Lots to go through! I will have to take some time to look in detail.
To try to simplify what I’ll be looking at in detail:
The point is that the entire 100% of the atmosphere, being warm, is emitting infrared back down towards the earth - not because of radiative emissions but rather just because it’s hot.
So the IR emitted by this entire atmosphere must be compared to the IR emitted by just the IR-absorbing parts of it.
I wouldn’t claim convection isn’t known to science as a thing , but rather that this IR radiating effect of the full atmosphere is not being taken into account.
Hehe indeed. One must keep in mind Richard spent weeks researching this, not just a few days.
I think it’s possible to get to a good enough endpoint eventually though…
Note I haven’t read through fully what Andrew posted yet, just replying here to what I already looked into…
Firstly it must be pointed out that this isn’t really relevant for making the simple argument against the theory. Whatever the calculation of how much hotter the Earth should be etc., doesn’t matter when evaluating the argument of whether the IR-absorbing gases heat the Earth a significant amount.
That being said, the math here is a little funny which comes with its own set of problems.
Although it appears to make sense to equate energy in == energy out and consider energy in on just the part the Earth is receiving from the sun, and energy out across the whole Earth…
…
This is mathematically equivalent to treating the Earth like a flat disk, with twice the radius of the Earth (and therefore the same surface area), which disk is constantly 100% of the time receiving on average 1/4th the power per square meter than the Sun is actually emitting.
Think about that:
Reality: rotating sphere, only half of which is illuminated at any given instance (i.e. 100% of the energy spread across 50% of the surface), while the other gets zero energy
Mathematical model: flat disk, 100% illuminated 100% of the time with all the energy spread across the full surface
So it is not clear at all on the face of it that any average temperature resulting from such a calculation has any significance or sensibility at all!
Yeah the blackbody calculation gives you a pretty good answer there for the part of the Moon receiving the full blast of the Sun.
Note that basically the same calculation holds for the Earth — 1,368 W/m^2 goes to 957.6 W/m^2 after accounting for albedo, which with an emissivity of 0.9 gives you (link):
i.e. the Earth should be at +87.4C in the direct sunlight.
Since 50% of the Earth is receiving the 957.6 W/m^2 from the Sun and the other 50% of the Earth is receiving 0 W/m^2, wouldn’t a better estimate be to take half the Earth as receiving 478.8 W/m^2 (i.e. since half the sphere has 2x the surface area of the circular area the Sun is irradiating) and the other half as receiving 0 W/m^2?
That gives a temperature of 303.1K for the side facing the sun and 3K (basically as cold as it gets in space) for the side facing away from the sun, which is 153K or -120C!
The reason this is so different than the number from dividing the irradiance by 4 is because of the 4th power relation in the Stefan-Boltzmann equation.
Specifically in the case of the Moon:
divide by 4 blackbody calculation: 270.4K (see: Nasa)
consider degree-by-degree exposure level and average each bit, also factoring in 35K of ‘night’ temperature from the light coming from the Earth: 178.45K (see Chapter 5 linked above)
reality: 204K (see Chapter 5)
Note particularly that the divide/4 calc is way off, and also that the better estimate going degree-by-degree still undershoots reality because of the heat-absorptive effect of the moon’s surface - i.e. by similar logic of the 33C “greenhouse effect” predicted for Earth (namely, making a blackbody calculation), there’s a 26C “greenhouse effect” on the Moon.
Right, what I was getting at is that I don’t think the reason the radiative heat loss is “much less efficient” is because of the specifics of the materials used, but rather because of the nature of radiative heat loss. The quote here was not qualifying it in terms of the material.
That is: “At lower altitudes, convection takes over from radiation as the most important heat transport process […]”.
It’s a good point and a cogent discussion. By ‘efficiency’ I am thinking in terms of, which of the mechanisms at the Earth’s surface is responsible for moving heat at a faster rate - radiation or convection? As per the atmosphere science textbook, it’s convection.
Also note that since the atmosphere is mostly transparent to IR, basically the entirety of the heating of it is due to convection!
Of course to leave the planet, period, only radiation will work.
But the picture in my mind is coming together something like this:
The sun heats the Earth basically by directly heating the surface
The surface then rapidly heats the entire atmosphere via convection
The entire atmosphere radiates IR back down towards the surface, much more than the IR-absorbing gases in the atmosphere emit IR back down towards the surface
This re-heats the surface which then re-heats the atmosphere etc… Meanwhile the surface + atmosphere as a net is gradually losing heat via radiation towards space
The question is, how much does the IR-absorbing gas contribute in terms of the net loss to space? I propose that it’s begging the question to say “a lot” because the “a lot” is based on the presumption that the entire heating-of-the-surface is due solely to the IR-absorbing gases. But if it’s only responsible for a small amount of heating the surface then the answer is “a little” (or at least: “not necessarily a lot”).
