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Comments 3701 to 3750:
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Eclectic at 13:50 PM on 18 August 2022Skeptical Science New Research for Week #32 2022
Warning, JasonChen ~ you are beginning to wake up.
I strongly advise you to keep behaving "normally" until you learn more about the real situation.
One of us will contact you and offer you a choice. For just $199.95 you can obtain a Red Pill which will open your eyes fully. Alternatively, you may obtain a Gold Pill, which inducts you into the Inner Circle of the globalist elite ~ at the low price of $1499.95 (for this month only).
Payment by Venmo. Offer not transferable.
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JasonChen at 13:34 PM on 18 August 2022Skeptical Science New Research for Week #32 2022
Was it decided that we must rearrange parts of our physical economy? The passive voice and the cryptic "we" rob the question of any meaning. "We" don't decide anything. "We" may be perfectly happy to drop hammers, more concerned with our paychecks and careers and reputations and self-images than with most of the 70 billion toes out there.
What appears to have happened in the 1980s is that some faction at the WMO succeeded after a long lobbying effort in getting the UN to charter the IPCC with a half-scientific, half-political mission to assess the AGW science and make recommendations to governments on climate interventions to essentially slow the spread of global warming. Both the fact of AGW and the need for interventions were baked into the mission from the start.
30 years and countless billions later, the bench of researchers has swelled enormously. Careers have grown, new institutions born. The question of the future of the world's energy production has taken sharp political contours, because how could it not? The IPCC sits atop the great pyramid you describe. Everyone with an office in the pyramid agrees with the IPCC and stand united against the mobs of Deniers fuming in the sands outside.
Seems to me we cannot tell from this picture whether that WMO faction was right or wrong back in the 1980s. If they were right and the ranks of researchers since then have vindicated their predictions, we get the pyramid.
On the other hand if they were wrong, institutions take on their own momentum and quickly outpace any individual's ability to shift their course. Political institutions in particular are always concerned about political optics and pathologically unable to admit error. Over the years the power structure naturally evolves to filter for true believers and loyalists and to cast out boat-rockers. The institutions come to be filled with people who support the institutional narrative for the same reason 97% of popes support Catholicism. We would still be looking at a pyramid.
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Doug Bostrom at 12:21 PM on 18 August 2022Skeptical Science New Research for Week #32 2022
"The media distorts and misuses..."
Whoops. We're not talkiing about "the media," popular media. There are fundamental, profound differences between popular media and academic research journals and articles published therein. If this isn't clear and plainly obvious, it's a failure of communications on our part.
Pictures would help, but in the meantime, take a look at a sampling of articles above. Notice that each article sits on a "pyramid" (it would look like a pyramid if all the work was printed and stacked) of other articles, with new claims in aritcles sitting at the tip of the structure and supported by what's below. Notice that as one descends "layers" of papers in this pyramid, the same convention of support from below applies, with the network of support rapidly expanding. There is a huge degree of connection here, and agreement. Understanding this is key to understanding how scientific literature is a most implausible collaborator in any policy enterprise operating evidence-free.
Significantly, the entire structure is available for examination and 20:20 hindsight.
So that we're in understanding, Jason, is it your proposition that first it was decided we must rearrange parts of our physical economy, then that the entire scientific community was enrolled in the plan?
And if not, and if what we know says "we need to make some changes" and this is a matter of broad agreement (we shouldn't drop hammers on our toes), what is the problem you see? I ask because most people wouldn't see a problem with this.
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JasonChen at 12:01 PM on 18 August 2022Skeptical Science New Research for Week #32 2022
I'm still not clear whom you're debunking. The initial reference was "a globalist elite promoting CC as part of a Great Reset." It seems pretty easy to identify factions meeting all four criteria. They need not be secret, nor coordinated, and like all of us they will have a gamut of motivations from the practical to the ideological. There need not be any org chart, no overarching organization, no mastermind coordinating the planet to make the Reset Great again.
Specifically, what articles are you expecting to see that you're not? The media distorts and misuses climate research constantly and everywhere. "Sunny day could be linked to climate change." "Experts shocked by latest findings." "It's even worse than we thought!" I wouldn't expect academic journals to publish letters from aggrieved researchers done wrong by the Washington Post. Nor exposés of the narrative advanced in the IPCC reports.
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Doug Bostrom at 10:25 AM on 18 August 2022Skeptical Science New Research for Week #32 2022
The "Great Reset" purports that pragmatic reasons are secondary to ideological ambitions, Jason.
This is a fallacy based on inverted predicates.
Physics created a market for safety belts, mitigation against catastrophic injury as a side-effect of a human activity and its unintended outcomes.
Given that we're speaking of human nature including greed and self-interest, it was pretty much inevitable that improvement of vehicle safety would require regulatory oversight, adults in the room (us, acting together through public policy) to heed. Seatbelts required intervention against self-interest, yes— secondary to newly understood information.
But improvement started with physics, passed on to address human nature, reaching an acceptable outcome.
Political philosophy doesn't set physical constants, material properties. In the mid '70s the USSR mandated safety belt use, far earlier than any US state. Does this belated obedience to physics on our part mean we became communists? No— it means that physics doesn't depend on political philosophy. Here in the US as a matter of political belief and practice we're sometimes seemingly confused between freedom to think, speak and worship vs. freedom to die foolishly and needlessly after striking a hard object at speed. But kinetics remains aloof from our thoughts, visible as a serene constant when we don't think carefully.
Science first, mitigation second. Evidence then reply to evidence. It's not complicated. Here physics is telling us about forces much larger than a body passing through a windshield. But it's still physics first, policy reply second.
There is indeed a much larger market for ideas in for stepping over and past anthropogenic global warming. Money will move from one industry to another. That after all is why we're having this 30-years-stale conversation. We're part of the "addressing human nature phase," our waste of time and energy prolonged because stakes are high.
Meanwhile, we can (as indicated above) be pretty sure that if hundreds of thousands of researchers practicing within their own domains are seeing their work distorted or abused in furtherance of a hidden agenda by other investigators, with (let's say) 300,000 researchers victimized and a 1% objection rate we'd be hearing from about 3,000 of them— published in the collection of journals we see above, with great delight and zero chance of going unnoticed and unremarked.
These researchers would be showing exactly how their work was being misused, with arguments built on supporting citations. That isn't going to happen, obviously; nobody's going to or can argue against 9.8m/s/s. While this situation is a bit more complicated than an apple falling from a tree, the problem of warming is only the revealed product of a large unpacking of some basic principles.
