The Continuing Enchantment of the Big Black Marble

The "lukewarmer" wuwt site has a post by fellow lukewarmer Christopher Monckton, purporting to derive the CO2 "climate sensitivity" by no-doubt-settled science (theory, that is). My response:

Lukewarmers like Monckton and Anthony Watts believe in the radiation transfer theory. I don't. As I wrote just a few weeks ago (June 30th), in the post "It Beggars the Imagination", "There are other obvious weaknesses in the radiation transfer theory ...but the main one is this error of making everything a blackbody or a quasi-blackbody, mitigated only by a fudge factor called the 'emissivity factor'."

I won't quote further, or at length, from what I wrote before. I will merely point out that Monckton's exposition of consensus theory assumes not only that the Earth's surface emits as a blackbody surrounded by vacuum, but that the so-called "emission level" in the atmosphere does also.

He says that 97% of the Earth's albedo, or reflected fraction of solar radiation, is due to clouds, not the Earth's surface. That is the same as saying the surface reflects relatively little, and is of course consistent with calling the Earth's surface a blackbody--as the radiation transfer theory assumes--but it is belied by looking at the Earth from space. The Earth does not look like a dark object (a black body) partially covered by bright clouds; it looks like "a big blue marble"--remember? One can see the landmasses, and their colors, clearly from low-earth orbit. It is simply NOT a blackbody, and cannot emit as one. (One might, and perhaps should, also question what fraction of Earth's clouds do not reach as high as the "emission level"--about 5km altitude--since Monckton subtracts the full value of the albedo from the incident solar intensity, and thus assumes all clouds rise higher than that "emission level"; but I don't know the precise answer, and it is of lesser importance than the "blackbody earth" error I want to emphasize.

When Monckton also says the emissivity of the "emission level" in the atmosphere is 1, that defines it as a blackbody also. This only underlines what I wrote in that "It Beggars the Imagination" post, that the theory assumes(!) every level, including the surface, is a blackbody or a quasi-blackbody. Monckton says there are two blackbody levels (and conveniently, just those he is interested in).

The obvious reason for such a ridiculous assumption, as I have written for years now, is that the scientists "measure" what they think are the radiation levels in the atmosphere, at the various levels, when what they must REALLY be doing is measuring the TEMPERATURE, misinterpreted as the equivalent blackbody radiation intensity.

I knew this must be the case years ago, when I realized the "radiation" "measured" coming off the Earth's surface was just that which would be emitted by a blackbody at the same temperature as that surface; but seeing it claimed by Monckton that the "emission level" is also essentially a blackbody drives home the point that the radiation transfer theory is fundamentally unsound, with local temperature responsible for the "radiation" being measured, not vice-versa. (And again, radiation transfer theorists are comparing the Earth's surface to a blackbody SURROUNDED BY VACUUM, which can only give off heat by radiation; while of course, the Earth's surface is surrounded by atmosphere, and heat is lost there by conduction and convection, as well as by radiation--so the whole idea is stillborn, unworkable according to basic physics, i.e., essentially by definition).

Again, it beggars the imagination, that even the "lukewarmers" (the heroes, to so many lay "climate skeptics") should be so enamored of the false radiation transfer theory (which is also disproved by the "global warming pause" of the last nearly 20 years, but an unwary layperson would hardly know it from the continued devotion to the dogma (or propaganda) of the "settled science", which is not science but only mass delusion).