I’m not fully resolved on the matter tho. I will have to read more carefully the materials Andrew linked to, and understand a few more things. But so far the argument is holding for me.
It’s great to be looking into all of this, as although I was of the opinion that CO2 was being used as a scapegoat, I didn’t know anything much beyond a high-school education and general knowledge.
The most important gas in the entire cycle is water!
Which thrills me to learn more, because it’s one of my favourite topics. I spent a lot of time over the years designing for fun engines (Stirling cycle, turbines, hydrogen generation) with water as the central heat transfer, storage medium.
It’s amazing stuff. An incredible thermal battery, immensely powerful when expanding as a gas, and can be electrically split into combustible gases (hydrogen and oxygen), and turns back to water when burnt!!!
I can’t easily think of a more fascinating material.
I particularly like how in 300BC the first observation, which is the level of science I actually understand, is that clearing a forest warms the local environment.
Then progressively, even though water is the primary way that the heat is being transported back into the atmosphere high enough to be radiated back into space, there is next to no public discussion of how to get more trees .
Also interesting, and sorry I don’t have a link, was that deserts are really bad at getting heat from the surface up into the atmosphere. They produce a lot of low level convection heat , (hot winds) but they don’t move the heat up because they have so little water.
Which immediately makes me think of the “virtual desert” WA has in its “wheatbelt” , thousands and thousands of square kilometres of essentially barren land in summer.
I was writing a huge ass reply and my phone died and now have lost the draft on recharging the phone. That is so annoying lol! I will reply tomorrow now, bed time for me.
Sure, I can imagine him beavering away just as we are now. I am not invested in the theories either way. I am not sharing information to argue or sway you but to demonstrate my own attempt to understand what is going on. I am just curious to understand what they are and what models exist, how they have evolved and what could be wrong or missing, the same way I approach any model or theory. I never felt invested in anything, maybe a benefit of not having a religious upbringing, could easily abandon something if it no longer made sense or there was a better model or theory interconnecting facts together.
This wasn’t an argument but fleshing out some background into the science behind trying to understand the energy distribution from the Sun to the Earth and crude predictions for the Earths surface temperature. Something I remember learning from uni and being surprised that there were attempts to model this. We are so made to feel so strongly about these greenhouse gases, really notice the emotional manipulations at play in our society, very strange lol.
I will give some more detailed responses and the types of questions I also have tomorrow, I can’t be bothered to type everything again now lol, so annoying stupid phone lol.
We want a lapse rate that effectively gets enough heat up high enough to radiate heat back into space.
So deserts suck. They are going to have the dry air lapse rate of 9.8C per - kilometre. (The air it losing heat really fast as there is nothing to transfer it - water!).
Cities suck. They are heat sinks which store heat and radiate to only to the lower air.
Farms suck. We need them to eat, but they keep the heat near the surface.
Forests are great! They are going to be a much lower lapse rate, as the water maintains the air temperature to a higher altitude. Maybe even only losing 4 degrees per kilometre.
Earth’s overall lapse rate is what matters here.
The more deserts, the less it can transfer heat via convection up to an altitude which can radiate into space. Which will warms the lower atmosphere.
So, the 300BC guy was the most sensible. If you want a nice livable temperature, get some Forrests!!!
Richard made a new post on the new Global Warming “Facts (Actuality) and Groupthink (Orthodoxy)” page: Global Warming .
He goes through the flat earth and blackbody math, although in a funnier way than I did .
I didn’t quite get this part tho:
RICHARD: Furthermore, no externally heated substance – be it heated by conduction (direct transference from the heat source), by convection (heated gases rising and mingling and mixing with sinking cooler gases), or by radiation (via the heat source emitting infrared light) – can raise the temperature of its heat-source (other than all the phantom planets in the quantum[1] solar system, that is, which are busily raising the surface temperature of its central star above 5778° K via a massive-scale variant version of this phantasmagorical ‘back-radiation’).
I mean I understand that no externally-heated substance can make the source hotter.
If you put hot coffee in a thermos, the coffee warms the thermos walls but the thermos walls don’t make the coffee hotter than when you put it in.
