What is the hot spot debate about?
Already for over a decade, all climate models have been predicting a significantly (100%) higher warming in the higher part of the troposphere than at the surface in the tropics. This is called “the tropical hot spot”.

All this time, balloon nor satellite measurements managed to find this hot spot, so it is now by sceptical scientists normally referred to as “the missing tropical hot spot”.

It is by many presented as the most convincing proof of the unreliability of the climate models.

Tropical hot spot: model outcome vs observations

Mainstrean scientists have not shown much interest in the case. They claim that the hot spot is a simple physical phenomenon, and has nothing to do with greenhouse gasses. Any warming at the surface will double at tropopause altitude. So obviously the measurements must be wrong.              (more…)

The innovation that is the core of the www.climatetheory.net  site is “The Fireworks atmospheric radiation simulation”.

It is an easy to understand Excel spreadsheet that can calculate exactly how much radiation is emitted into space and how much is absorbed by the earth surface, by using one very simple formula only.

It can do so, not only based on the radiation that is emitted from the surface, but also based on the IR energy that is absorbed from the solar irradiation, or released by condensation of water vapour, containing latent heat.

This formula is simply adding two numbers and dividing the outcome by two. There is no temperature, pressure or wavelength involved.

The great trick that enables this enormous simplification is to divide the atmosphere into layers, the height of which is defined as the average free path of greenhouse gas sensitive wave lengths. This definition incorporates all parameters that determine the free path,  such as temperature, pressure and wave length. As soon as you have established the number of layers, and the layer into which the energy is absorbed or inserted by condensation, the calculation is extremely accurate.

The problem is of course moved to the determination of the number of layers, and the place where the energy is inserted. But that problem too can be solved rather easily, be it so far a lot less accurately. I am convinced that climate scientists wil be able to do this in a very accurate way, at least accurate enough to use the simulation to achieve greater insight, and for a lot of other purposes.

The first five chapters are explaining the simulation and the energy balance that is necessary to incorporate the other influences such as clouds and albedo in the Fireworks model, based on the simulation.

The next four chapters contain the first building blocks for quantifying the influence of greenhouse gases on convection. These chapters too contain a number of innovative new ideas that contradict generally accepted assumptions, both in sceptical and alarmist circles, about convection and the greenhouse effect.

The chapters 10 and 11 show how the Fireworks calculation can provide new insights on the radiative aspects of the Hadley cell and may even explain the so called “Missing Tropical Hot Spot”.

Welcome to ClimateTheory.net, the forum about my attempt to model climate in a completely new way, aiming to – eventually – calculate the real climate sensitivity of CO2.

This site was hastily and somewhat prematurely constructed in May 2012 in an attempt to present my thoughts about the mechanisms behind our climate to researchers that I planned to meet at the Heartland ICCC7 meeting in Chicago.

One year earlier, in 2011, I became as excited as astonished when the new approach of modelling climate that I tried, appeared to give remarkably accurate and plausible results. I decided that, with such a good outcome, I should try to have real climate scientists have a look at it.

In the first five chapters, I explain my theory and the modelling that I did. In the next four chapters I am proposing thoughts that I am working on, while trying to get a grasp at the feed back mechanisms of an increase in CO2 concentration. In the last two chapters I present two cases in which I use the Fireworks calculations to provide new insight in the radiative aspects of the Hadley Cell and the so called “Missing Tropical Hot Spot”.

I realise that the core of my model (the so called Fireworks simulation) is so different from the calculations that every climate scientist has based all his or her scientific work on, that this site will only appeal to those of you who are prepared to really think outside the box.     (more…)