This month’s open thread on climate topics. Please be constructive and keep nonsense to a minimum.
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4 Responses to "Unforced Variations: Sep 2026"
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On Nigel using AI to evaluate Nabil Swedan’s “thermodynamic” alternative to the modern climate science
Nigel, thanks for (unintentionally?) proving how badly AI can drop the ball. here is the context:
– Tomas: “ Swedan is silent about solar radiation as well as about infrared radiation from Earth to space, as if none of them would have existed. Swedan treats Earth as an isolated thermodynamic system, what might be the most fundamental flaw of his article.”
– AI: “ Swedan argues that under pre-industrial conditions, the Earth reached a stable thermal equilibrium. In this steady state, incoming solar radiation perfectly matched outgoing space radiation.”
This proves nothing nor even addresses Tomas’ point: in Swedan’s “thermodynamic approach” there is no incoming solar radiation NOR “outgoing space radiation: neither explicitly- as he dismissed “radiative approach as “ incorrect physics” and “violating the laws of thermodynamic” – nor implicitly – as he presumes that the only source of AGW is human oxidation of C to CO2, i.e. implies NO effect of extra CO2 on the outgoing radiation, and then calculates AGW as the amount of heat accumulated in the last 250 years, i.e. AS IF NONE OF IT was lost to space by outgoing radiation.
That’s what Tomas means by saying: “Swedan treats Earth as an isolated thermodynamic system [as if neither] solar radiation nor infrared radiation existed”. And that’s what your AI failed to notice and address.
Nor did it pick on the fact that Swedan in his calculations treats Watts is if they were the units of ENERGY
and self-confidently calls them as such:
Nabil Swedan: “ No, Sir, and this is your confusion. Chapter 8 of IPCC AR6 is clear, radiative forcing (W/m2) is not a power term, it is an energy term
To sum up, your AI failed to see that the Nabils’ reasonable assumption (“that under pre-industrial conditions, the Earth reached a stable thermal equilibrium”) was made on his belief that no radiation leaves the Earth, and therefore to be in ” a stable thermal equilibrium”) – no solar radiation is absorbed by the Earth.
Therefore, it provides his argument with more credibility (“he used a reasonable assumption!”) than it deserves.
Tomas Kalisz 31 Aug 2026 at 4:03 PM : Although I do not know what JCM exactly meant by the “atmospheric flywheel effect”
who cares what it means. Fancy moniker proves nothing.
TK “ I guess that by “unnatural surface moisture limitation”, he meant anthropogenic interferences with land hydrological regime that decrease water availability for evaporation.
That’s obvious. How about you answer the points I was making to that “unnatural surface moisture limitation”?
Maybe climate scientist not taking you up on your repeated demands that they explain things to you and/or do the research to substantiate your ideas – have a good reason – the doubts on your “research proposal” may be linked to the fact that you can’t answer the three questions I keep asking you and JCM, repeated in the post to which you are ostensibly replying:
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JCM: “ I encourage our academic counterparts to explore [sic!] what I would label “the atmospheric flywheel effect” as a practical method to quantify unnatural surface moisture limitation”
Piotr: Maybe the reason why nobody so far has taken you and Tomas up on your continuing demands that “the academic counterparts” take their time and run their models to test your ideas- is NOT that all scientists are too dense to come with the ideas you and Tomas came up, but that some of them considered it in the past, but decided against doing it as ineffective use of their research time and resources.
In short, an academic counterpart would ask themselves:
1. Would it produce an actionable proposal for AGW mitigation? The answer is: NO, since from the paper you brought up yourself (Lague et al. ) we already know that we CAN’T change that moisture ENOUGH to mitigate AGW in any meaningful way. See also the fate of the Sahara irrigation proposal by your fellow waterboy, Tomas. Do you have a BETTER plan?
2. Would it improve our climate models? Answer again: NO. The availability of water for evaporation is already either calculated or more likely parametrized for each surface grid element in the general circulation models (GSMs) – so in these models we already account for this effect the best way we can.
