve an understanding of the real physics of the atmosphere. In essence to get away from climate phiisics that pervade the club.

Anyone using equations to represent physical phenomena should have an appreciation of the assumptions implicit in those equations and where the assumptions fail. The S-B equation is an approximation and is useful in many applications but not in defining heat transport within the Earth’s atmosphere.

Last edited 1 month ago by RickWill
leitmotif
September 3, 2022 2:54 pm

This indicates you do not understand electro-magnetic radiation. In this field, energy only flows in one direction at any point in time and space. There is no “net”

At last, someone who says how it is.

Kudos to RickWill.

The S-B equation is an approximation and is useful in many applications but not in defining heat transport within the Earth’s atmosphere.

Double Kudos.

One more and you get to keep the trophy, RickWill.

September 3, 2022 5:56 pm

This indicates you do not understand electro-magnetic radiation. In this field, energy only flows in one direction at any point in time and space. There is no “net””
It’s you who doesn’t understand e-m radiation.
Consider a satellite orbiting the earth passing between the Earth and the Moon.  The satellite measures light coming from the Moon and light coming from the Earth, what do you think happens if the satellite isn’t there?

Rud Istvan
September 2, 2022 5:33 pm

Sorry, your GHE ignorance knows no bounds.
Water has a dipole moment. That is why microwave ovens are so effective.
True, CO2 does not. Thatnis whynit is irrelevant to microwave ovens.
BUT, it does have an elastic linear (stretch/shrink) bond that stores and then re-emits its absorbed IR. My goodness, at least learn basic physics before posting here.

Barry Malcolm
Reply to  Rud Istvan
September 2, 2022 6:19 pm

CO2 “bond” that stores” and then “re-emits”? Like it absorbs and then emits IR? If true, what’s with the comment about basic physics? How about simple understandable concepts?

Editor
Reply to  Barry Malcolm
September 2, 2022 8:41 pm

I think 135,000 miles per second is the minimum speed of the IR wave…..

AndyHce
Reply to  Barry Malcolm
September 2, 2022 9:30 pm

It is a mysterious universe.

Reply to  Barry Malcolm
September 3, 2022 4:38 am

Have a look at the physics behind a CO2 laser:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-dioxide_laser

Reply to  Rud Istvan
September 3, 2022 12:14 pm

In the case of the 15𝜇m radiation it’s a bond that bends and then re-emits the absorbed energy.

leitmotif
Reply to  Rud Istvan
September 3, 2022 3:08 pm

Sorry, your GHE ignorance knows no bounds.
Water has a dipole moment. That is why microwave ovens are so effective.
True, CO2 does not.

So I was correct that CO2 does not have a dipole moment?

So your “GHE ignorance knows no bounds” is not correct?

BUT, it does have an elastic linear (stretch/shrink) bond that stores and then re-emits its absorbed IR. My goodness, at least learn basic physics before posting here.

So when I said to Brench about “ molecular vibrational modes” you did not think that was how I perceived how a a CO2 molecule absorbs and re-emits a photon. This is a reduced discussion on a previous discussion with Brench.

You are still blowing smoke from that orifice, Rud.

September 2, 2022 11:34 am

Willis, you say “We know the earth is warmer than expected. Nobody has ever come up with an explanation for that except the greenhouse effect.”

I am pretty sure there are other hypotheses, making your unnecessary strong claim wrong. This has no effect on your argument.

RickWill
Reply to  Willis Eschenbach
September 2, 2022 4:33 pm

The energy balance is controlled by two physical processes involving ice formation. Sea ice insulates ocean surface. Atmospheric ice, resulting from deep convection, sets an upper limit on open ocean surfaces that can not sustain a temperature higher than 30C by limiting surface sunlight.

The energy balance is controlled by temperature sensitive processes with powerful feedback.

The ability of the atmosphere to form an LFC is the only reason Earth is not a snowball. The concept of “greenhouse effect” controlling earth’s surface temperature is ridiculous. You have just proven that it has no effect on the temperature.

AndyHce
Reply to  Willis Eschenbach
September 2, 2022 9:43 pm

I can’t say how many points it covers but absorbed IR energy can and is (claimed) to be transferred through kinetic interactions. In fact, according to William Happer here,
http://www.sealevel.info/Happer_UNC_2014-09-08/Another_question.html
in the lower atmosphere, 99.9999999% of the time surface IR absorbed by CO2 and H2O is transferred to other atmospheric molecules through kinetic interactions before it can be re-emitted.

This would seem to me to be an explanation of how warming occurs that doesn’t seem to fit the general greenhouse meme. It does not require any back radiation to explain the surface being warmer than just from absorbed solar. Of course it does involve GH gases.

Robert W Turner
September 3, 2022 6:33 am

And of course we know energy is never transferred from the 98% of the atmospheric molecules to IR active molecules which would increase emissivity and cooling at the ToA. It’s a one-way energy transfer in climastrology.

Robert W Turner
Reply to  Willis Eschenbach
September 3, 2022 6:46 am

If everything were a fixed molecule in space and time that had no kinetic energy and the only mode of energy transfer were radiative then you’d be correct. The atmosphere transfers energy back to the surface in other ways than radiative emission of IR, in fact, it is by far the least significant and is why you keep finding no signal from the ever increasing CO2.

Reply to  David Wojick
September 2, 2022 1:07 pm

No one including the IPCC wants to talk about natural causes of climate change, so climate change gets blamed on AGW. What’s left? It’s called starting with a conclusion junk science.

Richard M
Reply to  David Wojick
September 2, 2022 6:56 pm

It is too strong of a claim. It gets the big picture wrong. The surface is not warmer because of energy trapped high in the atmosphere and radiated downward. It is warmed from energy absorbed low in the atmosphere, radiated upward and shared based on atmospheric density. You need radiating gases to effect the warming with either explanation, the correct one has more or less a fixed warming effect. It is why Willis couldn’t find any increase and neither did Miskolczi in his 2010 paper looking at 70 years of NOAA data.

LARRY K SIDERS
September 2, 2022 11:47 am

Unstated (unless I missed it) was that the decreasing “Incoming” radiation was likely from a decreasing trend in low level clouds. Where else could the albedo vary as rapidly? Real Question…I dont know of any other “delta-albedo” sources to chose from (maybe albedo effects from changes in vegetation?). It was obviously NOT from any solar output change (solar radiation is not that variable).

I believe I’ve seen several references citing Satellite Data Records showing a several Decades long slow decline in Low Cloud Cover…enough to account for 100% of the Average Surface Temperature Increase on record.

This article and the actual Cloud Albedo reductions appear to “fit” quite well.

Reducing Cloudiness would also seem to counter the KEY 3X’s Hydrological Amplification (“Key” to produce Catastrophic Climate Change from a paltry DIRECT CO2 Effect) of the very small DIRECT 0.3° C to 0.7° C CO2 “Doubling” Temperature Effect.

Lower Cloudiness would require a Lower Global Humidity level…not the *INCREASE* in Humidity required to CREATE a 300% Climate Crisis Multiplier Effect.

Last edited 1 month ago by LARRY K SIDERS
Tom.1
September 2, 2022 11:52 am

Willis: For the time period in question, how much incoming energy has been accumulated in the total atmosphere expressed in terms of w/m2 and based on the amount of observed warming?

Dan Hughes
Reply to  Willis Eschenbach
September 2, 2022 1:46 pm

“A watt is a joule second …”

A Watt is a Joule/sec: Joule per second.

Tom.1
Reply to  Willis Eschenbach
September 2, 2022 2:57 pm

My thinking was (is) that the energy imbalance at the earth’s surface over the long haul to generate the amount of warming is trivially small. I could be wrong, so check me on this (anybody). The atmosphere has warmed by 5.3E21 joules in roughly the past 50 years (very approximate, but in the ballpark). This amounts to 5.3E21/(50*365*86400) joules/sec = 3.36E12 J/S = 3.36E12 watts. The surface area of the earth is 5.1E14M2, so the long term watts/sq meter = 3.36E12/5.1E14 = .0066 watts/sq meter. Can that be right?

Anders Rasmusson
September 2, 2022 12:01 pm

Willis Eschenbach, so nice, thank you.

Different “greenhouse multiplier” at the 0°, 30°, 60°, 90° latitudes?

