Climate Scientists Misapplied Basic Physics

A mistake in climate model architecture changes everything. Heat trapped by increasing carbon dioxide just reroutes to space from water vapor instead.

The scare over carbon dioxide was just due to a simple modelling error. A whole category of feedbacks was omitted, which greatly exaggerated the calculated sensitivity to carbon dioxide.

Main Messages

The scientists who believe in the carbon dioxide theory of global warming do so essentially because of the application of “basic physics” to climate, by a model that is ubiquitous and traditional in climate science. This model is rarely named, but is sometimes referred to as the “forcing-feedback framework or paradigm.” Explicitly called the “forcing-feedback model” (FFM) here, this pen-and-paper model estimates the sensitivity of the global temperature to increasing carbon dioxide.

The FFM has serious architectural errors. Fixing the architecture, while keeping the physics, shows that future warming due to increasing carbon dioxide will be a fifth to a tenth of current official estimates. Less than 20% of the global warming since 1973 was due to increasing carbon dioxide.

The large computerized climate models (GCMs) are indirectly tailored to compute the same sensitivity to carbon dioxide as the FFM. Both explain 20th century warming as driven mostly by increasing carbon dioxide.

Increasing carbon dioxide traps more heat. But that heat mainly just reroutes to space from water vapor instead. This all happens high in the atmosphere, so it has little effect on the Earth’s surface, where we live. Current climate models omit this rerouting. Rerouting cannot occur in the FFM, due to its architecture—rerouting is in its blindspot.

Blog Posts

This material was introduced in a series of blog posts on Joanne's blog. Note that the forcing-feedback model (FFM) was called the “conventional basic climate model” in these posts (omitting some words for brevity where context allowed). Those with a climate science background will likely find the posts tagged in red of more interest.

Related blog posts: