Roy Spencer tells Slayers: “Put Up or Shut Up”
Presents his “time dependent model” as a challenge
(this article can be downloaded as a pdf. original article here)
Dr. Roy Spencer has challenged the Slayers to either “put up or shut up” [i] and presents what he says is a “time-dependent” Earth model to describe “reasonable surface temperatures”, and asks us to produce the same. Anthony Watts added his reply: “Like me, you’ve reached a GHG [greenhouse gas] tipping point with these folks. Good for you for taking a stand. I await them addressing your model challenge.” Watts has subsequently responded on his own blog: “…if and when they are able to provide a simple working model of the atmospheric energy balance that matches their theory with observations, I’ll be happy to take another look at the idea here”.
Spencer provides an xls spreadsheet showing the “code”, and he references the model as being “time-dependent” several times in his text. He also says that it produces “realistic temperatures”, and this is apparently supposed to be taken as some sort of support for the model.
A few things here. First, “reasonable temperatures” can be created by any arbitrary model at all. So, that his “time dependent model” produced such temperatures means nothing at all. The Ptolemaic model of the solar system, for example, produced “reasonable planetary positions” for over a thousand years, yet it was so fundamentally flawed that correcting it brought about a scientific revolution. The unquestioning belief in Ptolemy’s model is analogous to a current belief in the “greenhouse gas effect”, as Joe Postma has observed [ii].
Second, and this is the really important part, we have to ask if Spencer’s own model is even “time-dependent”, as he claims it is. His model’s solar input is a constant 161 Watts for each square meter of the Earth, which is a value equal to 230 Kelvin (or -420 Celsius). Hence, that model is not a “time-dependent” model. For him to call what he has there a “time-dependent model” is scientifically and mathematically incorrect. It is not a time-dependent model because the sun is static at a constant 161 W/m2, and this indicates static, flat, non-rotating Earth, with no day and night, and hence no time dependence at all. That the “model” Spencer produced can be run from a starting temperature to a final temperature in time does not mean that the model is “time-dependent”. The real sun rises and sets over a rotating spherical Earth, meaning that Spencer’s model actually abandons any attempt to make surface temperatures “time-dependent”. Such a description can only be called misleading at best, for the term “time dependence” in differential equations and heat flow calculations denotes something else entirely than what Spencer offered. Spencer’s model is static and he seems to not understand this; he challenged us to produce a time-dependent model and presented us with his own, however, his isn’t even what he claims it is.
So then, with sunshine freezing cold and constant, meaning the model is static and not time-dependent, they insert the required greenhouse effect (GHG) pumping up factor wattage from an even colder atmosphere in order to force it to produce a “reasonable temperature”, with values “…based upon the Kiehl-Trenberth diagram” (quoting Spencer) which is designed to do precisely that – to force a flat-Earth model to work when the initial assumption of freezing cold and static sunshine is wrong. Thus, cold has to heat hot and the atmosphere needs to be an additional source of heat, even though it is not even a source of energy, because that’s what they need to make their static model with static freezing cold sunshine “work”. This is pretty much how you define circular and tautologous reasoning. It is just like Ptolemy arbitrarily adding epicycles to make his model work.
What is equally noteworthy at the moment is not just that Spencer’s model is actually static, but that Spencer’s challenge per se could only be predicated upon utter ignorance about PSI’s and the Slayer’s work. Not only has PSI member Postma created an actual real-time model [iii], meaning that it genuinely uses a time-dependent Sun, his model also included the effects of the latent heat of liquid H2O which showed that such heat helps to hold the surface temperature higher than otherwise all by itself. The modeling also used a temperature-dependent function for the thermal capacity of water. Astonishingly, none of this is even mentioned by Spencer or in his model, which means he didn’t even think it relevant to include in the model the vast majority of what the surface of the Earth actually is. PSI and the Slayers do think it important.
To be sure, Postma’s model uses the exact same heat flow equation as Spencer used in his model, but the difference is that Spencer’s model is actually a static non-time-dependent model that assumes a flat Earth and cold sunshine, while Postma’s model actually rotates the spherical Earth and accounts for real-time solar heating and latent heat as an actual time-dependent differential equation. Spencer’s model requires the GHE to produce a reasonable temperature, while Postma’s does not. The difference arises in using fictional vs. actual boundary conditions and inputs: one model is based on fiction which therefore creates fiction, while the other model is based on reality in real time and therefore reproduces reality. So, PSI has already presented much more than what Spencer challenged us with, and it turns out that Spencer doesn’t even have what he seems to think and claims that he has in the first place.
Postma’s model produces “reasonable temperatures” without including any “greenhouse gas effect” at all. Indeed, his model was tested against real-time observational temperature data collected by PSI member Carl Brehmer, and Postma’s dynamic model predicted the results with great accuracy, finding no need to introduce a single epicycle of back-radiation warming from “greenhouse gases”. The results proved that backradiation heating from the atmosphere did not, was not, and does not occur on top of the solar forcing, even though backradiation is maximized during the day time as we see here:
Figure 1: 440 W/m2 of backradiation did nothing to augment the surface temperature above the solar forcing. The Slayers have always said that cold doesn’t heat hot. (Image source: http://www.arm.gov/news/facility/post/51; Blue is DWIR, black is DWSW.)
Postma’s model equations also showed that, overnight, the majority of atmospheric cooling occurs directly at the surface and that the amount of cooling overnight was at least ten-times the value expected without a theoretical backradiation delay in cooling. Cooling at the surface is actually enhanced overnight rather than impeded, and there is no sign of delayed overnight cooling occurring at all. This is a matter of observational fact and can be explained by the enhanced cooling caused by convection and conduction at the surface with a cooler atmosphere. The paper proved beyond any doubt that Sunshine is hot and cannot be averaged down to an artificial freezing-cold value as it in the creation of the GHE, as Spencer does in his model.
In that paper Postma also showed precisely how to calculate the wet atmospheric temperature lapse rate from first principles, given by adding water vapour condensation to the dry lapse rate. The real-time model also explains precisely why and how the temperature lag to insolation forcing occurs on both the diurnal and seasonal time-scales, and Postma also explained how to extend the model to be more general and discussed some of the other boundary conditions the more general model would have to satisfy.
Spencer and WUWT have seemed to continually short-change their readers in this debate. Spencer’s challenge itself creates a sham in claiming that we have never presented any alternative model. But we have had it already in Postma’s previous paper [iv] from 2011. Postma’s follow-up paper in 2012 details precisely what has now been demanded of us. It is there, in the links, on our website under ‘Publications’ and has been there now for almost two years.
Postma’s model is not only referenced in many of our articles but also in blog comments elsewhere (including at WUWT and Spencer’s blog). Time and again, we have invited our opponents to familiarize themselves with that model and engage with us in friendly discussion about it, comprehending the implications that the usual static models (like Spencer’s) are wrong. Thus, Spencer’s latest challenge to “put up or shut up” over this issue points to his intellectual laziness or something less forgivable.
