Above is a ‘skew-T diagram’ of weather balloon data for Albany, NY, on July 7, 2021. The earth’s surface is at the bottom of the diagram; the top is the top of our troposphere, where all the weather happens, roughly 10 miles up in this case.
I’ve been looking at graphs of balloon data recently in order to investigate whether comparing balloon data from 1975 and 2021 indicates any change in the lapse rate in the atmosphere. The reason for doing this is that in the current theory of catastrophic CO2 warming, as CO2 increases this raises the average radiative emissions height (at roughly 500 hPa scale on y-axis on the above diagram) and then we ‘count down’ from there using the lapse rate (6.5 C/km?) to get a new surface temperature. So the lapse rate is important in this version of catastrophic warming. Indeed, the lapse rate ‘saves’ the theory! Do observations support that theory? Here’s more on the lapse rate.
Here’s a consensus climate scientist, Dr. Pierrehumbert, explaining how CO2 warming works. Note that he says that just a 300 meter rise in the emissions height will cause about a two degree warming of the surface. Yikes!
As many know, I believe that the theory of catastrophic CO2 has to be dismantled because this theory serves as the basis for the ‘necessity’ of a global government in the Great Reset vein: if we don’t do this, so the Great Narrative goes, we’ll destroy the earth. Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, has two books on his Great Reset narrative that are shot-through with the unquestioned assumption that we’re all going to burn up if we don’t take drastic and necessary actions.
So, I was comparing skew-T diagrams from 1975 and 2021 for four locations (so far I’ve done three of these) and asking a simple question: is there any change in the lapse rates from those two time periods? In 1975 the concentration of CO2 was about 330 ppm, below the ‘safe’ level of 350 ppm; today it’s around 415 ppm. As the temperature rises— as indeed it seems to be, but modestly— can we see this reflected in the lapse rate? Or in other words, is there any signature of atmosphere congestion from CO2 such that the rate of cooling of our atmosphere is inhibited? This is what the lapse rates denote: how our atmosphere cools. If we ‘count down’ using a lapse rate, well, what’s the lapse rate doing? Is it stable enough such that we have a hard ‘count down’ number to work with, such as 6.5 C for every kilometer? Stay tuned.
The dark mostly-vertical line on the right in the above diagram (repeated below) is— in essence and to keep this introduction short— the lapse rate. It’s actually the balloon sounding as it passes up through the atmosphere, but it follows lapse rate trajectories, which are plotted on the diagram along with pressure and temperature and several other parameters. The more irregular dark line on the left is the dew point sounding. Temperature plots are skewed 45 degrees clockwise; hence the name, ‘skew T.’ These are a bit hard to see because of all the lines but if you look in the center right of the diagram, portions of these lines are slightly darker to help pick them out in the balloon temperature plots. More on skew-T diagrams here.
I looked at skew-T diagrams for July of 1975 and 2021 for Albuquerque, NM; Albany, NY; Grantley Adams (Barbados) and I was going to do one for Greenland. But I was struck by an interesting thing: these diagrams all look pretty much the same no matter what year we look at. There are no irregulaties noted, such as that the atmosphere is heating up in some ‘hot spot.’
But more than that, I found that the height of the tropopause was constantly changing, day by day, as was the lapse rate, which I calculated as the temperature difference to a height just below where no diagram for that month showed a tropopause near the top of the diagram (the tropopause is where the air stops cooling and temperature stays the same; in the diagram we’re looking at, this occurs at about 150 hPa [hectopascals, same as millibars.] There we can see that temperature follows the skewed temperature line at about -65C.) Moreover, using -20C as the emissions height, I found that the emissions height could vary as much as 500 meters in one month, up and down, yet this seemed to have no effect on surface temperature at all. Remember: Pierrehumbert said disaster at just 300 meters difference.
This lead me to conclude that the idea that as CO2 raises the emissions height we then ‘count down’ using the lapse rate to get a warmer surface temperature is nonsense. Where exactly is the emissions height? It constantly changes. What lapse rate? That constantly changes, too. As for the change in emissions height related to surface temperature, it doesn’t exist.
For now, suffice it to say that if anyone still believes in catastrophic warming, hang out at WUWT for a while. I used to be a believer but that’s what I did— I listened to arguments on WUWT— simply because I was curious and wanted to know why there were skeptics and what they had to say. There are many smart people hanging out on that website; you’d find the level of scientific discourse often quite advanced and beyond most of us. But, I got certain concepts, and over the years I realized that there were too many holes in the theory of catastrophic warming. I now believe it’s complete pseudoscience.
As for my own journey into skew-T: it’s taken a bit of time and along the way I asked certain questions which led me to a simple and elegant explanation for why our atmosphere warms the surface even as it cools it, and it seems to me this explanation accords nicely with reality and makes sense. It has little to do with radiative effects, which are real but exist in the background, as it were. Maybe more on that later.
I found this list which I hope that you don't mind me sharing it:
For those that missed the prophets of doom (aka ‘scients’), Let’s recap:
1966: Oil Gone in Ten Years
1967: Dire Famine Forecast By 1975
1968: Overpopulation will Spread Worldwide
1969: Everyone Will disappear In a Cloud Of Blue Steam By 1989
1970: World will Use Up All its Natural Resources by 2000
1970: Urban citizens will Require Gas Masks by 1985
1970: Nitrogen buildup will Make All Land Unusable
1970: Decaying Pollution Will Kill all the Fish
1970s: Killer Bees!
1970: Ice Age By 2000
1970: America Subjected to Wafer Rationing by 1974 and Food Rationing By 1980
1971: New Ice Age Coming By 2020 or 2030
1972: New Ice Age By 2070
1972: Oil Depleted in 20 Years
1974: Space Satellites Show New Ice Age Coming Fast
1974: Another Ice Age?
1974: Ozone Depletion a 'Great Peril to life
1976: Scientific Consensus Planet Cooling, Famines imminent
1977: Department of Energy says Oil will Peak in 90s
1978: No End in Sight to 30-Year Cooling Trend
1980: Acid Rain Kills Life in Lakes
1980: Peak Oil in 2000
1988: Regional Droughts (that never happened) In 1990s
1988.Temperatures in DC Will Hit Record Highs
1988: Maldives Islands will Be Underwater by 2018 (they're not)
1989: Rising Sea levels will Obliterate Nations if Nothing Done by 2000
1989: New York City's West Side Highway Underwater by 2019 (it's not)
1996: Peake Oil in 2020
2000: Children won't know what Snow Is
2002: Famine In 10 Years If We Don't Give Up Eating Fish, Meat, and Dairy
2002: Peak oil in 2010
2004: Britain will Be Siberia by 2024
2005: Manhattan Underwater by 2015
2006: Super Hurricanes!
2008: Arctic will be Ice free by 2018
2008: Climate Genius Al Gore Predicts Ice-Free Arctic by 2013
2009: Climate Genius Prince Charles Says we Have 96 Months to Save World
2009:UK Prime Minister Says 50 Days to 'Save The Planet from Catastrophe'
2009: Climate Genius Al Gore Moves 2013 Prediction of ice-Free Arctic to 2014
2013: Arctic Ice-Free by 2015
2014: Only 500 Days Before 'Climate Chaos’
2019: Hey Greta, we need you to convince them it’s realty going to happen this time"
Nice work Jim. Thanks for sharing. I’m not a scientist but always thought it was all a hoax.