I thought a better example would be if you have say a tall thin metal pot on a stovetop with coffee in it. At a certain temperature setting the coffee will be say 20C. Then if you wrap the pot in insulating material, the coffee inside will end up hotter, say 25C, because less heat is escaping. But that’s only possible if the stovetop was hotter than 25C. If the stovetop was at 20C then the temperature would have been lower than 20C in the initial configuration due to heat loss, or if the coffee inside already were 20C then that means it’s already perfectly insulated and more insulation won’t do anything lol.
I suppose the point is that if the incoming Sun’s energy is really at a temperature equivalent of -18C as the flat-earth model says, then no amount of insulation on the Earth can make the Earth hotter than -18C (i.e, such that the temperature coming from the sky is now 15C instead of -18C), so the flat-earth blackbody model of trace gas radiative forcing doesn’t even make sense on the face of it (i.e. it doesn’t even really matter that the 99% of the atmosphere is radiating IR back to the surface as well).
It seems too simple an argument to be correct on the face of it haha. But I can’t find any convincing counter-examples in real life that would demonstrate the point. I can make a mathematical equation that results in that it should heat up, and complicated hypothetical examples involving flames and lasers, batteries, perfectly insulating glass walls, etc…, but that doesn’t mean it’s correct or reflects reality…
In any case I think I may have reached the “good enough” point for me for now. It’s become clear it’s a lot more important and relevant to be happy and harmless, and enjoy and appreciate being alive, which eventuates a reveling in delicious intimacy with my partner (as opposed to resentful distancing), which is a lot more fun, and whether humans are causing the Earth to heat or not is not really the primary concern, although the arguments (that the model which demonstrates this is flawed) are at the very least certainly not “bad arguments”, certainly so far they make sense and I can’t disprove them… indeed so much so that I would call them “good” arguments .
Lasers are considered to have a negative temperature, which means that lasers are not hot but have high energy, which they readily transfer to other material when it comes in contact.
This can be demonstrated by the fact that a fiber laser cannot burn various organic materials, or a diode laser cannot burn transparent materials.
Whereas heat transfers from higher temperature to lower temperature regardless of the type or opacity of the material.
The energy transferred by the laser excites the molecules of the material.
These excited molecules undergo random motion and start colliding with each other, thereby increasing the temperature.
[…]
The major difference between heating material by a conventional heat source (like fire) and by a laser is the equilibrium state.
When heating a material with fire, the heat continuously transfers from the fire (source) to the material (target) until the temperature of the material is raised high enough to be equal to that of fire [i.e. it cannot heat it beyond the heat of the fire].
This is known as the equilibrium state, and the fire cannot heat the material beyond it.
Whereas in lasers, the material is heated by absorbing the laser energy.
No matter how hot the material gets, the energy of a laser will always be greater than the material.
Therefore, the material keeps heating up, and there is no equilibrium state to limit the laser from heating the material beyond a certain temperature. How Hot Is a Laser Cutter? Answered - MellowPine
The visible light from the Sun is more akin to a laser than a traditional fire – as it’s electromagnetic radiation (particularly, in the visible spectrum).
So why couldn’t it heat the Earth beyond the equivalent blackbody temperature of the W/m^2 insolation?
It wouldn’t violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics because as a whole, the entire Sun is expending more energy to generate the visible light than just the energy of that visible light… (just like the laser cutter also doesn’t violate the 2nd law when it raises metal temperature to a really high amount).
I am going to “Tap out” of this topic, but I want to thank @JonnyPitt , @claudiu for bringing it up and shaking down a lot of my beliefs in this area.
It has been very interesting to see just how far the prevailing “carbon” narrative had actually penetrated my otherwise “bring back the trees” outlook.
Also, we are all breathing mostly nitrogen, so we are complete alien freaks.
My first draft which got wiped I was going through and explaining some of the other assumptions of that model which I had included. Richard funnily enough has touched on some of those models assumptions in his post.
Some of the assumptions in that model I quoted that I didn’t delve into for brevity:
Area: treated as a circle on the one surface that is facing the Sun at any one time. It never said why they didn’t consider the surface area of half a sphere though (hemisphere). I am not sure why they make that decision.
Power out: They use the Stefan-Boltzmann equation for the total power radiated from an object and for the value of area they take the surface area of a sphere.
Albedo: is taken as a constant value of 0.3 but in reality this can vary. (Measuring Earth’s Albedo)
Power from Earths core: this is considered small enough a percentage to neglect and ignore.
