Energy is fungible, the Work done is not

A little blast from the past.  K. Kimoto published a paper in the often trashed Energy and Environment journal.  E and E developed a contrary policy of publishing more controversial papers.  During the bad old days of "pal" review, there were not a great deal of options for scientists, professional and not so professional, to publish.  So with the cliquishness of Climate Science, any and all papers published in a "trash" journal along with the authors are contaminated.  I have always been of the opinion that the reader should determine the value of the content he chooses to read.  I don't shun Nature just because it has and will continue to publish tripe, there are papers that are of value even in Nature.

Why would Nature or any other scientific magazine publish tripe?  Because science progresses.  A journal likes to publish "ground breaking" science.  It is good for business.  The only problem is that only one "ground breaking" paper in hundreds is likely to be truly "ground breaking".

I am familiar with the K. Kimoto, "On the Confusion of Planck Feedback Parameters", because the paper that Kimoto used in his paper was outdated and contained a major error.  That is right sports fans, the Kiehl and Trendberth Earth Energy Budgets were flawed.  K&T misplaced approximately 20 Wm-2 of energy that was absorbed in the atmosphere.  This gave K&T a 40 WM-2 surface to space atmospheric window which adding CO2 to the atmosphere would cause spectral broadening closing a portion of the over estimated Atmospheric window producing greatly over estimated climate impact due to a doubling of CO2.  Kimoto noticed that there was some error, but mistakenly assumed that K&T could actually add.  As a result, K. Kimoto's paper was rubbish because it was based on rubbish that had been published in a "proper" peer reviewed journal and widely distributed to the public as an icon of climate science, much like the Mann Hockey stick.  Science progresses.

That brings us to the title of the post, Energy is Fungible, the Work done is not.   That 20 Wm-2 is absorbed energy that does work.  It produces a substantial portion of the atmospheric effect that keeps the Earth's climate rather stable.    That work happens to be done in the moist air portion of the atmosphere which excludes it from being a positive feedback to additional CO2.  The amount of energy absorbed in the moist air portion of the atmosphere may well increase, but 20 Wm-2 of that has already happened and cannot be considered a future impact.

I thought some might get a chuckle out of this.  BTW, Professor Kevin "missing heat" Trenberth has corrected that error with a "minor adjustment" in his recently published revised Earth Energy Budget.  :)