Global Warming? Nullius in Verba!

Written by Stephen Wells on February 1, 2019. Posted in Current News

The opportunity to write articles for PSI came about through a chance encounter on a Facebook Climate Change debating page with John O’Sullivan who is the co founder of the organisation. He and I found ourselves debating someone with much more scientific credentials than ourselves and he liked the things I had to say enough to offer to share them with his readers.

John doesn’t spend the amount of time that I do testing his intellect against Greenhouse Effect believers on debating forums. I’ve literally done it every day for the last five years. Often spending hours a day, going back and fourth with an opponent. Most people simply don’t have the amount of free time available that I do to troll for arguments. It could be worse, I could be spending that time watching mainstream TV!

Since we met I’ve exchanged an entire books worth of arguments with the same person we debated together. Our opponent is VERY credentialed and to say I feel out of my depth is a massive understatement. It’s been very daunting without having someone like John to back me up in the debate.

My nemesis is well aware of this and constantly uses appeals to his own authority and denigration of my formal academic achievements to try and intimidate me into accepting his assertions:

“In your case, you have no idea, because you truly don’t understand radiative heat transfer. Or science for that matter.”

“Since I have worked with radiation propagating through the atmosphere in a professional setting (high energy laser weapons) I am quite comfortable that I am on the side of physics”.

Time for me to just bow down to this superior being, wouldn’t you say? “Trust the experts” and all that. It is true, for example, that he has an answer for literally every single thing that I thought I had learned about the theory of radiative physics over the last five years. I am David in front of an intellectual Goliath.

The trouble is Joseph E Postma, (physicist published with PSI) is also an intellectual giant in comparison to me. How do I discover which of the two is the king of the Titans? Both assert that the other is intellectually inferior. Both assert that the other is pushing discredited pseudoscience.

I have locked horns with both. You see I took the Royal Society’s motto of “Nullius in Verba” as universal and advice for everyone. Including me. “Nothing in words”, take nobody’s word for it. I argue. I troll, because I am sick to death of people cleverer than I am assuming I should just accept the things they are telling me.

Their IQ and their education mean diddly squat to me. Both can be used to illuminate or deceive those of lessor intellect and education.

If you’re a scientist, which one are you?

I don’t know who to trust, so how about I trust no one? How about the 90{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117}-99{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of people who’s education is far less than Postma or the person quoted above (who shall remain nameless) stop trying to compel those less educated than themselves to accept their assertions? I’ve not had a problem with Joe Postma. He hasn’t relied on his credentials to convince me. But I’m yet to meet a single Greenhouse Effect Scientist believer who doesn’t feel compelled to ram their PhD down my throat.

This guy has done a great job of proving that I’m his intellectual inferior in physics. Whoop te do for him. There are probably 100 million people on the planet that could do the same. What he has utterly failed to do is convince me that his assertions are correct.

It continually astounds me that when people make insults about my lack of education or knowledge that they think they are saying something that I am unaware of, or trying to hide. That I am suffering from the Dunning Krueger Effect and think I am cleverer than I really am.

Let me assure all you brainiacs our there of something. We, who are dunces. We, who look like complete and utter failures in life to you. We are acutely aware of our shortcomings. We are under no illusions about our abilities. If anything, we have spent our whole lives undervaluing ourselves and putting ourselves down.

It’s like life has naturally done to us, what the first part of traditional military training does to new recruits. It broke us down. It took away our ego. It made us feel worthless, so that no matter what an enemy put us through on the battlefield, we had already experienced bottom.

Lack of self and of self worth. We are just waiting for life to put us through the second part of the training. Where we are built up again. Made to be something greater than we were before.

That comes when you take on someone you know to have better intellectual weapons than yourself and are not cowed. What more can they say about you anyway? When you stubbornly resist and push back with simple logic and demands for evidence. When your opponent fails to provide it and you feel victory. We have nothing to lose and everything to gain and that is empowering.

The opponent that John and I took on, kept coming back and I’ve had to tackle him alone. I’m outmatched, out classed and out gunned. But it is still up to him to provide evidence to me, not vice versa. It is up to him, not me, to demonstrate how his evidence overcomes my objections. It is not up to me to simply accept his assertions that his evidence is sufficient. Nullius in Verba.

So what is the dispute? What is the crux of the issue?

He asserted to me that it is possible for natural recycling of radiation to result in an object achieving a higher temperature than the natural heating potential of the energy that the sun provides directly.

Now I am a dumb, uneducated non scientist illiterate, so what would I know? Joseph Postma (pictured right) might have deceived me when I read his blog and Papers, or maybe I am just too dumb to have understood him properly. I have certainly been corrected many times over the last five years. In fact there were many other details and red herrings thrown at me during this debate, that I tackled head on and made a complete idiot of myself on. It was in fact Joseph Postma who showed me where those errors were and thus helped me expand my broader knowledge on physics, to a smidgin more than my grade B ‘O’ Level provided. For example, if a system has a higher absorption coefficient than its emission coefficient, it will achieve a higher temperature than the blackbody temperature of the energy absorbed. Don’t I sound all intelligent now?

This has absolutely nothing to do with any of the claims of a greenhouse effect, but it was a great red herring to use against me to make me out to be an idiot on everything else.

But at the end of all the back and forth, I simply asked my opponent for one thing: SHOW ME!

