March 3, 2022 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
(Note: I apologize for not posting much in the past few months, as I am dealing with family health issues. Hope everything will be back to normal soon. I also want to thank everyone who has support and help keep this site up and running since Google turned off monetization… thank you!)
As I continue to watch them all crazy statement about how human-caused climate change is disrupting life around the world (e.g. February 28 release of IPCC Report from Working Group 2, [Pielke Jr. analysis here]), I cannot help but return to the main reason why the cause and effect of recent human warming has not been conclusively determined. I’ve discussed this before, but it’s worth repeating.
As a preface, I will admit, on the contrary, that due to lack of evidence, I remain temporarily on the side of the view that warming has been most of anthropogenic (and this says nothing about whether the extent of anthropogenic warming is alarming).
But this is why human cause and effect is primarily a statement of faith…
ALL temperature changes in any system are due to an imbalance between the ratio of energy gained to energy lost. In the case of the climate system, it is believed that the Earth each year absorbs a global average of about 240 Watts per square meter of solar energy and emits the same amount of infrared energy back into space. .
If we believe that over the last ~15 years of Argo buoy measurements of the ocean (to a depth of 2000 m), there has been a slight warming equivalent to an imbalance of 1 Watt per square meter, which shows very small imbalance in the energies that flow.
One watt per square meter.
That small imbalance can be compared to 5 to 10 Watts per square meter uncertainty an average of ~240 Watts per square meter flows in and out of the climate system. We don’t know exactly those flows. Our satellite measurement system does not have that level of absolute accuracy.
The global energy balance chart you’ve seen has numbers calculated on the assumption that all imbalances are man-made.
I repeat: WITHOUT natural energy flows, the global average in the climate system is known to be around 5-10 Watts per square meter…than the imbalance based on ocean warming being 1 Watt per square meter.
This means The recent warming may have been mostly natural…and we’ll never know it.
However, climate scientists simply assume that the climate system would have been in perfect and long-term harmonious equilibrium, if not for humans. This has been a quasi-religious assumption common in the Earth science community for as long as I can remember.
But this position is largely a humanized statement of faith.
That doesn’t make it wrong. It’s just… not sure.
Unfortunately, that uncertainty was never communicated to the public or to policymakers.
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