Wood Romances

A recent paper[1] published in the MDPI journal Climate by Frank Stefani provides a wonderful illustration of why we should never treat papers from MDPI journals as having any competent, let alone robust peer review. This paper argues that TCR = 1.1°C (0.6°C - 1.6°C) for doubling CO2. I'm not going to evaluate the entire paper here, since that would take too much time. The paper does make some counterfactual claims, like there's a "nearly perfect correlation of solar activity with temperatures over about 150 years." That's objectively false, but the correlation between CO2 forcings and GMST has an r^2 = 0.88. There's also some comical contrarian alarmism in this paper: "we fear that the huge Milankovitch drivers will—perhaps much too soon—massively interfere with the solar and anthropogenic factors that were considered in this paper." There's a lot we could say about this paper, but I want to focus here on some elementary math errors that would ...

In a previous post I looked at evidence of the greenhouse effect from empirical data. In short, an analysis of empirical data for CO2 and GMST shows a one-way causation with CO2 causing warming since the mid-twentieth century. This paper conclusively establishes causation from empirical time series of CO2 and temperature. That is, not only is CO2 a good predictor of temperature, but  uncertainty is reduced in future values of temperature given past values of CO2. This evidence is conclusive, but  even without this, we have observational evidence for the greenhouse effect. In this post I want to consider how this is true generally in satellite observations of earth's emission spectrum at the top of the atmosphere and in individual studies that have made observational determinations of the greenhouse effect. General Observations The graph above quite literally shows the greenhouse effect. This can be readily determined, but we need to begin by calculating the effective temperat...