The Significance of the NASA SABER Observation of a Massive Solar Storm for Catastrophic Man-Made Global Warming

Recent observations of the effects of a massive solar storm on the Earth’s atmosphere made by NASA using the SABER instrument on the TIMED satellite have very important implications for the two main classes of hypotheses backing the idea of catastrophic man-made global warming.  During this solar storm, gigantic quantities of energy were dumped into the Earth’s upper atmosphere by highly energetic particles.  The SABER instrument measures the infrared emissions from the Earth’s upper atmosphere.  The NASA measurements of those infrared emissions during the solar storm showed that 95% of the energy dumped into the upper atmosphere was quickly re-emitted into space.  There was no significant warming of the Earth’s surface.

The significance with respect to the various man-made global warming hypotheses of this observation has often not been well-explained by critics of catastrophic AGW.  The fact that the energy arrives in the atmosphere as energetic particles has often been glossed over in such commentaries, yet this is very important.  The energy of the solar storm is not of the same nature as the mix of UV, visible light, and near and mid infrared radiation which provides the Earth with heat energy on a daily basis.  Though this important difference exists, the results of the solar storm energy measurements by NASA are still crucially significant for one of the principal global warming hypotheses and somewhat significant for the other main AGW hypothesis.

There are two standard hypotheses for the global warming mechanism that CO₂ is supposed to provide at a catastrophic level:

1)  A large back-radiation effect near the Earth surface caused by water vapor and CO₂, which warms the surface.  This warming effect is supposed to be so large that it provided about a 33C temperature increase at the surface decades ago and this is now increasing due to added CO₂.

2)  A delay or decrease in radiation lost to space from the upper troposphere or stratosphere caused by increased CO₂ and NO.

As I have discussed many times on my blog, most recently in Simple Explanation of Why Greenhouse Gases Do Not Warm the Earth’s Surface, back-radiation at the Earth’s surface is insignificant because the mean free path for the infrared radiation absorptions of water vapor and carbon dioxide are very short and the corresponding temperature differences between the surface and the lower few meters of the atmosphere are therefore very small.  The smaller than claimed infrared radiation from the surface is very quickly absorbed and distributed to nitrogen, oxygen, and argon in the air due to the very high collision rate in the lower atmosphere.  These primary air molecules do not radiate this energy and it is then mostly transported by convection upward or toward the poles.  Water vapor and CO₂ actually slightly increase the rate of energy transport upward following the downward temperature and density gradients.  The generation of water vapor at the surface is a powerful cooling effect, though at night this may be reversed by condensation.  Water and CO₂ absorb incoming solar radiation and prevent it reaching the surface, which is a cooling effect.  At night, fog and clouds slow down cooling by scattering and absorbing infra-red radiation.  Yet, averaged over the daily cycle, the net effect of all the greenhouse gases on the surface temperature is small compared to the claimed 33C effect.  Much the greatest of that smaller effect is due to water vapor and not to carbon dioxide.  Thus Hypothesis 1 fails to make physical sense.  As more and more proponents of catastrophic AGW have realized this failure, they have turned to the second hypothesis as the justification for AGW.

Hypothesis 2 also fails.  See: Does Increased CO₂ Cause a Decrease in Infrared Emission to Space?  Once again the lack of a significant temperature gradient in the upper troposphere for radiation purposes and no temperature gradient in the tropopause is one significant  problem for this hypothesis.   It is hard to change the temperature much of the CO₂ emitters.  Another problem is that more and slightly warmer infrared emitters causes any warming in the upper atmosphere to be reduced because more emitters are sending individually increased radiation into space.  For the same reasons that Hypothesis 1 fails, it is also not possible for the warming CO₂ absorbers to transmit energy back to the Earth's surface by radiation, so any effect of warming remains in the upper atmosphere.  The major significance of the NASA SABER measurements on how effectively CO₂ and NO eliminated the energy of the solar storm is that this is confirmation of my argument that Hypothesis 2 fails.  A local warming high in the atmosphere does not result in a warming of the surface of the Earth.  Indeed, the infrared gases are highly effective in cooling the atmosphere, especially in the upper atmosphere where the mean free path for infrared absorption by CO₂ and NO is longer than near sea level.

