Andy Revkin has made a career on reporting Global Warming, not covering the debate. He’s all in, and he needs to protect his chips.

Yet another consideration is that the entire CO2-driven Global Warming theory, as expressed in the silly models, has proven completely, spectacularly wrong in every concrete prediction it has made — no extra warming in the lower troposphere, no ocean heat buildup during the current cool spell, and so on. Its only confirmation is a weak correlation between temperature and CO2 concentration for the years 1980–1997.

By contrast, a competing theory — the Svensmark effect, solar variation affecting cosmic rays — has good correlations on time scales from months to millions of years.

The IPCC models are, as some of us have been saying for twenty years, useless simpleminded trash. And when the American (and European) people realize this, and look at the enormous price they have already paid for this nonsense, some scientists and many politicians may find themselves lynched from their own beloved wind turbines.

The NASA Langley Research Center where I work designed and operated an Earth Radiation Budget satellite program (ERB) in the 90’s. The purpose was to determine whether the amount of energy absorbed by the Planet Earth from outside is equal to, smaller than, or greater than that radiated back into space. Obviously, that energy balance is profoundly important to know whether the Earth is in a thermal steady state, cools down, or warms up.

The program has concluded (there were and still are other satellites , e.g., the CERES series, that followed up) and the results were archived at the NASA Goddard Space Center. They are summarized on a number of websites and cited in many articles (references are available). The principal websites are

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_energy_budget

http://asd-www.larc.nasa.gov/erbe/components2.gif

http://okfirst.mesonet.org/train/meteorology/EnergyBudget2.html

(The larc website is the root reference)

The key result was surprising: the energy received equals to that radiated out; all three websites provide data to show that. It is surprising because this equilibrium would indicate the Earth temperature not changing despite that the ground data indicate warming (regardless whether people are guilty or not). Elementary thermodynamics tells us this.

However, the ground data do show warming. How such warming is possible despite the Earth radiative energy balance? One explanation that I can think of is that there may be a slight imbalance with the energy absorbed exceeding that radiated out by a small amount below the satellite instrumentation resolution. If so, the imbalance is small and not a reason for the doomsday alarm trumpeting by Mr. Gore and his media sycophants.

The other possibility is that the energy is in balance but is being redistributed within the Earth oceans and atmosphere. If the latter were true, we should see mutually offsetting warming and cooling in various regions of the globe. If the redistribution is responsible for the ground data indicating that the climate is changing, then we do not have global warming or cooling, the whole process is a resultant of regional variations, and the research now preoccupied with CO2 ought to be redirected to the causes and effects of such redistribution. A very different issue.

I thought that it might be an opportunity for students of the subject like you to look deeper into the ERB data and their interpretation. Perhaps, it would be a very constructive contribution to the climate changing debate. It is very puzzling indeed that the data available on the Earth energy balance (collected by the US Government at a considerable taxpayer expense) are not being mentioned as the key piece of information in that debate. It is just a single number but so very important. Maybe it is being ignored because it does not support the cause for alarm, apparently so dear to many people.

Sincerely,

Jaroslaw Sobieski, PhD, AIAA Fellow.

~ -.014 Degrees per decade.

It appears to me that, since this result also holds for the satellite data (I’ve done the calculations several times) No warming for a full twelve years is a solid conclusion.

Links to some of his previous pieces touching on the topic can be found here, here, and here.

-Chip