Is the Earth Flat? No!
PSI has been at the forefront of debunking the fundamental foundations of the Catastrophic Man Made Global Warming claims, by falsifying the Greenhouse Effect Hypothesis itself.
When I came across the work of the scientists whose papers they published, I had to spend a lot of time looking up relevant laws of physics, rules of mathematics and hours and hours of time generally to make sure I was understanding what had been written.
It was like trying to follow the instructions to assemble a 100-piece cabinet from IKEA. It’s all logical, it can be done, but God, how many times can you stuff it up along the way?!
The same thing was true of both the “Alarmist” (scientists who say that we are causing catastrophic global warming) papers and the “Lukewarmer” (scientists who say there is a Greenhouse Effect but that man doesn’t contribute very much to it) papers.
To try and find out who was correct for myself, I challenged scientists on all sides of the debate. I played devil’s advocate with them all. Trying to pick holes in the assertions of everyone. Pointing out contradictions wherever I saw them and demanding that such contradictions were resolved before accepting any point, however minor.
Eventually I took the side of those saying there was no Greenhouse Effect, but I realised that for the majority of people they would not be able to make head nor tail of of either the scientific literature nor the technical arguments being waged between scientists.
I realised I had a role to play in this. My physics and mathematics qualifications just about squeezed me into the top 10{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of the population, but the debate was happening between the top 1{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117}. As the truth or falsehood of this issue affects everyone, there was a need for the general public to be able to understand just why the folks at PSI are correct. I could help be a bridge between people with PhDs and people who switched off the day the maths teacher in 7th grade, used a letter instead of a number.
I am a reasonable chess player, but like my maths and physics understandings, I can tell you why Kasparov (above) lost against the IBM computer after he made the bad move and tell you why it was a bad move in hindsight, but I could have never played a game like that myself. I am in the top 10{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of players, not the top 1{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117}.
In physics, I can tell you in layman’s language why the scientists publishing at PSI are correct and why the papers of other scientists are wrong, after they have been written, but I couldn’t have written any of those papers myself. Anyone can understand it, it just needs pointing out.
So let me show regular folks just one of the reasons that the Greenhouse Effect doesn’t exist. Once you know this it will be like you’ve been shown why Kasparov lost to Deep Blue. It won’t matter that you can hardly remember how a knight is supposed to move, Magnus Carlson (current top chess player) himself won’t be able to prove you wrong.
In the diagram shown below, we have a representation of the greenhouse effect on earth and how it’s supposed to work.
In physics, if you wish to understand how something works, the first step is to simplify it as much as possible to get an approximation of reality. Then you can gradually add complexity to get a more accurate picture. In this way it also becomes possible for ordinary people to gain basic understanding and experts can be used for more precise calculations and details as and when required. You don’t need to solve complex equations, you just need to understand that equations start with the premise that 1+1=2
However, if your simplified model or theory is wrong to begin with, then adding complexity will simply compound the error. This is what we have with the greenhouse effect.
There are lots of scientists that can and do make intricate calculations and models about how IR active gasses can affect temperature on earth, but their education has grown out of accepting this diagram and others like it as a valid representation of reality when they started their undergraduate degrees at university.
Just like there are astrologers (not astronomers!) who know intricate variations of the movements and positions of planets and how they affect people born on different dates and times and places, based on centuries of work, it doesn’t change the fundamental fact that your personality and destiny is independent of it all. In the same way, all the maths and equations that people spend years learning, doesn’t change the fundamental errors contained in this diagram.
So what is the problem? Well there are lots of them, but let’s focus on just one.
Is the earth flat or spherical?
Is the earth a disk or a ball?
When you simplify the earth to the point of making it flat, then you have no night and day, no poles and equator and you must average the energy of the sun by dividing its power by 4.
Look at the diagram again. Is it a picture of a spherical globe or is it a picture of a flat disk?
So on the left hand side of the diagram the sun’s energy hits the surface at an average value equally spread across equator and poles, night and day. In such a situation it always has a value of 161W/m2. It can never have a value of 644W/m2. Clouds also are uniform across the sky. The 79W/m2 is always there. Never at 316W/m2. Never at zero. Never a clear sunny day, never torrential rain.
So the surface can never receive a zenith of 960W/m2 and it becomes necessary for students to look for other ways, outside of the sun, to explain the surface temperatures we actually experience. If we started with a spherical earth, we would find different discrepancies to deal with. But they would be based on a correct starting model. Not one based on modelling the earth as flat.