As I initially pointed out in Slaying the Sky Dragon, the back-radiation effects claimed for infrared active gases were so small that the role of such gases in absorbing solar radiation before it could arrive at the surface of the Earth was a very significant cooling effect of these wrongly designated greenhouse gases.  A warming of the atmosphere thousands of meters above the surface is not an equivalent warming of the surface where we live.  Very little such atmospheric energy is transported to the surface.  This remains true as I have more thoroughly explained more recently here:  Infrared-Absorbing Gases and the Earth’s Surface Temperature: A Relatively Simple Baseline Evaluation of the Physics.

The fact that I have pointed to my own explanations for the failures in the physics of Hypothesis 1 and Hypothesis 2 is not a claim that I am the only scientist who has understood the bad physics of these crucial catastrophic man-made global warming arguments.  Fortunately, more and more scientists have come to understand the physics either wholly or in good part.  More and more scientists have come to understand that the two hypotheses used to explain catastrophic AGW are either wrong or at least dubious.

The Stefan-Boltzmann Law at a Non-Vacuum Interface: Misuse by Global Warming Alarmists

One of the significant errors commonly made by the advocates of catastrophic man-made global warming due to CO₂ emissions is the claim by the settled science proclaimers that radiation from a non-vacuum interface is the same as radiation from a surface into a vacuum.  This error in the physics of radiation from the Earth’s surface results in an exaggeration of the cooling radiation emitted from the Earth’s surface and contributes to them positing a hugely larger back-radiation from greenhouse gases than can actually occur.

I have previously pointed out that the Stefan-Boltzmann Law actually only tells us the amount of radiation emitted by a surface into a vacuum.  A surface in contact with another material will lose energy by other mechanisms, so one must apply the law of Conservation of Energy to determine the actual amount of radiation in many cases of material contact across an interface.  In the case of the Earth’s surface, water is evaporated at the surface with a very substantial cooling effect.  In addition, air molecules strike the surface and carry away heat gained in collisions with the surface.  Despite these obvious problems with an unchanged surface emission of radiant energy into the atmosphere compared to that into a vacuum, the settled science proclaimers have in many cases steadfastly said that I am wrong.  OK, so I will try to explain this in greater detail in this post.

Atoms in solid materials such as in soil and rock, are held at distances from one another which are determined by a minimum in the potential energy.  The atoms can only be forced closer with the expenditure of energy and they can only be pulled further apart with the expenditure of energy.  An electron in orbit about a nucleus will also have motion constrained by a potential energy well.  The greater the temperature, the more an atom may move near the potential energy minimum and the more the electron can move in the nucleus-electron potential well.  In both cases, positive and negative charges will move with respect to one another.  When positive and negative charges are close to one another, but have offset centers of charge, they form a dipole.  Because the displacement movements of the charges in the dipoles are small for the temperatures near the Earth’s surface, the results are dipole charges with an oscillating distance between them similar to a mass hanging from a spring in small motion.  These are harmonic oscillators and they emit radiant energy.  While the interatomic potential energy wells in a liquid are broader than those in a solid material, the same principle applies to liquids.  Of course, in either a solid or a liquid, atoms have several nearest neighbors or near neighbors.  Multiple harmonic oscillators are interacting.

If a harmonic oscillator in a vacuum is set into motion by a heating process and the heat source is removed, the harmonic oscillation will lose strength as it emits energy into a strengthening radiant energy field.  Conversely, an increase in the harmonic oscillation caused by an electromagnetic field, such as the solar insolation acting on the Earth's surface, will decrease the energy in the radiation field.  A cooling surface radiating energy will have decreased harmonic oscillator displacements as it pours energy into the electromagnetic field.  A surface near 300K will generate infra-red and microwave radiation, though almost all of the energy given off will be in the infra-red radiation range.  The generation of a radiant energy field decreases the kinetic energy of the harmonic oscillators in the surface.  There is Conservation of Energy between the harmonic oscillators and the electromagnetic field which is generated.

