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Those of you who follow our efforts to bring some balance to offset global warming alarmism also likely know of our honorary godfather, Fred Singer. Fred has been a tireless crusader, including helping to establish the NIPCC as an answer to the U.N.’s IPCC.
But people like Fred (and myself) didn’t start out in global warming, which is a relatively modern invention. For example, my original claim to fame was developing methods for measuring global precipitation from satellite-borne microwave radiometers, starting in the early 1980s. Fred started out well before me in satellite remote sensing, serving as the first director of the National Weather Satellite Service during 1962-64. I was still in elementary school at that time.
Now, as my 60th birthday approaches in December, I find myself going through my old files and throwing away everything except items of historical interest. Yesterday, I hit upon a stack of old microwave rainfall retrieval papers, and I stumbled upon one I had totally forgot about.
It turns out that Fred Singer wrote one of the very first papers on the possibility of measuring precipitation from satellites with microwave radiometers. The original idea was put forth in brief qualitative terms in a German article authored by Konrad Buettner in 1963. Then, in 1968, Fred and co-author G. F. Williams, Jr., put some theoretical equations and aircraft test flights behind the idea. The article was Microwave Detection of Precipitation over the Surface of the Ocean, in the May 1968 issue of Journal of Geophysical Research.
As an expert in this field, I can tell you that Fred’s treatment of the issue was surprisingly sound and insightful for such an early piece of work. It postulated effects which we now have widespread support for from satellite measurements.
I just wanted to bring attention to his early pioneering work in satellite microwave remote sensing, which eventually led to a wide variety of passive microwave imagers flying in space: ESMR, SMMR, SSM/I, TRMM, SSMIS, AMSR, GMI, and others. I’m sure there are other satellite areas he also helped to pioneer, too.
Great work, Fred!
Roy,
In any field of endeavor it is always refreshing to see a nod to those who have gone before.
I find it interesting to note the contributions of Robert H. Dicke, who is credited with inventing microwave radiometers as a consequence of his work in developing radar at Princeton University, part of his involvement in defeating Nazi extremism and Italian fascism.
Today, we have such great patriots as Singer and Spencer doing battle against the ever-changing face of social extremism: Catastrophic Climate Change Proselytizers, CCCP for short.
All right thinking scientist will recognise Fred S and BGray’s contribution to real scientific progress and I’m confident that their work will be respected long after the likes of Rabbit, Gavin, hansen et al.
That’s the irony. They all think they are being great human being and will therefore be remembered fondly in the future.
AND Roy, your’s and Dr Cristy’s work should not be under estimated by your good selves.
It’s a sad indictment of the AGW brigade that for all the brilliant pioneering work accomplished in remote (satellite) sensing, the results are simply ignored, as if they never even existed.
He also pioneered in satellite remote sensing of stratospheric ozone, paving the way for probably the longest satellite-based record of an important atmospheric parameter.
He did that even before the first satellite ever was launched (paper from June 1957)
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/JZ062i002p00299/full
Fred is a true phenomenon and an inspiration to all of us. At 90 he still gets around and relishes he does. Fred knows about all of the problems with the alarmists, the climate skeletons in the closets, the skeletons out of the closets, and despite all of the BS attacks on his integrity by the likes of Oreskes and other careerists, he retains his positive outlook and for the most part good relations with those who disagree with him. I can recall when he soldiered on as one of the very few skeptics, taking all of the heat. Nowadays skeptics are far more numerous and better organized and coordinated, so he has lots of talented company. A big h/t to Fred.
Regarding his experiences in the climate business, he should write his memoirs. But perhaps he chooses to forget.
Thanks, Dr. Spencer.
Yes, Dr. Singer saw the future coming. He will be remembered long after this AGW cult has faded away.
Roy writes: “Now, as my 60th birthday approaches in December”
Well, Roy, now as my 70th birthday approaches (also in December) it’s time for you to really try to understand the thermodynamics in which you got your “A” and get yourself up-to-date with modern advances in the understanding of the most important physical law of all, namely the Second Law of Thermodynamics or, more precisely, the Law of Entropy. I suggest you start by reading this guy’s website http://entropylaw.law and then mine at http://climate-change-theory.com which will be easier to understand when you start to think as physicists do.
yes, Doug, if only I could think like a physicist.
Yes Roy, the thermodynamics of atmospheric tropospheres is out of your depth and you are wrong in thinking radiation to a planet’s surface determines its temperature.
And still no one has made a submission for the $10,000 reward to prove me wrong.
Here are some examples of how people with a correct understanding of thermodynamics think. I’ll start with an excerpt from this comment ..
“As for my qualifications to engage in argument with PhD’s, I have many times been part of and have led teams with PhD team mates. I was also married to a PhD for 20 years.
Because the import of the consequence of the radial temperature gradient created by pressurizing a spherical body of gas by gravity, from the inside only, is that it obviates the need for concern over GHG’s. And, because this is based on long established fundamental principles that were apparently forgotten or never learned by many PhD’s, it is not something that can be left as an acceptable disagreement.”
(“BigWaveDave”)
Then there is this review of my book stating how I show “how simple thermodynamic physics implies that the gravitational field of a planet will establish a thermal gradient in its atmosphere. The thermal gradient, a basic property of a planet, can be used to determine the temperatures of its atmosphere, surface and sub-surface regions. The interesting concept of “heat creep” applied to diagrams of the thermal gradient is used to explain the effect of solar radiation on the temperature of a planet. The thermal gradient shows that the observed temperatures of the Earth are determined by natural processes and not by back radiation warming from greenhouse gases. Evidence is presented to show that greenhouse gases cool the Earth and do not warm it.”
John Turner B.Sc.;Dip.Ed.;M.Ed.(Hons);Grad.Dip.Ed.Studies (retired physics educator)
and this one …
“The fallacies in the greenhouse conjecture are exposed rigorously and backed up by a comprehensive study (in the Appendix) which compares rainfall and temperature data for locations on three continents. The study concludes convincingly that the wetter regions do indeed have lower daily maximum and minimum temperatures than dry regions at similar latitudes and altitudes. This supports the hypothesis in the book which shows that so-called “greenhouse gases” (mostly water vapor and a little carbon dioxide) do in fact reduce the lapse rate and thus lower the “supported” temperature at the surface. In other words, water vapor cools and so does carbon dioxide, the latter by only a minuscule amount.
“The book discusses how and why surface cooling slows down almost to a halt in the early pre-dawn hours as the supported temperature is approached. This slowing down process is well known, but the concept of the supporting temperature (due to a temperature gradient autonomously induced by gravity) was not understood, even though this “gravito-thermal” effect was originally proposed in the nineteenth century. Modern day physics can now be used to prove the Loschmidt effect is indeed a reality, as this book shows.
“As a physicist, I can honestly say that the physics is indeed mainstream and valid in all respects. It discusses the maximum entropy conditions that evolve as the state of thermodynamic equilibrium is approached, and then goes on to develop a real break-through hypothesis of “heat creep” which, when we consider what happens on Earth and other planets with atmospheres, we see must be the process which explains how the necessary energy gets into the surface of Venus to raise its temperature during its sunlit period. Indeed all planetary temperature data, even that below any surface, can be explained by the hypothesis in this book, which is indeed a totally new paradigm that completely demolishes the old greenhouse conjecture that was based on mistaken understanding of the laws of physics.
“I would expect “warmists” and “lukes” alike to attack the reviews of this book, but the astute reader will realise that is just their normal mode of approach to all such matters. To them science matters not – just their vocation or other pecuniary interests in maintaining the status quo. They would do well to consider the final comment in Chapter 1: “One wonders how many lives may have been saved had such funds been devoted instead to humanitarian aid.”
I really wish you would give it a rest, Cotton
And what great work will you be remembered for in science history, Mr Cotton? Dr. Roy Spencer has a legacy and continues to contribute to the understanding of climate and weather. Your legacy seems to be thousands of annoying emails with no point to them and which have contributed nothing useful to any scientific discussion.
P.S. – get over yourself.
yes doug…it is for this signature achievement of yours…figuring out that putting spaces between the letters of your execrable last name gets your inane comments through spam filters of others’ blogs that you will be remembered.
Roy,
Thanks for the nice write-up on Fred Singer. I wasn’t aware of his contributions to remote sensing via microwaves, so it is helpful to have some background on his work.
Turning 60 isn’t all that bad, did that almost a year ago (youngster!).
I appreciate the work Fred Singer has done with satellite technology and for his important contributions as a skeptic on global warming.
One thing I have learned over the years is not to have heroes. Sooner or later, heroes can let you down.
After all his good work, Fred let some skeptics down by attacking them as nutjobs for claiming the greenhouse effect contradicted the 2nd law of thermodynamics. That was a mistatement of the 2nd law argument.
I wrote you a personal email about that a while back, trying to explain that you (and Fred) had misinterpreted the argument. The argument was not that the GHE contradicted the 2nd law it was the positive feedback claimed as back-radiation in one form of the AGW theory that contradicted the 2nd law.
Rahmstorf, a realclimate stalwart, has put it in words. He has claimed AGW does not contradict the 2nd law because a positive net energy balance between the surface and atmosphere makes up for it. You have defended that nonsense, Roy.
You did it here and you are supporting the arguments of Fred Singer:
http://www.odlt.org/dcd/docs/In%20Defense%20of%20the%20Greenhouse%20Effect.pdf
In that article you claimed that “…this violates the 2nd Law, which (roughly speaking) says that energy must flow from warmer objects to cooler objects….”
The 2nd law says nothing about energy in general, it talks about heat transfer. Clausius stated that HEAT can only be transferred from a warmer body to a cooler body without compensation. That is the 2nd law, in words.
Then you go on, “… the 2nd Law applies to the behavior of whole systems, not to every part within a system, and to all forms of energy involved in the system…not just its temperature..”
The 2nd law is only about thermal energy, nothing else, and temperature is a vital measurement in the transfer of heat. It’s a principle law in the field of thermodynamics, which is a study of heat. It has nothing to do with infrared energy which is covered in the 1st law. That’s why Clausius wrote the 2nd law, the 1st law, which is about conservation of energy, allowed perpetual motion in certain instances.
Later…”..the processes involved in conductive heat transfer are not the same as in radiative heat transfer…”
They are exactly the same, the only difference is in the means of heat transfer. Heat is a measure of the kinetic energy in atoms and it can only be transferred from atoms with higher kinetic energy to those with lower kinetic energy. In radiative transfer, the warmer body has the higher state of kinetic energy.
You and many others are confusing the infrared energy of radiative transfer with heat. IR is electromagnetic energy and heat is thermal energy. Their properties are quite different.
As much as I appreciate the good work done by you, John Christy, Fred Singer and Dick Lindzen, you guys need to get with it and understand this very important argument.
Mr. Robertson,
you say:
“Heat is a measure of the kinetic energy in atoms and it can only be transferred from atoms with higher kinetic energy to those with lower kinetic energy.”
This is incomplete and therefore not correct. Thermal energy is connected with the average energy of the atoms or molecules that comprise a finite system. Thermal energy is equally distributed across the available degrees of freedom which includes therefore potential energy.
Heat is the thermal energy transferred between two system across the boundary that separates the two systems.
Guenter is correct, Gordon. Your terminology is muddled. The transfer of IR energy from one object to another does indeed accomplish heat transfer. “Heat” has 2 main definitions in thermodynamics (having to do with either the thermal energy content, or the transfer of thermal energy…which is the one you choose to use to the exclusion of the other), and so isn’t very precise. “Energy” is more precise. My statements are correct as they stand.
Roy,
A simple proof of your statement being correct is that an IR thermometer can measure temperatures lower than the temperature of the device itself.
I remember very clearly from my heat transfer class that the NET radiative heat transfer between two objects was the DIFFERENCE between the heat radiated heat from the warmer object and the radiated heat from the cooler object. This is why an IR thermometer can measure the temperature of a object cooler than the sensor.
Erik, have you ever heard of a “thermocouple”? Ever heard of a focusing lens? An IR thermometer is designed, with “devices”, to measure temperatures lower than it is. That would not happen, otherwise.
Geran,
I have heard of focusing lenses (which have to be made out of an IR transparent material) and thermocouples. IIRC, most IR thermometers use thermopiles, which IIRC are a collection of semiconductor thermocouples.
My point was that an IR thermometer provides a very simple proof that a cooler object will radiate some energy to a warmer object, which, of course, will be less then the energy flow going the other way. If the 2nd law of Thermodynamics prohibited any radiative transfer (as opposed to net transfer) from the cooler object to the warmer object then the IR thermometer would be incapable measuring temperatures lower than the temperature of the thermopiles. “Measuring” in the previous sentence means providing some quantification of how much colder the target object was as opposed to a binary “it’s colder” measurement.
This ultimately gets to the point why CO2 causes “warming” in that while CO2 at say -50C is cooler than the surface temperature, it is still warmer (and radiates more energy) than the 3K cosmic background radiation of outer space.
Erik, just as your “belief system” has confused you about what an IR thermometer “proves”, it also confuses you about “proof” of CO2 “warming”.
“This ultimately gets to the point why CO2 causes “warming” in that while CO2 at say -50C is cooler than the surface temperature, it is still warmer (and radiates more energy) than the 3K cosmic background radiation of outer space.’
You “logic” is hilarious. The fact that atmospheric CO2 is above the temperature of CMBR proves NOTHING about CO2 “warming” the planet. Talk about “grasping at straws”…
Erik, you cannot show any warming by CO2. No one can. We have had only one warming episode for the last eighty years and we know that this was due to reduced cloud albedo, globally. AGW is a modern day witch hunt, a sort of mass hysteria.
“AGW is a modern day witch hunt, a sort of mass hysteria.”
Involving $20 billion per year WASTED trying to prove AGW. That’s $100 billion in the last five years, folks. WASTED!
FWIW, my belief system is that the presence of CO2 does slow the transfer of heat from the to outer space and that a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere will lead to about 1K increase in temperature in the absence of any negative or positive feedback mechanism. As for the sign and magnitude of those feedback mechanisms – my belief is that they are unlikely to be as highly positive as postulated by Hansen and more likely that the equilibrium climate sensitivity will be less than 2K (which I guess makes me a “lukewarmer”, certainly not in the CAGW crowd).
My belief is that Lindzen may be on the right track with his “iris” hypothesis, though I am not well versed enough in meteorology to have anything like an authoritative opinion on it.
My belief is that “climate research” is shooting itself in the foot by focusing on CO2 and man-made GHG’s and not enough attention os being paid to clouds (including contrails).
My belief is that the GCM’s are not likely to produce results that match reality – too many things with high sensitivity to initial conditions.
What a fine fellow you are! Regarding contrails, under certain conditions these will expand inordinately. I have seen a clear sky turn half cloudy because of contrails crisscrossing the blue ether, greatly reducing insolation ( no thin cirrus, but thick clouds). So yes, I too believe contrails may have an unexamined effect. But unless it supports the AGW hysteria, this will not be studied, or if studied, it won’t be published.
@Eric Magnuson “I remember very clearly from my heat transfer class that the NET radiative heat transfer between two objects was the DIFFERENCE between the heat radiated heat from the warmer object and the radiated heat from the cooler object”.
Once again, Eric, you are confusing heat with infrared radiation, which is electromagnetic radiation. Heat is NOT EM or IR.
I am not splitting hairs, this is aimed at the 2nd law, which has nothing to do with EM. I am not arguing that the amount of heat transferred via radiation cannot be calculated using IR, I am claiming there are two distinct processes taking place, one of them involving the 2nd law and one of them not involving it.
IR flowing into space from two separate bodies does so isotropically. Only a small angle of the radiated IR will be intercepted by another body depending on how close it is to the radiating body. That has nothing to do with the 2nd law, which is a law about heat only.
The 2nd law determines how heat can be transferred, even though IR radiated from each body may be intercepted by each body. It specifies the direction of the heat flow and no radiative law applies to that.
In fact, the intensity and the frequency of the radiated IR depends on how hot each body is. Therefore, it should be possible to measure the amount of heat in each body given the intensity and frequency of the respective emitted radiations.
However, no matter what happens with radiated IR, which is only the transporting agent for heat transfer, heat can only be transferred in one direction without compensation. It can only be transferred from the warmer body to the cooler body. If you want to transfer heat from a cooler body to a warmer body you must compensate the heat lost by the cooler body and that requires adding external energy as in the power required to drive a compressor in a refrigerator.
The reason is simply. Heat is the kinetic energy of atoms in the bodies. When you transfer heat, you transfer kinetic energy via radiative energy. Atoms with higher KE levels radiate IR naturally and if that IR is intercepted by a cooler body, it can raise the KE levels in the cooler body. Apparently, the opposite is not true.
Radiated energy has no properties of heat.
Here’s an example. You can take a piece of ice and carve it into a lens. You can run EM through the lens and focus it so it will burn something but the EM does not melt the ice. Neither EM nor its lower frequency component IR have any properties related to heat.
The notion that the ambiguous net energy (IR in this case) flow between bodies satisfies the 2nd law is just plain wrong. The 2nd law addresses heat only, not IR. Net IR energy flow is an outcome of heat transfer, not the other way around. Therefore it cannot satisfy the 2nd law.
“Erik, you cannot show any warming by CO2. No one can.”
They can, and they have:
“Observational determination of surface radiative forcing by CO2 from 2000 to 2010,” D. R. Feldman et al, Nature 519, 339–343 (19 March 2015)
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v519/n7543/full/nature14240.html
Press release: “First Direct Observation of Carbon Dioxide’s Increasing Greenhouse Effect at the Earth’s Surface,” Berkeley Lab, 2/25/15
http://newscenter.lbl.gov/2015/02/25/co2-greenhouse-effect-increase/
“So yes, I too believe contrails may have an unexamined effect. But unless it supports the AGW hysteria, this will not be studied, or if studied, it won’t be published.”
Patrick Minnis, J. Kirk Ayers, Rabindra Palikonda, and Dung Phan, 2004: Contrails, Cirrus Trends, and Climate. J. Climate, 17, 1671–1685.
doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/1520-0442 (2004)
Contrails in a comprehensive global climate model: Parameterization and radiative forcing results, Michael Ponater et al,
First published: 3 July 2002
DOI: 10.1029/2001JD000429
Nature 391, 837-838 (26 February 1998) | doi:10.1038/35974
Clouds, contrails and climate
John H. Seinfeld
For more, see
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=contrails+climate&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C38&as_sdtp=
@Eric Magnuson “My point was that an IR thermometer provides a very simple proof that a cooler object will radiate some energy to a warmer object…”
Eric…all objects radiate IR, right down to 0 Kelvin. They are not radiating to another object, they are just radiating. However, they are not radiating heat, they are radiating electromagnetic energy.
It’s imperative that you understand the difference.
EM is energy radiated by atoms from their orbital shells, as electrons transition from a higher energy band to a lower energy band. That can also happen in the covalent bonds of molecules. That radiated energy contains no heat, the heat change comes when the energy leaves the orbital, reducing the kinetic energy in the atom.
By the same token, if that EM is absorbed by an electron in an atomic shell, the electron will rise to a higher energy level and the KE will increase in the atom, hence the heat. However, EM wont be absorbed unless certain conditions are met with regard to intensity and frequency of the EM.
It’s wrong to think that any EM incident on a body will increase its KE, hence it’s heat.
You cannot average the emitted/absorbed EM and make an accurate statement about heat transfer. You have to consider the KE gain/loss WITHIN the atom (or the covalent molecular bond) to get a meaningful statement about heat transfer. That’s where the 2nd law comes in.
The 2nd law specifies that the KE transferred can be in one direction only, from atoms with higher KEs to atoms with lower KEs. Transfer in the opposite direction is not possible unless you supply energy to compensate the cooler atoms for loss of heat.
The thing to get is that heat transfer happens locally. Heat does not flow between bodies but the IR emitted from a warmer body has sufficient energy and frequency to be absorbed by a cooler body hence raising the KE in it’s atoms.
Heat decreases in a warmer body and increases in a cooler body. The opposite is not true without compensation, according to the 2nd law. If a cooler body was transferring heat to a warmer body, the cooler body would get even cooler, which makes no sense.
@Roy Spencer…”Your terminology is muddled. The transfer of IR energy from one object to another does indeed accomplish heat transfer”.
Roy…I am not trying to attack the good work you have done, I am trying to give you ammunition against modelers and their magic positive feedbacks. Thermodynamics already supplies the solution via the 2nd law. Positive feedback in its true sense cannot exist in the atmosphere because the 2nd law says so.
I implied nowhere that IR is not involved in heat transfer, all I said was that IR and heat are two different energies and have different scientific rules governing them. I am fully aware that IR transfers the heat, but in one direction only.
The 2nd law applies to heat only. If you disagree, read Clausius and why he developed the 2nd law. He was dealing with a heat problem, not an IR problem. You are wrong to claim the 2nd law applies to energies other than heat, or energies in general.
You seem to think that IR is heat, hence must be transferred in both directions between hot and cold bodies. IR is not really transferred between bodies, it simply radiates to space, and if a body intercepts it, under the right conditions, the IR can raise the KE of atoms in that body, provided the atoms absorb it. However, that cannot take place unless the IR has a specific intensity and frequency (Bohr).
You have argued in past articles that heat can be transferred from a cooler body to a warmer body. Clausius stated clearly that heat can only be transferred from a warmer body to a cooler body without compensation. In other words, in order to reverse the process, external energy must be supplied as in a refrigerator.
Where is that external energy in the atmosphere? You are claiming, in essence, that the atmosphere behaves like a refrigerator, extracting heat from a colder source and transferring it to a warmer source. That can certainly be done, as in a refrigerator, by supplying external power to run a compressor and using a special gas (refrigerant) for the heat transfer. That’s called compensation.
*****************
““Heat” has 2 main definitions in thermodynamics (having to do with either the thermal energy content, or the transfer of thermal energy…which is the one you choose to use to the exclusion of the other), and so isn’t very precise. “Energy” is more precise. My statements are correct as they stand”.
I have not chosen to use the transfer of thermal energy. I have used it because we are talking about radiative heat transfer. I have implied the transfer of kinetic energy, which in this case is thermal energy. No thermal energy flows through space between a warmer and cooler body. IR flows between bodies but it is emitted from a warmer body with a higher KE in its atoms.
The cooler body also emits IR but at a lower intensity and frequency. It emits it isotropically and a small angle of it may be intercepted by the warmer body. According to Bohr, in order for it to affect the warmer body it requires a specific intensity and frequency.
Obviously, thermal energy at a higher KE level is not going to be affected by IR that cannot raise that KE to a higher level.
*************
““Heat” has 2 main definitions in thermodynamics (having to do with either the thermal energy content, or the transfer of thermal energy…”
I think it would be more accurate to say that heat in thermodynamics is defined according to it macro effects or by it’s micro effects (atomic) as in statistical mechanics.
Clausius addressed the problems of thermal content and thermal transfer. However, as he pointed out, the heat content of a system can be defined externally through measuring the work done by the heat. You don’t need to look inside a body to determine it’s heat properties.
Planck was a pioneer in the study of the micro states. However, he could not measure the local effects of atoms in something like a flow of hot gas, therefore he worked on averaging the effects using statistics. He developed equations that related entropy to probability and he made it very clear that such a system could not be visualized.
When you study heat equations in the macro state there is absolutely no reference to IR. All that is addressed is heat (q) and temperature (T), or work.
Entropy is defined (by Clausius) as the integral over a process of an infinitesimal change in heat (dq) as measured at a specific temperature (T). Entropy is the sum of the dq/T differentials in a process. If the process is reversible, the entropy equals zero, otherwise it is positive.
Since Planck equated entropy (wrt heat) to probability, he had to be aware that heat was not reliant on electromagnetic energy. It can be transferred when energy is emitted as EM but the EM is not heat. He tells the reader explicitly that heat in statistical mechanics is a measure of the local kinetic energy of the particles in a substance like a gas.
Well put.
Just I would like to add one more thing. The Stefan-Boltzmann law was later derived from the first and second law of thermodynamics. This inherently implies that Clausius statement is valid for radiation as well. Heat therefore cannot be radiated from a cold object to a warm object.
Based on Plank, heat radiation is emitted at any temperature, and when it is “air born”, there is no way to stop it from going to a warmer object as backradiation. This is incorrect as you stated. It requires certain level of energy to overcome the “river flow” of incoming energy from hot to cold.
Also, one cannot exclude the possibility of interaction between low frequency radiation from the cold object and those coming from the hot object. Because the spectrum from hot is broader, there must be a common frequency range. Since they have the same direction and opposite sense of travel, the are likely to interact destructively such that no backradiation can take off from the cold object in the first place.
Gordon,
your statements are flawed:
“The cooler body also emits IR but at a lower intensity and frequency. It emits it isotropically and a small angle of it may be intercepted by the warmer body. According to Bohr, in order for it to affect the warmer body it requires a specific intensity and frequency.”
If you compare a black body at 300 K and 310 K you will see that both emit Photons at the same frequencies, but with lower intensities at each frequency.
Moreover, if you have a hot body of 400 K that you heat with an electrical current of constant power that radiates towards an environment of 100 K. Now you bring a colder body lets say 200 K in between the hotter body and the environment that absorbs radiation from the hotter body, radiates back to the hotter body and radiates toward the environment.
Now you will see that the colder body effects the hotter body. There is nothing that violates the 2nd law
Hi Nabil. Fully agree. In Poynting Vector physics the line by line monochromatic (coherent) addition of opposing (subtraction) radiation vectors integrated over the entire spectrum of available angles yields the net flux. The ‘photon’ argument of modern climatology cannot subtract to annihilate back radiation like em radiation does. Only wave mechanics correctly describes radiant energy superposition and hence net radiant energy flux. The larger,and more intense and spectrally complete upward electromagnetic wave package annihilates completely the back radiation. Likewise, the presence of the atmosphere and the superposition of its radiative potential annihilates the surface emissivity such that very little energy in the form of radiation leaves the surface. This is particularly true in GHG’s prominent spectral bands. This explains why the surface is not radiatively coupled strongly to the low heat capacity of the atmosphere. The radiant energy in bulk never goes up so it can never come back down ( from “Spartacus is free”).
