Consensus climate science obsesses over superfluous complexity

A new comment on the post "Economist watch: Cruz denies climate change"
http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2016/02/06/economist-watch-cruz-denies-climate-change/
Author: co2isnotevil
Comment:and then ...,

I understand the basics just fine.  One of the basic laws of physics is that the Stefan-Boltzmann LAW is immutable.  Consensus climate science obsesses over superfluous complexity which gets in the way of understanding that the only effects this complexity can have is to 1) vary the effective emissivity (currently 0.62) and 2) vary the albedo (currently 0.30).  The SB sensitivity (what you seem to refer to as the Planck sensitivity) is completely deterministic and a function of temperature and emissivity given by, 1/(4*o*e*T^3), where 'o' is the SB constant (5.67E-8 W/m^2 per K^4) and 'e' is the equivalent emissivity (measured to be 0.62).

As an exercise, you should try to find some combination of albedo and emissivity that results in the claimed sensitivity.  Such a combination that fits the data simply doesn't exist unless the surface temperature is only 176K or the effective emissivity is only about 0.23, neither of which is consistent with the data.

Another exercise you can do is start with an ideal gray body whose emissivity is 0.62 (which maps to the data extraordinarily well) and morph it in a way that the power to temperature relationship is as measured while the sensitivity is as high as claimed.  Again, you will never be able to do this because the claimed sensitivity is impossibly high.

The idea that the SB law is mutable arises from Schlesinger's broken feedback analysis where he incorrectly positions the SB law as the open loop gain in order to convert surface emissions (the power output of the modeled system) into a temperature output and presumes that positive feedback to result in a temperature dependence slower than T^4 and negative feedback makes the temperature dependence faster than T^4.  This is absolutely incorrect and the only effects feedback, the lapse rate and any other climate system attribute can have is to increase or decrease the effective emissivity or albedo while the T^4 relationship remains intact.

Unless you can show first principles physics that overrides the T^4 relationship between power density and temperature, every argument you make is unsupportable by the laws of physics.

G