I started to read about this and immediately hit a couple of snags and questions.
@claudiu is this (past the Vineeto bit) your original research/theory or something that you’ve got from another source? If so can you cite the source?
You did say that you had ‘looked’ for evidence that conduction and convection were considered but did not find anything. What was your search strategy? Also is the above an idea that has wider circulation - if so, source please?
One issue is that I (and I suspect many others here), have neither the time nor the expertise to competently and comprehensively review your arguments. I wouldn’t know for example if there were errors in your reasoning, misrepresentations of research, misunderstandings of fundamental physics esp. as applied to the climate, glaring omissions, cherry picking of data etc.
The “search strategy” was to see exactly how the -18°C that the Earth would supposedly be without the greenhouse effect is derived – and to confirm it with multiple sources to see that it is indeed how it is derived.
I suspect this really is the crux of it. Because what you wrote here applies equally well to the arguments, papers, IPCC reports, etc., that are in support of global warming. What is the reason to, by default, accept what they write without “competently and comprehensively” reviewing it yourself? How do you know they don’t have “errors in [their] reasoning” and "misrepresentations of research" and “glaring omissions” and “cherry picking of data”?
For an example of “glaring omissions” – how about not considering conduction and convection and the rotation of the planet and 99% of the atmosphere in the calculation for the supposed +33°C magnitude of the greenhouse effect?
For an example of “cherry picking of data”, one commonly-cited type of evidence in support of the AGW hypothesis is satellite data. The “Intermediate” version of the skepticalscience.com article titled “Is the CO2 effect saturated?” says, for example:
What they found was a drop in outgoing radiation at the wavelength bands that greenhouse gases such as CO2 and methane (CH4) absorb energy. The change in outgoing radiation over CO2 bands was consistent with theoretical expectations. Thus the paper found “direct experimental evidence for a significant increase in the Earth’s greenhouse effect”.
This result has been confirmed by subsequent papers using the latest satellite data. Griggs 2004 compares the 1970 and 1997 spectra with additional satellite data from the NASA AIRS satellite launched in 2003.
If we access said Griggs paper (pdf) we see the following Table 2 on page 5:
IRIS is the satellite from 1970, and you can see that they kept 25 of the 3,662 data points from that data set…
That is, they only kept 0.6% of the data! They literally discarded 99.4% of the data to get the results they got in their paper and support their conclusion.
They say it’s to remove the influence of clouds but… how do you know they didn’t just pick a plausible-sounding physical reason that just gets them the result they want?
Also they threw out OVER NINETY NINE PERCENT of the data!! Lol.
So essentially it comes down to this: why trust what the AGW-proponents say over what the AGW-skeptics or “deniers” say? Or even more poignantly, why trust anyone at all? Why not ascertain the facts for yourself, or absent that, just acknowledge that you yourself don’t know and are making a choice to accept what the mainstream says? And if you are doing the latter, why automatically doubt people that have gone and looked into the facts for themselves and come to different conclusions, without “competently and comprehensively” reviewing it yourself?
I operate daily in an environment where my work is scrutinized by the results. Although no one but me actually knows what goes into costing the houses in the company I contract for, the quality of my work will appear on the profit & loss sheet eventually.
As @claudiu has painstakingly demonstrated, the “science” of AGW basically comes down to “believe us, we are scientists”. There is no accountability in what is publicly available. It circles back on itself, in a tirade of references and obfuscation to absurdity.
Whilst it’s not impossible that the conclusion is correct, the attitude of the scientific community “leading bodies” is simply “believe us”.
Well, no. No I don’t believe you.
For me, it’s not that I think they are categorically wrong, it’s that they are impenetrably arrogant.
Right and this seems to be the same attitude with all of the popular beliefs, whether it’s to do with healthy eating, environmental concerns, smoking, various scientific paradigms/beliefs etc
It’s like there is a certain way of thinking that is demanded to be accepted, to even attempt questioning these is to be seen as some halfwit or conspiracy theorist, yet the popular opinions at the core of it simply demand belief based on authority or tradition.
It’s like all the big guns agree to agree with each other and henceforth that shall be it.
I’m dubious about some aspects of AGW. But the basic physics that governs the premise isn’t one of them.
Claudiu, I would have thought that at minimum, if you wanted to conclude that conduction and convection had not seriously been considered in existing climate models of CO2 driven AGW then you would have searched for those terms in scientific journals dealing with the subject and then written up what specific search strategy you used. A Wired article unfortunately doesn’t quite cut it.
Also you didn’t answer my question re: whether what you wrote about was a piece of original research/thought/argument or something that exists in some other place that I could read or refer to. It really was an honest question.