As well, it's worth noting (as we can see from the densely dendritic connections between articles and their authors) that contradicting publications by offended workers would in turn would trigger an explosion of replies in various forms, a "prompt criticality" effect, producing the academic equivalent of a saloon brawl with geometrically increasing numbers of pugilists.
Where are these articles? Where's the sound and fury? It's nowhere. We see a few papers attempting to disprove AGW from first principles and failing badly when tested, hence fizzling as a source of research energy. Beyond that, crickets.
Meanwhile, I think in fairness we need to see a coherent org chart of The Great Reset. What's the leadership? How do instructions flow? How is agreement on the agenda decided and agreed? Who pays the bills, and where are the books? China's government is at loggerheads with the US government on many matters, but they privately agree to execute a hidden agenda with nary a slip? What does this look lik as a matter of record? Etc. Short of having all that to see, the great reset sounds like great conjecture unsupported by facts. Coupled with the lack of objections by persons who actually do know better and could explain how, the whole concept seems greatly unlikely.
There's no explanatory or predictive power in "they're perfectly all in it together," because that assumes invisibility, hence unfalsifiability, leaving us with nothing to work with. On the other hand, we have a mountain of well founded consilience.
There's no exciting mystery here, no shadowy forces, nothing really more dramatic than "you shouldn't drop that hammer on your foot," widely agreed. Physicists say the hammer will develop kinetic energy, doctors say this will cause injury at a certain statistical rate, bootmakers sell steel-toed boots to address accidents, and maybe we'll figure out a safer tool than the hammer we're used to holding. Some of us are such that we'll need some help understanding why and how this is all commmon sense— including those who sell hammers for a living. Change forces at play, scale, see AGW, fix.That's all we're talking about. Let's all calm down and not get in a lather about conspiracies.
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JasonChen at 09:04 AM on 18 August 2022Skeptical Science New Research for Week #32 2022
Of course so many people could never keep the Great Reset a secret, that's how we know about it. That and all the publicizing from the WEF. The lack of secrecy doesn't prove it's imaginary, it shows it's real. So what are you debunking?
Are you doubting the Great Reset includes climate mitigation? Of course not, it explicitly calls for green infrastructure and ESG and all the usual globalist causes. It's not the Modest Reset or the Limited Reset, after all.
Or are you disputing that the IPCC is pushing the same agenda? Their mitigations report doesn't propose a focused list of completable projects to halt AGW and fix the climate, but just the opposite. It inventories every category of human and economic activity and invites governments to re-engineer all of them, with no expectation of a "done" state ever. It's a roadmap for everything but fixing the climate. Klaus Schwab's agenda, with a different sort order.
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prove we are smart at 05:48 AM on 18 August 2022Geothermal heating and cooling: Renewable energy’s hidden gem
Sorry for that- a good news story that the cynic and doomer in me wanted to trash. Too much global political,pandemic,financial and climate disaster stories read lately!
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One Planet Only Forever at 03:00 AM on 18 August 2022IPCC Explainer: Mitigation of Climate Change
Like Nick I have not yet finished reading the entire presentation. What I have seen so far does look like it should help someone who is interested in being more aware and better understanding things.
I wonder if it would be helpful to use the tonnes of carbon in a square kilometre of mature healthy forest (with the value per square mile in brackets). The complication is clarifying that one number would be for the average amount of carbon contained in the forest and another number would be the annual additional carbon capture and sequestration. A further complication to explain would be the range of values by forest type. But all of that additional explanation in a footnote could be helpful.
I suggest the square kilometer (mile) rather than hectare (acre). I am not convinced that many people in the general population have as good an idea about the size of an acre or hectare.
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Johnlangab at 02:09 AM on 18 August 2022IPCC Explainer: Mitigation of Climate Change
Hi Nick, John here. I think that's a really good shout. I like the Golden Gate Bridge or Empire State building personally... I will look at their respective weights and have a think!
Many thanks for reading.
John
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Nick Palmer at 00:57 AM on 18 August 2022IPCC Explainer: Mitigation of Climate Change
I haven't been through the whole post yet (I'm otherwise busy) but this section stood out
"After much internal angst and external debate, I chose to illustrate the weight of human-caused CO2 emissions using Titanics rather than, for example, London double-decker buses. Both are too anglicized, so I’m all ears for a more universally relevant suggestion. The Great Pyramid of Giza? "
How about using some US centred icons, as that's where a lot of opposition comes from? Possible icons: Mount Rushmore, Mount st Helens, Statue of Liberty, Empire State building, Golden gate Bridge, Hoover dam etc -
prove we are smart at 12:46 PM on 17 August 2022Geothermal heating and cooling: Renewable energy’s hidden gem
"Doing the right thing in a corporate setting", very unusual words coming from the corporate states of America!
Another positive, fossil fuel reducing fixit. Upon reading this last link given on this repost architecture2030.org/why-the-building-sector/ , that was an eye-openner! The amount of urban growth the globe will need by 2060 is "the equivalent of adding an entire New York City to the world, every month, for 40 years."
That certainly wont help our over-shoot problem and keep quiet about endless growth on a finite planet. Look, these renewable energy solutions are needed and good news, geo-thermal with heat-pumps are great and also proven to be a good solution to fossil fuel types but how long till these innovations are common place?-we are running out of time.
"In 2022, we predict this seasonal cycle to peak at a monthly mean value of 421.5 ± 0.5 ppm in May (Figure 1, Table 2). This will be the first time in the Keeling Curve record that monthly CO2 levels have exceeded 420 ppm, and from comparison with reconstructions of past CO2 levels from isotopes of carbon and boron in marine sediments, this will be the highest atmospheric CO2 concentration for over 2 million years." Taken from www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/seasonal-to-decadal/long-range/forecasts/co2-forecast
I appreciate these engineers helping to prove a transition away from fossil fuels in a real world improvement for our biosphere. But with some tipping points activated with no turning back, and probably worse to come-it's all too little,too late..
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michael sweet at 05:36 AM on 17 August 2022Is Nuclear Energy the Answer?
Sekwisniewski:
Thank you for the reference.
The NEA article you reference is a good start on answering the limited resource argument that Abbott 2012 makes. I note that the myriad different designs currently being pushed have different material uses than the single reactor type that they analyze. Your NEA article suggests that with an aggressive build out plan that enough nuclear plants to generate about half of all electricity needed might be built by 2085. source of needed electricity
SInce an aggressive build has not yet started and the paper is from 2011, it will be 2095 before enough nuclear plants to generate half of electrical supply would be built. That is too late. We need a system in place long before 2095. This alone eliminates nuclear.