Postma says: “I have always wondered if this was some genius conspiracy or plot behind man-made climate alarmism to block people like the Slayers from asking a simple question like ‘Hey, you know, instead of modelling Sunshine as freezing cold and constant, neither of which it is, then, what difference will it make if we acknowledge that Sunshine is actually really hot and that the Earth can’t actually really be modeled as flat and with no day and night?’. It turns out it isn’t a genius conspiracy or plot to gate-keep such simple questions from being asked; the gatekeepers really are just scientifically illiterate. Can you believe that in the climate change orthodoxy, you’re not allowed to talk about how hot sunshine is, and what it can do, because it conflicts with the incorrect tenets of the GHE?”
Postma’s paper has pages and pages of discussing an actual real-time, time & temperature dependent, differential heat flow equation and it included pages of Matlab code and all the required algorithms, showed how to calculate the solar forcing in real-time (actual real-time, not static non-real-time constant cold input with no day and night and a flat Earth), successfully compared the results to actual real-world data, discussed how to improve it, etc. etc.
Spencer accuses the Slayers of “cult science”. That’s a nice accusation, but please point it out. PSI can point out yours: a) you literally think it is reasonable that sunshine is freezing cold, b) you literally think it is reasonable that there is no day and night, c) you literally think it is reasonable that the Earth is flat, d) you literally do not know what “time dependent” means in regards to a differential equation, e) you literally think it is reasonable to say that because “greenhouse gases cool the atmosphere/the atmosphere would have no way to cool without greenhouse gases” (direct quotes from Spencer) that this means that GHG’s heat the atmosphere…because they cool it, f) you literally deny or are at least incapable of acknowledging that the near-zero emissivity of O2 and N2 means that 99% of the atmosphere can hold a higher temperature for a given radiative output than it would otherwise, when this is the very basis of radiative thermal physics and doesn’t require a GHE or GHG’s at all.
Need we go on? Those beliefs don’t relate to “cult science”, but a full-blown fanatical and insane religion. We Slayers, in reality-land, have simple questions pointing out basic facts which makes GHE believers go blind with rage. Just look at an example of what GHE orthodoxy wants us to believe:
Figure 2: Do two light-bulbs near each other make each other shine brighter? (Image courtesy of Alan Siddons.)
In the GHE orthodoxy of backradiation heating, when you put two light bulbs near each other then it means that the photons from one “have to be slowing the cooling of the other light source, meaning that it has to heat up the other light source and make it brighter”. Of course, the same thing would happen both ways and so the idea should strike one immediately as being unphysical and unlikely, because it sets up a run-away mutual heating process. Of course, any person who has artificial lighting in this world knows that what is claimed doesn’t happen. It doesn’t happen for candles beside each other, light bulbs beside each other, etc.
In fact, the GHE orthodoxy even requires that a heating scheme such as this will occur from a single light bulb’s own light shone back upon itself. This scheme is in fact directly analogous to GHE orthodoxy because that idea is based on backradiation from the atmosphere, the atmosphere which was heated by the earth’s surface in the first place, causing the surface to heat up some more even though the atmosphere is far colder than the surface and cannot rightly be considered a heat source for the surface in the first place, because it is the surface which is the heat source for the atmosphere. Does shining a flashlight at a mirror so that all the radiation comes back to the flashlight make the flashlight shine brighter? We all know it doesn’t.
Figure 3: A light bulb facing a mirror does not heat up or shine brighter from its own radiation coming back. (Image courtesy of Alan Siddons.)
Let’s also go back to the claim that, because GHG’s cool the atmosphere, this means that they heat the atmosphere. This is literally what Spencer says. Belief in the “greenhouse gas effect” says that without GHG’s, the atmosphere wouldn’t be able to cool, and because of this fact, GHG’s heat the atmosphere. Yes you are correct, that makes no sense at all. In reality, the Stefan-Boltzmann Law shows that the only way for a thermal radiative object to have a higher kinetic temperature than what its radiative output flux is, is if it has an emissivity lower than unity. Well, 99% of our atmosphere, which is oxygen and nitrogen (O2 and N2), have emissivities near zero! It is O2 and N2 which literally “trap heat”, because they are unable to radiate any heat away at all, and radiative flux energy loss is the only way the planet has to cool down. Alan Siddons discussed this years ago [v] when he pointed out the fundamental flaws of GHE orthodoxy.
There are three things the GHE orthodoxy will not touch with a ten foot pole. 1) that sunshine is hot and has to be treated in real-time, not averaged out to some non-physical and therefore meaningless value, and that it is impossible to meaningfully average solar power input; 2) that O2 and N2 have near-zero emissivity and that in the land of the Stefan-Boltzmann Law and radiation, the only way to get something to a higher temperature with the same flux output is to reduce its emissivity, 3) that the lapse rates (both dry and wet) can be calculated without reference to any GHG radiation whatsoever and that according to GHE theory, the lapse rate should be steepened by GHG radiation, yet the rate is still exactly as it is calculated without reference to GHG radiation, and when the “GHG” water vapour is present it lessens the slope of the lapse rate and decreases the surface temperature, not increases those as is required by the GHE.
The usual responses are: 1) to accuse us of not knowing what an average is, and insult our intelligence with snide remarks in a few ways, which just begs the question if they have any clue as to what power input means and that more power does more power than less power; real sunshine can drive extremely energetic processes (take the water cycle for instance, etc.) and generate very high real-time temperatures that 240 W/m2 (let alone 161 W/m2 !!) could never emulate – not without inventing their GHE (hello!!) to make up for the difference; 2) they never address the emissivity question as far as we know because it automatically and immediately renders the GHE superfluous; 3) they’ve backed away from the lapse rate = GHG effect but still use it from time to time, but the point simply needs to made repeatedly as it was above, because the lapse rates, both wet and dry, can be calculated without any reference to GHG’s at all and GHG’s do not have the observed effect which is claimed.
Postma did ‘put up’, last year already, exactly what Spencer requested. And more, Spencer walks into his own trap by presenting his own model which is not even a time-dependent model as he claimed and seems to think it is. All the Slayers have always ‘put up’ the simple questions about the actual nature of reality that has always made GHE believers get very upset. We didn’t actually ever need to have an alternative model anyway, we just needed to point out what was really unscientific and wrong about the GHE one. They never learned from the criticisms, and in general they couldn’t handle them at all. They ignored what we did try to put up and usually won’t even allow it to be discussed on their blogs. Why aren’t people allowed to ask that, if sunshine is actually really hot, then how can treating it as cold correspond to anything in reality? It is such a simple thing: real-time sunshine can drive processes that are much higher temperature and much more energetic that the averaged-out, cold-sunshine, no day & night assumption could never do. In short, clouds exist, and therefore any model that averages out sunshine down to a freezing cold value is wrong, and has to be wrong. Hence, the greenhouse gas effect is wrong. And that is why the greenhouse gas effect is invented with these flat-Earth cold-sunshine models: because they have nothing to do with reality.
[So, Spencer, where is YOUR time-dependent model? Perhaps Anthony Watts can wait for you to produce it.]
