German Scientists Compute CO2 Climate Sensitivity At Only 1.1°C – “Alarmist Prognoses Fully Inappropriate”

The German-based European Institute For Climate and Energy (EIKE) reports here on a paper just published by German scientists Horst-Joachim Lüdecke and Rainer Link appearing in the IJMPC Journal (International Journal of Modern Physics C), see here.

The full paper is available as a pdf file here in English.

The authors claim that CO2 does have a modest warming effect on the global temperature, but:

The effect is harmless (to the contrary, CO2-increases and slight global warming are beneficial for man and thus desirable) and show that the overly alarmist prognoses for future climate developments as fully inappropriate.”

The two authors applied a simplified model to determine a climate sensitivity for mean global warming for a hypothetical doubling of CO2 concentration to be 1.1 °C based on radiative flux without feedback effects.

The conclusion states (emphasis added):

This paper demonstrates that a basic 1-dimensional 1-layer model with different atmospheric and top of atmosphere long wave radiation fluxes and temperatures, and including the reflections of the long wave radiation at the surface of the Earth and atmosphere can reproduce with excellent agreement the observed global average surface temperatures and radiation fluxes. This requires that all emission and absorption processes are correctly introduced into the model. In particular the direct emission of long wave radiation from Earth to space and the temperature dependence of latent and sensible heat have to be taken into account. Our model yields a change in the surface temperature of the Earth of roughly 1.1°C for an additional radiative forcing of 3.7 W/m2 – caused for instance by a hypothetical doubling of the present CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, which is in good agreement with the appropriate IPCC value, if no feedback ampli cation (or attenuation) is considered.”

Debate papers welcome

Readers are encouraged to join the discussion at the EIKE website linked above. Comments in English are welcome as well. Anyone who believes to have good physical critical points to introduce against the publication and is prepared to join the IJMPC peer-review process is warmly welcome to present a debate paper to the IJMPC.

Sounds like just the thing for the publisher of the site Science Of Doom.

14 responses to “German Scientists Compute CO2 Climate Sensitivity At Only 1.1°C – “Alarmist Prognoses Fully Inappropriate””

  1. Captain Pithart

    Pierre,

    you should make clear that the “beneficial for man” quote is NOT from the paper, but from the, obviously non-peer-reviewed, EIKE website. now you’re implying it’s from the paper, which could be seen as dishonest.

    p.

  2. Captain Pithart

    also, don’t you see that the paper is only about the CO2 forcing without the feedback? this is why the paper went through peer review – because it is actual science, that, as you quote, “is in good agreement with the appropriate IPCC value”. you’re just implying that there are no feeback mechanisms, which is not part of the paper, and which would NOT go through peer review, because it has no base in reality.

    p.

    1. DirkH

      The feedback must be negative, as Prof. Murry Salby points out in the Q&A session in this 1 hour podcast (Q&A is from 0:30 on). He doesn’t go into much details as the lecture is more about the carbon cycle; i just bring up this link because i listened to it yesterday and he mentions the question of feedback.

      http://www.thesydneyinstitute.com.au/podcast/global-emission-of-carbon-dioxide-the-contribution-from-natural-sources/

      Prof. Salby was an expert reviewer on at least one of the IPCC reports, i hear.

      1. Captain Pithart

        dirk,

        do you even know what “expert reviewer for the IPCC” means?

        read up here: http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2006/05/you_too_can_be_a_leading_clima.php

        salby hasn’t published the paper, we should wait until he does, don’t you think that would be the skeptical thing to do? anybody can claim anything in a talk, or on a website.

        also stop trolling me about some wiki phantasies you have, i won’t bite. stay on topic for now; it won’t be long before pierre again bans me, then you can badmouth me as much as you like.

        p.

        1. DirkH

          Again, thanks for your volunteer work for Jimbo Wales’ online encyclopedia. It is always interesting to get the warmist low-down from there.

          As for Prof. Murry Salby, he writes books about atmospheric physics, so maybe he knows a thing or two about it? You call him an “anybody” who can claim “anything”; so i guess the personal attacks start to fly now; this was to be expected. AGW science is so predictable. I guess they have special lectures on “How do I smear critics when i run out of arguments” in their Global Warming curriculum.

          http://www.4shared.com/document/h0gSdrKk/Fundamentals_of_atmospheric_ph.html

  3. DirkH

    And Captain Pithart, as you are here under your Wikipedia author name, i suspect you will document what you learn here under the NPOV in that giant treasure trove of knowledge that you help Jimbo Wales erect. I applaud your efforts to inform humanity of AGW skepticism.

