IPCC Computer Models vs. Direct Measurement

Quoting The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley
(RESPONSE TO US ENERGY SECRETARY CLIMATE STATEMENT):

“CO2’s warming effect is best determined by measurement. It cannot be measured directly. However, it can be derived from the relationship between changes in surface temperature and corresponding changes in outgoing radiation escaping to space…

All UN models (11 are shown in red) wrongly predict that as the sea surface warms by 1 Cº (1.8 Fº), the outgoing radiation escaping from the top of the Earth’s atmosphere to space diminishes by about 3 Watts per square meter. The UN wrongly assumes temperature feedbacks cause water vapor – the most significant greenhouse gas – to accumulate in the upper air.

However, direct measurement with the Earth Radiation Budget Experiment satellite (green: center) shows that as the sea surface warms by 1 Cº (1.8 Fº) the outgoing radiation escaping to space does not diminish by 3 W m–2: it increases by 4 W m–2.

The graphs from the models’ predictions actually trend in a direction opposite to that of the graph from observed reality…

Lindzen and Choi calculate that the ‘global warming’ to be expected in response to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration is not the UN’s 2.0-4.5 Cº (3.5-8.0 Fº) but a small, harmless, and beneficial 0.5-0.8 Cº (1-1.5 F). By patient, painstaking measurement, the two researchers have trumped the computer models’ unanimously erroneous guesswork, and have definitively ended the debate over the question how much warming CO2 causes.”

Click the image & read the rest:

Click here to read the abstract.
Click here to read the entire paper.
To say that this paper “definitively ended the debate over the question how much warming CO2 causes” probably overstates the case. Others may well question these conclusions (via published, peer reviewed papers like this one). Time will tell.

But, based upon what we know about historic CO2 levels, my bet is that the Iris Effect which Dr. Lindzen has long hypothesized and which this study demonstrates is -- indeed -- a big part of the explanation for why CO2 levels at about 20 times current levels did NOT cause runaway catastrophic global warming 520 million years ago.

This study and, at least one other (abstract here) support this Iris Effect hypothesis. There may well be others I am unaware of.

This question of how water vapor responds to the tiny amount of warming directly caused by CO2 has always been the linchpin of climate change theory. Expect the alarmists to pull out all the stops in defending their assumptions. If those assumptions are sufficiently invalidated, it’s game over for the alarmists.

Click here for some basic climate science.