Climate of Sophistry 
Pingback: Slayers “Putting Up” not “Shutting Up” | Skeptics Chillin'
Only a model like mine can actually create clouds. Spencer’s model and all models which depict a greenhouse effect can not create clouds. All you have to do is ask, when you see one of their models, “where do clouds come from, how are they created in your model?”. They can’t answer that. Only a model like mine with a true time-dependence can. The GHE models are wrong by their definition.
Just in case certain terms would be filtered over there, shared this with Roy: http://tinyurl.com/clyhton
To my above statement I would add “a model like mine or Max’s” (!) 🙂
Eh, mine is just an extrapolation of the same ideas behind yours, it was one of those *smacks forehead* “that’s so obvious” type moments after seeing how you set it up.
I posed a brain twister over at Roy’s thread: why is Lake Vanda in Antarctica around 298 K at the bottom when there is no geothermal heating taking place?
The answer:
1. The ice is meters thick but incredibly clear due to sublimation on top and long crystal growth periods underneath.
2. The water is incredibly clear.
3. The lake is stratified into chemically distinct layers, with no convective mixing below about 15 meters (as I recall) due to the positive density gradient as you descend towards the bottom.
4. Sunlight passes straight through the ice layer into the depths, but the warmed water is unable to transfer heat upwards by convection, leaving conduction as the only method available.
5. Water has low thermal conductivity, thus this is a water analogue of a glass greenhouse, both of which are real things which really lead to temperature increases by preventing… yep, convection.
Yah there was someone who was highly experienced in diving and he once asked me why the water temperature was so much warmer when he got down near the rocks than higher up… The answer is of course that the sunlight is heating the dark rocks and then this heat is conducting into the adjacent water…heating is from the bottom up.
Vanda is even weirder than that, as the lake actually heats the rocks, drilling tests were done to check for geothermal heating and only found a decreasing temperature gradient from the lakebed downwards.
This is actually all that needs to be understood:
ABSORBED HEAT ESCAPING A SURFACE BY WAY OF MOLECULES CAN BE RESTRICTED. This is what our atmosphere is doing.
ABSORBED HEAT ESCAPING A SURFACE BY WAY OF PHOTONS CAN NOT BE RESTRICTED. This is what our atmosphere is not doing.
Hmm, or maybe rather, ‘The escape of absorbed heat from a surface by way of molecules CAN be restricted. The escape of absorbed heat from a surface by way of photons can NOT’ …?
From: LEONARD WEINSTEIN
Subject: Re: Dr. Roy Spencer’s’ Put Up or Shut Up’ is Put Down
I hate to tell you, but your article about Roy Spencer is basically wrong. One easily shown example of your error is the argument about two facing light bulbs. They absolutely would shine brighter if the power input were held constant (input voltage is usually what is held constant, and bulb resistance changes with temperature, so power is the correct variable), however, the small size of the filaments and large distance apart compared to filament area would make the effect very small and hard to notice in that poorly posed example. The candle example is a joke as this is a mixed chemistry and energy problem with no control on many variables. A better example would be two electrically heated plates facing a short distance apart (at least 6″ X 6″ or larger). Holding input power constant, and measuring plate temperature. It is a clear fact that the plates would be hotter than if they were not facing each other. Try it, it is an easy case to do. You can use blackened plates to minimize reflection to better approximate black body radiation, and insulate backsides so most energy out goes from the facing surfaces. You should keep the plates far enough apart to allow free upward convection (6″ apart would do). You do need to be in a still air room, and the plates mounted vertical. If you can do it in a vacuum, it would be a better proof, without worrying about the convective cooling, but even with air, the increase would be significant. The plates should be heated enough so radiation is large (200 F with just 1 plate should be enough). If you need help with design, I would be glad to help. Since this concept is so basic to your position, you should jump at the chance to prove otherwise.
Sincerely yours,
Leonard Weinstein
As a start, the plates would need about 500 Watts for radiation to a room not including convective loss to reach about 200 F. The exact temperature is not critical, as long as you measure correctly, and do the case of facing and not facing.
Leonard, to call the example with candles “a joke” because it mixes chemistry with energy would have to mean that your heated plates example is also a joke because it mixes electricity and energy. Either accusation of a “joke” is a joke, so thanks for making a joke. I tend to just call it sophistry.
The objection here is also beside the entire point, because the brief two-light bulbs discussion isn’t even the point of the article and doesn’t even bear on the main important points of the article. Like most sophists, you choose to focus on the irrelevant and superfluous instead of admit the blatant point, that constant-heating models are frauds and can have nothing to do with reality, that my model is an actual real-time model which predicts the surface temperature without requiring a GHE, and Spencer is so stupid he doesn’t even know what a “real-time” differential equation is. So thank you for making this fine example of sophistry because we all (Slayers and other rationalists) learn from it.
Chemical energy does not obviate the rules of thermodynamics, any more than electrical energy obviates thermodynamics, for some arbitrary reason. The statement makes no sense either with chemical or electrical energy. They are both energy, and they both follow the same thermodynamics rules. You pointedly wished to deny the candle example because candles obviate your objection of the small angular diameter of electrical filaments…you wanted to be able to ignore candles and pretend that “chemical energy” isn’t relevant to your brand of thermodynamics…but then why would electrical energy be – they’re both energy, and hence the same and obey the same true thermodynamics. Candles have a large angular area and they don’t heat each other up. Anyone knows this from experience and it must be why you wished to avoid it. When you use one candle to light another, you stick the cold wick right in to the lighted wick. The lighted wick then starts burning at candle temperature while it is burning inside the flame of the other candle. The temperature and brightness holds at the temperature of the energy production rate from the combustion of each candle. You can stick two lighted wicks right in to each-others flame, combining their energy, yet they don’t shine brighter. Nor do they increase in temperature, even though they’re continuously pumping more and more energy at each other. This is directly analogous to the electrical filament example. I also made the point of shining a flashlight into a mirror which is known to not increase the flashlight brightness, etc.
If electrical heating plates could heat each other up to higher temperature with fixed input as you argue, then every single electrical oven and stovetop in the world would be constructed with two sandwiched heating elements each using only half (or less) the energy to produce even higher temperature, which would be an amazing feat of saving electricity and make the manufacturer of this stove trillionaires. We all know that there is actually nothing, no device anywhere in the world, ever invented, that utilizes the principle you argue for or that GHE believers argue for.
Spencer’s model is wrong, not even what he said it was(!), and all GHE models can’t even explain where clouds come from – they’re just assumed. The “joke” is the GHE, and I recommend you study my work and that of other Slayers such as Alan Siddons and the others, and come to understand that the GHE is a fraud. The fundamental reasons are directly and specifically pointed out in the article.
Pingback: Is there a Greenhouse Effect? « Another View on Climate
Spencer blocked me from posting more comments in that thread and I know he blocked others too … Hmmm.. That was a low-point in a debate that rather should had been focused on the the issues, not the censorship of “naughty” slayers! On the other side of the axis; Why does Spencer need help from sKs-mafia-members at all?