Considering the amount of times people have accused my assertions on this subject as being like those of “Flat Earthers”, the irony is hysterical.
All kinds of claims about everyday things get made because of this fundamentally flawed starting position. Soon people start looking at all kinds of things from blankets to cars and forget that the sun is hot and it’s energy has a lot of heating potential.
Worse is that scientists seem to be the ones doing most of the forgetting. All because they oversimplified the starting model and forgot this fact as more complexity was added as they progressed in their studies.
Take a basic explanation of how the Greenhouse Effect is supposed to work:
So the sun can’t do this on its own, it’s energy needs to be trapped so it can build up and exceed the sun’s normal potential. That’s what the energy budget diagrams say too. The sun provides 161 Watts of energy to each square meter of the surface, but thanks to our magical greenhouse gases that energy can build up until the surface emits 396 Watts.
But the sun’s energy doesn’t arrive all averaged out (above diagram). The sun’s energy arrives concentrated and powerful. Up to 1000 Watts. On a clear day with it directly overhead (at the Equator) it has the potential to heat an object to over 90C!
It’s not the sun’s energy that is being amplified inside a car, it simply the fact the warmed air can’t escape. It has nothing to do with the glass letting visible light in or short wave infrared in but not letting long wave infrared light out. If the was because of the properties of the glass, your attic wouldn’t also warm up to sauna temperatures on a hot day!
All light is blocked from getting into your roof space and is absorbed by your roof tiles, yet your attic can get just as hot as the inside of your car. It’s only the air that is trapped. The “greenhouse effect” has nothing to do with it.
Our atmosphere DOES affect the surface temperature, but the debate is about how? What the correct mechanism is to describe what is observed. But as the discrepancies observed arise out of different starting models, we get different solutions and theories to explain the observations.
So how would you like to start your model earth? Flat Earth? Or Sphere Earth? Because once you’ve seen the error and understood it, you can’t unsee it. It’s always there, no matter how many PhDs the person has, who is trying to tell you it doesn’t exist.
Just like in a chess game between Grandmasters. Someone has told you that pawns can’t go backwards and when white moved his pawn forwards one square, he could never move it back to defend the square Black was attacking. You know nothing about chess. You would have probably moved all the pawns yourself, were asked to play a game, but after the game, somebody showed you what happened and it’s as clear as day. Pawns can’t go backwards, the Earth is not flat.
If you would like to use a spherical earth. One that has day and night, equator and poles, give the scientists at PSI the opportunity to state their case to you. Feel free to also give them all of your skepticism, just as I did. Look for as many holes in their arguments as you can. Just be open enough to accept the possibility that they might just be right.
Because is the Earth flat? NO!
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tom0mason
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The great hole in the diagram is that it implies that at every moment energy in = energy out.
WRONG for any time period less than infinity! It is correct if you can imagine it functioning forever. However THIS IS WRONG over any fixed time period!
Consider that currently the number of trees has expanded over the last 100 years (see https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/wilderness-resources/stories/more-trees-than-there-were-100-years-ago-its-true), and NASA has reported the planet is greening, has more vegetative growth. This means that solar energy has NOT left the planet but has remained, locked-up in plant growth (locked in these natural chemical bonds) during this recent warm period. So ‘energy in’ has not equaled ‘energy out’ over this period; nature has acquire and held on to some of that energy. That’s the way nature works. I takes solar energy sequesters it away then releases it at a much later date.
The same could be shown with the human population. Over the last 100 thousand years our population has grown MASSIVELY, where did all the energy come from for such an expansion — THE SUN’S ENERGY!
Due to these types of natural events ‘energy in’ hardly ever equals ‘energy out’.
The diagram is a lie! An unnatural view.
This planet (due to nature) transfers solar energy to the energy holding the organic chemical bonds and organic structures together. Later this energy is then released during natural decomposition. If it did not work this way life would fail, there would be no fossils, no coal, arguably no oil.
Solar energy enters and is held by plant life. Then later clumps of energy from decomposition are released; the amounts of released energy can exceed what solar energy supplies on that day.
In the long view, during warm climate periods the total solar energy used by all life expands (the amount of solar energy released reduces!), life sequesters more solar energy , during the cold climate periods the totally of life reduces so less solar energy is stored. During the transition between these periods great clumps of energy are released via decomposition, or they are stored away in structures like peat and coal.
NOTE – The majority of reactions in natural decay are exothermic — when your compost heap is functioning it’s very warm, peat bogs can be very warm, during this time they are releasing more CO2, methane, etc. to the oceans and atmosphere.
