Hi @son_of_bob ,
I combined my response to both your posts into one post.
Mais non. It is the foundation. Everything is predicated upon the premise of this +33°C baseline effect. It is the edifice upon which it is all built.
For an analogy, it’s like the Ptolemaic model of astronomy. This model is predicated upon the Earth being at the center of the universe with the planets, Sun and other stars rotating around the Earth. One could call the starting-point system of deferent and epicycles the “crude model”:
In the Ptolemaic system, each planet is moved by a system of two spheres: one called its deferent; the other, its epicycle. The deferent is a circle whose center point, called the eccentric and marked in the diagram with an X, is distant from the Earth. The original purpose of the eccentric was to account for the difference in length of the seasons (northern autumn was about five days shorter than spring during this time period) by placing the Earth away from the center of rotation of the rest of the universe. Another sphere, the epicycle, is embedded inside the deferent sphere and is represented by the smaller dotted line to the right. A given planet then moves around the epicycle at the same time the epicycle moves along the path marked by the deferent. These combined movements cause the given planet to move closer to and further away from the Earth at different points in its orbit, and explained the observation that planets slowed down, stopped, and moved backward in retrograde motion, and then again reversed to resume normal, or prograde, motion.
However this system produced observational errors, namely:
Unfortunately, the system that was available in Ptolemy’s time did not quite match observations, even though it was improved over Hipparchus’ system. Most noticeably the size of a planet’s retrograde loop (especially that of Mars) would be smaller, and sometimes larger, than expected, resulting in positional errors of as much as 30 degrees.
The errors were due of course to the system being founded upon a completely invalid premise – that the Earth was in the center of the universe and that the other celestial bodies rotated around the Earth. However, Ptolemy was able to improve the model, that one could say “have come a long way” from the initial model:
To alleviate the problem, Ptolemy developed the equant. The equant was a point near the center of a planet’s orbit which, if you were to stand there and watch, the center of the planet’s epicycle would always appear to move at uniform speed; all other locations would see non-uniform speed, like on the Earth. By using an equant, Ptolemy claimed to keep motion which was uniform and circular, although it departed from the Platonic ideal of uniform circular motion. The resultant system, which eventually came to be widely accepted in the west, seems unwieldy to modern astronomers; each planet required an epicycle revolving on a deferent, offset by an equant which was different for each planet. It predicted various celestial motions, including the beginning and end of retrograde motion, to within a maximum error of 10 degrees, considerably better than without the equant.
And indeed the observational accuracy was better, but… it was just an improvement, an added model complexity onto the initial model. It didn’t fix the fundamental flaw – that the Earth is not in the center of the universe. And further, no improvements on Ptolemy’s model could fix this flaw. The whole model has to be discarded.
And so it is too with the greenhouse effect. It is predicated upon a physically invalid premise – a model which doesn’t include conduction or convection, among other blatantly unphysical assumptions like the Sun being placed twice as far from the Earth as the actual Sun is – with a physically impossible solution - that a heat source (the Earth’s surface) is further heated (+33°C no less) by the heat of an object (the atmosphere) that it itself heated in the first place!
Yes, one could I’m sure add further tweaks such as epicycles and equants were to the Ptolemaic model to get results even better than 10 degrees. But it would never address the fundamental flaw which is the invalid premise.
Also a model is just a model, not proof or evidence of anything.
It should be shocking to anyone that the models used to justify the actions in the name of saving the environment – increased energy costs, banning synthetic fertilizer, etc. – all of which cause great harm to the majority of humans while making a few humans incredibly powerful and wealthy – are “not freely available” to the public being subjected to such measures.
The +33°C calculation is arrived at by a trick of geometry, where it is as if the skin of the perfect sphere (which is itself not so far off from an oblate spheroid) is unwrapped and flattened and then placed twice as far from the Sun as the Earth actually is. This is the mathematical calculation used to arrive at the -18°C, which is used to justify the +33°C degree of the greenhouse effect!
All those versions are based upon this fundamental calculation, though. That is how the magnitude of the greenhouse gases is encoded. All the models are based on it.
What they have done is then taken this calculation and embedded it into more sophisticated models that do incorporate rotation, varying insolation, water, terrain, etc. (all of which were initially absent) – but the potency of the greenhouse effect is literally at the core of it. So it taints the entire rest of the model. Just like the equants didn’t fix the problem with the Ptolemaic system – neither do these more sophisticated models fix the problem with the greenhouse effect theory.
The +33°C calculation does treat it as completely black – without any water either by the way!
The +33°C calculation does.
The actual insolation of the Sun is about 1368 W/m^2. This corresponds to a blackbody temperature of +120.96°C (calculator link).
