The Rational Climate e-Book: Cooler is Riskier
This article contains excerpts from the new book The Rational Climate e-Book: Cooler is Riskier
Summary
I have been interested in Planetology for 50 years and observed all the planets as a child with a small telescope.
I was fascinated by these distant worlds about which not so much was known in the early seventies.
Having access later to the great refractor of the Nice observatory (76 cm) gave me a better perspective on these magnificent celestial bodies and as any astronomer knows, clear sky nights are much colder than those that are overcast.
So, it has long seemed logical to me to invoke greenhouse gases to explain that the temperature was enhanced by them. Of course, the warmer nights are of little consolation to the astronomer if they are covered, but as soon as the sky clears the temperature drops, you’d better have an appropriate equipment as telescopes are located on top of mountains to have dry air and no light pollution.
So, I was not particularly skeptic about the global warming narrative, as warming since the end of the Little Ice Age was obvious, but becoming later a geochemist and a computer scientist I knew two things : the Earth-system is huge and extraordinarily complex and software can deliver whatever results one has programmed them for. Then, later being interested ever more into what drives the climate on planets, I became more suspicious about the way some conjectures were awkwardly imposed as supposedly evidences.
The more we knew, the more the discrepancies between the packaged discourse and the scientific observations grew.The greenhouse effect on Venus did not match the observations for a number of reasons, Mars was desperately cold despite its 96.5 percent of CO2 in its atmosphere and the more one was observing how IPCC was being operated, the more suspicious any experienced scientist had to become.
When François Hollande (a former French President) stated at the 70th session of the UN General Assembly in New York, on September 28, 2015 that tsunamis and earthquakes will be the result of uncontrolled anthropogenic global warming, that was simply too delirious to hear for a geologist.
Learning from a politician that plate tectonics were now going to be driven by the action of a trace gas, because a 100 ppm increase of it had been recorded, was such a flabbergasting statement that I was not suspicious any longer but resentful of the way science was tortured to match a political agenda.
I had been accumulating and reading thousands of papers on that subject over the years, but Covid time was the trigger, it was long overdue to put back science in the first place, to remind in Chapter 1 what science teaches us, from Physics to Planetology, Geology etc, to evaluate in Chapter 2 the computer models that are presented as the only evidence of a human fingerprint on the current modern warming and to address in Chapter 3 the net-zero dystopian world that is going to be implemented if the public does not raise itself against the green tyranny.
Chapter 4 summarizes and explains why a warmer world is better anyway and addresses the question of whether the current climate optimum has anything special. You won’t be disappointed, everything is revisited from scratch.
Introduction
The foundation of radiative transfer were laid by some of the greatest physicists, physical chemists, chemists, astronomers or astrophysicists and even mathematicians of the 19th and 20th centuries, e.g. Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1768-1830), John Tyndall (1820-1893), Gustav Kirchhoff (1824-1887), Josef Stefan (1835-1893), Ludwig Boltzman (1844-1906), Max Planck (1858-1947), Svante Arrhenius (1859-1927), Karl Schwarzschild (1873-1916), Albert Einstein (1879-1955), Arthur Eddington (1882-1944), Edward Arthur Milne (1896-1950), Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1910-1995) and many more whose names would deserve to be cited.
Even if the basic radiative physics of the greenhouse effect were “unassailable” as stated by Pierrehumbert (2011), radiative transfers only represent a tiny part of a far broader subject for one interested in understanding the climate of this planet and of at least its telluric neighbors in the Solar System.
Remarkably, as early as 1872, James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1889) demonstrated in his seminal work “Theory of Heat” that temperatures of the lower troposphere of Earth are primarily determined by convection and by the atmospheric mass / pressure / gravity relationship (Holmes, 2018), thus thermodynamics that emerged of the seminal work of Sadi Carnot 6 (1796-1832).
Carnot’s (1824) book is considered the founding work of thermodynamics, it contains a number of principles such as the Carnot cycle, the Carnot heat engine, Carnot’s theorem, thermodynamic efficiency (Hertz, 2004). The work was unnoticed until 1834 and Carnot was already dead at the young age of 36, when French mining engineer and X comrade Émile Clapeyron (1799-1864) who never met Carnot made in his “Memoir on the Motive Power of Heat” five citations of Carnot’s work (Clapeyron, 1834).