Geoff Wood
I have to say that your statement
“Likewise, the presence of the atmosphere and the superposition of its radiative potential annihilates the surface emissivity such that very little energy in the form of radiation leaves the surface.”
simply does not compute. You are having some fun here, right?
mpainter, hi.
In a vacuum the sea or land surface would emit around 370W/m-2 from a temp of 288K and ε=0.95. If this flux was indeed emitted and largely absorbed by the atmosphere then the surface would heat effectively and be strongly thermally coupled to the atmosphere by this heat transfer. It would be the dominant heating method for the atmosphere. Line by line radiative transfer coding analyses the vector potential in both directions and the superposition of near equal but opposite fluxes gives the net flux from the warmer body. This turns out to be about 67W/m-2 not the 370W/m-2 suggested. This 67W/m-2 is the only energy that leaves the surface by radiation due to the presence of this complex atmosphere (annihilating the surfaces ability to radiate). Next to zero energy is transferred in GHG’s strong absorption bands. If it never goes up it can’t come back down. The atmosphere uses other heat transfer methods to set the gravitational lapse. Of the 67W/m-2 around 40W/m-2 on average passes through the atmospheric window leaving only around 17W/m-2 (from 370W/m-2 calculated without an atmosphere) as heat transferred by radiation that heats the atmosphere by surface emissions.
Regards.
Interesting choice of words though,
“does not compute”
When LBLRTM is one of the methods used to compute and support measurements that the surface emits very little as net heat transferred by radiation given its temperature and ‘in vacuum’ emissivity!
Again, regards.
Geoff, thanks for your reply. Does not compute in my computer, understood :-).
Nonetheless, very interesting. I wonder if you could explain in less specialized terms. For example, I have never heard of Poynting Vector, as I am no physicist. Is the “annihilation of back radiation” accomplished by wave interference? Please explain.
Best regards
Geoff Wood
I am not sure if I understand your calculations. Any point on the earth’s surface radiates back to space on on about a hemispheric view angle, or 180 degrees. Only a small fraction should be assumed to be backradiated to the sun and requires annihilation. It is that portion of radiation with a view solid angle having a tangent that is equal to the ratio between the radius of the sun and distance between earth and sun. This angle has a tangent of 0.005 degrees on average, or it is only 0.27 degrees. Therefore, the actual backradiation to be annihilated is only (0.27/180)x 100=0.15% of the total, very small and will not affect the heat flux from the sun to the earth.
Correction….
Diameter of the sun should be used instead of the radius for the tangent of the solid angle. Numbers remain the same, the diameter is used correctly in the calculations.
mpainter. Thank you for your reply. I will reply in some detail later today. Please check again.
Regards
mpainter. Thank you for your reply.
The modern visualisation of radiative transfer as ‘photon’ streams does little to further our knowledge of this interesting and strange form of heat transfer. As you have suggested, ‘interference’ of superimposed waves occurs and cannot be explained by the photon argument. There is no doubt that energy lost or gained by this method is discrete and quantised but this is only relevant at the point of emission or absorption. In order to attempt to describe the manner in which radiation interacts with other radiations and matter in three dimensions we are required to use electromagnetic wave properties. In this manner we can describe, interference, diffraction and refraction.
Most people are aware that the coherent wavefront from a laser, with stimulated emission producing ‘in phase’ radiation travelling in the same direction, can produce intensities that arise from the addition of the electromagnetic components. This can vastly overcome the normal continuum intensity of everyday objects and transfer this difference to the targets kinetic distribution, even at relatively long wavelengths. In a similar manner we can view a continuum thermal spectrum (integration of the Planck function) as a collection of overlapping line spectra. In radiative exchange with another body emitting line radiation such as the atmosphere, then the opposing radiation vectors can, line by line be subtracted from the continuum to reveal the ‘difference’, which is the only energy lost by the warmer body. As we are selecting line by line we are assured wavelength anti-coherence of opposing vectors, and the availability is calculable from solutions of Schrodinger’s wave equations as to the line spectra associated with molecular vibration. For an emitting surface this has to be calculated over all available angles across all optical depths and intensities. The net energy transferred is still a function of the relative temperatures as this sets the vector intensity of subtracted components. It goes without saying that isothermal conditions would leave no product from this sum at a frequency associated with a strong spectral line.
Integrating the net flux over the entire spectrum over all available angles yields the net flux radiated from the warmer body. This is exactly the Poynting Vector at that point and represents the energy flow resulting from all of the available radiative potentials. Electric and magnetic fields can store energy. Propagating em waves are vector disturbances of the local field as they intersect and summing the vector components yields the netted energy flow in W/m-2 passing through the plane of interest.
This is supported by all the energy budget diagrams that the netted flux, the only energy transferred, is, globally averaged around 67W/m-2 from the surface upwards. There is no energy downward from cold to warm, nor is there 370W/m-2 upwelling and since the reduction is so significant, then, hence the use of the term annihilation. It isn’t slightly reduced when it’s at one sixth of its proposed intensity! This is supported by the embarrassing fact that climate science’s 330W/m-2 from GHGs is unavailable for work or power, unlike sunlight which is demonstrably powerful in its ability to raise energy levels on this planet! But then the Earth emits little EMR which overlaps with or can cancel the Sun’s irradiance.
I am sure there will be questions.
Thanks for taking interest.
Hi Nabil. Sorry we are at cross purposes, I never said the Sun cancelled the Earth’s emissions or similar. My calculations are about the atmosphere and Earth’s surface.
Regards
Thank you Geoff Wood.
Geoff Wood, thanks for your reply. You say
“Next to zero energy is transferred in GHG’s strong absorption bands. If it never goes up it can’t come back down.”
###
Nor can it go back up if it never comes down. Then by addressing the problem in terms of EM wave properties we see that the energy budget diagrams (such as the K-T) that show 330 W/m² of back radiation “absorbed by the surface” are simply egregious, that net energy transfer can be computed on a line basis, line by line, and there is only a net radiative flux from the warmer surface as computed on a discrete basis. Ha! It does compute, after all, :-).
Then insolation is the only radiation of significance, regarding surface temperatures, SST, etc. This tears the heart and guts out of AGW radiative theory, it seems. There is left only an isometric atmospheric radiative flux that does not transfer energy to the warmer surface. Thanks for your comment.
This explains much left unexplained by AGW radiative hypothesis.
So, Guenter, does a column of water of one cm (atmospheric water vapor) determine the temperature/energy content of a column of water of 10,000 cm (ocean heat to 100 meters depth). And how? Because it does not compute when the problem is addressed in that way.
What has your question to do with Mr. Robertsons incorrect statement:
“Heat is a measure of the kinetic energy in atoms and it can only be transferred from atoms with higher kinetic energy to those with lower kinetic energy.”
Ah, if you do not wish to address my comment, that is your prerogative. I will answer your question, though. The Climate question, this blog and most related issues revolve around problems of thermodynamics, including the one that you touched on. This is because of the role assigned by AGW to the so-called greenhouse effect (ghg, clouds) in determining climate. If you feel that this ultimate question is too far removed from your comment, so be it.
However, I do not see much value in your raising an issue which, when examined, is seen as a matter of confusion arising over ambiguous terminology. I myself would equate heat with molecular energy. But now a sort of revisionism seems to have polluted thermodynamics. This revisionism now makes heat a process rather than a property, and by this revisionism I am counted by some physicists as incorrect by holding such a view while being upheld by others. Physicists need to straighten out their terminology so that the study of thermodynamics can proceed without such semantic kersnaffles.
@Guenter Hess “What has your question to do with Mr. Robertsons incorrect statement:
“Heat is a measure of the kinetic energy in atoms and it can only be transferred from atoms with higher kinetic energy to those with lower kinetic energy.””
I should have added, ‘without compensation’, as Clausius specifies.
Guenter, what do you think heat is? Do you think, as mpainter pointed out with respect to revisionists, that heat is a mysterious phenomena that cannot be described?
If you apply a propane flame to the end of a bar of steel, what happens? The atoms in the steel at the flame end become highly agitated. Normally, atoms connected by covalent bonds vibrate naturally in their bonds. If you add thermal energy from a flame, the mean path of that vibration increases.
If you use acetylene with oxygen and heat the steel, many of the covalent bonds will break and the steel will melt. In that case, the steel can glow white hot and become supper hot.
Energy is passed atom to atom down the length of the rod forming a heat gradient. That energy is thermal energy.
What is kinetic energy? It is defined roughly as KE=1/2mv^2. If you increase the velocity of an atom of mass, m, it’s KE increases.
What else increases? The heat. The temperature increases, and temperature is a measure of heat. Temperature is not a natural phenomenon, heat is the natural phenomenon. Temperature scales were developed by humans to measure relative heat levels.
It is obvious that the kinetic energy of atomic vibrations in a substance is the same thing as heat. Furthermore, heat and work are equivalent. When you heat atoms in a steel rod, and the mean length of the atomic vibrations increases, the atoms do more work…further proof that kinetic energy of atoms vibrating in a steel rod is representative of the heat contained in the atoms.
When those atoms vibrate in their covalent bonds, they also emit and absorb electromagnetic energy of a specific intensity and frequency. If you heat the metal, and the atoms vibrate harder, their kinetic energy increases. The EM generated by the atoms increases in intensity and frequency.
Why should EM generated by a cooler body have the proper intensity and frequency to affect the atoms in a warmer body whose atoms are vibrating at an already higher level of KE?
@mpainter..”I myself would equate heat with molecular energy. But now a sort of revisionism seems to have polluted thermodynamics. This revisionism now makes heat a process rather than a property…”
It’s like a denial that heat exists as a property. If someone touches a hot object and it burns his finger he is now discouraged from claiming the object was hot, or that it has a heat content.
What is clearly being missed is the basic understanding about energy. Heat is the kinetic energy of atoms in motion and your revisionists get hung up on KE being internal energy rather than heat. However, KE is generic and the name can be applied to energy of any form in motion.
The KE in a body of atoms is thermal energy, or heat. There is nothing else it can be. In a body of atoms it’s not chemical energy, not electrical energy, not mechanical energy, not nuclear energy, and so on. It is heat energy and the word heat is used to define a particular form of energy.
If you drive an electrical current through a resistor, the electrons collide with atoms in the resistor increasing their KE. That KE is heat and any revisionist does not agree he should hold his finger on a resistor with sufficient current through it to approach it’s power rating.
Since the 1930’s we have been inundated by the revisionists who prefer a denial of physical reality to a mathematical obfuscation. Schrodinger, the father of quantum theory, retired rather than endure them. In the ensuing decades since the 30s they have managed to set physics back a century.
Tell that to a bullet.
E=mv², fool.
@Steve Ta “The KE in a body of atoms is thermal energy, or heat. There is nothing else it can be”.[GR}
Tell that to a bullet.
You confuse the internal kinetic energy of a substance with external properties of a solid. A bullet is solid lead in many cases and it’s kinetic energy is due to an explosion of gunpowder.
If you take that same lead bullet off the cartridge and let it sit in a room on a table, sooner or later it will reach the temperature of the room. Why?? The atoms on the surface interact with the atoms of air in the room and heat is transferred till equilibrium.
If you insist on calling me stupid you shouldn’t use examples like a bullet to compare kinetic energies of atoms within a body to a solid fired by an explosive action in a gun barrel.
“E=mv², fool.”
(Sigh.) Your equation is wrong.
Lord help us.
No, David, E=1/2 mv² You should know better.
@Guenter Hess…”This is incomplete and therefore not correct. Thermal energy is connected with the average energy of the atoms or molecules that comprise a finite system”.
Guenter…I was only demonstrating the heat is not infrared energy.
You have not demonstrated how my statement is incorrect. It may be incomplete but it’s not incorrect. Even you admit there is a one-to-one relationship between thermal energy and ‘the average energy of the atoms or molecules that comprise a finite system”.
What do you think the energy is? It’s kinetic energy. KE is the energy of motion and in this case it’s the heat energy related to the motion of the atoms.
Thermal energy is heat.
Here is a more precise description of heat from two Scientists, Gerlich and Tscheuschner, who are experts in the field of thermodynamics (Page 16 on http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0707/0707.1161v4.pdf ).
“Heat is the kinetic energy of molecules and atoms and will be transferred by contact or radiation. Microscopically both interactions are mediated by photons. In the former case, which is governed by the Coulomb respective van derWaals interaction these are the virtual or off-shell photons, in the latter case these are the real or on-shell photons. The interaction between photons and electrons (and other particles that are electrically charged or have a nonvanishing magnetic momentum) is microscopically described by the laws of quantum theory. Hence, in principle, thermal conductivity and radiative transfer may be described in a unified framework. However, the non-equilibrium many body problem is a highly non-trivial one and subject to the discipline of physical kinetics unifying quantum theory and non-equilibrium statistical mechanics”.
Gordon, the Kinetic Theory says that the temperature of a gas is equal to the average kinetic energy (KE) of the gas molecules times a constant (1/Boltzmann’s_constant.)
The critical point that people are missing is that half of the molecules in a gas have an KE lower than the average and half higher than average, some near zero and some with much higher than average KE.
When radiation from a colder gas strikes a warmer gas many molecules in the warmer gas have less KE than average and can absorb energy from the radiation. The result is that the average KE of the warmer gas will become higher even if the higher KE molecules in the warm gas cannot absorb energy from the radiation originating from the colder gas.
It works the same for liquids and solids.
Rick says
“The result is that the average KE of the warmer gas will become higher even if the higher KE molecules in the warm gas cannot absorb energy from the radiation originating from the colder gas.”
####
!? So the colder gas warms the warmer gas? Or maybe this is your idea of a joke.
No, the warmer gas is also radiating to the colder gas and the net energy transfer is from warmer to colder. The net energy transfer from the warmer gas is less than it would be to space without colder radiating gas in between.
My point was that the KE distribution of the colder gas overlaps the KE distribution of the warmer gas so that a higher KE molecule in the cold gas can radiate energy to a lower KE molecule in the warm gas without violating the Second Law.
So then, do you mean to correct yourself? See my quote of you above.
@Rick …”When radiation from a colder gas strikes a warmer gas many molecules in the warmer gas have less KE than average and can absorb energy from the radiation”.
Rick, what you are implying is that a cooler body radiating in the direction of a warmer body will continue to raise the KE of the warmer body indefinitely. You are also implying that the radiation from a cooler body has the ability to single out atoms/molecules with lower KE’s and be absorbed into them.
In a gas, those atoms are traveling near the speed of light and the rays of IR from the cooler body is traveling through them. According to Bohr, the IR wont be absorbed unless it has a specific intensity and frequency that can affect the electrons in the orbitals of the atoms.
I don’t think you need to get into thought experiments like that. Clausius and others have already done that. They have experimentally proved that IR from a cooler body cannot transfer heat to a warmer body.
Rick, it’s hard to believe that GR is really as stupid as he appears from the above, so I wouldn’t bother responding, as I assume this is pure trolling.
No science here, only name-calling by someone who does not have the guts to identify himself.
Gordon you said, “You are also implying that the radiation from a cooler body has the ability to single out atoms/molecules with lower KE’s and be absorbed into them.” Radiation does not “single out” molecules in the sense that it looks for lower KE molecules but, as you say, per Bohr when it strikes a molecule in the right state it will be absorbed. Because there are about 10^24 molecules in a cubic foot of gas at STP the chance of radiation from a colder gas striking a receptive molecule in the warmer gas are fairly high.
The warmer body will reach an equilibrium temperature where the heat transfer in equals the heat transfer out, the net heat transfer will become zero. This is Roy’s point- place a heat shield between a warm source and a cold sink and the warm body will loose less heat to the cold sink.
Just for reference this graph from Wikipedia shows that the molecules in a gas are traveling at about the speed of sound, not light:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%E2%80%93Boltzmann_distribution#/media/File:MaxwellBoltzmann-en.svg
Those, like Gordon, who claim that Clausius asserted that there can be no spontaneous heat transfer at all from cold to hot, simply do not know what they are talking about.
Let’s look at his actual words:
*****************************
“The principle may more briefly expressed thus: Heat cannot by itself pass from a colder to a warmer body; the words ‘by itself’ (von selbst) however, here require explanation…
In the first place, the principle implies that in the immediate interchange of heat between two bodies by conduction and radiation, the warmer body never receives more heat from the colder one than it imparts to it….
On considering the results of such processes more closely, we find that in one and the same process heat may be carried from a colder to a warmer body and another quantity of heat transferred from a warmer to a colder body without any other permanent change occurring. In this case, we have not a simple transmission of heat from a colder to a warmer body, or an ascending transmission of heat, as it may be called, but two connected transmissions of opposite characters, one ascending and the other descending, which compensate each other.”
Clausius, R., “The Mechanical Theory of Heat”, p. 117, 1867
***********************
So Roy very clearly follows Clausius when he talks about radiative heat transfer from cold to hot, as long as it is less than from hot to cold. Any physics or engineering textbook on the subject calls this “radiative exchange”.
If you compute in anything other than net heat exchange, there is no end to the sort of idiocies that can be generated. Like the earth heat budget diagrams a la Kiehl-Trenberth.
The KT diagrams follow Clausius closely, with a lesser heat flow from the colder atmosphere to the warmer surface, and a greater heat flow from the warmer surface to the colder atmosphere.
Are you saying that Clausius was a fool?
You are the type of pest who likes to put words in the mouths of others. I stand on my above statement.
You claim that the KT diagrams are “idiocies” because they “compute in [something] other than net heat exchange”. But they use Clausius’ concept of exchange of gross radiative heat flows. What other conclusion am I supposed to draw?
Would you be happier if KT showed a net 63 W/m2 upward net heat exchange between surface and atmosphere, instead of gross flows of 396 up and 333 down? The result is the same.
See my above comment.
You say “If you compute in anything other than net heat exchange, there is no end to the sort of idiocies that can be generated.”
If you actually read Clausius, he computes in terms of gross heat exchange, not net. It is the logical direct inference from your statement that you think this is an idiocy. Not putting words in your mouth at all.
The KT diagrams are egregious and they are being phased out by your more intelligent AGW types. The latest energy budget diagrams do not put values on IR flux. The KT diagram with 330 W/m² of back radiation “absorbed by the surface” is junk science for the gullible. I can prove it.
Some diagrams show a net upward flux of ~60 W/m2 instead of ~390 up and 330 down gross flows. Same thing!
Can you show me a single diagram that shows ~390 up and 0 down?
What portion of the back radiation is converted to latent energy. None, by the KT diagram. Egregious rot.
I asked “Can you show me a single diagram that shows ~390 up and 0 down?”
I guess not!
Also, the Kiehl-Trenberth diagrams show about 80 W/m2 of latent heat transfer from the surface. The last time I checked, that’s greater than the “none” you claim.
None from the back radiation “absorbed by the surface”. The 80 W figure you gave is from insolation- 50%.
So the solar photons come earmarked for evaporating water, and the thermal IR photons from the atmosphere do not? What property of the photons has this earmarking? Please provide a reference!
Get you an education. Add total radiant energy “absorbed by surface” and calculate. Emitted OHC===> 60% latent heat, 30% radiation, 10% sensible heat.
Can’t do that? Never mind, I already done it: around 215 W/m² of latent heat. Compare to 80 W on diagram. Which figure is correct? The 80 W figure is correct. So why does not the 330 W/m² not generate latent heat? Your answer_______.
“Ad!d total radiant energy “absorbed by surface” and calculate. Emitted OHC===> 60% latent heat, 30% radiation, 10% sensible heat.”
As before, reference please, one that states this is true regardless of amount of total radiant energy absorbed. And “off the top of my head” doesn’t count
You don’t like my partition scheme for ocean energy emission?
Well, it’s not mine. There is a link to the paper some months back. June or July, maybe. Go look. Or you can take my word for it. Or you can accept mine, at 70 % via evaporation, which combines sensible and latent heat loss. Or you can take a hike.
The KT diagram is egregious; putting 330 W/m² of back radiation “absorbed by surface” when total precipitation = 80W/m². Ha ha! the back radiation is comically exaggerated and pure invention. Invented to get proper S-B figures and make the earth a black body, which it _is_not_. It is not even grey. The earth is at 288K because of the heat capacity of the ocean and it’s accumulation of energy, emitting it mostly via evaporation, not radiation. Add evapotranspiration to this.
You are by now bewildered to this affront to your system of beliefs, no doubt. Cruel world it is and fixing to get crueler as the “hiatus” lengthens. Go weep. Or get an education because it is better to laugh than to cry.
So your reference is “some webpage I saw months ago, but I can’t remember where or how to link to or search for it, or exactly what it said.”
Do you realize how pathetic you sound?
The ~330 W/m2 “back radiation” is from measurements, with well understood spectra corresponding to the emission bands of H2O and CO2, and not remotely like blackbody radiation.
I copy my first response to you above:
mpainter says:
September 21, 2015 at 4:37 AM
You are the type of pest who likes to put words in the mouths of others. I stand on my above statement.
###
This time you actually put your invention in quotes. This sort of stuff happens all the time. Fabrication is the only argument left to AGW types.
mpainter:
It was a fair paraphrase. When I asked for a reference on your claim, you said “There is a link to the paper some months back. June or July, maybe. Go look.”
Pathetic! Why can’t you provide an actual reference???
Go look yourself. You are the one who does not believe.This blog. If you wish to be educated, pay attention. If you insist on being dumb, that is your choice.
So you have no reference to back up your claim. I thought so!
You choose dumb. Fine.
@mpainter…”Like the earth heat budget diagrams a la Kiehl-Trenberth”.
Kiehl-Trenberth admitted their heat budget is based purely on speculation. The newer forms of the KE heat budget diagrams have removed the 350 watt back-radition claimed in the original KE budget diagram.
“Kiehl-Trenberth admitted their heat budget is based purely on speculation. ”
Wrong! You should try reading their papers. They discuss at length what measurements they used and how they used them.
“The newer forms of the KE heat budget diagrams have removed the 350 watt back-radition claimed in the original KE budget diagram.”
Wrong again! The back radiation, in slightly varying magnitudes, is in every version of the KT diagram.
You are simply showing you have no familiarity with the topic at hand.
Gordon Robertson says:
“Kiehl-Trenberth admitted their heat budget is based purely on speculation.”
Citation to this admission?
@David Appell “Citation to this admission?”
On page 5 of EarthsGlobalEnergyBudget.pdf by Trenberth, Fasullo and Kiehl, there is a piece titled Spatial and Temporal Sampling. in that piece they reveal how they ‘calculated’ certain aspects of the budget.
For example, to get the surface outgoing radiation they used Stefan–Boltzman’s equation for a blackbody radiating at 15C. They did not measure it and I doubt if anyone has measured it.
Same article, they ‘define’ a global mean. The entire budget is based on climate model guesstimates.
The budget is full of speculation.
@Ed Bo
Ed…read again what you have cherry picked from Clausius. Your opening statement is:
““The principle may more briefly expressed thus: Heat cannot by itself pass from a colder to a warmer body; the words ‘by itself’ (von selbst) however, here require explanation…””
The first statement by Clauaius is clear…”Heat cannot by itself pass from a colder to a warmer body”
What you are missing entirely is what he goes on to explain. He is explaining the meaning of ‘by itself’ which means ‘compensation’. He is describing a specific condition in which heat is transferred from a colder body to a warmer body.
What you have quoted is his explanation of heat being transferred from a colder body to a warmer body. No one is denying that is possible. However, if you extract heat from a colder body and move it to a warmer body, “YOU MUST COMPENSATE THE LOST HEAT”.
THERE IS NO MECHANISM IN THE ATMOSPHERE TO DO THAT!!!!
He is explaining why. He is not claiming that heat can be transferred in both direction under ordinary means.
There is another very important matter you are missing. If two bodies are independent heat sources that is far different than what is going on in our atmosphere. If you have two stars close to each other and one is hotter, they are both generating their own heat. That’s not the same problem we are discussing here and it’s why people are confusing themselves by using stellar blackbody radiation as an example.
On our planet, solar energy is absorbed by the surface, raising its temperature. The surface radiates infrared energy to space and some of that energy is absorbed by so-called greenhouse gases causing them to warm. They warm because they are molecules and their covalent bonds absorb the IR, causing the bond KE to increase, hence the heat.
That makes the GHGs DEPENDENT bodies. According to AGW theory, the GHGs are dependent on the surface for the IR energy that warms them. When GHGs radiate IR, the IR is of a lower intensity, frequency, and bandwidth. The radiation they emit represents a loss of KE at the surface, therefore any IR they radiate back to the surface has to make up the loss of KE that warmed them.
Even if IR from the cooler GHGs could raise the temperature of the warmer surface there is no way they could supply enough energy to warm the surface to a temperature higher than it is warmed by solar energy. That would be a case of perpetual motion, therefore the AGW theory falls flat from that alone.
The other argument, that GHGs act as a blanket, or a layer to slow heat loss from the surface, is too ludicrous to consider. Physicist/meteorologist Craig Bohren, who has written a book on atmospheric radiation, considers that theory a metaphor at best, and at worst, plain silly.
How do you slow down radiation from the surface which is traveling at close to the speed of light? The problem of IR photons being regarded as one-to-one heat transferring agents between surface atoms and GHGs molecules is absolutely naive.
“That would be a case of perpetual motion, therefore the AGW theory falls flat from that alone.”
AGW and greenhouse gas effect are two separate things. AGW is real and greenhouse gas effect and backradiation as you described are fiction. In other words, we still do not know how AGW actually occurs.
“AGW is real….we still do not know how AGW actually occurs.”
Nabil, I think you just won the “Confusion” award for this thread.
@Nabil Swedan…”In other words, we still do not know how AGW actually occurs”.
Therefore it’s real??? Sounds like the logic of alarmists.
We don’t know how gravity works but we can measure it. When we measure warming in the atmosphere, and we have no idea what causes it, as you have admitted, we blame it on humans.
