My Climatology Pages

Climatology is the study of long-term environmental conditions. It's a little different from meteorology, which deals with daily or weekly weather. Weather becomes chaotic fairly quickly (say, after five days or so), and can't be predicted long-term. Climate, being a sort of average weather with a huge number of values to average out, is much more predictable.

Here's an example to distinguish the two: I don't know what the temperature will be tomorrow in Cairo, Egypt (weather). But it's a fairly safe bet that it will be higher than in Stockholm, Sweden (climate).

Links to my various pages on climatology follow.

Absorption Coefficients from the Professional Literature
Both band and specific-wavelength figures.

Absorption Coefficients 2. Conversion Techniques
A tour through the math.

Uniform Absorption Coefficient Catalog
Comprehensive absorption coefficient data, arranged by absorber, with all units uniform.

Annual Temperature Time Series 1850-2014
All five major time series: Hadley CRUTEM4, NASA GISS, NCDC, RSS, and UAH.

Annual CO₂ Ambient Volume Fraction Time Series 1832-2014
Law Dome ice core and Mauna Loa flask sampling data.

Climate Sensitivity
How much would the surface temperature change if carbon dioxide were doubled?

Gas Data
Because I just got sick and tired of having to page through Google for half an hour to get one figure...

Lean's TSI Data
How much energy does the Sun deliver to the Earth?

Svalgaard's TSI Data
Another reconstruction of historical sunlight.

What is "Effective Temperature?"
How do you calculate a planet's "effective temperature" and what does it mean?

What is "Optical Thickness?"
A term from radiation physics and atmosphere science defined.

What is "Partial Pressure?"
A term from physical chemistry defined, with a note about my personal confusion over the subject.

China and India
Why should the US move on climate change while other big polluters do nothing?

Climate Science Time Line
Has climatology been around long enough to be a real science?

CLIMATEGATE!!!
Could it be the biggest scientific fraud of all time???

CO₂ Evidence.
The evidence that carbon dioxide warms the Earth, despite the persistent denier lie that "There's absolutely no evidence CO₂ has ever warmed the Earth!"

CO₂ and Temperature Update as of 2019
The correlation between carbon dioxide and temperature with twelve more years of data

CO₂ and Temperature: What is the Correlation?
Is the correlation between carbon dioxide and temperature really rather weak and coincidental?

The Greenhouse Effect in Terms of Emission Height.
How does the concept of "average emission height" explain the greenhouse effect?

Geometry Deniers
Are some global warming deniers unable to divide by 4?

Global Warming Brief Lecture
What's it all about?

The Great Stasis
Does the "cooling" from 1940 to 1975 prove that carbon dioxide can't be causing global warming?

Global Warming in Simple English
Want an explanation without all the math and science jargon? Here it is.

Global Warming--As Simple as it Gets
Short and sweet. A REALLY simple summary which makes all the important points.

Greenhouse 101
How does the greenhouse effect actually work?

Did Humans Cause Global Warming?
Sure, maybe there's a greenhouse effect and CO₂ contributes, but is it really our fault?

Is the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming illogical?
Is AGW based on circular reasoning or other logical fallacies?

Intimidation: How Climate Scientists Have Been Attacked... So Far
Nasty letters and emails; firing; and threats of prosecution, rape, and violent death.

Does the Lapse Rate, not Greenhouse Gases, Set the Surface Temperature?
Another science-illiterate argument from global warming deniers.

Are the Models Reliable?
Can we trust Global Climate Models to tell us anything worthwhile?

1934: Were the 1930s the Warmest Decade?
Were the 1930s warmer? If so, how can there be global warming?

No Warming for 15 Years!
Is this frequent denier claim true? Or a statistically illiterate misinterpretation?

Can Pressure Alone Heat Planets?
Are planet surfaces hot due to air pressure, and not the greenhouse effect?

How to Calculate Planetary Temperatures
A little comparative planetology to illustrate what governs the temperature of a planet.
This one has been replaced with an updated version as of 2021.

Planetary Temperature Calculator
An on-line program to calculate planet temperatures using the algorithms on the page above. This is the 2021 version of this semigray temperature model.

RCM Tutorial
A tutorial on how to write Radiative-Convective Models of planetary atmospheres. Follow along and construct an actual RCM for Earth's climate system.

Does Renewable Energy Harm the Environment?
A long list of how wind turbine blades, solar panels, and electric vehicle batteries are being recycled.

Saturation
If the infrared radiation from the ground is almost completely absorbed by the lowest layers of air, how can adding more carbon dioxide possibly matter?

Second Law: Does the Greenhouse Effect Violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics?
Have the deniers found a fatal weakness in climate science?

Is Solar Power Enough?
Can we power the planet on Solar power alone, or is that just a dumb eco-freak pipe dream?

Is It the Sun?
Is it the sun that's causing global warming, and not carbon dioxide after all?

If Temperature Leads CO₂, Can CO₂ Affect Temperature?
According to ice core data, although temperature and carbon dioxide are correlated, temperature leads CO₂ by an average of 800 years. So how can CO₂ be the cause of global warming?

My View of the Matter
Want to know what I really think about global warming?

Why 30 Years?
Why do climate scientists insist you need 30 years or more of data to find a climate trend?

What Is To Be Done?
If we're going to fix global warming, how do we do it? What do we need to do?

Climate Book
Climatologist Raymond Pierrehumbert's work-in-progress climatology textbook.

My own climate book!
I just published a book about the greenhouse effect! It's on amazon, Kobo, many other places!

Open Mind
A statistics expert examines climate change issues.

RealClimate
A climatology blog by actual climate scientists.

Explaining climatology is great fun, but it's even more fun to point out why some other poor slob is wrong about it. Especially when the slobs in question are trying to keep humanity from taking badly needed steps to avert the worst effects of the coming crisis. I'll add to this list whenever I run across another egregious example of denier error or dishonesty.

Why Tim Ball is Wrong
"Global warming stopped in 1998!"

Why Alexander Cockburn is Wrong
"The new carbon dioxide is coming from the ocean, not fossil fuels!"

Why John Dodds is Wrong
"Greenhouse gases can't heat the Earth!"

Why Peter Eirich is Wrong
"Explanations for the greenhouse effect all disagree!"

Why Robert Essenhigh is Wrong
"All Earth's IR light gets absorbed by CO₂ already, so more can't matter!"

Why Robert Ian Holmes is Wrong
"TSI alone accounts for planet temperatures!"

Robert Holmes thinks I'm a pedophile
"made me want to vomit" (actual quote)

Why J, J and J are Wrong
"Back-radiation from the atmosphere violates the second law of thermodynamics!"

Why Rush Limbaugh is Wrong
"Volcanoes put out more CO₂ than all human technology!"

Why Ferenc M. Miskolczi is Wrong
"Earth's gray IR optical thickness is fixed at 1.87!"

Why Viscount Monckton is Wrong
"Temperature leads CO₂, not the other way around!"

Why Daniel Pangburn is Wrong
"Water vapor is increasing much faster than CO₂, so CO₂ isn't driving warming!"

Why Tilo Reber is Wrong
"El Niño and La Niña don't affect short-term temperature trends!"

Why SAL is Wrong
"The Earth's not warming, new CO₂ is from the ocean, it's the sun, Stupid! Svensmark rules, Einstein was a plagiarist, etc., etc."

Why Roy Spencer is Wrong
"The fraction of carbon dioxide in the air is too small to matter!"

Why Vangel Vesovski is Wrong
"The satellites show temperature has been falling since 1998!"