3. Is there any new valuable theoretical insight to be gained? Again – I don’t see one – What new insight would we get – if from the results of a GCM that already calculates/parametrizes surface moisture – we found that out the total, say, 3C of warming in a given grid element, 1C. was due to natural surface moisture limitation, and 0.1C due to unnatural surface moisture limitation?
—– end of quote ——
And since unlike other RC deniers, you went from blowing the smoke to … actually looking for money:
Tomas: “ I have therefore launched an initiative to ensure that the next round of the European Horizon grant programme includes funds specifically earmarked for this research. I would like to achieve this by gathering advocacy for this idea from as many scientists working in climatology, hydrology and related fields as possible.
– you owe us the honest, documented, answer to these 3 questions.
I hope any scientist considering supporting your proposal to the European Horizon, an organization whose principal goal is to fight climate change – will ask you these 3 questions. And since Tomas Kalisz “proposal” is a part of “anything but CO2” denialism, I hope they would consider how this research, if funded, would be used:
Russia, Saudi Arabia and the rest of the “drill baby drill” interests would love to spread the message that a significant part of global warming were attributed NOT to CO2, but to the limitation in the evaporation from land, about which we can’t do enough to make any difference , thus getting them off the hook for CO2 emissions. While the fact that the only way to stop this feedback is to stop increasing CO2 conc. – will be missed by the general public and glossed over by the “drill, baby, drill” politicians,
“Tomas, will you be submitting also negative voices about your proposal?” he asked rhetorically…
In re to Tomas https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2026/08/unforced-variations-aug-2026/#comment-850803
congratulations on your initiative – it’s refreshing to see evidence of positive efforts and contributions to the world on these pages.
Circle-in Sarosh on as he notes their analytical framework provides potential to independently infer moisture limitation from readily available observables, which I suppose offers potential to identify parameterization bias and correction for complex numerical schemes that otherwise wouldn’t be possible. I can imagine more direct applications without the nuisance of passing it through such schemes too.
From the work previously cited:
“””Our approach shows that DTR contains imprints of surface evaporative conditions as the water availability at the surface directly affects the energy input into the lower atmosphere. This implies that information on surface water limitation is included in observations of the diurnal temperature range. It may be possible to exploit this relation to infer water limitation and evaporation rates directly from widely observable temperature observations without accounting for additional parameterization to represent surface water limitation. This interpretation is consistent with recent approaches that only use near-surface meteorological observations to estimate evaporation rates (McColl et al., 2019; McColl & Rigden, 2020).”””
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2024GL113595
I’ll be mostly offline over the coming month, supporting our partners with soil remediation work on location abroad.
keep up your enthusiasm and positive efforts.
cheers
With the interest in the El Nino brewing, don’t neglect the AMO in the Atlantic. In my research, I apply tidal forcing as a driver for modeling climate indices, and have long noticed that a balanced ~120-year cycle emerges via interactions with the annual cycle. This produces large excursions both + and -, which is interesting because it was legendary oceanographer Walter Munk who proposed that large forcing of subsurface fluid volume produces frictional loss independent of the sign of a fluid’s velocity. The implication is that the ~120-year tidal cycle is rectified to produce a ~60-year cycle, which hints at the AMO 50-70 year cycle. Moreover, the model of the tidal cycle produces a ragged stepped staircase over that long period, of which the individual steps also map to the fast cycles of AMO (easily seen in NAO as well).
I have an extended optimizing simulator for this project, but I factored out the essential features for a one-pass model fit to the AMO data here: https://gist.github.com/pukpr/05687a46cf1a5b76b2ba6ae589343172
Munk & Wunsch (2002) – “Millennial Climate Variability: Is There a Tidal Connection?”
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/clim/15/4/1520-0442_2002_015_0370_mcvita_2.0.co_2.pdf