Dan Hughes: “The official NOAA/Climate position seems to be that during El Nino the normally Easterly trade winds weaken but remain Easterly and during especially strong El Nino, the trade winds might sometimes reverse”.

Thank you for stating … the obvious? Both Paul .and I know it. How is this supposed to save YOUR patronizing comments to others? If the memory does not serve – let me help:

– Paul Pukite, in the discussion of ENSO: “wind goes from high pressure to low pressure” [so a change in pressure during ENSO would change the winds)

– D. Hughes joins in with: “That is not always the case on a rotating planet.”

– Piotr: “Except we are discussing El Nino – which depends on what happens near the equator, where the Coriolis deflection drops to zero. So Paul Pukite’s “ from high pressure to low pressure ” is a good approximation of ENSO equatorial winds.”

– D. Hughes lectures: “The predictable response has been given by Piotr. [Piotr’s] info is of little practical use, because we are seldom, if ever, interested in the motions of a line which contain no mass.”

– P.: That’s your strawman, Mr. Hughes. since nobody here, other than you, was talking about “the motions of a line which contain no mass.”

D. Hughes: “ both North and South of the equator a Coriolis force is present ”

– P. :” Thank you, Captain Obvious, but you missed the point – it’s not about “presence” but about strength/significance . In the 0-2 deg. zone – the Coriolis deflection is between 0 and 3.5% of the maximum value, So while Coriolis is very important to the winds in higher latitudes – in the area of discussion here – near the equator – its effect is at its weakest. Hence Paul Pukite’s “ from high pressure to low pressure” that you “corrected” – is a good approximation of ENSO equatorial winds.”

So, how is your stating: “The official NOAA/Climate position” supposed to justify your patronizing tone above?

Thank you both for the insightful response.

I repeat that it’s necessary to disentangle diagnostic variables, such as an environmental lapse rate, and the balancing heat fluxes that satisfy steady-state energy budgets.

A lapse rate does not uniquely determine heat flux. Likewise, an adiabatic rate which is constrained by gravity and heat capacity does not tell you how much energy is flowing through the column.

Two atmospheres can have similar lapse rates while transporting vastly different amounts of energy. Obviously a system with same gravity and heat capacity but absorbing 5x more solar must generate vastly more steady state heat flux compared to Earth.

The underlying message I was hoping to convey is that the atmosphere cannot transport heat so efficiently that it destroys the temperature differences required to transport heat in the first place.

The turbulent heat flux and the greenhouse effect, expressed as a surface-to-radiating-level temperature difference, are coupled. Increasing turbulent transport reduces the temperature difference that drives it, while radiative heating and cooling continually regenerate that temperature difference. The steady state emerges from this competition.

In the detailed example provided, the relevant thermodynamic boundaries provided were the Ts and the atmospheric effective radiating temperature Ta. As such, the heating of atmosphere from below is balanced by radiative cooling out the top in grey atmosphere. The steady state is therefore established by balancing the upward transport of energy through the atmospheric column against radiative loss to space.

In your example as you note, the derivation of the adiabatic lapse rate has no dependence on external heating and cooling rates, and that is precisely why it says nothing about the balancing heat fluxes that satisfy energy budgets.

The analytical relations I presented instead describe how the heat flux itself is constrained. Simply, atmosphere cannot consume the thermodynamic gradients faster than radiative processes regenerate them. Additional steady-state optical depth therefore cannot simply be cancelled by increasing turbulent heat flux, because doing so would undermine its own driving force.

cheers

@Rodger

“The 80Wm^-2 strength of the Lapse Rate feedback is your conjecture” – Well, about as much as my conjecture that 1+1=2.

