Here we continue our examination of Prof. Qing-Bin Lu’s CRE model of climate change and particularly his six key observations that show halo-GHGs, rather than CO2, dominate climate change. Last week we began with his take on Outgoing Longwave Radiation (OLR) at the top of the atmosphere and this week we move on to the second item on his list: 21st century temperature patterns in the troposphere and stratosphere that match CFCs but run counter to predictions from models that assume rising CO2 is the dominant forcing factor.
The match with CFCs, and mismatch with CO2, is particularly strong when looking at stratospheric warming. Climate models predict that, as CO2 levels rise, the surface and troposphere should warm, but above that the stratosphere should cool at all latitudes from the tropics to the poles. The logic is the same as what would happen if you added insulation to the walls of your house. The inside should get warmer but, with less heat loss, the air around your house should get cooler. By contrast, as Lu has previously shown, as halo-GHG levels drop and ozone levels rebuild, the stratosphere should warm especially in the polar regions.
Inconveniently for the CO2 theory, the stratosphere stopped cooling around 20 years ago and even the IPCC admits it now appears to be warming. In which context Lu refers to a 2018 paper by Rolf Philipona et al. with the pleasantly straightforward title “Radiosondes Show That After Decades of Cooling, the Lower Stratosphere Is Now Warming”.
That paper used evidence from weather balloons. And now Lu discusses a satellite record we were not previously aware of called the EUMETSAT which allows him to examine 21st century warming rates by latitude zone and altitude. This approach yields the following pair of charts:
The chart on the left summarizes the observations in various places from the tropics to the poles, while the chart on the right reports what CO2 model theory says should happen. Lu takes the chart on the right from a summary paper by the 2021 Physics Nobel Prize committee, probably as a way of poking them in the eye for giving a Nobel prize to a climate modeler without checking if his model was valid or not.
On both charts the vertical (Y) axis represents altitude above the surface of the Earth. But on the horizontal (X) axis the chart on the left shows the temperature change between the 2000s and the 2010s while on the right it shows the average temperature projected.
On the chart on the right the three lines show what the average temperature at each height is expected to be at the different CO2 concentrations in the legend (blue for 150 ppm, black for 300, red for 600). The differences are small in the troposphere (the lowest layer of the atmosphere, from the Earth’s surface up to roughly 6 km at the poles, 17 km in the mid latitudes and 18 km at the equator) but even so there should be slight warming as CO2 levels go up. The big differences are higher up in the stratosphere, the second of five layers in the atmosphere, which extends from the troposphere to about 50 km and thus covers the rest of both charts. Clearly above 25 km, the models expect a strong cooling as CO2 rises (hence the lines diverge), and they expect it to be stronger the further you go up.
That’s the prediction. Now for the data. The chart on the left shows the difference between average temperatures in the 2010s versus those in the previous decade as measured by the EUMETSAT. In the tropics there is some warming in the troposphere and slight cooling in the stratosphere. But in the Arctic and Antarctic the troposphere cools and the stratosphere warms (the vertical black line at 0° is the boundary between cooling on the left and warming on the right). Since CO2 levels rose rapidly during this time while halo-GHGs fell, Lu argues this validates his model, not the IPCC’s:
“Obviously and strongly this observation contradicts the prediction of upper-stratospheric cooling by CO2 climate models, provided with well-measured increasing annual growth rates of atmospheric CO2 in the past two decades.”
Granted it’s only 20 years of data, but because it coincides with a large increase in CO2 levels the contrast in outcomes is very interesting. And as we will see in future weeks, there is more to bolster his theory and challenge climate orthodoxy at a fundamental level.
The historical warming ny latitude since 1075 exactlt matches what was expectedfrom greenhuse warming
No warning of Antarctica because of the negative greeng house effect over most of the continent ue to the permanent temperature inversion.
The least warming of the tropics where the greenhouse effect wasalready the strongest before more CO2 was aed.
Fast warming of the Arctic where the greenhouse effect is weakest due to the least humidity. The tropics send heat by ocean advection toward the Arctic where it most easily escapes to space. Ocean currents act much like a conveyor belt, transporting warm water and precipitation from the equator toward the poles and cold water from the poles back to the tropics. Thus, ocean currents regulate global climate,
Lu is a real lu lu, living in la la land