I had respect for Spencer due to good articles in the past, but now with the censorship in place, I say “Bye bye”.
I’m not sure if I am a fully fledged Slayer yet, but maybe an apprentice? Thanks to all of the good people at PSI and Joe Postma 🙂 You have taught me much.
You missed the subtle insertion of “if power is held constant”… rather tricky little statement there, isn’t it?
Constant power reminds me of the Operation Yashima project from Evangelion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khnkvKu4yzw
A huge system to drain the power output from all of Japan to let them fire a positron rifle powerful enough to pierce the defenses of Ramiel (the blue psychadelic cube of doom there in the video), with the accompanying shot of Japan blacking out as they divert power to the rifle.
Except replace the giant mecha and psychadelic angel-cube of doom with a lightbulb and a mirror.
…positron rifles are basically the same thing, right? 😀
hahaha…wow man that was a trip…nice 🙂
Obelix says (2013/05/13 at 5:51 PM): “…but now with the censorship in place, I say “Bye bye”.
===============================================
Right, make him happy.
Or read this: https://climateofsophistry.com/2013/03/08/the-fraud-of-the-aghe-part-11-quantum-mechanics-the-sheer-stupidity-of-ghe-science-on-wuwt/#comment-1945.
Watts blocked comment on his ”Slayer” report. He has yet to comment in me calling him a hypocrite for blocking the discussion he has asked alarmists to have.
Glad your Spencer reply has been quick to publication. Good work.
Joseph,
Your snide remarks do not become you. I made the comments in good faith. The case that is being examined is for constant power, so the experiment is not a valid one. In fact, the two light bulbs is a major part of your write up, and the easiest to disprove as I suggest. If that is what I say, your whole issue fails. The candles are different due to the fact that they work by evaporating the wax and it combining with air. The thermal power makes the emitting gases emit. putting two close would change the amount of wax evaporating, and change the POWER being generated.
Leonard
Leonard, you came in using adjectives of the paper as “a joke”. I now see you are accusing us of “not understanding optics”. These are snide, useless, and accusatory adjectives and comments to make. If you do not like such language, then please don’t use it.
Again, you focus on the light-bulbs, when it is beside the point of the paper in the first place. The light-bulbs do not change that Spencer doesn’t know what a time-dependent equation is, that my time-dependent equation can predict surface temperatures without requiring a GHE, that any model which averages sunshine has to be wrong by its very definition, that there is no observed delay in cooling occurring at any time, etc etc. Your light-bulbs and candles sophistry doesn’t change any of these facts, and to pretend somehow that they do, that these facts depend on your interpretation of what light-bulbs and candles do, is absurd. To reorient and hang the paper on those is a typical ploy of misdirection.
As for your argument: A candle burns at constant power. If you put two close beside each other, without the flames combining, then this doesn’t change the power each is intrinsically producing, yet almost half of the field of view of each candle is illuminated with the incoming energy from the other candle. Again, this does nothing to change either’s temperature or brightness. Even when you begin to fully combine the flames, the brightness doesn’t go up, down, sideways, or change at all. And as we all know, in the electrical analogue, there are no devices that we know of anywhere in the world that employ the argument you described. The onus is not on me or the Slayers to produce a perpetual motion or over-unity device to prove the GHE.
Also caught this at PSI, good stuff, well done. We need to get more of the pioneering ‘Postma model’ into the daily media. Recent (May 9) Opinion piece in Wall Street Journal titled “In Defense of Carbon Dioxide” by Happer of Princeton and Schmitt of U Wisconsin is good example of popularizing proper climate science. I recommend Joe Postma’s work to editors of daily media who are stuck on green dogma. Hope it helps!
Petrus, chemist
Cheers, Petrus 😉
Joseph,
The basic issue is not your equations at this point. If you can’t get the radiation issue correct, I have no reason to look farther. Candles close to each other will radiate some thermal energy to the wax of the other (which is absorbed), and this changes the amount of evaporation and thus output power. The candle example is a mix of many complex factors and is not a constant power case. That is why it is a bad example. I can get into more detail if you wish, but the issue still is about absorbing back radiation, and you have not suitably responded. Instead you pick around the edges. I tried to not be snide, but the comments I read on your comments about Roy’s position influenced me. I am sorry if I came across as snide, but continuing to make an issue of linear vs non-linear equations does not matter if you get the basic physics wrong on absorption.
Leonard
Leonard, obviously it does no good to argue about candles and light-bulbs as a proxy for the GHE. And I am not sure why you mention linear vs. non-linear equations when the issue was over time-dependent vs. non-time-dependent equations…time dependence or lack thereof does not equate to linearity or lack thereof, so changing the phraseology to an issue of “linearity” introduces confusion and its attendant obfuscation. Tactics like this are something I experience and have to deal with on a daily basis.
It looks to me that you are the one picking around the edges, because as I have repeatedly said, the fact is that the GHE does not exist, averaging of solar insolation always has to give a wrong answer and model, we were challenged with a false claim from Spencer in the first place, and Spencer lied or simply didn’t know about what he claimed to challenge us with, etc. And as I said, the candle example can easily be a constant-power example if you just hold them a cm or two apart, etc. You can also shine a light at a mirror to try to get the same effect. The issue here is that the GHE doesn’t exist, as has been proven and as is readily known by anyone who simply thinks about it.
This is how sophistry works; it picks around the edges at what are superfluous analogies that don’t change what the central facts and presentation actually were. What I am learning from your “criticism” is that it was unnecessary to have included any analogies in the response paper at all, because once you do something like that you open the door to reinterpretation and “picking around the edges” by those who wish to misdirect the core science. Your advice on this issue is taken and received. The analogy-by-lightbulb section is a minor and irrelevant part that doesn’t even need to be in the piece, I agree – why argue by proxy when the direct facts are already stated, a I have stated them.
Nonetheless, there is no device in the world that uses two sandwiched heating plates in order to produce higher temperature with half the power input. Such technology could be extended to sandwich another layer to produce even higher temperature with quarter the input, and on and on. And to be sure, even if such devices or similar did exist, it still wouldn’t bear on the atmosphere because the atmosphere is not an independent source of heat or energy, and the observations and physics do not conform to what is described in any case.
Joseph,
It is hard to communicate with you as your responses slide around the basic questions and issues. My slip about non-linear vs time varying was just a simple slip, as I responded on the fly. Correcting that is valid, but not the issue. What do you think happens when you put a layer of insulation around a heated (internally) surface. It gets hotter on the heater (but not on the surface of the insulator). This is a different version of the concept, but the point is the same. Any process that decreases direct heat transfer out (even over part of the area) results in the remainder of the area becoming hotter to get the total power out. That is all that is happening with the blocked area absorbing and back radiating. The total power out is not increased, but the local variation changes.
