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Wednesday, April 5, 2023

Global Warming Greenhouse Theory’s Greatest Weakness




Global Warming Greenhouse Theory’s Greatest Weakness

This is the transcript for the video at https://youtu.be/XHLafd2MU-k

 

Welcome back everyone.

How long heat gets trapped near the earth's surface determines the global temperature, but the lack of adequately measuring this time delay is the greatest weakness in global warming theories.

The public often gets the wrong impression of the greenhouse effect from illustrations like this suggesting CO2 is trapping heat forever.


A comparison of the time delayed cooling by 3 different mechanisms of trapping heat, calls into question how each mechanism contributes to global temperatures and extreme weather. Other heat trapping mechanism by sea ice, clouds, or urban surfaces, won’t be discussed. Now undeniably, greenhouse gases delay the escape of infrared radiation back to outer space. .

In contrast heat domes that produce heat waves don’t trap radiation but suppresses the normal convection process that normally carries heated air away from the surface for days and even months.

The ocean's salty sub-surface layers also suppress ocean convection, trapping ocean heat for days, seasons, and years. And that trapped heat intensifies hurricanes and typhoons.

In one of the 20th century's most influential books "the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Kuhn wrote “philosophers of science have repeatedly demonstrated that more than one theoretical construction can be placed upon a given collection of data.” Kuhn was advising us to be careful and distinguish good data from the opinions claiming the data supports their pet theory.

This illustration graphicly represents the collection of data describing how the energy absorbed by the sun each day escapes back to space via waves of long wave radiation. It is solid, undisputed science based on theory and observations from satellites and laboratory experiments. It is the foundation of greenhouse theory upon which opinions regarding various climate crisis theories have been constructed.



The laws of physics have theoretically determined "how much" energy each infrared wavelength should transport back to outer space, for a given surface temperature if, there was no atmospheric interference. This is represented by the blue curve.

For non-physicists, it is helpful, to think of infrared wavelengths as roadways carrying solar heat from the earth back to space. Wavelengths between 20 and 15 microns should act like interstate highways carrying the greatest flow of heat,

While wavelengths of 5 or 40 microns act like dirt paths allowing very little heat transport.

The black jagged line represents how much energy each wavelength is actually transporting back to space as observed by satellites.

The difference between the blue and black curves represents an undeniable greenhouse effect. This is all excellent data and settled science.

But beware! This data does not determine for how long infrared heat will be trapped. Greenhouse gases only serve as detours, not permanent traps. Those detours simply delay the time needed for heat to escape to space. Not understanding this crucial point, has led to many absurd theories of a climate crisis, mass extinctions and much weeping and gnashing of teeth.

CO2 is a powerful greenhouse because it absorbs wavelengths centered around 15 microns that serve as major interstate highways for heat escape. CO2 forces half the theoretical heat to take a detour.

CO2 emits any absorbed heat in less than a second and emits those wavelengths in all directions with half re-directed back to the earth's surface. It is this redirected heat that is believed to warm the surface.

In this illustration the green line separates absorption by CO2 from absorption by water vapor. The red line shows that by doubling CO2, it only increases the amount of re-directed heat by 1%.

Water vapor absorbs much more heat from a wider range of wavelengths. Dry desert climates lacking water vapor experience a reduced greenhouse effect. Heat can escape more freely so that nighttime temperatures rapidly plummet by 50 to 100 degrees Fahrenheit, despite a remaining CO2 effect.

More importantly, there are also wavelengths that always escape freely to space, providing an atmospheric window that allows about 15 to 20% of the earth's energy to escape without delay. That window also provides the escape detour for re-directed greenhouse heat.

Although the redirected energy is transported by specific wavelengths of water vapor and CO2. It has a more general effect. A warmer surface now emits the entire spectrum of wavelengths.

So, 20% of CO2's redirected energy now escapes freely through the atmospheric windows counter-acting the warming. That process repeats and continues throughout the night dropping surface temperatures lower and lower, back to their early morning minimums. So, despite added energy, the greenhouse effect doesn’t trap heat for very long.

Extreme heatwaves caused by heat domes operate in a manner like a car with its windows raised. It doesn’t matter how heat is radiating back to space, but for how long warm air is trapped close to the surface.



The longer the windows are up during midday sunshine, the higher the temperatures rise. At midday in 80F heat, temperatures inside your car can rise by 43 degrees to 123F in just one hour. Tragically, not realizing how quickly heat can accumulate, pets and children left in cars can die.