Kind regards
Anders Rasmusson

Barrie
September 2, 2022 12:06 pm

A minor niggle: “earth is much warmer than the moon, which receives the same amount of solar energy.” should you not add per metre squared?

Barrie
September 2, 2022 12:08 pm

I meant to add this to my niggle comment: I greatly admire your posts on this issue, those you have done on emergent phenomena in particular. Thanks

JeffC
September 2, 2022 12:09 pm
Barry Malcolm
September 2, 2022 6:31 pm

Not if we can’t read it without subscribing so you can get a pittance of a commission, baksheesh!

Mr.
September 2, 2022 6:51 pm

Not to Willis’ contribution to educating us atmospheric know-nothings.

Otherwise – did you have a point?

JeffC
September 3, 2022 12:29 am

Yes

Prjindigo
September 2, 2022 12:14 pm

Gravity generates heat.

The satellite is unable to discern between IR sourced up-welling IR, other spectrum sourced up-welling IR, solar and cosmic particulate dynamic inductive sourced up-welling IR, non-solar sourced energy converted to up-welling IR and most pointedly human generated or human and life creation sourced up-welling IR.

There is a not insignificant amount of heat generated by simply the compression of air through moving machinery or stationary structures inhibiting wind and water motions.

If the IPCC thinks modeling the clouds is too hard of work, monitoring the effects of human activity is probably not even on their minds. That’s why they’re trying to schill a 55% fudge-factor linear progression instead of doing any science at all. What they are doing is presenting unreliable polling information, ALL anecdotal in form, as scientific input… and it’s bullshit all around.

Last edited 1 month ago by Prjindigo
September 2, 2022 1:53 pm

Gravity generated heat at the moment that the atmosphere was formed. One day later that heat ws gone to space. No new heat can be generated from a static pressure.
If you inflate a tire, after a few hours it is back to ambient temperature and still under pressure. No new heat is generated at all.

BTW, Willis explicitly asked not to start a discussion on alternate “explanations” like gravity, which were thoroughly debunked years ago:
‘I proved that hypothesis incorrect in my post “A Matter Of Some Gravity“’

Macha
Reply to  Ferdinand Engelbeen
September 2, 2022 5:06 pm

Why reply? Gravity is not static, it’s continual work done, else air lost to space. No tyre holding bike tyre air in. Just like greenhouse stops convection.

Last edited 1 month ago by Macha
Ed Bo
September 2, 2022 7:01 pm

Macha:
In physics, “work” has a very specific definition. The work (energy) done on an object is the mechanical force on that object multiplied by the distance the object is moved by the force. (Technically, it’s force integrated over distance, but we’ll keep it simple here.)
Taking the derivative, the rate of work (power) at any time is the force multiplied by the velocity of the object it causes.
Taking the atmosphere as a whole, the distance of movement caused by gravitational force is zero, and the velocity is zero. Any down movements must be balanced by up movements somewhere else.
So the “continual work” done by gravity on the atmosphere is zero. This is basic high school physics.

Robert W Turner
Reply to  Ed Bo
September 3, 2022 6:52 am

Lol yes, high school physics of work equal to zero if something is moved from point A to B and then back to A, magic.

Ed Bo
Reply to  Robert W Turner
September 3, 2022 8:21 am

When X does work on Y to move it from point A to point B, then Y does the same amount of work on X to move it back to point A the resulting transfer between X and Y is zero.

Yes, basic high school physics (for those who were paying attention…)

Robert W Turner
Reply to  Ferdinand Engelbeen
September 3, 2022 6:50 am

I love the bike tire analogy where the pumping of the tire (the sun) stops and is supposed to disprove Kinetic Theory of Gases.

Ed Bo
Reply to  Robert W Turner
September 3, 2022 8:27 am

How exactly does his argument conflict with the Kinetic Theory of Gases?

Mr.
September 2, 2022 6:55 pm

Cliff Mass often cites the heating effect on air blowing down from the peaks of the Rocky Mountains westwards toward the Pacific North Western coastal regions.

AndyHce
September 2, 2022 10:02 pm

which causes air elsewhere to raise, lowering it temperature. However, neither mass of air gains or loses energy.

AndyHce
September 2, 2022 9:56 pm

The claim is that the amount of energy used by all human activity in one year is provided by the sun every couple hours.

ResourceGuy
September 2, 2022 12:25 pm

Okay, we have very small movement in solar inputs up and down as measured in both years and individual solar cycles. Now if the oceans are capacitor storage systems, are groups of weak solar cycles and groups of higher solar cycles of say 50-70 years each still considered insignificant? See Leif charts for examples

Per
September 2, 2022 12:28 pm

Great article – thank you. The clouds….yes indeed, by blocking/reflecting 100 W/m2 are they not indeed the dominant factor in all these analyses? I’m anxious to know why cosmic galactic rays and the theory by Svensmark gets so little traction/attention. What is the problem with that theory?

John Tillman
September 2, 2022 12:44 pm

It doesn’t fit the desired narrative to which everyone should stick, or else.

AndyHce
September 2, 2022 10:03 pm

Supposedly, best estimates calculations say the effect is real by insignificant in magnitude.

September 2, 2022 12:49 pm

” the main cause of the warming is clearly the increase in the amount of solar energy after reflections from the clouds and the surface.”

Jumping to a conclusion.
Solar irradiance change was insufficient to explain warming from 2000 to 2020, which is over +0.5 degrees C. in the UAH global average temperature record

UAH Global Temperature Update for August, 2022: +0.28 deg. C « Roy Spencer, PhD (drroyspencer.com)

Solar irradiance – Wikipedia

Last edited 1 month ago by Richard Greene
Reply to  Richard Greene
September 2, 2022 2:53 pm

Richard, you didn’t understand the point Willis was making: with a constant amount of greenhouse gases, the warming should be +0.5 K from 2000 to 2020 only caused by the solar input, as that is the fortifying factor by GHGs.

But the GHGs increased a lot in that period, According to the climate models, there should be some 0.5 K increase from GHGs alone, that is with a constant input from the sun.

With both increasing, there should be 1 K total increase in temperature. But there is only 0.5 K warming certainly caused by the solar input (as the fortifying factor didn’t change at all), thus where is the warming caused by GHGs?

Reply to  Ferdinand Engelbeen
September 2, 2022 4:21 pm

There are many climate change variables.
No one knows the exact effect of each one.
You have mentioned only two of them. The sum of all the variables is obviously less warming than thought to come from those two variables alone. What does that prove? Nothing !

The following variables are likely to influence Earth’s climate:

1)   Earth’s orbital and
orientation variations

2)   Changes in ocean circulation
Including ENSO and others

3)   Solar activity and irradiance,
including clouds, volcanic and manmade aerosols, plus possible effects of cosmic rays and extraterrestrial dust

4)   Greenhouse gas emissions

5)   Land use changes
(cities growing, logging, crop irrigation, etc.)

6)    Unknown causes of variations of a
complex, non-linear system

7)  Unpredictable natural and

8) Climate measurement errors
(unintentional or deliberate)

9) Interactions and feedbacks,
involving two or more variables.

Last edited 1 month ago by Richard Greene
Barry Malcolm
Reply to  Richard Greene
September 2, 2022 6:42 pm

“There are many climate change variables. No one knows the exact effect of each one”. Frick, thanks Tipster!

Richard M
Reply to  Richard Greene
September 2, 2022 7:14 pm

As I mentioned above, the Dubal/Vahrenholt 2021 paper can shed more light on the situation. They found the cloud changes correlated well with natural ocean changes. The big change in the PDO during 2014 seems a likely candidate.

Reply to  Richard Greene
September 2, 2022 10:04 pm

I believe Willie E. is the best writer on this website
So I am biased in his favor.

If Willie E. is correct with this article, then he has, in one article, refuted 20 years of consensus climate science. This article would be worthy of a Nobel Prize.

Do I believe that actually happened?
Sorry, I do not believe that happened and my instincts are good on the subject. For Willie E. to be right, virtually every other climate scientist has to be wrong. That seems very unlikley.

If the article was on the future climate, that could be true.
Climate scientists have so many always wrong predictions of doom. Easy to refute that.

But the article is about the past climate — the past 20 years –and I very much doubt that Willie E. has discovered what thousands of scientists around the world overlooked. I’m not buying the conclusion, no matter how much I enjoy reading Willie E. articles here — and I do read every one.