One thing to consider for those who are tempted to pick a side is that spectrum of opinions about AGW is vast and can take a variety of forms. It doesn’t necessarily need to fall into the ‘Hoax!!!’ vs Greta Thumberg-alypse dichotomy. One could for example not dispute the physics of CO2 driven AGW, but question the ability to empirically be certain of the effects of this against the background of natural climate variability. Or one could also question the data about the feedback and feed-forward effects of climate on AGW, the inherent unreliability of climate models, the manufactured consensus among climate scientists and the social pressures they face. The one can also question the solutions. All of this can be done without necessarily questioning the basic physics of AGW. Climate sceptics like Bjorn Lomborg (whom Vineeto once mentioned), Judith Curry and Steve Koonin - far as I can tell don’t dispute the basic physics of CO2 driven AGW.
Wow, this discussion sure did explode lol. I have been so busy lately but each time I start to write something and get back to it the conversation has evolved or somebody has already referenced and mentioned what I was going to. Apologies for this long post.
From what I am aware, these crude models that we have discussed though the beginnings and foundations of the modelling, they are not the absolute state of affairs of models currently being used. I guess models tend to have some starting point right?
Schmidt says climate models have come a long way from the simple energy balance and general circulation models of the 1960s and early ‘70s to today’s increasingly high-resolution and comprehensive general circulation models. “The fact that many of the older climate models we reviewed accurately projected subsequent global temperatures is particularly impressive given the limited observational evidence of warming that scientists had in the 1970s, when Earth had been cooling for a few decades,” he said.
The authors say that while the relative simplicity of the models analyzed makes their climate projections functionally obsolete, they can still be useful for verifying methods used to evaluate current state-of-the-art climate models, such as those to be used in the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assessment Report, to be released in 2022.
As you all seem aware the latest models have taken a different route, these Global Circulation/Climate Models (GCMs), and apparently there are a whole bunch of them (possibly hundreds by now) with varying parameters. So, there isn’t one model per se lol but competing models. I assume it might be the case that the latest papers explaining the models in more detail are not freely available now. There was always a lag of papers coming out for free online so we probably don’t have the most up to date information available to us because there tends to be a pay wall still for latest scientific papers. I have been meaning to sort out an alumni card from my old university as can go to the library at off peak times and check out certain papers and stuff.
As regards some of what Richard indicated on the AF site, I have to challenge back on the model I was mentioning just to be pedantic.
Richard: 1. The physical earth is not flat.
The initial model I was referring to did not treat the Earth as flat, though earlier models have. The Earth is treated as a perfect sphere rather than an oblate spheroid. It also doesn’t always take into consideration the complexities of the terrain such as the differences in land and water but some versions have attempted this.
The surface area illuminated is estimated as a circle rather than the surface area of a hemisphere, this is a common method as a cross section of a hemisphere is a circle, see image below for visual clarity.
The initial model I was referring to did not treat the Earth as black but what tends to be called grey, so the emissivity being less than 1, though many of the first models did seem to take this value. I have seen some papers/models now take averages and considerations between land and water and even the clouds impact, based on their relative sizes and influence too.
The physical earth is not static (it is constantly rotating).
The model is not assuming the Earth is static. The model I guess assumes a timeframe of a second since a Watt is a Joule per second, so it is the Power transfer in a second of time on the Earth, which I guess approximates being static.
The physical earth is not bathed with quadruply-weakened sunbeams.
The sunbeams are not quadruply-weakned I don’t actually get what Richard means here? Is he referring to the Stefan–Boltzmann law not being true? To be accurate it is a to the power of 4 relationship with temperature it is a quartic relationship, whereas quadruple implies to increase fourfold i.e. to multiply by 4. Therefore, the quartic root of the one side of the equation to get the Temperature value on the surface of the Earth is established from the Power of the suns beams being represented by the Stefan-Boltzmann equation.
Sunlight does not impinge upon every square millimetre of the physical earth twenty-four-seven (only during daytime).
If the equation is taking into consideration a second as the timeframe, I assume it also assuming certain initial conditions are also implied. These initial conditions assume that the Earth is still always radiating energy out again because it is not the only second that the Earth has received energy from the Sun.
That is, we can assume the Earth didn’t just pop into existence into the position and orbit that it was in at the point of a given measurement.
Sunlight does not impinge with equal intensity upon every square millimetre of the daytime hemisphere (most obliquely at polar latitudes and dawn-dusk regions).
Some models have begun to attempt to take this into account, the one I was demonstrating did not. It was simplified in this regard.
All atmospheric gases are heatable (not just several trace gases).
