Alastair wrote:
> You may be interested to hear that Prof. Ray Pierrehumbert came to the
> same conclusion as you, that a boiling away of the oceans was
> impossible for the same reasons you give, in this paper:
>
> Pierrehumbert, R. T. 1995: Thermostats, Radiator Fins, and the Local
> Runaway Greenhouse. J. Atmos. Sci. 52, 1784-1806.
> http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~rtp1/papers/JASRadiatorFins.pdf
Thanks for the ref. I wondered if his name would come up, as he has said
similar things on RC.
GCMs can achieve runaway warming - in fact some informal conversations
suggest to me that this is rather more common than you might imagine
based on reading the literature - but this is generally attributed to
some nonphysical behaviour such as a parameterisation extrapolated
beyond its valid range. However, I don't believe that Pierrehumbert's
handwaving with simple approximations can really refute calculations of
state of the art climate models.
Nevertheless a the strong argument against it, as Robert Rohde
mentioned, is that the Earth has been up to ~3000ppm in the past and
recovered.
James
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