Thank you for deleting most liefmotif attack posts. I normally oppose censorship. But when I recommend any article here to friends, they read all the comments, and then can get a false impression of WUWT readers from any drive by character attacks. Not that I loved this article, but I’ve tried to be civil.

Last edited 1 month ago by Richard Greene
Robert W Turner
Reply to  Willis Eschenbach
September 3, 2022 7:14 am

It does not mean that the greenhouse effect doesn’t exist. It does mean, however, that whatever gains in efficiency that occurred due to increases in CO2 have been counteracted by other climate phenomena.”

Well it’s important to take note of this; when most people refute the back radiation hypothesis, they are not saying that certain gases are not IR active, or that they are not incident with outgoing IR, and in turn emit the same frequencies of light. They are saying that this phenomenon is not close to the primary warming mechanism of the atmosphere. (with obvious exceptions to “most people”)

For instance, one can argue against eugenics while still believing in the underlying biological science that the sophistry is built upon.

Richard M
Reply to  Willis Eschenbach
September 3, 2022 8:06 am

It does not mean that the greenhouse effect doesn’t exist

The original greenhouse effect does exist. However, it is saturated which has been known for many decades. The saturation occurs very low in the atmosphere. For CO2 the saturation occurs well below 200 ppm and now less than 10 meters..

The problem comes with the enhanced greenhouse effect. This is based on increases in DWR and a supposed increase in the effective emission altitude.

We now have several different ways of looking at the data (Miskolczi 2010, Dubal/Vahrenholt 2021 and now Willis 2022) that all come the same conclusion. There’s been no increase in the greenhouse effect.

I think Willis should publish his result. It is very important and brilliant in its simplicity. It also confirms the previous work of DubalVahrenholt and Miskolczi.

Chris Hanley
Reply to  Richard Greene
September 2, 2022 4:22 pm
Last edited 1 month ago by Chris Hanley
Reply to  Chris Hanley
September 2, 2022 10:06 pm

The year to year (2000 to 2020) change is about +0.5 degrees
You have applied a linear trend to non-linear data

Chris Hanley
Reply to  Richard Greene
September 2, 2022 5:03 pm
Barry Malcolm
Reply to  Richard Greene
September 2, 2022 6:39 pm

And… after reflections of lesser or greater degrees whether clouds or the surface? You were a little dodgy there Richard.

Reply to  Barry Malcolm
September 2, 2022 10:09 pm

I’m guessing “not”. If I had the answers to why the global average temperature rose from 2000 to 2020, maybe I’d get the Nobel Prize. My “answer” is no one knows exactly why GAST rose from 2000 to 2020, and Willie E. is no exception.

Bob
September 2, 2022 1:15 pm

Very nice Willis.

dk_
September 2, 2022 1:16 pm

Good post. Thanks.

leitmotif
September 2, 2022 1:34 pm

Now, if you don’t think the “greenhouse effect” exists, this is NOT the thread for you.

So, whether the greenhouse effect exists is just an opinion? It’s whether one thinks it exists or doesn’t think it exists is the question? It’s nothing to do with empirical evidence, then?

There are lots of places to make that argument. This isn’t one of them.

Oh, scary. Stay away if you are sceptical of the existence of the greenhouse effect? Doesn’t that contradict the raison d’etre of WUWT?

We know the earth is warmer than expected.

“warmer than expected”? What does that even mean?

Nobody has ever come up with an explanation for that except the greenhouse effect.

What? An explanation of “warmer than expected”?

Nobody has ever come up with an explanation for the existence of the universe except for the existence of a supreme being. 6 out of every 7 people on this planet practise a religion and believe in god.

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. I explain this in my posts “People Living In Glass Planets“, and “The Steel Greenhouse“.

Except “The Steel Greenhouse” was thoroughly and laughingly debunked by astrophysicist Joseph Postma many years ago and accused the author of having no scientific training.

To reiterate: PLEASE do not post your opinions here on why the greenhouse effect isn’t real, or why there’s no such thing as downwelling radiation, or that scientists don’t understand the instruments that measure IR. The web is a very big universe. Somewhere out there is the perfect place to make those arguments.

This is not that place.

So do not debate on the greenhouse effect, do not debate on whether downwelling radiation can raise the temperature of the planet surface and do not argue about what pyrgeometers actually measure?

Doesn’t leave much to debate, does it Willis?

leitmotif
Reply to  Willis Eschenbach
September 2, 2022 1:52 pm

Pass.

They were perfectly good questions, Willis.

If you don’t have the answers just say so.

No need to take this moral high ground of a a messiah who has been questioned on his faith.

Tap the sign? I only, and have always, asked for evidence on your assertions about the surface warming effects of DLR or back radiation.

Come on, Willis, loosen your corsets and indulge me and, I’m sure, only a minority of WUWT posters. I and they can’t really do you any damage as you have the whole lukewarmist community behind you.

September 2, 2022 2:30 pm

Just one reply and then I hope this nonsense will be stopped by the moderators:
DLR was not only measured with pyrgeometers
which are questioned by some, but also line by line as full spectrum:
https://escholarship.org/content/qt3428v1r6/qt3428v1r6.pdf Fig. 1.
In both cases, that amounts to around 300 W/m2.
Measured, really measured.

As a black body absorbs all wavelengths and a gray body like the earth still absorbs almost all of the DLR, the conservation of energy requires that the incoming energy at the earth’s surface is the sum of incoming sunlight and incoming DLR, which is (much) higher than of the incoming sunlight alone.
That makes that the surface must warm up to restore the balance…

Alexy Scherbakoff
Reply to  Ferdinand Engelbeen
September 2, 2022 11:24 pm

I saw values in milliwatts and great mention of models, but I drifted off sometime after.

Reply to  Alexy Scherbakoff
September 3, 2022 4:46 am

The A side of Fig. 1 is the real DLR as measured by spectral analyses, the B side is the difference with what the radiation model expected. Not that bad…

Robert W Turner
Reply to  Ferdinand Engelbeen
September 3, 2022 7:53 am

Estimated atmospheric LWR is sensitive to near surface temperature. So the “measured” total LWR of the atmosphere is a factor of the temperature that the instrument is in. Too funny. LWR is not measured directly at the surface, it can’t be, it is inferred with circular reasoning that roughly converts near surface temperature to a mathematical abstraction based on back radiation hypothesis.

Gerald Machnee
September 2, 2022 2:38 pm

You missed the point.
Discuss it on another post. Maybe start one.

stinkerp
September 2, 2022 2:40 pm

Hey lazy guy, the internet has a lot of information YOU can look up YOURSELF to answer your questions about downward longwave radiation. But you didn’t write here to get an answer. You wrote to pester with your favorite argument because you either can’t be bothered to read what the rest of the climate science community has already written about DLR and warming or you simply won’t accept it. If you aren’t convinced by the robust body of science and evidence to support it, Willis certainly won’t be able to persuade you either. But that’s not why you asked, is it? People who ask questions to needle and provoke an argument rather than to learn are…annoying. Once we realize what the game is that the provoker is playing, the best response is to walk away, because arguing is a waste of time. And I just wasted several minutes.

Last edited 1 month ago by stinkerp
leitmotif
September 2, 2022 2:58 pm

Haha!

Now I get a bunch of replies from a guy who quotes arch warmist, Science of Doom and a reference to the totally debunked Feldman et al (2015) paper and a couple from Willis groupies who basically tell me to back off.

Nice try, guys but I’m here till Mr Watts bans me for questioning the science which will probably be quite soon.

(You are now in Moderation because you are chronically off topic threadjacking and being very impolite) SUNMOD

Last edited 1 month ago by Sunsettommy
leitmotif
Reply to  Willis Eschenbach
September 2, 2022 4:34 pm

Why do you not just answer the questions I posed at the start of this thread, Willis?
[Personal attack snipped – w.]

Last edited 1 month ago by Willis Eschenbach
Editor
Reply to  Willis Eschenbach
September 2, 2022 8:51 pm

He has been put in MODERATION.

