by Willis Eschenbach, June 8, 2019 in WUWT

Due to the recent posts by Lord Monkton and Nick Stokes, I’ve been thinking about the relationship between radiation and temperature. So I turned to the CERES dataset. Here is a scatterplot of the monthly global average surface temperature versus the monthly global average downwelling total radiation absorbed by the surface. The total radiation is the sum of the net solar radiation at the surface and the downwelling longwave radiation at the surface. I’ve removed the seasonal variations from the data.

Note that 3.7 W/m2 is the increase in downwelling longwave radiation expected from a doubling of CO2 …

When I saw that, I thought well, maybe the increase is small because there’s a lag between the absorption of the radiation and the warming. To see if that was the case, I did a cross-correlation analysis of the relationship.

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