Here’s more of the logic. The Earth went through a mini ice age (the Little Ice Age) for several hundred years, ending circa 1850. The global average became about 1 C cooler during the LIA. The Earth warmed up by about 1C therefore the warming was caused by anthropogenic warming.
More…the IPCC based it’s zero point for anthropogenic warming in the pre-Industrial Era, which was in the middle of the LIA, when the global average was 1C lower. According to the IPCC, the only force causing the ensuing warming was anthropogenic warming.
I agree with you it is confusing. But the simultaneous surface warming and carbon dioxide emission is unlikely to be a coincidence. We are the cause of the emission.
Nabil says “But the simultaneous surface warming and carbon dioxide emission is unlikely to be a coincidence.”
The “simultaneous warming” also coincides with the dramatic increase in cell phone usage. Maybe cell phones are causing “global warming”?
Or, would you prefer some actual science?
I guess not.
Regarding the warming of the last century, it came in two episodes: circa 1918- 1943 and circa 1980-2000.
We know what caused the last episode: reduced global cloud albedo hence increased insolation. This also warmed SST.
We don’t know what caused the earlier episode, but we do know that it was_not_CO2_.
And how do we know this? Because in 1918 the anthropogenic contribution to atmospheric CO2 was only about 20 ppm, as per ice core analysis (Law Dome, Anarctica, assuming pre-industrial CO2 at about 280 ppm.) Only the most rabid, foam-flinging AGW zealot would argue that 20 ppm of added CO2 would cause the warming episode beginning circa 1918.
No Gordon, the “compensation” Clausius talks about for the “ascending” heat transfer from cooler to warmer is simply the greater “descending” heat transfer from warmer to cooler. He is very specific on this.
And I am not cherry picking. This is the most detailed explanation from Clausius I have found (do you have anything more detailed?) and it is very clear that its intent is to head off misinterpretations from people like you.
You have obviously never done formal energy balance calculations on even simple systems, or you would not make ridiculous statements like claiming the greenhouse effect is “perpetual motion”. Whether you consider it a separate “back radiation” flow or a reduced outward flow from the surface, it results in less outward energy from the surface compared to inward energy, resulting in increased energy (and so temperature) of the surface.
“How do you slow down radiation from the surface which is traveling at close to the speed of light?” Simple, you absorb the radiation rather than let it pass. That’s the whole point!
Ed Bo says: “Whether you consider it a separate “back radiation” flow or a reduced outward flow from the surface, it results in less outward energy from the surface compared to inward energy, resulting in increased energy (and so temperature) of the surface.”
Ed, that is a common mistake make by many. At least you have company, wallowing in your pseudoscience.
Right, the great revolving perpetual motion machine of the AGW clowns. The cool object warms the warm object because the cool object is compensated by the warm object! Ha ha!
Ummmm, a system with a constant power input, whose output is reduced below the input (or with output matching input, has a 2nd power input added), will have its internal energy increase.
That is what the 1st LoT DEMANDS.
And the NET heat transfer from the 1st warmer body to the 2nd colder body is always positive, as the 2nd LoT DEMANDS.
So no 1st LoT “perpetual motion”, and no 2nd LoT “perpetual motion”.
@Ed Bo…”This is the most detailed explanation from Clausius I have found…”
You came into the middle of the discussion. He was explaining the clause about compensation. He states several times in the work you quoted that heat ‘by itself’ can only be transferred from a warmer body to a cooler body. In other places in the paper he refers to ‘by itself’ as ‘compensation’.
You really need to get into his explanation of heat engine cycles in which he explains in great detail why a heat transfer from cold to hot requires that the colder body be compensated for its loss of heat.
You can’t compensate the cooler body unless you introduce heat from an external source. In a refrigerator that is accomplished by using Hydro power to run a compressor, which compresses a refrigerant. Later, the compressed refrigerant expands in an expansion coil.
None of that is available in the atmosphere. It’s not possible in the atmosphere to extract heat from a colder body and use it to warm a warmer body.
I wish Roy would get that. He has argued against the use of positive feedback in climate models. He doesn’t seems sure as to why it is wrong but the 2nd law supplies him the perfect answer. Positive feedback cannot happen in the atmosphere.
Roy explained in another article that in climate science, positive feedback is a not-so-negative negative feedback. he seems to understand that only negative feedback can happen in the atmosphere but he doesn’t seem to get it that the 2nd law ensures that.
Clausius devised the 2nd law largely because Carnot had claimed there were no losses in a heat engine. Clausius proved there were losses and that lead to the 2nd law. In a lossy system with no amplification, you cannot have positive feedback.
Many people, including many alarmists, speak of positive feedback as if it is amplification. It is not, pf is only a part of an amplified system. It is a portion of the output signal in an amplified system fed back to the input ‘in phase’ with the input signals. During each cycle of amplification the output signal then increases exponentially.
You can control the exponential rise to a degree but you can’t stop it. That’s what is implied in Hansen’s tipping point theory but that can’t work because there is no amplifier. PF cannot amplify on its own.
Here it is:
Ed Bo says:
September 21, 2015 at 7:46 PM
No Gordon, the “compensation” Clausius talks about for the “ascending” heat transfer from cooler to warmer is simply the greater “descending” heat transfer from warmer to cooler. He is very specific on this.
Round and round she goes.
Gordon: You say, “Clausius devised the 2nd law largely because Carnot had claimed there were no losses in a heat engine.”
You are as mistaken about the history of science as about the science itself. Carnot claimed no such thing!
Clapeyron, trying to explain Carnot’s work, mistakenly thought that “heat” was conserved in a heat engine, that as much heat was rejected to the cold reservoir as was taken from the hot reservoir. But neither remotely thought that you could convert all of the heat from a reservoir into mechanical work. Carnot’s whole insight was to realize that you needed to reject at least a minimum amount of heat to a cold reservoir in a heat engine.
And I repeat, in the passage I cited, the “compensation” Clausius cites for heat transfer from cooler to warmer is just the greater heat transfer from warmer to cooler. There is NOTHING about work in that passage.
“How do you slow down radiation from the surface which is traveling at close to the speed of light?”
a) photons always travel at the speed of light.
b) simply put an atom or molecule with an absorption frequency equal to the photon’s frequency, and it will (yada yada) be absorbed. You don’t need to “slow down” radiation for that to happen.
c) How do you think ANY photon is ever absorbed?
Ed Bo says, September 20, 2015 at 7:49 PM:
“Those, like Gordon, who claim that Clausius asserted that there can be no spontaneous heat transfer at all from cold to hot, simply do not know what they are talking about.”
Says a guy that apparently wants to claim that “heat” can and does – on a regular basis – transfer not just from hot to cold, but also from cold to hot!
Have you by any chance picked up a textbook on thermodynamics over the last 60 years?
If you have, how is the “heat” in a heat transfer process (radiant or otherwise) defined in that/those textbook(s)? Is it defined as EM radiation simply moving from any object at any temperature to any other object at any temperature? Are all photons carriers of “heat”? Are any photons carriers of “heat”?
Or is “heat” in a heat transfer process specifically distinguished from the “energy” carried and/or contained by conceptual entities called ‘photons’ or ‘phonons’, or by real, physical entities such as molecules, in being a probabilistically averaged (macroscopic) quantity of energy flux? Meaning, it is the actual (as in observed, detected) unidirectional ‘transfer of energy’ from one object to another within a heat transfer process?
“Heat” in a heat transfer process, between two objects (or between an object and its surroundings) at different temperatures, ALWAYS (!!!!!) moves ONLY (!!!!!) from hot to cold. Unless there is work applied.
When Clausius talks about “heat” moving in both directions between objects at different temperatures, he is obviously referring to the opposite conceptual flows of ENERGY making up the “radiant heat”, the NET of these two conceptual flows, not to the net itself, which is the actual flux, moving one way only, from hot to cold; the “heat”. He simply still hadn’t figured out the terminology, separating between “energy” and “heat”. All heat is energy, but not all energy is heat.
And ONLY a transfer of “heat” [Q] can induce a temperature change in a system (disregarding “work” [W]). Clausius even derived the 1st Law to point this out:
dU = dQ – dW
If dW is zero, then dQ = dU, where dU is the change in the system’s “internal energy”, proportional to its change in temperature.
dQ is not just any energy transferred to the system. It is specifically and very strictly the NET energy transferred to the system. This is what Clausius meant by “compensation”. You cannot separate for instance an UWLWIR ‘flux’ from a DWLWIR ‘flux’ in a radiant heat transfer process. Neither operates independently of the other. They are two integrated conceptual parts of a whole. And that whole is the “radiant heat”.
This is why it makes no sense talking about DWLWIR from the atmosphere “warming” or “heating” the ocean. Because it is ALWAYS compensated by a larger upward ‘flux’ from the surface, meaning the actual transfer of radiant energy, the “radiant heat”, is going UP, not down. Which means radiative transfer between the surface and the atmosphere COOLS the surface, it doesn’t warm it. So DWLWIR to the surface can neither directly warm the surface (unless the air is indeed warmer than the surface below), nor directly provoke evaporation from it.
Why? Because you can’t speak of the DWLWIR ‘flux’ without automatically including the UWLWIR ‘flux’. If you do, then you are indeed fooling yourself into thinking that “heat” (in the modern sense of the word) can move freely both ways, from hot to cold and from cold to hot. That “heat” is just any energy flying about.
Kristian:
You ask: “Have you by any chance picked up a textbook on thermodynamics over the last 60 years?”
Why, yes I have, many in fact. And they ALL introduce the topic of radiation heat transfer with the concept of a two-way “radiant exchange” between bodies, making it clear that this is the real physical mechanism. This is understood down to the photon level, with each photon carrying energy of E=h*v.
You further ask: ” Is [heat] defined as EM radiation simply moving from any object at any temperature to any other object at any temperature?” Yes! In fact, all of the explanations I’ve seen in these texts use temperature descriptors like “T1” and “T2”, or “Ta” and “Tb”, with nothing to distinguish warmer from colder except different numerical values.
You can debate the semantics of whether the individual one-way radiant fluxes are “heat”, as Clausius called them, or just “energy”, but it is just semantics, and makes no difference to the result of the analysis.
Oh, and if you have any familiarity at all with opto-electronics, you will realize that the evidence for quantized radiative energy (“photons”) is every bit as strong as the evidence for quantized electrical charge (“electrons”). Both have funky quantum properties, but that is no reason to reject them as unreal.
The concept of net “heat flow” or “heat flux” is just a convenient metaphor, dating back to the old caloric theory days. It’s useful, but there is nothing physical flowing in a single direction. Yes, net heat flow is always from warmer to cooler (when no work is involved).
But with an unchanged power input to a system, a reduced net output (whether you just consider the net or compute the difference between gross flows) leads to increasing energy in the system, usually manifesting itself as increased temperature. And even though the net metaphorical “heat flow” is from the warmer surface to the cooler atmosphere, this net flow is less than what the net heat flow would be from surface direct to deep space. And with unchanged solar input, this means that the surface is warmer with an absorbing, radiating atmosphere than without.
So I see you’re in effect asking to be spoonfed.
Listen, when Clausius talks about “compensation”, what he’s referring to is the simple fact that you can never speak of an actual (macroscopically observed) transfer of energy making the receiving system warmer upon absorption moving from cold to hot, because there will ALWAYS be a concurrent, opposite and larger conceptual ‘flux’ moving the other way, from hot to cold. You cannot separate the two. They are fundamentally integrated into ONE physically detectable transfer: the “HEAT” (in radiative heat transfer terminology often just called the “net flux”).
Which is to say: Radiation from a cold object or cold surroundings to a warmer object can NEVER raise the temperature of (warm, heat) that object. The warmer object ALWAYS cools radiatively to the colder object/surroundings, because the warmer object itself, in this conceptual/theoretical setup, will always emit more radiation than it absorbs, and so its “internal energy” will always be observed to go down, not up.
You say:
“You can debate the semantics of whether the individual one-way radiant fluxes are “heat”, as Clausius called them, or just “energy”, but it is just semantics, and makes no difference to the result of the analysis.”
No, it is not just semantics. Because the “heat” in a heat transfer process is very strictly defined as the energy transferred from the warmer object to the cooler object by virtue of the temperature difference between them. In a conceptual radiant heat transfer, this will always be the “net”, never any of the individual theoretical ‘fluxes’.
Why is this important to bear in mind?
Because only a transfer of energy as “heat” [Q] (disregarding “work” done [W]) can change the temperature of a system (either cooling or warming). Not radiation itself.
“Heat” does not move both ways inside a heat transfer, Bo. Period. This is Thermodynamics 101, Bo.
If you keep on insisting that it can and does, you’re only proving yourself as a complete dilettante.
Kristian:
I see that any problem more complicated than two bodies isolated from the rest of the universe is too difficult for you to grasp.
Let’s first do the simple problem you can handle, with bodies A and B in radiative exchange, but isolated from the rest of the universe. If Ta > Tb, the radiative energy flow from A to B (what Clausius called the “descending heat transfer”) will always be greater than the radiative energy flow from B to A (what Clausius called the “ascending heat transfer”) and the two bodies will reach the same steady state temperature in between Ta and Tb.
But now add a separate steady power input to body A. It will reach a steady-state temperature when its NET heat transfer to cooler body B matches its power input.
Next, we increase the temperature of body B to Tb’, which is still less than Ta. The NET transfer from A to B is decreased, which means that A’s power input is greater than its power output, so its internal energy and temperature increase.
This happens DESPITE the fact that the NET heat transfer between A and B is always from A to B, from warmer to cooler.
That wasn’t so hard, was it?
Ed Bo says, September 23, 2015 at 8:14 AM:
“But now add a separate steady power input to body A. It will reach a steady-state temperature when its NET heat transfer to cooler body B matches its power input.
Next, we increase the temperature of body B to Tb’, which is still less than Ta. The NET transfer from A to B is decreased, which means that A’s power input is greater than its power output, so its internal energy and temperature increase.
This happens DESPITE the fact that the NET heat transfer between A and B is always from A to B, from warmer to cooler.”
Bo, what is this? Don’t include me in the group of people who don’t know how insulation works. I haven’t said anything about the ultimate effect of a warm atmosphere on top of a solar-heated planetary surface. All I’ve said is that “heat” does not travel both ways in a heat transfer, like you very clearly seem to be claiming. Which tells me that you simply don’t know the common thermodynamic definition of “heat”.
The heated object cools to the insulating layer wrapped around it. However, the whole principle of insulation says that the heated object cools more slowly to the insulating layer than to the surroundings outside the insulating layer.
That’s what an insulating layer does. No more, no less. It makes LESS ENERGY move as “heat” from the warmer object to the cooler surroundings. You seem to think that insulation works by the insulating layer being warmer than the outside surroundings, thereby sending MORE ENERGY towards the warmer object, and that this extra energy should also be counted as “heat”. Which is utterly ridiculous, and is what I’m pointing out. Stop spouting nonsense, Bo. And learn som basic thermodynamics.
Only the net transfer (“heat” [Q], “work” [W]) affects the system temperature, not the individual conceptual ones. If the theoretical UWLWIR ‘flux’ from the global surface of the Earth remains unchanged and the equally theoretical DWLWIR ‘flux’ from the global atmosphere increases, that does NOT mean that the atmosphere heats the surface some more. It means that less “heat” escapes the surface via radiation. The surface cools more slowly by radiative transfer. And if the solar input then also stays constant, and the conductive and evaporative losses too, then the surface temperature will be forced to rise.
But that is NOT the cooler atmosphere HEATING the warmer surface, Bo. If you think this is solely about semantics, then your understanding of physical relationships and processes is worse than I thought.
Kristian, you said: “And if the solar input then also stays constant, and the conductive and evaporative losses too, then the surface temperature will be forced to rise.”
So you agree that in an atmosphere with Green House Gasses the temperature will be higher than without GHGs, all else being the same. You say that is because the heat transfer out of the surface is less than the solar input and the surface temperature must rise so that the heat transfer equals the solar input.
It seems that you and Ed Bo agree that the net heat flow is less and the temperature will rise due to GHGs but you don’t agree with the physical mechanism that Ed is giving so what do you think is happening?
One thing about this interesting discussion is that the atmosphere and surface are treated as cold and hot reservoirs only. There is more to it: The atmosphere is a system as well and possesses both internal energy and potential energy. The potential energy is external work of gravity available at the disposal of the atmosphere. It can provide the compensation required to transfer energy from the atmosphere to the surface.
Check the literature, the surface is warming, the upper atmosphere is cooling and its geopotential height are decreasing. It is clear that the external energy of gravity is driving the heat from the atmosphere to surface. It is a refrigeration cycle. This is what is going on.
Greenhouse gas effect has not explained anything, that is why this thread and a lot more like it are long.
Kristian:
Do you or do you not agree that with a constant pattern of solar power input, the earth’s surface with an atmosphere that provides DWLWIR has higher temperature levels than it would have with an atmosphere that provided no DWLWIR?
Rick says, September 23, 2015 at 12:38 PM:
“It seems that you and Ed Bo agree that the net heat flow is less and the temperature will rise due to GHGs but you don’t agree with the physical mechanism that Ed is giving so what do you think is happening?”
Firstly: There is no such thing as a “net heat flow” within a heat transfer between two systems at different temps (like surface and atmosphere). This is precisely what I am trying to explain to Ed Bo. There is – conceptually – only a “net ENERGY flow”, and this is equal simply to the “heat flow”. In this theoretical setup, the “heat” is the “net”. So when you say “net heat flow”, you’re basically saying “net net flow”. Redundant. Meaningless.
Secondly: Look, I’m not discussing rGHE mechanisms here. I only jumped into this thread upon noting Ed Bo’s insistence on stupidly arguing that “heat” moves both ways within a heat transfer. It doesn’t. By definition!
Let me ask you these three relatively straightforward questions, Rick:
#1
Do you think “heat” travels in both directions between two objects at different temperatures?
#2
Do you think that “back radiation” (DWLWIR) from the global atmosphere heats the global surface of the Earth, meaning “transferring energy as heat” to it, thereby raising its temperature directly?
#3
To you, what is “heat” and what does it do? What specifically distinguishes a transfer of energy AS HEAT?
Ed Bo says, September 23, 2015 at 2:13 PM:
“Do you or do you not agree that with a constant pattern of solar power input, the earth’s surface with an atmosphere that provides DWLWIR has higher temperature levels than it would have with an atmosphere that provided no DWLWIR?”
*Sigh*
Bo, do you think that “back radiation” (DWLWIR) is HEAT transferred from the cooler atmosphere to the warmer surface? And that it therefore HEATS the surface directly? Yes or no?
Kristian:
I asked you first. Why won’t you answer my very simple question?
Kristian:
You say, ” I only jumped into this thread upon noting Ed Bo’s insistence on stupidly arguing that “heat” moves both ways within a heat transfer.”
I was quoting Clausius, who explicitly stated that heat moves both ways within a heat transfer, “ascending” as well as “descending”.
Is it really your claim that Clausius was “stupidly arguing”?
@Ed Bo…”If Ta > Tb, the radiative energy flow from A to B (what Clausius called the “descending heat transfer”) will always be greater than the radiative energy flow from B to A (what Clausius called the “ascending heat transfer”)…”
Ed, what you are missing is that Clausius does not talk about ‘heat flow’ in radiative transfer. He does not imply at any time that heat flows, as does an energy field like IR. Heat energy can flow in a solid, and it can be measured. In gases and liquids the heat is transferred through convective forces although it can be transferred conductively between a surface and adjacent air molecules.
You can represent radiative IR flow with vectors and create a theoretical vector field, but the process is very complicated. You can’t do that with heat in radiative transfer because no heat is flowing. The heat in the hot body remains in the hot body and reduces as the body emits IR. By the same token, the cooler body’s atoms absorb IR from the warmer body, causing the temperature in the cooler body to rise. The warming/cooling is done in the respective hot and cold body, not through space.
If you calculate through experiment how much IR, under specific conditions that obey the 2nd law, is required to raise the heat content in a specific body, you could calculate how much IR is required to cause a certain rise in temperature in that body. However, you must be extremely careful to obey the 2nd law. You cannot loosely talk of net IR energy flow satisfying the 2nd law which demands that heat can only be transfered from a warmer body to a cooler body without compensation.
What Kristian seems to be saying is that the reverse process is not possible. You cannot radiate IR from a cooler body and have it warm the warmer body that warmed it. That would represent perpetual motion.
Clausius did not relate heat transfer to net energy balances, he was very specific about it. Planck referred to IR as ‘heat rays’ but he did not specify that the rays were heat. His associated reasoning makes it clear he meant IR.
I am not speaking with arrogance but you need to focus more on the physical issues here and not give up on it till you can visualize heat transfer as opposed to IR flow. The 2nd law has nothing to do with IR flow and suggestions by the likes of Rahmstorf that a net energy balance does not contradict the 2nd law is plainly wrong.
@Ed Bo…”I was quoting Clausius, who explicitly stated that heat moves both ways within a heat transfer, “ascending” as well as “descending””.
Ed…you added the part about heat moving both ways, not Clausius. He at no times in his treatise on heat claims that heat moves both ways. Like Planck, Clausius was strapped for an understanding of IR. Planck referred to IR as heat rays and it’s plain he meant the transfer mechanism not heat itself.
You have misinterpreted what he meant by ascending and descending heat. Like Planck’s heat rays, he is talking about IR, not heat.
Today we know much more about IR, that it’s EM, and that it has different properties than heat. EM does not have a property by which it can transport heat, but it can affect the electrons in orbitals in atoms. If the electrons absorb the IR, they jump to a higher energy band and the atom warms.
Thinking of EM between bodies as heat is wrong.
@nabil Swedan…”One thing about this interesting discussion is that the atmosphere and surface are treated as cold and hot reservoirs only. There is more to it: The atmosphere is a system as well and possesses both internal energy and potential energy”.
Of course the atmosphere is infinitely more complex than what the radiative theory alone can explain. The focus in this discussion is related to whether the AGW theory contradicts the 2nd law. That’s essentially what we are debating, whether heat can be transferred from a cooler atmosphere (essentially GHGs) to a warmer surface that is claimed in the AGW theory to have warmed it.
“Check the literature, the surface is warming…”
The IPCC admitted in AR5 that we have been experiencing a warming hiatus since 1998. Since no further warming has occurred in the meantime, according to UAH, we are coming up to 18 years without a warming trend. In fact, based on NOAA satellite data, which is processed at UAH, Dr. John Christy is on record as stating there has been little or no warming the past 33 years.
I think that’s proof that GHGs are not warming the surface.
“It is clear that the external energy of gravity is driving the heat from the atmosphere to surface. It is a refrigeration cycle. This is what is going on”.
I think you have to be a bit careful here. It’s not heat that is being driven to the surface, it is molecules of air being compressed by gravity that are 98% nitrogen and oxygen. Of course, heat is related to those atoms. If you cram more molecules of air into a tighter space, the temperature goes up as the collisions between molecules increase.
All CO2, which is 96% from natural sources like vegetation and the oceans, makes up only 0.04% of atmospheric gases. ACO2, based on an overall CO2 density of 390 ppmv, makes only about 0.001% of atmospheric gases. That comes from the IPCC and includes all anthropogenic CO2…all the gigatonnes of it.
The IPCC admit in AR4, I think it is (maybe TAR), that ACO2 is a small fraction of natural CO2. How can such piddly amounts of a gas contribute anything to the overall atmosphere?
Refrigeration requires external power to drive a compressor, to compress a special refrigerant, which later expands in an evapouration unit. You can’t just compress air molecules with gravitational force and get refrigeration.
In a refrigerator, heat is extracted from a cooler area and vented to a warmer room through evapouration coils. There’s nothing like that happening in the atmosphere. Heat is not extracted from a cooler atmosphere and transferred to a warmer surface.
Think about that. Short wave solar radiation heats the surface. Atoms and molecules in the surface absorb photons of short wave energy, causing them to warm. However, that warming is immediately transferred to adjacent atoms/molecules deeper in the surface or oceans.
All bodies with a temperature higher than zero Kelvin will radiate energy to the atmosphere. If the Sun got turned off, the surface would continue radiating till it reached the approximately 0K of space. However, as it radiates and cools, the surface temperature is replenished by solar energy till an equilibrium is reached.
The absorbed solar energy is not immediately radiated. There is a time factor between the surface warming and it radiating to the atmosphere. That allows the surface to warm till an equilibrium is reached. We don’t need a greenhouse theory to explain that.
Many parts of the world, like the west coast of Canada and the west coast of Europe are warmed by warm ocean currents from the Caribbean (Gulf Stream) and Japan (the Japanese Current). Vancouver on the west coast of Canada remains at a moderate temperature during the winter while Regina on the prairies cools to -50C at times. Of course, that cooling is augmented by freezing air from the Arctic.
The point is that the Earth’s atmosphere has had natural CO2 levels much higher than the present 0.04% and nothing drastic has happened. As the IPCC has claimed, ACO2 is a small fraction of natural CO2, so why should it cause a catastrophic warming that its counterpart, natural CO2, could not cause at nearly 100 times the concentration?
Gordon – “Ed, what you are missing is that Clausius does not talk about ‘heat flow’ in radiative transfer.”
Not exactly Gordon. Instead of “flow” Clausius’ approved translation uses the words “impart heat”. In Clausius time (1864) the concept of heat actually having a physical existence in a body had not yet been totally discarded by science despite J.P. Joule’s 1843 paper demonstrating heat did not have a physical existence so heat cannot flow as does a current of water. Google books makes it possible to download & search Clausius 1867 “The Mechanical Theory of Heat”.
Clausius many times uses the term heat synonymous with energy e.g. p. 113: “Q may be divided into three parts, of which the first is employed in increasing the heat actually existing in the body”. In modern times this part of Q has become the non-mechanical energy transfer by virtue of a temperature difference (U). W being the energy transfer due mechanical work in Q=U+W.