Let us go through this step by step, then you can tell me which logical step you object

1. The GHE is the difference between surface- (Ts) and emission temperature (Tz), like 288 vs. 255K
2. The GHE is proportionate to the lapse rate. A lase rate of 0 means Tz = Ts and GHE = 0.
3. WV does reduce the lapse rate from a dry unstable adiabat (>9.8K/km) towards 6.5K/km.
4. Holding other things constant, this smaller lapse rate reduces the GHE and provides a cooler surface
5. This reduction of the lapse rate is also known as “latent heat”
6. This “lapse rate effect” is physically the same as the well known lapse rate feedback, which is simply an increase of said lapse rate effect, or latent heat respectively

The rhetorical pattern here is similar to the way Nikolov applies the ideal gas law to “derive” planetary temperatures. In Nikolov’s case, a toy closure on =/() is tuned via the density term to compensate for pressure and temperature, creating the illusion of a universal relation that bypasses radiative transfer and vertical structure. In Willis’s paper, a two‑zone or 2-box “Constructal” closure is tuned on CERES‑derived albedo and greenhouse factors, plus a conductance and ocean absorption, to reproduce bulk heat flow, hot-zone T, cold-zone T, and areas creating the illusion that a new physical law has been discovered. In both cases, the construction is a tautological re‑expression of bookkeeping under heavy aggregation, not a replacement for the actual mechanisms that determines the temperature.

I am pretty certain that Willis used an LLM with this paper. What’s scary is that an LLM can easily construct an apparently deep model by layering known equivalences but in the end is nothing more than a tautology, like saying x=x. Lots of time wasted as Willis keeps conflating structural equivalencies with what he considers novel findings.

Anyone can review on PubPeer so have at it if we want to see Willis’s paper retracted like Nikolov’s was.

[Response: I agree that there is nothing much to it. But his climate sensitivity calculation forces all feedbacks to be zero (since there is no change in atmospheric absoption or albedo allowed), and thus gives (as all such calculations do) the no-feedback value. We went over this issue ages ago: https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/04/learning-from-a-simple-model/ – gavin]

…“Less heat has to flow downward to balance the solar heating of the air, so it’s not clear exactly how things work out,”
? – um, consider the SARF – but I’m done for today…

https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2026/07/unforced-variations-july-2026/#comment-849896

**(a reminder that the cumulative forcing from many changes can/will different if the climate is allowed to equilibrate before each successive next forcing, and therefore the cumulative feedback can/must also differ.)

And, (even without hysteresis) the partition between forcing and feedback can be shifted between a change and the reverse change. Consider the complete removal of Earth’s GHE (but somehow maintaining solar heating exactly as it; this is a model experiment, after all). The TOA forcing would be a large increase in OLR, tending to cool the climate system overall. Now let’s add back the GHE. Well, to start, let’s add a little back. In the equilibration to 0 GHE, the troposphere would largely disappear – It’s hard to see how it could be maintained in any significant way with significant depth without an ability to emit LW radiation to balance an upward convective heat flux…
— —

So given that there is solar heating within the air, in a 1-dimensional globally representative model (I’m going to stick with that here to keep things simple), no GHE means all OLR must come from the surface, and so the surface equilibrium T must be at the effective radiating T (assuming perfect blackbody – yes, that is an approximation and it does have some error), but heat must now flow downward to the surface, so the whole atmosphere would be a stratosphere/thermosphere, and possibly very very hot (maybe it would even start to contribute to OLR via SW emissions – but let’s set that scenario aside).

Introducing a GHE in this scenario, there would initially be an increase in OLR. The TOA IRF forcing would be cooling! But that doesn’t necessarily mean the sfc wouldn’t warm. There would be a downward LW flux to the sfc now; the net upward flux within some lower layer would decrease. Less heat has to flow downward to balance the solar heating of the air, so it’s not clear exactly how things work out, but the solar heating at the surface would start to get trapped a bit.

Add enough GHE, and pure radiative equilibrium would become unstable to convection, and so a troposphere would develop and grow. The solar heating within the troposphere would then become part of the convectively-coupled layer…

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202607/1366545.shtml

That’s one small step for China, one giant leap for mass extinction.

1.

