How it Really Works
This is a public WIP summary of a book I am writing to explain the reality of how Earth’s energy balance in space is controlled, at whatever temperature that balance requires. I am publishing it while editing it. Comment welcome if it’s about clarity, data & referenceable facts.
Earth Energy Balance is a strongly controlled process that is not significantly changed by human activity, because the natural feedbacks are far stronger than any human effect. The simple reality is that modellers have ignored the major negative control feedbacks that stabilise Earth’s energy balance in space, and presumed to only quantify positive feedbacks to make it appear there is a delicate balance, even instability, of this balance in space. This is the opposite of the reality our satellite and other measurement systems have recorded, or is directly supported by quantification using proven applied physics. The artificially contrived science of partially framed UN models is evidentially wrong, so their conclusions and predictions deliberately deceitful if used by anyone competent to claim expertise, and is certainly nothing to do with the reality that the whole system scrutiny of nature by deterministic science can reveal, repeatedly, and by any competent observer.
Summary:
Evaporative Negative Feedback: 6W/m^2 deg K
Stefan Boltzmann Negative Feedback: 3.3W/m^2 deg K
Adding in other smaller effects from Clouds and positive GHE feeback:
Net Negative Whole Earth system (net of GHG amplification): 8.7W/m^2 deg K
This means the changes attributed to small AGW radiative effects of a few W/m^2 are VERY unlikely to ever create more than 1 deg K of warming, before the next cooling of the natural 1,000 year cycles returns.
Mine is an empirical approach to this problem, so all real and very different to the world of people arguing the presumptions and attributions of climate models that cannot predict what really happens and are wrong by hundreds of percent versus satellite measured reality. The models have no serious relevance to the real world we observe, and they deny, to assert a fantasy from a perceived authority they overtly do not have, because they omit so much of known and measured natural effects from their tales.
It doesn’t work like they say. They models don’t even work as as we measure it and know they must. But why?
It is strange that most people in academic involvement with this matter fall for these opening and crucial deceits of the modellers framing of claimte cintrol, and thus are having the wrong argument before they start, by the wrong initial framing..
Specialist theoretician academics in particular, even sceptics, do not seem able think empirically about the whole natural system, which include science outside their speciality, and are thus unable to imagine how such a complete system might work holistically. Judith Curry raised the issue of “radiatively obsessed specialists” without breadth in her recent talk in London. It has taken me a long time to understand why that was funny, 8 years, roughly, as I went through the elements of the whole empirical system physics, one at a time. Most people never will, sadly. It’s too easy to believe.
It is clear many of these “expert climate scientists” simply don’t have the formation to imagine the whole energy balance system, and hence don’t have the competence to model or debate it.
Which is why charlatans like Hansen can pretend to understand how the whole system works, while overtly describing only the positive feedbacks, and leaving the larger negative feedbacks out, and even quantifying those he does include wrongly as regards “amplification” of AGW with warming by water vapour GHE, as if his obviously limited philosophy of the system controls was all that should be dreamt of, with apologies to Shakespeare.
Hansen et al’s claims to understand the whole system model are overtly false on the facts of the many things he omits or gets wrong, and hence his predictions using them are wrong. But there is more. Much more. Unless I have missed something and my feedbacks are included by implication in their models, but never mentioned? But where? Here goes….
The climate is the consequence of the earth’s changing energy balance, because that is what it naturally controls, its not a thermostatic control. Earth’s average surface temperature is a direct consequence of whatever temperature is needed to maintain anenrgy balance, and hence the sneitivity of that control determines the variability of the average global temperature over significat time periods (tens of years).
An imbalance between the lectromagnetic energy flows to and from space cannot be sustained, because energy in MUST equal energy out, at whatever temperature. THis is an uunavoidable balance, and constantly changing.
IF the solar input is constant in our time scales (its +/-40W/m^2 over a year at max orbital eccentricity BTW, do the inverse square law maths on 340W/m^2),………..
THEN surface temperature is the temperature that balance requires to exist at the mainly oceanic surface to ensure the LWIR re radiated to space balances the EMR aborbed, the 240W/m^2. This is naturaly self adjusting system, in which temperature is decided by the controlling need to balance enrgy flux in and out.
So SST will change if the characteristics of the GHE scattering within the atmospheric component of the enrgy transfer system change, this will create a radiative perturbation to the energy imbalance created by the perurbation. But how much surface change is required to rebalance?
Most of the negative feedback occurs from evaporative cooling, and the second largest from the direct radiative feedback change across the whole surface, whether scattered by GHE or not, to create the total amount of radiation loss necessary to rebalance the system, neutralising the radiative imbalance caused by the change in the internal atmospheric transfer function of the greenhouse effect..
But the modellers seem to presume that its temperature that is controlled in their models, which is obs wrong. Temperature is a consequence of system balance, and varies as it must with total GHE, even if the incoming energy is the same. Simple and obvious. Unless you are a modeller, or just hard of physics.
It is also nuts to assume there are no strong negative feedback responses to changing conditions in the system balance whe you look at its main components and how variable they really are with temperature. The question I have struggled with and now offer empirically derived numbers for.
Yetvthese these very real effects, measured by NASA satellite, are not even mentioned in the litererature I see, even though they are there in plain sight in the diagrams the literature presents us with. Only the positive feedbacks are mentioned. I wonder why?
In 500 Million years the planetary control system has moved only 14 degrees up and down in 300K or so, mostly cooling so it is now 14 deg colder that 500Ma BP..
This is clearly NOT a positively fed back (by GHE) and hence inherently unstable temperature control system, that can be destabilised by a few W/m^2 of radiative imbalance. Such a presumption is overtly false on the observations. The empirical evidence is that of a highly stable energy balance maintained over a range of a few degrees.