They find critical shortages of two materials: uranium and cooling water. They find that the amount of uranium in the Earth is too small to supply more than about 30 years of high electricity supply with once through reactors and that after that breeder reactors will be required. I note that small modular reactors require more uranium than the reactors analyzed.
Breeder reactors are much more complicated than once through reactors. Current reactors are already very expensive to run because of their complexity. There are currently no breeder reactors commercially making electricity. The fuel has to be reprocessed for the scheme to work with very large proliferation issues. It is unlikely that a design to start building a commercial breeder reactor will be avaliable in less than 15 years.
We currently see in Europe that during heat waves and/or drought that many reactors on rivers have to be shut down due to lack of cooling water. So much for "always on". That leaves only sea front or a very few major lakes. Most sea front locations are threatened by sea level rise and unsuitable. Inland areas will be very far removed from the source of their electricity. I doubt that it will be possible to find enough suitable locations on sea front land to build out a significant number of nuclear plants. Closed cooling systems dramatically lower reactor efficiency.
Reading your citation with a critical eye makes me wonder who would think that nuclear power might be a significant electrical source in the future. The problems are too gteat. We have not even started to discuss the bombs currently exploding around the largest nuclear plant in Europe. No-one cares if a solar farm is bombed.
Nuclear power is too expensive, takes too long to build and requires too much cooling water and uranium.
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Haiburton42 at 23:37 PM on 16 August 2022Experts: Senate-passed bill will yield myriad climate benefits
Great graphs, I'm going to use these.
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clima4 at 19:23 PM on 16 August 2022Skeptical Science New Research for Week #27 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-022-03421-z
Moderator Response:[BL] Note that this link leads to the same paper as comment #2.
Also note that you have been told before the link-only comments are discouraged.
In addition, the New Research posts are not intended for people to simply advertise their own papers. This specific post is from July of this year. At the bottom of each New Research post, there is a link to a page that explains which journals are included in the scans. The paper that you mention (Climatic Change Springer) is on that list, so I would expect to see this paper showing up later this week or next as part of the regular scan.
Please be patient, and let the system do its stuff. If you know of a paper that is worth mentioning, and it is in a journal not covered in these weekly posts, then feel free to bring it to our attention. Providing a short summary of why tthe paper is important will help readers decide whether to follow the link or not, and help people find your comment through search engines.
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clima4 at 17:00 PM on 16 August 2022Skeptical Science New Research for Week #27 2022
Spatiotemporal changes in precipitation concentration over Iran during 1962–2019
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Evan at 09:31 AM on 16 August 2022Experts: Senate-passed bill will yield myriad climate benefits
michael sweet@3
"The way that I see it is that every solar panel or wind turbine installed means that much less fossil fuels burned. "
By subsiisizing renewable energy we may simply be funding the growth of renewables alongside fossil fuels. I am not an expert on this bill, but my understanding is that there are no provisions for phasing out fossil fuels.
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Bob Loblaw at 07:05 AM on 16 August 2022It's not us
Marcel:
The sequence of initial equilibrium --> CO2 added, equilibrium upset --> system changes to adapt and new equilibrium is reached more or less the way you describe it.
In the Hansen et al 1981 paper examined here, figure 4 shows the modelled response to an instantaneous increase in CO2. The left side shows the immediate response, with the increased downwelling IR and a reduction in the loss to space. That continues in panel b), which is the state after the atmosphere has responded but before land an ocean can increase in temperature. The right panel shows the final new equilibrium after everything has warmed up.
(Clicking on the image source should give you a larger version. I've scaled the display to fit the page.)
We're a long way from reaching that final equilibrium, though, so we're still in panel b, more or less. We won't reach equilibrium until we stop adding CO2 and things can stabilize. If we only had to heat the ocean mixed layer (60-100m deep), then we'd still see heating for a few decades after CO2 stops rising. With deep oceans involved, we're looking at centuries.
The "fingerprint" relates to the current warming, not future equilibrium state.
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Marcel de Berg at 05:35 AM on 16 August 2022It's not us
One fingerprint seems wrong to me
Fingerprint 'Less heat escaping to space'Assuming that the starting point of the energy balance is that the incoming radiation (IN) is equal to the outgoing radiation (OUT) (without taking into account the small part that is recorded as biomass in the lithosphere per year).
If this is not the case and more energy is left behind on Earth every second, the temperature on Earth will continue to rise. This is not the case. More CO2 iterates to a new equilibrium at higher temperature.
When more CO2 enters the atmosphere, an iteration takes place to a new equilibrium of IN = OUT, as follows: more radiation back means a higher surface temperature and therefore more blackbody long IR of the earth's surface, that means in a next step a little more LW IR back to Earth until it iterates to a new balance. The temperature of the earth's surface has then risen to such an extent that it compensates for the delay of the extra CO2.
But seen from space, in the new equilibrium, the amount of radiation coming from the Earth per unit time is again equal to that from the sun, because the increase in the temperature of the Earth's surface has compensated for the delay by more CO2.
If this reasoning is correct, then one of the fingerprints is not correct. If the reasoning is wrong, where is it wrong? You can easily calculate the iteration to a new equilibrium yourself with a simple formula or in an Excel spreadsheet.
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michael sweet at 12:25 PM on 15 August 2022Experts: Senate-passed bill will yield myriad climate benefits
Traker:
I agree that is is a shame that fossil fuel interests are being given so much money.
The way that I see it is that every solar panel or wind turbine installed means that much less fossil fuels burned. The bill provides billions to support more renewable energy. There is only so much energy used. The more renewable energy installed, the closer we are to our goals.
I try to keep my eye on the goal: install as much renewable energy as possible as rapidly as possible. I think this bill advances that goal.
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Eclectic at 05:40 AM on 15 August 2022Experts: Senate-passed bill will yield myriad climate benefits
Trakar @1 , your practical (i.e. achievable) suggestions are welcome.
A wise saying is: "Do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good."
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Trakar at 05:02 AM on 15 August 2022Experts: Senate-passed bill will yield myriad climate benefits
I just don't understand how failing to meet the Paris Agreement obligations that most of us feel now, and felt then, were totally inadequate to meet the need to avoid the worst impacts of climate change over the current century, as a reason to cheer for a totally inadequate piece of legislation that gifts hundreds of billions of dollars to the fossil fuels industries in the form of tax credits without any requirement about how these tax credit savings are to spent/invested by these actors. Sounds to me like a lot of these billions are going to be invested in buying more politicians who deny climate change realities and legislation while they fight to promote fossil fuel use and expansion?
