So far, I have not seen any significant rebuttals to my paper which proved that there is no atmospheric greenhouse effect.  In that paper I developed the differential equation of heat flow for an arbitrary surface, based on textbook mathematics on the subject, and used data from my associate Carl Brehmer.

With that data and with the heat-flow equation, I was able to do two things: 1) predict the day-time surface high if NO greenhouse effect were present; 2) predict the night-time cooling if NO delay in cooling was present.  Both of these points were relevant to assess because they represent the two main versions of the greenhouse effect.

It is interesting to note that the atmospheric greenhouse effect doesn’t actually have a consistent description.  These two main descriptions don’t function by the same physics, and they are actually inherently mutually contradictory.  In the first case, a cold object can heat up a warmer object, because adherents try to pretend that radiation doesn’t obey the Laws of Thermodynamics & hence Physics.  In the second case, backradiation doesn’t violate physics, and so doesn’t actually cause any heating, but its presence delays the rate at which an object can cool.  This latter version (“Version 2”) is actually compatible with the laws of physics, because an ambient radiation field will certainly set the baseline equilibrium temperature for a location.  However an external ambient radiation field is not what exists in the atmosphere.  The energy which is present in the atmosphere is simply a result of the energy which has been gained from the Sun in the first place, and it radiates freely to outer space.  However, the way that GHE adherents use the idea, is to say that an object’s internal thermal energy preferentially delays its own-self from leaving.  That is not what happens under any laws of physics or thermodynamics.  Internal energy is simply internal energy, being held by the material which holds a temperature.  For any object, internal thermal energy can be freely shared in any which way, as long as it doesn’t violate the laws of thermodynamics; but this energy does not and can not prevent itself from leaving or cooling.

What the atmosphere does do is present a much larger thermal mass as part of the thermodynamic surface ensemble, has a natural lapse rate which forces it to be warmer at the bottom than at the top (with the average in the middle), and it has a much lower emissivity which means it loses heat very inefficiently.  Low emissivity also allows it to hold a higher temperature than it could otherwise, for a given output rate of radiative energy.

The atmosphere also contains water vapor, and as we learned in my previous post, water vapor is truly the only thing which can delay cooling, because there is an actual mechanism for original energy and heat input into a system when water vapor (and liquid) sheds energy within its latent range.  This is an actual, known thing, and it is known that carbon dioxide can not do this because it has no latent energy release at terrestrial conditions.  We have also seen the Zero-Energy-Balance plot which shows that heat is going missing around the equator, and showing up at the poles, and we know that the latent heat of water is the only place a significant amount of energy can actually disappear (and reappear) like that.  Carbon dioxide simply can not explain these facts, and there is no reason to try to force it to, like the greenhouse effect “faithers” do, when there is already an existing explanation.

The results of my paper were that 1) there was no GHE heating up the surface from back-radiation to a higher temperature, thus proving that version of the GHE wrong; 2) there was no delay in cooling at the surface, but instead cooling was enhanced there, thus proving this version wrong.  This “Version 2” is a very interesting point, because it is consistently the fall-back position that GHE adherents use when they are proven wrong when arguing for “Version 1”.  This is always how it goes…they start with Version 1 and then fall back to Version 2 when they are proven wrong on Version 1.  But here is the telling point: they never, and have never, actually stated any numerical values for how much cooling they expect with and without the delayed-cooling GHE overnight.  They merely “say” that the GHE and backradiation causes delayed cooling at night, but they have never actually shown any numbers from physics or math or anywhere to justify the statement!  Isn’t that amazing?

What I did in my paper was to actually predict the value, using standard thermodynamics, of how much cooling should actually occur for a column of air overnight.  This is not something GHE faithers of Version 2 ever do.  And why don’t they?  Because the actual measured cooling overnight was ten-times the predicted value if no delayed cooling was occurring!   If delayed cooling from Version 2 of the GHE was occurring, then there should have been less cooling than the predicted value without the delay, rather than ten-times more.  And it is very easy to understand why cooling is enhanced at the surface: energy is most efficiently lost near the surface because the surface itself has high emissivity (ability to radiatively shed heat), and because the emissivity of the atmosphere itself is highest near the surface.  Thus, cooling is most efficient near the surface, as is already well known.

