Climate Letter #2013

For over a year now, Carl’s Climate Letter has mostly been spent on the development of “Carl’s theory.” The theory is basically devoted to a series of claims tied to “the greenhouse energy effects” of precipitable water (PW). Thankfully, the theory has never quite been finalized, or written up in a formal way, or submitted for publication, with or without peer review. It would immediately be shoved aside as unreviewable gibberish. There is indeed a concept of greenhouse energy and its effects that is held in high esteem in the sciences. It refers to a clearly defined physical process, viewed as a specific way of processing energy in Earth’s atmosphere, or any atmosphere of a similar kind. Critically, science has settled upon an understanding that the process and its effects are only applicable to matter in the form of gases. PW is a complex material, many parts of which are not gaseous. For that reason, even though a significant fraction is gaseous and thus subject to independent review, PW in its entirety does not receive consideration as an instrument of greenhouse energy producer.

In Friday’s letter (CL#2011) I admitted to being unaware of this scientific limitation and went on to spell out the reasons why, by detailing an alternative meaning of how greenhouse energy is processed in the atmosphere. The alternative is very much broader in scope than the one accepted by science. It includes potential greenhouse generation from practically any kind of matter, solid or liquid as well as gases, that happens to be suspended in the atmosphere. Most such material can be of no possible significance for quantitative reasons, but what about the high-volume participants? The potential for PW as the highest of all would then necessarily qualify for consideration. I have been imagining a procedure wherein tiny droplets of water capture infrared photons that are headed toward space at their surfaces, and then re-emit energy in the form of photons that are headed outward in a completely random direction, half of them toward the planetary surface. Any such fundamental turnaround, on any scale or as part of any cascading sequence, should be sufficient as an explanation for how the greenhouse process gets underway. Some photons are virtually sure to end up on the surface that would not have done so without the admission of a fundamental turnaround process. Has this rather simple idea ever been fully debated by scientists? If it has, there should be some records in the literature.

With that in mind, I have headed back to Spencer Weart’s classic book, The Discovery of Global Warming, published in 2003, which has reviews of practically everything scientists argued about from the days of Fourier up until our present century.  On page 134 he discusses the work of Sean Twomey, who made a number of important observations about cloud albedo effects in the 1960s and ’70s and is still frequently cited.  One sentence in particular from Weart’s review caught my attention:  “Moreover, while a cloud would reflect sunlight back into space, it would also accept radiation coming up from below, causing a greenhouse effect.” (my ital) Twomey also did calculations leading to a conclusion that the net effect of this warming and cooling should be to cool the Earth.  Other scientists paid little attention at the time, apparently because too many of these things were being widely debated.  Cloud theory has made its way into many new observations and genuine advances since that time, and remains hotly debated, but never to my knowledge with greenhouse energy calculations included as a basic consideration for causation of the warming effect of clouds. No way has yet been found to precisely calculate the strength of this effect, and attempts made to describe the physical mechanism of warming in a detailed way are uncommon.

Tomorrow I will once again review a method of calculation that has been overlooked and could not be more simple. The calculation itself offers extraordinary evidence of greenhouse energy production beyond the province of gases alone.

Carl