How do they get the -18°C? Well they observe that the Sun only shines on one hemisphere at a time. More specifically the Sun only shines on a circular cross-section whose radius is the size of the disk – which energy is distributed varyingly across one hemisphere. But they take this circular cross-section of input and assume it is instantly and evenly and constantly radiated out by the whole sphere, which has x4 surface area of the circle. So they divide the 1368 W/m^2 by 4 to get 342 W/m^2. Then they re-equate this outgoing 342 W/m^2 to also be the incoming 342 W/m^2 – which is the figure you see in the energy budgets of incoming solar radiation – 1/4th the power of the actual sun.
This washington.edu course says it explicitly:
We need to multiply the incoming solar energy by the factor 1/4–the ratio of the area of the earth’s disk (pi R2) to the Earth’s surface area (4 pi R2)-- You can think of this as spreading out the incident solar radiation uniformly over the earth’s surface (the night side of the earth as well as the day side) 1370 / 4 = 342.5 watts per square meter.
So they are quadruply-weakened indeed!
They don’t stop there, though. This 342 W/m^2 corresponds to 5.5°C which is only 9.5°C off from the measured average 15°C. How do they go even lower? Their perfidy knows no bounds. Even though this calculation is supposedly the temperature of the Earth without an atmosphere (from the same course link):
This effective temperature of 255 K [(-18.15°C)] is the temperature the Earth’s Surface would have if it didn’t have an atmosphere.
They still factor in the planetary albedo which is the value due in part to the atmosphere!
Then we need to multiply by the factor 0.70, which takes into account the fact that 30% of the incident solar radiation is reflected back to space by clouds, snow and ice, the light colored sands of the deserts, and even just a bit from the daisies.
So to finish the calculation, they then multiply it by the this 0.7 to account for the light reflected away and not absorbed by the atmosphere, and they get 345 * 0.7 = 239.4 W/m^2 . Plug this into the calculator and you have your -18°C.
There are various ways to explain the +33°C gap of course, such as all the blatantly unphysical assumptions they put into deriving the number. But no, they don’t attribute it to that… they attribute it to the greenhouse effect!
Then they assume the greenhouse effect is real, make a model based on it, and “validate” it (i.e. demonstrate that it proves the greenhouse effect is real) by assuming that which they were trying to prove, that it is real! I’m not making this up, here it is from the 1984 paper “Climate Sensitivity: Analysis of Feedback Mechanisms” that the seminal 1988 paper which was the basis of the Congressional testimony (full story here):
The temperature increase believed to have occurred in the past 130 years (approximately 0.5°C) is also found to imply a climate sensitivity of 2.5-5°C for doubled C02 (f = 2-4). if (1) the temperature increase is due to the added greenhouse gases , (2) the 1850 C02 abundance was 270 +/- 10 ppm, and (3) the heat perturbation is mixed like a passive tracer in the ocean with vertical mixing coefficient k - 1 cm2 s-1.
This is besides the point which is that in the physical world, on any given point on the planet, it has no sunlight for the night-time (~12 hours), and varying intensity of sunlight for the daytime (the other ~12 hours), peaking in the middle and crescendoing and de-crescendoing around that peak.
The basic premise of the greenhouse effect model does not take this into account!
And you don’t think it having been “simplified in this regard” may introduce some rather significant error into this +33°C they calculate?
Yes, which is an amazingly glaring omission isn’t it?
Yes, exactly. Alan Siddons article that I linked to goes into this very well: The Hidden Flaw in Greenhouse Theory - American Thinker .
Basically the model is that the Sun heats the Earth to -18°C. Now this Earth itself, acting as a heat source, heats the atmosphere. Now that atmosphere – having been heated by the Earth – now takes that same heat and uses it to heat the Earth again – by +33°C!
This isn’t how heat works in the physical world. In the physical world, if object A heats another object B, object B doesn’t then make object A warmer than it was initially.
Just stand outside one sunny day and gaze upon the distance. The warmists are saying that the Sun heats the Earth, then the Earth heats the atmosphere (that is colder than the surface) — and then it’s like the colder atmosphere extends a giant tentacle tendril of warmth back down to the Earth (which warmth came from the Earth initially) and uses it to re-heat the Earth!
That’s just not how the physical world operates.
As to:
Yes, but how do you know for example that their definition of “clear sky” isn’t essentially “that which demonstrates what we’re trying to prove”, i.e. any contradictory data point, one that doesn’t show the result, is considered to be ‘noise’ and discarded?
With 99.4% of the data discarded it seems like one really has to give them a lot of faith and credence and trust that they didn’t do this… and what warrants such belief when they are trying to prove the modern-day equivalent of the Ptolemaic astronomical system that the Sun revolves around the Earth?
