Readers have written in to say that it was not the job of the IPCC to provide a self-contained exposition of the scientific issues pertaining to increased CO2. I’ve looked at a couple of statements of the role of the IPCC and there’s certainly nothing that prohibits them from providing a coherent explanation. IPCC’s website […]
Yesterday I collated IPCC AR3 and AR4 “expositions” of the enhanced greenhouse effect, observing that, in my opinion, they were so baby food as to be essentially useless to a scientist from another discipline. Today I’m going to drill a little deeper in the expositions, going to a 1995 journal comment by Houghton and to […]
Judith Curry writes: I’ve posted the chapter on Thermodynamic Feedbacks in the Climate System from my text “Thermodynamics of Atmospheres and Oceans” on my website, the links can be found at Text: http://curry.eas.gatech.edu/climate/pdf/Ch13_GalleyC.pdf Figs: http://curry.eas.gatech.edu/climate/pdf/chapter13_figs.pdf For my more recent thoughts on the subject of climate feedbacks, I refer you to my previous post on the […]
A logarithmic relationship between CO2, radiative forcing and direct impact is reported by IPCC and widely relied on. While this may well be a plausible relationship (Lubo, for one, endorses it), it is not easy finding a proof of the relationship. In a recent post, I noted this in connection with IPCC AR1 (1990), where […]
One of the fundamental questions for someone interested in the impact of doubled CO2 is exactly how (1) the greenhouse effect works; and (2) how the “enhanced” greenhouse effect works. AR4 FAQ 3.1 poses the question: I’m going to show their answer to this question in full because the answer does not rise about a […]
Chapter 1 of AR4 has some surprisingly interesting comments about models that, to the extent that the points are disclosed in the body chapters, are disclosed so opaquely that they would be undecipherable to anyone other than a few. Here are some interesting comments about flux adjustment – an issue that must surely raise civilian […]
In our summary of IPCC AR1 (1990) on radiative forcing, I noted that the logarithmic relationship and 4 wm-2 values were attributed to: Hansen et al (1988), which in turn cited Lacis et al 1981; and Wigley (1987) which is not presently available to me (or to Wigley himself) and appears not to have been […]
AR4 (chapter 1 on the History of Climate Science) contains the remarkable statement: The strong effect of cloud processes on climate model sensitivities to greenhouse gases was emphasized further through a now-classic set of General Circulation Model (GCM) experiments, carried out by Senior and Mitchell (1993). They produced global average surface temperature changes (due to […]
It is very difficult for the general public to understand that IPCC does not carry out independent due diligence. The answers of Michael Mann in 2003 to questions from Sen Inhofe are well worth re-reading in the present context. Mann says that it is “against the mission” of IPCC to “carry out independent programs” or […]
As an innocent bystander to the climate debates a couple of years ago, I presumed that IPCC would provide a clear exposition of how doubled CO2 actually leads to 2.5-3 deg C. The exposition might involve considerable detail on infra-red radiation since that’s relevant to the problem, but I presumed that they would provide a […]
Climate Audit 