[also the sharpness of the lapse rate change at the tropopause will tend to delay the approach to saturation of net radiant warming by CO2 at/near that location (saturated limit value of 0; I’m sure it’s not paper thin – see https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2026/04/a-reflection-on-reflection/#comment-847511 last ~half);

Okay, the idea of a nonzero saturated limit for net (spectral) (LW) radiant cooling at a perfectly sharp bend in ∂B/∂τ_{vc,norm} [discontinuity in the lapse rate in τ-proportional space] is more of a mathematical curiosity I used to illustrate aspects of radiant heat flow net (the layer with nonzero cooling will get thinner and thinner so it would eventually disappear from any graph with finite resolution), but its practical application is that the final approach to saturation at 0 should tend to be delayed in the neighborhood of sharper features in the temperature profile (in terms of B(T)) (in τ-proportional space)

2a.
“But with line broadening, the “vast”* majority of the bandwidth may be is? far enough from line centers such that σ_a is ~proportional to p” , approximately…

*Actually, that’s a point made by Romps, Seeley, and Edman – see sec. 5“c. Linearity of κ in pressure” https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/clim/35/13/JCLI-D-21-0275.1.xml :

To demonstrate the approximate linearity in pressure, Fig. 10 plots κ calculated from the line-by-line model as a function of pressure level for 4000 equally spaced wavenumbers in each of three different atmospheres (IsoAtmo, IsoStrat, and StdAtmo). To avoid the figures becoming saturated with color, the individual curves are plotted using a translucent color. We see that, regardless of the thermal structure of the atmosphere, the vast majority of the wavenumbers have κ values that increase quasi-linearly as we move to higher pressure in the atmosphere. The lower-right panel quantifies this by plotting three histograms (one for each atmosphere) of the slopes of the best-fit lines to each of the 4000 curves. Less than 2% (1%, 3%) of the slopes in IsoAtmo (IsoStrat, StdAtmo) case are negative. We see that the slopes are clumped around unity, demonstrating the quasi-linear dependence of κ on pressure.

(The clump does have some width to it, though, and one could imagine lines converging on κ proportional to p at some p and then… um…?)

2b.
Fraction of atmospheric τ_{CO2} above ~30 km if:
τ_{CO2} proportional to p: ~ 1 %
τ_{CO2} proportional to p²: ~ 0.01 %
τ_{CO2} proportional to p above ~ 30 km and (30 km – z) below that: ~~~ 19 % ? or a bit less , … (≈7/37; but 7 km scale height too large?)

3.

(and then there’s that some part of the increase in OLR is coming through the stratosphere’s windows, thus not heating it back up so much… ; but that wasn’t my main point here (otherwise I’d compare to the LW-grey gas behavior)…)

That may be the more important thing (some increase in OLR coming from lower down through the stratosphere’s windows avoids undoing the cooling of stratospheric adjustment (going from IRF to SARF)), as far as the spectral effect is concerned. A LW-grey gas GHE with LW-grey GHG-forced warming, even without solar heating at/near TOA, will have a IRF→SARF upper atmospheric cooling, but it would be completely cancelled out in the full climatic equilibration (final TOA T same as initial, barring ASR (SW, ie. solar heating, ie. albedo…) feedbacks (1-dimensional column globally-representative model, using only a bidirectional (I think they call it “two-stream” in the literature) calculation of radiance to be representative of flux densities – which does miss some possible interesting phenomena caused by the directionality of radiance (eg. https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2025/12/unforced-variations-dec-2025/#comment-842798 (PPIA) :

Interesting case: if you have an inversion layer above a(n isothermal) cloud layer [or any PPIA absorbing layer that doesn’t refract the LOS’s too much, and assuming any LW scattering that might happen? doesn’t mess this up], for some levels of opacity, you can get net radiant heating in the uppermost part of the cloud and net net radiant cooling deeper in the layer, both due to the radiances from above. If the overlying atmosphere is not too opaque, but opaque enough, L↓ from near vertical can be dimmer (colder) than B of the cloud, while L↓ from closer to horizontal can be brighter (hotter) than the cloud’s B. The L closer to vertical penetrates deeper into the cloud; L farther from vertical is absorbed over a shallower layer. Compare to https://scienceopinionsfunandotherthings.wordpress.com/2024/12/10/directionally-averaged-radiance-and-the-semi-gray-skin-temperature-wip-awaiting-final-proofread-double-check-diagrams-pending/ (see last part: *†* …”Meanwhile, the anomalously brighter radiance near vertical penetrates deeper below TOA than the anomalously darker radiance near horizontal “…) [regarding T at/near TOA]

A LW-grey gas GHE with LW-grey GHG-forced warming, with upper atmospheric solar heating: see Thomas Gordon Hewitt @ https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2026/06/unforced-variations-june-2026/#comment-849443