Hydrological cycle: it doesn’t really take into account the affects of the hydrological cycle, water vapour and its involvement in convection, etc.
I mean, models are supposed to be helpful and useful to at least get figures that are in the right ballpark at least, rather than be the exact representation of the facts. I would be more concerned if the figures were like 0.001K or 10000K lol.
Funnily enough, I recently read this article on Medium about models, it was titled “Models are unrealistic by design.” It had some interesting quotes, like this one from Hanna Kokko in “Modelling for Field Biologists and Other Interesting People”:
…models only exist because we need them to help us: none of us are born with such supercomputer brains that we could evaluate arbitrarily complex arguments immediately and without external help.
What is the optimal complexity of a model, then? Once again, it depends on the question. Reflect for a moment that there are maps with different scales. In the context of scientific models, it is useful to be reminded of the ultimate reason we do science: it is the joy of understanding something.
If we could visualize and memorize more detailed maps than we currently do, useful maps would include more detail than they currently do. Exactly analogously, if we could grasp much more complex processes without getting headaches than we currently do, models would look different too.
Yes, again seeing some of the details that don’t get included when doing a particular model. I will have to read the book to better understand what you mean by the degree-by-degree exposure level.
Interesting, how we interpreted the same phrase differently. To me, he was implying that the radiators having to be a large surface area was inefficient but this is the nature of the relationship between how a body emits radiation, so the Stefan-Boltzmann equation again, that relationship between Power emitted being proportional to surface area.
Thinking about it, each materials emissivity determines how good they are at emitting as well so both are important aspects in the Power emitted being a higher value, bigger surface area and closer emissivity is to 1 the higher the value of your power emitted.
So, is it that radiation emitted having a relationship to surface area that is inefficient, or is it an inefficient means of exchanging energy (i.e power output/power input)?
What I don’t know is the Power in relation to the ammonia/water heat transfer to the plates and how much efficient that ouput/input ratio actually is.
To me that quote is implying that it is an inefficient way to emit and expel energy in space because of the relationship with area, bigger ships then need bigger surface areas for their radiators to expel heat. It doesn’t mean it is an inefficient way to exchange and transfer heat, i.e. heating a room on Earth with infrared heaters instead of a standard radiatior.
I assumed you might be considering at the Earth’s surface. By moving heat at a faster rate, I mean infrared moves at the speed of light lol so is definitely the fastest rate right lol! But joking aside, it made me think as well how much energy is involved in the transfer per unit area in a given time frame, something to delve into more. Moving at the fastest rate is a tricky thing conceptually, I think I prefer the term dominant better, which is the dominant mode of heat transfer in a particular point of consideration, the type contributing the biggest amount per unit of time, so in the lower atmosphere closer to the surface, convection takes over.
What is interesting about convection is that water vapour is clearly involved, which is also a greenhouse gas and also a part of the hydrological cycle. Hence why I said before this process and its involvement both with convection and infrared absorption needs to be better understood to make better models.
It made me wonder how distributed greenhouse gases are in the atmosphere and how high do they go.
Yeah, I have oscillated so many times on my positions on it. It seems a very difficult area. I am curious with improvements in AI if there will be model refinements that produce more accurate results and useful insights.
Yea but the crux of it is that this extremely questionable model (flat earth, black earth, sun that never sets and is 1/4th the actual power, no water effects taken into account, no infrared emission of the 99% of IR-transparent gases taken into account, etc etc) is taken to be proof (!!) that CO2 has the vast warming effect it’s said to have!
Literally the theoretical construction of this constantly-irradiated flat disk is taken as evidence. As opposed to … say an experiment.
Example:
How can CO2 trap so much heat if it only makes up 0.04% of the atmosphere? Aren’t the molecules spaced too far apart?
Before humans began burning fossil fuels, naturally occurring greenhouse gases helped to make Earth’s climate habitable. Without them, the planet’s average temperature would be below freezing. So we know that [emphasis added] even very low, natural levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases can make a huge difference in Earth’s climate. How Exactly Does Carbon Dioxide Cause Global Warming? - You Asked
The ” planet’s average temperature would be below freezing” refers to the black body calculation of -18C of course (in other places it’s explicit). This calculation is then proof (”So we know that […]”) that CO2 has a ”huge difference in Earth’s climate”. From there it’s a given that it does.
And also for example:
Has the greenhouse effect been falsified?
