What is the Climate Science Journal?

The Climate Science Journal and its referenced papers provide evidence and explain why and how thermal energy is stored in the atmosphere, and present a general challenge to understand that heat transfer issues are intimately intertwined with quantum mechanics and electrodynamic theory—the fundamental nature of photons and their interaction with molecules.

Does thermal energy storage have no relevance to the temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere? Yes, of course it does, and evaluating the thermal heat capacity of the atmosphere should corroborate any other approach grounded in soundly reasoned and demonstrated theoretical physics. As discussed below, carbon dioxide (CO2) has a lower specific heat capacity than either nitrogen or oxygen (N2 or O2), which means less thermal energy is stored on a per molecule basis with each 1˚C change in temperature. Yet, CO2 is only 0.04% of the atmosphere, thus how can it affect the 99% of the atmosphere comprised of N2 and O2? An increase in CO2 concentration necessarily results in less capacity to store thermal energy, whatever its channel, whether level change through absorption or velocity increase through photon impact.

The climate analysis using “energy balance” or “energy budget” approaches, championed by NASA, for example, concentrate mostly on radiation, ignoring a thermodynamic analysis, which will identify the the primary means of thermal energy transfer to and storage by the Earth’s atmosphere. Classical thermodynamics and molecular physics demand that conduction, radiation and convection all be considered in a scientific assessment of any physical system, and this fundamental approach has been missing in climate science today.