Yes, correct. I mean they are implying that these gases are transparent to infrared, so they are not saying that they are not heatable, just that that they are not heatable by that particular means (or mode) of heat transfer. It does not mean that they won’t get heated by the surface being warm both in the conductive and convective means, these simple earlier models did not attempt to take into account these complexities. I mean I would expect a more thorough description taking into account the kinetic energy of all these gases and how that also varies depending on the degrees of freedom of the different molecules of gases in the atmosphere. So, being transparent to infrared does not imply that the gas can’t be heated by other means. I would also add water vapour into the consideration as well. Therefore, consider the relevance a particular gases specific heat capacity.
All heated atmospheric gases radiate infrared light (not just several trace gases).
I mean this one has confused me the most. I was always taught anything above 0 Kelvin can emit infrared so was confused with the concept of Oxygen and Nitrogen being defined as totally transparent to infrared. They often state is neither absorbs or emits infrared. To further add confusion, I have seen information regarding identifying planets with oxygen by utilising its absorption of infrared (https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/goddard/2019/oxygen-planets). Or for Nitrogren absorption of far-infrared (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00268978400102221). As the infrared is a spectrum, a range of frequencies (or wavelengths) it must be less or limited bands that Oxygen and Nitrogen are able to absorb and emit rather than an absolute transparency. Again though, I do not like this whole description of never radiating infrared, it seems an oversimplification and disingenuous. So, yes all gases can absorb and emit infrared light but the complexities lie in how much of the spectra that it will emit and absorb and the nature of the chemical molecules and the types of moments and degrees of freedom they have.
The physical atmosphere insulates the daytime hemisphere from heating-up to unliveable temperatures (unlike its nearest neighbour the airless moon).
The physical atmosphere insulates the nighttime hemisphere from freezing to unliveable temperatures (unlike its nearest neighbour the airless moon).
It seems a reasonable explanation to explain the differences between the Earth and the Moon. Considering also just how many more molecules per square meter on Earth compared to a given space of the Moon. The constituent nature of these molecules to also be able to absorb and diffuse energy clearly are a big difference between the Earth and the Moon.
In the physical world no externally heated substance can raise the temperature of its heat-source.
I am not sure what Richard is implying here. I mean the equation relationship gives an upper limit to the possible highest temperature on Earth (395.9 K) or consider the highest temperature recorded on the Moon. ( 120° C, 250° F, 400 K). The effect of global warming still does not exceed this upper limit. So, there is not a higher temperature on Earth higher than the expect Power transfer from the Sun.
In the physical world some specified trace gases can (as evidenced in notable past eras) exceed by several thousand parts-per-million those several hundred parts-per-million pre-industrial levels deemed sacrosanct by influential doomsayers and/or panicmongers.
I mean in trying to understand why regional temperatures have increased a lot of evidence seems to suggest Carbon Dioxide and its presence has some role to play. I would say Carbon Dioxide definitely seems statistically relevant considering its trace amounts. But then so is water vapour. So, I am not saying that it is a definitive indicator or some doom type scenario and neither that it is sacrosanct from being questioned. I just think it would be disingenuous not to consider the amount of evidence that indicates it seems to have an important role to play for such a small quantity of gas.
In contrast, a molecule of water vapor stays in the atmosphere just nine days, on average. It then gets recycled as rain or snow. Its amounts don’t accumulate, despite its much larger relative quantities.
“Carbon dioxide and other non-condensable greenhouse gases act as control knobs for the climate,” said Andrew Dessler, a professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas A&M University in College Station. “As humans add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, small changes in climate are amplified by changes in water vapor. This makes carbon dioxide a much more potent greenhouse gas than it would be on a planet without water vapor.”
As regards this paper you have references, there are sometimes subtle reasons for excluding certain datasets in experiments and this is quite normal in physics at least.
The purpose of this paper was to measure the absorption spectra of the green house gases only for sections that were of clear sky at the same months, then comparing data over several years. They excluded the other data points because they were not relevant to their intent.
Comparisons are made of the average spectrum of clear sky outgoing longwave radiation over the oceans
in the months of April, May and June.
In this particular experiment they are studying the absorption spectra and it is known that clouds can interfere and mute certain spectra so they have no choice but to ignore it, because if I am correct we still don’t have the means to compensate for them and understand. So the cloud is like an interference, static or noise effect.
To reduce the amount of variability seen and thus aid interpretation, only cloud free spectra are used. Brindley
and Harries16 discuss the use of all sky data to make similar studies but concludes that the IRIS and IMG datasets
only have adequate sampling to study the clear sky case. A two stage process is used which is specifically designed
to identify the properties of a clear sky spectrum. This removes spectra contaminated by cloud from the dataset
and also removes spectra contaminated by other effects, such as dust storms or high instrument noise.
Now, this is not to say that clouds and other water vapour related phenomena aren’t important to the model to better understand and predict temperature on the Earth’s surface or in the atmosphere. It is merely that they are trying to understand the absorption of spectra by the greenhouse gases and the presence of clouds doesn’t change the fact that these gases can and will and absorb and emit certain frequencies of the infrared spectrum. It just means clouds interfere with the measuring process.
