Source: email
A few notes about climate - supplement
Howard Cork Hayden
May 18, 2025
The world has thousands of people (“leaders”) who are doing things --making decisions for others to follow, either maliciously or (more likely) stupidly --- that have the effect of impoverishing people by restricting the use of coal, oil, and natural gas. The professed reason is “climate change” brought on by “carbon emissions” (a.k.a. increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration).
The only effect CO2 has on the climate is by increasing the greenhouse effect --- slightly --- thereby affecting the heat balance of the planet slightly.
Aside from the heat balance of the planet, there is also the heat balance of the atmosphere (the grayed-out area below) and the heat balance of the surface (below the grayed-out area. Missing from this drawing and all of its kin is the heat flux from the ocean to the atmosphere not included in the sensible heat and the latent heat. Also missing is heat from the interior.
The drawing shows a NET ATM of –109; the figure refers only to radiation, because they were only interested in radiative fluxes. The real NET ATM is zero. Sensible heat and latent heat add 109.
In any case, all of that internal energy moving around is the cause of our stochastic weather phenomena. Given knowledge of what is happening where and when, meteorologists can predict the weather for a few days. That takes a lot of expertise. But that expertise does not extend to making predictions about 30-year averages, namely changes in climate. Especially, it does not tell about climate if its experts do not understand the heat balance of the planet as a whole.
Heat up a pan of water and then put a tiny drop of butter on it. Watch stuff swirl around. Take a photo and predict what the pattern will look like in two minutes. Think of that as weather patterns.
There is an interesting phenomenon related to the lapse rate. For dry air, the lapse rate is g/cp, the ratio of g to the specific heat at constant pressure (9.8ºC/km). In other words, it’s a constant. Now what happens when the surface temperature increases by 1ºC. The constant lapse rate means that the temperature at 10,000 feet of elevation also rises by 1ºC, and ditto for all altitudes. This means that at high altitude, where the IR can escape unimpeded to outer space, the IR is emitted by molecules that are 1ºC warmer than before, and this increases the rate of radiation. The IPCC evidently assumes instead that the fraction of surface IR that gets to space remains constant.
There is also a lapse rate for saturated air (5ºC/km), half that for dry air, and a continuum between. Now assume that the surface temperature remains constant, but the relative humidity somehow increases. This means that the lapse rate decreases. That is, the air at high altitude becomes warmer, and the emission of IR to space increases. So, the lapse rate affects the heat balance by affecting IR to space, but somehow IPCC misses the phenomenon.
Cheers, Cork Howard "Cork" Hayden corkhayden@comcast.net
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Chromoergic psychosis: The delusion that energy has a color, usually green.