Recent content by chriscolose

This is all wrong. For one thing, "the basis for belief" is the fundamental physics of radiative transfer, and the "broad brush science" was laid down late in the 1800's and early in the 20th century. If you can disprove that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and does not possesses the chemical...

Not that I know this for sure, but the claim that "there have been more increasingly violent earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, tornadoes, etc... than in any other decade in history" sounds pretty dicey. Where do you get this from? How good is the data for this, especially for older times?

Note that values of CO2 residence time in the atmosphere (several years) often refer to something much different than the perturbation lifetime, which refers to the amount of time CO2 levels remain elevated. There is no single number that describes how long CO2 levels remain elevated, since a...

Changes in temperature should alter CO2 levels by influencing gas solubility in water, perhaps wind patterns and ocean upwelling, changes in the biosphere, permafrost and ice extent changes, etc. It shouldn't be surprising that the carbon cycle can be perturbed if you change the underlying...

I smell lots of straw man.

I haven't worked through the details, but I think Ray Pierrehumbert loosely defines the tropopause as the height of convection.

I think the Hansen et al number of 0.85 W m-2 was based on the year 2005 relative to some pre-industrial baseline, not a long-term value.

It's hard for deserts to lose much heat at the ground because the evaporation term in the surface energy budget is small compared to the moist tropics. This has little to do with water vapor feedback. If you could make the Sahara moister, the surface would cool even if you increase CO2 a bit...

jsmith, I'm not sure the at what level of detail you need to get into for your work/notes or personal curiosity. The reasons why H20 (or CO2, CH4, etc) are greenhouse gases involves quantum physics and technicalities which you might not be interested in. If you're doing this just for a high...

Hi lisab, Just to repeat everything sylas said (although maybe a bit different), In general the fundamental constraint on Earth's climate (and all such climates for the rocky planets) can be thought of as a balance between the incoming energy from the sun, and the outgoing energy that the...

This mode of heat transfer was understood since at least the 1960's, looking through some of Manabe's work (and maybe before that, but I don't know) and can even be treated in simple radiative-convective models.

Vanesch, What's happening with the greenhouse and convection can be understood at a wide variety of levels. In actuality, constructs like S(1-a)/4 = sig T^4 are not actually used in sophisticated GCM's, but such simple formulas valuable way of explaining the basic physics of radiation...

vanesch, Unfortunately the circuit analogies are a bit over me, so I'm still unclear as to what you're getting at, especially with the concept of "thermal resistance." It may be useful to consider the top of the atmosphere energy balance as a separate entity as the surface energy balance...

This is not appropriate, and I would be happy to discuss this with another (impartial) moderator privately. In fact, neither sylas or myself have ever claimed any special authority, have never claimed to be "on the right side," have welcomed substantive challenges and corrections insofar as...

Great post by sylas. I am not quite sure how many third-party readers we have who are not posting, but just digesting the back-and-forths going on here. It may be worthwhile for any of those readers to ask specific questions they may have; I'm sure someone will be able to either explain it...