That’s another criticism separate from what’s been presented here, though @Andrew has mentioned it – how can they be so sure in all their model calculations when they don’t even know how to account for clouds??? Lol. From what I understand, minor cloud variability could well account for whatever observed temperature changes have happened in recent decades. Not that we need an alternate explanation to show that the greenhouse effect is entirely fictitious.
And that’s another thing – what experiments have been done to demonstrate the greenhouse effect is real? The ones that are commonly touted, I have found to be actually fraudulent as they demonstrate something else and then claim that it demonstrates the greenhouse effect. It’s already well-known by now that actual greenhouses don’t work via this effect.
It should be evident from all the above that there is zero reason to think it has any effect on warming at all – other than the fact that so many apparently intelligent and supposedly scrupulous people are pushing the propaganda that it does.
It can be… but to assume this is the case is sort of the weasely way out. It’s just assuming a compromise so that one can appear reasonable to both sides. It’s like confronted with the question of God, instead of seeing for a fact there is no God you throw up your hands and say ‘well maybe, who knows?’. But it doesn’t change the fact.
Except it does in that it accounts for the amount of sunlight the atmosphere reflects… after which point the atmosphere is discarded for the rest of the calculation. It boggles the mind lol.
As the atmosphere is included in the part of the calculation lessening the sunlight and then excluded for anything else it isn’t surprising their calculation would be more incorrect for planets with an atmosphere.
I also observe that Earth’s atmosphere has 100x the pressure of Mars and the Earth has a bigger discrepancy than Mars… and Venus’s pressure is 93x the pressure of Earth and has a bigger discrepancy than the Earth… yet the pressure isn’t taken into account whatsoever in this calculation [Note: referring to the calculation that the greenhouse effect causes +33C of warming].
So how can you conclude it’s due to the trace gas of CO2, and not the entire atmosphere, and due entirely to radiation effects, not conduction and convection, and that the atmospheric pressure has nothing to do with it, just from this calculation?
Well what is it measuring, exactly? The moon’s effective temperature is basically the same as the Earth’s. Yet it’s +120°C during the day and -130°C at night. It would be incorrect in the same way a stopped clock is incorrect (yet right twice a day), to say the moon is “on average” -18°C.
But it’s like the Ptolemaic system, improving the model complexity can never fix the foundational problem. The whole thing must be stripped away.
If you started from a model that takes all these factors into account then there wouldn’t be a gap in calculated vs expected temperature in the first place – and therefore no need to introduce any greenhouse effect.
But a model can never prove anything. So you’re effectively saying we can never prove or disprove the greenhouse effect theory. So it isn’t scientific – it’s not falsifiable. Which is a big problem indeed.
As it’s logically evident that they must have some sort of an effect, isn’t it a glaring omission of research that no one in 4 decades has looked into it?
IF this is true – and it may be – that would mean they [effectively can’t, or only very poorly] cool radiatively. So 99% of the atmosphere, that is heated by the Earth, cannot radiate. And as Earth can only lose energy by radiating it… then these gases would be the perfect insulators, perfect preservers of temperature. And wouldn’t this make them far more effective ‘greenhouse gases’?
As Alan Siddons wrote in the article:
Yet this amounts to a double-whammy. For meteorologists acknowledge that our atmosphere is principally heated by surface contact and convective circulation. Surrounded by the vacuum of space, moreover, the earth can only dissipate this energy by radiation. On one hand, then, if surface-heated nitrogen and oxygen do not radiate the thermal energy they acquire, they rob the earth of a means of cooling off – which makes them “greenhouse gases” by definition. On the other hand, though, if surface-heated nitrogen and oxygen do radiate infrared, then they are also “greenhouse gases,” which defeats the premise that only radiation from the infrared-absorbers raises the Earth’s temperature. Either way, therefore, the convoluted theory we’ve been going by is wrong.
So either way it disproves the theory.
Again it doesn’t matter the specifics of the latest GCM’s, it’s like the Ptolemaic system, the foundational premise is wrong.
For me personally, it all came down to this:
Doubt has been a key player for me. It’s made it a lot harder to see what the facts are in this situation. Ultimately I have had to see that the feeling of doubt – and the feeling driven to prove myself wrong of what I already saw the fact of – just reeled me back into the warmist propaganda, repeatedly over and over. Ultimately it added nothing of value and now I see the value of just sticking with what I now know to be factual.
And the wonderful thing about it is that to be saying factual things is to be capable of being proven wrong. Someone just has to show why or how it’s not a fact. From the almost 2 months of research I’ve done on the topic, I haven’t found anything to show that what I’ve written here about the foundational premise of the greenhouse effect is not a fact.
Cheers,
Claudiu