Ultimately, a models usefulness is supposed to be in its ability to demonstrate equivalent values in historic data and make potentially accurate future predictions. It seems with the latest GCM models they are claiming to getting more accurate predictions that the previous models and can also correlate with historic data. I have not been able to see something to verify this though.
From NASA’s own site:
GCM developmental research focuses on sensitivity to parameterizations of clouds and moist convection, ground hydrology, and ocean-atmosphere-ice interactions. We have a specific focus on the climate interactions of atmospheric composition (via aerosols and gas phase chemistry) both as a response to climate and as a mechanism for climate change. The program also involves the application of satellite simulator software (such as the COSP simulator package) that creates model output compatible with retreivals such as CloudSat, CALIPSO, MODIS, and other satellite instruments. Ongoing field and laboratory programs in palynology, paleoclimate reconstruction, atmospheric clouds and convection, dust processes, and other geophysical sciences provide fundamental climate data for evaluating model predictions.
Future expansions of this work include collaborative projects with other units of the Goddard Space Flight Center Earth Sciences Division and with the National Center for Atmospheric Research to include dynamic ice sheets in the models (to better constrain long term sensitivity and short term rises in sea level), oceanic and terrestrial carbon cycles, including dynamic vegetation, and further improvements to the stratospheric simulation so that the models can self-generate a Quasi-Biennial Oscillation. Current development is focused on the Cubed Sphere grid and dynamical core to improve the model simulations at higher resolution.
I mean the other points raised by @Andrew regarding science is true of anything, as we all understand enough about the human condition now, we are not really surprised that sometimes scientists can be arrogant, aloof, egoic, dishonest or avoidant or some other negative aspect of the human condition. Sometimes, it is their careers or whole lifetime’s work on the line so people obviously get affected or have a conflict of interest with facts or theories that better describe the interplay of facts than their theory or model.
I always found it funny that people feel so strongly to say “I think the universe is this or that way” rather than to find out, or they had such certainty and confidence about their theory or model. I always have that sense of doubt in everything though. I think that made it hard for me doing AF at first, because I also initially doubted everybody’s sincerity and integrity as regards the PCE, virtual freedom and being actually free.
I agree with you @Kub933, there is a tendency for the collective to accept or reject a certain theory or idea, like with big bang theory or string theory or some other idea.
However, when it comes to Science I always think repeatability, so we can do the same set of experiments and be able to draw the same conclusions because our results are comparable. If our results are wildly different then we need to extend and understand our hypothesis, theory or model.
For a model as well, not just repeatability but as I mentioned before explaining past data and predicting future data with sufficient accuracy should be the premise of the theory or model, otherwise it is purely the hypothetical.
If these models start allowing countries to make accurate predictions for the climate over a given time period then they have some genuine real world use. But theories are just ways of interweaving facts, it doesn’t mean a better theory won’t surpass it.
I guess one has to keep splitting out the questions.
Can CO2 contribute to warming - yes or no?
Can CO2 cause amplified effects by also increasing the content of water vapour?
It can be the case that the above are true without necessarily indicating some doomsday scenario, so some subtle point between the spectrum of CO2 contributes nothing and CO2 is the devil and is going to destroy humanity.
Actually the quartic root more applies to the Earth’s surface emission of energy following the Stefan Boltzmann law (though the Sun’s emission has followed the same rule).
In the calculation of the model I was discussing, the divide by 4 factor comes from the relationship between the surface area of the Earth which is treated as a perfect sphere and 4𝝅 r-squared.
When radiation from the sun reaches a planet, it does not strike all areas of the planet at the same angle. It strikes directly near the equator, but more obliquely near the poles. To find the amount of energy entering the planetary atmosphere (if any) averaged over the entire planet, consider the diagram. The total amount of radiation incident on the planet (and atmosphere) is equal to the amount the planet intercepts to cast the imaginary shadow shown in the diagram. That is, SPπrP2. If the average energy flux over the area of the planet is Save, the total energy for the planet is Save4πrP2. These two total energies must be equal, so: Save = SP/4.
The stated motivation given for the greenhouse effect being potent – potent enough to worry about humanity’s influence on it – is that the Earth is +33°C warmer than it would be without the greenhouse effect.
2.2 Greenhouse Gases
2.2.1 Introduction
[…] The strength of the greenhouse effect can be gauged by the difference between the effective emitting temperature of the Earth as seen from space (about 255K) and the globally-averaged surface temperature (about 285K).