Clausius p. 224 for two bodies at different temperatures: “in the case of radiation, wherein mutual communication of heat takes place”. In that passage, in modern times, one should read “heat” as the term “energy” meaning Clausius agreed with 2 way radiative energy transfer between two bodies (which Planck much later confirmed). Clausius did indeed refer to this two way exchange as ascending and descending p. 117-18 * footnote “two connected transmissions of opposite characters, one ascending and the other descending”.
Gordon, if the earth’s surface radiated directly to space at near 0 K, given the same solar input, would it be colder than it is now?
If it would be colder why would it be colder?
@Ball4…”“Q may be divided into three parts, of which the first is employed in increasing the heat actually existing in the body”. In modern times this part of Q has become the non-mechanical energy transfer by virtue of a temperature difference (U). W being the energy transfer due mechanical work in Q=U+W”.
U is not a temperature difference it is the internal energy of the atoms in a body. According to Gerlich and Tsheushner, two experts in thermodynamics, that internal energy is the kinetic energy of the atoms, therefore the heat.
Clasius developed U as U = H + J, where H is the quantity of heat already in a body and J = the internal work done by atoms on each other due to internal forces. He referred to Q as the heat being transferred into and out of a body.
In differential form he wrote: dQ = dH +dL, where dH is an infinitesimal change in a body’s internal heat and dL is an infinitesimal change in work done on the body or by the body. Then dQ becomes an infinitesimal amount of heat entering or leaving the body.
W is work and there is an equivalence between work and heat. You cannot make them equal because they have different parameters but you can claim an equivalence between them.
Clausius used T for temperature and he defined entropy as the integral of the dq/T differentials in a cycle. He claimed that U was not essential for calculating external heat since it could be determined by calculating the work it did externally.
@Rick…”Gordon, if the earth’s surface radiated directly to space at near 0 K, given the same solar input, would it be colder than it is now?
If it would be colder why would it be colder?”
Rick, I am not following you. Around 0 K, radiation would likely stop. That implies that the Sun could not be radiating to the Earth. The only reason the Earth can radiate at it’s present 270+ C is that it has been warmed by solar energy.
Actually, you have to take into account the Earth’s own heat generating system deep in the Earth. Near the core, the Earth is apparently close to the temperature of the surface of the Sun. That heat has to seep up to the surface and be radiated as well.
I did not mean to imply that the Earth’s surface radiates straight to space. It’s far more complex according to Lindzen, who thinks convective currents carry heat to high in the atmosphere where it is radiated.
Let’s not forget that radiation is only one means of cooling the surface. The surface transfers heat directly to the atmosphere via conduction then transports it via convection. There’s also evapouration, which has a cooling effect.
Gordon – You use your own words incorrectly not conforming Clausius official translated words. Clausius was aware from J.P Joule’s 1843 paper (et.al.) that heat does not exist as a body separate from the KE of the ultimate particles of a body, Clausius p. 15: “It may be remarked further, that many facts have lately transpired which tend to overthrow the hypothesis that heat is itself a body, and to prove that it consists in a motion of the ultimate particles of bodies.”
If one interprets “motion of the ultimate particles of bodies” to mean your “kinetic energy of atoms” then you redundantly write “internal energy is the kinetic energy of the atoms, therefore the heat” which is equivalent to writing: “internal energy is the kinetic energy of the atoms, therefore the kinetic energy of the atoms.”
In Clausius work wherever the term “heat” is used one can under this assumption substitute your words: “kinetic energy of the atoms.” for Clausius “motion of the ultimate particles of bodies”.
“Clasius developed U as U = H + J, where H is the quantity of heat already in a body”
Means in Clausius terms: H is the quantity of kinetic energy of the atoms already in a body. J would be the energy in producing the mechanical interior work (p*V). Then W is the energy in producing the exterior mechanical work. U changes by virtue of a non-mechanical temperature difference thru H 0th law) whereas J & W change by virtue of mechanical work p*V, f*d (1st law).
“Then dQ becomes an infinitesimal amount of heat entering or leaving the body.”
This makes no sense as is equivalent to “Then dQ becomes an infinitesimal amount of kinetic energy of atoms entering or leaving the body.” Atoms are not entering or leaving a body during zeroth law energy transfer, nor in 1st law J,W.
“He claimed that U was not essential for calculating external heat..”
This also makes no sense as is equivalent “He claimed that U was not essential for calculating external kinetic energy of atoms”.
Atoms of a body are not external. In this manner all sorts of misuses of Clausius heat term can be identified in the words of yourself et. al.
My main point is quote Clausius exactly, he uses heat term correctly, always interchangeable with “kinetic energy of the atoms”. Many modern authors do also, an exception being G&T where they do not use Clausius “heat” term correctly – according to Clausius work I cited.
Gordon, I guess my question wasn’t clearly stated.
I was asking if the surface ,warmed by the Sun, with an atmosphere but no IR absorbing gasses so that the heated surface would radiate directly to space (space being at about 3 K) would the surface be colder than it’s present 270+ C?
My understanding of the situation:
If there were no IR absorbing/radiating gasses (no CO2, no water vapor, no other GHGs) in the atmosphere a convectively warmed atmosphere could not radiate to space. The surface would radiate directly to space and the earth’s energy balance would be (Sun+core_heat = Surface_radiation). Given that the energy input would be the same as now, surface temperature would only be a function of the Stefan-Boltzmann Law (Sun+core_heat = sigma*T^4). Calculating the surface temperature with the above equation gives about a 33deg C lower surface temperature than we have now. Why?
Do you see any problems with my understanding?
Gordon: I’m sorry, but you have the reading comprehension of a third grader, and you are blatantly contradicting yourself.
You say, “Clausius does not talk about ‘heat flow’ in radiative transfer. He does not imply at any time that heat flows, as does an energy field like IR. Heat energy can flow in a solid, and it can be measured” and “He at no times in his treatise on heat claims that heat moves both ways.”
Hogwash!
Clausius explicitly is talking about both radiative and conductive heat transfer when he says, “in the immediate interchange of heat between two bodies by conduction and radiation, the warmer body never receives more heat from the colder one than it imparts to it…” and “On considering the results of such processes more closely, we find that in one and the same process heat may be carried from a colder to a warmer body and another quantity of heat transferred from a warmer to a colder body without any other permanent change occurring”.
He is clearly talking abou bi-directional heat flow in both conductive and radiative transfer. There is no other reasonable way to interpret what he is saying. You may not like his terminology, but you are just arguing semantics (unless you claim that you have found a fundamental error in Clausius’ analysis).
But then you admit he does talk about bi-directional heat transfer when you say, “You have misinterpreted what he meant by ascending and descending heat. Like Planck’s heat rays, he is talking about IR, not heat.” So apparently he does say what you earlier said he didn’t, but he just doesn’t know what he’s talking about!
@Ed Bo…”Clausius explicitly is talking about both radiative and conductive heat transfer when he says, “in the immediate interchange of heat between two bodies by conduction and radiation, the warmer body never receives more heat from the colder one than it imparts to it…”
You talk about my ability with comprehension then you cherry pick a quote…twice…making no reference to where you found it or in which context it was said.
Personally, I think you’re making it up.
On page 92 of the Mechanical theory of Heat, he claims:
“He [referring to himself, Clausius, as the author] thereupon propounded the following as a fundamental principle: .. Heat cannot, of itself, pass from a colder to a hotter body.”
So please take the nonsense you have written in your last reply to me and stick it in a dark place. The quote above is the basis of the 2nd law.
He goes on to explain what he means by ‘of itself’, which means compensation. The crux of the explanation that follows between the asterisks is this:
“It is true that by such a process (as we have seen by going through the original cycle in the reverse direction) heat may be carried over from a colder into a hotter body: our principle however declares that simultaneously with this passage of heat from a colder to a hotter body there must either take place an opposite passage of heat from a hotter to a colder body, or else some change or other which has the special property that it is not reversible…”
Note the word ‘simultaneous’. If heat is extracted from a cooler body, as in a refrigerator, the heat removed must simultaneously be replaced by heat from a hotter source.
I advised you to look up the explanations he offers wrt to the ‘cycle’ he mentions above.
*********
The words’ of itself,”here used for the sake of brevity, require, in order to be completely understood, a further explanation,as given in various parts of the author’s papers. In the first place they express the fact that heat can never, through conduction or radiation, accumulate itself in the warmer body at the cost of the colder. This, which was already known as respects direct radiation, must thus be further extended to cases in which by refraction or reflection the course of the ray is diverted and a concentration of rays thereby produced. In the second place the principle must be applicable to processes which are a combination of several different steps, such as e.g. cyclical processes of the kind described above. It is true that by such a process (as we have seen by going through the original cycle in the reverse direction) heat may be carried over from a colder into a hotter body: our principle however declares that simultaneously with this passage of heat from a colder to a hotter body there must either take place an opposite passage of heat from a hotter to a colder body, or else some change or other which has the special property that it is not reversible, except under the condition that it occasions, whether directly or indirectly, such an opposite passage of heat. This simultaneous passage of heat in the opposite direction, or this special change entailing an opposite passage of heat, is then to be treated as a compensation for the passage of heat from the colder to the warmer body; and if we apply this conception we may replace the words” of itself” by “without compensation,” and then enunciate the principle as follows:
” A passage of heat from a colder to a hotter body cannot take place without compensation.”
************
THERE IS NO PROCESS OF SIMULTANEOUS COMPENSATION AVAILABLE IN THE ATMOSPHERE.
In your cherry-picked passage about heat transfer, you are not understanding the difference between a colder INDEPENDENT heat source radiating at a hotter INDEPENDENT source. Two stars would fit that bill, with one hotter and one cooler. There is no such process in the atmosphere.
GHGs in the atmosphere are fully DEPENDENT on the surface for warming, according to AGW theory. In that case, IR radiated from the surface that warms the GHGS when they absorb it, is radiated at a LOSS OF ENERGY on the surface. When the surface radiates IR, it cools and its kinetic energy decreases.
Before GHGs can raise the temperature of the surface, those losses must be made up. The losses are humungous compared to the pithy amount of IR allegedly back-radiated to the surface. Anthropogenic CO2 is only a small fraction of the 0.04% of atmospheric gases represented by natural CO2, based on a concentration of 390 ppmv.
The 2nd law was created by Clausius partly because Carnot had claimed there were no losses in a heat engine. Clausius proved there are losses and the atmosphere, as a heat engine, has losses.
That’s why it is nonsense that heat back-radiated from the atmosphere can super-heat the surface beyond what it is heated by solar energy.
There’s no point cherry-picking Clausius if you don’t have a clue what the 2nd law is about.
@Rick…”My understanding of the situation:
If there were no IR absorbing/radiating gasses (no CO2, no water vapor, no other GHGs) in the atmosphere a convectively warmed atmosphere could not radiate to space. The surface would radiate directly to space and the earth’s energy balance would be (Sun+core_heat = Surface_radiation). Given that the energy input would be the same as now, surface temperature would only be a function of the Stefan-Boltzmann Law (Sun+core_heat = sigma*T^4). Calculating the surface temperature with the above equation gives about a 33deg C lower surface temperature than we have now. Why?
Do you see any problems with my understanding?”
Rick…my personal view is that GHGs do nothing. I like to use the analogy that if a real greenhouse was made up of 100 panes of glass, based on the 1% of the atmosphere that is GHGs, you would need to remove 99 panes of glass from a real greenhouse to get the equivalent of the atmosphere. Furthermore, the amount of ACO2 in the atmosphere would be represented by a tiny sliver of glass in one corner of a frame.
With regard to your statement that a convectively warmed atmosphere would not radiate to space, Lindzen has already answered that in a paper.
http://www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/230_TakingGr.pdf
He claims that convectively transferred heat DOES radiate to space and he explains it in detail. He further suggests, again too kindly, that radiative theory is over-blown.
If you look at why AGWers adopted radiative theory it’s because it is easy to program the same equations you used into a climate model. Kiehl-Trenberth used it in their heat budget to estimate surface radiation.
I think both the AGW and greenhouse theories are nonsense. Lindzen claims the greenhouse theory is over-simplified and I think he is being kind.
Gerlich and Tscheuschner (both experts in thermodynamics) have addressed your problem of a 33C warming due to an atmosphere. They think the figures used to justify it are not supported. They suggest in a manner that the figures were drawn out of a hat. In the theory of the 33C warming due to an atmosphere, nothing is mentioned about oceans.
It’s heavy reading in places but they meticulously debunk all arguments supporting a greenhouse effect and the AGW.
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0707/0707.1161v4.pdf
Gordon – Substituting in Clausius own words in your clip:”.. Heat cannot, of itself, pass from a colder to a hotter body” results in “motion of the ultimate particles of bodies cannot, of itself, pass from a colder to a hotter body..”.
This shows your (et.al.) lack of understanding of the correct use of Clausius term for heat; Clausius intention here is not to convey only one way radiative energy transfer exists.
For clarification see Clausius p. 224 for two bodies at different temperatures: “in the case of radiation, wherein mutual communication of heat takes place” i.e. his meaning is “in the case of radiation, wherein mutual communication of motion of the ultimate particles of bodies takes place..”. Planck built on this concept in his early 1900s writings.
For practice substitute Clausius own words correctly for heat term in your written words to find if this makes any sense at all:
”That’s why it is nonsense that heat back-radiated from the atmosphere can super-heat the surface beyond what it is heated by solar energy.”
Gordon – ”Gerlich and Tscheuschner (both experts in thermodynamics) have addressed your problem of a 33C warming due to an atmosphere.”
As I wrote, G&T do not use Clausius heat term correctly – I mean exactly as Clausius wrote – so they need to improve their understanding of thermodynamics. The 33C is from observed measurements with reasonably precise, calibrated instrumentation and basic 1LOT analysis using Clausius & Planck’s own words exactly as they intended.
@Ball4…”If one interprets “motion of the ultimate particles of bodies” to mean your “kinetic energy of atoms” then you redundantly write “internal energy is the kinetic energy of the atoms, therefore the heat” which is equivalent to writing: “internal energy is the kinetic energy of the atoms, therefore the kinetic energy of the atoms.”
I think you are confusing kinetic energy with a form of energy. KE is energy in motion…any energy in motion. The question you have to ask in a solid is this: what kind of energy is the KE representing?
If you have a hunk of pure iron in which all the iron molecules are joined via covalent bonding, the atoms will vibrate in place. If you consider the path of vibration to be a straight line where the atom moves from L to -L on one half cycle, and L to L+ on the other half cycle, you have two points where the atom stops to change direction, at -L and +L.
Those points are described by potential energy and the points in between as kinetic energy. The temperature of a body is defined by that motion and temperature measures what energy…heat?.
I have never claimed that heat is a substance. I have no idea what it is just as I have no idea what energy is, nor does anyone else. We do know that energy takes different forms and that each form is pertinent to a specific set of conditions.
Thermal energy is one of those forms and it is related to atomic motion. Electromagnetic energy is related to energy given off atoms when an electron drops from a higher energy orbital to a lower energy orbital.
Since the heat energy is internal to the body’s atoms, it is also the body’s internal energy. So, heat is the internal energy and the kinetic energy.
“Means in Clausius terms: H is the quantity of kinetic energy of the atoms already in a body. J would be the energy in producing the mechanical interior work (p*V). Then W is the energy in producing the exterior mechanical work…”
Why are you confusing the issue with reference to all these different energies? When an atom vibrates, it is doing work, and work is equivalent to heat. Kinetic energy is related to work, and that’s why in this case the KE is the heat, which is equivalent to the work done by the atoms.
“Then dQ becomes an infinitesimal amount of kinetic energy of atoms entering or leaving the body.” Atoms are not entering or leaving a body during zeroth law energy transfer, nor in 1st law J,W….”
I did not say they were. We know that heat can be transferred, and as thermal energy, it is transferred. That does not mean atoms have to leave the body in order for heat to be transferred.
It’s the same in an electrical circuit. Electrical charge is transferred atom to atom without the atoms having to leave where they are fixed in a conductor. Electrical charge can be arced between bodies without atoms leaving either body. In many ways, I think there is a parallel between heat and electrical charge.
We have no idea what energy is. No one can describe it. Thermal energy can travel through a body, atom to atom, through a gas, by collision, and through space by IR as the transporting agent.
No matter what the conditions, heat is related to atomic motion. In radiative transfer, kinetic energy does not flow through space between bodies, it is transferred via photons of IR. Atoms with higher KE levels in hotter bodies transmit photons that are absorbed by atoms in a cooler body, raising the KE in the cooler bodies, causing them to warm. At the same time, the hotter body cools due to the radiation unless it’s KE is replenished.
It’s the same with electrical energy. We know that electrons can jump from atomic bond to atomic bond around a conductor but the actual energy is transferred much more quickly by charge. We have no idea what charge is either. It’s a phenomenon in a circuit by which electricity is transferred through a circuit at nearly the speed of light. Electrons in a conductor don’t move that fast.
All I was saying wrt to dQ, was that Clausius used it in reference to heat gained or lost by a body.
Gordon – “I think you are confusing kinetic energy with a form of energy.”
KE=1/2*m*v^2 is a form of energy Gordon.
“temperature measures what energy…heat?”
Temperature is not heat Gordon, temperature is proportional to, and scaled from, the mean KE in the “motion of the ultimate particles of bodies”.
“Why are you confusing the issue with reference to all these different energies?”
After Clausius p. 113: “Q. may be divided into three parts..”
“When an atom vibrates, it is doing work..”
No, the mean particle displacement is zero in the solid lattice, no mechanical work. This mean particle energy can be increased by virtue of a temperature difference, no mechanical work needed.
“We know that heat can be transferred, and as thermal energy, it is transferred.”
No, the particles kinetic energies are “imparted” per Clausius to another object, the particles do not transfer & since the heat in an object is “motion of the ultimate particles of bodies” then heat cannot transfer. Only their energy can transfer to another object.
“It’s the same in an electrical circuit.”
No. Electrons have substance, are objects, so electrons can flow as a current, heat cannot flow as a current as heat is not an object, has no current. Only energy can flow.
“We have no idea what energy is.”
No, E=m*c^2, KE=1/2*m*v^2, PE= mgh, E=m*c^2 are all examples of ideas, there are many more ideas such as chemical energy.
“All I was saying wrt to dQ, was that Clausius used it in reference to heat gained or lost by a body.”
Clausius wrote dQ is the infinitesimal change in “motion of the ultimate particles of bodies” gained or lost by a body thru mechanical and non-mechanical means (3 ways). He completely avoided the term “flow” in his book in favor of “impart”.
Hi Ball4,
You are correct when you state that the ambient atmosphere temperature is seldom steady to the tenth degree Celsius, or even to a half degree. So, why do you quibble about two tenths or a half degree when claiming the frost point cannot be observed. And I wonder how whoever ever determined its determination was in error if it cannot be determined with fair precision (accuracy?)? I never even suggested it need to be determined. I could go on but it seems that Nibal is correct. Ball4 goes round and round.
Good bye, Jerry
@Ball4…”As I wrote, G&T do not use Clausius heat term correctly – I mean exactly as Clausius wrote – so they need to improve their understanding of thermodynamics…”
Good grief, they are both PhDs and work in the field of thermodynamics. Gerlich apparently passed away recently but he taught thermodynamics mathematics. They understand Clausius perfectly, it’s you who has misinterpreted what he was getting at.
In a previous article you wrote: “This shows your (et.al.) lack of understanding of the correct use of Clausius term for heat; Clausius intention here is not to convey only one way radiative energy transfer exists”.
You seem to think that radiation has to be exchanged between bodies of different temperature. Bodies in the temperature range of the atmosphere radiate IR … period. They are not interchanging radiation with other bodies, they are simply radiating isotropically. That’s what they do.
When atoms in a body emit infrared radiation they are not sending it to a specific body. However, if a body intercepts a small angle of the radiation it can absorb it or it might not. According to Bohr, it depends on the intensity and frequency of the radiation.
Hydrogen, for example, emits and absorbs in discrete frequency bands. Any energy outside those bands is not absorbed.
It’s not clear why you insist that radiation from a cooler body must be absorbed by atoms that have a higher kinetic energy. It’s not about 2 way absorption/emission, there is nothing in physics says that has to happen in all circumstances where bodies of different temperatures are in proximity.
Clausius was not implying one way radiation and that mistake was made by Halpern et al when they offered a paper in rebuttal to the the G&T paper on the greenhouse effect. Halpern at al mistook IR radiation for heat and they did so based on the G&T claim that heat could only be transferred from a hotter body to a cooler body.
Much of the radiation theory of Kircheoff and Boltzmann is aimed at theoretical blackbody radiators. The closest thing we have to that theoretical concept are stars. They have such high temperatures they behave somewhat like blackbodies.
However, stars are so hot that electrons and protons get stripped off the nucleus and can be ejected as a solar wind. That’s a far cry from conditions here on Earth where IR is radiated from the surface and absorbed by very rare anthropogenic gases.
On the one hand, you have stars at millions of degrees C radiated to space. Who knows what happens when a cooler star radiates and its radiation is intercepted by a hotter star. And who cares?
We are not talking about such super-high temperatures we are talking about a planet’s surface that is theorized to average 15C. That surface is furthermore theorized to radiate IR to molecules of water vapour and CO2, the latter being extremely rare wrt the flux emitted from the surface.
So, the surface is an independent radiator and the GHGs become dependent. If they do back-radiate IR to the surface, it’s not the same as independent radiators like stars intercepting the energy of each other.
Heat transfer in the atmosphere must obey the 2nd law since there is an alleged system in the AGW theory. In that system, heat cannot be transferred from the cooler atmosphere to the warmer surface THAT WARMED THE GHGs.
You can’t reheat the surface using the same heat it transferred to GHG AT A LOSS. And if that was possible, the GHG back-radiation would have to make up the losses from the surface that warmed them.
We are talking perpetual motion and positive feedback that both contradict the 2nd law.
Gordon – “(G&T) understand Clausius perfectly, it’s you who has misinterpreted what he was getting at.”
G&T insist heat flows when Clausius’ book never uses the word flow and explains why heat cannot flow p. 15. Remember I am using Clausius words not mine; according to Clausius heat is not a body, no substance, so no current. G&T figures 30, 31, 32: Energy transfers, heat does not, the ultimate particles stay in the body.
“Hydrogen, for example, emits and absorbs in discrete frequency bands. Any energy outside those bands is not absorbed.”
Not according to Clausius and Planck papers Gordon. According to Planck distribution & S-B formulae, hydrogen emits (and absorbs) at all frequencies, at all temperatures, all the time. The intensity formulae are not ever zero Gordon.
“It’s not clear why you insist that radiation from a cooler body must be absorbed by atoms that have a higher kinetic energy.”
Incident radiation is reflected, absorbed and transmitted Gordon. Incident photons live on or they die.
“It’s not about 2 way absorption/emission, there is nothing in physics says that has to happen in all circumstances where bodies of different temperatures are in proximity.”
Yes, there is according to Clausius and Planck testings. Your words are contrary to Clausius statement I clipped 6:47am on p. 224, perhaps you want to challenge Clausius? You will need a proper test as he relied on many tests to support his written conclusions.
“Heat transfer in the atmosphere must obey the 2nd law..”
According to Clausius, heat does not transfer Gordon, you make the same mistake as G&T: only energy transfers. Energy transfer obeys the 2nd law as any transfer process must increase universe entropy. (An idealized, reversible process can hold universe entropy constant but these processes do not exist in nature).
“In that system, heat cannot be transferred from the cooler atmosphere to the warmer surface THAT WARMED THE GHGs. You can’t reheat the surface using the same heat it transferred to GHG AT A LOSS”
You again misuse Clausius work & draw a mistaken conclusion Gordon. Energy transfers, heat does not transfer according to Clausius. In the case of a planet, radiation transfers energy both ways per Clausius p. 224 – between two objects at different temperatures – surface and atmosphere. The gases in an atm. cannot by themselves warm the surface, they don’t use up a fuel as does the sun. More radiatively active gases enable the sun increase the temperature of the L&O&air near surface above less gas though other processes may overpower.
@Ball4…”Energy transfers, heat does not, the ultimate particles stay in the body”.
Heat is energy. The heat energy, which is the kinetic energy of the atoms in a body, does not move through the air, but the energy is transferred between bodies via the emission and absorption of IR.
You don’t seem to understand the process by which IR is emitted and absorbed by atoms. A body with its atoms at a higher level of KE is hotter than a body where the KE of the atoms is at a lower relative level. The atoms in a hotter body emit IR of a higher intensity, and average frequency than a cooler body.
Heat does not have to leave a hotter body to be transferred, in fact, when the hotter body emits IR it cools. When atoms in the cooler body absorbs higher intensity/frequency IR emissions from a hotter body, it warms. Heat does not have to travel through the air, the IR does that.
Radiative heat transfer is accomplished by IR emission and absorption affecting atoms in a body. It’s the absorption and emission that causes the heat to rise and lower, but the IR is NOT the heat. Even though IR is the transferring agent, comparing IR (EM) to heat is like comparing apples to oranges.
The thing you need to understand is that the heat and the IR are different energies. The heat is the kinetic energy of atoms in a body and the IR is EM that is emitted when an electron at a higher energy level in an atom drops to a lower energy level.
Because they are different energies, you cannot derive the net IR and claim it as heat, or that it satisfies the 2nd law. The 2nd law applies to the heat only, not the IR.
“I said, ““Hydrogen…emits and absorbs in discrete frequency bands. Any energy outside those bands is not absorbed.””
You said, “Not according to Clausius and Planck papers Gordon. According to Planck distribution & S-B formulae, hydrogen emits (and absorbs) at all frequencies, at all temperatures, all the time”.
Here’s a site explaining Hydrogen emissions. Note that H emits only in discrete bands that are named based on their wavelengths.
http://www.chemguide.co.uk/atoms/properties/hspectrum.html
If what you claimed was true, radiotelescopes could not distinguish H from and other element (in a star), which emit with known signature wavelengths. In fact, that’s how they measure Doppler shifts in stars, leading to red and blue shifts in frequency spectra. If your theory was correct, the Big Bang theory would be kaput, which I think it should be anyway.