To reach 123 degrees Fahrenheit, the car's rate of energy gain was at least 154 W/m2 for a full hour (FYI a watt is a measure of energy per second). Increased CO2 only adds about 2 W/m2, so it would be silly to argue that rising CO2 made the car hotter, when just lowering the windows would eliminate the extreme temperatures. The important dynamic for people to understand is suppressed convection causes extreme temperatures.

The ground, heated by solar radiation, sheds that heat in 3 ways: by emitting a spectrum of longwave radiation, by cooler air absorbing heat when contacting the ground, and by convection that carries the heated air towards the stratosphere. Without convection, the earth's surface would trap surface heat like the car with its raised windows.

Convection not only causes warmer air to rise but allows cooler air from higher altitudes to sink. The mixing of cooler air further reduces surface air temperatures.


Carrying warm air up to the stratosphere is also crucial for cooling. You can see where the stratosphere begins when a rising rain cloud flattens out as it reaches an altitude where the stratosphere begins, called the tropopause. At that altitude, the air is about 100F (64C) cooler than the ground. The air has cooled due to both lower air pressure and by radiating heat back to space.

 


However, if the air doesn’t radiate heat away, cool air would simply warm back to its original temperature as it sinks. So, how does 99% of the air molecules that are not greenhouse gases, mostly oxygen and nitrogen, radiate away the heat they absorbed from contacting the ground?

C02's warming effect is greatest at low altitudes where it is largely saturated. So future increases of CO2 will have a smaller and smaller warming effect.

Unfortunately, click-bait media rarely informs the public that CO2 also has a strong cooling effect increasing emissions in the stratosphere and mesosphere. Satellites observe that the stratosphere is cooling twice as fast as the lower atmosphere is warming.


Warmed oxygen and nitrogen can shed their heat by colliding with CO2 and transferring its heat. So, CO2 can then radiate their heat away.

In contrast, heat waves are caused by suppressed convection in the lowest 6 kilometers of the atmosphere that prevents rising air from reaching the stratosphere and cooling radiatively. Heat domes trap heat for days. They are high pressure systems where sinking air inhibits convection and reduces cloud cover which also increases solar heating.


Canada's record high temperature was set and reset 3 days in a row at the end of June 2021 in Lytton, British Columbia. The final record was 45F (25C) warmer than the average maximum temperature for June. A difference that's intriguingly like the increased temperature of the car with its raised windows.

Southwestern Canada’s heat wave was caused by an exaggerated ridge in the jet stream known as an omega block. Omega blocks regularly cause high-pressure systems that linger in one location. As the block remained in place for days, more heat accumulated each day driving Canada’s record temperature higher and higher.




Click-bait media, like CNN clearly doesn’t know its geography. They ranted that this very local heat dome was evidence that "climate change is frying the whole northern hemisphere."

However, science doesn’t support CNN’s rants as climate models all suggest any warming "should reduce such blocking events."




Finally, if we also consider that the dryness accompanying most heatwaves reduces the normal greenhouse effect, plus the absolute lack of any correlation between heat waves and rising CO2 as seen in this EPA graphic, it suggests that all the hype by politicians and the media ranting heat waves are evidence of a CO2 driven climate crisis, is just unsubstantiated fear mongering.


Lastly, suppressed convection also warms the oceans causing layers of trapped heat that can warm the air and intensify hurricanes and typhoons. There is a scientific consensus that no matter at what depth heat is absorbed, it is trapped in the ocean until it rises to the micron-thick skin surface, the only place ocean heat can escape.

However, when there is a salinity gradient with fresher water at the surface and saltier water below, despite being warmer, the denser saltier water suppresses convection, preventing it from reaching the skin surface to cool.

Humans have taken advantage of that salinity effect by creating solar ponds that generate useful heat to warm buildings and greenhouses or generate electricity. Solar ponds maintain a bottom layer of dense salty water at about a 6 to 10-foot depth where solar heating is greatest. Those dense layers trap penetrating solar heat, raising the bottom layer temperature to as high as to 190F (88C) despite air temperatures of only 68F (20C).


Similarly, salinity gradients in the ocean trap heat in subsurface layers maintaining warmer ocean temperatures from the tropics to the arctic.

Surveys in tropical oceans observed that the upper 20 to 40 meters will usually be well mixed by the winds and currents. So that layer has similar salinity, represented here by the blue line.

As well as similar temperatures represented by the black line.