Note the IPCC doesn’t provide a reference here for how this calculation is done. So you should now be asking them to cite their source
As they didn’t cite a source though, I will find another one for you since you didn’t like the Wired one. The keyword “effective emitting temperature” was helpful to find it. How about MIT? On a page titled “Lecture 2: Physics of the Tropical Atmosphere, I” they go into the derivation although in less detail then the Wired article.
How do they get it? They take the intensity of solar radiation actually received - 1,362 W/m^2 – then divide it by 4 due to the geometry of receiving the solar energy on a circle vs emitting it on a sphere (sphere has 4x the surface area as a circle given the same radius) – then multiply it by 0.7 to account for planetary albedo – and the result is 238 W/m^2 which you apply a scaling factor to to get temperature. You can plug into this online converter to do it yourself:
Then they observe that the actual measured surface temperature is 15°C not -18°C and they just attribute this +33°C difference to the greenhouse effect! I’m not making this up, here it is from the IPCC again:
[…] The strength of the greenhouse effect can be gauged by the difference between the effective emitting temperature of the Earth as seen from space (about 255K) and the globally-averaged surface temperature (about 285K).
That’s literally it. As you can see for yourself it’s strictly a radiative calculation. It simplifies the Earth effectively into a flat disk 4x the size of the Earth (ie with same surface area as the spherical Earth) that receives constant solar irradiation that is 1/4th the power of the actual sun, with no oceans, winds, currents, etc, no rotation, no varying insolation, etc. Then they observe that the result of this calculation is -18°C, compare it to the measured +15°C actual average surface temperature, and assume (!) it’s all due to the greenhouse effect.
But regarding our wires getting crossed, you said:
By this I wasn’t saying they don’t consider conduction and convection in the more complex GCMs that do factor rotation and varying insolation etc., I’m saying that the stated raison d’etre of the potency of the greenhouse effect is this calculation, which doesn’t consider conduction and convection.
However even those models are ultimately based on this strictly-radiative calculation. It’s in the energy budgets they regularly publish, e.g. from 1997 “Earth’s Annual Global Mean Energy Budget” (link), where on the page labeled 206 they have a figure showing “Incoming Solar Radiation” as 342 W m-2 (i.e. the dividing by 4):
Note also how absorbed by surface of 168 + absorbed by atmosphere of 67 = the 235 from the calculation earlier (close enough to the 238 in any case).
And Trenberth is a prominent figure: “Kevin Trenberth has been prominent in all aspects of climate variability and climate change research and is a leader in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessments [emphasis added] and in the World Climate Research Programme.” (source).
They actually do things this way!!!
You’re not dubious of the fact that +33°C of warming is attributed to the greenhouse effect, when the calculation itself is so far removed from physical reality? And further you’re not dubious about the fact that this is just assumed to be (i.e. not proven to be) due to the greenhouse effect and not anything else? Why not?
I’ve dug into this topic a lot in the past almost 2 months or so, so there’s lots of sources, and by now a lot of it comes from my own knowledge.
The structure of the specific argument I made in the reply to @solvann came from an email from Vineeto where she presented to me “an excerpt Richard edited from [an] article by Alan Siddons’ published in the American Thinker Magazine in 2010”: The Hidden Flaw in Greenhouse Theory - American Thinker .
The specifics of the info that I posted to Solvann came from links I provided in the text already or that Solvann had earlier linked to, with the exception of one quote (starting “Carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases have molecular structures that enable them to absorb infrared radiation […]”) where I omitted the link: Climate explained: why carbon dioxide has such outsized influence on Earth's climate
I am curious to see what you will do with this info You don’t need it to evaluate whether what I was saying was right – you can do that by evaluating what I’m saying. But it might 1) help you to evaluate it by seeing where it comes from. However I also see a possibility you want to know so you can see if it’s a source you can discredit without having to do the evaluation – either by 2) it being my own original thinking (in which case you can ask how I have the credentials to know I’m right and discount it) – or by it being someone else’s who you can then 3) discredit on other grounds or 4) find somebody else who discredited them. But maybe it’s 5) something else, and I shouldn’t presume the worst.
Of course it can be done. But “should it” be done? It depends on what one’s goal is. If one’s goal is to get to the facts, then one should question everything - as all the scientists involved should be doing - to see if what they call the “basic physics” is actually sensible. And if it isn’t… then the whole thing does rather fall apart. And it’s actually the most sensible starting point, cause if the foundation is incorrect then one doesn’t need to get involved in all the theories that spring from it, one can just point to the rotten foundation.
One can always make the mistake of not understanding some aspect of the physics, of course. In which case I ask you to provide the specifics of where my understanding is flawed, of what I’ve presented here so far!
@claudiu I don’t think our wires are crossed at all - or if so not in the way you mean. The point I’m trying to make is that a search strategy that isn’t comprehensive enough and doesn’t specifically look for the effect of conduction and convection on AGW is obviously not going to find evidence for it. It’s not about the relative prestige of your sources.
