Roy Clark: A Nobel Prize for Climate Model Errors

Volume 4.1

When the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded part of the 2021 Nobel Prize for Physics to Syukuro Manabe they failed to recognize that the climate models used to justify the award were invalid. When the CO2 concentration was increased in the 1967 model developed by Manabe and Wetherald it created warming as a mathematical artifact of the simplistic steady state energy transfer assumptions that they used. The initial temperature increase was then amplified by a second artifact, the assumption of a fixed relative humidity distribution that created a water vapor feedback. When the CO2 concentration was doubled from 300 to 600 parts per million (ppm), the 1967 model predicted an increase in equilibrium surface temperature of 2.9 °C for clear sky conditions. The equilibrium temperature increase produced by a CO2 doubling later became known as the equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS). The algorithms used in the 1967 model were incorporated into their 1975 global circulation model (GCM). This also had an ECS of 2.9 °C. The steady state assumption provided the foundation for the concept of radiative forcing. The water vapor feedback became part of a set of feedbacks that were used to adjust the radiative forcings. The ECS produced by the 1967 model artifacts provided a benchmark for the temperature increases to be expected in future climate models. The invalid concepts of radiative forcings, feedbacks and climate sensitivity were accepted by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and have been used in all six of the IPCC Climate Assessment Reports. A thermal engineering analysis of the interactive, time dependent surface energy transfer processes that determine the surface temperature demonstrates that it is impossible for the observed increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration since 1800 to have caused any unequivocal change in surface temperature.

More to read here: https://doi.org/10.53234/SCC202404/17