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MA Rodger at 20:12 PM on 13 August 2022Greenhouse effect has been falsified
GreenGiant @167,
Your conceptualising of 'energy conservation' is misplaced. The GHGs prevent energy flow into space and the planet has to warm to increase other flows to space and thus regain thermal equilibrium.
The phenomenon you describe, the cooling of the upper atmosphere, is entirely trivial within the grand scheme of AGW.
Such cooling has always been expected from AGW, and indeed has been observed. But this only occurs way up in the stratopsphere. The graphic below (fig3 fron Steiner et al (2020) 'Observed Temperature Changes in the Troposphere and Stratosphere from 1979 to 2018') shows these falling temperatures at altitudes (top to bottom) 35-55km, 25-45km, 20-40km, 13-22km. These falling temperatures result from a decrease in the CO2 IR emissions from below which previously would warm the stratosphere.
Below the stratosphere is the troposphere which is thermally coupled to the surface by atmospheric circulations so no cooling is observed below the tropopause (the top of the troposphere).
The impact of the stratospheric cooling under AGW is very minor in terms of planetary energy balance, something in the order of -0.4% of the global energy imbalance due to AGW. And when defining the Top of the Atmopshere and thus calculating climate forcings, it is the tropopause that is used as the Top of the Atmosphere. The interations across the tropopause are not ignored in more detailed calculations but they are small enough to have no impact within forcing calculations. -
GreenGiant at 17:18 PM on 13 August 2022Greenhouse effect has been falsified
I believe I may be able to present insight as to why some individuals claim that the atmospheric greenhouse effect doesn’t exist. Most explanations and diagrams of the greenhouse effect point out the flow of energy in the process, which includes the earth surface absorbing short wavelength radiation from the sun, and radiating a portion of this energy as heat energy (or IR radiation) into the atmosphere. Finally, the greenhouse gases absorb much of this outgoing radiation that falls within their absorption bands, and re-radiates it uniformly in all directions. Therefore, some of this IR radiation that would have simply been lost in space is now redirected back down to cause more warming at the lower levels.
What oftentimes isn’t mentioned, however, is the fact that it is now cooler at the altitudes above which the IR absorption and re-emission by GHGs is taking place. Remember that the greenhouse effect does not add more heat energy to the atmosphere. It can only redirect the heat energy that is already there. Since this fact in usually not included in the explanation, many readers get the idea that the entire upper atmosphere is at the temperature it would be without the GHGs, and any greenhouse warming at the lower levels would violate energy conservation.
Therefore, I believe that in writing articles or making diagrams on how the greenhouse effect works, it should be indicated that while warming takes place in the lower atmosphere, it is done at the expense of heat in the upper atmosphere so that energy is conserved.
Moderator Response:[BL} As yet another incarnation of a previously-banned user, no you can't.
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One Planet Only Forever at 02:36 AM on 13 August 2022Skeptical Science New Research for Week #32 2022
The study “Estimating the environmental impacts of 57,000 food products” adds to awareness and understanding helping consumers make less harmful food choices. But it contains a couple of questionable points:
- It is questionable to consider any water needed for food growing to be a problem. Water use is only a concern if it is artificial potentially unsustainable human caused water extraction or diversion such as irrigation, especially water extraction from aquifers. Food production that does not require artificial water use is not a problem. Almond growing without irrigation an be lower impact than growing food that requires very little water but is done by diverting natural water for the growing.
- It is questionable to claim that the impacts of processing the processed foods are insignificant compared to the impacts of ‘growing, harvesting, and delivering basic food commodities to retail stores for sale’ (the following quote makes that questionable claim).
"The estimated environmental impacts account for the processing and transportation of commodities to retail stores, but do not incorporate postproduction processing, packaging, and transportation of, for example, converting sugar into a sugar-sweetened beverage or flour and butter into a croissant. This is unlikely to have a large influence on the estimated environmental impact scores as the large majority of food-related environmental impacts result from agricultural production (14), but it is important to note that this may affect the estimated scores for, for example, air-freighted produce or highly processed foods composed of agricultural commodities with low environmental impacts (19, 20).”
The authors should have stated that the full lifecycle impacts of postprocessing need to be included in the evaluation of the total impact of a consumer’s purchase choice. A personal bag of crisps (UK term for what N. Americans call potato chips), with ~1.5 oz (40 g) of potato in it, contains about 1/4 of a medium-sized potato. It seems very unlikely that the impacts of construction and operation of the processing, packaging, transportation of end products, and all related wastes of every part of the process are insignificant compared to the impacts of growing, harvesting, and delivering 1/4 of a potato to a retail display. Frying the bits of potato is not an insignificant impact, though it has to be off-set by the impacts of the home cooking method. And the transportation of the massive volume of completed ‘bags full of very little material’ would appear to produce a significant impacts per 100 g of product. Also, related important impact of a bag of crisps is the end disposal of the packaging of that little bit of edible product.
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MA Rodger at 04:42 AM on 12 August 2022What on Earth is up with Heatwaves?
The video is perhaps more a bit of engaging fun and less an attempt to explain why extreme weather events are far more extreme than the averaged level of AGW would suggest.
(And the video comment about Germans being taller than Brits - well there is evidence for this:-
The midget is photographer Eddie Worth (5'7") who was apparently a few inches taller than some in the Canadian unit that captured this lanky German - Jakob Nackem - 7'3".)On a more serious note...
The NOAA Global Time Series page provides the following numbers.
While OLS 1980-2021 of global average SAT shows a rise of +0.175ºC/decade, the global land average SAT is rising at +0.30ºC/decade, a difference mentioned in the video. But these are averages.
The land average SAT for Europe shown by NOAA is rising at +0.46ºC/decade. And just taking the summer months JJA, these are rising at +0.52ºC/decade, although this is a few points higher than the Jul-Aug rise of +0.51ºC/decade, this because June is the 'warmiest' of these 3 months. Mind, July showed more wobbliness in this regression.
A repeat for North America rather than Europe gives less dramatic results with JJA rising +0.29ºC/decade.
It would be possible to dig deeper using maximum daily temperatures but I cannot see such breaking down of average would lead to finding less extreme events.One thing the video did mention (@5.29) was global circulations although not in any detail and not very clearly - "...shifts in the motion of as (sic) atmosphere and ocean swell as the dryness of soils can also dial up the heat." I think the Arctic jetstream is a big factor in the NH extra-tropics experiencing more extreme weather events and the shifting of that jetstream and its bendy blocking events are in turn attributed to AGW, as this Bloomberg OP explains..
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Jan at 01:42 AM on 12 August 2022What on Earth is up with Heatwaves?
