Current Climate Data

Global warming predicted by IPCC (1900 through 2100), showing effects of CO2 reduction.

Surface measurements (below) show about 0.6C increase from 1979 to 2019, corresponding to approx. 1.4C per century.

BUT warming Effect of CO2 is Saturated, according to very detailed study (“Dependence of Earth’s Thermal Radiation on Five Most Abundant Greenhouse Gases”) by Prof. Will Happer of Princeton U. and W. A. Wijngaarden

FORCING: The term “forcing” or “radiative forcing” is the extra heat (energy) the earth’s surface has to produce, per unit area, in order to maintain a balance between incoming solar radiation and outgoing top of the atmosphere infrared radiation. The units are in watts per square meter (w/m²).

Who is Will Happer?

Article by David Wojick |October 26th, 2020|Climate

Precision research by physicists William Happer and William van Wijngaarden has determined that the present levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and water vapor are almost completely saturated. In radiation physics the technical term “saturated” implies that adding more molecules will not cause more warming.

In plain language this means that from now on our emissions from burning fossil fuels could have little or no further impact on global warming. There would be no climate emergency. No threat at all. We could emit as much CO2 as we like; with no effect.

This astounding finding resolves a huge uncertainty that has plagued climate science for over a century. How should saturation be measured and what is its extent with regard to the primary greenhouse gases?

In radiation physics the term “saturation” is nothing like the simple thing we call saturation in ordinary language, just as the greenhouse effect is nothing like how greenhouses work. Your paper towel is saturated when it won’t pick up any more spilled milk. In contrast greenhouse gases are saturated when there is no more milk left to pick up, as it were, but it is far more complex than this simple analogy suggests.

Happer is probably best known to our readers as a leading skeptical scientist. He co-founded the prestigious CO2 Coalition and recently served on the staff of the National Security Council, advising President Trump. But his career has been as a world class radiation physicist at Princeton. His numerous peer reviewed journal articles have collectively garnered over 12,000 citations by other researchers.

In this study Professors Happer and van Wijngaarden (H&W) have worked through the saturation physics in painstaking detail. Their preprint is titled “Dependence of Earth’s Thermal Radiation on Five Most Abundant Greenhouse Gases“. They have gone far beyond the work done to date on this complex problem.

To begin with, while the standard studies treat the absorption of radiation by greenhouse molecules using crude absorption bands of radiation energy, H&W analyze the millions of distinct energies, called spectral lines, which make up these bands. This line by line approach has been an emerging field of analysis, often giving dramatically new results.

Nor do they just look at absorption. Here is how Professor Happer put it to me:

“You would do our community a big favor by getting across two important points that few understand. Firstly: Thermal emission of greenhouse gases is just as important as absorption. Secondly: How the temperature of the atmosphere varies with altitude is as important as the concentration of greenhouse gases.”

So they looked hard, not just at absorption but also including emissions and atmospheric temperature variation. The work is exceedingly complex but the conclusions are dramatically clear.

Happer and van Wijngaarden’s central conclusion is this:

“For the most abundant greenhouse gases, H2O and CO2, the saturation effects are extreme, with per-molecule forcing powers suppressed by four orders of magnitude at standard concentrations...”

Their graphical conclusions are especially telling:

“Fig. 9 as well as Tables 2 and 4 show that at current concentrations, the forcings from all greenhouse gases are saturated. The saturations of the abundant greenhouse gases H2O and CO2 are so extreme that the per-molecule forcing is attenuated by four orders of magnitude…”

The other three greenhouse gases they analyzed are ozone, nitrous oxide and methane. These are also saturated but not extremely so like water vapor and carbon dioxide. They are also relatively minor in abundance compared to CO2, which in turn is small compared to H2O.

Clearly this is work that the climate science community needs to carefully consider. This may not be easy given that three major physics journals have refused to publish it. The reviews have been defensive and antagonistic, neither thoughtful nor helpful. Alarmism is in control of the journals, censoring contrary findings, hence the preprint version.

Undaunted, H&W are now extending their analysis to include clouds. Alarmist climate science gets dangerous global warming, not from the CO2 increase alone, but also using positive water vapor and cloud feedbacks. Given that carbon dioxide and water vapor are both extremely saturated, it is highly unlikely that cloud feedbacks alone can do much damage, but it requires careful analysis to know this for sure. Stay tuned.

