Keeping It In Balance
19 hours ago Willis Eschenbach 83 Comments

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

A short post. I came into my obsession with the climate by a side door. Back around the turn of the century, I read that the global average surface temperature was in danger of going through the roof because of increasing CO2.

But when I got to thinking about it, that seemed unlikely. What made it seem unlikely were the estimates at the time, which were that the global average surface temperature over the entire 20th century had increased by 0.6°C, which is the same as 0.6 kelvins (K).

Now, I’ve done a reasonable amount of work with heat engines. So I knew that if you want to analyze a heat engine, you need to do your calculations in the Kelvin temperature scale. You can’t use either Celsius or Fahrenheit. All of the thermal equations require that you use Kelvin (abbreviated “K”).

So I got to thinking … the earth is at an average temperature of something like 288K.

… so a change of 0.6K over a century is a 0.2% change in temperature.

The earth’s global average temperature has only undergone two tenths of one percent change in a hundred years. I had to scratch my head about that one.

So I first ventured into the climate science arena, not following mainstream scientists looking to find out why the temperature was changing so much, but instead looking to find out why it was changing so little.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/05/01/keeping-it-in-balance/