If you’ve derived your theory (that I linked to in my earlier post) from multiple sources, then at least a few helpful links that I can peruse at my leisure would be good. And ones that specifically talk about the conduction/convection issue. At this stage of life I am quite time poor, but I think I’ll slowly get through it.
Ah okay, I can see that you’ve mentioned this somewhere in the middle of your post. I’ll take a look. Why didn’t you just come out and say so at the start? Would have saved us some time.
I mean the calculation is one without an atmosphere being taken into consideration so is truly only evaluating blackbody radiated from the Earth’s surface. This is also an average temperature and not the minimum and maximum.
The effective temperature is the first value in the above table and you can see predictions for other planets such as Mercury and Mars are quite accurate and there is a big discrepancy for Venus and Earth, which leads us to conclude this is due to their atmospheres.
If it was so far removed from reality we wouldn’t have got such close approximations with the other planets. So effective temperature despite crude assumptions is not too bad a starting point.
As the models evolve with a greater number of phenomena considered, a greater number of data points and a greater number of parameters, I guess they will be able to play and strip out certain aspects and see what happens. For example, we could then compare models with just water vapour in the atmosphere with oxygen and nitrogen vs the real state of affairs. Piece by piece we will start to understand the contribution of each type of phenomena to the actual observed temperatures on the Earth.
The problem is we only have the models to compare because we can’t strip the Earth of an atmosphere nor easily and chop and change its atmospheric constituents to see what different outcomes might occur.
There is an aspect in our scientific culture that I also see in other areas such as history, geopolitics and economies where things get oversimplified or certain details misconveyed or excluded, I have seen it happen a lot now and I don’t really know why it happens. It seems we don’t like the reality of the compelxity of situations. For example, like what I said about Oxygen and Nitrogen absorbing and emitting infrared.
Major gases like nitrogen and oxygen, then, do not just radiate heat to the earth below, but the total of this radiation vastly exceeds what minor players like carbon dioxide and water vapor contribute.
They will radiate heat in a much limited frequency range as they are near transparent and not totally transparent as often misconveyed. So, yes their contribution has to be calculated but it is not like for like with the other gases. Their absence of a dipole moment, polyatomic molecular structure considerations do not allow such a wide range of frequencies to be absorbed and emitted.
As I said before there are other chemical and physical complexities regarding the greenhouse gases. Then you have things like spectral overlap of infrared.
Accordingly, any heated gas emits infrared. There’s nothing unique about CO2. Otherwise, substances like nitrogen and oxygen would truly be miracles of physics: Heat 'em as much as you wish, but they’d never radiate in response.
There are aspects different to each molecule based on dipole moments, degrees of freedom, the rotational, vibrational and translational considerations. There are aspects that make certain molecules different so the frequency range absorbed and emitted will not be like for like. Each molecule will have its unique profile for infrared spectroscopy and Raman spectroscopy hence how we can detect their presence on other planets and satellites (as in moons).
At present, until I have seen more mathematical detail on the latest GCM’s I can’t really say what they are or are not modelling, estimating, assuming or excluding.
The point I’m making is the +33C calculation really doesn’t include conduction and convection. It is strictly an (unphysical and incorrect) radiative heat transfer calculation. The MIT and Wired links show you how to derive it. They are correct in their derivations (ie it matches the derivations that are at the basis of the greenhouse effect theory).
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.
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?
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.
Although it is very interesting what has been published here, if you have really come to the conclusion that you are on to something (and maybe you are!) and your thirst for knowledge is genuine, you should not be content with what you have searched and found: you should expose your ideas to those who have the time, the knowledge and the will to analyze them properly.
It takes less and less time and effort to present ideas in the appropriate media to get feedback (from peer-reviewed scientific journals to specialized websites -but even sites like Quora-) or to directly contact hundreds of experts that were previously inaccessible.
You can be content without doing so, of course, but then those ideas should have for you (and certainly will have for others) an objective value similar to that of a scientist presenting his supposed discoveries or reasoning to the consideration of laymen and being satisfied for not finding flaws.
Just to be clear, my conclusion is that Richard is on to something. I just investigated what he wrote and concluded it is all 100% factual and relevant… … just like everything else I have deeply looked into that he wrote so far, lol.
Ahh so now you make a judgement of whether my thirst for knowledge is genuine or not. But what do you base this judgement upon?
But how do you know what I have “searched and found”? I see I initially reached out to Vineeto about this topic around March 8th, and I’ve spent a ton of time looking into it since then. You don’t know the articles I’ve read, the papers I’ve read, the questions and comments I’ve posted on various blogs, the authors of papers that I’ve reached out to, the books I’ve read, the discussions I’ve had with Vineeto on this, etc…
So, your judgment is based on an incorrect assumption that I only looked into it superficially.
