by K. Richard, Dec 24, 2020 in NoTricksZone

The “unsatisfactorily large” magnitude of the discrepancies between models in estimating the various radiative contributions to Earth’s energy imbalance serves to undermine confidence that CO2’s small impact could even be detected amid all the uncertainty.

Scientists have engaged in offering their educated guesses, or estimates, of cloud radiative effects for decades.

In the latest models, CMIP6, the top of atmosphere (TOA) net cloud radiative effects (CRE) when considering clouds’ longwave and shortwave combined impact is somewhere between -17 W/m² and -31 W/m² (Wild, 2020). That’s a 14 W/m²spread in CRE modeling.

The discrepancy range between modeled estimates for downward longwave clear-sky radiation is 22.5 W/m². This is the component where CO2’s underwhelming 0.2 W/m² per decade impact (Feldman et al., 2015) is manifested. Modeling discrepancies are thus more than 100 times larger than CO2’s forcing contribution over a 10-year period.

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