That is what I suspected, it is the great tragedy of contrarian Science — continuing to endure the slaying of their beautiful hypothesis by the ugly facts.
This BTW is one of the main reasons why deniers don’t publish, IIRC there were times were even skeptical researchers told Anthony Watts to drop the idea to publish, because what Watts was missing was so clear and it would be a pain to the few remaining skeptical scientists to support him.
Thanks!
Both flux and forcing are vector values, incoming flux is parallel, outgoing flux is spherical … I come up with around a third of the area available for income flux, thus it’s vector magnitude needs to be about 3 times larger … when using unit area. I understand the arithmetic isn’t adding up, but it’s tax season and, well, you know … different rules apply.
Thank you for your comments … I’m sure it’s clear to you just how peripheral my understanding of climatology is by now. I very much appreciate your input. I’m curious: for a 10ºC temperature gain, over 10,000 years, wouldn’t the average forcing be extremely small compared to the total budget numbers?
Yeah, geometry makes it complicated. Radiation changes in time as well, which adds another layer. When you’re looking at the total energy budget, the easiest way to do that is to integrate the components of the energy balance over the entire globe (a non-trivial but feasible geometric exercise) and consider just the rate of energy transfer (watts). Radiative forcings in the sense that they’re used in climate change studies can also be normalized to surface area, because they’re global phenomena, but the incoming solar radiation can’t be handled the same way.
The earth’s temperature is an equilibrium system - the energy fluxes are determined in part by the temperature, so as the earth’s temperature rises the radiated energy increases until the incoming and outgoing energy fluxes reach a new balance. So if you’re looking at a particular temperature change, it doesn’t make much difference whether you’re talking about a timescale of 10,000 years or 100 years. Here is an article that puts the equilibrium sensitivity of the earth at 0.3 ± 0.14 K / (W/m2)*. To drive a 10 K increase in global average temperature, you’d need a radiative forcing of ~33 W/m2 (23 - 63 W/m2 considering the uncertainty). As long as you allow enough time for the system to reach equilibrium (that article suggests ~5 years), it doesn’t matter how long a time it takes to exert that radiative forcing.
When it’s integrated over the entire globe, the incoming radiation is ~340 W/m2, so you’re talking about a forcing that’s roughly 10% of the total energy budget. If you do that over 10,000 years, then it’s 1% per 1000 years, but we’re driving radiative forcings on the order of 1 W/m2 in timescales of decades rather than millenia.
*chosen purely because the number right there in the abstract so you can read it without online access to AGU’s journals.
Thinking more about that sensitivity calculation, I’m not sure it holds for a change of 10 °C. The sensitivity estimate was based on records from 1880-2004, during which time the global average temperature increased by roughly 1 °C. Longwave emission scales with fourth power of temperature, so a linear sensitivity estimate might be ok for a relatively small variation in temperature but not usable for a larger change. Take the back-of-the-envelope calculation above with a cellar of salt.
This is why scientists need peer reviewers. 
So, I’ve ran the numbers myself and have determined I’ve had a few too many high-balls this evening. I have 10,000 hectopascals per liter of forcing … which sounds a bit off … I either didn’t carry a two someplace or underestimated the volume of the typical baleen whale … I’ll look tomorrow morning when I’ve sobered up some.
How would I find out about the rates of longwave radiative transfers, I need some for them Joules for a vortex but I don’t know how to limit the absorption of the water vapor and carbon dioxide. I can give the Joules back after a few days, so I’m not wreaking your climate or anything. I just need to them to do some work I’ve got.
Sounds like you’ve had just the right number of highballs - you’re just trying to do the wrong amount of math! 
For the record, that equates to an equilibrium climate sensitivity of 1.1 deg. C which is wildly incorrect, and explains why that paper has received so much criticism (but of course has been much celebrated by the oil-funded astroturfers). It’s an unfortunate incidence of a good atmospheric scientist venturing outside his primary area of expertise. The main problem with the paper is the use of an overly simplistic model and, in particular, the implicit assumption that the climate system responds to forcings on only one timescale, and an exceedingly short one at that. Good rebuttals can be found here and here.
The general consensus in the climate science community is that equilibrium climate sensitivity is in the range of 1.5 to 4.5, but more importantly, it is tightly bounded at the low end but not on the high. The probability density function is a highly skewed distribution with a very long tail towards the high end. I find it particularly amusing that the second rebuttal to Schwartz’s paper that I linked comes from James Annan, who has long been a proponent of low climate sensitivity, but even he isn’t buying what Schwartz is selling.