Leonard
Joseph,
Here is a little thought problem to consider. Get a large vacuum type thermos bottle and spray the inside flat black. Put a 100 Watt electrically heated resistor inside. The resistor is held with a very long and thin wire (assume negligible thermal conductivity of wire) through a seal. Now pump the inside of the bottle also to a hard vacuum. Assume the surface of the resistor and inside of the thermos are black bodies and have a surface area of 0.01 m^2 and 0.1 m^2 respectively. What temperature do you expect the resistor to go to, and why. Remember, the resistor is in a perfect vacuum, so no air conduction or convection or air heat storage, and assume negligible conduction along the wire.
This is a trivial calculation if there is no back radiation and absorption, but is different if there is back radiation and absorption.
Please have your optics expert do the very simple calculation and respond. I am truly trying to resolve the basic issue, and would be glad to go into detail on the remainder if we can come to an agreement on this part of the issue.
Leonard
No, Leonard, it is you who continue to slide around the basic questions. You continue to make that snide accusation and come here with that accusatory tone. As I’ve pointed out several times, it is sophistry and obfuscation and changing goal posts etc., and I acknowledge it as such.
For us to proceed, you must acknowledge and agree with several things: 1) That it is apparent that Spencer doesn’t know what a time-dependent model is, because what he presented is not time-dependent, 2) that it is always wrong to average down solar sunshine flux into time periods and areas it does not exist, 3) that my model predicts the surface temperature in real time and Spencer’s doesn’t, 4) that my model does it without a GHE, 5) that only a model like mine, not Spencer’s static model or any static solar-averaged model which has a GHE in it, can actually create real-world reality phenomena such as clouds, 6) that for all the reasons I’ve stated also previously, the premise of the GHE has no rational justification, because how it is invented does not correspond with reality, and it is simply not observed in reality.
It will take it that you would agree with all of these facts.
Now for your problem: 100 Watts coming out of 0.01m^2 equates to 10,000 W/m^2 flux at the surface of the resistor. If emissivity = 1, then this is 648 Kelvin.
If the surface area of the inside of the thermos is 0.1m^2, and we assume to a good enough approximation a spherical point source and a spherical cavity (or a line source and cylindrical cavity), then the flux at the surface of the inside of the thermos is 10,000*.01/.1 = 1000 W/m^2, which is of course the same thing as the 100 Watts input now falling over 0.1m^2, which is 364 Kelvin, assuming full absorption.
That is all. Re-emission from the inside of the thermos doesn’t contribute to further heating of the resistor, because the walls of the thermos are not a source of heat. The walls of the thermos heat up and now they become the source of emission towards the outside. If you reduce the emissivity of the outside of the walls, then they can achieve a higher temperature for a given fixed input; even in this case, however, this wouldn’t cause the resistor or any internal passive object to heat up some more because the flux from the walls would never be higher than the flux they’re receiving from the source in the first place. The resistor or the walls can not produce more energy output than the input they’re receiving in the first place. Only low emissivity of the walls or resistor can increase the temperature above the strict blackbody behaviour.
The basics of radiative transfer can be learned with just a wall, a candle and a mirror. Light the candle near a wall. Try to brighten the wall with the mirror. Failure. But what happens when the mirror is behind the candle? Success. The mirror supplies what amounts to a second candle and the wall gets brighter. Notice, though, that there’s now a shadow of the candlestick on the wall but not a shadow of the flame. Because the mirror’s light passes right through it.
“The same laws that govern the transfer of light also govern the transfer of heat.” — Christie Geankopolis
And you can’t make something brighter with its own light.
I first entered this “debate” publicly with the post “Hoax of the Century” at InfoWars.com in Apr 2009, followed by others at ClimateRealist.com, ClimateDepot.com and many more. It was Dr Weinstein that gave me my first bit of support. Coming from a fellow engineer, and a PhD, this was most welcome at that lonely time. It was obvious that GHE was a violation of LoT, a constant theme in my 150 posted articles on Faux Science. I was approached in the summer of 2010 to be co-author of “Slaying the Sky Dragon” and i sent Dr Weinstein a signed copy of that book in Jan 2011. The violations of GHE are well explained there, and in all of the posted material under “Publications” at Principia-Scientific.org. I have followed this chatter for years, there is NO physical experiment supporting back-radiation WARMING and proof is NOT on the skeptics of this hypothesis, but on those who claim it’s existence.
Dr Weinstein, do not propose hypothetical experiments to prove a hypothetical force. Dr Nasif Nahle has conducted an ACTUAL experiment to measure this phantom force, posted at PSI website, and this IMAGINARY FORCING DOES NOT EXIST. Since this is a fully documented, repeatable experiment, conduct your own test and post your own contradictory data and hypothesis. Anything less is just unicorns and rainbows.
I reckon it might have been me that attracted Dr Weinstein to your site by posting a link to his site on that daft steel planet epic a while ago (a bit like the Borg has found you) sorry about that. Now I am an idiot (as you well know) but it seems to me that reflection/conduction and convection keeps us cool from the heat of the Sun during the day and at night the rest of the heat from the ground and any clouds keep us warm. Any dog would tell you that as well.
Best Regards,
Martin.
The incredible thing about Spencer is that to my knowledge he has never actually tried to prove his arguments through experimentation to support his theory – all I have ever seen presented is an IR photo of a house, a Nimbus chart and endless unsupported statements about heating effects by cold objects in his thought experiments.
I see very few supporting his proposals with anything more than a though bubble such as a “photon doesn’t know if it is emitted from a hot or cold object or has no memory of what it should do when it strikes another object be it hot or cold”.
What incredible bullshit – of course it does – it is emitted with precisely the energy it was by the circumstances that caused the emission.
As far as I am able to comprehend the emission of this photon has also reduced the energy of the emitter. This is never accounted for in back radiation.
Supposedly the surface emits photons and a maximum of 50 % of these photons return energy to the surface creating extra heating – So the emission of a photon must result in zero energy loss by the emitter else the 50% return can ONLY result in decreased energy !
And don’t these clowns try to support their argument by some sort of spurious “net” energy transfer complying with thermodynamics ? As I see it 100 out and 50 back is equivalent to 50 out 0 back no matter how you try to spin it – no heating there !
Oh wait – I forgat about that 161 W/sq m solar radiation shining 24 hours a day heating the Earth’s surfaces to minus 43 degrees C – silly me !
At least I thought you approached your paper in a scientific manner – develop a model and test it with data – something I have never seen from the Thought Bubblers.
When I was much younger many moons ago – in the 70s – I had a mate whose older brother had a permit to catch snakes for the Museum who milked them for venom used to create anti-venom.
Australia has most of the top ten venomous terrestrial in LD50 terms and all of these reside in the forested areas surrounding our home city – there is a large area of forest just a few minutes’ drive from where I lived at that time – water catchment reserve, state forest and national park.
The majority of Australian mammals are nocturnal so snakes are active in the early evening on their hunt.
So 3 young guys in a beat up old Chrysler Valiant would set off hunting snakes in the early evening of late autumn, winter and early spring – driving up into the surrounding hills. The snakes would be attracted to the warmth of the bitumen road in the early evening – soaking up as much warmth as they could before embarking on their hunt.