But between 40 and 60-meters depth, increased salinity trapped solar energy and slightly increased temperatures where we would otherwise expect cooler temperatures due to declining solar penetration. Oceanographers call this layer the "barrier layer" because it stores heat and prevents colder deeper water from mixing with the surface layer, thus making surface temperatures warmer.

In contrast to the solar-salinity heating effect, there is no obvious mechanism demonstrating how greenhouse infrared might warm a solar pond or the ocean. All infrared energy re-directed towards the surface by greenhouse gases never penetrates deeper than a very few microns into the ocean's skin surface layer.




A recent tropical ocean study measured 410 watts of greenhouse infrared energy penetrating a few microns into the cool skin surface.

However, the cool skin surface immediately radiates away all the heat that reaches that layer. In this study the heat emitted from the skin layer accounted for all the infrared heat from the atmosphere plus any solar heated subsurface water that had risen by convection and conduction to the skin layer.

Solar heated water requires more time to reach the skin surface and ventilate. Thus, it is most likely that any ocean warming is driven by trapped solar heat that is mixed downward.

There are well studied natural mechanisms demonstrating how oceans create and maintain salinity gradients that trap subsurface solar heat. In the simplest of terms, regional differences in evaporation and precipitation produce the required salinity gradient.



Atmospheric circulation, the Hadley Circulation, creates regions of descending air and high pressure that generate clear skies, greater solar heating as happens in heat waves and high rates of evaporation with very little rainfall. Saltier water is produced there.

As illustrated by the red regions, these so-called ocean deserts happen at the same latitudes where the atmospheric Hadley Circulation maintains deserts on land.


The trade winds then blow that saltier water towards the equator and westward.

The trade winds also blow the evaporated water vapor towards the equator where it converges, then rises and produces the world’s greatest region of rainfall around the equator, here represented in blue, and named the Intertropical Convergence Zone. The copious rainfall maintains the salinity gradient with fresh water on top of the warm saltier water. These combined dynamics constantly provide the needed ingredients to produce permanent heat trapping barrier layers.



This "solar pond" heat trapping mechanism forms the earth's greatest reservoir of heat, the western pacific warm pool, which stores solar heated water as deep as 200 meters. The warm pool grows during La-Nina like conditions and shrinks when an El Nino event ventilates that heat.

During La Nina-like conditions, the amplified trade winds blow the warm salty water into the western pacific warm pool.

Simultaneously, colder deep water upwells in the eastern pacific, permitting a high-pressure system to form that amplifies the trade winds and creates clearer skies and greater solar heating.

As a result, the eastern Pacific and eastern Atlantic, illustrated here by the blue regions,


Absorb and trap more solar heat than any other regions on earth. That stored heat is eventually transported around the world where it ventilates and warms the atmosphere.

The regions illustrated in red represent where the most of that trapped heat ventilates, warming those latitudes several degrees higher than possible if there was no ventilated heat.

For example, heat ventilating from the Gulf Stream is why western Europe’s winters are milder than similar latitudes in North America by 27-36F  (15-20C).

These dynamics contribute to the recent 150-year global warming trend as the tropical Pacific’s predominant El Nino-like condition during the little ice age switched to a predominant heat-absorbing La Nina-like conditions this past century. Intriguingly, based on scientific estimates of the speed of the global conveyor belt's transport, heat now ventilating in the arctic and reducing sea ice may have first been trapped in the Pacific Ocean 200 years ago.

It is also the trapped heat in tropical warm pools that enables tropical storms to evolve into hurricanes.


And the pacific warm pool with its more permanent barrier layers enables hurricanes with the most intense wind speeds designated as category-5 hurricanes, to develop.

Uniquely, in the tropical south Atlantic, hurricanes virtually never form because waters heated in the tropical south Atlantic circulate across the equator and get stored in the north Atlantic warm pool.

In 2005 three category 5 hurricanes struck the United States prompting a flurry of click-bait media headlines proclaiming global warming was making more fierce hurricanes that also "intensify more rapidly", thus rising CO2 will continue to make hurricanes more deadly.

But examining the different 2005 storm tracks of hurricane Wilma or hurricane Katrina reveals those 2005 hurricanes only reached a "fierce" category 5 status for a very short time and over just a very small local area and not when making landfall. Thus, it is regional ocean warming that is much more likely to be the cause of any intensification bouts. Not global warming.


