Where is a published thermodynamic model for climate change with boundary conditions and equations?

Question

Hearing about climate change predictions is unavoidable, but after about 3 hours of looking on the internet, I haven't been able to find a published model. Presumably, this would be a 1st law, controlled volume model, which addresses emmissivity, absorptivity, their relationship to greenhouse gases, and the methodology of measuring current mean earth temperature as well as future temperature change. Any published model would be nice though. For all the people talking about these models, I'd think someone would have published it somewhere obvious.

Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

Here's measurement showing the change:

Earth's Energy Out of Balance: The Smoking Gun for Global Warming

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/imbalance_...

For the underlying process, at the simplest level there are multiple planetary examples of greenhouse gas warming that don't require detailed earth climate models: Earth vs. Venus and Mars.

"It is interesting to note that in the absence of a greenhouse effect, the earth’s mean temperature would have been 255°K, instead of the observed value of 288°K. Greenhouse warming is thus about 33°K.  This is much more pronounced around the planet Venus, whose atmosphere contains over 90% carbon dioxide (CO2), a prominent greenhouse gas. Without a greenhouse effect the mean surface temperature of Venus would have been 227°K, but greenhouse warming raises it to 750°K. This represents warming by 523°K!"

http://www.ias.ac.in/resonance/Mar1996/p...

"If we include the effect of Terrestrial albedo which is about 30% (meaning the actual amount of solar energy absorbed by our planet is 70% of top of atmosphere irradiation), the above equation gives an average Earth surface temperature of 255 K only. The "missing" 33 K between such calculated value and the actual measured one (288 K) is deemed to be the result of greenhouse gases, namely water vapor, carbon dioxide and methane."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan-Bolt...

Mars is thought to be undergoing a minor heating (funny that the skeptics accept that one without question, so they can claim it disproves earth's anthropogenic heating), but that's thought to be due to dust storms (albedo change).

Answer 2

There is some information on the technical details of climate models on Wikipedia.  

Measuring the temperature of the earth is a whole different project.  People who research climate models aren't going to design a system of weather satelites.

Answer 3

I think that this is what you are looking for, but I haven't had a lot of time to take an in depth look:

http://www-pcmdi.llnl.gov/ipcc/about_ipc...

Answer 4

I too, have found no such model.

I have noticed that people who believe in Global Warming seldom help people with science questions in other sections of Yahoo Answers.  Seems contradictory to me, if they really know science and care about other people.

Answer 5

There is no such model.

Answer 6

Here's a couple possibly suitable for the general public:

http://www.astr.ucl.ac.be/users/matthews...

http://www.ccsm.ucar.edu/models/

They won't be easy to get up and running.

The best professional models (listed under Source) are more complicated of course.  They generally run on expensive "supercomputers".  One reason the study of climatology has accelerated is the increasing availability of adequate computers to researchers.  I doubt very much that any non-scientist has them running on their home PC.  It's probably essentially impossible, based on a look at the complexity of the two simpler versions above, especially the second.  Note that the professional models are run by research groups with teams of computer scientists and climatologists.  This really is "rocket science".

If you want information on those, you need a university library, not the Internet.  And certainly not Yahoo answers.

This might be a good place to start.  It's about the well regarded HadCM3 model.:

Gordon, C.; Cooper, C., Senior, C.A., Banks, H., Gregory, J.M., Johns, T.C., Mitchell, J.F.B., and Wood, R.A. (2000). "The simulation of SST, sea ice extents and ocean heat transports in a version of the Hadley Centre coupled model without flux adjustments". Climate Dynamics 16: 147-168

EDIT - Ron C's suggestion of climateprediction.net is a really excellent one.  As a practical matter, it's far more useful than mine.  The model involved is not the most sophisticated, but it's decent.  And the concept of showing people how modeling works is superb.  This might be exactly what you're looking for.  Well worthy of a best answer even though......

the McIntyre/Curry/Spencer stuff - not so much :-).  Just a few "skeptics".

Answer 7

Quite a few models have beenpublished of various aspects in the scientific literature. Just go to any university database and look them up.

Answer 8

You are asking us bone heads in this post for actual scientific proof.  Sorry, you won't find that on either side of the fence here. Just a bunch of useless opinions and rants.

Answer 9

You've already received a few good replies, but if you're interested in some early work in the field you may want to check out Svante Arrhenius publication from 1896.  As far as I know, he was the first person to attempt to calculate the greenhouse warming affect of human emitted CO2.  From the link below you can see his actual published paper in PDF format.

http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Ima...

Answer 10

You might be interested to know you can download a climate model from http://climateprediction.net and it will run on your computer in the background.  You would be contributing to a large distributed computing project.  

Judith Curry has a textbook on thermodynamics and has posted a chapter from it on thermodynamics feedbacks (and a separate file for figs).

Text: http://curry.eas.gatech.edu/climate/pdf/...

Figs: http://curry.eas.gatech.edu/climate/pdf/...

Dr. Curry also recommends a paper on cloud feedback by Graeme Stephens.

http://irina.eas.gatech.edu/EAS_spring20...

Regarding thermodynamics and the resulting climate sensitivity to rising CO2, there are some interesting discussions at:

http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2543

http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2562

http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2564

http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2570

http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2571

Pay special attention to comments by Judith Curry and Roy Spencer.  Judith Curry wrote a textbook that represents the old view.  Spencer is trying to move the science forward.

I believe General Circulation Models have no predictive value. In my opinion, they have only limited value in that they can tell us what we do not understand about the climate.  For example, Richard Lindzen studied GCMs and it caused him to hypothesize about a negative feedback that had not been observed and was not in the GCM.  Later Roy Spencer and his team at UAH observed a negative feedback in satellite data over the tropics.  They identified this as the “Infrared Iris Effect” hypothesized by Lindzen.  I believe the GCM played a role in that discovery.  

GCMs have a great many problems.  Google search “cold equator” with  Ã¢Â€Âœclimate model” and you will see some of the problems these GCMs have.  They do not model clouds, precipitation processes or oceanic oscillations (PDO, ENSO, etc) well.  

Good luck to you.

Edit: Above Bob makes a comment that McIntyre/Spencer/Curry are all skeptics.  That is not quite accurate.  Spencer is a skeptic.  Curry is not a skeptic but a strong AGW believer.  McIntyre is skeptical of temperature reconstructions, but has not expressed an opinion on the thermodynamic issues.  McIntyre is just beginning to look into the issue to see if it warrants a full audit.  BTW, I contribute to ClimateAudit.com under my real name, Ron Cram.

Edit - A number of scientific papers are discussed in the links above.  I should probably also mention that the level of scientific uncertainty is quite high regarding the thermodynamics.  Recent attempts at forecast verification has shown that global warming has been overpredicted as discussed here:

http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2602