Eventually all this solar energy in and energy released equalizes. But when is eventually? It’s certainly not now!
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John Harrison
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How would your premise explain why temperatures at night fall far more rapidly in regions of low humidity than they do in those of high humidity. The logical explanation would seem to lie in the fact that water molecules have the ability to absorb LWIR emitted by the surface and immediately re-radiate it in all directions, some of it back down to the Earth. The escape of LWIR into space seems thus to have been slowed. Most intelligent lukewarmers I have communicated with say that if this can happen with water vapour molecules then CO2 will exert a similar but much less potent effect. How would your Spherical Earth physics explain this?
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Herb Rose
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Hi John,
The universal gas law (PV=nkt) states that in an unconfined gas, like the atmosphere, the density of the gas (n/V) is inversely proportions to the temperature of the gas molecules. The hotter the gas is the less dens it is. This would mean the less dense gases higher in the atmosphere are hotter than the gas molecules lower in the atmosphere. In high humidity the additional water molecules in the atmosphere are more effectively conducting heat from the upper atmosphere to the surface of the Earth. The basic assumption of the GHGT that the surface the Earth is radiating heat into space is wrong.
Have a good day,
Herb
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A Thorpe
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All of thermodynamics destroyed in a few words. Well done!
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John Harrison
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It is as I feared, you have no real grasp of the atmospheric physics involved.
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John Harrison
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Are you really saying that the rarefied atmosphere at the top of Everest is warmer than at sea level and that the gases there, which are abysmal conductors of heat, will rapidly conduct sufficient heat down to the Earth’s surface to reduce cooling rates, that water vapour molecules do not absorb and re-radiate LWIR and that the surface of the Earth does not cool at all by emission of that LWIR? All of this contravenes that which we know about the physics, nature and behaviour of the atmosphere/surface interactions.
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Herb Rose
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Hi John,
There are three possibilities. The universal gas law is wrong, the measurement of density of the atmosphere is wrong, or that the measurement of temperature is not an accurate indicator of the kinetic energy of a gas. Since the clouds at thirty thousand feet are made of liquid water droplets while the measured temperature is minus 30 degrees I believe that the measured temperature is wrong.
The surface the Earth radiates energy into the Earth (in order for seeds to germinate is spring the temperature of the earth must warm.) and into the atmosphere. The atmosphere radiates heat into space and into the earth. All molecules in the atmosphere, including water, absorb and radiate heat. it is done according to the second law of thermodynamics.
Have a good day,
Herb
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Ed Bo
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Herb:
There’s a fourth possibility — that you have no freaking idea what you’re talking about.
In your use of the ideal gas law, you implicitly assumed that pressure is constant over altitude. For anyone who understands the basics of either theory or observation, this is utterly and obviously RIDICULOUS!
Hint: The pressure comes from the weight of the atmosphere above the point in question, so obviously decreases with altitude. Mediocre high school students have no trouble with this point, but it eludes you.
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Herb Rose
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Hi Ed,
The pressure referred. to in the universal gas law is not atmosphere pressure, which is the weight of the molecules in the atmosphere, but the pressure that confines the gas and resists expansion. In the case of the atmosphere that pressure is gravity and it is constant throughout the atmosphere. It is unaffected by either the number of molecules in the atmosphere or their temperature.
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Ed Bo
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Herb:
Hogwash! Pressure is pressure, whether induced by gravity or by containment. It is, by definition, force per unit area exerted by the gas.
And pressure is NOT gravity! The units are not even the same. These are basic things you should have learned in high school.
Hb Rose
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Hi Ed,
You don’t believe that gravity is trying to compress the atmosphere to the center of the Earth. You don’t believe the more intense light from the sun heats the molecules in the atmosphere. It’s amazing how the laws of physics are suspended to make the GHGT right.
Herb
Ed Bo
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How did you miss the part where I talked about pressure “induced by gravity “?
James McGinn
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Hi Ed,
The pressure referred. to in the universal gas law is not atmosphere pressure,
JMcG:
Surreal. Pressure is pressure. Bo is correct. You are confused.
Herb Rose
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The weight of the atmosphere is included it the pressure of gravity pushing down on the Earth and gravity is the only downward pressure. If the atmosphere had no energy it would be a layer of liquid on the surface of the Earth. It is energy that causes the molecules of the atmosphere to overcome the pressure of gravity and become a gas that ricochets off the surface of the Earth. The molecules are not stack on each other adding their weight like a liquid but by colliding with each other transferring energy.from the molecules with higher energy to molecules with lower energy.
