In #1 we looked at some examples of natural variability – the climate changes from decade to decade, century to century and out to much longer timescales.
How sure are we that any recent changes are from burning fossil fuels, or other human activity?
In some scientific fields we can run controlled experiments but we just have the one planet. So instead we need to use our knowledge of physics.
In an attempt to avoid a lengthy article I’m going to massively over-simplify.
“Simple Physics”
Some concepts in climate can be modeled by what I’ll call “simple physics”. It often doesn’t look simple.
Let’s take adding CO2 to the atmosphere. We can do this in a mathematical model. If we “keep everything else the same” in a given location we can calculate the change in energy the planet emits to space for more CO2. Less energy is emitted to space with more CO2 in the atmosphere.
The value varies in different locations, but we just calculate it in lots of places and take the average.
As less energy is leaving the planet (but the same amount is still being absorbed by the sun) the planet warms up.
In our model, we can keep increasing the temperature of the planet in our model until the energy emitted to space is back to what it was before. The planetary energy budget is back in balance.
So we’ve calculated a new surface temperature for, say, a doubling of CO2.
To see the whole article, visit the new Science of Doom on Substack page and please consider suscribing, for notifications on new articles.