Clyde Spencer
September 3, 2022 6:50 pm

There is an old saying that people are often their own worst enemies. Why do you insist on continuing to poke the wasp nest when it is obvious that the wasps don’t like it? You are not only lacking in manners, but also common sense. If you are banned, you lose your opportunity to comment in the future.

stinkerp
September 2, 2022 2:32 pm

I’ll tap the minus. You can make your argument all you want even though it was noted that this isn’t the place for that argument. Fyi, it makes you look a.) truculent, 2.) arrogant, like your opinion is SO important that it must be expressed at all costs and in every forum regardless of its relevance, and e.) not very bright since you don’t appear to grasp the actual points being made by the author so you resort to your favorite argument instead. But if you want to be a zealot, by all means…

Last edited 1 month ago by stinkerp
leitmotif
September 2, 2022 4:14 pm

(SNIPPED)
(No more thread jacking attempts stick with the current topic) SUNMOD

Last edited 1 month ago by Sunsettommy
September 2, 2022 4:23 pm

The article provided data about the greenhouse effect.
What problem do you have with the data presented?

Mark BLR
September 3, 2022 3:51 am

So, whether the greenhouse effect exists is just an opinion?

Saying “the GHG effect does not exist” isn’t “just” an unsubstantiated opinion (/ conjecture), it is one directly contradicted by several sets of empirical data (including the CERES satellite data, a subset of which is used in the ATL article).

Stay away if you are sceptical of the existence of the greenhouse effect?

After reflection I concluded (possibly incorrectly, as is always the case …) that most of my posts on CiF that were “Removed by a moderator” ended up that way due to my infringing the Guardian‘s “please stay on-topic” clause of their Community Guidelines.

I didn’t always agree with their “strictness” when assessing what was (not) “on topic”, but I accepted those decisions without rancour.

It’s what is called in some circles the “your house, your rules” level of politeness.

– – – – –

Here at WUWT a few of the “Policy” elements are :

Respect is given to those with manners, those without manners that insult others or begin starting flame wars may find their posts deleted.

Some off topic comments may get deleted, don’t take it personally, it happens. Commenters that routinely lead threads astray in areas that are not relevant or are of personal interest only to them may find these posts deleted.

Trolls, flame-bait, personal attacks, thread-jacking, sockpuppetry, name-calling such as “denialist,” “denier,” and other detritus that add nothing to further the discussion may get deleted; …

This specific post included the specific “warning” that :

To reiterate: PLEASE do not post your opinions here on why the greenhouse effect isn’t real, or why there’s no such thing as downwelling radiation, or that scientists don’t understand the instruments that measure IR. The web is a very big universe. Somewhere out there is the perfect place to make those arguments.

This is not that place.

This is the WUWT “house”, so their “rules” about what is, and is not, “on topic” apply.

Gratuitous insults are unwelcome in any “house”.

Why are these such difficult “life lessons” for you to learn ?

Last edited 1 month ago by Mark BLR
paul courtney
Reply to  Mark BLR
September 3, 2022 6:40 am

Mr. BLR: It doesn’t help that Mr. motif quotes Mr. E, only to distort the quote in the very next line. Over and over. The only effect is that Mr. motif comes across as a whiny b., and is probably lucky the mod spared him further embarrassment. If he does have comment in other posts, this will be hard to forget.

Mark BLR
Reply to  paul courtney
September 3, 2022 9:38 am

If he does have comment in other posts, this will be hard to forget.

From my exchange with “Mr. motif” under Willis(s previous article (direct link).

I wonder why you have never been banned as I have been banned from the Guardian 5 times.

I admit I have been outspoken on 2 or 3 of those identities but sometimes I have been banned just because I disagreed.

I would hope (probably in vain, but still …) that “Mr. motif” would consider more carefully just why their “outspokenness” attracts the attention of moderators on sites as widely spaced on the “climate debate spectrum” as WUWT and the Graun.

Last edited 1 month ago by Mark BLR
Editor
Reply to  Mark BLR
September 3, 2022 11:28 am

He can still post here but it requires moderator approval to make them appear on the board to stop his trolling and immature attacks on people.

He is given a chance to improve his behavior in time can be removed from moderation.

Last edited 1 month ago by Sunsettommy
CD in Wisconsin
September 2, 2022 1:35 pm

Willis,

I am not a scientist, but this brings up a question in my mind.

Do your conclusions here reflect and support the study done a while back by Dr. Happer that greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are largely saturated with IR and therefore incapable of making any further meaningful contribution to atmospheric temperatures?

Paul Johnson
Reply to  CD in Wisconsin
September 2, 2022 2:15 pm

On a related topic, does this imply an Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity much lower than most models reflect?

leitmotif
Reply to  Paul Johnson
September 2, 2022 3:54 pm

ECS is not indistinguishable from zero.

Mike
September 2, 2022 6:14 pm

Distinguishable. ECS is theoretical and current attempts at quantifying it are next to meaningless.

Last edited 1 month ago by Mike
Reply to  Paul Johnson
September 2, 2022 9:49 pm

The models reflect whatever ECR is needed for a scary global warming prediction. It does not have to match observations because accurate predictions are not a goal.

leitmotif
Reply to  CD in Wisconsin
September 2, 2022 3:52 pm

[Snipped: contained a personal attack only, not one scrap of science. w.]

Last edited 1 month ago by Willis Eschenbach
Reply to  CD in Wisconsin
September 3, 2022 10:57 am

Do you have a reference to that study by Will?

CD in Wisconsin
September 3, 2022 12:27 pm

I should have posted it in my comment above. Apologies for not doing so.

https://www.heartland.org/news-opinion/news/study-suggests-no-more-co2-warming

“Happer and van Wijngaarden’s central conclusion is this:

“For the most abundant greenhouse gases, H2O and CO2, the saturation effects are extreme, with per-molecule forcing powers suppressed by four orders of magnitude at standard concentrations…””

My point here was that the conclusions drawn by the Happer/Wijngaarden paper and what Willis is saying here seem to complement each other. Namely, that CO2’s ability to affect the climate at 420 ppm and up is low/minimal.

Reply to  CD in Wisconsin
September 3, 2022 6:52 pm

Thanks, Will’s paper states that a doubling of CO2 would result in ~3W/m^2 increase in forcing, and if other IR active gases are considered it could be about 5W/m^2.  This is consistent with the conventional value so doesn’t support the Heartland Institute’s interpretation of the paper, fortunately the original preprint was linked.

Robert B
September 2, 2022 1:45 pm

“CERES TOA products are measured products, taking into account the solar radiation incident at the TOA. CERES surface products are a combination of CERES measured fluxes and atmospheric profiles (GEOS-5.4.1), NCEP SMOBA Ozone, MATCH aerosols and cloud cover properties derived from MODIS Collection 5 until March 2017”

I’m not convinced that it doesn’t say more about the methodology than physical reality.

mkelly
September 2, 2022 1:52 pm

WE says:”In other words, for every watt per square meter of solar input, we get ~ 1.7 watts per square meter of upwelling surface radiation.”

I am at a loss to understand what physical mechanism in nature multiplies energy. How does the dirt beneath my feet increase energy?

leitmotif
September 2, 2022 2:02 pm

It just gets more surreal every time Willis posts, mkelly.

Moritz Büsing
September 2, 2022 2:44 pm

It is not about multiplying energy. It is about the energy added to the system related to the energy in the sytem (or more precicely the flux)

There is an other example:
You may add 100W/m2 of heating in your insulated house in order to reach a temperature leading to 500W/m2 of heat radiaton from the inner walls.

leitmotif
Reply to  Moritz Büsing
September 2, 2022 3:15 pm

mkelly refers to the energy of the dirt beneath his/her feet but he/she is really referring to the upwelling energy emitted by that dirt as in his/her quote “1.7 watts per square meter of upwelling surface radiation.”

Energy is measured in Joules and is a state property.

Power, as in upwelling energy, is measured in Watts which is Joules per second and is energy in motion.

mkelly wonders where the extra energy in the dirt beneath his/her feet comes from.

Don132
Reply to  Moritz Büsing
September 3, 2022 4:24 am

If a 100 W/m2 heater warms up a room this is because the heater is continuously adding heat and the most of the heat isn’t allowed to leave.
Not so with the atmosphere. The heat is allowed to leave: balloon data tells us that very clearly.

leitmotif
Reply to  Willis Eschenbach
September 2, 2022 4:38 pm

[SNIPPED—Personal attack only, science-free. w.]