When the liquid in a thermometer contracts and becomes denser you believe the temperature is lower and there is less kinetic energy. When a gas contracts and becomes denser you believe it is getting hotter. When a gas gains energy it expands and becomes less dense. The sun is adding to the energy of the molecules in the atmosphere and this energy is transferred lower into the atmosphere where it finally reflect off the Earth keeping the molecules as a gas.
It is gravity that is compressing the atmosphere while it is energy that is overcoming gravity and keeping the atmosphere as a gas.The universal gas law says that the density of a gas is inversely proportional to kinetic energy of the gas molecules. If you don’t believe that gravity exerts a constant pressure on the atmosphere or that the gas law is not correct then I understand why you believe in the GHGT.
Have a good day,
Herb
John Harrison
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Herb. Adiabatic expansion of a gas will cool it as it does work on it’s surroundings hence air is colder at greater heights eg temperatures commonly fall by approx 1C every 300m. You have attempted to apply the Ideal Gas Equations incorrectly. The Earth’s surface cannot radiate IR down through the soil, only conduction is possible. Water, in the absence of a solid nucleus can be supercooled as a liquid to temperatures way below 0C. Raising the internal energy of a molecule by absorption of LWIR or its subsequent emission has little or nothing to do with the second law of thermodynamics, see adiabatic expansion above. Oxygen and nitrogen molecules in the atmosphere will not absorb or emit LWIR. Gases are appalling conductors of heat and hence transfer by this means in the atmosphere will be neglible. You should learn more of the basic physics before being tempted to post comments. Uninformed comments put the website in a bad light. Sorry.
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John Harrison
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Hi Herb. In no way have I inferred constant pressure with increasing altitude. On the contrary. Warm air rises and expands in the lower pressures of the upper atmosphere. As it expands, as all good physicists will tell you, it cools. If you do not know that you should not be posting on this site. Sorry to be so abrupt.
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Herb Rose
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Hi John,
The pressure on the atmosphere is gravity. The difference in that pressure at a distance of 4000 miles and 4030 miles is not significant. The gases are not expanding because of lower pressure but because of higher temperature like a hot air balloon.
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J Richard Wakefield
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One thing that is missed here is that the earth rotates. No place on the planet gets the full input from the sun, it rotates away from the energy source. Like moving your hand over a candle flame, do it fast enough and you hand warms, but doesnt burn. Do it slow enough, and you burn. Change the rotation of the planet by any major percent one way or the other, and the planet would be uninhabitable.
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Herb Rose
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Hi,
The atmosphere rotates faster than the Earth. This was shown during the 1950s when radioactive clouds from nuclear bomb tests orbited the planet moving east. The higher a molecules is in the atmosphere the longer it is exposed to the energy of the sun (not in the Earth’s shadow) and the greater the energy of the sun striking the molecule. Just from the energy source you would expect the molecules higher in the atmosphere to have more kinetic energy (heat) than the molecules lower in the atmosphere.
Have a good day,
Herb
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Richard Wakefield
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Yes, but the vast majority of the energy absorbed from the sun is on the surface, which imparts that energy to the atmosphere.
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Herb Rose
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Hi Richard,
An object above the atmosphere will have the surface heated to 250 degrees while the same surface at sea level will be heated to 50 degrees. The missing solar energy is contained in the atmosphere. The atmosphere molecules are equivalent to 33 feet of fresh water which can absorb a lot of heat.
Have a good day,
Herb
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Gopal Panicker
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Gases absorb radiation in a peculiar way. This called Selective Absorption. Look it up.
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Ed Bo
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Stephen:
It’s often said that “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” Because all models are simplifications of the real world, they will not duplicate everything. The question is how much you can simplify and still get useful information.
In thermodynamic analysis, steady-state evaluation is almost always done first, to put you at least in the ball park. The K&T diagram you cite, which is intended only as a conceptual illustration, is such a steady-state evaluation.
So is it a useful analysis, when we know that these quantities, especially the solar power input, are not constant? Well, we can start to make the model more complex and see what happens.
So we use double the insolation values for 12 hours, and then use zero for the other 12 hours. Still very simplified, but avoids the “flat earth” problem you complain about. Nothing is steady-state any more. Things heat up during the day, then cool off at night. The rate of warming and cooling depends on the thermal capacitance involved.
