A new study reveals the limit of the greenhouse gas-induced longwave radiative impact extends only to the ~10 μm (0.01 mm) skin layer — the ocean-air interface — and no deeper.
Determining the sea surface temperature (SST) variation at this skin depth is critical to any attempt to quantify or calculate the impact of greenhouse gases like CO2 on ocean temperatures.
Yet scientists admit such temperature variations are “impossible” to measure at this depth.
Instead, temperature variations in the skin layer must be “schemed” (i.e., guessed) using models that only begin at the 500 to 1,000 mm (0.5 to 1.0 m) layer depths.
This means, of course, that CO2’s effects on ocean temperatures are also impossible to measure.
“SST right at the interface, which is actually impossible to measure”
“…the too-course vertical resolution does not allow to direct modeling skin SST (the first model layer being only around 0.5 – 1.0 m thick”…). Therefore, one must use schemes to reconstruct skin SST variations.”
The authors of the paper do not even mention greenhouse gas-induced changes as factors affecting – much less driving – variations in ocean heat flux at the interface.
The only causal factors mentioned in determining energy changes in the ocean-air system critical to “global warming” are variations in solar radiation and wind speed.
“The net energy flux across the air-sea interface results from four contributions: the net solar radiation, latent and sensible heat fluxes, and the net thermal radiation. The last three contributions depend on SST and have a direct impact in determining ocean heat uptake…”
“The skin SST diurnal warming amplitude increases under low surface winds (smaller than 2 m s−1 ) and intense solar radiation (higher than typical daily peaks, around 900 W/m²) conditions…”
Apologists for anthropogenic global warming (AGW) have advanced the hypothesis that greenhouse gas-induced changes in downwelling longwave radiation (DLWR) can affect changes in the thermal gradient at the skin layer depths, thus reducing or enhancing cooling.
However, in a blog article he composed for RealClimate back in 2006, Dr. Peter Minnett reported the results of a 2004 experiment using cloud-induced DLWR changes as a proxy for CO2-induced DLWR changes.
Clouds were used as a proxy because CO2’s longwave effects are too small to detect, as they are acknowledged to be 50 times smaller than cloud longwave effects.
The results of the experiment revealed the thermal gradient change was merely 0.002°C (two one-thousandths of a degree) for a ~100 W/m² DLWR change in cloudiness.
Because cloud forcing is 50 times larger than CO2 forcing (~2 W/m² since 1750), CO2’s impact, dividing the 0.002°C cloud value by 50, is thus 0.00004°C. This is four one-hundred-thousandths of a degree.
This specified quantification marks how ridiculous it is to believe that CO2 can be a causal mechanism – much less a driving mechanism – for global ocean temperature changes.
Read more at No Tricks Zone
Dear chaps and chappesses, A little reality at natural scale in a joined up Earth energy system, in case you prefer to discuss such things as they happen, where they happne. In the real World of the great oceans where real radiative enrgy change we measure happens and is balanced by the powerful feedback caused by any small surface temperature change, outside the very constricting rabbit holes that the blinkered climate scribes create in bogus fairy tales ,that can’t be measured in the real world because the one true control of climate doesn’t work like that. It’s small perturbation to strongly fed back so highly stable system.
FIrst and largest, The total evaporative loss from the oceans is 86.4 w/m^2 of latent heat, which condenses and becomes radiative loss to space in the troposphere, also creating the 67% albedo cover of clouds. Now, as any decent engineering handbook will tell you, that evaporation of water vapour will increase by 7% per deg K over a +/-10 K range of temperature and from 10 to 90% RHI. Feel free to check the data on the engineering toolbox or elsewhere.
So that’s a direct feedback of 6W/m^2 per deg K. Which a is more negative AKA whole Earth energy system balancing feedback than you can shake a stick at. And then there’s the 3.3W/m^2 of S-B Radiative feedback. And they are worrying about what? And this account, a stated, is built on a false premise at the start.
Also serious BS in thsi case. Because the atmospheric GHGs are not warmed by the greenhouse effect. Their molecular binding energy state is raised by LWIR absirption and the same energy is then released as the molecule relaxes, an identical quantium amount. It is excited but not warmed. Stirred but not shaken,
And the dominant heat flow at the macro level is from the oceans to space , where most SW solar energy is absorbed directly, to space, The place where it has to get once it leaves the surface. 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. Science 1.0.
There is no direct GHE warming of the atmosphere, it works by reducing the total LWIR lost to space, MODTRAN 101. Its a molecular binding energy effect, and has no connection with direct vibrational warming. Same as the energy that travels to the Troposphere as latent heat which is the binding energy of water vapour. Anyone who says otherwise is absolutely denying the fundamental science of even extreme alarmists like David Archer at UoC who teaches this science rather well to make money, but still has no idea , like the rest, what the natural feedback to the calculated perturbation (i.e. guessed in a model ) is, and simply claims CO2 GHE will have a lot more effect than it is measured to, time after time. So is wrong.
CO2 is not even suggested to have a large radiative effect, rather it is small and diminishing logartithmically with concentration, and the actual change in temperature that is required to stabilise the radiative perturbation caused by the reduction of LWIR loss to space by CO2 GHE is tiny, fractions of a degree, not several degrees.. It is, far less than they guess, because the stabilising negative feedback is so much more powerful than the weeny little pretendy threat they big up in models, that doesn’t happen in reality we measure. Its celebrity science, made up in models, science fiction, not provable, not real. CEng, CPhys.
Once again detailed review shows the absolute nonsense we are fed every day on the climate scam. Thankfully, more and more people every day are recognising the stupidity.