Taking Greenhouse Warming Seriously

In science, there is an art to simplifying complex problems so that they can be meaningfully analyzed. If one oversimplifies, the analysis is meaningless. If one doesn’t simplify, one often cannot proceed with the analysis. When it comes to global warming due to the greenhouse effect, it is clear that many approaches are highly oversimplified.

This article presents a physically correct view of the greenhouse effect and shows how this view makes it possible to use modeling results and observations to estimate a bound on the greenhouse contribution to recent surface warming of about 1/3. This is less than the claim in the IPCC Summary for Policymakers of Working Group 1, which claimed it was likely that “most” of the recent warming was due to man. The estimate presented in this article is more constrained and thereby suggests a lower climate sensitivity than is commonly found in current models.

The main point of this paper is simply to illustrate why serious and persistent doubts remain concerning the danger of anthropogenic global warming despite the frequent claims that ‘the science is settled.’