Last edited 1 month ago by Willis Eschenbach
DonK
September 3, 2022 8:14 am

@mkelly.  I’m glad that I’m not the only person a bit troubled/confused by the apparent violation of Conservation Of Energy in Willis’ numbers.  I actually don’t think Willis methodology and conclusions are wrong.  Neither do I think COE is violated.  My guess is that we’ve got two similarly named quantities that you (and I) are  confusing.  FWIW Trenberth 2009 has downwelling radiation at 340,2 W/m2 and upwelling radiation at between 233.3 and 253.9 W/m2 — depending on which of a half dozen sources one chooses to believe.  Those numbers seem likely to be not too far from what COE dictates.  My plan is to go off and think about all this.  Most likely the truth will eventually surface.  … And I’ll learn something.

September 3, 2022 10:53 am

In order to maintain a stable atmospheric temperature only 1 W/m^2 of that upwelling surface radiation can leave the top of the atmosphere so 0.7 W/m^2 are recycled back to the planet/atmosphere.

September 2, 2022 1:56 pm

Very interesting figures Willis!

Looks like the negative feedback’s keep the earth’s temperature in narrow limits…

Richard M
Reply to  Ferdinand Engelbeen
September 2, 2022 8:08 pm

I’d say the physics of the atmosphere limits the warming effect of GHGs. Well mixed GHGs have an almost constant warming effect.

john harmsworth
September 2, 2022 2:05 pm

I know there are a near infinite number of people who are smarter than I am on this site, and that’s before we even limit the discussion to the field of climate.
Would it not be possible to analyze data on nighttime cooling? If CO2 causes a lag ibn heat loos from the surface, it should show up as a higher morning temperature as CO2 accumulates and increases. That effect should show up  at every level as one rises through the atmosphere.

Reply to  john harmsworth
September 2, 2022 4:31 pm

Greenhouse gases mainly affect TMIN when people are sleeping, not TMAX in the afternoon. That has been true since the 1970s. Also, more effect in higher, colder N.H. latitudes in the coldest six months of the year. More CO2 has the most effect where there is little water vapor in competition. Think of warmer winter nights in Siberia as the global warming “poster child”, How is that a climate emergency? That sounds like good news to me.

Then think that the same warming pattern did not happen in the Southern Hemisphere since the 1970s= climate science is not settled. And there was no warming from 1940 to 197 as CO2 levels increased.

You don’t need science or scientists to know how it felt to live with global warming since 1975. We loved it here in SE Michigan and want more. A climate emergency would be if global warming stopped, and global cooling began. Those are the two trends — pick the one you like best and be happy if your favorite is global warming. The climate on our planet does not get much better than it is today. Not in the past 5,000 years. Celebrate the current climate ! Don’ fear the future climate.

Last edited 1 month ago by Richard Greene
Jim Davidson
September 2, 2022 2:07 pm

“ The Moon is much cooler than the Earth.” At mid day on the lunar equator the rocks reach a temperature of 130C. At night these rocks can radiate directly to apace and their temperature drops to -170C. The Moon is both colder and hotter than the Earth. The difference lies in the Eart’s two oceans: the ocean of water that covers 7/10ths of the Earth’s surface to an average depth of 4 kilometres: and the ocean of air which envelops the entire Earth to a depth of about 100 kilometres.

Macha
Reply to  Willis Eschenbach
September 2, 2022 5:14 pm

Which shows that averaging temperatures says so little about living conditions..aka climate.
Rather have 20to30C than 0to50C.

September 2, 2022 2:20 pm

Ja. Ja. I told you. It is not the CO2. It is not the sun either as Tmax (global) is still going down.

Now I know there some who claim that the geothermal factor is only 90 milliW/m2.
I think something is wrong there. According to my old books T is going up 3K per km down. Come down in a goldmine here and soon you will have sweat pouring from your face.
That means I only need an internal shift of 1/3 = 334 meters of the inside of earth to get a raise of 1 degree Tmin in the NH.That is not much?
otoh
The movement of the magnetic northpole inherently means a lower Tmin in the SH.
THAT EXPLAINS THE RESULTS I AM SEEING

Last edited 1 month ago by HenryP
Ed Bo
September 3, 2022 8:12 am

Henry,
Let’s look at the basic equation for conduction heat transfer:
q = k * A * DeltaT / DeltaX
Re-arranging, we get
q/A = k * DeltaT / DeltaX
The thermal conductivity of most rocks is about 2 W/m/K
The geothermal gradient is about 30 (not 3) K per km.
So we get:
q/A = 2 (W/m/K) * 30 (K) / 1000 (m) = 0.06 W/m2 = 60 mW/m2
It does seem surprisingly small, doesn’t it?

September 3, 2022 10:19 am

You probably need to get some new books, in the S African goldmines the rock temperature get as high as 60ºC 4km down.

stinkerp
September 2, 2022 2:48 pm

Why is the Incoming Solar Radiation increasing over the last couple decades? I don’t understand. It seems like it might increase or decrease slightly due to orbital eccentricity throughout the year (a single orbit of the sun) and perhaps in relation to the 11-year solar cycle (roughly 0.07%). I can’t see why incoming radiation at the top of the atmosphere would increase over the last 22 years. Could you explain?

Last edited 1 month ago by stinkerp
Jason S.
September 2, 2022 5:32 pm

This is measuring incoming solar radiation after absorption/reflection. So these changes are not due available solar radiation (changes in sun output, orbits, etc.) but more likely changes to albedo. There has been literature showing a reduction in cloud cover over this same time period which correlates well to the increase in temperature.

This analysis from Willis seems to me to corroborate those findings. Changes is solar radiation driving temperature changes, not CO2.

Bob boder
September 2, 2022 5:50 pm

Changes in cloud coverage

Richard M
September 2, 2022 8:11 pm

Best to read Dubal/Vahrenholt 2021. The cloud changes appear to be related to ocean cycles.

davetherealist
September 2, 2022 2:51 pm

I 100% disagree with this statement.  “We know the earth is warmer than expected.”   Expected by who?  and what is their basis of determining what the temperature should be.

Other than that, it is always back to the same answer:  Its the SUN  stoopid!.
﻿

Hubert
September 2, 2022 3:00 pm

In fact , this period of 20 years is too short to see a significant change in greenhouse multiplier !
The greenhouse effect has increased by 1 watt/m2 in 30 years , compared to the total Natural of 150 watts/ m2 .
Even the amount of 3.3 watts/m2 of anthropogenic greenhouse since the industrial revolution has a small impact on this multiplier !!
That’s not the right factor to analyse …

Eric Vieira
September 2, 2022 3:00 pm

Hi Willis
Just one comment: it looks like more energy is coming out of the system than is being put into it.
When you calculate the W/m2 is the wavelength and intensity distribution taken into account? The incoming (visible) light has more energy per photon than the outgoing (LW) radiation. Is this already inherent in the CERES data ? Does the W unit really reflect the energy coming in and out of the system ?

RickWill
September 2, 2022 4:02 pm

We have observational evidence that the temperature increase from 2000-2021 was not due to an increase in greenhouse gases, or any increase in the efficiency of the greenhouse effect from any cause. The efficiency has been very stable over the period, with a standard deviation of 0.2% and no significant trend.

I have always been clear on this. The “greenhouse effect” plays no role in Earth’s energy balance so why does it even come up in any discussion on climate?

leitmotif
September 2, 2022 4:18 pm

[SNIPPED—Contained personal attacks only, science-free. w.]

Last edited 1 month ago by Willis Eschenbach
leitmotif
September 2, 2022 4:41 pm

Snipped by Willis.

Don’t believe this man.

He snips or gets snipped those who disagree with him.

(No more discussion of moderation actions!) SUNMOD

Last edited 1 month ago by Sunsettommy
leitmotif
Reply to  Willis Eschenbach
September 3, 2022 3:47 pm

WUWT cowards

(Hold for Administrator considerations and all the others below this moderated post) SUNMOD

RickWill
September 2, 2022 4:07 pm

Figure 4 shows a comparison of the upwelling longwave shown in Figure 3 and the Stefan-Boltzmann derived temperature. Basically identical in form.

Of course they are because the ULW is inferred from the temperature. It is not a measurement of power flux.

Like my wood moisture meter, it indicates moisture but actually reads a current and voltage to determine a resistance, which is correlated to moisture..

Last edited 1 month ago by RickWill
RickWill
Reply to  Willis Eschenbach
September 2, 2022 5:29 pm

S-B is an approximation that can be applied in a constrained reference frame. It is not applicable when heat transport is dominated by other processes. For example an ocean warm pool has no SW radiation leaving the surface. All heat is transported by latent heat of evaporation.