Political fear mongers do not hesitate to weaponize the societal damage and human grief caused by hurricanes, so they cherry-pick the brief category 5 stints to blame rising CO2, while ignoring the dynamics causing hurricanes to exist for most of their lifetime in much weaker conditions.

Fortunately, mother nature quickly counter-acted the blatant fear mongering. For the next 9 years the USA experienced no intense hurricanes leaving most climate experts without any explanation.

Despite persistent click-bait media headlines from the NY Times or national public radio claiming CO2 is making hurricanes more deadly,

Good solid science finds no correlation with rising CO2 and hurricane frequency.


And no correlation with any increased frequency of the most intense hurricanes, categories 3, 4 & 5.

Yet as expected, the 150 mph winds at landfall from the 2022 hurricane Ian, provided an opportunity for the Guardian and world’s worst alarmist climate scientist, Michael Mann, to fear monger, claiming a climate crisis is causing more powerful hurricanes.




Hurricane Ian was a category 4 when it made land fall along the western coast of Florida. Mann emphasized that Ian was the fifth strongest hurricane to ever make land fall in America. But Mann avoided sharing the inconvenient truths that Ian was tied with 5 other category 4 hurricanes such as the 1919 Florida Keys and 1932 Freeport hurricanes, or the strongest landfall was the 1935 category 5 Labor Day hurricane.


Mann also failed to share that numerous peer-reviewed studies have documented that short bouts of hurricane intensification happen when they passed over the stored heat in ocean barrier layers.

The Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea experience a shifting mosaic of warm barrier layers. Multiple studies have shown that barrier layers supply the heat needed to intensify a hurricane as well as preventing the typical upwelling of cooler deeper water that weakens a hurricane. Still to push his pet theory that all things are possible with rising CO2, Mann’s Guardian article never mentions barrier layers at all.

To produce the salinity gradient for a barrier layer, the Amazon, Orinoco, and Mississippi rivers supply seasonal plumes of fresh water, highlighted in blue, into the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico.


The Loop Current erratically transports deep warm & salty equatorial waters northward towards the Gulf coast. It sometimes veers quickly to the east to join the Gulf Stream. Or 2) it sometimes loops much further northward and 3) sometimes those loops pinch off to form warm eddies.


Whatever the case, when hurricanes pass over a region with fresh river water above and warm salty loop current waters below, the hurricanes intensify. No wonder Michael Mann avoided discussing barrier layers, barrier layer formation and thus hurricane intensification has nothing to do with rising CO2 or a climate crisis.

Clearly, there are many proven scientific dynamics that trap heat and drive warmer temperatures other than rising CO2.


If you follow all the science, you will sleep much better knowing claims of a CO2 driven climate crisis is most likely just a flawed theory placed upon good scientific data! By following all the science, I am sleeping well!

13 comments:

  1. E. Swanson:

    I think your presentation leaves out much of importance.

    For example, your discussion of ocean circulation and heat transport misses the fact that the Atlantic is cutoff from the Pacific by the Isthmus of Panama, which results in higher salinity in the sub tropical North Atlantic gyre as seen in your graphic of the Loop Current. Those salty waters are recycled into the waters feeding into the Caribbean Sea, forced by the southeasterly trade winds in the tropical NA and the northeasterly equivalent in the tropical SA. You mention the Gulf Stream with a map, but fail to take notice that it is a continuation of flows thru the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. More importantly, the Gulf Stream is a western boundary current, driven by winds in the overlying atmosphere. There is also a corresponding current in the western Pacific, also shown on your graphic. For the GS, some of the water re-circulates around the gyre and some moves toward the north, eventually feeding high salinity waters into the Atlantic sub-polar gyre, where it may eventually cool and sink during the cold months. Those sinking waters over many thousands of years have resulted in the temperatures of the deep ocean being near freezing. Those deep waters may reach near the surface, such as during La Nino periods, when the easterly surface winds push the warm surface waters of the eastern tropical Pacific toward the west.

    In addition, I think you are missing the impacts of water vapor on vertical circulation. Water vapor is less dense than dry air and warm air with a high H2O content is less dense thatn that without. This results in the air mass rising as the colder, denser surrounding air pushes the air mass upwards. As it rises, the pressure declines as the mass expands. When the temperature of the mass hits the dew point, condensation begins and clouds form. the condensation warms the air mass, which further strengthens the upward convection. Eventually an elevation is reached where most of the WV has condensed and the upward movement stops. The clouds may produce precipitation, returning the water to the surface. As you note, the upper air cools and is dryer, so it may begin to sink. The sinking dry air exhibits a temperature increase is it's pressure increases during descent. But, this simple discussion doesn't get into what happens to cool the air at the tropopause or why the temperature begins to increase as one moves to higher levels in the Stratosphere where convection is suppressed.