But here’s the thing. Because radiative power output varies as the 4th power of absolute temperature, a 1 degree increase over average causes a greater increase in radiative output than a 1 degree decrease causes a power decrease. So variation leads to an overall decrease in energy level, and therefore temperature, compared to the steady-state average.
This phenomenon is called Holder’s Inequality, and it dictates that the bigger the variation (over time or surface), the lower the resulting temperatures will be compared to the steady-state average.
The ramification of this is that the “flat earth” model provides an upper limit to what the temperatures could be. And with the absorbed solar input of 240 W/m2, the surface temperature of the earth in the flat earth model could not be over 255K (-18C) from solar power alone.
But the improvements you want to the model can only lead to lower average temperatures because of Holder’s inequality. So we can consider the flat earth model an upper limit rather than a best estimate.
But we observe that the surface temperatures over the vast majority of the earth are greater than 255K, mostly significantly so. The flat earth model cannot explain this without atmospheric contributions, but the models you prefer are even farther from explaining it.
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Quokka
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Everything Ed says about a flat earth model is correct, but it’s worth noting that this is not a flat earth model – it’s not using those energy flow values to calculate temperatures. All of those values come from estimates for energy flows for the whole earth, as derived from measurements. Those whole-earth energy flows are then divided by the surface area of the earth to give a representative value in W/m^2.
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tom0mason
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“All of those values come from estimates for energy flows for the whole earth, as derived from measurements.” Indeed and all of those ‘steady state’ estimation are wrong! The planet have greened up, the oceans now measure cooler than they did, and that supposition that the tropical upper atmosphere would heat-up has not happened. 3 estimate out of play!
As a rough guide for some period years ago it may (but quite unlikely as the measurement were not all in at the time) been on the outer reaches of the ball-park, but now there are not even in the same state!
And of course that cartoon of the earth has built into it the blather of CO2 warming the planet via it’s re-radiation of IR to water. This has not been shown to happen in the atmosphere, there is no empirical prove of this action. Gasses in the atmosphere are very mobile and not, in the main, static radiative molecules.
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Squidly
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I just love some of these comments. All sorts of hocus-pocus sophistry going on.
I hate to point it out but, for molecule A to further excite molecule B, molecule A must be of greater energy state than molecule B. There are no “magical” exceptions. Heat cannot “pile”, which is why no matter how much 130F coffee I pour into my cup, my coffee can never be greater than 130F.
Case close … GHE/RGHE ..DEAD !!! … move along…
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tom0mason
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Yes Squidly,
Some CO2 0.04% of the atmosphere may get excited by some of the sun’s IR radiation, and then some of those excited CO2 molecules may re-radiate a low frequency IR, which then may excite (warm-up) some of the water molecules that eventually warm the atmosphere by an amount that is so small that it is virtually indistinguishable from the natural thermal noise about it. And of course the effect of this minute CO2 warming can only rise as CO2 level rise logarithmically. As CO2 levels rise it’s so called ‘warming’ effect levels off.
Certainly with such small probabilities at work on such a small amount of warming to start with, the idea that this could overheat the planet and cause major harm is laughable. It’s certainly never happened before and it is not happening now.
While just as likely is that planet-wide cooling happens by the imminent solar minimum and this will cause more harm to humans and nature, but no political leader is watching that probability no matter how likely it becomes.
Meanwhile very overpaid ‘climate scientist’ pontificate about the numbers (and the minutia of how many molecules make a cloud) without really knowing the true nature of the climate.
So weigh-up the probabilities of solar minimum initiated cooling verses the CO2 mediated warming. 60:40? 50:50? 40:60? Any which way, why are we having to spend $trillions on only one probable outcome that can not be shown to be conclusively to be the more likely?
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Ed Bo
| #
Squidly:
Temperature is a measure of the MEAN energy of the molecules of a substance. There is ALWAYS a distribution of energy levels in the individual molecules of any substance, even at thermal equilibrium. In gases, this distribution is called the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution, and it’s quite wide.
So a cooler object will have some molecules with higher energy levels than a warmer object. The closer the two objects are in temperature, the greater this fraction will be, but it will never get to 50% for the cooler object.
Clausius realized this statistical nature of heat transfer over 150 years ago. He called this the “ascending transmission of heat” (ascending in the temperature sense), which is “compensated” by a greater “descending transmission of heat”.
So in the K&T diagram, the 333 W/m2 downwelling IR is real, but is less than the 396 upwelling IR from the warmer surface. But if you bother to go through the energy balance, the surface is warmer with the DWLWIR than it would be without. (This requires the sun’s input.)