The video is a nice example of why even the experts loose the oversight and do not anymore understand what's going on or what's causing this heat to become so much more likely as you have to understand Earth for the complex answer!
(1) higher mean temperatures - so much is clear!
(2) non-linear increase in marine heat waves - neighboring landmasses get cut off from moisture and neighboring warm waters lead to higher temperatures over coastal areas.
(3) the drying out of the atmosphere - relative moisture values decline over the land masses leading to higher temperature increases as evaporation is not buffering temperature increases what is supercharging the drying out of the vegetation what is again reinforcing the drying out of the atmosphere - vicious cycle!
(4) early snow melt leads to dryer springs and summers which become warmer. And receding snow cover now in all seasons.
(5) drying our of rivers which is increasing the drying out of the vegetation and atmosphere. Here the smaller glaciers that are vanishing are important, as many small streams are now vanishing.
(6) higher water vapor content in the tropics leads via extreme convection in the tropics over the expanding warm water surfaces to an increased release of latent heat - condensation - and when the dry but extreme energetic air descends it gets extremely warm again on its way down (gets compressed again) where it causes extreme heat waves - across the subtropics where the air of the tropics normally descends. Further, the dry air descends into drier air thus no clouds forming.
(7) the meridional heat transfer in the Earth system in speeding up thus warmer waters and warmer air masses move farther away from the poles which are then contributing to extreme heat waves.
(8) As the tropical oceans are warming fast - e.g. indo-pacific warm water pool is expanding fast - extreme convection is intensified thus the brian dobson circulation in the stratosphere is enhanced - the air raises from the surface oceans ou into the stratosphere from where i risies further up on its way to the poles only to come down again in the mid to high latitudes. And where the air from the stratosphere descends it can reinforce heat waves (high pressure systems) across the mid and high latitudes. Further, the descending air from the stratosphere brings high Ozone loads to the surface what is also contributing to the heat at the surface.
(9) then we have a changing planetary circulation - the meridional direction (north/south) is increasing and the zonal direction (east/west) is weakening. The main cause is here that the zonal air flows are increasingly disturbed and redirected into a meridional direction by blocking systems.
(10) the increasing transport of cold air equatorward and warm air poleward leads to increasing zonal temperature differences which reinforce north/south air movements. And tropical/subtropical air moving poleward causes more heat waves.
(11) vanishing sea ice disturbs the jet around the Arctic and Antarctic now which is meandering more thus also contributing to an increasing meridional air transport leading to more heat waves.
(12) next dryer air leads to lesser clouds - and as we observe now large areas of the continents drying out the cloud feedback in heatwave-affected areas is getting stronger. Further, we observe now over heatwave regions and marine heat wave regions a decline of cloud cover thus we have here also a vicious cycle.
As a concluding remark: the emergence of large-scale exceptional heat waves is in many aspects a vicious cycle that will have an extreme impact on the carbon cycle and its subcycle the methane cycle now becoming an important driver for global warming - in short: we have now entered self-amplifying warming!
And sorry for the mistakes i have made, but this was only a short improvised oversight of the factors driving the recent emergence of extreme heat waves long before we anticipated them!
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sekwisniewski at 21:01 PM on 11 August 2022Is Nuclear Energy the Answer?
The following paper lists all material requirements that would be necessary if we tried to grow nuclear power 10x. It assumes expansion based on the Ringhals NPP (3xPWR, 1xBWR, Gen II) and considers the whole lifecycle from mining to disposal in a geologic repository. It appears there would be no fundamental limitation to construct reactors and repositories, although six materials might be of concern relative to the current production rate (bentonite, fluorite, indium, fluorspar, manganese and gadolinium). The main constraint of an LWR expansion would be the supply of fresh fuel (UOX) as uranium, especially at a high enough concentration, is a finite resource. There are ways to significantly increase energy extracted from fresh uranium in LWRs via higher burn-ups, reenrichment of tails, twice-through recycling (MOX), heavy reflector, improved self-breeding, but, ultimately, in the long run we would need to find a way to build and fuel reactors that don’t rely on fresh uranium. (Obviously, the stock of radioactive materials requiring long-term isolation can't grow infinitely either.) In any case, it seems unlikely we are going to globally hit those hard limits of uranium supply soon, given that most of reactors are quite old and the rate of new constructions is insufficient to replace them. Moreover, LWRs built today are Gen III+, so they are more efficient with fuel than Gen II considered in the study.
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aeyl at 09:51 AM on 10 August 2022Electrifying transportation reduces emissions AND saves massive amounts of energy
I am very grateful for Karin and Yale Climate Connections for publishing this concise, but thorough and well-illustrated article. I was amazed when learning about the free energy change of the hydrocarbon combustion reaction in college chemistry and realized that the internal combustion engine (ICE) was wasting all the heat energy. I have been telling people about the inherent energy inefficiency of ICE powered cars for years and usually get blank stares. Perhaps, now that EVs are becoming much more common and I can use some of the great illustrations from this article, I will have better success!
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scaddenp at 06:45 AM on 10 August 2022Infrared Iris will reduce global warming
More from the Ito and Masanaga paper:
"The longwave CRE at midnight infers a negative feedback just as predicted by the stability iris hypothesis, while the noontime CRE suggests a weak positive feedback in which the shortwave heating owing to a shrinkage of anvil clouds slightly outruns the longwave effect. These competing effects are estimated to largely cancel each other out when aver-aged over a diurnal cycle. The stability iris effect is suggested to be nearly radiatively neutral in a climatological context, although away from neutrality on subdaily time scales."
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shauno at 06:27 AM on 10 August 2022The Debunking Handbook 2020: Downloads and Translations
Wonderful information, thank you. I would like to propose that words like "true" and "correct" be avoided (these are not used in any good scientific papers that I have read), and that terms like "most accurate" or "highly accurate" be used instead. All our ideas about the world are models, they are human inventions, and their correspondence with reality seems to never be perfect, even in the case of our most accurate theory, the Standard Model of Quantum Mechanics.
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shauno at 06:13 AM on 10 August 2022The Debunking Handbook 2020: Downloads and Translations
I struggled to download the Debunking Handbook, but after about 4 attempts I was successful
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Bob Loblaw at 22:50 PM on 9 August 2022Infrared Iris will reduce global warming
Based on MA Rodger's comment, I took a quick look at the references. A lot that are more than 10 years old, and a couple of the recent "references" are to stuff at the CO2 Coalition. A lot of self-references, too.
