May be of interest, check out Chapter 5 of Slaying the Sky Dragon: Slaying the Sky Dragon - Alan Siddons, John O'Sullivan, Hans Shreuder - Google Livros .
This will be the 5th time I link to it in this thread btw 
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Also this article (linked from the footnotes in the Chapter): “A Greenhouse Effect on the Moon?” .
Cheers,
Claudiu
That’s fascinating. I found the 2nd link far more helpful. I think the first link explained basically why a blackbody turned sphere doesn’t make sense. But there was a lot I had to take for granted. To much info I had to bracket and go back to. The 2nd link is very concise though.
In other words, the components of a planet’s mass itself, rather than an atmosphere, bring about an appreciable difference between its calculated temperature and its actual temperature
I also didn’t know they tried using stefan-boltzmann to predict a range of temperatures for a single spot. If this is possible then it seems like a real way to falsify the theory. Using napkin math, it seems the range of discrepancy between prediction and actual measurements is more than the difference between the assumed 291 and the measured 258 here on Earth.
I assume you have looked but not found any literature to debunk these claims.
Cross-posting the experiment fun
Very well done Claudiu. You must have been a science fair kid. I couldn’t have done that experiment even if I wanted to. That really shows a lot of talent and intelligence.
I’ve been on percolation now for the last 3 days maybe, in my head, meandering through AGW with the limited scientific affinity I have. I had a question for you. Reply if your interested.
The second article regarding the moon is exactly where my mind went with the starting point.
Actual data from materials, rotating as the way the earth does, on the tilted axis.
The first part of the article very much is the crux of the extreme delusions needed to take the Stefan Boltzmann equation as gospel.
Which are of course, Richard’s exact points. The earth is none of these things at all.
Which was my response regarding “a very long pole”. Basically, there is so much that is wrong with the use of the equation, I may as well be guessing house prices based on the area of the ink left by a pen writing “I want a house” on a napkin. There is no co-relation at all.
EL PAIS climate change
I got the same conclusion (AGW is junk) but from the other direction. It seems to me the values used to gauge any climate models predictive capacity are themselves derived from stacked assumptions. Values like the average temperature of the mesosphere at nighttime is derived from very high level math that hasn’t been properly tested in the lab. So we have variables derived from stacked assumptions run through a model to see how well they predict values that are themselves derived from stacked assumptions.
Cool, that’s a very succinct way of saying it.
“Stacked assumptions”
… is anyone here actually a physicist or a scientist?
i admittedly skimmed this thread, and appreciate a healthy dose of skepticism around mainstream science, but y’all are dismissing a theory whose models have been incredibly successfully predictive on changes in temperature and sea levels over the past few decades… because richard said so? the argument about a heat sink being unable to heat the source sounds pretty straw-man to me honestly. i will admit the shortcomings in my own research, but there just seems to be a lot of hubris and intellectual righteousness here from people who don’t seem super well-researched compared to the vast panel of scientists whose life’s work has been to analyze this, and whose predictions based on the models you mock and dismiss have proven to be entirely right thus far.
richard is brilliant in a lot of ways and his capacity for divergent thinking undoubtedly uncovered something very few people in the history of humanity have ever uncovered (inb4 he was the first, there is messaging from prior folks that say exactly what he was saying albeit with less emphasis on precision of language. he certainly modernized and clarified a lot)
however i think sometimes this forum operates similarly to a religion - built around a diamond of genuine insight, and a fundamentally important and useful practice; but the insight is muddied by the perspectives of people who don’t yet embody the full realization though they aspire to it. and thus those followers begin to worship the peripheral details of the individual who saw the diamond (his specific language, his semi-informed opinions on random topics) as dogma, as facets of the truth when they are at best pointers and at worst entirely irrelevant.
don’t get me wrong, i’m here because richard seemed right about a lot of stuff that just about everyone in the world gets wrong. i’m just concerned that blind idolatry of everything he says will make this place no different than any other spiritual community. he arrived at the actual state specifically because he was willing to think entirely for himself. if you outsource your capacity for critical thought to richard to the point where you can’t challenge that maybe in every topic he didn’t fully know what he was talking about, how can you ever be free?
Have you entertained the idea that some of his “followers” may have looked into said topics and came to similar conclusions based on their own research and understanding? I believe Claudiu even posted some experiments, and instead of discussing the matter you’re dismissing it based on your own beliefs surrounding the scientific community and limited understanding of the research you’ve done thus far. You’ve admitted the shortcomings of your own research so why can’t you admit that you don’t know one way or the other? How is your confidence in this “vast panel of scientists” anything but a belief?
Have you considered that your perception of the participants of this forum blindly following Richard’s words without thinking for themselves may be a projection from your own personal disposition to blindly follow and believe? In this case, in the vast-panel of scientists & their research that you seemingly can’t understand?
