Vineeto, more-or-less, challenged me to confirm or refute Richard’s opinion. She might not put it that way but before replying to her latest email, I feel it very prudent to take a deep dive.
I’m coming from a place that climate change is probably man-made due to 2 things. 1) it’s going on during the population explosion/industrial age. 2) Even gas and oil companies, OPEC countries, and the union of petro-engineers concede that it’s made-made. I’ve always lived by the assumption that greed trumps everything so I would find it very perplexing if Saudi Arabia and Exxon confirmed man-made global warming when there are perfectly good scientific reasons to refute it.
But what I find very interesting is that the so-called refutations of sceptic/denier arguments are all quasi-strawmen. That’s a red flag. They seem to pick the dumber arguments to refute and ignore the good ones. I haven’t seen any climate change sceptic refutation that talks about evaporation or conduction.
Right now, I’m mulling over the atmosphere question and the point that a source can’t get hotter from the thing it’s heating.
On the former, it seems to me that if conduction is responsible for over 99% of the heat in the atmosphere and thermal radiation is only 1% then adding trace amounts of CO2 won’t have any effect. And certainly convection and evaporation would mitigate what little effect it did have. That should be the base assumption anyway. But it doesn’t seem to be the base assumption. Based on wacky models they seem to think conduction plays little to no role in heating the lower atmosphere. I can’t say I understand those models but I do understand they are based on an egregious simplification of the Earth’s surface.
On the latter point, I don’t see why preventing heat from escaping wouldn’t make the source hotter. When I wear a hat, my head gets hot.
So this is very interesting, because, two assumptions have been nobly challenged. The assumption that money trumps everything has been challenged. The assumption that climate change scientist and climate change writers are being sincere has been challenged. But I don’t understand Richards point that the source can’t be reheated by it’s own energy.
I think my next step is to take a look at ice sheet analysis. It may turn out those studies are as flawed as the flat earth surface temperature models. It’s important to know if they are or are not reliable because that would tell us if we can know the ice sheets world wide had ever rapidly receded before like we are seeing them rapidly recede now.
Either way, I think public policy should factor in that this movement may be man-made. And if we can know they have never moved like we are seeing them move now then policy should assume the man-made hypothesis with or without actual proof. Global warming has always been half science and half risk mitigation for me. I’m grateful to finally be catching up on the science part.
One final note, I don’t understand why all the heat of the lower atmosphere doesn’t rise to the upper atmosphere.