Show me where man has made an object get hotter than the natural heating potential of the sun’s energy without concentrating the sun’s energy onto a smaller surface area (such as a magnifying glass or mirrors for thermal solar power). Show me where energy is amplified above the value given for the sun at full strength at noon above the equator so that back radiation causes higher energy and higher temperatures.

Do you think he obliged? Do you think he enlightened and educated and showed the evidence? Did he heck!

Instead I get this:

“My discussion of emission and absorption coefficients did not claim any amplification of power in and out.”

Funny because every textbook in undergraduate degrees across the world including Harvard and every google search on the earth’s energy budget diagrams will show those from Kiehl and Trenberth that do precisely that. Hence the thing being a complete Red Herring and thanks to Joe Postma for teaching me about them.

“Another thing you need to jettison is the idea that “the sun’s energy” has a temperature.  Photons have no temperature.  All you are working with are flows of power, and power has no temperature.  Depending on whether a surface is dissipating power by radiant emission, that surface will have a temperature, but it arises from its circumstances, not from some reference outside itself.  I did describe to you how you could make an object that would equilibriate at higher than black-body temperature.  It has no practical use, so no one has made one, but the description is bullet-proof.  You would have to reject the Stefan-Boltzmann law in order to reject the example.”

No, I find spending trillions on climate change “research” has no practical use. I could think of a hundred uses for raising temperatures of the sun’s energy beyond its blackbody temperature without having to build hundreds of mirrors to concentrate it from an area the size of a village onto a small tower killing every flying creature for miles that fly in the vicinity!

What he is basically acknowledging is that he has zero experimental evidence to give me. Because the only evidence he could give me, is for the red herring and not for the Greenhouse Effect.

You CAN get a higher temperature from the same energy output by lowering the emissivity of the object/system. You CAN’T get a higher power output than input by doing so. Why is this important?

First, because the energy budget diagrams for the Greenhouse Effect explicitly show power at the surface being amplified, not emissivity being lowered.

Second, both Carbon Dioxide and water vapour have a higher emissivity than Oxygen and Nitrogen, so replacing an atmosphere with “greenhouse gasses” would do the exact opposite of what my opponent was claiming was occurring! He carried on:

“At some point you have to accept the fact that there is down-welling IR radiation.  That is the crux of the theory.  Would you ask for experimental evidence for the behavior of a tornado or hurricane?  There is no way those phenomena can be studied in a laboratory.  And you have to accept the fact that CO2 and H2O have absorption/emission spectra, which leads inescapably to their behavior in a Greenhouse Effect. “

What is lacking?  All the pieces are there?

“You can’t reasonably demand an experiment that cannot be performed in practice.  My thinking is that one might construct a reflective tube with a target surface at the end, and a window at the other end, and fill the tube with about a ton of air (for a cross-sectional area of 1 square foot).

I don’t have the time to work the numbers, but that would either be a very long tube at high pressure, or a very heavy one operating at higher pressure.   And, if you wanted to create an acceleration gradient to compress the gas into layers, it might have to be spun at the end of a centrifuge arm.  A pretty expensive experiment, if you ask me, for results that are easier to confirm by observation.”

“So, you have no ability to put the pieces together and judge the validity on the basis of facts and logic—you demand “an experiment.”  But just because you demand something probably highly expensive and maybe impossible in practice doesn’t mean I am wrong; it only means you can’t assess the information I have given you.  It wouldn’t hurt to take it by steps.”

So it would be too expensive to demonstrate heating beyond the natural potential of the power source of radiation, via “back radiation” and to do it we would need to create high pressures and simulate gravity! Because, apparently “back radiation” doesn’t work without external forces.

These are the same forces that are the basis of the alternative theories to the greenhouse effect. He is saying that we need to add these forces, at great expense, before his assertions can be experimentally demonstrated.

What a coincidence! The same forces that we do ALREADY have experimental evidence of causing a temperature gradient (vortex cooling tube, experiments with fluids) without regards to IR absorption properties of gases.

These are the forces that he can’t do without.

Where is the force of gravity in the Kiehl Trenberth diagrams (see above)? My opponent requires we simulate gravity to validate the diagrams! So why isn’t the force of gravity actually included in the diagram already? How has the force of gravity got anything to do with the claimed ability of “back radiation”, to take the power of an object beyond the power of the incident radiation shining on it, according to the theory?

Surely there is indeed a secondary force acting on the system. The energy isn’t being amplified by natural absorption and emission. It’s being amplified by the force of gravity that is required before this guy can provide an experiment that might actually work.

He also wants to make sure we compress some gas with it as well. You know. Because heating via compression of a gas isn’t a thing we’ve ever observed in the lab or in an air conditioning unit, either!

It’s all to do with “back radiation”. Trust me I have a PhD in lasers.

All this guy can actually give me of evidence of the hypothesis to explain the observations about the atmosphere, is observations that the atmosphere behaves like the atmosphere. Well DUH! I might be a complete Dunce, but I still know what circular reasoning is.

As for explaining tornadoes and hurricanes, we actually have tons of small scale lab and layman’s examples of the behaviour of them. Just pour cold cream into a cup with hot coffee and watch the two fluids turn about one another. It’s like some people with PhDs just don’t believe people without them ever notice things in the real world.

The simple fact is we have direct, man made experimental evidence for every hypothesis that graduates to a valid theory. Or at least science used to. Nullius in Verba. It’s time we applied that to the assertions of scientists once more. Then we wouldn’t have to concern ourselves with how supposedly stupid and uneducated we are!

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