For those who want to understand the details of the imagined hotspot which never materialized,
Dr. David Evans provided a detailed explanation of how we KNOW that the WVEL has NOT ascended with increasing CO2, but instead, it has descended:
Dr. David Evans wrote:In the last few decades there was surface warming yet the WVEL did not ascend — there is no hotspot. Therefore the conventional model is incorrect.
That post is part of
an outstanding series of posts which explain, in gory detail, the structural flaws which exist in ALL the currently-popular climate models.
Dr. Evans does NOT dispute ANY of the physics used in the models, he ONLY addresses the serious architectural flaws found in the models. He has summarized his work in this white paper:
Why More Carbon Dioxide Makes Little Difference. But I recommend reading the long version which is the series of blog posts found at the bottom of the page,
starting with this post.
Here is the
basic summary of Dr. Evans' excellent work:
Dr. David Evans wrote:The scientists who believe in the carbon dioxide theory of global warming do so essentially because of the application of “basic physics” to climate, by a model that is ubiquitous and traditional in climate science. This model is rarely named, but is sometimes referred to as the “forcing-feedback framework/paradigm.” Explicitly called the “forcing-feedback model” (FFM) here, this pen-and-paper model estimates the sensitivity of the global temperature to increasing carbon dioxide.1
The FFM has serious architectural errors.2 It contains crucial features dating back to the very first model in 1896, when the greenhouse effect was not properly understood. Fixing the architecture, while keeping the physics, shows that future warming due to increasing carbon dioxide will be a fifth to a tenth of current official estimates. Less than 20% of the global warming since 1973 was due to increasing carbon dioxide.
The large computerized climate models (GCMs) are indirectly tailored to compute the same sensitivity to carbon dioxide as the FFM. Both explain 20th century warming as driven mostly by increasing carbon dioxide.3
Increasing carbon dioxide traps more heat. But that heat mainly just reroutes to space from water vapor instead. This all happens high in the atmosphere, so it has little effect on the Earth’s surface, where we live. Current climate models omit this rerouting. Rerouting cannot occur in the FFM, due to its architecture—rerouting is in its blindspot.4
The alarm over carbon dioxide can be traced back to an erroneous assumption implicitly made in 1896 and never corrected—that there are no significant feedbacks in response to increasing carbon dioxide rather than to surface warming. The rerouting feedback is such a feedback. The FFM introduced another erroneous assumption—that the heat blocked from leaving to space by increasing carbon dioxide causes the same surface warming as if, instead, absorbed sunlight is increased by the same amount,5 or more generally, surface warming is proportional to the sum of all radiative forcings. These assumptions are built into the architecture of the FFM, and are echoed in the GCMs.
Increasing carbon dioxide causes warming in the upper troposphere, because it blocks some heat from escaping to space from there. In the GCMs that heat travels down to warm the surface, where it is like heat from increased absorbed sunlight — due to water vapor amplification of surface warming, less heat is then radiated to space from water vapor. In reality that heat mainly reroutes, radiating to space from water vapor molecules instead. Crucial observations from the last few decades indicate that the heat radiated to space from water vapor has been increasing slightly, suggesting that the effect of rerouting (which lowers the water vapor emission layer) was outweighed by the effect of water vapor amplification due to the surface warming (which raises it).