You should not be surprised by the correlation – that is how the instrument is calibrated. It simply takes the temperature and applies the S-B equation. It is inferring a radiated power flux from temperature. Your chart simply verifies the calibration. But is is not measuring a radiated power flux.

There are other approximations used in appropriate reference frames. For example the gravity field. It is a field with time component as Einsien determined but we approximate the force between two bodies to a simple constant and the inverse of distance squared.

Michael Mishchenko is one of the best authors on the physics of EMR relative to Earth’s atmosphere. He understands field theory and has made efforts to apply it to climate science.

Ed Bo
September 3, 2022 8:40 am

Are you seriously claiming that if water is evaporating from the surface, it stops radiating away? (I presume you meant LW radiation). Really?
This afternoon, I will find a nearby rock that has been in the sun all day and is hot enough that I can feel the radiation from it. Then I will pour a little water on it, which will immediately start evaporating. I will check to see if it stops radiating.  Not holding my breath…

September 3, 2022 7:06 pm

For example an ocean warm pool has no SW radiation leaving the surface. All heat is transported by latent heat of evaporation.”
I’m sure Mishchenko didn’t say anything this stupid!

RickWill
September 2, 2022 4:10 pm

The most important question to answer is why are there ever clear skies over oceans?

Once you can answer that, you begin to understand how the energy balance is controlled.

Bob boder
September 2, 2022 5:54 pm

So wouldn’t less cloud cover infer a cooling ocean?

Macha
September 2, 2022 4:54 pm

Because heat, manifested as temperature, is not entirely defined by quanitity W/m2. Intensity and emissivity play a significant part.
A few minutes of UV versus LWDR (15um) on your skin will prove.

Jeff Alberts
September 2, 2022 7:09 pm

The temperature has been generally rising over the period 2000-2021″

Which temperature?

richardw
Reply to  Willis Eschenbach
September 2, 2022 11:39 pm

This is a question, not a criticism. Why not include and use the UAH record? From a long time (albeit as a non – scientist) reading WUWT I have reached the conclusion that UAH is the most reliable record as it avoids the various distortions inherent in land based temperature measurement.

Richard M
September 2, 2022 8:37 pm

It’s nice to see that Willis was able to reproduce essentially the same results seen in Dubal/Vahrenholt 2021. I like the greenhouse efficiency idea. It appears to support the Miskolczi 2010 constant opacity concept.

I’ve been bringing this up every now and then. Most skeptics seemed to accept the claims that Miskolczi was wrong. We can’t say he was precisely right, but it appears he had the general concept right.

Miskolczi analyzed 70 years of NOAA data and found the greenhouse effect was a constant. Willis has now found a similar result over the past 20 years. The chances both of these could be wrong is pretty small.

This means that climate science got it completely wrong. It also means luke-warmers got it wrong. There is no warming due to doubling of CO2.

There’s real physics involved. I’ve explained why boundary level feedback counters DWIR warming. I’ve also explained why the effective emission altitude is a constant. Time for skeptics to quit looking for feedbacks to warming and consider why the warming never occurs.

KcTaz
September 2, 2022 9:57 pm

“On the other hand, the change in incoming solar energy is both adequate to explain the increase in warming, and has the same shape as the change in surface radiation (blue LOWESS smooths in both panels in Figure 3). While there are undoubtedly other factors in play, the main cause of the warming is clearly the increase in the amount of solar energy after reflections from the clouds and the surface.
And once again, the clouds rule … go figure …”
There are other scientists whose work completely supports your statement, Willis.

Japanese researchers at the University of Kobe arrived at similar results as the Turku team, finding in a paper published in early July that cloud coverage may create an “umbrella effect” that could alter temperatures in ways not captured by current modeling.
A pdf (1.7MB) for download is available at
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.00165.pdf

Also to note is a recent paper called
‘No experimental evidence for the significant anthropogenic climate change’
Jyrki Kauppinen, Pekka Malmi
(Submitted on 29 Jun 2019)
Abstract

In this paper we will prove that GCM-models used in IPCC report AR5 fail to calculate the influences of the low cloud cover changes on the global temperature. That is why those models give a very small natural temperature change leaving a very large change for the contribution of the green house gases in the observed temperature. This is the reason why IPCC has to use a very large sensitivity to compensate a too small natural component. Further they have to leave out the strong negative feedback due to the clouds in order to magnify the sensitivity. In addition, this paper proves that the changes in the low cloud cover fraction practically control the global temperature.
CERN: Cosmic Rays Influence Cloud Formation
Aug 25, 2011

CERN

CLOUD discovers new way by which aerosols rapidly form and grow at high altitude

The resultant particles quickly spread around the globe, potentially influencing Earth’s climate on an intercontinental scale
18 MAY, 2022
Another Climate Scientist with Impeccable Credentials Breaks Ranks: “Our models are Mickey-Mouse Mockeries of the Real World” – Electroverse
September 26, 2019
http://bit.ly/33p7OSa

Dr. Mototaka Nakamura received a Doctorate of Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and for nearly 25 years specialized in abnormal weather and climate change at prestigious institutions that included MIT, Georgia Institute of Technology, NASA, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, JAMSTEC and Duke University.
In his book The Global Warming Hypothesis is an Unproven Hypothesis, Dr. Nakamura explains why the data foundation underpinning global warming science is “untrustworthy” and cannot be relied on:
“Global mean temperatures before 1980 are based on untrustworthy data,” writes Nakamura. “Before full planet surface observation by satellite began in 1980, only a small part of the Earth had been observed for temperatures with only a certain amount of accuracy and frequency. Across the globe, only North America and Western Europe have trustworthy temperature data dating back to the 19th century.”
From 1990 to 2014, Nakamura worked on cloud dynamics and forces mixing atmospheric and ocean flows on medium to planetary scales. His bases were MIT (for a Doctor of Science in meteorology), Georgia Institute of Technology, Goddard Space Flight Center, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Duke and Hawaii Universities and the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology.
He’s published 20+ climate papers on fluid dynamics.
There is no questioning his credibility or knowledge.

Doug Proctor
September 3, 2022 1:06 am

I just read the albedo article at the centre of this post
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2021GL094888

The Earthshine project showed a 0.5W/m2 decrease over 20 years. The CERES satellite showed 1.5W/m2.

The authors seem to discount the satellite data and stick with the 0.5W/m2.

They say models say 0.6W/m2 increase from CO2 and pollution. So together 1.1W/m2.

Why discount 1.5? If really 1.5, then 0.6 models are wrong, just curve fitting to an alleged 0.5W/m2 albedo.

Also, the albedo change is said to be from melted ice loss in Arctic and less clouds over a warmer Pacific. But could this explanation be from confirmation bias? That they have cause and effect reversed?

If global warming models are curve fitting to an unknown reason for albedo changes, the whole global warming narrative fails. The models are based on an assumption we understand the variables heating the planet’s atmosphere.

A variable we don’t know we don’t know doesn’t get put it the model. The other variables are then tweaked to account for it.

Maybe I’m missing something.

Richard M
Reply to  Doug Proctor
September 3, 2022 8:39 am

One of the key data items that supports CERES over Earthshine is the high correlation of the temperature computation Willis did from the LW data and the UAH data. Two different approaches and almost identical results.

Doug Proctor
September 3, 2022 1:13 am

The albedo change of 0.5 or 1.5 W/m2 is 15% or 42% of the alleged equivalent forced by 2X CO2 of 3.5W/m2. Which is supposed to be 3 or 4*C in the scary scenarios. Which strikes me as the entire reason for the planetary warming of the past 20 years.

Again, cause and effect inversion due to not knowing what we don’t know is going on?

Again, what am I missing?