“According to Clausius, heat does not transfer Gordon, you make the same mistake as G&T: only energy transfers. Energy transfer obeys the 2nd law as any transfer process must increase universe entropy”.
I just had a flash…you are Doug.
Heat is energy and Clausius said it can be transferred. That’s where I got the notion of heat transfer. Energy transfers per se do not obey the 2nd law, only heat energy transfers. The 2nd law is a law from thermodynamics, which is a study of heat.
Clausius stated clearly about entropy that it can be part of a reversible process, in which case the net entropy is zero. Entropy only increases in an irreversible process.
Gordon – “Heat is energy…The heat is the kinetic energy of atoms in a body..”
Very good; Gordon now agrees with Clausius p. 15. Nice progress. No backsliding Gordon.
“Note that H emits only in discrete bands..”
Pay attention to this statement in your link Gordon: “There is a lot more to the hydrogen spectrum than the three lines you can see with the naked eye.” Precision testing at 1bar, room temperature shows matter emits at nonzero intensity at all frequencies, at all temperatures, all the time since the Planck curve is smooth & continuous and, by formula and test, intensity never = 0.0 and of course hydrogen is matter.
“Energy transfers per se do not obey the 2nd law, only heat energy transfers.”
Here Gordon backslides a bit since opening line says heat is energy so this means “only energy energy transfers” is redundant and nonsense. Test what you and Clausius et. al. write by substituting energy for heat (Clausius always means heat is the KE of the ultimate constituents in a body p. 15).
“Energy transfers per se do not obey the 2nd law..”
Clausius book p. 365: “The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum.” so all irreversible energy transfer processes (conductive, convective, radiative) must increase universe entropy. Reversible processes do not exist in nature as Clausius explains by way of Carnot: “production of work is not only due to an alteration in the distribution of (energy), but to an actual consumption thereof; and inversely, that by the expenditure of work (energy) may be produced.”
Gordon:
You accuse me of not citing my reference, of cherry picking, even of making it up. Not so!
Upthread, in a response to you, I included a lengthy quotation, and I carefully referenced it as:
Clausius, R., “The Mechanical Theory of Heat”, p. 117, 1867
The passage appeared much earlier in Clausius’ 4th memoir, but this cite is easier to find. The book is mostly an assemblage of his earlier writings, so there is overlap. The passage I cited is the most on point, where he is obviously taking great pains to try to head off misinterpretations like yours of his work.
The quotation you cite from page 92 makes the same point: “our principle however declares that simultaneously with this passage of heat from a colder to a hotter body there must either take place an opposite passage of heat from a hotter to a colder body”.
Note the use of the word “opposite”. He is obviously there talking about the simple “exchange” between two bodies, as is shown in textbooks around the world.
You further quote: “This simultaneous passage of heat in the opposite direction, or this special change entailing an opposite passage of heat, is then to be treated as a compensation for the passage of heat from the colder to the warmer body;”
which again makes my point. The compensation can just be the heat transfer from hot to cold. This is why I question your reading comprehension.
And you repeat your ridiculous assertion that: “The 2nd law was created by Clausius partly because Carnot had claimed there were no losses in a heat engine.”
If you understood the first thing about Carnot’s work, you would realize that Carnot’s great insight, the reason we celebrate him today, is that you CANNOT convert thermal energy to work without losses, that you must reject heat to a lower temperature level as part of the process. He even computed the absolute minimum of these required losses.
I don’t see how you can expect anyone to take you seriously when you spout such nonsense.
@Ed Bo…”Note the use of the word “opposite”. He is obviously there talking about the simple “exchange” between two bodies, as is shown in textbooks around the world”.
You have to use that statement in context with the overall message of the 2nd law that heat can only be transferred from a hotter body to a cooler body WITHOUT COMPENSATION.
The simultaneous transfer from a hotter body to a cooler body does not refer to a simple exchange of heat. There is no heat moving radiatively through the air between bodies of different temperatures …ever. There is a transfer of kinetic energy via IR. That process involves atomic theory and until you understand that theory you will never understand that the IR energy to which you refer is not heat(thermal)energy.
If you have a block of ice, how do you transfer heat from it to warm a room? A heat pump can extract heat from the ground to warm a room, but a heat pump is compensation driven by external power. You cannot just connect a tube from the ground into a house and heat a room.
The statement by Clausius is eminently clear, heat cannot by itself be transferred from a colder body to a warmer body. That is the 2nd law.
With regard to Carnot, he did claim that a heat engine had no losses, and much to his credit, he caught his gaffe and corrected himself. However, it was his claim that a heat engine had no losses that prompted Clausius to develop the 2nd law.
I wish you people who promote this nonsense that heat flows from a cooler body to a warmer body at the same time the opposite occurs would use some common sense. You are all thoroughly confused as to the difference between heat and IR.
How do you think a refrigerator works? Do you think one could work if no power was supplied to drive a compressor that compresses a special refrigerant?
Refrigeration is accomplished by changing the pressure in a gas so that it extracts heat at one pressure and emits it at another. Why bother with all that when, as you claim, it’s all part of a natural process of heat exchange?
Gordon – “There is no heat moving radiatively through the air between bodies of different temperatures …ever.”
Gordon correctly wrote 9:15pm heat is energy agreeing with Clausius. Now test Gordon by doing that substitution: “There is no energy moving radiatively through the air between bodies of different temperatures …ever.”
Big mistake uncovered. This is how one can ascertain what Gordon writes here (backsliding) is nonsense as IR (a form of EM energy) photons are born and some die in between bodies per Clausius p. 224 “in the case of radiation, wherein mutual communication of heat takes place”, the net energy “imparted” complying with Clausius 2nd law p.365. I urge Gordon to test his other statements in a similar manner to see if they agree with Clausius (hint: many more of Gordon’s et. al. statements are nonsense like this one according to Clausius actual words).
At the end of the day, observations are what count. There is no backradiation from the atmosphere to the surface. Those who claimed to have measured backradiation, they made a mistake in the experiment. They measured radiation from the surroundings or instrument housings and not from the atmosphere.
When the infrared thermometers are shielded from the surroundings and the shield is cooled close to zero absolute, the thermometer measures no downwelling radiation from the atmosphere. The claimed 330 watts per square meter of infrared backradiaiton simply do not exist. They infact cannot exist. The GHG hypothesis can have no place in the climate science based on observations and the laws of thermodynamics.
Nabil – “Those who claimed to have measured backradiation, they made a mistake in the experiment.”
You will not get far in science claiming mistakes were made in experiments that proved Clausius p. 224 “in the case of radiation, wherein mutual communication of heat takes place”, Clausius p. 15: “many facts..prove that (heat) consists in a motion of the ultimate particles of bodies” and Planck’s law.
Hi Nabil,
Hopefully, none of your clients, who know anything about cryogenic temperatures will read: “When the infrared thermometers are shielded from the surroundings and the shield is cooled close to zero absolute, the thermometer measures no downwelling radiation from the atmosphere.” The statement is true, but it is only true because any infrared thermometer near absolute zero could never be exposed to the atmosphere. As you state, it is (and must be) shielded from its surroundings.
Have good day, Jerry
@Ball4…””Gordon correctly wrote 9:15pm heat is energy agreeing with Clausius. Now test Gordon by doing that substitution: “There is no energy moving radiatively through the air between bodies of different temperatures …ever.””
You still don’t get it. HEAT ENERGY IS NOT EM ENERGY. IR is EM energy and it is NOT heat energy.
It is not correct, as Roy implied earlier, to classify the energy transferred between bodies as generic energy wrt the 2nd law. The 2nd law covers heat transfer only and demands that heat be transferred only from warm to cold without compensation. There are two different energies involved in radiative transfer and it is critical to specify which one when applying the 2nd law. IR energy does not apply to the 2nd law.
I have not contradicted a thing. I claimed heat energy does not travel through space in radiative heat transfer, it is IR that travels through space.
The fact that you don’t understand the difference suggests your understanding of basic physics is flawed. You are thoroughly confused with the difference between forms of energy and how they are transferred. You keep insisting that the energy moving between bodies of different temperatures is heat, but it is EM.
The heat in each body is relative to that body. You have it in your head that because heat energy is atoms in motion, that atoms have to leave a body in order for heat to be transferred. In radiative heat transfer, it is emitted IR that causes the heat to rise in one body and reduce in the emitting body.
Once again, IR is EM. It has different properties than heat. EM does not have heat as a property. EM transfers no heat. If EM does not contact matter there is no heat increase anywhere. Also, EM is a range of frequencies with specific intensities. It’s a broadband electromagnetic vibration that travels through space but has no relationship with heat until it contacts matter.
EM has no equivalent with work but heat does. Heat changes as temperature when atoms in a body increase their kinetic energy (i.e. velocity). EM has no temperature other than the colour temperature, which is an equivalent to the colour of steel heated till it glows.
IR between bodies in radiative transfer is not heat and it does not have the properties of heat. If the IR is absorbed by atoms in a body, it can increase the kinetic energy in the atoms which increases the heat. Until the IR is absorbed by the body, IR has no relationship with heat whatsoever.
The notion that a net energy flow of IR satisfies the 2nd law is flawed because people like you are confusing IR with heat, You regard a heat transfer between bodies as IR flowing both ways between bodies. That’s why you are hung up on the notion that heat is transferred from a cold body to a warm body. You think because IR flows from a cooler body and is intercepted by a warmer body that it must be warming the warmer body.
IR from a cooler body does not affect the temperature of a warmer body because it lacks the frequency and intensity to raise the KE in the atoms of the warmer body.
Gordon, you said, “IR from a cooler body does not affect the temperature of a warmer body because it lacks the frequency and intensity to raise the KE in the atoms of the warmer body.”
A few days ago I pointed out that all of the atoms in a body do not have the same KE, the KE the atoms has a distribution, some atoms have near zero KE and some have very high KE but the temperature of a body is proportional to the average KE of the atoms in the body. This is the basis of Kenitic Theory. So there is always an overlap in the KE of some of the atoms in a colder body with some of the atoms in the warmer body.
So if radiation from a high KE atom in a cold body strikes a low KE atom in a warm body it can increase the KE of the atom in the warm body. Of course more radiation from the warm body will find receptive atoms in the cold body than the other way around but energy will be flowing in both directions- the net energy will go from warm to cold.
@Rick…”So if radiation from a high KE atom in a cold body strikes a low KE atom in a warm body it can increase the KE of the atom in the warm body”.
Rick…when you make such a statement you must do so wrt heat within the confines of the 2nd law. Clausius stated clearly that heat cannot by itself be transferred from a cooler body to a warmer body.
What you are implying, in essence, is that radiation from a cooler body will be absorbed by atoms in a warmer body that have a lower KE. In that case, those lower KE atoms, which are cooler than the average, will warm. As they warm they will collide with atoms with a higher KE hence raising the temperature of the warmer body.
There are problems with this. For one, no one can single out and measure the KE of individual atoms, and the kinetic theory of gases recognizes that. Planck admitted that as well in his work on heat. Therefore, any suggestion that IR from a cooler body can affect atoms with lower KE in a warmer body is nothing but a thought experiment.
Secondly, what you are suggesting contradicts what Clausius has claimed, that heat cannot, without compensation, be transferred from a cooler body to a warmer body.
Ball4 is messing with this statement of Clausius by confusing statements made by Clausius. Both Clausius and Planck, who were not privy to a modern understanding of the nature of IR flow between bodies, but who seemed to understand it’s basic nature, referred to IR in terms of heat rays (Planck) or as heat exchange in the case of Clausius. Neither was referring to heat per se.
Clausius at no time implied that heat was being transferred in both directions and he explains that. He goes deeply into the operation of a theorized heat engine with phase drawings that show a heat engine at various phases of its warming/cooling cycle. He demonstrates in one of the drawings, that if you want to reverse the heat cycle, hence drawing heat from a cooler source and ultimately transferring it to a warmer source, that you must introduce another heat source to compensate the heat lost from the cooler source.
Ball4 is suggesting that Clausius is talking about a two way heat transfer and he said nothing of the kind.
Another problem with your statement is related to a statement by Bohr, that in order for energy to be absorbed into an electron, forcing it to rise to a higher energy state, increasing the KE of the atom, and its heat, the energy must have a specific frequency and intensity.
It may be possible for what you claim to happen if the relative temperatures of the bodies are close, I don’t know. However, in the surface/atmosphere model of AGW, the GHGs in the atmosphere are totally dependent on the surface as a source of IR.
Think that one through. If IR is emitted from the surface in a huge flux, from every nook and cranny on the surface and in the oceans, the IR represents a KE/heat loss at the surface. Without solar energy to replenish that loss, the Earth would cool to near 0 K.
No GHGs in the atmosphere could slow that process or stop it. The AGW theory is suggesting that a tiny amount of CO2 can absorb enough of that large flux emitted from the surface and feed it back so as to increase the surface temperature beyond the temperature it is maintained by solar energy.
That is sheer lunacy. What is even more lunacy is that GHGs in the atmosphere act as a blanket to trap heat or to slow down IR surface emissions.
Even if IR from a cooler atmosphere could contravene the 2nd law and transfer heat back to the surface it could never make up the losses incurred at the surface due to the overall IR flux escaping.
More importantly, you just can’t transfer heat to a body and have it transfer heat back to create a positive feedback condition. That is perpetual motion.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could set up a container of CO2 in our homes and have it absorb infrared energy then transfer it back to the room to not only maintain room temperature but to increase it?
Jerry L Krause,
The infrared thermometer is shielded from the surroundings but open in the front to the atmosphere. They do it every night using infrared telescopes cooled using nitrogen or helium. They see no 330 Watts per meter square of the alleged infrared backradiation from the atmosphere. They see nothing. That is how infrared astronomers mapped the universe. In the presence of 330 watts per meter square of backradiation, infrared astronomy could not exist. So back radiation and GHG effect must be fiction.
Cooling is the key. When the refrigerant of Spitzer infrared telescope was exhausted, it ceased to capture clear signals from the cosmos because it was getting infrared radiation noise from the telescope itself. It works now as optical telescope. Therefore, if you want to prove the existence of backradiation from the atmosphere, you have to shield the instruments from the surrounding and cool it close to zero absolute. Otherwise, backradiation from the instrument and surrounding will be measured and the experiment would be in error and cannot be used as evidence. All those publications claiming to have measured backradiaiton did not use coolant in their experiments, check the procedure, they are worthless as a result.
Gordon:
You say: “I wish you people who promote this nonsense that heat flows from a cooler body to a warmer body at the same time the opposite occurs would use some common sense. You are all thoroughly confused as to the difference between heat and IR.”
Clausius very clearly talked about the radiation from cooler bodies to warmer bodies as “imparting heat”. Are you saying that Clausius lacked common sense?
And in the passages I (and you) quoted, the only “compensation” discussed is the (greater) radiative “imparted heat” from warmer to cooler. He was very specific on this. There was nothing about a refrigeration cycle in the passages I quoted.
At best you have a semantic quibble.
A work input IS required for the NET (resultant) heat transfer to be from a cooler body to a warmer body. That is where your confusion lies. We are not talking about refrigeration cycles, and we are not talking about systems where there is a greater heat/energy transfer from cooler to warmer than from warmer to cooler.
Carnot published his seminal work, “Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire” explaining the necessity of rejecting heat to a low-temperature reservoir in a heat engine in 1824, when Clausius was 2 years old. Are you seriously suggesting the Clausius’ work 30-40 years later was to correct any Carnot errors (which I have not been able to find, BTW) from before he was born?
Gordon, you do know that radiation in the IR range does not have enough energy to move electrons to higher energy states don’t you? What happens is IR causes molecules to vibrate more (doesn’t work with monatomic gasses like the noble gasses) and this added energy spreads to other degrees of freedom (DOF) in the gas or body.
The bands you see in a spectrograph are from electrons dropping from an excited state to a lower state, giving off photons of a particular energy. The black body radiation is from a different process.
Gordon shouts: “HEAT ENERGY IS NOT EM ENERGY.”
Which is nonsense, according to Gordon’s own Clausius compliant words means: Energy energy is not EM energy.
“The 2nd law covers heat transfer..IR energy does not apply to the 2nd law.”
No, only in Gordon’s words. In Clausius words p. 365 2LOT: “The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum.”
“You are thoroughly confused with the difference between forms of energy..”
Nope, I clipped Clausius exact words for the 3 components of Q, Gordon remains oblivious.
“You have it in your head that because heat energy is atoms in motion, that atoms have to leave a body in order for heat to be transferred”
Nope, I wrote no words to that effect Gordon, I clipped Clausius words though so you could find what he wrote in his book, Gordon should actually read Clausius book to find if I made any errors.
“EM transfers no heat.”
Nope. Warm a nice strong container of several gallons of water to say 200F. Launch it into space where negligible sunlight occurs. Near perfect vacuum, 2.8K outside the container. No conduction, no convection. Only EM radiative energy transfer. The heat in the water will decline over time Gordon because EM does transfer heat – the KE in the ultimate particles of one body transferred to the KE in the ultimate particles in the other body.
“The notion that a net energy flow of IR satisfies the 2nd law is flawed because people like you are confusing IR with heat..”
According to Gordon’s own words this is equivalent to: The notion that a net energy flow of IR satisfies the 2nd law is flawed because people like you are confusing IR with energy. With that Gordon meaning, I plead guilty. IR is not heat (the KE of ultimate particles of a body), IR is energy.
“You regard a heat transfer between bodies as IR flowing both ways between bodies.”
Bingo. Because that is what Clausius own words mean p. 224: “in the case of radiation, wherein mutual communication of heat takes place”
“IR from a cooler body does not affect the temperature of a warmer body because it lacks the frequency and intensity to raise the KE in the atoms of the warmer body.”
Nope. Clausius P. 224: : “in the case of radiation, wherein mutual communication of heat takes place”
Gordon you would do well to actually read Clausius book to look for errors in Mechanical Theory of Heat. You have picked up major error propagations from others of lesser standing. Remember Gordon’s own Clausius book compliant words 9:15pm: “Heat is energy…The heat is the kinetic energy of atoms in a body..”
Nabil – The ground based infrared telescopes cooled using nitrogen or helium aren’t placed where the 330 W/m^2 mostly from wv avg. in the column (observed continuously by NOAA ESRL) would be “seen” reducing their visibility as you write. These telescopes are placed way up high to get as dry air column as possible to improve visibility. The fact they are placed so high reinforces back radiation as a problem for them or the expense would not be incurred. You will notice Spitzer was placed very high AGL indeed.
“All those publications claiming to have measured backradiaiton did not use coolant in their experiments, check the procedure, they are worthless as a result.”
Not at all Nabil. Read up on accuracy vs. precision. NOAA ESRL instrument accuracy is good enough vs. the cost of cooling all the instruments. If precision were needed also in this app., the cooling would help but precision is not needed. The instruments are calibrated to around 5 W/m^2 which is good enough out of your 330 (and higher) for gov. work of this type especially when looking for changes over time. The instruments are regularly recalibrated.
Gordon – “Ball4 is suggesting that Clausius is talking about a two way heat transfer and he said nothing of the kind.”
Clausius did write so Gordon. Please read Clausius book p. 224: “in the case of radiation, wherein mutual communication of heat takes place”
“That is sheer lunacy.”
Not according to Clausius. P. 224: “in the case of radiation, wherein mutual communication of heat takes place”
“Even if IR from a cooler atmosphere could contravene the 2nd law.. “
Not according to Clausius words. That process increases universe entropy and Clausius p. 365 2LOT: “The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum.”
“Wouldn’t it be great if we could set up a container of CO2 in our homes and have it absorb infrared energy then transfer it back to the room to not only maintain room temperature but to increase it?”
Actually if the furnace was on the outside and the optical depth of current earth atm. was the room, yes, this would work about 33C total as borne out by instrument readings. Gordon look for errors by reading Mechanical Theory of Heat and quoting Clausius verbatim – your own words are to great extent failing you.
@Rick “Gordon, you do know that radiation in the IR range does not have enough energy to move electrons to higher energy states don’t you?”
Good point Rick, but I think you’re talking about the intensity of IR from a body that transmits IR at the temperature of the Earth’s surface. In that case, IR wont affect any of the atoms in the Earth’s surface. I seriously doubt if it will affect water in the oceans since the GHG that is reputed to cause all the problem is water vapour.
Obviously, that does not apply to IR from a 1500 watt radiant heater. Being a Scotsman, I like to lift my kilt and warm my bare butt next to the radiant heater. It gets cold up in the Highlands, even in summer.
Are you saying that the heat I feel in my butt is not produced by IR? Most of my butt is made of carbon chains but no CO2, or other molecules other than water. Maybe, like microwaves, the IR is heating the water in my skin.
However, if you put a steel pot an inch above a 1500 watt radiant ring on a stove, with no water in the pot, it will make the steel mighty hot. In fact, if you hold your finger there long enough it will likely be well done in an hour or so.
Solar energy is 52% IR. In that case, it should warm GHGs on the way in.
I think climate science has done us a disfavour by creating the impression that all IR only affects molecules like CO2 and H2O. Also, they have conned us into ignoring the 99% of the atmosphere made up of nitrogen and oxygen. About the only place where the GHG effect takes place wrt to IR is our atmosphere and at that it is still highly theoretical.
If you take CO2 in high concentrations in a lab you can demonstrate the phenomenon of a molecule like CO2 absorbing IR in it’s molecular (covalent) bonds. I just don’t think the concentrations of CO2 in our atmosphere affect anything, and the IPCC has confirmed that by admitting there has been no warming trend since 1998.
Gordon – “About the only place where the GHG effect takes place wrt to IR is our atmosphere and at that it is still highly theoretical.”
Dr. Spencer’s simple experiment detected night time IR from passing GHGs in the form of cirrus, demonstrating the GHG effect on water temperature occurs in nature according to basic thermo theory and re-confirming Clausius writing p. 224: “in the case of radiation, wherein mutual communication of heat takes place”
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2015/06/can-infrared-radiation-warm-a-water-body-part-ii/
Ball4
Location of infrared telescope has nothing to do with the alleged 330 watts per meter of backradiation from the atmosphere to the surface for they do not exist. Spitzer is in outer space completely, out of the atmosphere, yet it cannot detect infrared radiation from the cosmos because it ran out of refrigerant. Without refrigerant, it measures its own infrared radiation, which is so large that it overshadows the minute infrared radiation from the cosmos.
What makes you so sure that infrared instruments at ambient temperatures do not measure radiation from their own housings?
I understand there can be some calibration, but they have to be calibrated at very low temperature, which was not done in the publications. Instrument precision or accuracy is not the issue at hand, it is the procedure that is wrong.If calibration at ambient temperature was sufficient, Spitzer would be now working, but it is not.
It is obvious that the alleged existence of 330 watts per square meter of backradiaiton from the atmosphere to surface is in error. A whole climate science has therefore being built on sand as a result. It is the the cold hard truth that we have to reckon with. That is why this and similar threads are long; they are not going to get shorter with time.
A final note. Do you really believe that at midnight there exist 330 watts per square meter of backradiaiton from the atmosphere? This is a large intensity of radiations that we do not need instruments to detect them. Our skin will feel them for they are equivalent to three (3.0) degrees centigrade above ambient air temperature. Too large for us not to notice it at midnight. We do not notice them simply because they do not exist.
Nabil – “Location of infrared telescope has nothing to do with the alleged 330 watts per meter of backradiation from the atmosphere to the surface for they do not exist.”
Then the ground based IR telescopes would be located much easier to access, operate & fund where your 330 W/m^2 bath is measured from all the wv et. al. in the column, they are not, they are located where the wv in the column is minimized, as far up the wv lapse rate, dry view as possible.
“What makes you so sure that infrared instruments at ambient temperatures do not measure radiation from their own housings?”
Proper calibration process they are run through frequently enough.
“but they have to be calibrated at very low temperature..
They are calibrated at room temperature, 1 bar, just like the experiments Planck references when he developed the theory.
“If calibration at ambient temperature was sufficient, Spitzer would be now working, but it is not.”
Spitzer is still partially working at 29K: “Spitzer can continue to operate until late in this decade”, passively cooled. To sort IR out from 2.8K background with precision it had to be actively cooled early on, this active cooling is not needed at Earth’s 288K avg. for the accuracy needed in NOAA ESRL instruments.
http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/mission/32-Mission-Overview
“It is obvious that the alleged existence of 330 watts per square meter of backradiation from the atmosphere to surface is in error.”
No, the cold hard truth is background IR glow or bath down welling from the sky is detected with simple experiments and observations of nature, no radiometers needed.
“Do you really believe that at midnight there exist 330 watts per square meter of backradiation from the atmosphere?”
Tests prove it. Actually my skin detects warmer summer cloudy nights over clear sky nights. It’s not hard to find the sky is glowing at night, the clouds glow even brighter in IR, don’t trust your lying eyes that can’t see them in the IR. Last night ESRL at 2:00-3:00am detected about 350 W/m^2 down welling IR give or take ~5 at 11C surface T and a little more (10-20) upwelling IR.
Ball4 says….
“To sort IR out from 2.8K background with precision it had to be actively cooled early on, this active cooling is not needed at Earth’s 288K avg. for the accuracy needed in NOAA ESRL instruments.”
This is the disagreement between us. Active cooling is needed at ambient temperature as well, otherwise no one would know the source of the infrared radiation measured. It can come from everywhere. Stating that it is downwelling from the atmosphere is misleading. They have to be sorted out.
Early meteorology tables of backradiation were based on theoretical equations and not measurements. Those measured later and published were similar to the ESRL. They are unacceptable for they measure infrared radiation from the surroundings and instrument housing. I spoke with instrument operators years ago and they confirmed my suspicion.
Nabil – “I spoke with instrument operators years ago and they confirmed my suspicion.”
The papers written with evidence from the calibrations do not confirm this easily made up hearsay Nabil without citation & it certainly does not comply with my own experience. My discussions with the experts indicate otherwise.
