Erich Schaffer: “Water Vapor Feedback, Part One” | Tom Nelson Pod #395

About this episode

Erich Schaffer discusses major blunders in climate science regarding water vapor feedback and the greenhouse effect.

Erich Schaffer argues climate science contains major blunders, chiefly that water vapor cools the planet and provides negative feedback. He explains the greenhouse effect as determined by emission altitude and the adiabatic lapse rate, criticizing older “back radiation” explanations. He claims climate budgets and attribution studies overstate surface emission by assuming Earth’s surface is a blackbody, ignoring water’s non-Lambertian behavior and ~0.91 hemispheric emissivity, which he says inflates the greenhouse effect and misattributes missing radiation to water vapor. He highlights latent heat cooling and contends empirical “proxy” methods used to infer strong positive water-vapor feedback are invalid due to lapse-rate behavior. He concludes climate sensitivity would drop to ~1 K or less. 00:00 Meet Erich Schaffer 01:06 Why Climate Basics Matter 04:52 Greenhouse Effect Explained 07:30 Lapse Rate Physics 10:52 IPCC Definition Shift 12:38 Debunking Back Radiation 16:04 Cloud Window Mistake 19:25 Latent Heat Cooling 20:40 Who Causes Warming 31:04 Reading the Spectrum 33:46 What CO2 Forcing Means 37:03 Deriving 3.7 Wm2 41:41 Water Vapor Feedback Setup 45:35 Models vs Observations…

People in this episode

Host: Thomas Nelson

Guest: Erich Schaffer

Topics covered

• climate science
• water vapor feedback
• greenhouse effect
• lapse rate
• climate sensitivity

Keywords

• climate science
• water vapor
• greenhouse effect
• lapse rate
• climate sensitivity
• back radiation
• latent heat

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: IPCC

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