So to use your coffee mug example: You have a mug maintained by a constant-power hot plate at 130F in a 50F ambient. Now you increase the ambient to 80F. The coffee will end up at a higher temperature.
Have you ever taken a statistical mechanics course?
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Jim McGinn
| #
Bo
Temperature is a measure of the MEAN energy of the molecules of a substance.
Jim
Bo, temp is rate of energy flow. We can infer energy from temp but you cant measure energy directly.
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Ed Bo
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Wow! Yet another PSI denizen with his own personal physics and terminology, unknown to the wider world.
Temperature is independent of energy flow. A thermodynamically isolated object (zero energy flow) in equilibrium has a temperature.
This is one of the first things you learn in an introductory thermo class. Did you sleep through it?
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Jim mcginn
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Dogmatic.
When temperature of a thing is measured the change in temperature has to do with energy flowing into or out of the entity. You arent measuring enrrgy. For example, a body of air that is dry and a body of air that is moist may have same temp. But the body of moist air will have more energy because the liquid water therein has a higher heat capacity.
By the way, all of the moist air on this planet contains liquid h2o. Not gaseous. Dont fall for that retsrded myth. (Also, your imagination isnt evidence. )
Ed Bo
| #
Jim:
Your schtick — that you are the only person who understands that certain scientific tenets that have proven incredibly successful for over a century in all sorts of fields are completely wrong — is getting very tedious.
James McGinn
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LOL. “Proven incredibly successful?” How is this possible? Show us the reproducible experimental evidence? You can’t because its never been tested. It’s just believed by the masses. Try to distinguish yourself from the rest of the sheep.
Ed Bo
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You’re the one confusing temperature and energy. A chamber with higher temperature but lower moist enthalpy sharing a wall with another chamber of lower temperature but higher moist enthalpy will transfer energy to that chamber. Did you ever actually take a thermo course?
James McGinn
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Ed Bo:
You’re the one confusing temperature and energy
JMcG:
You are the one that resorted to consensus-based stupidity in your response. Your example is irrelevant to my assertion.
Consensus is for fools: And the world is full of fools.
goo.gl/8Lr7ax
James McGinn / Solving Tornadoes
tom0mason
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“Clausius realized this statistical nature of heat transfer over 150 years ago. He called this the “ascending transmission of heat” (ascending in the temperature sense), which is “compensated” by a greater “descending transmission of heat”.”
And I doubt that Clausius would apply to a process that has yet (hopefully not in my lifetime) to complete, and by it’s very nature is not a smooth action but very chaotic one, The K&T static diagram is a gross simplification to absurdity, contriving as it does to say that these energy flows are what there are when in actuality they are not.
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tom0mason
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And of course in K&T energy diagram there is no latent heat for water is there?
Now we would like K&T imaginations to get clouded with real observed physics would we now?
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Ed Bo
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Ummm, the K&T diagram shows 80W/m2 marked “latent” right in the middle of the diagram…
Bob Armstrong
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I hate those one sided heat budget cartoons .
At the crudest level the disk approximation by dividing by the 4 to 1 ratio of the surface area of a sphere to that of a disk is appropriate . But that’s as far as it’s useful . I prefer a picture like http://cosy.com/Science/1DeqDiagram.jpg which at least tries to show the source and sink sides separately . The one equation ( computation ) beyond the common scalar Stefan-Boltzmann I offer is the calculation in terms of object absorptivityemissivity spectrum and source and sink power spectra . But that unfolding of the spectral dimension seems beyond the understanding of many .
It’s still a disk world . But it’s actually quite easy , in an APL , to express the computation for multiple sources and sinks . I actually “solved” that before tackling spectra : http://cosy.com/Science/TemperatureOfGrayBalls.htm .
But in terms of modeling a radiantly heated sphere , the 3rd dimension really unfolds when you apply the Lambertian cosine function to pixels over the surface . With that parameter you finally have a true geometric model .
And with that parameter , you can apply the SB 4th power emendation to the temperature and its emission . People are referring to this by reference to Hölder’s inequality , but I think that is both overkill and imprecise because the actual function , ie: the SB 4th power is known .
I’ve seen some good work starting to be done modeling the Moon . My main interest is providing the computational language to support such efforts . But , I invite anybody interested in implementing such things and the bleeding edge of computer language to browse my CoSy website and see if it might be useful to them .
