Trenberth, Monckton and Lucia - Are They missing the Heat?

In my last post Back to Baking Bacon Bread, the pork fat must have stimulated my brain or killed a few extra brain cells, not sure which. Anyway, in my pork fat euphoria, it appears I have located a missing 22Wm-2 of heat. Because of the sensitivity of errors, it is not all that easy to find out how much heat is missing versus some just misplaced.

However, since it looks like the flux generated by the greenhouse effect is 133 and not 155, there is probably a slight error in estimating the effective emissivity of the Earth's atmosphere, the planet itself or both. That is not only likely, but probable. The question would be how much would it effect the overall estimation of the change in forcing due to a doubling of CO2? Hummm?

I am not sure how to go directly to the answer. I can start by using the 133 instead of 155 just to see what that may do.

Back to my new favorite formula, dF/dT=4F/T and the ratio Tge/(288-255)=Fge/(390-235), the 390, Fs(urface)-235, Ftoa equals 155, but that does not include the effective emissivity of the atmosphere. Effective emissivity would be 133/155=0.85, which is much lower than typically assumed. So modifying the ratio, 0.85*(Fge)/0.85(Fs-Ftoa), to allow for this emissivity value we have T/33=0.85Fge/133. Since we are solving for an unknown temperature change due to 2xCO2 we have, dTge=dFge*Tge/4Fge=0.85*(3.7*33)/(4*133)=0.195, so for a 3.7Wm-2 change in forcing, 0.72 degree K change. That is a considerably smaller amount than the 1 estimated, a lot smaller that the 1.2 often estimated and one hellava lot less than the 1.5 estimate by some. So I think it is worth looking into a bit.

The nuts of the matter is that warming is likely over estimated by up to 15%, 85% of 3C is 2.55 Degrees, which purely by chance I am sure, agrees nicely with most of the recent estimates of sensitivity and is just about how much the models are over estimating the impact of global warming.

Could it be the MISSING HEAT?