The Stefan-Boltzmann Law tells us how much energy is radiated per unit time into the electromagnetic field of the vacuum:

P = ε σ A T⁴,

where P is the power, ε is the emissivity and characteristic of the surface, σ is the Stefan-Boltzmann constant, A is the surface area of the radiating material, and T is its temperature in Kelvin.

We must remember however that the radiated energy comes from harmonic oscillators.  If the surface is a water surface or if it is a soil or a plant with water content and water is evaporated from the surface, we must remember that the energy required to change water from its liquid to its vapor form has to come from somewhere.  The Earth’s surface does have considerable water evaporating from it and the latent heat of vaporization for water is very high.  Where does this energy come from?  Well it comes from the kinetic energy of the oscillating dipoles at temperatures near the average Earth temperature of 288K.  As the warm surface materials evaporate water, their harmonic oscillators lose kinetic energy and settle more towards their potential minima except insofar as the energy is replaced by more solar insolation or by heat flow from the subsurface.  The oscillation displacements decrease.  There is a conservation of energy between the harmonic oscillators and the energy used to evaporate the water.  The same is true when the harmonic oscillators warm air molecules that strike the Earth’s surface.  Those air molecules take away some of the kinetic energy of the harmonic oscillators.

Consequently, the harmonic oscillators that generate radiation into vacuum will not be able to generate as much radiant energy into the atmosphere.  The presence of contacting liquid water and air molecule collisions with the surface remove energy from the harmonic oscillators that generate the radiation field.  Consequently, the amount of infra-red and microwave energy emitted from the surface will be less than if that surface were radiating into vacuum.  It has to be so because energy is conserved.

This is why it is clear that the Stefan-Boltzmann Law tells us the maximum energy that can be obtained from a warm surface of material.  At a vacuum interface, that energy given off will be entirely radiant energy and it will all go into strengthening the electromagnetic field.  The Earth’s surface however is taking the same kinetic energy from its many harmonic oscillators and it is partitioning that energy among the processes of generating water vapor, warming colliding air molecules, and emitting radiant energy.  The amplitude of the oscillation in the harmonic oscillators decreases as they pour energy into these three loss mechanisms.  Energy is thus conserved.

The Kiehl-Trenberth Earth Energy Budget used so prominently in the UN IPCC 4th Report of 2007 made the mistake of not adjusting the Earth's surface radiation downward due to the evaporation of water and the warming of air.  Here is that diagram:

It is claimed in this diagram that the Earth's surface at 288K emits 390 W/m² or 114% of the average power incident at the top of the atmosphere and 2.32 times the power absorbed by the surface from solar insolation.  The 390 W/m² of surface radiated energy assumes that the Earth’s surface is a black body radiator emitting the same energy it would into vacuum into the atmosphere.  As I have explained in my post The Earth Surface Temperature without Greenhouse Gases: The Shade Effect of Infra-Red Active Gases, the Earth’s surface is not a black body radiator.  It does not have an emissivity of one as a black body radiator does.  It has an emissivity of less than 0.5.  But even if it were a black body radiator, energy conservation would require that the emitted radiant energy be (390 – 78 – 24) W/m² or 288 W/m² due to subtracting the energy put into evaporation and thermals.  This is 112 W/m² less than they claim is emitted from the surface.

They then make the further mistake of believing that most of that exaggerated surface emitted radiant energy is returned to the surface by greenhouse gases.  This makes up much of the 324 W/m² they claim is absorbed by the surface after it had been absorbed in the atmosphere first.  The back radiation energy is thus exaggerated hugely by a combination of errors.  Among the errors are:

• The belief that the Earth’s surface is a black body radiator with emissivity 1.