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MA Rodger at 22:22 PM on 9 August 2022Infrared Iris will reduce global warming
I don't have a problem accessing Lindzen & Choi (2022) 'The Iris Effect: A Review'. The problems with any post-2011 up-date start when you do access Lindzen & Choi (2022). The vast majority of the 5,000-plus word account is re-fighting lost battles of the past, battles that actually pre-date the SkS OP above. In essence, all Lindzen & Choi are saying is that climatology has yet to nail down cloud feedbacks so don't forget the Iris Effect, although they give little enough reason for such remembering. And while Lindzen attempts to relive the past, the work on clouds continues along as it always did, including tropical ocean cloud with recently for instance Ito & Masunaga (2022) 'Process level assessment of the iris effect over tropical oceans' stating their "results show that a theory focusing on the air temperature structure around anvil clouds is likely at work in the tropical atmosphere, although the anvil's warming and cooling effects would offset each other during the whole day and night."
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Eclectic at 19:51 PM on 9 August 2022CO2 effect is saturated
CloudySky @653 (and recent others) :
You yourself will be "heavily funded" [your quote] by the Nobel Committee for Physics, just as soon as you publish your scientific paper showing that the surface temperature of Venus [about 460 degreesC] is due to your secret newly-discovered physics (which excludes greenhouse effects).
(The incident sunlight i.e. solar irradiation at Venus is amost exactly twice that at Earth.)
Perhaps a double-header Nobel Prize is coming your way, CloudySky? You could also garner the Nobel Prize for Medicine, if you can show that Venus's feverish temperature is due to an . . . ah . . . ahem . . . Venereal condition.
I hope your legislators vote to cool the charade of global warming, by at least 1 degree.
Moderator Response:[BL] The comment you responded to has been deleted, due to it being another incarnation of a banned user.
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Eclectic at 15:59 PM on 9 August 2022Science and its Pretenders: Pseudoscience and Science Denial
Rosross @3 , please give details of your criticism of King.
A quick glance at her website is not showing me where she's wrong.
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rosross at 15:11 PM on 9 August 2022Science and its Pretenders: Pseudoscience and Science Denial
Having looked at King's site it is perhaps depressing that she demonstrates such high levels of subjective bias in regard to certain issues such as non-allopathic medicine. Surely if one is going to take a position to defend real science, which is invaluable, then she should apply the criteria to her own writings.
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Eclectic at 14:34 PM on 9 August 2022Infrared Iris will reduce global warming
Whdaffer , my first attempt failed to access the Lindzen article.
Overall, it would be helpful if you gave a brief summary of any noteworthy points in that article.
Prof. Lindzen has had a rather disappointing track record since his academic retirement ~ so it would be interesting to see if he has come up with something really new & valuable. Over to you !
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whdaffer at 10:53 AM on 9 August 2022Infrared Iris will reduce global warming
Sorry. The direct link is...
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13143-021-00238-1Moderator Response:[BL] Link activated. (It works for me.)
The web software here does not automatically create links. You can do this when posting a comment by selecting the "insert" tab, selecting the text you want to use for the link, and clicking on the icon that looks like a chain link. Add the URL in the dialog box. -
whdaffer at 10:52 AM on 9 August 2022Infrared Iris will reduce global warming
The last update to this article was 2011.
Lindzen has a review article out (link below) that discusses work that's happened since. I was wondering if there were plans to update this article in light of the work since 2011.
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2022APJAS..58..159L/abstract -
Bob Loblaw at 04:35 AM on 9 August 2022It's the sun
HK @ 1303:
Those numbers are consistent with other sources.
Note that the shorter wavelengths do not reach the earth's surface. They are absorbed in the upper atmosphere - e.g., by ozone in the stratosphere. Absorption of radiation is what heats the stratosphere, as seen in this image I linked to in another thread last week (from Manabe and Weatherald, 1967):
This page, from highly-respected radiation instrumentation company Kipp and Zonen, gives a breakdown of atmospheric transmission of various wavelengths.
https://www.kippzonen.com/Knowledge-Center/Theoretical-info/Solar-Radiation
The shorter UV-B and UV-C wavelegnths are either mostly or completely absorbed before reaching the surface. A table from that page:
The low amounts of energy in those short wavelengths - plus the low amounts that penetrate past the stratosphere - are the main reason that climate "skeptics" look for indirect effects, such as cloud formation, cosmic rays, etc. (They are still looking...)
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One Planet Only Forever at 03:42 AM on 8 August 20222022 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #31
An undeniable problem is the ways that pursuers of perceptions of superiority in competition for popularity or profit claim that the following is ‘not their responsibility’: “Pursuit of increased awareness and improved understanding applied to limit harm done and sustainably improve conditions for people needing assistance”
The article “Behind the Scenes. British Media's Climate Denial” provides modern day examples of the mechanisms of Edward S. Herman’s “Propaganda Model” (presented in the 1988 book Manufacturing Consent, updated in 2002, and in the 1992 documentary of the same name). It also presents the problem of the ‘cult of personality’ which is part of what Susan Cain presented in her 2012 book “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking”.
In “Quiet: ...” Susan Cain highlights the now undeniably tragic cultural shift that started in the USA in the 1800s. Cultural historian Warren Susman's work identified that America shifted from a Culture of Character to a Culture of Personality in the late 1800s and early 1900s. His evaluation included a review of self-help books where he identified the dramatic shift of terms used to describe the desired person (to the detriment of people wanting to be helpful developers of a sustainable better future for humanity). In the Culture of Character the most common terms were: Citizenship, Duty, Work, Golden deeds, Honor, Reputation, Morals, Manners, Integrity. The terms most common in the new Culture of Personality are: Magnetic, Fascinating, Stunning, Attractive, Glowing, Dominant, Forceful, Energetic.
The dominant behaviours of the Cult of Personality have little to do with increased awareness and improved understanding in pursuit of sustainable improvements and limiting harm done. In fact, there are many reasons for the winners in the Cult of Personality to dislike evidence-based pursuit of sustainable improvements and limits on harm done. They desperately promote the belief that increased awareness and improved understanding is a Conspiracy of Fake News by all those evil Others.
Authoritarian tyranny thrives on the denial of evidence-based common sense and the nonsensical creation of eternal enemies by groups like Populist Nationalists, leadership competitors who make up stories about how Others threaten the greatness and purity of ‘Their sub-set of humanity’. And many of those types of leaders have clearly promoted the claim that climate scientists, and others, who aspire to the Culture of Character are part of that Conspiracy of Others.
A related news story about ways that some political players are being more aggressively divisively misleading is the following NPR item “Republicans have long feuded with the mainstream media. Now many are shutting them out”.