    Sorry for the long rant, which I hope is correct, but I think you still have a lot more to learn before declaring that there's no problem with increasing CO2.

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    1. Dear E Swanson, it is quite odd that you would expect me to explain the whole universe in a 20 minute video and that you would suggest I have a "lot to learn" because I didnt mention the Isthmus of Panama , and blah blah blah. Most people dont pay attention to a science video for more than 10 minutes, and my concern was that I already had too much info for the public to absorb in one sitting.

      I understand all the dynamics you correctly alluded to and have posted about them before in other other contexts. But it also seems quite odd that you would conclude "you still have a lot more to learn before declaring that there's no problem with increasing CO2" , yet you never address or refute a single word I presented regards the Greenhouse effect.

      I get the feeling you are overly concerned there is a CO2 climate crisis, so you are engaging in a bizarre stealth tactic to undermine my arguments that CO2 isnt causing causing a crisis, by ranting about all the things in the universe I didnt have time to discuss. Of course you never discussed the Antarctic Circumpolar Current or the Siberian High Pressure System clearly showing you have so much to learn.

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    2. I was in politics and ran political campaigns for years Jim. The distraction and confuse tactic you describe is classic woke Marxist leftism modus operandi.

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  2. I am still lingering on the issue that CO2 has to radiate all the energy away for Nitrogen and Oxygen.
    If talking about how long heat can get trapped in the atmosphere, it seems a gas that cannot radiate will trap heat forever.

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    1. Yes, It might be better said to emphasize that N2 & O2 are most important in trapping heat. However from a satellite point of view what is seen is the reduction in escaping infrared in wave lengths affected by greenhouse gases. Folks focused on CO2 note that O2 & N2 will collide with energized CO2 and absorb its heat more quickly than the time between absorption and emission of infrared by CO2, and so the argue it is CO2 warming the atmosphere. But it is not a one way street and CO2 also serves as a cooling agent that becomes more efficient with altitude as the decreasing density with altitude allows more space for infrared radiation to escape.

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  3. It would seem that what we were all taught in 6th grade science classes has been thrown out the window, when dealing with global warming.

    We are taught that for a cart to roll down from the top of a hill that it must contain kinetic energy. Once down, the cart does not move unless the energy is returned to the cart by pulling it back up the hill.

    We are told, however, that when CO2 in the 15 micron band absorbs IR energy, the atmosphere is warmed by this energy, and then the CO2 molecule re-emits an IR photon. Thereby continuing the warming.

    This process ignores the necessity of pulling the cart back up to the top of the hill.

    The 15 micron band IR energy undergoes conversion to heat energy in the atmosphere. Once the energy is absorbed by the CO2 molecule, the vibratory state of the molecule is increased from the ground state. Two things can then occur:

    A. the CO2 molecule collides with another particle and increases the atmospheric temperature. B. the CO2 molecule can re-emit a photon.

    These two processes require energy. In the case of re-emission, there is a quantum amount of energy which must be expended. It cannot be a partial amount of the energy absorbed.


    When the CO2 molecule collides with another atmospheric particle, that atmospheric particle has its speed increased. the CO2 molecule drops to the ground state and does not contain the vibratory energy level that it did upon absorbing the IR photon. It cannot re-emit.

    WE ARE TOLD BY THOSE WHO PUSH THE STORY OF GLOBAL WARMING..... that the CO2 molecule WILL re-emit an IR photon, thereby continuing warming in the atmosphere, IF some of the photons are directed towards the Earth.

    This of course runs afoul of the need to return the CO2 molecule to a higher energy state.

    ---------------------------------
    We do know that in the atmosphere CO2 molecules do re-emit IR photons. Primarily in the high atmosphere where the molecule is not colliding with other particles and the time to emission can elapse.

    So how do these CO2 molecules gain the energy to re-emit?
    (And allow a false narrative to be put forth?)

    Simple, The atmosphere has particles constantly colliding with each other. Some of these collisions will re-excite the CO2 molecule above ground state and allow it to re-emit if it is high enough in the atmosphere so that it does not lose the energy again to collisions.

    Well then, why is the global warming narrative wrong if these molecules re-gain the energy so they can re-emit?