Sure, the housing is radiating but housing T is well known by thermometer and compensated for in the circuitry. I have done similar calibration and measurement first hand Nabil and found reasonably accurate (not precision) results at working room temperature without active cooling. The accuracy & precision needed by Spitzer required its active cooling to about (within a few K) the working temperature of space 2.8K, this instrument is still useful making discoveries in the “warm” mission working at about 29K.
On the day NOAA ESRL made the measurement I noted, I obtained a similar clear sky daytime calibrated DWIR reading from my back porch.
Ball4 says….
“On the day NOAA ESRL made the measurement I noted, I obtained a similar clear sky daytime calibrated DWIR reading from my back porch.”
Of course you should obtain the same results. So did I, and they are practically in agreement with the theoretically prepared backradiation tables of meteorology. This what puzzled me for a very long time. I understand your firm position and how the climate science ended up with the radiative forcing theory. The answer is simple: they have one common denominator-ambient temperature. At about this temperature, the measured and theoretically calculated backradiation should be about 330 watts per square meter. Clearly, the instrument were measuring radiation from instrument housing and surroundings.
Infrared thermometer is a non contact instrument. The sensitive device can be warmer or colder than a set point depending on how much radiation is exchanged. If it is pointed to a cold object, it will cool because it radiates heat to the colder object. Its final equilibrium temperature is the net between incoming radiation minus outgoing radiations to the device. Based on the temperature value, calibration is set. The calibration can be radiation, temperature, volts, amperes, etc. But there is no such a thing as harvested radiation such as in a solar oven. We therefore cannot talk of physical radiation measured by infrared thermometer. We only can talk about proxies such as voltage, amperes, temperature, etc. This does not mean radiation flows from a cold object to a warm object.
If you point a solar oven to a hot object, rest assured you will harvest radiation. However, you will never harvest any radiation if you point the solar oven to a cold object. If you point a solar oven to the clear sky at night, you will make ice and they are sold on the market to make ice this way. Based on your theory, the solar oven pointed at night to the sky will harvest heat of 330 watts per square meter, this however does not happen. Therefore, no 330 watts per square meter of backradiation exists.
Nabil – “Based on your theory, the solar oven pointed at night to the sky will harvest heat of 330 watts per square meter, this however does not happen.”
Nabil – You obviously haven’t done that test properly, you just make this up. If you do the test properly, as others have already repeatedly demonstrated, the data will show the solar oven pointed at night to the sky will harvest heat (as Clausius defined heat on p. 15) contrary to your comment. I have also done similar testing and found nature indeed demonstrates the sky glows significantly in the IR bands at night.
Ref. Dr. Spencer’s night time test right here (I posted for Gordon above) which easily and completely refutes your claim.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2015/06/can-infrared-radiation-warm-a-water-body-part-ii/
Ball4 says…
“You obviously haven’t done that test properly, you just make this up. If you do the test properly, as others have already repeatedly demonstrated.”
I am not MAKING IT UP, it is reality, solar oven that make ice are sold on the market. Why don’t you buy one and see for yourself? You can make ice at night, refrigerate vegetables, make cold water, etc.
Here are sample links:
http://solarcooking.org/plans/funnel.htm
http://www.permies.com/t/7317/cooking/Making-ice-solar-oven
It is your turn now to show me a link where infrared radiation is harvested at night.
Nabil – ”You can make ice at night, refrigerate vegetables, make cold water, etc.”
Agreed, when the sun goes down the night time near surface ambient air starts to cool from the days insolation highs, you can check out that observation at NOAA ESRL & many weather stations Nabil, I am not just making that right up. The UWIR exceeds the DWIR by observation & test.
”I am not MAKING IT UP..”
By “it” Nabil means he is not making up: ”the solar oven pointed at night to the sky will harvest heat of 330 watts per square meter, this however does not happen.”
Nabil does just make that up since offers no test in support. Show test that isn’t made up Nabil. Dr. Spencer’s test (linked) data (consistent with Clausius p. 15, p. 365, p. 224) demonstrates the opposite to what Nabil has simply made up.
”It is your turn now to show me a link where infrared radiation is harvested at night.”
Again, actually check it out Nabil: http://www.drroyspencer.com/2015/06/can-infrared-radiation-warm-a-water-body-part-ii/
I would also suggest a good text book on atm. radiation that explains LWIR effects on dew, frost, fog, sand, water, terra firma et. al. as observed in nature. Not as made up by Nabil – no effect on any of those. If can’t find one, I can recommend with page cites.
Hi Nabil and Ball4,
Have you never seen frost forming on car tops and windshields, home roofs, etc. when the ambient temperature is never observed to cool to the melting point of water? Clearly these surface’s cool to temperatures below the melting point of water because, even at these temperatures lower than those of the atmosphere a little distance above them, these surfaces are radiating (emitting) radiation upward which balances the downward radiation from the atmosphere. The temperature of these radiating surfaces, if frost forms on them, must be the frost point temperature of the atmosphere in contact with them.
Can you both accept the truth of the above simple observations and basic science?
Have a good day, Jerry
Ball4 Round and Round He Goes.
I am sorry but I have to discontinue this conversation.
JLK – ”..if frost forms on them, must be the frost point temperature of the atmosphere in contact with them.”
Not exactly. Frost is ice formed directly from the vapor phase. The frost point is counterpart of the dew point at temperatures below 0C. Although the dew point is accurately defined, the exact temperature at which dew or frost forms on a surface is NOT well defined, is only a best guess, the truth is also found by experiment. If interested further, see R.G. Wylie in Humidity and Moisture, Vol. 1, 1965, p. 125. The atm. windows play a part in the process.
——
Apparently Nabil is just too hidebound to change by reading up on experiments showing opposite results than is claimed.
Hi Ball4,
First, if you are going to quote someone, please quote the entire sentence because I could not believe I could have written what you quoted. But it does make sense if you begin at the beginning.
Next, Nabil is not the one seemingly dismissing what I wrote; you are.
Once frost can be seen to form, the water vapor can condense on the frost, if not also the original surface. So, it is very difficult to understand how water vapor condenses on liquid dew droplets is any different from water vapor condensing on ice particles except that the temperature of the ice must be below the melting point of water. I say below because any condensation of vapor on ice at its melting point cannot locally freeze until the latent heat of condensation is radiated away and then latent heat of the transition from liquid to solid must be radiated for the vapor molecule to become part of the frost solid. And I do not really care who says otherwise because this is very basic science.
I suspect you might be confusing the observed formation of frost on the surface which I mentioned with the super-cooling of liquid cloud droplets of which I am very aware occurs.
Have a good day, Jerry
JLK – “But it does make sense if you begin at the beginning.”
Only approximately Jerry. The dew point is at best just an approximation to condensation as R.G. Wylie 1965 points out from experimental evidence you can do at home: “the concept of a sharply defined temperature, at which condensation begins abruptly, represents only an approximation to the truth…in dew point hygrometry, the usual simple concept of condensation is inadequate when the accuracy sought is higher than 0.2C.”
Dew point where? Air temperatures vary near surfaces as well as surface temperatures. Wylie points out everything takes time, as wv is removed from the air, which lowers its dew point, net condensation gives rise to warming. As condensation takes place the moist air is filtered to remove particles onto which wv can condense complicating the situation. Also, a surface must drop below the temperature for dew to form. That surface is both absorbing radiation from surroundings and emitting radiation, all very complicated & very interesting. Get a copy of Wylie for more.
Your bathroom mirror is a good dew point indicator. Take a hot bath. Droplets form nicely. Put some detergent on it find condensation is a thin film. Lose your windshield wipers in the rain? Keep a potato in the trunk, rub it on get a nice clear thin film to drive to a garage easier. Some of this science is helpful, you know like the thrillers where the message appears on the mirror after a shower.
@Ball4 “Gordon shouts: “HEAT ENERGY IS NOT EM ENERGY.”
Which is nonsense, according to Gordon’s own Clausius compliant words means: Energy energy is not EM energy”.
Could you stifle your ego long enough to consider what is being said rather than getting caught up in your incredible misunderstanding of basic physics?
Heat energy is not EM energy. Heat energy is the motion of atoms in a substance and EM energy transmits through space as an electromagnetic field. There are no atoms in EM but heat is the kinetic energy of atoms in motion.
Heat cannot exist without atoms and EM can. Once EM is transmitted as a wave, like light, it will carry on happily, doing nothing.
““The 2nd law covers heat transfer..IR energy does not apply to the 2nd law.”
No, only in Gordon’s words. In Clausius words p. 365 2LOT: “The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum.””
You are just babbling now. What does the maximization of entropy have to do with this?
Clausius stated in words when he coined the term entropy that entropy is a summation of the incremental transfer of heat, dQ, at a specific temperature, T. If you take the integral of dQ/T over a reversible process, the entropy is zero. Entropy does not increase to a maximum in reversible processes.
Clausius added what you have quoted as an aside, not as a hypothesis. He was speculating about irreversible processes and he noted that most processes in nature are not reversible, therefore the entropy is always positive.
Entropy cannot be -ve according to Clausius therefore no process can, of itself, transfer heat, dQ, from a colder body to a warmer body. A simultaneous transfer of heat in the opposite direction is required and he was not referring to your allegation that heat transfers both ways between a warmer and a colder body.
““EM transfers no heat.”
Nope. Warm a nice strong container of several gallons of water to say 200F. Launch it into space where negligible sunlight occurs. Near perfect vacuum,
2.8K outside the container. No conduction, no convection. Only EM radiative energy transfer. The heat in the water will decline over time…”
Duh!!
I have been trying to tell you that but you can’t shut up long enough to get it that your understanding of physics is slim to none.
Of course the heat will diminish over time. IR will be transferred from the atoms in the container that hold the heat and that transfer of IR will reduce the KE of the atoms over time and diminish the heat.
The radiated IR will do nothing…absolutely nothing…till it encounters mass. It is not carrying heat!! The heat was in the container as KE and the atoms that contained the heat emitted the IR.
Once again, IR IS NOT HEAT, it is EM.
I can’t believe you are arguing this point when you don’t have a clue about the relationship between IR, atoms, and heat.
@Ball4…”“The notion that a net energy flow of IR satisfies the 2nd law is flawed because people like you are confusing IR with heat..”
According to Gordon’s own words this is equivalent to: The notion that a net energy flow of IR satisfies the 2nd law is flawed because people like you are confusing IR with energy. With that Gordon meaning, I plead guilty. IR is not heat (the KE of ultimate particles of a body), IR is energy.
*********
IR is energy and heat is energy. They are different types of energy just as chemical energy is different from nuclear energy. I said nothing about confusing IR with energy. You are the one who is so thoroughly confused about energy that you insist on misquoting me based on your faulty understanding of energy.
Do you think electrical energy is the same as electromagnetic energy? EM is comprised of an electric field perpendicular to a magnetic field. There are electric fields in electrical energy but they have no perpendicular magnetic field. Also electric fields don’t have a spectrum as is found in EM.
How about gravitational energy, is it the same as EM? If they are the same energies why bother giving them different names?
Why do you have so much trouble understanding that heat, aka thermal energy, is not the same energy as IR?
Also, why would they developed a discipline to study heat (thermodynamics), where the 2nd law is a basic tenet, and have the law apply to IR? Clausius says nothing about IR when he goes through the process of developing the 2nd law. He talks only about Q, the transfer of heat into or out of a substance, T, the temperature, and W, the work done by heat..
He talks about internal energy and work related to atoms but he explains those parameters are not required to measure heat externally to a body. That’s the basic difference between thermodynamics and statistical mechanics.
In the definition of the 2nd law, there is not one mention of IR.
**************
“You regard a heat transfer between bodies as IR flowing both ways between bodies.”
Bingo. Because that is what Clausius own words mean p. 224: “in the case of radiation, wherein mutual communication of heat takes place”
*************
Once again, IR is the messenger, not the heat. If water aids in the transfer of heat from a warmer body of water to a cooler body of water, or even from a hot shower to a cooler human body, are you suggesting water is heat as well?
You have cherry-picked a quote from Clausius without getting the overall picture.
***********
“IR from a cooler body does not affect the temperature of a warmer body because it lacks the frequency and intensity to raise the KE in the atoms of the warmer body.”
Nope. Clausius P. 224: : “in the case of radiation, wherein mutual communication of heat takes place”
************
Now you are parroting purely for the sake of argument.
It was Bohr said an electron requires a specific frequency and intensity of EM to affect it. You obviously don’t understand the basics of how EM is absorbed or emitted from atoms.
You simply cannot aim IR from GHGs in a cooler atmosphere and have them be absorbed by any atoms in any substance.
@Ball4 ….”Gordon – “About the only place where the GHG effect takes place wrt to IR is our atmosphere and at that it is still highly theoretical.”
Dr. Spencer’s simple experiment detected night time IR from passing GHGs in the form of cirrus, demonstrating the GHG effect on water temperature occurs in nature according to basic thermo theory and re-confirming Clausius writing p. 224: “in the case of radiation, wherein mutual communication of heat takes place”
***************
I don’t agree with Roy. I witnessed a debate between Roy and a chemical engineer, Pierre Latour, who works directly with thermodynamics and I thought Roy’s argument was wrong.
Here is a rebuttal from Pierre that indirectly addresses Roy’s experiment:
http://www.principia-scientific.org/skeptical-arguments-that-don-t-hold-water-pierre-latour-s-rebuttal.html
Pierre states, “I explained you are confusing S-B irradiance or intensity of radiating matter with radiating heat transfer between two radiating matter bodies, driven by an intensity difference. Just because they share the same units, w/m2, does not mean they are the same phenomena. So your argument doesn’t hold water, or GHGT. Since there is no greenhouse in the sky, how can there be a greenhouse effect?”
**************
You have to be extremely careful when you point a pyrometer at the sky and make inferences. Dr. Craig Bohren has pointed out that if you point a pyrometer at a cloudless sky, it measures about -50C. If you swing it over till it points at cloud, it rises to around 0 C.
That is a measure of IR radiation and it’s equivalent temperature, not heat.
Explain how a radiation from a source indicating 0 C could warm the Earth’s surface at an average of +15C. The -50C is liable to be the GHGs water vapour and CO2 since clouds are modeled as droplets of water regarded as a small lake.
Gordon – I note nowhere in your three comments immediately above do you cite a passage from Clausius proper test based words to counter a passage I wrote or Dr. Spencer wrote. No reference to a test counter to what I wrote or counter to Dr. Spencer’s test. Until you do so, you make no valid points on Clausius’ Mechanical Theory of Heat.
Sure, it is possible I made a mistake when compared to Clausius work or a proper test, Gordon’s et. al. proper challenge is based on Clausius writings not muddled writing. Whereas note I clip Clausius validated points to show some of Gordon’s writing is nonsense.
“What does the maximization of entropy have to do with this?”
The clear 2LOT as written by Clausius p. 365 not the muddled writing of Gordon.
“Heat energy is not EM energy.”
Energy energy is not EM energy? Nonsense. Sense: Kinetic energy is not EM energy, both are different forms of energy.
” Entropy does not increase to a maximum in reversible processes.”
Nor do reversible processes occur in the natural universe.
“most processes in nature are not reversible”
All processes in nature are not reversible, Clausius p. 365: “The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum.”
” (Clausius) was not referring to your allegation that heat transfers both ways between a warmer and a colder body.”
Again, Gordon seems to be having a hard time with this, not my allegation, Clauisus p. 224: “in the case of radiation, wherein mutual communication of heat takes place” thus EM transfers heat not as Gordon wrote “EM transfers no heat” and Gordon now writes when I pointed out an example “Duh!” agrees with Clausius.
“IR is energy and heat is energy.”
Very good Gordon, stay the course, no more muddled “heat energy” please.
“..you insist on misquoting me…You have cherry-picked a quote from Clausius without getting the overall picture..”
No Gordon, I clip your and Clausius’ exact words to show where the astute reader can find the context.
“I don’t agree with Roy.”
Fine, make your and Pierre Latour points valid with an exact quote from Clausius counter to Dr. Spencer or myself and/or proper test as Clausius et. al. performed.
“Explain how a radiation from a source indicating 0 C could warm the Earth’s surface at an average of +15C.”
Clear sky and cloud brightness sources are both warmer than the deep space back ground brightness 2.8K, as demonstrated by Dr. Spencer’s test I linked. Gordon IS accurate about Dr. Bohren’s test (-50C clear sky, 0C cloud) which means Gordon writing above at 2:55am is muddled: “GHGs act as a blanket, or a layer to slow heat loss from the surface, is too ludicrous to consider.” Dr. Spencer’s test I linked confirms Gordon’s writing is muddled (Dr. Spencer term 6:05 am).
@Ball4…”Gordon – I note nowhere in your three comments immediately above do you cite a passage from Clausius proper test based words to counter a passage I wrote or
Dr. Spencer wrote. No reference to a test counter to what I wrote or counter to Dr. Spencer’s test. Until you do so, you make no valid points on Clausius’ Mechanical Theory of Heat.
I have already cited Clausius on that, several times, that heat cannot transfer, of itself, from a colder body to a warmer body. You have chosen to offer your own interpretation of that law, as has Roy.
Anyone who has studied basic physics, at least in engineering studies, understand clearly that heat cannot be transferred from a colder body to a warmer body without some kind of mechanism to perform the simultaneous transfer of heat from a warmer body to the colder body to compensate for the heat loss.
Based on your version of Clausius, a steel rod with it’s end in an ice bath and it’s other end in free air, heated by a propane torch, will have heat transferring both ways from the hot end to the cool end and vice versa. Not only that, you are claiming heat can be transferred from the ice bath to the hot end of the rod.
What will happen is that heat will transfer from the hot end to the ice bath, melting the ice and raising the water temperature till the rod and water are in thermal equilibrium.
In a refrigerator, heat is transferred from a colder source by supplying external power to drive a compressor, which compresses a refrigerant. Later in the process,the refrigerant goes through an evapourator, where heat it has gathered is vented to a warmer room. So extracting heat from a colder source in a refrigerator is done by the compression/expansion of a gas using external power to make it happen.
That cannot happen with gases at standard pressures in the atmosphere.
You have completely misunderstood what Clausius was saying because you have cherry-picked words out of context. To understand what Clausius was talking about, you have to carefully follow his explanation of a heat cycle in a heat engine. If you understand that you can see immediately why heat wont transfer from a colder source to a warmer source by itself.
The explanation is in the heat phase diagrams.
****************
“Whereas note I clip Clausius validated points to show
some of Gordon’s writing is nonsense”.
You mean, you cherry-picked statements out of context to show you really don’t understand what Clausius was talking about.
****************
“Heat energy is not EM energy.”
Energy energy is not EM energy? Nonsense. Sense: Kinetic energy is not EM energy, both are different forms of energy”.
You are babbling again. You don’t understand the difference between thermal energy and electromagnetic energy.
Kinetic energy is energy in motion…any energy in motion that involves matter.
**************
” (Clausius) was not referring to your allegation that heat transfers both ways between a warmer and a colder body.”
Again, Gordon seems to be having a hard time with this, not my allegation, Clauisus p. 224: “in the case of radiation, wherein mutual communication of heat takes place”
You are misunderstanding what he means by ‘mutual communication of heat’. By the use of the word ‘communication’ he is not talking about mutual heat transfer.
****************
“IR is energy and heat is energy.”
Very good Gordon, stay the course, no more muddled “heat energy” please.
You are babbling again. You seem to think there is only one energy. If that’s the case, why do they have different names for energy like gravitational, electrical, electromagnetic, nuclear, thermal, chemical, mechanical and so on?
You seem to think there is no difference between electromagnetic energy, which is a field with an electric and magnetic component, and which exists as a spectrum of frequencies, and thermal energy, which is the energy in moving and vibrating atoms.
Light is EM as are x-rays. Are you claiming light and x-rays are the same as heat? If not, why would you claim that IR is the same as heat?
***********
“I don’t agree with Roy.”
Fine, make your and Pierre Latour points valid with an exact quote from Clausius counter to Dr. Spencer or myself and/or proper test as Clausius et. al. performed”.
Pierre Latour is a chemical engineer who has expertise in thermodynamical processes. Why Roy is debating him using thought experiments and arguments on heat that are contrary to the field of thermodynamics is not clear.
There is nothing in the works of Clausius to support the argument put for by Roy that heat can be transferred from a colder body to a warmer body without compensation.
Your interpretation of what Clausius has said is faulty.
Gordon – “I have already cited Clausius on that, several times..”
Only with Gordon’s own muddled words not a page number and clip of the actual words Clausius used as I demonstrated & not writing my own interpretation. See Clausius own words p. 15, p. 224, p. 365 Gordon.
“understand clearly that heat cannot be transferred…That cannot happen with gases at standard pressures in the atmosphere.”
This is an example of Gordon’s own muddled wording. Kinetic energy can indeed be transferred from a colder body to a warmer body as long as the 2LOT is not violated: p. 365: “The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum.” Dr. Spencer’s test showed how that can happen, the cooler cirrus slowed the cooling of the warmer water sample in view increasing its entropy by adding energy in the form of radiation as shown by the 0.1F difference to the control sample not viewing the cirrus.
“You have completely misunderstood what Clausius was saying because you have cherry-picked words out of context.”
Not at all Gordon, Clausius context I clipped p. 224 is proven right by his own and Dr. Spencer’s testing cited, Planck later agreed with both Clausius and Dr. Spencer’s test shows Planck was right.
Here is the clip from Planck 1912 Theory of Heat, p. 9 agreeing with Clausius clip: “A body A at 100C. emits toward a body B at 0C. exactly the same amount of radiation as toward an equally large and similarly situated body B’ at 1000C. The fact that the body A is cooled by B and heated by B’ is due entirely to the fact that B is a weaker, B’ a stronger emitter than A.”
“Kinetic energy is energy in motion…any energy in motion that involves matter.”
Very good Gordon, try to maintain that thinking not using your muddled “heat energy”.
“By the use of the word ‘communication’ he is not talking about mutual heat transfer.”
Right again Gordon, maintain that thinking, drop heat energy, Clausius means the radiative form of energy referred to as electromagnetic (EM) aka light photons not kinetic energy of the ultimate particles.
“You seem to think there is only one energy.”
Wrong. Energy has many forms, some of those I have listed.
“There is nothing in the works of Clausius to support the argument put for by Roy that heat can be transferred from a colder body to a warmer body without compensation.”
Muddled words Gordon, Dr. Spencer’s test I linked proves Gordon muddled and Clausius right p. 224, p. 365 as clipped. I do not interpret Clausius, Gordon, I clip his words and cite a page for the astute reader to find the context. Go thru Dr. Spencer’s test thoroughly Gordon to find your error, Clausius conducted similar testing and found the 2LOT p. 365: “The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum.” Dr. Spencer’s test complies.
Dr. Spencer,
Has UAH discontinued the publishing of the Lower Troposphere Global Temperature Report at http://nsstc.uah.edu/climate/ ?
I have asked the webmaster, but got no answer.
It hasn’t been discontinued. It must just be delayed.
Lets hope so.
Today http://nsstc.uah.edu/climate/ is showing “August 2015 Report” but with a small rendition of the July 2015 world map, and no link to any large graphic from “Click to view full map”.
I recently turned 72 and still have an active interest in learning new things. While I am not a scientist, new scientific discoveries fascinate me and challenge my understanding of the way things work.
My point is that at 60 you have plenty of time to make new discoveries in science. Heck, you probably have enough life-span left to start and complete a new career these days. Meanwhile, your site is one of my favorites to visit because I almost always learn some new fascinating thing.
Great to know. Although I have admired what little I knew of Dr. Singer, I had no idea that his background in atmospheric science extended so far back. (I was largely aware of Dr. Spencer’s.)
That tends to underline what I’ve concluded about the field (and seen to a lesser extent about others). The guys who were doing it before it attained the cachet tend to be the genuine article, while those who gravitated to it once the limelight hit tend to be poseurs. That’s an over-generalization, of course, but I think it contains a lot of truth.
Kudos to Fred Singer.
Dr Spencer
Thanks for all your work.
The only thing that genuinely terrifies me about the global warming debate is that one day the people who are trying to make it illegal to disagree with them, and who are re-writing the thermometer record to dispose of the “hiatus”, will one day get their hands on the satellite temperature record and start re-writing that too. At that point, all will be lost. The satellite evidence will be ‘homogenized’ to fit the theory along with everything else…
Do you ever give that any thought? What can be done to preserve the integrity of the satellite temperature records now and in the future? (And how can people help make sure this happens?)
Should it have been legal for the tobacco companies to deny that nicotine is addictive?
from 1994:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_ZDQKq2F08
David
The problem with that point of view is, you always assume that the people who will get to legislate the issue will be people that agree with you. And because you think you’re right and have righteousness on your side, you can live with that or even encourage it.
But what if the opposite were true? What happens if the people who get to legislate the issue don’t agree with you but take the opposite view?
For example, what if the government had done the opposite instead, and actually made it illegal to say that nicotine is addictive?
Maybe you’re thinking that it wouldn’t have made any difference in the long run because the evidence that smoking is in fact addictive would have eventually become overwhelming.
But then do you think the evidence that CO2 is causing disastrous global warming will one day become overwhelming? Because it really hasn’t yet…
Maybe the opposite is true. And maybe it should be illegal to say that CO2 causes dangerous global warming…
Or maybe we should just encourage debate and follow the evidence!
Do let me know what you think?
Actually, now I come to think of it, and speaking as someone who smoked 30 a day for 20 years, nicotine isn’t actually that addictive.
From experience, the hardest part of giving up smoking is overcoming the belief in your own addiction – which is caused largely by everyone telling you how addictive it is and how dependent you are on it all the time.
Why don’t people give you a break and tell you it’s easy to give up smoking? Why do the warnings on packets of cigarettes say;
“Nicotine is addictive! Giving up smoking is hard!”
Why don’t they say;
“Giving up smoking is easy! Nicotine withdrawal has no symptoms whatsoever and will cause you no pain or sickness at all. In fact, you will immediately feel better and more breath easily and be happier and feel much less stressed. Giving up is a breeze!”
