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 Schaffer01:06 Why Climate Basics Matter04:52 Greenhouse Effect Explained07:30 Lapse Rate Physics10:52 IPCC Definition Shift12:38 Debunking Back Radiation16:04 Cloud Window Mistake19:25 Latent Heat Cooling20:40 Who Causes Warming31:04 Reading the Spectrum33:46 What CO2 Forcing Means37:03 Deriving 3.7 Wm241:41 Water Vapor Feedback Setup45:35 Models vs Observations46:57 Empirical Feedback Proxies51:10 Calculating Feedback From Slopes54:16 Super Greenhouse Tropics Claim56:52 Lapse Rate Versus Water Vapor58:45 Moist Adiabats And Latent Cooling01:00:58 Clouds Versus Water Vapor Paradox01:05:21 Water Reflectivity And Polar Amplification01:09:55 Infrared Emissivity Of Water01:15:01 Surface Emissions Overstated01:21:16 Reattributing The Greenhouse Effect01:28:30 Thought Experiments Removing Water Vapor01:34:26 Why Regional Proxy Fails01:40:24 Seasonal Proxy Broken By Inversions01:44:37 Sluggish Troposphere Explains Slopes01:49:33 Wrap Up And Next Partshttps://x.com/erich_schafferhttps://greenhousedefect.com/=========Slides, summaries, references, and transcripts of my podcasts: https://tomn.substack.com/p/podcast-summariesMy Linktree: https://linktr.ee/tomanelson1