One night had been particularly fruitful with a couple of 8 foot eastern brown snakes (reputed to be number 2 in toxicity), several death adders (reputed to be number 4 or 5 in toxicity) and a couple of red-bellied blacks.
These were placed in a sealed hessian bag in the boot – trunk to US citizens – of the car. As it was cool they soon settle down and become sluggish.
As we were leaving the last stop a police car came upon us.
Now, apparently 3 young men in the bush at night with a feeble excuse of snake collecting for the curator of herpetology of the museum are extremely suspicious.
Suspecting some nefarious purpose they commenced searching the car. Despite repeated warnings they opened the boot and began handling the hessian bag.
Now most Australian snakes are usually not aggressive. They are more likely to flee an encounter before you even see them. This goes a long way to explaining the low number of deaths caused by snakes in Australia despite the high levels of toxicity.
Imagine the horrified expression resulting from opening a hessian bag containing some of the world’s deadliest snakes angrily seeking revenge on the source of their torment.
Luckily he avoided the need for urgent treatment because the snakes were sluggish due to the cool air temperature.
Where was that back radiation when the snakes needed it ?
True story – the curator of herpetology wasn’t too impressed at his evening being disrupted by police seeking verification of our bonafides.
Everybody was let off with a caution – especially the foolish copper !
Rosco says, 2013/05/15 at 6:37 PM:
“As far as I am able to comprehend the emission of this photon has also reduced the energy of the emitter. This is never accounted for in back radiation.”
Precisely! This is something I pointed out quite early on during ‘that daft steel planet epic a while ago’ on Tallbloke’s. You cannot BOTH keep the temperature of the shell AND make its resulting inward emitted radiation warm the planet at the same time. It is in seeing that the temperature of the shell is dynamically maintained (at Tpl / 2^0.25) by the the heat flux from the planet, that we can KNOW that the shell does not in any way warm the planet back.
Rosco says (2013/05/15 at 6:37 PM): “Supposedly the surface emits photons and a maximum of 50 % of these photons return energy to the surface creating extra heating – So the emission of a photon must result in zero energy loss by the emitter else the 50% return can ONLY result in decreased energy !
And don’t these clowns try to support their argument by some sort of spurious “net” energy transfer complying with thermodynamics ? As I see it 100 out and 50 back is equivalent to 50 out 0 back no matter how you try to spin it – no heating there !”
========================================================
So far I do not see any scientific basis for your photon arithmetic.
Your “100 out and 50 back” is exactly the warmists point. They say like “100 – 50 is more than 100 – 0, hence back radiation slows down cooling”. You call this “net” thing spurious, yet do the same calculation.
Either you do not get the core point or I misunderstood you.
Joseph,
Roy’s use of time varying was longer time scales, with smoothed global averages, while yours looked at shorter periods and local variation. I do agree that day/night and latitude variation (and even season variation) makes using a global smoothed average approximation less accurate for the response, but I had that concern in the past and ran some numbers and found it does not make the basic response far off, and greatly simplifies the problem without significant error of the main effects. The key is storage (lag) and redistribution . The water and atmosphere storage and redistribution (ocean currents and wind), along with the fact that radiation at altitude dominates direct surface radiation to space effects allows the approximation to be reasonable. This is not true of the Moon, since it has no water or atmosphere storage and movement, and rotates slowly, so a more local calculation should be used there. Adding a degree of complexity where you do not even have real data for accurate calculations does not improve anything. When you add complexity and do not even have the basic physics correct is not useful.
In response to your answer to my model, where do you think the energy is going from the resistor? The initial temperatures you gave are only correct if the energy is being removed from the inner wall of the thermos as fast as it arrives, and That wall acts like near absolute zero. The wall does get hotter as you calculated, but you only showed the initial response. However, it is a THERMOS bottle, and hold the heat very well (the walls in the thermos are silver coated for low emissivity except the inner wall near the resistor, which is given here as a black body, so there is very little radiation heat transfer OUT of the thermos). The resistor and inner wall will both get hotter and hotter until the slow loss by radiation through the thermos wall can equal 100 Watts. For a thermos this is a very large temperature to get the radiation heat transfer. The silvered coat usually results in an emissivity near 0.03 per surface, and there are two surfaces of reflection to contend with, so the resistor would get to a much higher temperature. If the only silvered surface was the outer wall of the painted black inner wall (the inner part of the thermos), and the outer part of the thermos passed the radiation without having any other effect, the thermos inner wall would have to be at least 873K to emit 100W. The resistor would have to be even hotter than 933K. In fact, the reflective outer surface and temperature would make it even hotter. If the silver reflective coating were a perfect reflector, the temperature would climb until everything melted.
You appear to never have seen the radiation equation: P=emissivity X sigma X (Thot^4-Tcold^4). What do you think the Tcold^4 is all about?
Leonard
Rosco and others,
Roy Spencer is giving well known and well established physics facts. He has tried to make it obvious by examples, and you talk as if what he says is new and unproven. If you had a clue to the physics and math, he would not need such simple examples. I can now see why some of the supporters of CAGW can call many skeptics as ignorant, since you are so far off of basic physics. This makes the real scientists that are skeptics such as Roy and me look bad by association. You are entitled to your opinion, but you are not entitled to claiming facts that are not correct.
Leonard Weinstein
Bullshit Leonard, Spencer did not use any time-dependence at all and his model does not compare to my model at all. You continue to change reference frames and chip around the edges because you are incapable of understanding that a solar-averaged model CAN NOT re-create reality conditions and processes by definition. All such solar-averaged models and their attendant GHE invention are wrong. And they’re not time-dependent. My real-time model can be run for as long as you want, it is not restricted to any short period. There is no single equation that represents the entire Earth at once! You have to look at local variations because the input is geometrically non-linear and time-dependent, and not constant. Again, there is no single equation that captures the actual behaviour of the actual physics of the Earth at once – the averaged values are not THE ACTUAL system. The averaged values can’t create clouds! Hence they HAVE to be meaningless!
I get that you are making the point that you don’t understand this physics. Some of us here do. As Rosco pointed out, you can be happy with your thought bubbles or you can try do real science like me and create a real-time model and compare it to actual data, using an actual heat-flow differential equation. Your thought bubble models are fiction by definition and it counts for exactly zero that they might be made to resemble reasonable temperatures. Ptolemy did the same with planetary positions.
My model can create clouds, the thought bubble solar averaged models CAN’T. Tell me how in the hell a physicist ignores a fundamental property of the behaviour of the actual system because they prefer the mental masturbation of their thought bubbles?. For you people to ignore this is stupid religious insanity. Only real-time models like mine can actually recreate reality; the averaged models are a fiction.