Once I realized it was easy to give up, I did. Easily. There are no physical symptoms at all. You don’t hallucinate, you don’t lose control of your bowels, you don’t lose your ability to regulate your blood sugar, there’s no physical pain. Only your own psychology – your belief system – is against you.
In fact the only reason I can think of for telling everyone that nicotine is so addictive would be if the government actually wanted people to keep smoking so they could have all the tax revenue from the sales and corporation tax, and keep a slight lid on the aging population problem. But I doubt that’s true…
Now alcohol – that’s a different story. A much more dangerous substance. You think the government will ever legislate against alcohol…?
😉
I think it is a disservice to Fred Singer to not mention the never-ending effort he has given in the name of science in fields outside of his original training. He spoke out publicly against banning CFCs for the sake of preventing damage to the ozone layer. He fought attempts to curb acid rain. And he was at the vanguard of those trying to keep the government from doing anything about second-hand smoke because it really doesn’t cause cancer at all. It is rare that one man can become an international expert on wide range of topics like Fred Singer is. Fred has written widely on all these topics, and his words are adopted by groups all over the world to argue against “scientists. We should be all be humbled by his courage and vision.
Where is the courage in being wrong? (CFCs, ozone, 2nd-hand smoke.)
Something I found interesting about Dr. Singer is that, in addition to being a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, (1) the American Physical Society, (2) and the American Institute for Astronautics and Aeronautics, (3) he was elected a fellow of the American Geophysical Union in the first year fellows were being elected, which was 1962. (4) It is truly a tragedy to see all these attacks on a brilliant scientist like Dr. Singer, especially since he was a pioneer in so many different ways.
1: http://membercentral.aaas.org/fellows?LastName=S&Section=X&Country=All&State=VA&name=Singer&company=
2: http://www.aps.org/programs/honors/fellowships/archive-all.cfm?initial=&year=1957&unit_id=APS&institution=University+of+Maryland
3: https://www.aiaa.org/uploadedFiles/Membership_and_Communities/Recognition/Member_Advancement/AIAA_Fellow_Roster.pdf
4: http://honors.agu.org/fellows/?name-2=Singer&fellow_year-2=155§ionfocus_group-2=69&institution=&country=67&l=%252Ffellows%252F&fellows_directory=1&simian_search=1&fellows_directory_paged=1
If anyone wonders why the CAGW myth persists then all you need do is look at any sceptical website and see what ignorance is peddled in the comments there. There are many objections to CAGW, but denying or misinterpreting scientific facts should not be one on them. I would like to see ‘educated’ sceptics who are able to argue their case on a sound basis. Alas, as Fred Singer pointed out, they are undermined by the scientifically-illiterate who may not realise they do more harm than good. They give all sceptics a bad name. In contrast, the alarmists seem relatively sane.
The warming produced by greenhouse gases is an established fact. The science really is settled for those capable of understanding it. On this topic the debate is truly over and no serious sceptic contests this. Those who deny this effectively disqualify themselves from serious consideration and only help to perpetuate CAGW.
@Mike B “The warming produced by greenhouse gases is an established fact”.
Then why does the IPCC only claim it as likely, and why did they announce after AR5 that no warming trend has been detected since 1998. It is now nearly 18 years with no warming.
The IPCC called it a warming hiatus.
Gordon: see newer, better data.
In science, both the data models and the theory models are subject to scrutiny and revision.
Hi David. Have you seen the latest post at Climate Audit? It’s the ocean 2k study, which shows no SST warming. None. How about that! It also talks about you and your silly list of HS which aren’t really HS.
I copy my above comment:
mpainter says:
September 21, 2015 at 3:51 PM
Regarding the warming of the last century, it came in two episodes: circa 1918- 1943 and circa 1980-2000.
We know what caused the last episode: reduced global cloud albedo hence increased insolation. This also warmed SST.
We don’t know what caused the earlier episode, but we do know that it was_not_CO2_.
And how do we know this? Because in 1918 the anthropogenic contribution to atmospheric CO2 was only about 20 ppm, as per ice core analysis (Law Dome, Anarctica, assuming pre-industrial CO2 at about 280 ppm.) Only the most rabid, foam-flinging AGW zealot would argue that 20 ppm of added CO2 would cause the warming episode beginning circa 1918.
mpainter says:
“Regarding the warming of the last century, it came in two episodes: circa 1918- 1943 and circa 1980-2000.
We know what caused the last episode: reduced global cloud albedo hence increased insolation.”
You keep claiming this, but have never produced any evidence for it, even though I’ve asked several times.
It’s clear by now that you have no such evidence.
David, thank you for bringing it up. There are a number of papers available on the internet addressing this. Dr.Roy Spencer has published on clouds. He has repeatedly stated his belief that cloud variability has contributed to warming episodes. Check out the sidebar here and read some of his appears and discussions.
Another paper that addresses this is by John McLean: Global Warming and late twentieth Century cloud variation. Here he uses the NASA cloud data base and shows that global cloud albedo decreased in the late twentieth century. There are other studies for those who wish to read up. Prediction, David Appell will never read up. He is afraid to. Pitiable.
MikeB, people that criticize REAL Skeptics either:
1) Don’t understand the science;
2) Are, in reality, Warmists; or
3) Want to, for some reason, control the debate.
Which category are you in?
MikeB says:
“The science really is settled for those capable of understanding it.”
####
Here MikeB reveals himself; no more pretending.
“The warming produced by greenhouse gases is an established fact.”
I get your point, and agree that skeptics who argue that greenhouse gases simply cannot heat the surface are doing more harm than good. However, you err in being overly broad in this statement.
Warming produced by greenhouse gases is a well grounded and established inference from the fact that, in a purely radiative exchange, when energy is impeded from exiting in the normal fashion, the surface must heat in order to reestablish equilibrium between outgoing and incoming radiation.
However, there are two disconnects in the hypothesis that increasing GHG concentration must thereby heat the surface. Firstly, to do so, it must first increase the outward impedance. Given convective pathways for energy to reach the radiating levels of the atmosphere, this increase in outward impedance is not assured.
For a system in which convective overturning has reached a threshold level, heat energy can bypass the optical filter of the lower atmosphere to arrive at the levels where it will be radiated away, with the surface experiencing little to no additional heating.
Secondly, although increasing outward impedance can heat the surface, shading the input would cool the surface. Clouds acting as a feedback can, in fact, completely nullify any heating due to increased outward impedance.
The statement that, all things being equal, increasing concentration of greenhouse gases must heat the surface, is true. But, all things are not equal. There are immediate and long term reactions which can nullify the heating effect.
Jumping from the impeding effect of greenhouse gases to a conclusion of irresistible heating of the surface is, in short, naive physics.
Okay, since you asked, I will give my opinion.
First, you must recognize that DWLWIR cannot heat water, as water is opaque to LWIR. For example, the 15 micron band (CO2) is absorbed in less than 5 microns of the surface. This incident energy is transient, being converted to latent energy or radiated to the atmosphere within a few seconds.
By this principle we see that SST is due to insolation and that alone, DWLWIR making no contribution to that metric. Since the ocean covers 71% of the planet, we see that back radiation cannot warm 71% of the planet.
But what about land?..well land provides the proof that the GHE is grossly mischaracterized by the climateers:
Compare the Sahara with the humid tropics. Which has the highest level of ghg? Which the lowest? Which has the highest tmax? Which the lowest? Which has the hottest maximum surface temperature? Which the lowest? The AGW claim that an enhanced GHE will lead to higher surface temperatures and higher atmospheric temperatures falls to the ground in face of these simple observations. Increasing ghg moderates diurnal temperature range. It does not increase temperatures.
“First, you must recognize that DWLWIR cannot heat water, as water is opaque to LWIR.”
You can take a LWIR laser (pure 10.6 um radiation), and boil water with it. Empirical fact.
Try again!
We are talking about natural processes. Try again!
So tell me, mpainter, what is the difference between a “natural” photon at 10.6um wavelength and a “synthetic” photon at 10.6um wavelength?
So you and James Hansen are busy boiling the oceans, still. Got your army of true believers with their zap-an-ocean atomic ray guns?
See attenuation curve for LWIR with respect to water and apply your sophistry against that. Explain to the curve how your laser proves that it knows nothing about photons.
Speaking of James Hansen, do you suppose he was ignorant of the absorbency of the ocean w/r to IR? Or was he aware of it when he screeched out his “boil the oceans” alarm?
FYI, SST is determined by insolation, and the absorbed energy is accumulative. The earth is no BB, does not behave as one. S-B principles are not applicable to the earth except to yield spurious results.
mpainter:
Evaporation occurs from the top few nanometers of the ocean, as only the top molecules can escape.
LWIR typically penetrates a few micrometers past the surface, hundreds to a thousand times deeper.
Visible light and SWIR typically penetrate a few meters past the surface, possibly tens of meters where the water is very clear.
The oceans average several kilometers deep.
Both LWIR and solar radiation are absorbed far below the evaporative layer and far above the bulk of the ocean.
You have not yet begun to come to grips with the experimental evidence of the 10.6um laser. Your theory says that it would just evaporate water off the surface. It does not! Even at low intensity, it does a good job of warming the water below the surface.
Most interesting comments by Geoff Wood upthread. I copy the first here. There are more. Touches on lasers.
Geoff Wood says:
September 21, 2015 at 4:03 PM
Hi Nabil. Fully agree. In Poynting Vector physics the line by line monochromatic (coherent) addition of opposing (subtraction) radiation vectors integrated over the entire spectrum of available angles yields the net flux. The ‘photon’ argument of modern climatology cannot subtract to annihilate back radiation like em radiation does. Only wave mechanics correctly describes radiant energy superposition and hence net radiant energy flux. The larger,and more intense and spectrally complete upward electromagnetic wave package annihilates completely the back radiation. Likewise, the presence of the atmosphere and the superposition of its radiative potential annihilates the surface emissivity such that very little energy in the form of radiation leaves the surface. This is particularly true in GHG’s prominent spectral bands. This explains why the surface is not radiatively coupled strongly to the low heat capacity of the atmosphere. The radiant energy in bulk never goes up so it can never come back down ( from “Spartacus is free”).
### several more comments by Geoff follow this as he explicates. Very interesting
When you get past the fancy terminology, Geoff just has a different analytical method for computing the ~(390-324)=66 W/m2 net transfer between the surface and the atmosphere.
Ever hear of “wave-particle duality”?
No. Why not address Geoff Wood? He is the one you should discuss this with. I’ll bet you don’t, though.
Why should I bother? He gets the same result I do with completely different analytical method. That’s the sign of a robust theory!
You are a lying troll.
I made a verifiable factual claim.
Geoff Wood said the presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere reduces the effective radiative output from the surface from 370 W/m2 to 67 W/m2.
K&T said the presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere reduces the effective radiative output from the surface from 390 W/m2 to 66 W/m2 (=390-324).
Who’s the lying troll?
You are
Wow! I’ve been arguing with a third-grader. I should have known from the level of technical understanding…
mpainter says:
“First, you must recognize that DWLWIR cannot heat water, as water is opaque to LWIR. For example, the 15 micron band (CO2) is absorbed in less than 5 microns of the surface.”
Every time I look at it, the ocean surface seems to be turbulent, not mirror smooth.
What was on the top 5 microns doesn’t seem to stay there for very long.
What of heat transfer by conductance?
We have been here before. It’s no good pretending interest. You lack background to understand. Oceanographic, David: See ocean swells, amplitude and wavelength. Gentle rise and fall, David, not turbulent, not a bit like the surf at the beach. Read up on the physics of ripples on water. No turbulence there, David. You want a storm? High winds blowing the tops off the waves? That is c_o_o_l_i_n_g, David. Cooling, not heating. You want to move the heat caught on the surface down to depth? Can’t move against the temperature gradient. You don’t believe? Then you must show how it happens, but you can’t. Convection is diurnal, nightly cooling. Cooling, comprehende amigo? Cooling.Incipient LWIR converts to latent heat or is ‘re-radiated in a few seconds as the interface ablates several microns per minute. That is thousands of layers of molecules per minute. No chance for incipient IR to transfer to depth. The ocean surface is all about cooling; the ocean warms via insolation.
You lack understanding because you are uninformed in all these various disciplines of science, like the whole of the AGW crowd.
Yet none of you ever attempt to read up.
Bart says “Warming produced by greenhouse gases is a well grounded and established inference from the fact that, in a purely radiative exchange, when energy is impeded from exiting in the normal fashion, the surface must heat in order to reestablish equilibrium between outgoing and incoming radiation.”
Nope!
1) There is no “well grounded and established” validation of back-radiation warming.
2) Back-radiation does NOT “impede” energy “from exiting in the normal fashion”.
It’s okay if you don’t understand the science, but how do you ignore 20 years of failed GHE?
This is really absurdly simple, guys. This is the spectrum of radiation outgoing from the Earth at the top of the atmosphere, along with a MODTRAN calculation of what we would expect, based on the composition of the atmosphere.
The spectrum coming up from the Earth more nearly fits a standard Planck distribution. Those big divots in the outgoing TOA spectrum are where IR absorbing gases intercept radiation coming up from the surface. They reduce the total outgoing radiation, which is the total area under the curve.
In order to achieve outward radiation which balances the incoming, the surface has to increase in temperature relative to what it otherwise would be, so that the spectrum will rise in those areas not intercepted, and the area will be what it otherwise would have been. That necessarily means that the surface is going to be hotter than it otherwise would be.
Note, however, that this is a bulk property. The greenhouse gases will increase the temperature above what it would be without them. But, that does not mean that, in the steady state, an incremental rise in greenhouse gas concentration will necessarily produce an incremental rise in surface temperature. I explained two reasons above why concluding that would be imprudent.
The large number of people on the pro-AGW side who believe this are not total idiots. They have reasons for believing what they believe. They just didn’t think it through carefully and/or dismissed any possible ameliorating circumstances, jumped to a conclusion, and now they are so heavily invested that they cannot turn back until it completely collapses around them without suffering significant pain and humiliation.
Deservedly so, in my opinion. They were sloppy. Scientists are supposed to be more careful. They are supposed to be trained to avoid snap judgments. They are supposed to know that nature is pernicious, and has, upon occasion, fooled even the most intelligent humans who ever lived. But, they rushed headlong into this fiasco, regardless. If they were ethical, they’d back off all the doom-mongering, and push for more time to gather data and consider competing hypotheses. But, we all know that isn’t going to happen.
Absurdly simple it is: 71% of the surface is unaffected by back radiation. SST is independent of atmospheric IR flux. And those who believe otherwise cannot support their beliefs.
The data show SST is increasing.
The IR that enters the skin layer of the ocean quickly mixes with ocean water below it, because the surface is turbulent.
Warmer air above the ocean surface also transfer heats by conduction.
Data shows north Pacific with red blob and incipient El Nino. SST data flat this century, like LT. You cannot demonstrate mixing Note: a bald assertion is not a demonstration. Air over ocean always cooler than SST.
You are a physicist? Interesting series of comments upthread by Geoff Wood on line by line Poynting analysis of earth’s radiative physics. Approaches the question by EM wave theory. Tears the heart and guts out of AGW. Very interesting.
Do you still hold that deniers should be imprisoned and branded on the left cheek with the letter “A” for “anti-science”?
Data on SST show significant warming:
0.69 C since 1850:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadsst3/data/HadSST.3.1.1.0/diagnostics/HadSST.3.1.1.0_monthly_globe_ts.txt
0.75 C since 1880:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cmb-faq/anomalies.php
“Air over ocean always cooler than SST.”
This gets back to the same argument so many on this blog don’t understand: If the air above the ocean surface warms, the rate of heat loss from the ocean declines, which means a warmer ocean.
Yeah, but David, the air over the ocean is always cooler than the SST.
Ocean2k study shows cooling last millennia.
Hi David Appell,
You state:
“The IR that enters the skin layer of the ocean quickly mixes with ocean water below it, because the surface is turbulent.
Warmer air above the ocean surface also transfer heats by conduction.”
Of course visible spectrum solar radiation penetrates deep below the ocean surface warming particulates/suspended solids and possibly the ocean floor (depending on depth and ocean opacity). That fact you completely ignore. Why? We know solar surface impact varies greatly due to cloud cover, glacial ice extent and other changes in Earth’s albedo yet you found it useful to ignore. Curious…
Have a great day!
Hi Bart,
MODTRAN is a very good simulator of what a very narrow field of view spectrometer installed on a satellite would see when it aims the nadir. If the satellite narrow FOV aims to other angles the result could be different.
See figure 3 in this link:
http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/6/5025/2006/acp-6-5025-2006.pdf
The limb view shows a complementary spectrum compared to the nadir one.
Being the Earth almost spheric that limb radiation is outgoing the system,
If it was true (how it is indeed) that increasing the CO2 concentration the nadir spectrum increases the bite at 666cm-1, it is true too that that limb spectrum increases the peak of outgoing radiation at the very same WL.
The effective outgoing spectrum of the whole Earth dish FOV should be the integral of the miriads of intermediate spectra between the nadir and the limb FOVs.
The whole Earth dish FOV should have that bite at 666cm-1 at least reduced (if it still exists).
Do you get my point?
Have a great day.
Massimo
That is quite curious, Massimo. Will have to think on it.
Bart, I was going to comment about the MODTRAN nonsense, but Massimo beat me to it.
I will add this, from wiki, where many pseudoscientists get their info:
‘MODTRAN (MODerate resolution atmospheric TRANsmission) is a computer program designed to model atmospheric propagation of electromagnetic radiation for the 100-50,000 cm−1 (0.2 to 100 um) spectral range.”
Let me emphasize, “computer program”. This is NOT the actual spectrum. And, who decides to cut off the range at 0.2 µm? if you cut out the high energy EM leaving the planet, do you not think that renders the “energy budget” meaningless?
Here’s a measurement of changes in the outgoing spectrum:
“Increases in greenhouse forcing inferred from the outgoing longwave radiation spectra of the Earth in 1970 and 1997,” J.E. Harries et al, Nature 410, 355-357 (15 March 2001).
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v410/n6826/abs/410355a0.html
Hi, Geran, I was gonna post some tripe about increases in greenhouse forcing from the risible peer reviewers, but David beat me to it.
Hi David, to further your understanding of the GHE non-forcing, see Geoff Wood’s comments upthread. Most interesting. Tears the lungs out of AGW.
Davie, I stopped chasing your links because they never prove anything. You have a collection of biased links that YOU believe in. But, your “belief system” is pseudoscience.
But, I decided to try this link. I was right again!
From the heading:
“Increases in greenhouse forcing inferred from the outgoing longwave radiation spectra of the Earth in 1970 and 1997.”
Davie, note the word “inferred”. You see, “pseudoscience” is made up of inferences, assumptions, “adjusted” data, mis-applied equations, made-up equations, “cherry-picked” facts, “spin”, and out-and-out lies.
You have to ask yourself why you want, so desperately, to be associated with pseudoscience? Is something missing in your life?
Ocean2k study shows ocean cooling last millennia.
Geran, meaningless? How so, if it is simply reflected light? The albedo hardly figures, does it?
I was being facetious, but sometimes my jokes get so twisted even I can’t unravel them!
My point is that MODTRAN can NOT tell us anything about Earth’s energy budget. I should say “anything useful, reliable, and believable”, to expand somewhat.
MODTRAN is based on fundamental laws of physics.
Every day, scientists and engineers use fundamental laws of physics to create technologies: airplanes, bridges, circuits, MRI machines.
Why should the calculations behind the latter be trusted, but not the calculations behind the former?
Hi David,
learn about the difference between regular and diffused transmittance:
http://people.bath.ac.uk/gp304/uv/44-74668PRD_DiffuseReflectanceTransmittance.pdf
When you learnt it, you should be able to understand why MODTRAN can’t be used to predict the exiting energy from a single point of the TOA, as the ones who play the game of changing the ground temperature to return the vertical outgoing flux believe they do.
Have a great day.
Massimo
To be clearer,
MODTRAN is probably the best tool to see an airplane behind the clouds but it can’t predict what it happen at the ground temperature when the CO2 double in the atmosphere.
Even if highly expensive a good instrument designed to measure a parameter could be unuseful for measuring an another one.
By the way, I suppose you know that MODTRAN is a SW designed and patented by the US Air Force to correct the view of the missiles/ airplanes FLIR devices to allow them to see behind the clouds.
Again, have a nice day.
Massimo
Davie, why should you get so confused by actual science, but always seem to fully understand pseudoscience?
IOW, you have to correctly apply the science. You cannot fly from LA to New York in a microwave oven. You cannot cross a river on an MRI “machine”.
Wow!!! Geran:
“You cannot fly from LA to New York in a microwave oven. You cannot cross a river on an MRI “machine”.”
A little extreme examples, but exactly what I wanted to say in my previous message.
What it wonder me is not that David Appell doesn’t figure out that about MODTRAN, but that there are some climate scientist that even when you explain that issue to them, they still continue to play that silly game of adjusting the ground temperature to match that flux at TOA, ignoring that that flux is no way the whole exiting energy there.
Have a great day.
Massimo
Hi Massimo and Geran,
You both seem to agree:
“You cannot fly from LA to New York in a microwave oven. You cannot cross a river on an MRI “machine”.”
Don’t tell that to Roger Shawyer regarding his EM Drive. Chinese scientists/engineers and an Austrian one at least have claimed microwave energy can fuel travel.
Have a great day
Correction: Chinese and an Austrian scientist have conducted experiments that support the Shawyer’s claims regarding EM Drive.
Hi JohnKl,
always nice read your posts.
I know nothing about Roger Shawyer’s EM Drive, but reading very little on the web it looks like an another incredible machine.
I don’t want give my opinion about its reliability, but (even if it really works) it seems light years far from being a useful thruster. It needs an enormous amount of energy to produce a so tiny movement that a laser interferometer is required to measure it.
Anyways, lets them work if they like it.
Just don’t ask me bunch of money for funding their research 🙂
Have a great day.
Massimo
Hi Massimo PORZIO,
Please know I largely agree with you that very large amounts of energy indeed would be required to propel an EM drive powered device. Interestingly enough the conical closed drive works by a thrust differential between the wide and narrow conical ends. I simply thought it coincidental that you two discussed traveling via microwave oven & that seemed very close to this device.
Don’t try the microwave oven wild ride!
Have a great day!
Despite his early valuable scientific work, history will not remember Fred Singer kindly. He sold his scientific soul to those who found him useful. His position on secondhand smoke is bad enough, but his views on climate science have degenerated into the absurd. (At a talk in Portland OR a few years ago, Singer said there was no global warming, and instead attributed the rise in temperature readings to too many thermometers at airports.) His recent article in the “American Thinker,” about why a paper of his was rejected in peer review, almost reads like satire. Almost.
It is a sad trajectory for any career. But Singer brought it on himself.
Singer will be seen as a prophet and a sage. The AGW house of cards is on the verge of collapse. Collapse, as in what you have prayed for in the case of polar ice caps, ha, fat chance. Hi, David.
Davie, last I heard, Singer “believes” in the GHE. So, he basically agrees more with you than with the extreme Skeptics. And yet, you attempt to trash him?
Interesting….
There is nothing wrong with Singer’s position on second hand smoke and this is from a person that has never smoked and has always abhorred having to smell second hand smoke. The “science” of second hand smoke was driven by similar forces to the climate change debacle. Crappy agenda driven science that one dare not question. And the minions of CAGW such as you David use Singer’s genuine scientific skepticism of the second hand smoke studies to attempt to turn him into a pariah.
Just checking to see if my posts are still banned, before I write a detailed response.
All the posts on Roy’s forum give a clear, net impression of the uncertainty of the effects on climate, that rising CO2 levels might have, and that’s all good, in my view.
At one end of the spectrum we have a certainty that CO2 levels have no bearing on a warming climate, and at the other end of the spectrum we have the views of David Appell who seems to be the most certain among contributors on the forum, that CO2 causes warming due to a ‘greenhouse’ effect.
Science progresses due to the presence of skepticism. Without skepticism we’d all still believe that the Earth is the centre of the universe. When scientists express certainty about issues that are clearly uncertain due to the complexity of the situation, there’s usually some other emotional and non-scientific factor involved, such as excessive concern about one’s grandchildren, concern for one’s job prospects, concern about personal fame and approval by one’s peers, and so on.
Now that the Pope has weighed in on the issue, I’ve begun to think again about the religious nature of climate-change alarmism. I’m not religious myself (at least not in any conventional sense), but I’m interested in ethical issues.
One major ethical issue I see in relation to the current political position, that we need to cut our CO2 emissions, is the justification for a lie. Is a lie ever justified? Is it possible that there is an issue here that is greater than the personal biases of scientists and politicians?
I recently came across the following analysis of the reasons why civilizations in the past have collapsed. (Mathematicians should also find it interesting!)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800914000615
In the conclusions of the study it is mentioned that one major reason why civilizations collapse is due to the over-exploitation of essential resources, in combination with an unequal ‘stratification of society’, or significant inequality of income, wealth and status.
Let’s imagine that the scare about AGW had never arisen because all climate scientists were perfectly honest and refused to exaggerate the degree of certainty about the effects of rising CO2 levels.
Let’s also imagine that the known and certain benefits of CO2, namely increased food production and a general increase in the greening of the planet, were not ignored or sidelined, as they currently are by the AGW alarmists.
Surely the effect would have been full-scale exploitation of fossil fuels around the globe, as well as continuing, and sometimes increasing wealth-inequality, the precise recipe for civilization collapse.
Now of course there would be many sensible and perceptive economists and scientists who could advise governments that we should set aside a certain amount of wealth generated from fossil fuels to fund research into alternative energy supplies, to prepare future generations for the big crunch when fossil fuels become scarce.
Unfortunately, populations at large do not respond well to rational arguments. They need the stimulus of fear to get them motivated, hence the need for AGW alarmism.