So with that out of the way, let me present you some Grade A Sophistry that has been sent my way by some fellow who apparently spent a few weeks writing a “rebuttal” to my paper.  There were two good examples actually, the first one being when this fellow tried to argue that the entire point of the first section of my paper, where I pointed out that the average terrestrial albedo is not actually found at the ground surface and so therefore it was never correct to assume that the surface of radiative balance should be found at the ground surface in the first place, is incorrect.  Well, that realization is correct by the simple expedient of it being true, but what this fellow said as a rebuttal to that was “the reflectivity of the surface would increase with no clouds in the way“.

I’m not sure if this person actually knew what they were saying, but there is no logical way to actually justify the statement if you try to give it the benefit of the doubt.  Reflectivity is albedo, i.e. the fraction of light reflected by a surface.  The fraction of light reflected by a surface doesn’t change if more light, or less light, of a particular spectrum falls on the surface!  I had referenced a value of 4%, from the literature, for the average albedo of the surface of the Earth.  So, this fellow was trying to say that 4% would increase to some other value if no clouds were in the way.  But this 4% is the value measured when no clouds are in the way!  Yes, a higher absolute quantity of light would be reflected when more light gets to the surface, but the percentage of light reflected relative to the whole would still be exactly the same.

Do you see how clever that sophistry is?  That’s the thing about the sophists, is they are actually extremely clever.  They lack true creativity, in the sense of evolutionary, scientific, philosophical, and mental development, but they exhibit some shadow of cleverness in their ability to destroy logic and “create” nonsensical statements.  It is as though their function is to exploit Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem, to create ambiguity and sophistry.  (An example of a statement exhibiting the Incompleteness Theorem is: “this sentence is a lie”; believers in the greenhouse effect have created an entire hyper-real pseudoscience with similar statements.  In my “religion series”, we will eventually discover why this is occurring in society, and what purpose it is serving.  It is highly doubtful that the people engaging in this comprehend what they’re part of, and what they’re working for.)

Following on that, the best example of sophistry from the supposed rebuttal, the central point, was when the person claimed that the reason why the heating from the greenhouse effect was not observed in the data is because the atmosphere is so strong at cooling!!

That is a quintessentially perfect representation of the Incompleteness Theorem, and of sophistry.  Remember, the entire premise of the atmospheric greenhouse effect is that the atmosphere causes heating!  They are saying, that the heating from an object is impossible to observe, because the object causes so much cooling!  Whaaaaaaaaaat?

Where is the heating if the cooling is just as strong?  If the heating is impossible to observe, doesn’t this mean that it is therefore ZERO, since it has no measurable consequence?  And if heating is impossible to observe because it is cancelled perfectly by the cooling, then what does the heating in the first place?  By the very nature of it being a statement from the Incompleteness Theorem, there is actually no possible way to make logical, rational sense of the statement.  It is simply meaningless.  And that is precisely what the point and goal of sophistry is: to obfuscate, to confuse.  The only valid way out of the statement is to realize that the heating is coming from the Sun in the first place, not from the object heating itself up.  In this solution is a return to the Laws of Thermodynamics.  People like Alan Siddons have long exposed the fraudulent logic of the greenhouse effect, and we see it still trucking along.  This is serving a purpose, a very important one, and the future of the structure of our society depends on the outcome.

Did I ever mention to you all that one time, recently actually, a sophist tried to argue to me that the greenhouse effect is real because “boat propellers can make bubbles underwater when they spin really fast”?  Yes, to the sophist mind, bubbles underwater is evidence for the heating power of the greenhouse effect.  They must have realized it when in the tub…lol.