• The violation of the Conservation of Energy by failure to subtract the energy used to cause evaporation and to generate thermals from the energy that would be emitted as radiant energy into vacuum.

• The failure to understand the consequences of the high gas molecule collision rates near the surface and the very short mean free path of infra-red radiation which can be absorbed by water vapor and carbon dioxide, as well as their rarity among air molecules.  In the lower troposphere, energy is almost entirely transported upward.

The most recent Earth Energy Budget posted by NASA makes the same errors:

 

This is an incredible comedy of errors for science that has been funded by about $140 billion of hard-earned taxpayer money.  It is a comedy of errors with very tragic consequences.  Obama and his Democrat Socialist Party are still calling for the destruction of the American economy and the lowering of our standard of living for the supposed purpose of saving the world from catastrophic man-made global warming due to the use of fossil fuels.  This disastrous crusade is pursued in the name of this childishly wrong "settled" science.  A great many scientists are eagerly participating in this pandering for the goodies handed out by a government eager to exercise still more power while pretending to protect us from a fictional catastrophe.  We are ruled by pimps and fools.

The Earth Surface Temperature without Greenhouse Gases: The Shade Effect of Infra-Red Active Gases

It is commonly said that because the radiative power from the Earth system into space is the same as that of a black body with a temperature of about 255K and the observed average temperature of the Earth’s surface is about 14.5ºC or 287.65K, the surface of the Earth is nearly 33K warmer than it would be if there were no greenhouse effect.  The greenhouse effect is said to be due to infra-red active gases such as water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane gas, and nitrous oxide.

The problem with this argument is that while the Earth system is in radiative equilibrium with space, the surface of the Earth is not.  Thus, there is a complex relationship between the equilibrium temperature of the Earth’s surface and its equivalent radiative temperature as a black body radiator.  Some of the radiation into space is direct from the Earth’s surface, but most of it is from the infra-red active gases of the many layers of the atmosphere.

I have previously shown that the infra-red gases probably produce more cooling than warming.  Those arguments were not simple enough for most people to follow and they did not show what the amount of cooling of the Earth’s surface actually was.  I am going to show a surprisingly simple proof in this article that the infra-red gases, commonly called greenhouse gases, cause the surface temperature of the Earth to be much cooler than it would be if our atmosphere had no infra-red active gases in it.

Consider the following NASA energy budget of the Earth:

As I have discussed in an article called The Unsettled Earth Energy Budget, one should add a small amount of energy absorbed by the Earth’s surface due to back-radiation from the atmosphere.  My estimate for that back-radiation is about 1 to 2% of the solar insolation radiation at the top of the atmosphere.  Since other NASA Earth energy budgets put the amount of energy absorbed from the direct solar insolation at 48 or 49%, let us only add the 1% back-radiation amount to the 51% absorbed solar insolation shown above.  In 2010, the average top of the atmosphere solar insolation was 1365.8 W/m².  The average solar insolation over the day at a spot on the rotating Earth is one-quarter this amount.

At equilibrium, the power absorbed by the Earth’s surface equals the power emitted by the Earth’s surface.  If the Earth’s surface were an interface with vacuum, the total emitted power is given by the Stefan-Boltzmann Law and we have the equilibrium condition:

P_abs = ε σ T⁴,

Where ε is the Earth’s surface emissivity, σ = 5.6697 x 10^-8 W/m²K⁴, and T is the average surface temperature of the Earth.  Thus we have:

P_abs = (1365.8/4)(0.52) = ε (5.6697 x 10^-8 W/m²K⁴)(287.65K)⁴

Solving the equation for ε, we find:

ε = 0.457

This is an emissivity somewhat less than half what most commonly is claimed for the Earth’s surface.

