Archives for May 7, 2009

IN recent years, a major advance in our understanding of the physical dynamics of the climate process has come from the work of Ferenc Miskolczi. For the present note I am calling his discovery the ‘climatically saturated greenhouse effect’. I use these words to mean that the ‘saturation’ of which I speak is not the classical static saturation of an isolated system, but is ‘saturation’ in a specially extended sense for an open system in a thermodynamically-non-equilibrium dynamic steady state.

Dr Miskolczi’s discovery arose from his regular work for NASA, examining the data measured by radiosonde balloons. Studied and analyzed under the microscope of the radiative transfer computer program that he had written, the large data set turned out to be a previously only partly tapped reservoir of a wealth of physical facts. From the reservoir of numerical data, Dr Miskolczi abstracted mathematical formulae that expressed new physical understanding.

Dr Miskolczi showed that the true physical dynamics of the climate process is that the present rate of change of amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is dynamically determined, amongst other factors, largely by the present amount of greenhouse gas. A second dynamical factor is the fluctuating temperature of the atmosphere. There are also other dynamical factors that are mostly ignored in this present note.

On the other hand, for its doctrine that man-made CO2-emissions cause harmful global warming, the IPCC speaks in terms of its mathematical formalism of “radiative forcing” and “positive feedback by water vapour”. But, sad to say, this formalism is fatally flawed and cannot describe the true dynamical structure of the climate response to CO2.

[Read more…] about The Climatically Saturated Greenhouse Effect: A Note from Christopher Game