  4. Charles Higley

    1.1 oC is still off by an order of magnitude. They are probably using the thermodynamic constant for CO2 put out by the IPCC, as they are using models.

    The IPCC bumped the constant up 12-fold while underhandedly marveling how constant the value has been in the literature over the years.

    If you use the real constant, the warming with CO2 doubling is 0.12 oC.

  5. cementafriend

    The 1.1C assumes 3.7w/m2 forcing (for CO2 doubled) which is itself an assumption (ie not connected to any atmospheric experiment or measurement). On the otherhand measurements in heat exchange equipment by engineering researchers extrapolated to the partial pressures and temperatures of CO2 in the atmosphere show the potential heat absorption to be very much less. It could in fact be close to zero.
    The calculations have also been adjusted to fit Kiehl and Trenberths view of global heat balance which is complete nonsense. Dr Noor Van Andel indicated in the slides of a presentation to KNMI that Trenberth had written in an email that he knew that the radiation “window” was 66 w/m2 (from actual satellite measurements) and not 40 w/m2 as in his two papers. By not correcting the value Trenberth is committing scientific fraud. Trenberth has no understanding of the engineering disciplines-“thermodynamics” and “heat & mass transfer”. Maybe his lack of knowledge and his inablity to explain the differences is holding him back. He is hoping with silence he will muddle through like Wang and Mann.

  6. Gerhard Kramm

    The paper of Link and Luedecke (2011) is based on false claims, falsified quotations and results that reflect, at least, scientific misconduct (see http://www.gi.alaska.edu/~kramm/index_files/pdf_files/toascj_comment_reply.pdf).

    (1) Their Figure 2, for instance, show hyperbolas for L_A and L_E as functions of the transmissivity d. If d tend to zero, L_A and L_E become infinitive (see their Eqs. (17) and (18)), and, hence, the temperatures T_A and T_E related to these fluxes become infinitive, too. This is in contradiction that the effective temperatures for the atmosphere and the earth’s surface are finite and amount to 255 K and 303 K if a planetary albedo of 30 percent is assumed.

    (2) The results of their Figure 3 are completely wrong. Anybody can check it because, according to their Eq. (17) , L_E is not affected by the fluxes of sensible and latent heat. This means that T_E must be constant. As mentioned in the capture of their Figure 3 they mentioned that the temperature T_A = 227 K and the temperature T_E = 271 K leads to Q = 7 W/m^2. This means that the so-called net radiation in the infrared range would be 155 W/m^2. This is much larger than the value of Trenberth et al. (2009) which is 63 W/m^2.

    (3) Link and Luedecke (2011) use their a definition for the climate sensitivity which completely disagrees with the definition that can be found in the literature (e.g., Dickinson, 1985) and used by the IPCC (Ramaswamy et al., 2001). Their of 1.1 K result is not based of their model predictions. Thus, Link and Luedecke compared apples with oranges.

    (4) Link and Luedecke (2011) claimed an excellent agreement for the predicted surface temperature. However, this result is not based on their model predictions. They only used the results of Trenberth et al. (2009) of L_E = 396 W/m^2 and L_A = 333 W/m^2 and related these fluxes to the Stefan-Boltzmann- law as expressed by their Eqs. (19) and (20). Thus, they obtained T_E =289 K and T_A = 277 K where they assumed eps_E = eps_A = 1. The latter has no relevance as a representative (volume-averaged) temperature for the lower atmosphere, and the former is close to the globally averaged temperature which was determined by Trenberth et al. (2009) on the basis of the surface skin temperature provided by the NCEP-NCAR reanalysis at T62 resolution. This means that the excellent agreement of the model results claimed by Link and Luedecke is based on the fact that they reproduced the input of Trenberth et al. on which L_E = 396 W/m^2 is based.

    It should be noticed that Bruce B. Hicks, former Director of the Air Resources Laboratory of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of the United States of America stated in a book review two decades ago:

    »Some papers report on models that are developed, adjusted to fit a set of observations, and then ‘validated’ by comparison against the same data set. As a scientific community, we should urgently work on setting an appropriate punishment for those convicted of this crime.«

    Obviously, the wind has changed during the past decades, but not as a result of climate variability.

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