The Science of Doom

In this article in the series we will look an interesting paper: An analysis of the dependence of clear-sky top-of-atmosphere outgoing longwave radiation on atmospheric temperature and water vapor, by Dessler, Yang, Lee, Solbrig, Zhang and Minschwaner, JGR (2008). This paper can be downloaded for free. I used some results of this paper in Theory and Experiment [...]

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After posting Part Two on water vapor, some people were unhappy that questions from Part One were not addressed. I have re-read through the many comments and questions and attempt to answer them here. I ignore the questions unrelated to the feedbacks of water vapor and clouds – like the many questions about the moon, [...]

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In Part One we covered a lot of ground. In this next part we will take a look at some basics about water vapor. The response of water vapor to a warmer climate is at the heart of concerns about the effect of increasing the inappropriately-named “greenhouse” gases like CO2 and methane. Water vapor is [...]

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In the CO2 series we looked at the effect of CO2 without climate feedbacks. The “answer” to the doubling of CO2 was a “radiative forcing” of 3.7W/m^2 and an increase in surface temperature of about 1°C. What about feedbacks? There are many ways to introduce this problem. We’ll start with the great Ramanathan, who is [...]

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