Ummm… no. This is part of the fundamental problem of that paper’s single-timescale assumption. The time it takes to reach equilibrium depends on the forcing and the associated feedbacks, and in the real world is not 5 years but thousands of years. This is why the metric of transient climate response was invented…
I found my mistakes, I was using cubic feet for volume and kilometers for length … duh … and now I’ve corrected these and come up with 3.1 x 10^-6 W/m^2 average forcing, or +0.0000031 W/m^2, to wit:
The atmosphere is 5.2x10^21 g, times the dry specific heat of 1.0 J/g-ºK times 10ºK gives 5.2x10^22 J. Dividing by 10,000 years (or 3.1x10^13 s) and the surface area of the Earth (4.1x10^14 m^2) gives 3.1x10^-6 J/s-m^2 (or W/m^2).
As a staunch climate change denialist, and insisting that water vapor is the primary driver of average global temperatures, the actual average forcing is more like 3.2x10^-6. As I suspected, a very small amount indeed. This is absolute non-disproof that indeed baleen whales are stripping the oceans of photoplankton, reducing the ocean’s ability to sink carbon dioxide, thus we see a spike in carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. Perhaps I go to far in stating that they are doing this by intent, but it doesn’t matter, human’s only hope of survival is killing every last whale.
Herman Melville was a prophet.
OK now I like you.
…You’d be dead wrong, of course; water vapor is a feedback loop, not a driver.
…You lost me. You do realize that sarcasm registers very poorly over the internet, right? And that Poe’s Law is in full effect when it comes to climate deniers?
Why am I reminded of Dawkins here… Oh right - “that’d look good on your CV, not so great on mine”.
Indeed, the denialists are like captain Ahab and they eventually could not slay the current understanding of what is going on.
Oh, contrarians will spit their last breaths at the researchers, but when going to publish their work they are more likely to go down with their ships.
[Beams] Now will you call my ideas “hare-brained-crackpotism-at-its-worst” ???
Water vapor is a gas, in the chemical sense. It’s positive feedback mechanism has bearing in the energy transfers within the system. The fact remains that the infra-red (longwave) spectrometers orbiting outside the system show that 60% of the Earth’s flux is due to water vapor, thus making it the primary driver of this flux.
I was wondering about that … I honestly thought you have been trying to feed into the sarcasm and was just terribly inept. I understand a lot of people log onto humor websites without their sense of humor, but I am not one of those. You should probably ignore everything I post then, treat me like white noise. I don’t mind, indeed I try to make sure my posts are short so as to not burden the other discourse. I’m a sweet kind of guy that way.
Rush Limbaugh is that you? 
There is no problem for me with jesters, after all the saying goes that only they can tell the truth, but Rushis not like Jon Stewart. The problem with some jesters out there is that they tell others that they are just entertainers when in practice they are influencing and helping the worst agents of denialism.
In the spirit of dispelling ignorance, not spreading it, let me show you why the claim “[water vapor is a feedback loop, not a driver](water vapor is a feedback loop, not a driver)” is a made up and false statement. Of course to be fair it might be the exact phrasing, so let’s look at “water vapor is a feedback loop”, which is the really wrong part of the claim.
Note that the first two sites below the No results found for “water vapor is a feedback loop” message are skepticalscience, which is to be expected, as it is a main source of so much bad science.
As usual on a Google vomit, there are more sources that confirm what "skeptical Science’ is reporting (third link):
Maybe FX is relying on the 5th link, but that is old captain Ahab himself, Roy Spencer. But just like the link FX claims to show that it is a made up false statement, it fails to load any page.
There goes Ahab to the depths of the warming ocean dragged down by the mighty white whale.
The problem is, when people make things up, like “Water vapor is a feedback and not a forcing”, there isn’t any evidence that such a statement exists, except where somebody made it up.
You won’t find it in a textbook, or any scientific paper, or even on a real climate science page.
Instead you get blogs, where people say all kinds of stupid things, but don’t back it up with science. Evidence. Note that the 9 hits are all blogs.
If you type any real phrase into Google scholar, or Google, you get real sources right away, not a few blogs. Like “Water vapor acts as a greenhouse gas”, which returns real science sources, like www.upi.com
carnegiescience.edu/news/water_evaporated_trees_cools_global_climate
https://www-airs.jpl.nasa.gov/climate/
Same for Google scholar, so it’s easy to see it’s a real phrase, from science. Not bloggers.
What are you talking about? I posted a Wiki link that essentially says that. Are you questioning the reliability of the footnoted sources?
Have we not learned anything from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home?
From Memory Alpha :
We ignore the link between whales and water vapor at our own peril!