Below in Trenberth’s diagram; [ Net Absorbed 0.9 W/m² ]
You may recall that Trenberth’s first iteration of this wondrous work was balanced. It is
It’s pretty obvious that someone has realized that if there is indeed warming to occur, there must be net absorption. You can imagine how this came about:
Once upon a bright sunny morning a few years ago, Dr. James Hansen looked at Kevin Trenberth’s iconic ‘world energy budget’ as he choked on his morning coffee, realizing the damn thing was balanced. That’s right, the energy input was equal to the energy output. Because he’s been saying for some time that heat energy is slowly building up in the Earth’s climate system and that won’t happen if the energy balance is balanced.
So he did some quick calculations, grabbed his cell phone and punched in Trenberth’s number.
“Hi Kev, this is Hansen, how are you? Do you have a minute?”
“Sure, Doc, what’s up?”
“I’m glad you asked. I’ve looked at your energy balance and it’s balanced. Can you fix that?”
“What do you mean fix it, restore balance?”
“Kev, listen carefully now, when it’s balanced, heat will never build up in the system. Do you understand where I’m going?”
“Er, I’m not sure, can you tell me a little more?”
“Come on Kev, don’t you get it? I need heat to accumulate in the system. My documentation says there is heat in the pipeline, there is slow feedback, and there is an imbalance between incoming and outgoing radiation. Your energy budget chart says it’s balanced. Do you understand it now?”
“Understood Doc, I’ll continue in a moment” [starts to hang up the phone]
“WAIT! I need an imbalance of nine watts per square foot [0.9 Wm²] so that everything works.”
“Uh Doc, what if it doesn’t come to that?”
“Jesus, Kev! Just stick it in there. Increase some of the reflectance numbers to make it look like an update, spice up the graphs a bit, and have some gibberish come up as to why you re-did the chart. You know how to do that, don’t you? ?
“Sure, Doc, consider it done” [click]
And the new map was created
You can calculate the numbers and 0.9 Wm² will warm the ocean at 600 meters depth by about 1/2°C in just over 40 years. Really amazing stuff. The midday sun emits almost 1370 Wm² and these people claim they added up all the chaotic heat movements across the planet and found an imbalance of 0.9 Wm². That’s an accuracy of what? five out of four places? Without plus or minus error bars or anything like that.
What it means are all the components
Reflected by clouds, reflected by aerosols, reflected by atmospheric gases, reflected by the surface, absorbed by the surface, absorbed by the atmosphere, thermals, evaporation, transpiration, latent heat, emitted by clouds, emitted by the atmosphere, atmospheric window AND backradiation ! And they all have to be accurate to those five or four digits for the 0.9 Wm² to be true.
Maybe dr. Hansen didn’t call Trenberth and urge him to change his chart, but Trenberth changed it to indicate an imbalance and it’s a good bet he did because he’s realized that if it’s like his original version would be balanced, the heat would not be enough. t build up.
And we’re all supposed to sit still for something like that.
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