And that means strong negative feedback in the range of the natural energy fluxes we observe..
QUESTION: How does it do that, what are the negtaive feedbacks, that no body wants to mention?
Well, first there are the clouds, of course, which I deliberately give a low value of 1.4W/m^2 to, because it’s not important to my point. Because there is more. Much more.
It seems that there are TWO more self evident truths, negative feedbacks to any surface temperature change that are clear, present, quantifiable and LARGE. Not GHE related.
1. First the smaller: The overall direct LWIR radiative feedback spectrum of 240W/m^2 at the interface to space, at whatever height that occurs above the surface, will vary by (289/288)^4 or c. 1.3% per deg K by the Stefan Boltzmann effect, so thats 3.3 W/m^2 deg K negative feedback. Just is, right?
2. Second is the big one: The oceanic evaporation (that the warmists acknowledge to claim a real but guessed as regards amplitude GHE amplification, but simultaneously ignore the larger cooling effects of the water vapour. The evaporative enrgy is carried to the troposphere and lost to space as LWIR on condensation. It’s part of the 240W/m^2 OGLWR we observe from space. But how much does it vary per deg K?
Easy again, once you know the magic numbers for water vapour change by weight in the atmshphere per degree. Its c.7% over the RHI of 10-90% and +/- 10 degK..
So the 86.4W/ m^2 NASA measures for this absolute effect now, give or take the errors, will vary by 7% of this per deg K. That gives a negative feedback of 6W/m^2 per deg K. That’ll do.
So I suggest two dominant negative feedback effects, clearly quantified in a few lines of High School maths and physics, that sum to 9.3W/m^2 deg K.. Plus another 1.4W/m^2 due to clouds I decided on. Based on 50W/m^2 albedo and 30W/m^2 radiative warming, so net 20W/m^2 varying at 7% per deg. Crude, but not my subject….
So that’s 10.7W/m^2 per degree gross negative feedback, all quite real, minus 2W/m^2 deg K water vapour GHE amplification, per NASA.
My quantification of the net feedback response to any single perturbation to the whole earth system balance is a net 8.7W/m^2 deg K, give or take a bit 😉
SOME TESTS AND APPLICATIONS: By this measure,
The temperature effect on the whole Earth system of a radiative perturbation of 1.6W/m^2, as claimed to be caused by AGW since 1850, will be less than 0.2 deg.
The ECS for doubling in CO2, assuming that adds 3.4W/m^2 radiative imbalance to the system, no longer needs to be guessed.
Its balanced by 8.7W/m^2 deg K in ……………… 0.4deg K.
Not a problem. Even less an existential threat.
And this is with only 1.4W/m^2 deg K cloud feedback…. And is all based on real measurements and basic physics, no models required.
I wholly agree that more CO2 must causes some change in the Earth’s SST. It must. And its effects are mainly beneficial as measured.
I simply point out the models fail to include obvious natural feedbacks they choose not to include, that are in fact larger and dominant negative feedback controls of Earth’s obvious strong energy balance in a narrow range. Easily able to rebalance Earth’s enrgy system in fraction of a degree.
It was just waiting for practical scientists, who follow scientific method and understand the laws of physics and basic control systems across the disciplines, to get involved, and point out this measurable reality, instead of making it up in models. But they clearly aren’t available, or are silenced.
I hope my easily verifiable approach if accessible, supported by the observations, and I have missed nothing of substance in the energy balance system of Earth.
I suggest this empirical method includes all the actual effects, at the highest level because it’s what we measure, however accurately, so real. What happens.. And that such a deterministic scientific method must take precedence over the predictions of overtly partial and also falsely attributed models, that were designed to prove assertions that supported political ends, never to test the reality of the presumptions regarding CO2 as control of climate it is not, just a tiny perurbation to.
Now you can add your clouds to taste :-).
OTHER CONCLUSIONS:
Nature has the Earth energy balance system locked down hard, a convergent syetm, which also means most of the change we see must be natural, as in the past cycles documented by geology and archeology, , which are also presumed by modellers to have suddenly stopped 2,000 years ago to suit their false attribution assumptions, , when before this they were well evidenced by geology, back 0.5Ma at least, at 2deg range every 1,000 years at the poles through the Holocene, 1 deg at the equator. No reason given why these cycles suddenly stopped happening, since modelling began, or how all the geological papers reporting them, or the archeological finds from the thawing ice, even the grape. vinicutures at over 50 deg North, and other historical accounts of past climate from mediaeval, Roman and Egyptian records, are all wrong. Per the modellers.
The only obvious reason for such unsupportable claims, on the evidence they had contrived using the UN’s self attributed authority torpomote some bad tree ring proxies, is so all that change can be attributed to human activity, no natural change can be seen or spoken of..
Prof Jorgen Peder Steffensen of the Neils Bohr Institute has the best line on this, from years back, when the truth was emerging from under the ice to counter the false narrative. He is also an evidence based guy you can phone to talk about this. Phone number on the University list.
https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/607494244
While I will leave the many similar issues of false denial and bad science by the IPCC regarding past change here, this is well supported by other reality geology has measured around the World. The key point, that Jorgen makes very clear in his summary, is that the temperature we measure now is 1.5 deg above the record coldest in 8,000 years, and c.2 deg COLDER than the Egyptian period of the Holocene optimum 3Ka BP, and that this proxy record is consistent with the archeological and historical proxy record, and is also neither unusual nor extreme in the directly comparable measurements of the past made using isotopic proxy records (d18O as also described by Prof Steffensen.). Mostly natural.
How did I do?
Brian Catt (Age 81 1/4)
Brian RL Catt
CEng, CPhys, MBA, MCIM
