In terms of climate change claims, it helps to shape the situation realistically. We live submerged in compressible atmosphere. It has the same mass as 33 feet of water, more or less depending on the altitude. How much does it make sense to try to attribute the increase or decrease in thermal energy in land and ocean, to a change of a few Watt-hours per hour per square meter in the radiative association of the surface with atmosphere?
The energy in a column of the atmosphere above us includes the potential of water vapor, kinetic, internal, and potential energy due to altitude.
For all of 2019, I plotted hourly values of the “vertical integral of total energy” for a grid point near where I live. This is the result of a reanalysis of ERA5 by ECMWF (European Center for Mid-Range Weather Forecasts). Vertical rates are expressed in Watt-hours per square meter.
See the problem? The direct static warming effect of doubling CO2 since pre-industrial times is widely claimed to be 3.7 Watts per square meter, or 3.7 Watt-hours per square meter. This is disappearing thin on the vertical scale. It is completely overwhelmed by what happens in such a short period of time when the weather obscures such small effects.
So let’s face it. There is currently no way for us to isolate the small impact of greenhouse gas emissions for a reliable allocation. The models themselves, such as the ERA5 reanalysis, help us see this more clearly.
Comments are welcome.