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Ed Bo
| #
Bob:
You say: “that unfolding of the spectral dimension seems beyond the understanding of many.”
Huh? The whole point of the “radiative greenhouse effect” (just a metaphorical term) is the difference across the “spectral dimension” of the resistance to transmission of radiative power. The atmosphere provides far more “resistance” to the longwave infrared portion of the spectrum than it does to the shortware solar portion of the spectrum.
If you prefer the presentation of your “1DeqDiagram”, fine. In many heat transfer textbooks, the “network analysis” approach is used by analogy to electrical circuits with resistors in between.
In your diagram, you have three important temperature levels (analogous to voltages), the sun’s surface (fixed at about 5770K), the earth’s surface (TBD), and that of deep space (fixed at about 3K). You can draw resistors in the network analysis between these “voltages”.
The earth’s surface temperature can be seen as the result of a voltage divider between the sun’s 5770K and deep space’s 3K. If you increase the resistance between the earth’s surface and deep space, (which “greenhouse gases” do), the temperature of the earth’s surface will be higher.
In your postings, you think you are covering new territory. You are not. You are simply stumbling your way to basic understanding (which is fine) of concepts that are well understood in both science and engineering.
You really need to study a few textbooks to get you started. I suggest Grant Petty’s “A First Course in Atmospheric Radiation” to get you started.
Also, standard engineering heat transfer texts could be helpful. MIT professor John Lienhard’s “A Heat Transfer Textbook” is available free on-line. If you read it, you will discover that you have no new insights about Lambertian distribution.
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John Harrison
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Herb. My level 6 students know that it gets colder as you go higher which is why you can get snow at the top of mountains when it is warm and sunny below. My sixth form students can explain why, all about adiabatic expansion. You seem to have lost your way somewhere and are confusing matters with the exosphere,the only layer where temperatures can exceed 0C but the gases are so rarified that the heat contained in that layer is negligible and the pressure is close to zero. A link for your homework reading could be https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth#Temperature_and_speed_of_sound
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Herb Rose
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Hi John,
I know the temperature drops with altitude but temperature is not the same as kinetic energy. If our atmosphere was a layer of water 33 ft deep the atmospheric pressure would decrease with altitude but not the density. It is not the weight of the molecules that is holding the atmosphere down is gravity and this is the pressure referenced in the universal gas law. The pressure of gravity is not significantly different in the atmosphere (the molecules have the same weight) so the pressure doesn’t change with altitude and the expansion is not a result of lower pressure. The density of the air changes because of the greater kinetic energy (heat) of the molecules.
If clouds were composed of super cool water, as you proposed, any disturbance would cause the water to convert to a solid ice.
Have a good day,
Herb
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Bob Armstrong
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As the atmosphere peters out the total energy comes to the radiant energy density which by Stefan-Boltzmann is about 278.6 +- 2.3 around our orbit .
The “blackness” in the IR must be what pulls the temperature in a good bit of the atmosphere below that number . And the
cos ^ 4non-linearity .Reply
Bob Armstrong
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Herb ,
Please show us the calculation of that 250K for our orbit .
I get 278.6 which is fairly close to the ~ 5c payload spec I’ve seen for unheated satellites .
Also , if “outer space” in our orbit was that cold , the Apollo 13 crew wouldn’t have just been chilly , they would have been frozen stiff .
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Herb Rose
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Hi Bob,
Where did you get that 250K figure? I was using Fahrenheit because that is how temperature is measured here in America. The sun side of the moon has a temperature of 250 F while the shade side has a temperature of -250 F. Most satellites need to be insulated to protect against these temperature swings and the problem isn’t heating them but cooling them to get rid of the internal heat being generated. The Apollo 13 crew moved into the lunar module after the explosion in their power generation system in order to conserve power.
Have a good day,
Herb
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Bob Armstrong
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Farenheit !
You’ve got to be kidding .
Others here are pointing out your problems of understanding , so I’ll get back to useful tasks .
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John Harrison
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Hi Herb. Your thoughts are so mixed up I cannot really make sense of them. You must be aware that the Kelvin temperature of a gas is directly equal to the average kinetic energy of the molecules. That density is the mass per unit of volume so as the air becomes rarified at increased altitude and contains fewer molecules per unit of volume then its density decreases. With fewer molecules per unit volume their collision rates decrease therefore the pressure decreases and is accentuated by the lower temperatures (lower KE) . The weight of a gas molecule decreases with altitude as the gravitational field strength decreases; however the mass remains constant. Gravity cannot exert pressure and will only impart weight to a mass. You come across as being very confused and certainly very confusing.