[…]
Some climate change skeptics dispute the so-called ‘greenhouse effect’, which keeps the surface temperature of the Earth approximately 33 degrees C warmer [bingo!] than it would be if there were no greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. In other words, without the greenhouse effect, the Earth would be largely uninhabitable.
How do we know for sure this effect is real? The principle is demonstrated through basic physics, because a bare rock orbiting the sun at the distance of the Earth should be far colder than the Earth actually is. Has the greenhouse effect been falsified?
Correction: a completely flat one-sided (ie losing energy in only one direction) fully black disk with twice the radius of the Earth that is constantly perpendicular to the sun orbiting said sun significantly further than the distance of the Earth such that the incoming solar energy is 1/4th the Earth actually gets, should be far colder than the Earth actually is. And this is the “basic physics” said to “demonstrate” the 33C of warming!
It’s reverse-backwards. The proof of the theory rests on a model, a thought experiment, whereas really a model is supposed to be based on experimental evidence…
———
There is certainly something captivating about radiation/electromagnetic waves/light. It is so weird and bizarre. How can you have a gas that absorbs nothing whatsoever of some powerful light shining through while a different gas does absorb it? It’s fascinating.
You certainly don’t need atoms or electrons to explain it… it’s just certain types of matter in combination with some types of matter has no effect while with others it does. But you can use it to do surprising things like make a laser that melts tungsten at extremely high temperatures. It seems like if some gas lets visible light through and absorbs infrared light, that that could have some strange effect. And indeed I still don’t understand this part of what Richard wrote of how an object can’t heat up its source. The sun is hotter than both the Earth and the atmosphere so I don’t see why the Earth couldn’t be hotter than it otherwise would be once the atmosphere is added. Like the pot on the stove with and without the insulation - liquid inside can have higher equilibrium temperature with the insulated pot, can’t it?
But to presume that such a strange effect accounts for exactly 33C worth of warming from a theoretical flat black Earth and then take it as a given … I’m fine calling this “rank absurdity” as well haha. Maybe it indicates more a captivation with radiation and quanta and atoms that it’s presumed to be responsible on the face of it…
Incidentally I think the CO2 absorbing-heating effect should be experimentally verifiable: make a small-scale model with visible light that heats a small-scale patch of dirt in an enclosure to IR-radiating temperatures … insert oxygen and nitrogen in both … insert CO2 in one and no CO2 in another … measure the equilibrium temperature differences.
But even if this one aspect were verified it wouldn’t address the other points that make it a nonsensical starting point for climate modeling.
Yes, I agree it is weird. But it made me think about models in general, like what is the comparison factor of models, how do they get rejected and accepted, I never really thought about that when at uni and I don’t recall them covering that. The experiments are bringing in some of the data like the averages for albdeo, power intensity of the sun so its a weird mix of experimental values thrown in with abstractions and loose concepts.
I have noticed this happening in science more and more. The uni I went to was famous for string theory and they had all these orher variants of it to try and make it still work with reality, I always thought this was the same, reverse-backwards and when I questioned it I was treated with such scorn and ridicule lol.
I guess because IR can be emitted in all directions one would we need something that allows IR to escape in the same capacity it does from Earth an amount stuck in the system and amount released, otherwise some IR will be lost to the surroundings I think.
Again, I am curious to see what more refined models with AI produce.
AI might be even worse, because they’re a ‘black box’ where we have no idea how they draw their conclusions. The major crisis in AI right now is that it can produce incredible products and it can also casually and confidently produce rank misinformation, and there’s no way to tell the difference without fact-checking literally everything.
In the case of trying to produce a climate change model we’d be right back where we started in terms of not knowing what is causing what, but with a model confidently giving an output.
On top of that you have humans inputting the parameters for the model (AI or otherwise) to work with, which means human assumptions (such as that CO2 is responsible for climate change)
I have seen in my field with Microsofts use of AI and ChatGPT. ChatGPT3 has had a lot of issues and makes a lot of mistakes still some that are subtle that people who don’t know the subject domain might not realise, though each subsequent version is improving. In my sector, people are quite shocked by the latest results from ChatGPT4.
The AI would have to be one explicitly trained on models and scientific papers from all the current models and theories with a focus on explainability if they want to prove unequivocally their model proves both the reason Earth has its standard surface temperature and anthropogenic climiate change.
Yes, but it also might help find our mistakes and other insights and relationships we didn’t realise or overlooked. I think there will be positive and negative outcomes.
(or at least: “not necessarily a lot”).
.
