Climate Letter #2003

Continued from yesterday’s letter, concerning the way claims made by Carl’s theory, if accepted, would affect the structure of fundamentals currently entrenched in the curriculum of the science of climate change.  A concise and well-written history of how current fundamental concepts developed over time is used as a reference, published online at https://skepticalscience.com/history-climate-science.html.  So far we have progressed through the 1950s.  A short section about monitoring CO2 in the late ’50s is valuable in its own way but has no affect on fundamental concepts.  We’ll restart with some early work on climate model development that was drawing attention in the 1960s:

8. Mannabe and Wetherald, 1960s. This pair introduced concepts of large amounts of heat being carried off to space by convection due to rising warm air currents, providing what they thought was having an important stabilizing effect on temperatures. This idea has not survived.

9.  Many scientists in the 1970s and ’80s..  An explosion of ideas related to research showing major changes in climate during the ice ages and much further back in Earth’s history, which at times was often much warmer than today.  A long list of factors and conditions that could affect temperatures was created, often depending on activation due to circumstances peculiar to the time of study.  A number of greenhouse gases other than CO2 and water vapor were studied and incorporated into that list but usually did not seem to stand out when compared to everything else. CO2 and its water vapor feedback were never really challenged, leaving CO2 in place as the “control knob.”  The CO2 level in the atmosphere always had a way of being estimated and, no matter what the circumstances, was always known to be relatively low when temperatures were coldest and much higher when warmest.  With respect to what we know about the ice ages, we read: But given that carbon dioxide levels were now substantially higher than anything in the past two millions of years, in either glacials or interglacials, it had become abundantly clear that the greenhouse effect was something we needed to take extremely seriously: even if the precise future increase in temperature was still an unknown quantity, with a fairly wide error-range, models indicated that for a doubling of carbon dioxide from pre-industrial levels, a rise of three degrees celsius as a global average was the most likely outcome.

10.  The 1980s and onward.  The whole idea of “Earth’s thermostat” was established, applicable to climates in all ages.  Our history report summarizes the major findings quite clearly:  Understanding the carbon-cycle was key to explaining this: the realisation was that throughout geological time the levels of carbon dioxide and other non-condensing greenhouse-gases had exerted major controls on the planetary temperature.  Carbon dioxide had sources and sinks but every now and then there were major upward or downward swings as unusually powerful sources or sinks dominated the picture.  More of this history is well worth a thorough reading because it includes descriptions of a number of extreme examples from the deep past.  Current research is deeply interested in discovering the full outcome that can be expected when carbon levels in the atmosphere are increasing at a pace and in volumes that have never before occurred in all of Earth’s history, such as we see happening today. 

Now it’s time to think about the specifics of Carl’s theory and how they apply to this entire picture.  Carl’s  theory is primarily focused on the study of precipitable water (PW),   The study reveals, or claims to reveal, a number of things about PW that science does not recognize.  PW is basically an alternate manifestation of water vapor, once the vapor has condensed into forms of matter that remain suspended in the atmosphere.  These forms have properties unlike those of condensation products that stick to the surface and at once become groundwater.  The ones in the atmosphere stay up there for awhile, before falling to the surface as precipitation, and while they are up there they generate a greenhouse energy effect.  My theory claims to have found evidence that the greenhouse effect of PW, when measured by weight, is little different from the greenhouse effect of the pure form of water vapor that performs the condensing action.

When you survey the history of climate science you can see that science recognizes that water vapor is a greenhouse gas, in fact the strongest one in terms of overall impact, and also the most unusual of all because of its short life as a gas and highly irregular distribution in the atmosphere, making it difficult to measure.  Arrhenius found a neat way to handle the situation as he saw it toward the end of the 19th century.  You can go back and read about it right now.  And if you keep reading, or want to do some outside studying, you will see that his solution has remained unchanged to this day.  The only thing different is that CO2’s energy powers have now been assigned specific numbers, which are embellished by adding on more numbers of roughly the same size meant to represent the powers of its tightly (and exclusively) held feedback, water vapor.  More tomorrow.

Carl