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Bob Armstrong
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Ed Bo ,
I’ve always been positive I’m not saying anything that wasn’t understood before I was born ( 27028 days ago next Thursday ) . But I have never seen the calculation of equilibrium temperature for arbitrary source , sink , and object spectra presented anywhere . All I ever see is the endless parroting of the uselessly crude 255K meme . I have never seen a calculation of our radiative equilibrium based on even the commonly presented Top of Atmosphere emission spectra , nor a discussion of how good a proxy that is for the absorptivityemissivity spectrum one really wants . Even your comment is totally qualitative . Can you point me to a presentation in traditional textbook notation , ie: integrals over the relevant spectra ?
I like the voltage and resistor analogy — somewhat . So you have
v0 — r — s — r — v1
Could you flesh out the parameters that make the voltage at s greater than , let’s see , what would it be ,
( v1 - v0 ) % 2 * r? I’m just throwing that out without much thought because I’ve got other things to do . What’s the equation which shows the trapping of , I guess in this analogy , voltage ?I actually am not interested in atmospheres , per se . Let me just see a good presentation of the quantitative calculation of heat distributions in mixed semitransparent and opaque solid media , eg: a cat’s eye marble , first .
I have an edition of Incropera et al , but that does not get into spectrum . Petty rings a bell , but not a good tone . I’m not going to bother searching now .
I just downloaded Lienhard’s book and it does look like his equation (10.9) is essentially equivalent to mine so the equilibrium could be put in a similar form .
The issue with the spectral GHG paradigm is , of course , how the interior between two “plates” can have a higher energy density than that passing thru them .
To me , not only does that notion violate the Divergence Theorem , but leaving gravity out of the energy balance equations is an unconscionable violation of conservation of energy . And it quantitatively explains planetary atmospheric temperature profiles once you get down to a significant density .
It’s a much higher priority for me to flesh out http://CoSy.com , the language , for everyday use , eg: accounting , than this cosmic stuff . But if you can state in a couple of testable quantitative equations in the notation of your choice how a spectral phenomenon “traps” a higher thermal energy density in the interior of an object than that computed for its effective radiant surface , I will immediately implement them and play in the parameter space until I understand the domain over which the trapping occurs .
Then see what would be required to construct a perpetual heat engine such a phenomenon points the way to .
So we’ve gone thru the word waving prelims . Let us see the essential enabling equations .
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Ed Bo
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Bob:
About to leave for a long weekend, so this must be brief.
The first integral you must understand is that of emissivity over wavelength. This is given on p529 of the Lienhard text.
You’ll probably have to go to a book like Petty’s to understand the attenuation of radiation by wavelength in the atmosphere. Focus on the Schwarzchild equation. Decent calculations are very tedious.
Also familiarize yourself with the MODTRAN and HITRAN databases that can be used for piecewise integration (at moderate and high resolution, respectively) of the atmosphere’s absorption and emission.
Gotta run. Good luck!
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James G Kennedy Jr
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As I, a layman, wade through all the “scientific” opinion of those sharing their opinion here, I marvel that nothing from those supporting or denying a flat earth found is anywhere to be found. Predictably, it all drains down to the one supports human caused global warming and another doesn’t. Nearly 40 years after all the CO2 hubub resumed and since then, nothing the zealous human caused global warming (HCGW) advocates has become empirical fact. Nada. Zilch. Anywhere.
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Herb Rose
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I have a long glass cylinder sealed at the bottom. I put a disc into the top of the cylinder that seals the air in the cylinder but is free to move up and dow. I put a weight on the disc compressing the air in the cylinder. If I heat the air in the cylinder below the disc the air expands and the disc and weight will move up. I then put several discs into the cylinder creating sections with the weight on the top disc. If I heat a section in the cylinder the air will again expand in that section and the weight at the top, along with all the sections above the heated section, will move up. The volume of the section heated increases but the volume of all the other sections, above and below, remain the same. I leave my experiment to cool over night and when I return the next day I see that the weight at the top is higher. Both my 4 ft assistant and 7 foot assistant deny playing with the heater. By examining the different sections of the cylinder I can determine where the heat was applied by the volume or density of the air in the sections.
The atmosphere is the same as my cylinder where gravity is the force compressing the air and the density of the air at different altitudes will indicate the heat of that section. The higher the altitude the less dense the air, the greater the heat of the air molecules.
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