The stated deletion reason is that the question doesn’t challenge a notable claim! As that is patently absurd - AGW is certainly a notable claim - and I even updated the question to specifically address what was obviously implicit – then it’s clear the deletion reason was something else… namely that I was challenging the groupthink. And the response to challenging the groupthink is to get shut down, downvoted, condescended upon, and cancelled. If I had a job in the field I would be fired like Peter Ridd was.
Here are some samplings from the comment section (that I can still view from my account):
Question: […] Further there’s a possible issue of the model having the Sun essentially be a constant diffuse light everywhere, as opposed to a small powerful light source in the sky. To show that this can matter significantly, it will help to understand that you can’t burn paper with moonlight and a magnifying glass. To put it differently, if the Sun is out and the temperature of a patch of ground is 30°C, you could still use magnifying glasses to burn a piece of paper on this patch of ground, because the magnifying glasses can ‘expand’ the ‘small’ image of the sun to look bigger, such as to surround a spot of Earth with the high-intensity sun, thus causing a paper to be able to reach 220°C+ and ignite. […]
Oddthinking: Magnifying glasses don’t “enlarge” the sun.
Which, of course, they do, lol.
Oddthinking: The Sun doesn’t heat the Earth less during “night”.
Amazing.
Oddthinking: No-one expects the toy model, used for teaching, to be accurate - that is a strawman.
He is saying the +33°C calculated by the simple model is not accurate! Yet the IPCC thinks it is accurate enough to base everything upon it…
Oddthinking: I suggest you don’t use the word ‘skeptic’ to describe denialists while you are here.
i.e. name-calling to shut down the conversation.
Oddthinking: But simply pointing to a thermometer in a glasshouse in someone’s garden seems to pretty much wipe out most of those claims.
i.e. pointing to how an actual greenhouse works, which is completely and 100% well-understood that it does not work according to the atmospheric greenhouse effect, but rather by preventing convective cooling.
Oddthinking: I don’t think we should delve too deep into tackling this problem, down at the OP’s level.
i.e. condescension.
Jiminy Cricket: What would constitute an experiment? Presumably you’d want a laboratory large enough for a solar system.
i.e. he is implying it’s not possible to prove the effect with an experiment, i.e it’s not falsifiable.
Dave: [in response to the question title, ‘Has the atmospheric greenhouse effect actually been experimentally verified?’] Yes. youtu.be/ueB3TONpv8Y
i.e. he links to a YouTube video with no control, no demonstration, no laboratory setup, just some jars and a graph, which is reproducing an experiment that fraudulently purports to explain the greenhouse effect when it’s actually a property of the differing thermal conductivity of gases: link to a German site debunking it, and document of the same:
Mark: I would argue that there is nothing capable of completely settling denialist arguments regarding the second law, or any other issue. Most of the deniers are basing their objections on (often intentionally) misunderstood science, rather than any real questions about physics.
i.e. name-calling and outright dismissing any questions about the standard narrative of global warming as not being “real questions about physics”.
In short, the reception and treatment I got here for asking a genuine question about demonstrating the greenhouse effect, is essentially the same that Richard got in 2006… so nothing much has changed in 17 years.
It’s not clear why one would expect a different response individually contacting the “experts” than more of the same of what has been presented above.
Yet I did do so – so your conclusion is invalid:
Further, as you cannot know what others will think, here you are stating that everyone should think what you think – that the value of what I’ve presented here is equivalent to “that of a scientist presenting his supposed discoveries or reasoning to the consideration of laymen and being satisfied for not finding flaws”.
As you wrote that I “should expose your ideas to those who have the time, the knowledge and the will to analyze them properly”, and you are one of the people on the forum that I have exposed my ideas to, you are essentially saying that you yourself do not have “the time, knowledge, and the will to analyze them properly”.
As you have not analyzed my ideas, nor do you think you are capable of or even perhaps want to analyze my ideas, and nor apparently have you submitted them to “hundreds of experts” to have them analyze it for you, in essence you have pre-judged them as wrong, and incorrect, or at the very least essentially valueless, and you haven’t based this judgement on the merits of the ideas at all nor taken any steps to back this judgement up with anything at all (as far as I can tell).
The salient question then, is: what did you base this judgement on?
It appears the solitary thing you based it on is that you presume the “experts” and “peer-reviewed scientific journals” (presumably you would only accept experts that are climate scientists/climatologists and not any of the other various scientists) all would say that the ideas are wrong. In other words, you’re making an appeal to authority.