You people are supposed to be physicists for God’s sake…aren’t you? I mean what the hell? Have you ever heard of unit analysis? What are the units for radiative flux and the Stefan-Boltzmann equation? Joules per second per square meter. This is energy, referenced to a specific second, referenced to a specific square meter. This is energy flux density and it is also known as power, and the raw energy occurs second-by-second, square-meter by square-meter – AS PER the UNITS! Averaging the time-varying input energy out into time periods where it does not exist and onto spatial areas where it does not exist is sophistry! It is wrong. It is taking what is real real-time power and artificially diluting it in a fiction. Are you all stupid man? Don’t you realize that there is a fundamental raw input barrier that has to be breached given the presence of 70% surface ocean? My real-time model breaches that phase-change barrier with real-time sunshine, while your mental masturbatory averaged out models don’t even talk about it, don’t even consider it and it isn’t even in the mental phase-space at all. You just assume what is required without actually demonstrating how it comes to be.
And you freaking morons tell us you don’t want us to have a look at what actually does happen in real time? You people do not deserve the letters you write beside your names – you should hold your heads in shame as frauds, sophists, bullshitters, religious nutjobs, murderers of rationality and reason, murderers of knowledge, the mental dreggs of the human species. I’ve talked to high-school drop outs that can figure out that real-time sunshine is required to actually heat the Earth and they can even appreciate that there are equations which can actually do that, while I have exclusively found that it is ivory-tower tenure-protected mental rejects that truly believe you can model the Earth as flat and static and who deny that there are equations which can model the earth in real time. How stupid are PhD’s today?
You want us to NOT do science, because you prefer your God-damned thought-bubble bullshit and your status-quo “all my friends agree with me” mentally degenerate conception of science? I got a message for ya: Piss off and let us to our work.
“People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.” ― George Bernard Shaw
Finally, low emissivity is not the GHE and if it is the GHE, then O2 and N2 are greenhouse gases and CO2 is a coolant. And yes, you snideful jerk, we ALL HAVE SEEN the radiation equation, but I got news for you:
P=emissivity X sigma X (Thot^4-Tcold^4)
does not mean that the hot side of the differential gets hotter in order to warm the cold side! How is it that physicists can be so god-damned stupid? I can’t wait until all you idiots are left behind.
Now get the hell out. You can come back once you’ve extended the work set out in my paper and you obey the actual boundary conditions of the system.
All you got is that you don’t want us to do some science and develop some math for it because it would conflict with your thought bubbles. You people are retarded. You may call yourselves scientists as a persona but your true shadow underneath is a direct re-manifestation of medieval Catholic Orthodoxy. You’re not in science because you have a passion for truth and for discovering what is unknown, you’re in science merely because it makes you feel like part of the group, and the group has always hated the unknown when they have thought-bubbles to hide that the unknown exists.
We’re going to model the Earth in real-time, we’re going to keep confirming the already-established a-priori fact that averaged-out models with the GHE represent nothing but fiction. You can not stop the unknown from being discovered by us, and by other people like us. You can not stop us from doing better science. We will destroy your belief systems, your groups, and your thought bubbles. We will destroy them, and we will ridicule them, and we will ridicule those who worship them. We will destroy what is false. The averaged-out models are false, because they are not what the Earth mathematically looks like, by definition. You have a choice here: stick with your thought bubble and your belief system and your denial of the unknown, or, do some science and solve some equations that have never been done before, and engage in some destruction of the old status-quo and help create a greater new. The choice defines everything about you.
When experimental outcomes and empirical evidence fail to support a hypothesis, a scientist is obliged to abandon that hypothesis and seek alternative explanations. This is not what we see with greenhouse speculators, however, which justifies the conclusion that they’re not scientists but rigid ideologues.
Back-radiation does not heat the radiation source.
This is why the “selective absorption” (and emission) of glass has nothing to do with the temperature of a glass enclosure, even though “hypothetically” it should.
This is also why the “selective absorption” of certain gases has nothing to do with the Earth’s temperature or its thermally graded atmosphere.
Despite what Spencer and Weinstein say.
Weinstein,
All you’re doing here is presenting your assertions about what will happen as fact. Without ever substantiating it other than giving us your opinion on how this works. Your understanding of this problem is exactly what we oppose. And we’ve explained quite clearly what it is that we object to. Which means we need more than just restatements of that same understanding for us to bother listening to you. We need for you to back it up with … something.
Please provide us with just one single physics or engineering textbook example of a constantly heated black or gray body in a vacuum radiatively made to become warmer than its original input potential temperature by putting an absorptive shell around it or surrounding it with mirrors or just placing an object next to it, cooler than the body, but warmer than the surroundings. Give us just ONE authoritative example from somewhere about this striking (and, I would think, quite important) phenomenon being discussed or even mentioned in passing as an eventuality or corollary of a reduced Q. And/or could you direct us to just one single account of an actual controlled experiment done in a vacuum chamber, all conductive and convective heat transfer ruled out, where a constantly heated black sphere after temperature equilibration is forced to become ~19% warmer by enclosing it within an absorptive (black) shell, or better yet, making it even much, much warmer than this by making the shells highly reflective? Or anything about your opposing plates. Or your thermos. Anything other than thought experiments and models. Real-world, genuine, observed physics.
Don’t just say it. Show it. So we can have a look at it.
We have asked for such examples now for a long time on many, many occasions. But I for one have never seen one SINGLE actual instance where a relevant link has been provided from any of you that verifies your assertions, Weinstein. If this is such a basic fact, why aren’t there a multitude of such examples out there? Why aren’t there heaps of accounts of conclusive experiments proving the theory (or just one such account)? You say there are many. Well, then, show us. And why aren’t writers of physics and engineering textbooks then seemingly interested at all in this amazing phenomenon – making an object hotter and hotter with just a tiny original input by simply insulating it better and better (like with MLI). Why is it never mentioned? Never discussed? Never explored? ONLY in the greenhouse realm …
Could you please put up or shut up!
You know we used to have sun-worshipping religions a long time ago, back when people were much more in-tune with natural reality and who had to have a deep working knowledge of how reality behaved in order to survive. They worshipped the Sun because they knew that the Sun was the only source of heat for the planet. Never, ever, anywhere, not until some point in 1980’s in fact, did any people ever consider that the atmosphere was a source of heat or caused more heating to occur than the Sun provided. Not until the total degeneration of modern academia did people begin to think that a flat Earth was heated by its atmosphere, and as I have pointed out repeatedly, this has truly formed the basis of a new religion.
The new academic religion is literally one of atmosphere worship! Ohhh, don’t upset the atmosphere or it will get upset and kill you and your children! Ohhh, don’t touch the atmosphere because it will change how much the atmosphere heats the flat earth! Ohhh, worship the atmosphere because it sustains all life with its greenhouse effect!
It is an academic religion created in the 1980’s which only exists to fulfil the religious longing of people who aren’t actually smart enough to be who they pretend they are.
Even when people really did believe the Earth to be flat, they still worshipped the Sun as the source of heat and life. Over tens of thousands of years of living in direct contact with nature, we would have noticed if the atmosphere was actually providing more heat than the Sun. Only in a mentally retarded academia protected by tenure where no matter how stupid you are, you get to keep your job (and you keep the naysayers out), can you have people believe that an invented flat Earth mathematics means that sunshine is freezing cold and the atmosphere provides twice the heat of the Sun by some process which actually isn’t even agreed upon by such academics. You might as well try logically reconciling the Trinity with itself before you reconcile which version of the GHE is the actual version. It is the belief in the GHE that matters…not how it actually logically works.