Richard M
Reply to  Doug Proctor
September 3, 2022 8:44 am

You’ve got it nailed. The CO2 increase over those 20 years would yield only about 20% of the 3.5 W/m2 claimed warming which is only half of the 1.5 W/m2 of solar warming. In fact, we’ve seen significant longwave cooling which reduced the amount of warming we have seen.

nobodysknowledge
September 3, 2022 3:55 am

Willis.
There is some problems with the “greenhouse effect”.
You should take all the energy in, and all the energy out from the earth surface. It is the energy budget that matters.
From Loeb et al 2021: Trend in EEI During the CERES Period
https://ceres.larc.nasa.gov/documents/STM/2021 05/35_Loeb_contrib_science_presentation.pdf

For the radiation at the earths surface we have the following numbers (Wild et al. 2019):<br />Solar radiation absorbed: 160 W/m2 with an increasing trend.<br />Longwave cooling from increased temperature: -56W/m2 with an increasing trend.<br />Evaporation, without presentation of trend: -82W/m2<br />Sensible heat, conduction/ convection from surface: -21W/m2 <br>Earth Energy Imbalance measurements tell us that there is a warming of 0,51 W/m2/dec from change in these variables, SWsurf down, LWsurf up, Evaporation, Sensible heat. The components behind these changes are Temperature change, Albedo change, Cloud radiation change, Water vapor Change, and Trace gases change. These are also the feedback components of climate change. <br>Loeb et al, 20 years of energy imbalance from 2000 to 2020:<br />Temperature surface radiation, Net LW cooling: -0,51 W/m2/dec<br />Albedo reduction. SW solar warming: 0,19 W/m2/dec<br />Cloud LW cooling (less clouds) -0,23 W/m2/dec<br />Cloud SW decreased absorption 0.44 W/m2/dec<br />Water vapor LW warming 0,33 W/m2/dec<br />Water vapor SW warming and latent heat. 0,05 W/m2/dec<br />Trace gas, aerosole LW warming 0,237 W/m2/dec<br />Trace gas, aerosole SW warming 0,002 W/m2/dec<br />If we assume that most trace gases and aerosols dont make much difference, and Methane stands for 22,9 % of trace gas warming, we get:
CO2 LW warming 0,185 W/m2/dec
Methane LW warming 0,055 W/m2/dec

Last edited 1 month ago by nobodysknowledge
nobodysknowledge
September 3, 2022 4:03 am

Sorry for the font shift

nobodysknowledge
September 3, 2022 4:12 am

The net LW cooling is change in the difference between longwave radiation up and the downwelling radiation, so there is a “backradiation” cooling. The downwelling doesn`t compensate for the surface warming radiation (Planck feedback).

Last edited 1 month ago by nobodysknowledge
Richard M
September 3, 2022 8:49 am

Much of the data used in Loeb et al 2021, which tries to compensate for the obvious problems the raw CERES data represents, is based on “estimates”, “guesses” and “models”. It looks very suspicious.

It reminds me of all the adjustments to surface data and the continued divergence of that data from satellite data.

Edim
September 3, 2022 5:44 am

Nice again Willis. As you probably know, there are already several papers showing that the recent warming is caused by increased absorbed solar radiation, but they speculate that it’s a feedback to CO2 warming (epicycles IMO).
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2009GL037527
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4250165/

Btw, the Earth’s atmosphere has an insulating effect on the surface. Greenhouse effect just sounds dumb and unscientific.

September 3, 2022 6:49 am

So given the evidence above that the increase in upwelling surface radiation cannot be due to a change in greenhouse efficiency from increased CO2 or any other reason
≠==========
This is strong evidence that the so called greenhouse effect is NOT due to CO2.

Willis, maybe I missed something, but it sure looks to me like you have proven that the greenhouse multiplier is not the result of CO2. That something else must be the cause.

It only takes 1 confirmed false finding to prove a theory false.

September 3, 2022 7:11 am

Question. What about the energy that leaves and enters the surface via conduction and convection? This affects outgoing radiation and is unlikely to be net zero because it delays cooling and interacts with ghg at altitude.

nobodysknowledge
September 3, 2022 7:37 am

Conduction/convection from surface 21W per m2
Evaporation from land and ocean surface 82W per m2
Net longwave radiation, surface emission minus backradiation 56W per m2
All these are cooling the surface, giving energy to the atmosphere and radiated out to space.
From Martin Wild et al.

Richard M
September 3, 2022 8:55 am

Conduction, convection (and evaporation) are key to the negative feedback for increases in DWIR. They counter the warming effect from CO2 increases immediately. No warming at the surface. I call this boundary layer feedback.

Last edited 1 month ago by Richard M
September 3, 2022 7:33 am

Willis wrote: “..the increase in upwelling surface radiation cannot be due to a change in greenhouse efficiency from increased CO2 or any other reason….”
=========

Thus, given that GHG was increasing during that period, while the greenhouse efficiency did not, either the greenhouse effect is not caused by greenhouse gas or there is an error in your work.

There cannot be causation without correlation.

Richard M
September 3, 2022 8:58 am

The CO2/CH4 greenhouse effects are saturated which means their effect can no longer increase. The alarmist invention of an “enhanced greenhouse effect” is what Willis has shown to be pseudo-science.

September 3, 2022 7:55 am

At an altitude of 500mb, the air temperature is the predicted temperature of the earth without GHG.

50% of the atmospheric mass lies above 500mb and is cooler. 50% of the atmospheric mass lies below and is warmer.

Only the sun moves the 500mb line, so the only way to increase the greenhouse efficiency would be to reduce the water vapor in the atmosphere. See formula for lapse rate. Adding CO2 will not do it because it is non condensing.

Last edited 1 month ago by ferdberple
September 3, 2022 8:05 am

A decreasing greenhouse efficiency as Willis has identified at a time of increasing CO2 tells me that CO2 does not affect greenhouse efficiency because CO2 is non condensing. Rather, the decrease in greenhouse efficiency is due to an increase in atmospheric water vapor, flattening the lapse rate. The obvious cause is burning, agriculture, irrigation and land use changes.

Last edited 1 month ago by ferdberple
Richard M
September 3, 2022 9:00 am

No, it has little to do with water vapor. The greenhouse effect is saturated. Nothing else is required.

September 3, 2022 8:16 am

No new heat can be generated from a static pressure.
==≠======(
Misconception. The lapse rate is a result of convection. The pressure is not static from the point of view of an air molecule or parcel of air moving vertically. The pressure is truly only static if you remove the sun which would end all convection.

In any case new heat is not being generated. It is being pumped downwards using solar energy to move air and water vapor through a pressure gradiant, similat to a mechanical heat pump.

Last edited 1 month ago by ferdberple
Richard M
September 3, 2022 9:02 am

The lapse rate is actually due to well mixed GHGs controlling the energy levels allowed at varying densities.

Reply to  Richard M
September 3, 2022 12:53 pm

The lapse rate is actually due to well mixed GHGs
========
Nowhere in rhe formula for lapse rate does well mixed GHG appear.

Richard M
September 3, 2022 2:18 pm

Not relationships are easy to see.

Well mixed GHGs means their concentration follows the changes in atmospheric density. What determines density? Good old gravity. And of course, gravity does appear in the lapse rate equation

September 3, 2022 8:34 am

It is a simple matter to generate 33C of warming by pumping a gas through a pressure gradiant. You are not creating energy. You are moving energy from one place to another.
Atmospheric convection driven by solar energy does this all day long.

Build a huge mechanical heat pump run via solar energy with the low pressue (cold) coils at altitude and the high pressure (warm) coils at the surface. That is convection.

Ps: this is a continuation of my earlier post based on Willis showing that greenhouse efficiency was not determined by CO2. It follows from that that the greenhouse effect must be based on some other gas other than CO2.

David Appleby
September 3, 2022 11:02 am

First of all, thank you for such a concise and informative post. The CERES data indicates an underlying fall in reflected sunlight of approximately 1.4% between 2000 and 2021. This could be due to a change in average cloud cover, but the reduction in average arctic sea ice & snow cover (from 10.5 to 9.5.10^6 km2 from AMSR data) could be having a significant effect. A very rough calculation, assuming a change in albedo from 0.8 to 0.15, gives an expected reduction in expected solar reflection of about 0.7%. It may be worth someone calculating a more accurate figure, accounting for ice cover & sun angle throughout the year.

Kevin kilty
September 3, 2022 12:21 pm

The efficiency used here is simply the inverse of the effective emissivity of the Earth: In this essay from 3 years ago, I calculated this effective emmissivity as 0.61 (ie 1.64 in Willis’s terms) but this presupposes an average albedo in the solar spectrum of 0.30. What goes on with regard to a secular trend in “efficciency of greenhouse effect” is actually a secular trend in the figure of merit of the Earth treated as a solar collector. What is good about the figure of merit is it takes into account both the effective emissivity and the effective solar absorptivity.

I’ll see here if LaTeX still works…figure of merit = $(\alpha_s/\epsilon)^{1/4}$

Kevin kilty
Reply to  Kevin kilty
September 3, 2022 12:21 pm

It works!

