Wood Romances

Back in 2015, Feldman et al published a paper showing observational and empirical validation of the greenhouse effect. They did this in a pretty ingenious way. They set up two RS-80 sensors at two locations and pointed these at the sky to record downwelling longwave radiation (dLWR) at frequencies absorbed and emitted by CO2. They monitored these sites for 10 years and recorded observations under clear-sky conditions, which would isolate dLWR from CO2 in the atmosphere apart from clouds. Their results showed a 0.2 W/m^2 increase in dLWR, and these results confirmed theoretical predictions regarding the greenhouse effect. In their words: The time series both show statistically significant trends of 0.2 W m−2 per decade (with respective uncertainties of ±0.06 W m−2 per decade and ±0.07 W m−2 per decade) and have seasonal ranges of 0.1–0.2 W m−2. This is approximately ten per cent of the trend in downwelling longwave radiation. These results confirm theoretical predictions of the atmosphe...

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...