But if the ideas are correct… then you already know that that very authority would reject them out of hand, because their livelihoods depend on it, e.g.:
Not only that, but these same authorities want to go from billions of funding to trillions of funding! I’m not making this up, here is the Secretary General of the United Nations speaking at the World Economic Forum in 2023:
The battle to keep the 1.5 degree limit alive will be won or lost in this decade. On our watch. […] We must act together to close the emissions gap. […] The developed world must finally deliver on its $100 billion climate finance commitment to support developing countries. […] our climate goals also need the full engagement of the private sector. […] I call on all corporate leaders to act on it. Put forward credible and transparent transition plans on how to achieve net zero […] Finally, what is true about private sector engagement on climate applies across a range of challenges. […] Government action is critical – but it’s not enough. We must find avenues to boost the private sector’s ability to play its full role for good.
In many ways, the private sector is leading. Governments need to create the adequate regulatory and stimulus environment to support it.
And business models and practices must be reworked to advance the Sustainable Development Goals [1]. Without creating the conditions for the massive engagement of the private sector, it will be impossible to move from the billions to trillions needed [emphasis added] to achieve the SDGs.
Now would these people really accept an idea, no matter how correct, that the very basis of the trillions of funding they desire and may very well get, is totally fictitious? Of course not… you already knew they wouldn’t when you wrote what you did.
So what are we left to do? We can either embrace the peasant mentality and trust the authorities that we’re all in good hands even though they want to reduce the world’s standard of living to back how it was at pre-industrial times…
Or we can come to our senses, critically evaluate using what we know to be facts, and stick to those facts, no matter how many experts or authorities may disagree with them.
Just think… how many psychological and psychiatric experts would say that actual freedom from the human condition is impossible, or actually a medical illness? We all know the answer… 100% of them. How many spiritualists would say that actual freedom is just a poor and incomplete Enlightenment or a delusion or a wrong view? Again we know the answer… 100% of them.
Should we just believe them all and give up and ignore what our PCEs factually tell us?
Everyone must choose for themselves, but … I know my answer .
Goal 7:“Ensure access to reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all.” Goal 13:“Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts.” https://sdgs.un.org/goals . ↩︎
Indeed, as far as the idea that scientists (and those discussing science with authority) it would make sense to bring up the information and be able to rationally discuss it.
Indeed, my partner, a doctor of physics, with a second doctorate in teaching physics on the way, will openly admit what most scientists in private will openly admit; no one really knows if there is a climatic “tipping point” and what if any fulcrums in the climate exist.
Indeed, it’s a fallacy that there is “scientific community agreement” on the topic. There certainly is very little actual science available.
If we define science as being the discovery of how the world works, we can see that it’s very obvious that is is so “unknown” that when one goes looking for something as obvious as a even a computer model verification of the Stefan-Blotzmann derived starting point, one can’t find one.
I have spent many hours researching and designing what I would think is a reasonable virtual model to do that.
Geological data of the thermal properties of various soils and rocks are plentiful. Indeed there is available actual measurements of the thermal properties of the moon’s regolith. From Apollo 15.
The moon however, isn’t really a great model for the earth as it has a “day” of 13.5 earth days.
It’s also vastly smaller, and doesn’t have the heated core. (I have already calculated in my proto-model the total energy output from just this geothermal energy; from widely available sources).
I am putting it on the “back burner” as I have lots of tax to get out of the way and like to relax too!
Indeed, with the extremely intelligent community here, I really think a working model of the geological earth is possible.
The main question is the starting point of -18C.
If this is accurate, then it does follow that something else is contributing the 33C to get to the observed average of 15C.
The model I envision is one based in freely available geological data. The thermal properties of various soil and rock types.
Starting from a model in a single sand type, one could build up a model which could in essence be a “GCM” for the bare planet itself.
Various schemes have occurred to me, and it would take many iterations of models and approaches to meet a standard of being a virtual verification of the Earth’s starting point.
It’s not a small or simple project, which is why it’s on the backburner right now.
(I am having a lot of fun writing new music at the moment, and generally enjoying my evenings on YouTube!).
First of all, @claudiu, I think it is good that you have made some movements in the direction of exposing your ideas in more expert forums/media than this one. You can always try to do it even in others, in spite of the reservations/preventions that you have exposed.
But having also read the way you had answered to @Srinath about his own inquiries to you, and having observed your frequent reactions when the mere possibility that Richard might be wrong in some opinion/position/statement/concept is raised, I see/judge/think/believe that you are again deeply (corrected: may be not “deeply”… ) involved emotionally with this topic (this possibility has already been suggested to you more than once in similar contexts).
No problem! Obviously (almost) everyone here deals with similar problems, at different levels, and with the same or different triggers (-at least I do, and my own reactions have been captured on the forum-).
) involved emotionally with this topic (this possibility has already been suggested to you more than once in similar contexts).