Toward A New Climate Paradigm
13 hours ago
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
What got me into investigating climate science a quarter-century ago? The astounding stability of the Earth’s global surface mean temperature (GMST). For example, since the year 1900, a century and a quarter, the Earth’s temperature has gone up by 0.46 ± 0.07 percent.
I’ll say it again. In a century and a quarter the Earth has warmed by less than half a percent
The Earth’s climate system is a curious thing. It is a giant solar-driven heat engine. A heat engine is a device that turns heat into mechanical motion. In the case of the climate, the mechanical motion is the endless, ceaseless motion of the ocean and the atmosphere. Like all heat engines, the climate heat engine is heated at the hot end, and then the heat is transferred to the cold end and leaves the engine.
So I started out to discover why the temperature is so stable. Yes, I know that from our tiny human perspective it seems unstable, but for a heat engine, the temperature varying by less than half a percent over a century and a quarter is very stable. And here’s what I found out.
Like all flow systems far from equilibrium, the climate is ruled by the Constructal Law, one of the most under-appreciated discoveries of modern thermodynamics. The Constructal Law governs the evolution of flow systems.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/06/30/towards-a-new-climate-paradigm/