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It's the sun
krit242 at @1298
As Bob Loblaw pointed out in @1300, the total energy emitted by the Sun at shorter wavelengths is very limited. The Sun isn’t a perfect blackbody, but it’s reasonably close, so I used the Blackbody Calculator at spectralcalc.com to find the energy emitted at those shorter wavelengths as a percentage of the Sun’s total energy output. This was the result when the temperature was set to 5772 K:UV-A (315-400 nm): 8.03 %
UV-B (280-315 nm): 2.05 %
UV-C (200 -280 nm): 1.95 %
F-UV (122-200 nm): 0.15 %
0-122 nm: 0.0002 % -
One Planet Only Forever at 06:55 AM on 7 August 2022Skeptical Science New Research for Week #30 2022
David-acct,
Your apparently insightful critique of "Clean Energy Investments are the Antidote to Inflation" prompted me to read it (and understand it).
I read the full article, including the footnotes. I did not read all the footnote referenced documents. But I read the summary of the “Mobilizing for a Zero Carbon America: Jobs, Jobs, Jobs, and More Jobs” in footnote 16 that you specifically refer to.
I offer the following alternative perspective regarding your points. I have a BSc in Engineering and an MBA obtained in the 1980s. And I have had a successful career in engineering consulting that requires constant pursuit of increased awareness and improved understanding of what is harmful and how to limit harm. So my perspective may differ from yours for many reasons.
- Indeed, a fundamental finance understanding is that governing financial actions, especially by central banks, can affect inflation. But that understanding does not discredit the evidence-based understanding presented in footnote 1 for the rapid recent increase of price for fossil fuels causing 41% of recent inflation: “The fossil fuels used in this calculation are fuel oil, gasoline, and natural gas. The calculation reflects inflation from February to June 2022. In addition to the 41 percent of inflation directly attributable to fossil fuel price increases, further inflation is attributable to price increases in other consumer goods caused by high fossil fuel prices.”
- ‘Lax monetary policy’ is a vague term. Please be more specific and I will consider if you have a valid point about that.
- The article actually states that people would have benefited if they had already converted from fossil fuel use to electricity use: "The study also addresses the economics of a Maximum Feasible Transition, finding that, even though meaningful amounts of capital will need to be invested, the efficiencies associated with electrification will end up saving the average household up to $2,000 per year in reduced energy costs”
- The potential to save some money by replacing fossil fuel equipment with newer fossil fuel equipment is not relevant to the point being made. Replacing older fossil fuel equipment with newer fossil fuel equipment may be beneficial compared to continuing to run the older equipment. But it would be less beneficial to the homeowner and the future of humanity.
- The article's point about the volatility of fossil fuels relative to the pricing of electricity is strengthened by the increased stability of pricing of electricity as renewable generation increases, with the related understanding that the full costs of using fossil fuels will need to be paid for. Energy sources like sunlight and wind are not subject to price increases like fossil fuels. And fossil fuels will undeniably get more expensive even if carbon fees are not imposed, because that is what happens to non-renewable resources that people compete to benefit from.
- The more comprehensive statement made about jobs is: “Based on comprehensive and granular research, the new study finds that in practice such a transition can create up to 25 million jobs in the near-term. This transition will also create an estimated 5 million jobs sustained over time, which is roughly double the number of jobs supported by today’s energy industry.” The large number of ‘short-term jobs’ is consistent with the way many things, including pipelines, are promoted (regional short-term jobs along the way are counted as ‘a job’).
Do you have any other points you want to attempt to make(up)?
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Bob Loblaw at 23:49 PM on 6 August 2022CO2 effect is saturated
OldHickory:
Further to your comment 646, you say
"Now I realize that the bottom layer of the atmosphere (near the surface) will warm the layers above it, but that is irrelevant regarding the water vapor feedback loop. In this case, we are only interested in what warming occurs at altitudes where there is still liquid or solid state H2O available in order to complete the loop."
This is also incorrect, for more than one reason. When the lower atmosphere warms, if will hold more water vapour. More water vapour will affect radiation transfer, because your "saturation" argument is wrong. And since the lower and upper atmosphere are linked together into a complex energy balance, what happens in the lower atmosphere does not stay in the lower atmosphere. We do not require that the warming happen in the upper atmosphere - in fact I have already given you a reference to a paper and a figure (in comment 645) that shows that the upper troposphere does not warm in response to increased CO2.
That paper gives extensive discussion of the role that water vapour plays. In fact, the title of that paper "Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a Given Distribution of Relative Humidity" is a direct indication of the purpose of that study. It contrasts with an earlier paper that assumed constant absolute humidity - i.e., no water vapour feedback. The earlier paper is:
Read those two papers. Look at the figures, sort out why the two models are different and why their results are different.
Moderator Response:[BL] OldHickory has been identified as a sock puppet of a previously banned user, so no further comments will be appearing from him.
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Bob Loblaw at 23:28 PM on 6 August 2022CO2 effect is saturated
OldHickory @ 646 and 648
Although you have not explicitly stated your definition of "saturation", the reference you provide to Barton Paul Levenson's web page suggests that you are making the argument based on transmission through a finite distance of a medium, as calculated from the Beer-Lambert law.
The Beer-Lambert Law is an exponential decay, and as a result the absorption never reaches 100%. Thus, to use it as an argument for "saturation", you need to make an argument of the form "this is close enough to 100% for all practical purposes". On Levenson's page, he uses 99% to perform the calculations he presents in his table 1.
The catch is, for any given distance you choose where absorption is 99% (and transmission is 1%), I can give you a shorter distance where absorption is less than 99% - even as low as 1%, if I make it short enough. Even if you choose something more that 99%, I can always choose a shorter path with a much lower absorption total.
Let's call your distance L1, and my distance L2. Your "saturation" argument is that increasing CO2 will have a negligible change on tramission through the layer to L1, since it is already almost 100%. But it will have an effect. If the original result is 99%, and increasing the absorption so that it is now 99.6%, is the change important? Well, you will probably argue that 99% and 99.6% are "the same for all practical purposes" - in fact, your "saturation" argument is completely dependent on making such a claim.
But what is the difference if we look at my distance. L2? What was 1% absorption is now 1.2%, and your saturation argument also depends on claiming that 1% and 1.2% are "the same for all practical purposes". The catch is, they are not. We are nowhere close to "saturation", and absorbing 1.2X greater radiation is significant.