Through Clapeyron’s paper, German physicist Rudolf Clausius (1822-1888) learned of Carnot’s theory of heat and through a modification of Carnot’s work, Clausius put the second law in mathematical form with his introduction of the concept of entropy, Clausius (1850, 1864).
The word thermodynamic was first used in William Thomson’s (1849) paper (i.e. 1st Lord Kelvin) “An Account of Carnot’s Theory of the Motive Power of Heat”. Josiah Willard Gibbs (1839-1903) invented in 1875-1878 chemical and electrochemical thermodynamics together with statistical mechanics. Finally, the statistical interpretation of the second principle was the work of Ludwig Boltzmann in 1877.
Boltzmann had the time to pass on his ideas on the quantification of energy to Max Planck, the first Nobel Prize winner in this new discipline (1918). One century after the work of Clausius, Manabe in a series of papers (Manabe and Möller, 1961; Manabe and Strickler, 1964; Manabe and Wetherald, 1967) demonstrated that the Earth’s atmosphere is essentially a thermodynamic machine, but was strangely enough awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics “for the physical modeling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming”.
This is not the first time that the Nobel committee falls into the trap of political contortions and one will remember that Einstein received the Nobel Prize in Physics (1921) for “for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect” (1905a) and not for his ground breaking theory of relativity (1905c-d, 1916) that was considered too controversial at the time.
One century apart makes History rhymes. When the Nobel price is given just before the COP26 held in Glasgow (Scotland) at the end of 2021, to a scholar who is 90 years old you know that politics is not far. Didn’t they notice before that Manabe deserved the price?
Why did it take so long? I wish a long life to Manabe, an old wise man, but I notice that his colleague who left Japan like him in the early 50s, e.g. Akira Kasahara who made important contributions as well, has passed away on March 29, 2022.
People knew in Stockholm that they had been told not to waste time. Manabe himself is so surprised, listen to him 7 “Nobody received the Physics Price for my kind of work…” @1’10, and then “I made numerical experiments, changing one thing at a time () I tried to understand ” then “prediction of climate change without understanding, it is not prediction better than fortune tellers” etc.
Manabe did not claim to have understood why and what is causing climate change, he modestly acknowledged that scientists must continue to work to better understand. Freeman Dyson stated that “the world is much more complicated then the computer models.” and reported that Manabe himself was very cautious “I have a good friend in Princeton who is a computer expert, [Syukuro] Suki Manabe is his name. He is Japanese but he lives here in Princeton.
He did some of the first climate models on carbon dioxide. And he always said from the beginning [“The climate model is a very good tool for understanding climate, but a very bad tool for predicting climate” Manabe], (Poels, 2016), more of the interview with Dyson p. 353.
Congratulations to Syukuro Manabe for this award, for his humility and for demonstrating, to those who read his articles cited above, that the atmosphere is essentially a thermodynamic machine, not a radiative one. Furthermore, even if radiative transfers calculations provide indeed some indications and give some order of magnitude of the warming to be expected from the additional CO2 of anthropogenic origin, no reasonable inference can be made without considering how the earth-system, a highly self-adaptative and complex dynamic environment, will react.
Alas, as this is too complex to model with some reasonable confidence, e.g. we do not even known how these changes will impact the variety of clouds 8 and how this will affect the albedo (Goode et al., 2021), it has led to arbitrary definitions that make bold hypotheses, such as the notions of Radiative Forcing (RF) or Effective Radiative Forcing (ERF), see e.g. Myhre et al. (2013), holding a number of parameters fixed at “unperturbed values” or having some other conditions “supposed to remain unchanged”, see p.104.
Doing this considerably weakens the confidence that we can have in the relevance of these radiative calculations and in their ability to deliver any result having a meaninful predictice capability. The Earth does not fit in a lab experiment where simple radiative transfer calculations would provide insightful results.
This will be addressed starting p. 32, with Section 1.4. “Let’s get back to some Physics”.
The earth-system is at minimum a non linear coupled ocean-atmosphere system interacting with its immediate stellar and planetary environment.
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