Svante Arrhenius is known as the “godfather” of the CO2 greenhouse effect. Today’s climate models are still based on his 1896 thought-experiment calculations of CO2’s imagined capacity to warm Earth’s surface (71% water) out of a frozen solid state by tens of degrees. [some emphasis, links added]
His one-dimensional model “assumed a state of equilibrium” for all other climate factors except CO2.
In other words, the model does not account for changes in albedo, insolation, cloud cover, or relative humidity (Anderson et al., 2016).
Instead, these climate parameters remain perpetually constant.
“The calculations involved balancing the radiative heat budget (thereby assuming a state of equilibrium), namely solar radiation arriving at the Earth’s surface (including the effect of albedo from clouds and the Earth’s surface)…”
“He assumed constant relative humidity within the atmosphere…”
“The cloud fraction remained fixed, as did the relative contributions of land, sea, ice, and cloud to overall albedo.”
Thus, the Arrhenius conceptualization is rooted in an assumed “state of equilibrium” that does not exist in reality—an imaginary world.
Even those who rigorously defend and extol Arrhenius’s work admit his model is so primitive that it cannot even represent heat transfer processes.
“The simplicity of the model meant that there was no possibility of representing changes in heat transport…”
Arrhenius even claimed that lunar temperatures are nearly equal to Earth’s in his 1896 paper.
“Now the temperature of the moon is nearly the same as that of the Earth.”
He also claimed doubling CO2 levels (300 to 600 ppm) warms the ocean 5-6°C, and tripling CO2 results in an 8-9°C warmer ocean surface.
There is no real-world observation supporting an assertion that doubling or tripling the CO2 in the air over a body of water results in these temperature changes.
To top it off, the “godfather” of modern climate science surmised it would take 3,000 years to double the atmospheric CO2 concentration.
“Arrhenius remarked that a doubling of CO2 would occur three-thousand years hence.”
Imaginary-world models are untestable and thus unfalsifiable. The unfalsifiability of a claim necessitates that it is no more than a belief.
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