The 21st Century New Paradigm Shift in Climate Change Science
by Douglas Cotton, B.Sc (Physics), B.A.(Econ), Dip.Bus.Admin
There can be no doubt that the world has not seen any further upward movement in the roughly sinusoidal natural 60 year climate cycle which peaked around 1998. Sure there was a second slightly lower peak in 2010, but since then we have had two more years which are back on the cooling trend, and sea surface temperatures have not in any year exceeded the 1998 maximum.
In fact, because of the 60 year cycle (which is clearly verified in the Appendix of my paper "Radiated Energy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics") we can expect slight cooling to continue until at least 2028. Yes there will be 30 years of warming after that, but around that time the long term (~1,000 year) cyclic trend will start a 500 year natural cooling period. This long term trend rises and falls for about 500 years at a time at a rate of about 0.5 C degrees per century, and it has nothing to do with carbon dioxide levels.
So the conjecture of greenhouse warming is simply not working, and this is because this IPCC statement (upon which the hypothesis is built) violates the laws of physics.
From their website* we read:
"Without the natural greenhouse effect, the average temperature at Earth’s surface would be below the freezing point of water. Thus, Earth’s natural greenhouse effect makes life as we know it possible. However, human activities, primarily the burning of fossil fuels and clearing of forests, have greatly intensified the natural greenhouse effect, causing global warming."
What this clearly implies is that they are assuming that the whole atmosphere would also be at the same temperature as their sub-zero surface “without the greenhouse effect.” They then go on to assume that radiation sent back to the surface from much colder regions in the atmosphere somehow slows the cooling of the surface, so that it stays 33 degrees warmer. But the Sun could not have warmed it to that temperature in the first place.
It is even more obvious on Venus, where the poles never receive any sunlight through the thick atmosphere, and yet both the poles and the Equator have surface temperatures around 730 K or more, and a fairly uniform thermal gradient (inappropriately called a “lapse rate”) in the atmosphere as it cools by well over 500 degrees approaching the top.
So this radiative warming simply cannot happen, because it implies there was a violation of the First Law of Thermodynamics in the very first fundamental assumption that there would have been a zero lapse rate (isothermal atmosphere) in the absence of water vapour and “Greenhouse Gases.”
Such an atmosphere would be creating energy, just as it would be if you could throw a stone in the air and it kept going upwards for ever, even though it was gaining potential energy. Molecules are no better at creating energy than are stones. Neither succeed one little bit.
Thus the foundation stone of the Greenhouse conjecture (which assumes an isothermal atmosphere to start with) is completely removed with valid physics, which has been confirmed with over 800 experiments this century. So the whole thing crumbles to the ground - which it wasn't warming in the first place.
Consider this experiment which you can try at home with any convex shaped lamp holder which gets hot from the globe. If you hold a finger close to the side of the lamp it will not feel much warmth, but a finger close to the top will. This is because molecules of air collide with the solid surface (just as they do with the Earth's surface) and get warmed by conduction, sometimes called diffusion when gases are involved. But the molecules at the side start to move vertically upwards by convection, following a natural thermal gradient which cools by about 0.1 C degree every 15 metres. So these warm molecules slip out between your finger and the lamp shade. But those which get warmed by diffusion at the top start to rise straight towards your finger where heat is then diffused into your finger. This is what happens at the Earth's surface-atmosphere interface.
Oxygen and nitrogen keep the surface warm with non-radiative diffusion processes just by being there at almost the same temperature. The closer the temperatures are, the slower is the cooling by both diffusion and evaporative cooling of water surfaces. And these normal air molecules (mostly oxygen and nitrogen and yes, 0.04% of them carbon dioxide) are at that temperature because of the autonomous formation of a thermal gradient as molecules swap kinetic energy (KE) and potential energy (PE) when in free flight between impacts - even in still air – even without convection - even at the poles of Venus where no sunlight ever reaches down.
The great planets receive virtually no solar insolation at their surfaces, so where is the energy for any back radiation? There isn't any. Their atmospheres get warmed by the Sun and a thermal gradient develops and maintains itself automatically due to their gravitational field. Their atmospheres “support” similar surface temperatures, which may be slightly warmer due to day/night variations.
So “human activities, primarily the burning of fossil fuels and clearing of forests, have not intensified any natural greenhouse effect, and are not causing global warming.”
That is the real world. That is the real Solar system. That is the real universe, because physics is universal. The autonomous thermal gradient in the atmosphere, together with Solar insolation, which sets the overall level of the thermal profile, determines the surface temperatures on Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and – wait for it – Earth.
May I encourage you to read my paper 'Planetary Core and Surface Temperatures' for further discussion and empirical evidence supporting this 21st century paradigm shift in climate change science.
* http://climateaudit.org/2008/01/07/ipcc-explains-the-greenhouse-effect/