In the meantime the present work needs to be front and center as we strive for rational climate science. Professors William Happer and William van Wijngaarden are to be congratulated for an elegant and timely breakthrough.

The conclusions of this study are as follows:

Conclusions of Happer & Wijngaarden’s Paper:

This work examined the transmission of infrared radiation through a cloud-free atmosphere
from the Earth’s surface to outer space. A line by line calculation used over 1/3 million lines
of the five most important naturally occurring greenhouse gases, H2O, CO2, O3, N2O and
CH4. This included considerably more weaker rovibrational line strengths, for H2O as small
as 10−27 cm, than other studies. The calculation of forcings took into account the observed
33altitudinal concentrations of the various gases as well as several temperature profiles.
The upward spectral flux, Z˜, “breaks out” at an emission height ze, given by (38).
Emission heights can be near the top of the atmosphere for frequencies in the middle of
strong absorption lines. For frequencies with little absorption, the emission heights can be
close to, or at the surface as shown in Fig. 3.
The most striking fact about radiation transfer in Earth’s atmosphere is summarized by
Figs. 4 and 5. Doubling the current concentrations of the greenhouse gases CO2, N2O and
CH4 increases the forcings by a few percent for cloud-free parts of the atmosphere. Table 3
shows the forcings at both the top of the atmosphere and at the tropopause are comparable
to those found by other groups.
Radiative forcing depends strongly on latitude, as shown in Figs. 7 and 8. Near the
wintertime poles, with very little water vapor in the atmosphere, CO2 dominates the radiative forcing. The radiation to space from H2O, CO2 and O3 in the relatively warm upper
atmosphere can exceed the radiation from the cold surface of the ice sheet and the TOA
forcing can be negative.
Fig. 9 as well as Tables 2 and 4 show that at current concentrations, the forcings from all
greenhouse gases are saturated. The saturations of the abundant greenhouse gases H2O and
CO2 are so extreme that the per-molecule forcing is attenuated by four orders of magnitude
with respect to the optically thin values. Saturation also suppresses the forcing power per
molecule for the less abundant greenhouse gases, O3, N2O and CH4, from their optically thin
values, but far less than for H2O and CO2.
Table 2 and Fig. 10 show the overlap of absorption bands of greenhouse gases causes their
forcings to be only roughly additive. One greenhouse gas interferes with, and diminishes, the
forcings of all others. But the self-interference of a greenhouse gas with itself, or saturation, is
a much larger effect than interference between different gases. Table 4 shows that for optically
thin conditions, the forcing power per molecule is about the same for all greenhouse gases,
a few times 10−22 W per molecule.
Doubling the CO2 concentration will cause a temperature decrease of the upper atmosphere of about 10 K as shown in Fig. 11 to restore hypothetical radiative-convective equilibrium. For the case of fixed absolute humidity, the surface warms by 1.4 K which agrees
very well with other work as shown in Table 5. The surface warming increases significantly
for the case of water feedback assuming fixed relative humidity. Our result of 2.3 K is within
0.1 K of values obtained by two other groups as well as a separate calculation where we used
the Manabe water vapor profile given by (87). For the case of fixed relative humidity and a
pseudoadiabatic lapse rate in the troposphere, we obtain a climate sensitivity of 2.2 K. The
corresponding climate sensitivities determined by other groups differ by about 10% which
can be expected using slightly differing temperature and water vapor profiles. The issue of
water feedback would undoubtedly be greatly clarified if additional observations of water
vapor concentration as a function of altitude were available.
Fig. 15 shows that the integral transform (27) used to calculate TOA intensities ˜I with
HITRAN line intensities and with no CO2 nor H2O continuum absorption gives results in
very close agreement with spectral intensities observed from satellites over climate zones as
different as the Sahara Desert, the Mediterranean Sea and Antarctica. One can therefore have
confidence in the calculations of spectral fluxes. The negligible effect of the H2O continuum
on the top of the atmosphere radiative flux has also been found by Zhong and Haigh [45]. It
34would be interesting to examine comparable data for the tropics where atmospheric moisture
is highest to determine the effect of a H2O continuum. One would need to be careful that
any “observed continuum” not be confused with a layer of cloud like haze which can be
prevalent at high humidities. In conclusion, the combination of one dimensional radiativeconvective models and observations such as TOA intensities are invaluable for furthering
our understanding of how increasing greenhouse gas concentrations will affect the Earth’s
climate.

A CLIMATE CHANGE SKEPTIC

Arguments of a Climate Change Skeptic