What I found helpful whenever I bucked up against one of Richard’s iconoclastic explorations was to go out and research for myself, and attempt to personally understand the topic so that I could make my own conclusion as to the facts. It sounds like you’re doing this but perhaps the topic of global warming is a bit harder to dig into.
Said process played a significant part in dismantling the authority I put into societal values and wisdom, and all the fear and anxiety associated with that.
It’s interesting to me that what you see on this discussion board is “blind idolatry.” Based on the posts I’ve been reading lately I would sooner describe it as “enthusiasm.”
Were you to ever write your own post about this, including the messaging from prior folks, I’d be interested in reading what you have found.
Get in line. 
As a final note - it may be worth contemplating how the scientific community isn’t pure. There is no great conspiracy going on, they’re just instinctually driven humans like all of us and will do anything for a job. Including toe the line they just spent a lot of years and money studying.
Hi Scout,
Just because a model is predictive for a period doesn’t mean that it is accurate or that the concepts behind it are accurate. That would be correlation vs. causation. I’m also curious if you have a source for that so I can see for myself, I don’t think I’ve heard that before.
If you can’t refute the argument of a heat sink being unable to heat the source then you’re basing your argument off of a feeling that it’s a strawman and a feeling that scientists know what they’re doing and should be trusted.
Please post that information, I’d be interested to peruse!
I think this is completely accurate.
My experience and view is that any ‘group’ of people will spontaneously generate a religion wherever belief and belief in authority are present. Because belief and belief in authority are inherent in all feeling-beings from birth (and only strengthened during the enculturating period), it’s inevitable that even well-meaning individuals will act in a way that is similar to / the same as a religion.
We can of course easily sidestep the most egregious pitfalls, but because it is a dynamic that goes to that deep emotional/feeling level, it will happen. It is just one more thing to become free of. As a result, it’s inevitable that there are dynamics happening on this forum that are the same as religion.
The interesting thing with that is that it calls into question the benefit of having the forum at all. The upside is sharing of information and experiences related to actualism. My view is that at this time it is a net benefit, especially considering the participation of several free people including the fully free @vineeto, whose observations I personally have found extremely useful. Additionally, there has been observable progress complemented by the forum in myself and others. That said it could possibly change, and it wouldn’t be a terrible shock if one day a more solidified religion in Richard’s name was generated.
In the meantime, we can all keep an eye out for those religiosity dynamics taking place in others and more importantly in ourselves.
I want to expand on the concepts of ‘scientists know what they’re doing and should be trusted.’
I work in a doctor’s office, another field where belief in authority is rife.
Some of the doctors I have worked with have made the observation that not all doctors are created equal - one quote is that ‘they don’t teach common sense in med school.’ This has been confirmed by my own experience - some doctors are extremely competent, some are absolute muppets hoping no one finds them out, and most fall in between.
But even within this dynamic there is the potential for authority dynamics to appear.
Just because a particular doctor has been very competent doesn’t mean that they won’t have an ‘off day’ or that their particular way of being doesn’t have blind spots where they will make mistakes. Every ‘being,’ by nature of being a ‘being,’ has those habitual ways of acting which inevitably lead to distortions and errors in judgment. Note that this is every single human alive, not every human except for doctors / scientists / pick your authority.
Additionally, it behooves those authorities to cover up any sign of weakness. As @edzd points out, how many people would admit they weren’t sure of something if their salary / funding was on the line? The winds of funding these days are for the most part blowing toward verifying global warming. More importantly, they would be endangering their reputations in their fields, where plenty of scientists and non-scientists have a field day / make a living out of mocking those with different beliefs. I’m thinking of Niel Degrasse-Tyson as one well-known example. This is a dynamic that is very commonly seen in politics but really touches all of us.
Add all of this up and it’s not surprising that the picture of the studious scientist, working honorably and selflessly to further human knowledge, is nothing but a fantasy. As I said above, every human has their distortions and dark sides.
I’d like to end by saying that I am not a luddite; it’s obvious that the scientific method as well as individual scientists and the scientific apparatus as a whole have done amazing things to discover new technologies and to understand the world around us. Really incredible work has been done! It’s just that not every single piece of science produced is accurate.
i appreciated your response, i intend on responding but it’ll take me some time to write and i’m all tied up with holiday festivities rn
Hi there!
I often think about this thread and what I learnt in it. It gave me a perspective on the topics you raised, especially with what Henry mentioned about how natural it is for us to believe and form quasi- religious beliefs about science and scientists.
Ironically, your evaluation is spot on, except it’s reversed. It wasn’t the participants in this thread forming new religious like beliefs because Richard said something was so, it was freeing those willing to do the reading and thinking from the religious beliefs surrounding Carbon dioxide and the green house effect.
It was very perplexing to find that not only was there no evidence for what the Green House believers has taught me my whole life, but that the evidence was actually pretty thin on the ground for any of the anthropomorphic climate change claims.