    It is wrong because to re-excite the molecule, there has to be a loss of translational motion to re-excite the CO2 molecule.

    A loss of translational energy in the atmosphere means that the atmosphere COOLS when these CO2 molecule rises above ground state.

    So to see a re-emission of an IR photon from a CO2 molecule in the high atmosphere we first have to cool that atmosphere to provide the energy for the emission.

    This of course causes the re-emission theory to fall flat on its face.

    In fact, because the re-emission is in all directions, there will be a net loss to space of energy. That energy redirected towards the Earth will only partially replace the energy that was absorbed from the high atmosphere.

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  4. Hi Jim,
    Hope you can help. My Engineering knowledge has me stuck in a logic loop that I don't think is correct, but I can't see the error in it. CO2 15um wavelength is absorbed and radiated at -80C using Wiens law (several Wiens law calculators on the web). But CO2 freezes into dry ice at -70C, so how does CO2 radiate or absorb anything?
    Many thanks,
    Rod

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    1. Two problems. First, you are ignoring pressure effects and CO2's phase state, CO2's triple point is −56.4°C at a pressure of 5.11 atm. The stratosphere is 0.1 atm and less, and its temperature averages about -57C. So it will remain a gas. Second, Wiens law describes how peak emission wavelengths for a blackbody with varying temperature. But it doesnt mean CO2 only absorbs or emits 15 micron wavelengths at -81C.

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    2. Jim, regards Weins 15um. Surely not both absorb and re-emit but must re-emit at -81C. Ab absorption is full spectrum wavelength hence higher intensity energy. Emission is single spectrum.

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  5. Hi Jim
    Your the first person I've come across to mention the time a photon remains in the earth's system as a major factor in the GH debate. This is the basis of my belief that the efficacy of a forcing
    is absolutely pivotal.
    The IPCC states many times that they believe the efficacy of solar forcing is about similar to the efficacy of a similar CO2 forcing. Is it possible that this could be the big fallacy that falsifies CAGW.
    Can we think of the ocean as part of our atmosphere?
    If so, then solar energy enters the ocean and these photons can remain in the system for hundreds
    or even thousands of years. On the other hand, the oceans are opaque to energy reemitted by CO2, these photons returning quickly to the atmosphere and space mainly as latent heat.
    Solar forcing must, therefore, have a much higher efficacy than CO2 forcing for this reason.
    The many discussions regarding cloud and other feedback may be significant but possibly irrelevant after forcing efficacy has been considered.
    I had a paper published by Witpress in 2014 that discussed this aspect. It disappeared without trace. I've never seen this approach falsified in any way and would be interested in your opinion.
    Thanks for the interesting post.

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    1. Hi Bob,

      Can you provide a link to your paper? Or email me with it as an attachment at jsteeele@sfsu.edu

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  6. Oceanic Barrier layers are the key to explaining how continental position drives warm/glacial climates on geological timescales. When continents are together there are no mixing currents to disrupt the barriers, when continents separate mixing occurs and the barriers are broken down while simultaneously heat is transported between tropics and poles with little insulation (engine/radiator style)

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  7. I hate to be a contrarian, but this is NOT the greenhouse gas' greatest weakness and - who am I lying to - I love to be a contrarian.

    The greatest weakness of the greenhouse effect is the reliance on the Stefan-Boltzmann Law to calculate outgoing longwave radiation, OLR, just above earth's surface. This is a crucial calculation for them as it essential for 'radiative forcing'. Radiative forcing being defined as the difference between 2 values of OLR. The aforementioned one at the surface than the value at the top of the atmosphere (ToA), as it leaves for space.

    Q: What's the fault with the Stefan-Boltzmann Law? A: Nowt. It's a perfectly good law, provided one acknowledges its limitations.

    Stefan and Boltzmann did all their experiments on black bodies in a vacuum. The concept of a black body bathed in a gas or atmosphere is senseless. Because the black body is all about cooling ONLY by radiative emission. If one attempts to calculate the cooling while it's bathed in a gas - that gas will also cool it - by conduction and convection - but far more quickly than by radiative emission. For example, a "black body" in proximity with earth's atmosphere, at 1 atmosphere pressure, will be cooled: 99.6% by conduction and convection with the gas, but only 0.4% by its radiative emissions.

    Tom Shula explains this in his excellent interview with Tom Nelson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NS55lXf4LZk

    Shula's finding, by itself, destroys all the greenhouse gas models.

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