To the extent that the public distrusts climate science, its not because climate scientists have made exaggerated claims in the past. I’m not denying that this has happened, but I question the extent to which this has happened and the public’s awareness of it.

A much more likely explanation of the public’s distrust of climate science is that a group of extremely ideological pundits have been vocal about it for years. They make no good points, either logically nor scientifically, but it persuades the public because these same pundits have persuaded their listeners that their uneducated, scientifically illiterate “common sense” is better than anything the academic “elites” have come up with (who are only motivated by pushing a totalitarian agenda, they say).

I’m reminded of an office mate who went around every day saying “it’s the sun, it’s the sun, you know what I’m saying” until I finally couldn’t take it anymore and commented on why that level of analysis explains nothing, not just about global warming, but any of the myriad conditions which exist on the planet. He finally conceded, but until that moment, he never really thought about it.

I suggest that THAT is the reason the public doesn’t trust climate science.

It was another comment from someone who has already posted a large number of repetitious comments that are maintained on this blog, and who has posted a large number of the exact same comments that have been deleted.

Not much more to say.

The comment is so totally wrong and generic that it’s not possible even to start to correct the errors. The only recommendation I can give is that the author makes some serious effort to learn physics, thermodynamics in particular. Having learned the basics he could come back to this site and extend his knowledge to the more specific issues discussed here.

From the points the basic requirement (1) is the only correct one and that’s, of course, the basis of all application of thermodynamics for atmospheric studies.

[..deleted rest of comment from this banned commenter]

The quantification of the upwelling LW flux absorbed by the atmosphere is about 300 W/m^2, yet it only takes about an additional 150 W/m^2 of surface power gain offset it.

As I understand it, the notion or concept of ‘zero-feedback’ is not a heat transfer calculation because it assumes everything else remains fixed or unchanged (and thus effectively linear).

Oh, awesome parody! Nice work.

Just in case (oh no!!) you are not..

Don’t start with this blog. You urgently have a long list of journals to contact.

Start with these guys: Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy & Radiative Transfer.

They have published literally tens of thousands of papers on the subject without so much as an Imprimatur from the Handbook of Physics and Chemistry.
They have papers like this one: The HITRAN 2008 molecular spectroscopic database. All out in plain sight, sucking in academics, researchers, bloggers..

Let us know how you go and I can give you a long list of other journals.
Then there’s university courses, university libraries..

It’s called a Handbook, not an Encyclopedia for a reason. It contains a lot of useful data, but nowhere near all. The HITRAN database of spectroscopic parameters (2,713,968 lines) of 39 small molecules comes to mind. There isn’t room to put this in the Handbook and a printed version would not be very useful anyway. Your view that the Handbook is the equivalent of inerrant holy writ is quaint and amusing. Do you only handle it while wearing clean gloves?

The Handbook has it’s own goals (i.e. collecting a wide variety of numerical data and some other straightforward factual data.

How can anyone propose that only those things are true that fit in one handbook.

Whatever your specialty you are likely to trust your knowledge on many issues not found in the Handbook of Physics and Chemistry. It’s not the ultimate repository of all knowledge.

Assuming what you have presented is factual and carbon dioxide does absorb and re emit substantial energy, at 400 parts per million in the atmosphere, it could not possibly be enough to show any measurable
change in global temperature.

As previously stated, earths nitrogen oxygen atmosphere is fundamentally
a thermodynamics and heat transfer question for temperature changes, if any. There are not any significant temp changes due to the long wave transparency of nitrogen and oxygen, even with your notch spectra for carbon dioxide considered, due to the less than small source of carbon dioxide at 400 parts per million in the atmosphere.

Give me your responsible sources and locations within the Handbook of Physics and Chemistry and then we will have a starting point. Until then, you are just blowing in the wind. And worse, people will take you to legal task for your expoundments if you publish these assertions as fact.

Oh, and I will put my factual understanding (which is the definition of physics) of the atmosphere up against yours based on the Handbook of Physics and Chemistry, probably any time.

I’m pretty certain that your model without any cutoff for far tails reproduces spurious results at concentration over 1000 ppm. I’m less certain on the relative accuracy, when the cutoff is introduced by a Chi Factor that follows closely enough the curve presented in the poster of Shephard et al.

With that function is plausible that the modification of your model is more correct on the cutoff than typical MODTRAN runs. There may be some additional points not considered by either of us, where MODTRAN is better even at high concentrations.

I introduced the following lines in the function optical

if cutoff > 0
dt1=1./(((vt-v(im(j))).^2+ga^2).*(1+((vt-v(im(j)))/cutoff).^2));
% line shape across all wavenumbers
else
dt1=1./((vt-v(im(j))).^2+ga^2); % line shape across all wavenumbers
end

and gave the value 6 for the cutoff parameter.