A few days ago, an international research group from the USA, Canada, and Switzerland led by Lorenzo Polvani of Columbia University (New York) published a sensational study in Nature climate change, which attributes a large part of the warming of the 20th century to CFCs (“Substantial twentieth-century Arctic warming caused by ozone-depleting substances“).
Using ten climate models, the researchers calculated the global and Arctic temperature development, once with CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) in the atmosphere and once without.
According to these models, from 1955 to 2005, global temperatures increase by 0.59°C with CFCs and by 0.39°C without CFCs. One-third of the warming is therefore not caused by CO2 but by the CFCs.
If the remaining warming for CO2 is converted over the five decades, average warming of 0.08°C per decade remains. Not exactly a lot. CFCs have a 19,000-23,000 times stronger forcing than CO2.
Half of Arctic warming due to CFCs
In the Arctic, the CFCs had an even greater impact in the model calculations. As is well known, the warming there from 1955 to 2005 was greater than on a global scale, by 1.59°C in the models.
According to Polvani, without CFCs, the increase would have been only 0.82°C, i.e. only half as much.
Half of Arctic melt due to CFCs
The same applies to sea ice. According to Polvani, half of the decrease in the area of Arctic sea ice in September (the smallest extent of Arctic sea ice in each case) is thus attributable to CFCs.
The other way round: only a maximum of half of the warming and the decline of the sea ice can be attributed to CO2.
Authors asked to edit conclusion
The authors conclude that the decrease of CFCs in the air due to the prohibition of the substances will substantially defuse the warming and the decrease of ice in the future.
It is interesting that these clear conclusions called mainstream scientists to the scene.
Piers Forster of the University of Leeds and John Fyfe of the Canadian University of Victoria asked the authors to change the sentence in the conclusion from “CFCs produce 1/3 of global warming and half of Arctic climate change” to “CFCs are an important contribution to the global climate system, especially in the Arctic.”
The numbers remain, but the interpretation is clouded because it would cause too much sensation. That’s how climate science framing works today.
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Ah, the wonderful models that are a joke when they come to predicting the climate. They are not science and only programmed to do what they do, warm.
The IR absorption spectra of CFCs is quite full of holes like a picket fence made of only the posts. However, they do have IR emission frequencies equivalent to a number of very cold temperatures, which means that these would tend to cool the climate rather than warm it. Only when in sunlight do these gases use their higher temperature absorption bands. Counter to the models, in sunlight, the gases would absorb some of the insolation and re-emit it in al directions, some of which is lost to space. So, these gases would decrease the energy reaching the surface.
No gas at any concentration can heat Earth’s surface by IR emissions. It’s just not how they work. The atmosphere is warmed mostly by conduction from the surface and along with water vapor, the air convects upward, carrying enormous amounts of heat to altitude where adiabatic cooling condenses the water vapor and the latent heat is lost to space. This accounts for about 85% of Earths’ daily energy budget and is a factor not in the models, thus making them fail every time.
The big problem here is that the layer of the atmosphere that they would like to claim is warming the Arctic is actually colder than the surface and, thus, no IR directed downward can warm the surface. This IR would be reflected by the surface, as the equivalent energy levels would already be full. Cold objects cannot warm hot objects, a law of thermodynamics that has never ever been proven wrong.