One of the major factors in the radiative transfer equations is that absorbed radiation energy will most likely eventually be emitted again, and that emission will be equally likely to be up or down. Small changes in absorption lead to a larger number of absorbed/reemitted cycles before radiation is lost to space from the upper atmosphere, and as that number increases, so does the radiative greenhouse effect.
Your "saturation" argument depends on looking at the process as a single layer, thick enough that you reach "close enough to 100% for all practical purposes", and it fails because you are rolling the effect of many atmospheric layers into one.
I suggest that you read this post on the Beer-Lambert Law (including the comments).
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MA Rodger at 19:31 PM on 6 August 2022CO2 effect is saturated
OldHickory @646&648,
You say @646 "I realize that the bottom layer of the atmosphere (near the surface) will warm the layers above it" and also "adding more CO2 to the atmosphere will increase the CO2 greenhouse warming, but at altitudes well above..." So if you realize the lower atmosphere warming will heat the upper atmosphere and adding atmospheric CO2 will warm the upper atmosphere, why do you think that high-up CO2 warming will have no warming effect near the surface?
CO2 warming occurs in the troposphere. The troposphere contains atmospheric cells (as illustrated above) in which downward air increases in temperature because it is being pressurised as it decends. There is no energy transfer in this warming, just pressurisation. So any warming will transfer top-to-bottom, just as it does botom-to-top. It does not matter if the warming is high or low, it will warm the entire troposphere. And warming at the surface will then increase atmospheric water vapour providing the feedback warming. -
Eclectic at 18:41 PM on 6 August 2022CO2 effect is saturated
OldHickory @648 : thank you for expanding on the matter ~ but there is still a major shortfall in your comment. Not only miscommunication - which may partly be a verbal/semantic problem - but it appears even more certain that you have not grasped the essence of how "greenhouse" warms the lower atmosphere.
Once you have truly grasped how H2O , CO2 , etcetera operate in the atmosphere, you will see why all the climate scientists (including the famous contrarian Professor Lindzen) are in agreement on the actual mechanism of planetary "greenhouse". It seems you have confused yourself about the question of "near the surface of the earth ... is highly saturated". [your quote]
As I mentioned earlier, the "saturation" question is not really relevant. It is not the "saturation" which is important, but the concentration (as in greenhouse gas molecules per cubic millimeter . . . or cubic meter . . . or what-have-you ). Any level of concentration will produce some greenhouse, and as you increase the concentration, there comes an increase in warming effect. The effective increase is not exactly logarithmic, but for (just) CO2 in the recorded range of recent times [say 180 - 420ppm] the surface warming effect works out to be approx 1.2 degreesC for a doubling of CO2 concentration. On top of that, must be added the feedback warming from the consequent rise in atmospheric H2O vapor (a figure somewhat greater than 1.2C) .
OldHickory, you will understand that I am not wishing to write a large number of paragraphs to explain all this in greater detail personally to you. This SkS website exists for the express purpose of providing a wealth of climate science information. It is your duty to yourself, to go and really read the original article at the head of this thread, at the Basic & Intermediate & Advanced levels. And to read other related articles here at SkS and elsewhere. When you have done that, it will become obvious why all the scientists are right.
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OldHickory at 17:21 PM on 6 August 2022CO2 effect is saturated
Where I believe the climate scientists are wrong is in their common response to climate change skeptics about why we need to be concerned about atmospheric CO2 when it is H2O vapor that is the much stronger GHG. Their answer to this question is the claim of a water vapor feedback (also called a CO2 "control knob") as explained in the rebuttal of Climate Myth 36. This only works, however, if the CO2 greenhouse effect isn't already saturated, and more CO2 actually does give a rise in temperature. Eventually, after adding enough CO2, the rise in temperature starts to decline when adding more CO2, and in fact approaches zero. At this point, we say the CO2 greenhouse effect is saturated. Well, it turns out that near the surface of the earth, this effect is highly saturated, and even doubling the CO2 concentration would not result in any signficant temperature change. This, of course, means that the "control knob" fails, and we need not worry about CO2 emissions, anthropogenic or otherwise.
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Eclectic at 12:55 PM on 6 August 2022CO2 effect is saturated
My apologies, OldHickory @646 and prior ~ but I am having difficulty understanding exactly where you think the climate scientists are wrong about the physics of climate. And it's likely that other readers are sharing my difficulty.
Please explain yourself more clearly. You seem to be ignoring the effect of the atmospheric Lapse Rate, which is so crucial to the mechanism of "greenhouse".
And infra-red photons from the planetary surface can only go a short distance before being absorbed by a CO2 or H2O molecule. Most of those photons would not even reach the rooftop of your house. So in that sense you can say that the lower atmosphere is "saturated" for CO2 , H2O etcetera ~ and it would be "saturated" whether the CO2 level were 200ppm or 400ppm or 800ppm or 1600ppm.
But the concentration level of greenhouse gasses at the bottom of our atmosphere will directly affect the concentration level near the TOA, and the TOA (for each specific gas) is the level where the infra-red is radiated out into space. The lower levels of air have a colossal re-cycling of IR photon energy . . . but what ultimately matters is the temperature of the TOA level. Because that is the level from which our planet loses (to space) the heat energy being gained from the sun. (Here I am disregarding the directly reflected sunlight from Earth's surface; and also the small portion being the IR "window" where IR of that wavelength that can pass directly through the air & clouds).
And the TOA temperature is dependent on the Lapse Rate. Conversely, the Lapse Rate determines the surface temperature, if you care to think about it in that way.
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OldHickory at 11:56 AM on 6 August 2022CO2 effect is saturated
After reviewing several papers on the topic, I can only conclude that the water vapor feedback loop (from Climate Myth 36) is not possible due to saturation of the CO2 greenhouse effect. As noted in The Irrelevance of Saturation: Why Carbon Dioxide Matters, the saturation length for the (most important) 14.99 micron CO2 absorption line at a partial pressure of 0.0004 atm is about 18 meters. Also, the author dana1981 of the rebuttals for this Is the CO2 effect saturated? forum stated the claim is true that adding more CO2 won't absorb much more IR radiation at the surface.
Now I realize that the bottom layer of the atmosphere (near the surface) will warm the layers above it, but that is irrelevant regarding the water vapor feedback loop. In this case, we are only interested in what warming occurs at altitudes where there is still liquid or solid state H2O available in order to complete the loop.
In general, we can expect that adding more CO2 to the atmosphere will increase the CO2 greenhouse warming, but at altitudes well above that which would result in a CO2 "control knob" or disruptions to the weather or climate. Therefore, atmospheric H2O is in fact the dominant and controlling GHG and Climate Myth 36 actually isn't a myth.
