Why increasing CO2 can not lead to catastrophic global warming

Reblog. From the blog: Knowledge Drift; The Science of Human Error. The whole blog has since been deleted by its authors.

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The effectiveness of CO₂ as a greenhouse gas, GHG, tails off logarithmically. On doubling CO₂, from 280ppm (pre-industrial level) to 560ppm an extra 3.7 W/m² warming is expected.

That is expected to lead to about 1ºC warming of the average global surface temperature. Note: more CO2 does not cause 'global warming', it just slows down the rate of loss of atmospheric warmth. All other things being equal that would cause warming. All other things are not equal. There is a negative feedback operating called the Stefan–Boltzmann effect. As temperature rises the rate at which black bodies emit heat increases according to the 4^th power of temperature. When the temperature increases the Stefan–Boltzmann relation means that everything else (ground and oceans) emits more black body heat. This extra heat is eventually radiated to space so is lost to the climate. This built-in negative feedback on temperature rise keeps earth's temperature at a reasonable level : a temperature rise leads to a faster emission of black body (LWIR) heat. The black body formula (Stefan–Boltzmann relation) used to calculate how much heat is being dissipated to space is P = 5.76 × 10^-8 × T⁴ where P is power in watts per square meter and T is temperature in degrees K or Kelvin. So the amount of LWIR emitted increases according to the fourth power of the temperature.

CO2 radiative forcing		Stefan–Boltzmann effect
CO2 ppm	Addition (W / m²)	Subtraction (W / m²)	P	T (ºC)	Net warming (W / m²)
280			396.3	15
560	3.7	5.5	401.8	16	-1.8
1120	7.4	11.1	407.4	17	-3.7

Comment: multiple catastrophic errors

The errors climate alarmists seem to have made are many-fold:

1. Eliding how the CO2 GHG effect tails off logarithmically,
2. Assuming the atmosphere is a heat sink. It is not. The oceans are earth's heat sink. Earth's atmosphere has a tiny heat capacity compared to its oceans. Oceans have over 1000 times the heat capacity of the atmosphere
3. Misuse of this saw them to invent 'catastrophic warming' by putting all their extra heat into the atmosphere! (which it isn't going to hold!). It was a convenient con because a body with a small heat capacity can (in theory) be made to warm quite fast!
4. Logically, it would make more sense to put their extra heat into the oceans. Because the amount of heat which could, in theory, warm the atmosphere by 10ºC can only warm the oceans by 0.01ºC. Fail. Put the heat in the oceans and catastrophic global warming is not 'catastrophic'.
5. Ignored basic physics of the Stefan–Boltzmann negative feedback.
6. The majority of climate models miss (forget, or never bothered to consider) many ocean oscillation effects. These are like smaller versions of El Nino. In the North and South Atlantic and Indian oceans. In this situation an area of the ocean collects warm water. Heat is transferred to the atmosphere by evaporative cooling, etc. So oceans heat the atmosphere. Not CO₂. CO₂ just slows down the rate of cooling. Ocean oscillations give global warming records a bumpy or spikey appearance.
7. ... on to infinity. There will always be yet one more 'error' they're prepared to make to push their alarmist/Luddite/Malthusian political agenda.

Global circulation model hindcasting - real or fabricated?

Global circulation models - AKA climate models claim to be legitimate because they say they can hindcast previous atmospheric temperatures. i.e. They claim their model projections reproduce past climate. For example: The global cooling period from the early 1940s to mid-1970s. This was done by adding a special factors (aerosols) for this period which they claim is no longer important today. Some people this is just fabricated data to give the GCMs a gloss of legitimacy. Just about all GCMs run too hot. They mis-forecast future temperatures too hot.

This is another 'reblog' of a comment.

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Allan M.R. MacRae January 9, 2017 at 5:47 am,

Ladies and Germs,

Have you looked at the model-hindcasting/fabricated-aerosol issue, as described below?

The climate models do not honestly hindcast the global cooling period from ~1940 to ~1975, because their authors fabricated false aerosol data to force hindcasting.

Therefore, the models cannot forecast anything, because they cannot hindcast. except through fraudulent inputs.

Hypothesis:

The climate models cited by the IPCC typically use values of climate sensitivity to atmospheric CO2 (ECS) values that are significantly greater than 1C, which must assume strong positive feedbacks for which there is NO evidence. If anything, feedbacks are negative and ECS is less than 1C. This is one key reason why the climate models cited by the IPCC greatly over-predict global warming.

I reject as false the climate modellers’ claims that manmade aerosols caused the global cooling that occurred from ~1940 to ~1975. This aerosol data was apparently fabricated to force the climate models to hindcast the global cooling that occurred from ~1940 to ~1975, and is used to allow a greatly inflated model input value for ECS.

Some history on this fabricated aerosol data follows:

More from Douglas Hoyt in 2006:

The P-T (extinction) event was caused by global cooling, not warming as previously blamed.

Hot off the press - revolutionary climate finding - The worst extinction event in earth's history (according to wikipedia) was caused by global cooling - not by global warming (as previously thought). So much for "the science is settled"

Quote (from WUWT):

... Scientists from the UNIGE explain the global temperature drop by a stratospheric injection of large amounts of sulphur dioxide reducing the intensity of solar radiation reaching the surface of the earth. “We therefore have proof that the species disappeared during an ice age caused by the activity of the first volcanism in the Siberian Traps,” added Urs Schaltegger. This ice age was followed by the formation of limestone deposits through bacteria, marking the return of life on Earth at more moderate temperatures. The period of intense climate warming, related to the emplacement of large amounts of basalt of the Siberian Traps and which we previously thought was responsible for the extinction of marine species, in fact happened 500,000 years after the Permian-Triassic boundary ...

--WUWT

Alarmists think CO₂ caused the P-T event, 252 million years ago, by causing run-away global warming. They got everything precisely back to front. They are exactly wrong. This P-T event is one of the reasons they get so uptight and rude when you don't believe their propaganda. Many of them think they are saving the world from an analogous P-T extinction by stopping "carbon pollution". Idiots!!!

“Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.”

-- T.S. Eliot

Ref: Timing of global regression and microbial bloom linked with the Permian-Triassic boundary mass extinction: implications for driving mechanisms, by Björn Baresel, Hugo Bucher, Borhan Bagherpour, Morgane Brosse, Kuang Guodun & Urs Schaltegger. Scientific Reports 7, Article number: 43630 (2017). doi:10.1038/srep43630

Polar bear "decline" ?

This is a rare example in the climate debate where the evidence is clear cut: one side lies and the other tells the truth, and it's obvious. Counting polar bears is quite simple (compared to most other climate science).

That's why I picked this example. It's impossible to disagree on the science without lying.

• Climate alarmists say that polar bear populations are on the decline because the arctic ice is melting. On this side we have the Royal Society twitter account, Desmogblog, National Geographic, and The National Wildlife Federation, etc.
• Climate 'deniers' say that polar bear populations are increasing since we banned hunting them. On this side is zoologist Susan Crockford who's studied polar bears extensively and wrote a few books on them. She tweeted.

Crockford 2017 https://t.co/prBw00Zp1Z

Armstrong et al, 2008 were right (in critique of USGS #polarbear survival forecasting) to conclude: pic.twitter.com/OF7vu1EkFP

— Susan Crockford (@sjc_pbs) March 2, 2017

The challenge is: If Susan Crockford is wrong on polar bears, read her paper and explain to me how and where she goes wrong. If you believe Susan Crockford is wrong and Desmogblog are right, but you can't point out an error in Susan's paper then you are anti-science.