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

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

46:57 Empirical Feedback Proxies

51:10 Calculating Feedback From Slopes

54:16 Super Greenhouse Tropics Claim

56:52 Lapse Rate Versus Water Vapor

58:45 Moist Adiabats And Latent Cooling

01:00:58 Clouds Versus Water Vapor Paradox

01:05:21 Water Reflectivity And Polar Amplification

01:09:55 Infrared Emissivity Of Water

01:15:01 Surface Emissions Overstated

01:21:16 Reattributing The Greenhouse Effect

01:28:30 Thought Experiments Removing Water Vapor

01:34:26 Why Regional Proxy Fails

01:40:24 Seasonal Proxy Broken By Inversions

01:44:37 Sluggish Troposphere Explains Slopes

01:49:33 Wrap Up And Next Parts

https://x.com/erich_schaffer

https://greenhousedefect.com/

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