Actually, as the biosphere is presently constituted, it is plain that the earth is far from its potential for supporting and benefiting life. Scientists have determined that the earth’s potential can be greatly enhanced and that a greatly expanded biosphere can be achieved. That “bona vitali maxima” will be realized when humankind achieves atmospheric CO2 levels of 1500-1700 ppm. There is every hope that humankind will be capable of achieving such levels of CO2, despite the claims by some that present day fossil fuel reserves appear to be insufficient. Those who claim a shortfall of the necessary carbon based fossil fuels are overlooking the carbon possibilities represented by the world’s forests. These are the ultimate carbon reserves and the beautiful thing about it is that these wonderful carbon reserves can be easily exploited, with the simplest of devices. A chain saw for example, in the hands of a skilled operator, is capable of harvesting several hundred high carbon timbers a day.
Hi Vincent,
“They need the stimulus of fear to get them motivated, hence the need for AGW alarmism.”
I don’t agree, the stimulus of fear typically leads people to do bad things which they never did otherwise. For example most of wars have started scaring people with the supposed dangers represented simply by the existence of their enemies.
In fact the AGW scaring is now used to waste a big amount of money into well known unsustainable “alternative energies”, while it could be used for much more profitable researches for the whole world wellness (for the third world too of course).
IMHO a scientist MUST BE ALWAYS HONEST, otherwise he/she isn’t a scientist at all.
Have a great day.
Massimo
Massimo,
You have a point which I wouldn’t totally dismiss. But scaring people in order to motivate them to do what is rationally the right thing, is different from scaring people to motivate them to do the wrong thing, like fighting an unnecessary war.
Encouraging the populace, through scare tactics, to temporarily accept higher energy prices in order to encourage the development of sustainable energy, might be the best way, despite any inherent inefficiencies in that method.
I would prefer a rational policy where governments would set aside a portion of GDP each year for research into improving the efficiency of alternative and sustainable energy supplies. But let’s be realistic. America has trillions of dollars of national debt. Many countries, including Australia, and especially certain European countries, have significant national debts or budget deficits, so adding to that debt by setting aside money for alternative energy research would not be politically feasible without a scare campaign.
I’m reminded here of a comment I made a few years ago on another climate forum, in relation to Obama’s comment that ‘the science is settled’. I argued, ‘Great, if the science is settled then we should reduce expenditure on climate-change research, retrain redundant climate scientists so they could be useful in the development of alternative energy supplies, and set up new or additional research centres for the development and improvement of alternative energy supply methods.’
Guess what! My post was censored.
Hi Vincent,
I’m Italian so I well know the meaning of the saying “the end justifies the means” because I’m a Machiavelli compatriot.
Anyways I remain on my point that science must remain out of politics. Politicians should look to other disciplines for liars.
IMHO, there is no place for scientists who fake their research for a political agenda.
Of course it’s just my own point of view.
Have a great day.
Massimo
Massimo, Machiavelli is an interesting read on statecraft: “Do not depend on gratitude”. The principles in this work would have been appreciated by one Cesare Borgia, right?
A compatriot? Do you mean that you are Florentine?
Another Borgia and sire of the above, one Alexander vi, recorded that there had been no reports from the Bishop of Greenland for the past eighty years. This document dating from around 1492, as I recall. This gives a good constraint on the date of the extinction of the norse colony there.
Hi mpainter,
I believed to replay last night instead I see that the message isn’t here.
Anyways, no I’m not Florentine, meant that Florence is from a long time an Italian city, so in that way he was an Italian like me, even if he never known about the concept of Italy as a country of course.
Have a great day.
Massimo
I am sure you have heard the fable of the boy who cried wolf.
You really think that some self appointed elitists can hide the truth for any considerable length of time. when the villagers find out they have been duped, they are liable to get out their pitchforks and torches and storm the Bastille.
I have to 100% agree with Massimo PORZIO on science. It has to maintain the quest for the REAL truth. If people need to be scared into taking action let politicians and phony media stir up the masses. Scientists should only pursue finding the truth to the best of their abilities. If any are intentionally misrepresenting data they should be removed from the science community. If NOAA or GISS are intentionally manipulating data to make it appear the Earth is warming more than it actually is, the scientists involved in such falsehood need to be driven from the science community and banned from participation.
Exactly Norman,
I’m with you.
Have a great weekend.
Massimo
Hi No tree sesrman and Massimo,
Of course you’re both correct. The problem for Vincent is that many people already know that eco-frauds manipulate data to create panic, delude the obsequiously gullible and siphon scarce resources to feed a class of academic and political grifters that appear not to have the intellect, will, or knowledge to comprehend let alone solve any problem much larger than keeping their funding sources satisfied and willing to pay their salary.
Scientific knowledge comprises the facts and laws of nature. Substituting fiction for ovservation and measurement
To continue:
…has no vslue.
Have a great day!
Science is highly offended when other considerations try to enter science and lecture us that their only duty is to truth. (How many times have you heard them tell their version of the Galileo story?) Yet Vincent seems perfectly willing to throw truth aside when it suits his agenda.
You’ve misinterpreted my post. I’m not perfectly willing to throw the truth aside. I’ve expressed the ethical dilemma of justifying a lie.
If an desired and sensible outcome, necessary for the survival of our civilization, can only be achieved through telling lies to a largely, scientifically illiterate polulation, then maybe that’s the best course of action.
Would that all AGW zealots preached as you do. That would cure the problem but quick.
OMG Vincent, do you realize what you just said? You are the enlightened who decides what everyone else (the stupid masses) should know (regardless of fact)?
Vincent,
You just communicated that you may be a consciously willing liar who claims to feel somewhat guilty about it but uses disaster scenarios of future doom as some sort of pseudo justification for fraud. Of course, if you admittedly deceive why should anyone take you seriously anyways? You could and likely would simply claim my climate paranoia made me do it every time your caught in yet another bit of eco-fraud. However, why should anyone care to read your claims, listen to your nonsense or do anything less than pelt you with eggs? Of course eggs contain a significant amount of sulfur and some eco-conscious defenders might point to the bad odor and resulting bio-waste as reason to leave you alone.
All that aside, you seem all to willing to abandon facts and reason. You state:
“If an desired and sensible outcome, necessary for the survival of our civilization, can only be achieved through telling lies to a largely, scientifically illiterate polulation, then maybe that’s the best course of action.”
You begin the statement with “if.” Do you expect any sentient person to take your word for it? You throw around vague words like “sensible” ( to whom? You? ) or necessary ( again to what purpose and to whom? You again? ) without clearly defining what you mean. As such you simply communicate to readers that you may lie if you cannot figure a way out of a dilemma and judge a situation hopeless. Btw when you use the terms civilization which do you mean? A community of eco-whackos?
Have a great day!
Hi Vincent,
You wrote: “Science progresses due to the presence of skepticism.”
Without observations all the skepticism you can muster will have no effect.
Have a good day, Jerry
Hi Jerry,
Observation by itself will achieve nothing. The observation must be considered in relation to previous description and explanations.
Without a degree of skepticism about the truth of previous explanations, the observer would likely not pursue the matter, assuming his own observations to be an aberration or a mistake when such observations were found to be in conflict with previous explanations supported by a mighty consensus of opinion.
“…in conflict with previous observations…”
As Artemus Ward, the American humorist said,
“It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us in trouble. It’s the things we know which ain’t so!”
I don’t think “Open Mind” respects the satellite data or what UAH is doing. The point they are bringing up is the satellite data diverges after 2000. The claim, if I read correctly, is the Earth warming has not paused but is continuing to rise at a steady pace, the satellite data is the flawed set according to this view.
https://tamino.wordpress.com/2015/09/24/exogenous-redux/
Hi Norman,
I think that men still haven’t found the way fr measuring the so called averaged temperature at the resolution and precision needed to state if the globe is really warming or cooling today.
The simple fact that including the UHI effect the curve goes downward and adding the effect of irrigation it returns upward should highlight that the ground measurements are the result of modeled data not real measurements indeed.
And yes, David Appell would say that even satellites data are adjusted so also they are useless for this purpose, but IMHO we should recognize that temperature is a very aleatory parameter, especially when referred to gases, so pretending to get a so high precision and resolution it’s probably a chimera.
Anyways this doesn’t mean that I don’t respect the satellite data, I think they are very useful for their original scope, that is: trying to predict the weather.
Have a great weekend.
Massimo
Hops! Maybe I was not clear,
my:
“the ground measurements are the result of modeled data not real measurements indeed.”
Must be: “the ground measurements are the result of modeled data not real measurements indeed (for the purpose of detecting so tiny variation of course)”
Per-capita emissions of CO2 of North Korea fell from 12 tonnes per annum in 1995 to about 3 in 1998, where the figure stays. Some of the pleasure, of living in a place with a low carbon footprint and using renewables instead, is explained in the following excerpt; from
“In Order To Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom, by Yeonmi Park”:
“One of the main problems in North Korea was a fertilizer shortage. When the economy collapsed in the 1990s the Soviet Union stopped sending fertilizer to us, and our own factories stopped producing it. This led to crop failures that made the famine even worse. So the government came up with a campaign to fill the fertilizer gap with a local and renewable source: human and animal waste. Every worker and schoolchild had a quota to fill. You can imagine what kind of problems this created for our families. Every member of the household had a daily assignment, so when we got up in the morning, it was like a war. My aunts were the most competitive. ‘Remember not to poop in school,’ my aunt in Kowon told me every day. ‘Wait to do it here.’ Whenever my aunt in Songnam-Ri travelled away from home and had to poop somewhere else, she loudly complained that she didn’t have a plastic bag with her to save it. ‘Next time I’ll remember,’ she would say. Some people would lock up their outhouses to keep the poop thieves away. At school the teachers would send us out into the streets to find dog mess and carry it back to class. This is not something you see every day in the West.”
No problem. Just explain to the North Koreans about renewable energy sources: you know, wind, sunshine, water buffalo, hamsters, etc.
I ran across an interesting website some of you may be interested in.
http://www.justfacts.com/globalwarming.asp
The link is for one area of the website. It covers many topics.
Roy and others … please go back to this comment.
Feel free to write an article attempting to refute my hypothesis, Roy – after all, I’ve refuted yours and perhaps next week when I get back from a National Convention here, I’ll add a page to my website about “Spencer Errors” just as I have about PSI errors and WUWT errors – these pages visited by over 2,000 out of nearly 12,000 who have visited the Home page so far this year.
I noticed this article in The Washington Post from earlier this year. They attack Ted Cruz’s skepticism by quoting Carl Mears. However, Ted Cruz cited both RSS and UAH in their response. Did they contact you for your opinion?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/03/24/ted-cruz-says-satellite-data-show-the-globe-isnt-warming-this-satellite-scientist-feels-otherwise/
MikeN asks of Dr Spencer:
“Did they contact you for your opinion?”
Why would they? They already had the anathema they wanted, to spit in the face of the impertinent, unwashed, unbeliever.
Hey Dr. Spencer,
I had a question about datasets. I’m an accountant by trade so I’m not familiar with much of the terminology, but I’ve done enough research and collected enough data to be able to ask basic questions about basic research methodologies.
I always hear about “data” that shows the temperatures are rising, whether it be surface temps, troposphere, or some other type of temperatures. My main question as I attempt to learn about this is topic– what temperatures are best to use as a measure of climate change, and why? Is it better to focus on surface temperatues? Atmospheric temperatures? Is that question largely agreed upon in the science community, or is that one of the primary drivers of disagreement?
I apologize if I missed something on your site that already answered the question. If you could kindly point me in the right direction, I would appreciate it.
Hi Josh
The satellite measurements for the lower troposphere include altitudes up to 8 km. Maximum weighting is given to altitudes between 3 and 4 km.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2015/04/version-6-0-of-the-uah-temperature-dataset-released-new-lt-trend-0-11-cdecade/
We live on the surface on the Earth, not 4km above it. So, our main concern is obviously the temperature at the surface.
The action of greenhouse gases is to warm the surface whilst cooling the upper atmosphere.
“The action of greenhouse gases is to warm the surface…”
Nah MikeB, the sun warms the surface. It’s the sun, stupid.
Mack says, September 29, 2015 at 5:24 AM:
““The action of greenhouse gases is to warm the surface…”
Nah MikeB, the sun warms the surface. It’s the sun, stupid.”
Exactly my point on this thread. People like Ed Bo simply don’t seem to get it.
The atmosphere doesn’t warm or heat the surface at all. The Sun is what’s doing the warming/heating of the surface. The atmosphere cools the surface, being its primary cold reservoir/heat sink.
Only less so than what space would … The insulation effect.
Kristian,
I agree with your post. I think too many believe GHG is an actual warming mechanism. You point out correctly it is not a warming system, it still cools. It is a relative rate of cooling that confuses so many. A nongas atmosphere like the moon will warm fast but cool very rapidly when the sun goes down. A GHG will slow down that rate of cooling which gives you a warmer surface relative to another state. It never directly warms the Earth’s surface. The measured downwelling IR is always less than or equal to the upwelling IR from the surface.
Thanks.
The converse still applies Norman, that without the atmosphere, the surface facing the sun would be a hell of a lot hotter than without an atmosphere.
The total net effect of the presence of an atmosphere, is to neither warm nor cool the surface, but to moderate or iron out,surface temperature.
Hi Kristian and Norman,
Let’s face it GLOBAL REDUCTION IN COOLING RATE doesn’t quite have the eye catching persuasive appeal of GLOBAL WARMING! Difficult to imagine thousands of climate activists bearing with sub-zero temperatures to attend some climate conference, wade through innumerable manipulated climate datasets projecting doom all because the planet doesn’t cool fast enough. Just saying…
Have a great day!
It would be interesting to calculate the man hours of attention paid by millions of people throughout the world to discern the portent and meaning of the supposedly measured, but in fact adjusted, temperature flux of approximately less than half a degree Celsius since 1979. Can one find an activity that has spurred so much interest and communication between people and has provided so little fruitful results?
Have a great day!
Kristian:
Why do you refuse repeated requests to answer my very simple, very basic question:
Do you or do you not agree that with a constant pattern of solar power input, the earth’s surface with an atmosphere that provides DWLWIR has higher temperature levels than it would have with an atmosphere that provided no DWLWIR?
I’m starting to think you don’t even know the answer!
Hi Ed Bo,
He answered your question in the post above and Norman touched on it also. The question has been answered by so many people including myself on this blog that any sentient person reading your question can only wonder what part of Kristian’s claim that the “atmosphere cannot warm the surface at all” don’t you understand?
Have a great day!
John:
No, he dodged the question. He responded by saying, and I quote:
“Sigh!”
That is not an answer!
Josh says:
“…question largely agreed upon…?”
The short answer is “No.”
One is reminded of what Lord Palmerston, the sometime Prime Minister of Great Britain, is said to have replied, when asked, “What is the answer to the Schleswig-Holstein question?”
“Only three men have ever known the answer. One was Juppe of the French diplomatic service, but he is dead. Another was Baron Wundst, of Warsaw University, but the knowledge drove him mad. The third is me – but I have forgotten it.”
Hi Roy and everyone,
You may like the following ( yet another ) false prediction/prophecy by climate alarmists aka eco-whackos from the pseudo-church of climatology.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/planet-still-standing-500-days-after-french-foreign-minister-warned-climate-chaos_1038074.html
500 days have passed since the French foreign minister, speaking to John Kerry, predicted that if nothing was done we’d face climate chaos in 500 days! Well 500 days have passed and the trees, bees and fleas all seem the same to me. Of course we shouldn’t be too quick to judge likely the IPCC or some other large emitter of eco-bull will tell issue a report that everyone on the planet is really dead but the effect of CO2 is such that no one is aware of it!
Have a great day!
Hi JohnKl,
nothing new under the sun, except that some news look like fried air… Fried air? Oh my God it’s surely due to the anthropogenic global warming! 🙂
Have a great day.
Massimo
JohnKl,
I wonder what is meant by the term climate chaos. Sounds ominous but I wonder what the French minister was suggesting by the use of this term. Weather is already chaotic but I really don’t think climate will go nuts like weather. I think most the same patterns in place now will continue as they have been. I wonder why people think a 0.5 C temperature raise (possibly) will be so drastic? What mechanism would happen to make sudden rapid changes to long term climate states?
Also I am never certain about the warming listed. I have read papers where the climate scientists claim Urban Warming is only a small amount. When I drive vehicles with outdoor thermometers available I notice Omaha NE is about 3 F warmer than the countryside at night and winter. Sometimes driving across I80 in winter the temperature in winter can be up to 8 F warmer. One winter the country temperature was -2 F going into Omaha and went up to 6 F across I80. When the claim is made that UHI is not significant it suggests dishonest reporting since anyone with an outdoor vehicle thermometer can easily see a rather large Urban heating at least at certain times. And what does climate scientists claim? Warmer nights, and if many thermometers are located within city limits it can explain a lot of the nighttime warming noticed.
Will Dr. Spencer post a time-lapse of the lunar eclipse? I have seen many photos of the blood red moon but no time-lapse.
“JohnKl says:
September 29, 2015 at 2:23 PM
Vincent,
You just communicated that you may be a consciously willing liar who claims to feel somewhat guilty about it but uses disaster scenarios of future doom as some sort of pseudo justification for fraud.”
That’s not correct, JohnKI. I’ve communicated my observations that other people are willing to lie for the sake of survival, self-preservation. advancement of their career, acquisition of wealth, and so on, and I’m questioning if there’s any justification for such lies regarding the degree of certainty about AGW.
Lying seems to be a part of an instinct for survival that is shared by many species of animal. However, I understand perfectly that the progress of scientific knowledge and understanding would be greatly retarded if scientists were to lie within the context of their data gathering and analysis, so I certainly would not approve of that.
The lying that I’m referring to takes place at a more political and administrative level. For example, Climate Research Centres have not been set up to carry out a purely theoretical scientific enquiry into the processes of climate change merely out of curiosity.
It’s the alarm about the effects of CO2 emissions which drives the funding.
Without that alarm there might be two undesirable, broad consequences.
(1) The funding for Climate Research Centres would be significantly reduced, perhaps causing unemployemt or at least a retraining of many climate scientists.
(2) There would be less sense of urgency about cleaning up our environment and making the transition to renewable energy. This could result in a much greater problem in the future if the supply of fossil fuels were to rapidly become very scarce, leaving our grandchildren unprepared for the transition, a transition which is currently underway, largely due to the alarm about AGW.
Hope that clears up matters for you, JohnKl.
Vincent, your consequence (2) assumes that we are not transitioning away from fossil fuels quickly enough to avoid some “much greater problem in the future.”
Most people in these comments, myself included, do not think that is true and see no reason to harm the world’s economy (hurting the poor more than the rich) to satisfy an elite who think they know what’s best for us.
When a transition takes place it will not be from a top down decision but from the actions of many acting in their own self interests.
Nope, Rick. My comments on this issue seem to be greatly misunderstood.
There’s no doubt that we are already transitioning away from fossil fuels.
I’m making the point that without the scare tactics of AGW alarmism we might not have transitioned away from fossil fuels at all, or hardly at all, or at least much more slowly.
With continuing reliance on fossil fuels and the continued construction of new coal-fired power stations, a catastrophic economic collapse in the future would have been more likely, when eventually fossil fuels became really scarce and expensive before fully developed alternatives had been prepared.
As it has happened, we have been gradually making the transition over the past few decades to the point where solar power, at its best, is now on a par, cost-wise, with coal-fired power. As technology advances, solar power should become significantly cheaper into the future, which is to everyone’s benefit, including the poor.
Vincent, we have never transitioned from one source of energy to another because we ran out of the old source, we transitioned because we developed new technology and energy sources that were less expensive and more efficient. Scare tactics and government intervention were not significant drivers.
Solar and wind are not competitive without huge subsidies. If they ever become competitive there will be no reason for scare tactics or subsidies.
The only practical energy source that has been helped along by the government is nuclear and that has not achieved it’s potential due to irrational fear. So I believe fear is always a negative.
Unless a new energy source is cheaper it should not replace what we have now.
Sorry, Rick! That’s not a rational argument. Fear can be a strong motivating force. If you think a lion or tiger poses a threat, you run as fast as you can, motivated by fear.
The fear of nuclear power is not irrational. We have the disasters of Chernobyl and Fukushima as examples of what can go wrong. Both of these disasters were caused by human incompetence.
The Chernobyl nuclear reactor was known at the time to be a flawed design, but despite that, the Russians continued to operate it, for economic reasons, in denial of the possible consequences.
The Fukushima disaster was caused by a tsunami, but the decision to build the nuclear plant close to sea level, which made it vulnerable to the effects of a tsunami, was due to human incompetence.
Along that eastern coastline of Japan there are numerous markings and stone engravings which indicate the height of previous tsunamis, one with a clear inscription which reads, “Do not build your house below this point”.
Why do you think people build houses in flood plains without considering the likelihood of a disastrous flood, sooner or later? Incompetence and denial.
Why do you think people build ordinary houses which are not strengthened to resist strong winds, in areas which are subject to Cyclones and Hurricanes? Incompetence and denial, again.
Both of those situations could be avoided by the authorities, or local councils, instilling the fear of future floods or cyclones in support of their strict building codes which would protect people from the disastrous consequences of such extreme weather events.
Have I made my point clear, or do I need to continue?
Oh my Vincent, running from lions and tigers because the risk of being eaten may be 1 in 10 verses the risk of being harmed by a nuclear power plant on the order of 1 in 100 million means that fear of wild beasts is rational but fear of nuclear power is completely irrational.
Building codes are not followed out of fear of future disasters but for economic reasons such as the need to follow the rules to get a loan, get insurance, and avoid liability. Codes are written by people who rationally weighed the risks and set penalties for noncompliance. People in the path of disasters are motivated by fear to get out of the way.
My main point is that creating fear to get people to act in a certain way is immortal even if you think it for a good cause. Scare tactics are never acceptable.
Hi Vincent,
You stated:
“That’s not correct, JohnKI. I’ve communicated my observations that other people are willing to lie for the sake of survival, self-preservation. advancement of their career, acquisition of wealth, and so on, and I’m questioning if there’s any justification for such lies regarding the degree of certainty about AGW.”
If you question whether lying appears justified to you it sure seems as if you haven’t made up your mind (or what passes for one) yet. If you believed it justified, would you lie for the alleged sake of survival, career advancement, wealth acquisition or your own personal gain period?
Have a great day!
Jerry L Krause,
The infrared thermometer is shielded from the surroundings but open in the front to the atmosphere. They do it every night using infrared telescopes cooled using nitrogen or helium. They see no 330 Watts per meter square of the alleged infrared backradiation from the atmosphere. They see nothing. That is how infrared astronomers mapped the universe. In the presence of 330 watts per meter square of backradiation, infrared astronomy cannot exist. So back radiation and GHG effect must be fiction.
Cooling is the key. When the refrigerant of Spitzer infrared telescope was exhausted, it ceased to capture clear signals from the cosmos because it was getting infrared radiation noise from the telescope itself. It works now as optical telescope. Therefore, if you want to prove the existence of backradiation from the atmosphere, you have to shield the instruments from the surrounding and cool it close to zero absolute. Otherwise, backradiation from the instrument and surrounding will be measured and the experiment would be in error and cannot be used as evidence. All those publications claiming to have measured backradiaiton did not use coolant in their experiments, check the procedure, they are worthless as a result.
Nabil:
The US government is currently spending billions of dollars preparing the James Webb Space Telescope. This is an infrared telescope, and the entire stated purpose of putting it into space is to get it past the “back radiation” from the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
How many letters have you written to your congressional representatives complaining about what you must consider a colossal waste of money?
They just spent many millions of dollars testing the sensors and electronics for the JWST in a giant vacuum chamber with the walls cooled to about 20K to eliminate the “back radiation” it would receive from walls at ambient temperature. Do you think they were idiots to do this?
“Rick says:
October 6, 2015 at 3:12 AM
Oh my Vincent, running from lions and tigers because the risk of being eaten may be 1 in 10 verses the risk of being harmed by a nuclear power plant on the order of 1 in 100 million means that fear of wild beasts is rational but fear of nuclear power is completely irrational.”
Fine example of a false argument, Rick. The reason why the risk of being harmed by a nuclear power plant is so low is because the fear of future disasters has resulted in very few nuclear power plants being built. Without such fear we could be in big trouble, with thousands of inadequately planned and poorly managed nuclear power plants scattered throughout the world, subject to the effects of earthquakes, floods, terrorist attacks, poor building practices due to corruption and so on, not to mention the widespread availability of uranium increasing the risk that such uranium could be processed by terrorist organisations to make nuclear explosives..
“Rick says:
Building codes are not followed out of fear of future disasters but for economic reasons such as the need to follow the rules to get a loan, get insurance, and avoid liability. Codes are written by people who rationally weighed the risks and set penalties for noncompliance. People in the path of disasters are motivated by fear to get out of the way.”
You missed my point again. Sloppy work, inadequate housing structures and inadequate building codes in relation to the historically known weather patterns that prevail in a particular region, are driven by immediate economic gain without proper regard for the future consequences.
Advertising the historical record of extreme weather events in a particular region, and taking into consideration the likelihood of a re-occurrence of similar events in the future, during the planning of dwellings, airports, bridges, roads, nuclear power plants, and so on, would be facing up to reality.
However, for the sake of immediate economic gain, we prefer to live in a state of denial. Strict building codes add to the cost of everything. A house built on sturdy, 4 metre high stilts or piers, to place it above the level of all previously known floods, is much more expensive to build than a house on a concrete slab.
Furthermore, the fact that the building code requires the house to be built on stilts, sends a clear message that a future flood can be expected. That fact alone would tend to put people off. Who wants to spend lots of money building a house in a particular location in the expectation that a major flood will occur in 20 or 30 years’ time?
“Rick says:
My main point is that creating fear to get people to act in a certain way is immortal even if you think it for a good cause. Scare tactics are never acceptable.”
Indeed it is an immortal practice. It’s been going on since the beginning of the history of humanity. I think you meant ‘immoral’ (wink). Now that’s open for debate. Suppose that the inducing of fear is the only way to get people to react in their own interests?