September 3, 2022 1:10 pm

The lapse rate is actually due to well mixed GHGs
========
it this is a prediction of Greenhouse theory, then it is surprising it has not been dealt with.

On Earth there is no term for well mixed gas in the lapse rate.

The lapse rate is a function of gravity and the work required to compress air. This contradicts the notion that heating/cooling due to compression is a one time event.

In addition the lapse rate is a function of the condensation of water and the energy released via phase change.

This is all driven by low pressure in places where the sun is shinning and high pressure in places that are dark. These are continually changing because of orbital mechanics.

Last edited 1 month ago by ferdberple
Kevin kilty
September 3, 2022 7:13 pm

True, Mr. Ferdberple. It is very difficult to get people to understand that temperature (a proxy for internal energy at fixed composition) is a reflection of the first law of thermodynamics, towit, change in internal energy = heat in – work out; or, $dU=\delta Q-\delta W$

September 3, 2022 1:20 pm

It is generally recognized that the atmisphere below 500mb is opaque to IR and as a result there is little cooling of the surface due to outgoing radiation. The heavy lidting below 500mb is done by convection.

September 3, 2022 2:13 pm

No, the atmosphere is not opaque to IR, as shown in the spectrum below it’s fairly transparent at many wavelengths.  The regions of the spectrum where it is opaque are where certain components (CO2, H2O, O3 etc) absorb.

Kevin kilty
September 3, 2022 2:19 pm

In most places, perhaps, but where I live cooling by radiation predominates after sundown and is substantial and quite apparent even without instruments.

Ulric Lyons
September 3, 2022 1:31 pm

“The earth is much warmer than the moon, which receives the same amount of solar energy. It’s generally accepted, including by me, that the warmth is from the very poorly named “greenhouse effect”

Earth’s sunlit side at any given time is cooler than on the Moon because of clouds and water vapour. Earth’s dark side at any given time is much warmer than on the Moon, primarily because of the sea surfaces barely cooling at night.

Last edited 1 month ago by Ulric Lyons
Reply to  Ulric Lyons
September 3, 2022 7:36 pm

The Moon has an albedo of 0.12 as opposed to the Earth which has an albedo of 0.30 so the Moon receives about 26% more solar energy than the Earth. On the dark side of the Moon the surface has a lot longer to cool (~14 days) it gets a lot colder.

Ulric Lyons
September 4, 2022 4:27 am

The lunar equator cools about 270K in a quarter rotation from midday to dusk, and then cools about 40K from dusk to dawn for half a rotation. So in twice as long, the dark side cools much less.

Reply to  Ulric Lyons
September 4, 2022 10:42 am

Yes the day-time temperatures are close to radiative equilibrium so the maximum temperature is at noon (~390K), due to the change in incidence angle the temperature drops rapidly before dawn (7 Earth days later) to about 200K (high std dev ~30K).  By the Lunar midnight 7 Earth days later it reaches ~95K, since loss depends on T^4 further losses are slow.  As I said, much longer cooling time than on Earth.

Ulric Lyons
September 4, 2022 12:58 pm

“due to the change in incidence angle the temperature drops rapidly before dawn (7 Earth days later) to about 200K”

Dusk comes after midday, by which time the equator has cooled down to around 120K. The night time cooling over ~14 days is only 40K.

Last edited 29 days ago by Ulric Lyons
Reply to  Ulric Lyons
September 4, 2022 3:27 pm

Yes mistyped dawn instead of dusk.

Ulric Lyons
September 4, 2022 1:03 pm

Double or quadruple the lunar rotation rate, and the sunlit side will be virtually the same temperature, except for a slightly warmer dusk terminator and a slightly cooler dawn terminator. The dark side mean temperature would be virtually the same.

Reply to  Ulric Lyons
September 4, 2022 4:04 pm

Well I was comparing it to the Earth which rotates 28 times faster!
Reaches its maximum  after 7 days of heating (noon) and proceeds to cool for 21 days after that.
The moon surface at the equator is warmer than the Earth for about 6 days around noon, colder the rest of the time.

Ulric Lyons
September 4, 2022 5:12 pm

The lunar sunlit side is roughly in equilibrium with solar irradiance, it does not take days to heat up, the surface temperature is mostly dependent on the angle of incidence.

leitmotif
September 3, 2022 3:38 pm

This is totally hilarious!

griff, loydo and simon have been allowed to post here for years on WUWT despite being CAGWers and yet I have been placed on moderation for disputing the existence of the GHE.

All I ever asked for was evidence that the GHE exists and that it causes surface warming. I also asked for evidence that Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity was a true measurement.

What can I say?

WUWT is a cancel culture website.

If you want me to go just ban me. WUWT is not really worth the effort in its current lukewarmist stance.

It will just convince me and a few others on this website (not many it seems but also the more intelligent and informed ones, I’m sure) that WUWT is just a supporter of lukewarmists and not really an edge-cutting protester against government policy on climate change.

WUWT had a great platform for change but the platform moved so much WUWT just slid off into the mire.

Yours

Very Disappointed

(You have 1322 posts and allowed this one because it shows how far off the path YOU are when it comes to following the blog policy:

Trolls, flame-bait, personal attacks, thread-jacking, sockpuppetry, name-calling such as “denialist,” “denier,” and other detritus that add nothing to further the discussion may get deleted…

and,

For the same reasons as the absurd topics listed above, references to the “Slaying the Sky Dragon” Book and subsequent group “Principia Scientific” which have the misguided idea that the greenhouse effect doesn’t exist, and have elevated that idea into active zealotry, WUWT is a “Slayer Free Zone”. There are other blogs which will discuss this topic, take that commentary there.

No one here is forcing you to be here but this blog has a policy in place to help people stay on topic and be reasonably civil, you are in MODERATION now because our lack trust in you has fallen to the point that your future posts have to be in the moderation bin first to see if you are here to contribute to the debate without the baiting the trolling and the numerous personal attacks.

Deleted 10 posts to clean up the thread) SUNMOD

Last edited 29 days ago by Sunsettommy
Clyde Spencer
September 3, 2022 7:13 pm

… I have been placed on moderation for disputing the existence of the GHE.

It is unfortunate for you that you don’t realize that the problem is not “disputing the existence of the GHE,” but rather your uncivil behavior and unwillingness to abide by WE’s request to not ‘thread jack’ the topic. You have some issues and this is not the time to air them.

Clyde Spencer
September 3, 2022 6:14 pm

Nobody has ever come up with an explanation for that except the greenhouse effect.

Something to consider is that the moon has no liquid water. The surface of rocks are heated to high temperatures by direct sunlight, and because of the S-B 4th-power law, it is radiated away rapidly.

On the other hand, Earth with abundant water (with a specific heat capacity ~5X greater than rocks) only gets to about 1/5th the temperature and radiates at 1/625 (0.2%). Also, the evaporation of water and transpiration from plants keeps the surface at a low S-B base temperature, keeping the rate of radiation low.

Kevin kilty
September 3, 2022 9:24 pm

Willis,

I don’t necessarily have an argument about this work or your earlier essay, but you begin with the statement

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.”

When someone says TOA I take that to mean where the atmosphere ends. But at such a height the radiation leaving the Earth cannot be anything other than what is entering from the Sun, with perhaps some small adjustment for lack of equilibrium due to a slowly warming planet. There is nothing going on within the atmosphere that can increase a TOA radiative flux up or down by any amount.

Now it may be that when people say “greenhouse” effect they actually mean at top of the troposphere, or stratosphere, or perhaps truly out where the atmosphere ends. In your opening words, what does TOA mean?

Possibly by a forcing of 3.7 watts they mean that solar albedo has declined for some reason by this amount, so that this is an increase of solar reaching the ground surface, but LWIR increases by the same. Is this what is claimed?

For any greenhouse effect, its maximum magnitude will be obeserved at the surface — whether measured by temperature or downwelling radiation. Even saying “surface” has its pitfalls. They must mean that the surface sees an additional LWIR downwelling, which raises its temperature, and this in turn increases upwelling LWIR at the surface — but none of this has anything to do with TOA.

Howard Hayden has made a presentation about the IPCC and claims about three things (greenhouse effect, surface temperature, and stefan-boltzmann law) that cannot be made consistent. Are you aware of his work?

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