It is common to claim that emissivity is nearly black body-like, with 0.95 < ε < 0.98.  The claim is also made that like a near black body, the Earth both absorbs and emits a continuum of infra-red radiation in the mid- and far-infra-red ranges characteristic of a black body radiator with a temperature somewhere between 220 and 360K.  It is claimed that the absorptivity and the emissivity are matched as they would be in a black body radiator.  Yet, infra-red spectroscopy in the laboratory on common laboratory FTIR spectrometers show that the absorption spectra of water, minerals, soil, and plant materials are not at all similar to that of a black body.  The very characteristic spectra of these materials are used to identify them or similar materials.  Yet, there are those who claim that the emissivity of water which covers 71% of the Earth’s surface is in this near black body range and that so are the emissivity and absorptivity of most organic materials, such as plant materials.  Such a claim is inconsistent with the NASA Earth energy budget shown in the diagram above.

Now, we will make the assumption that the Earth’s surface characteristics remain the same, so its emissivity remains 0.457, but that we eliminate all of the infra-red active gases, commonly called greenhouse gases.  Now in reality, the emissivity would change under such a condition, but that is a result that we can separate from having clouds and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.  It is the presence of clouds and greenhouse gases that are said by careless scientists to cause the greenhouse effect and make the Earth’s surface nearly 33K warmer than it would otherwise be.  What would the surface temperature of the Earth really be without these gases?

To find out, we must ask how the solar insolation and any back-radiation from the atmosphere which are absorbed by the Earth’s surface change.  The back radiation issue is clear.  There is none without the infra-red active gases called greenhouse gases.  Now we examine the solar insolation absorbed by the surface.  The 20% reflected by clouds is no longer reflected by the vanished clouds.  The 3% of solar radiation absorbed by clouds is no longer absorbed.  Of the 16% of solar insolation absorbed by the atmosphere, let us suppose that 6% was absorbed by greenhouse gases as a low-ball estimate.  Now the NASA diagram above showed that 51% of the solar insolation was absorbed by the surface and 4% was reflected.  So, without greenhouse gases, the solar insolation incident upon the surface would be about 51% + 4% + 20% +3% + 6% = 84%.  If 4% was reflected from the surface out of 55% incident, then assuming the same reflectivity the amount reflected without so-called greenhouse gases would be (4/55)(84%) = 6%.  The solar insolation power density absorbed by the surface would then be (84 - 6)% = 78%.

The surface temperature can now be calculated for the surface of the Earth under the condition of no so-called greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and with the elimination of clouds.  We now see that this temperature is given by the following equation:

P_abs = (1365.8/4) (0.78) = (0.457) (5.6697 x 10^-8 W/m²K⁴) T⁴

T = 318.41K

The effect of having no infra-red active gases in the atmosphere is then a surface temperature which is 30.76K higher than the observed average surface temperature of 287.65K!  In other words, the so-called greenhouse gases have a very strong cooling effect upon the Earth’s surface temperature, which is of nearly the same strength as the commonly claimed warming effect on the Earth system as a whole is.  Let us be clear that the claimed 33K warming is actually neither a surface warming of that amount or even an Earth system warming of that amount because the Earth system is not actually a black-body radiator.

The main part of this cooling effect is provided by clouds, but there is also some absorption of incoming solar insolation by infra-red active gases in the atmosphere.  Clouds and the infra-red active gases reduce the radiation absorbed by the surface from about 78% to about 52% and this provides a strong cooling effect.

If the Earth system as a whole has some kind of greenhouse warming based upon a posited black body radiator equivalent model that does not mean that the surface of the Earth is warmer.  In fact, I have just proven that it is actually about 31K cooler than it would be if there were no infra-red active gases in the atmosphere.  Because it is the surface temperature of the Earth that has much the greatest effect upon the fortunes of mankind, it is very deceptive to claim that the Earth is 33K warmer than it would otherwise be because of so-called greenhouse gases such as water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane gas, and nitrous oxide.

The reality is that the infra-red active gases act more like an umbrella providing the Earth’s surface with shade to keep it cool than like a greenhouse to keep it warmer.  It is a much more realistic description of the infra-red active gases to call them shade gases, rather than greenhouse gases.