It’s an extensive thread with many many links and reading involved. I would be happy to explore the topics again if you want. It was quite a trip the first time around.
I’ve yet to have the couple of uninterrupted hours to fully poke through the material here but I very much intend to, holidays are just busy. Fun albeit demanding to perform the degree of research required to form a nuanced perspective.
I’ve started a new thread for this one! Allusions to Actual Freedom existing before Richard
Interesting. @scout I went to the thread you linked to and was impressed with the respect you treated the subject. I didn’t have that level of common courtesy back in the day when my objections were being aired.
What I particularly would like to highlight is that there was never a claim on the AFT that what is termed a “pure consciousness experience” or PCE was peculiar to actual freedom. Quite the opposite actually. Richard claimed that all people he had spoken with at length could recall this experience. Although I don’t have the particular definition of a PCE in my experience, I do have many experiences that have at least some of the qualities defined.
It’s informative to read that while going through the links in this thread is on your otherwise busy holiday reading list, the main objection is not; that is, what does it mean to believe in something?
It is such an ubiquitous term; to believe. Your link is about how you believe there was precedence for actual freedom.
Is this what holds you back? Richard never claimed there was no reference or previous hint of what lay beyond enlightenment. Quite the opposite. He claimed that there were hints of it in many writings, especially Krishnamatutri (spelling). They otherwise would write/speak about it, but never actually “went” there.
It’s in this vein that many have hinted at, within the scientific industry, there are problems with the established view on humans involvement in climate change. To date, those who “go there” are far and few between.
I came up with a pretty straightforward way of debunking the “greenhouse effect” in relation to carbon dioxide and the atmosphere.
It’s a 1 dimensional example, but it could be expanded into 2 and 3 dimensions.
It works well in a spreadsheet, but can be described pretty well.
If you can imagine a line with the sun on the left, the atmosphere in the middle, and earth on the right, one can put arbitrary numbers to that.
We calculate only a single “instant”.
We assign the middle number an absorption value, and the earth the same.
So the start of the “instant” looks like this;
From left to right, the sun (100), the energy emitted from the “greenhouse gas” going back into space(0), the “greenhouse gas” (0), the energy emitted towards the earth (0), and the earth (0).
We can arbitrarily assign the “greenhouse gas” an absorption of 50% and emission value of 100%. That is, half the energy is absorbed, half passes through.
Note the sun will always be 100. It doesn’t get anything back.
All lines (passes) are the same “instant”, and the energy is not renewed from the sun.
Beginning state;
100 0. 0. 0. 0.
First pass, the 100 has been half absorbed by the gas, half passes through to the earth.
100 0. 50. 0. 50.
Pass two, the gas emits 100% of it energy in both directions.
100 25 0 25 50
Third pass, the earth has now all the initial energy. We arbitrarily say it’s going to emit 100% back from right to left in Pass 4.
100 0 0 0 75
Pass 4, the energy is now in the gas.
100 0 75 0 0
Pass 5
Pass 6
And so on. The energy from the gas to the earth will trend towards zero.
We can keep running passes on this instant.
If we now increase the density of the gas, so it now absorbs 60% of the energy, something quite obvious happens
100 0. 0. 0. 0
100 30 0 30. 40
At the same point in the previous example, we had 75!
So, if we increase the gas absorption and emits 100% of that energy, the "earth "
got cooler, not hotter.
It doesn’t matter if we now take our figures and run a “second instant”, for example,
Running the same process will always result in the right hand number being smaller if we increase the absorption value of the middle number.
In short, as this is really just a 1D example, there is no way around the obvious, any increase in absorption of a gas (or any medium) will result in less heat on the other side of it.
While logically what you’re saying makes sense, it doesn’t apply here because of the difference between the radiation coming in from the sun (UV/visible light) and the radiation emitting back out from the Earth (infrared). Greenhouse gases do not really block or absorb UV/visible but once that radiation is absorbed by the Earth and emitted back into the atmosphere as infrared, the infrared is absorbed by the greenhouse gases. So because the effect primarily occurs in a single direction (only absorbing the radiation leaving), increasing the gas density increases the back-radiation and thus the warming.
Hi Scout,
The sun emits full spectrum light, including UV & IR
The point about Infra Red seems to be backwards, most of the IR passes through CO2(which means it will pass back out the same way)
So, if that is true, then one can set the absorption/emitted values in the simple 1D calculation I presented.
The principle is the same.
Given that the sun is emitting full spectrum energy, how does your understanding change now?
Infrared comes from the sun, and according to climate science (picture attached) there is a “window” in the atmosphere allowing a certain band of IR straight through, and thus also, straight back out.
Obviously, we can’t have the atmosphere magically work different.
So, how would “primarily occurs in a single direction” work?
Full spectrum comes from sun , certain amounts of energy are absorbed at certain spectrums, partial spectrum energy is emitted from the earth, yet the atmosphere is going to treat these differently based on direction?