Next, Dr Weinstein will explain how to stand inside a bucket and lift it off the ground.
Alan Siddons says:
2013/05/16 at 10:02 AM
“Back-radiation does not heat the radiation source.
This is why the “selective absorption” (and emission) of glass has nothing to do with the temperature of a glass enclosure, even though “hypothetically” it should.
This is also why the “selective absorption” of certain gases has nothing to do with the Earth’s temperature or its thermally graded atmosphere”.
Alan, I know back radiation does not heat the radiation source, it slow energy loss so the absorbed energy heats the radiation source more. A greenhouse is different from the atmospheric greenhouse effect, since that is a trapped air problem. You did not read my write up or you would understand what I said. I repeat, read: http://scienceofdoom.com/2012/07/23/how-the-greenhouse-effect-works-a-guest-post-and-discussion/
Leonard Weinstein
Leonard Weinstein says, 2013/05/16 at 1:34 PM:
“(…) I know back radiation does not heat the radiation source, it slow energy loss so the absorbed energy heats the radiation source more.”
No. The absorbed energy/heat from the heat source (the Sun) radiatively escapes freely from the surface. That particular heat loss is not inhibited by the ‘back radiation’ in any way. What your ‘back radiation’ is doing is adding to the energy of the surface. And by then claiming that the surface temperature rises when this energy is added, you have effectively turned the ‘back radiation’ energy into HEAT.
And there’s your second law violation.
Priceless, Kristian!
Greg House says – “Either you do not get the core point or I misunderstood you.”
The simple fact is if 100 out 50 back or 50 out zero back is the same thing then there is NO EXTRA HEATING – OBVIOUSLY.
If the GHG results in a decreased cooling rate then that is an entirely different argumentand so I am assuming you are dismissing “back-radiation” as a source of extra HEATING energy – which the concept of “net” radiation obeying thermodynamic rules is exactly – an admission of NO EXTRA HEATING.
This is because a decreased cooling rate simply cannot under any circumstances be responsible for heating something above its current temperature – it is cooling after all.
Roy even agrees with this because he claims – “The temperature of anything heated will increase until the rate of energy *loss* equals the rate of energy *gain*. So, temperature can be increased by increasing INPUT, or decreasing OUTPUT.” – WUWT post by Roy Spencer.
Now I believe that the rate of energy input to the Earth’s surfaces drops to zero eapdily after sunset so slowing the cooling rate atthis time cannot increase the temperature.
Of course Roy is claiming the “back radiation” is the source of the energy once the sun has set but the GHG hypothesis proposes it is only providing 50 % of the terrestrial radiation.
This viewpoint, for no other is possible based on his own logic, clearly destroys his claim his model accounts for any time dependant variable – the obvious time dependant variable is the solar radiation variation from zero before dawn to a maximum at the zenith and decreasing back to zero again after sunset.
The next most obvious time dependant variables – air and surface temperature – follow a similar pattern but obviously there is retained heat in the surface and to a lesser extent the air.
I say my solar panels prove Roy Spencer’s 24 hour a day radiation at an albedo 1/4 of the solar constant is BS – just like his model.
Kristian says (2013/05/16 at 2:18 PM): “What your ‘back radiation’ is doing is adding to the energy of the surface. And by then claiming that the surface temperature rises when this energy is added, you have effectively turned the ‘back radiation’ energy into HEAT.”
=====================================================
Kristian, how do you know that back radiation adds energy to the source? So far I have not seen any scientific reason to claim that.
What we know for sure is that back radiation can not have any warming effect on the source, because otherwise it would lead in some cases to an endless mutual warming without extra input of energy, which is absurd.
One possible explanation is that back radiation does not add any energy to the source. Maybe we should not speculate at all about what exactly happens to the energy, because we do not know and it does not matter in the first place.
Um Greg Kristian was saying that backradiation does not add energy to the source.
Joseph E Postma says (2013/05/16 at 4:52 PM): “Um Greg Kristian was saying that backradiation does not add energy to the source.”
=====================================================
I understand, by saying “What your ‘back radiation’ is doing” Kristian did not mean that back radiation is really doing that. I am sorry then :oops:.
Rosco says (2013/05/16 at 4:22 PM): “If the GHG results in a decreased cooling rate then that is an entirely different argumentand so I am assuming you are dismissing “back-radiation” as a source of extra HEATING energy – which the concept of “net” radiation obeying thermodynamic rules is exactly – an admission of NO EXTRA HEATING.
This is because a decreased cooling rate simply cannot under any circumstances be responsible for heating something above its current temperature – it is cooling after all.
================================================================
Let me be very clear about that: back radiation can neither warm the source nor slow down cooling of the source.
Although IR generally can warm, the “greenhouse effect” as presented my the IPCC (warming by back radiation from “greenhouse gases”, or “the surface warms the greenhouse gases and they warm the surface back) is physically absurd and impossible.
As the first step to understand that I recommend everyone a simple experiment: just stand in front of a mirror and enjoy the “back radiation warming”. Must be 33C or more, if the “greenhouse effect” as presented by the IPCC exists. Please, not too close to the mirror, to avoid the effect of suppressed convection. If you do not feel the warming, you are ready for the next step.
On the theoretical level, it goes like that. You have initially a body kept at a certain temperature by it’s internal source of energy. Now you put another colder body at the absolute zero temperature, let us say, in vacuum close to the warm body.
The warmer body will start warming the colder body immediately. Then, according to the “back radiation warming” concept, the back radiation from the colder body will increase the temperature of the warmer body. Actually, already on this stage we should ask “how come?”, but let us proceed. So, the now even warmer warm body will warm the colder body even stronger, and the colder body will repay by sending even more back radiation to the warmer body, thus further increasing the temperature of the warmer body. The warmer body will get warmer again. So will the colder body in turn. And so on.
The result is mutual endless warming without any additional input of energy, it is easy to understand how physically absurd it is. This proves that the concept of “back radiation warming” is physically absurd. The “greenhouse effect” as presented by the IPCC can not exist.
Sometimes we hear that it is not actually warming, it is just slowing down cooling. But replacing “warming” with “slowing down cooling” can not save the concept, because the assumption about “slowing down cooling” leads to warming in cases where the initial temperature is stable, and this is physically absurd and impossible, as shown above, which means that the assumption is wrong. “Slowing down cooling” is equally physically absurd and impossible.
As for IR thermometers, IR cameras etc, I am not an expert, but a reasonable explanation would be that it is the OPTIC in this devices that helps the IR from colder bodies to overcome the natural barrier. In the atmosphere there are no lenses focusing the IR from a large area on a very small area of the sensor.
Alternatively, I would suggest the proponents of the “greenhouse effect” remove the lenses and then measure the change in temperature. The result would be the same as in the mirror experiment: nothing.
Instead of – “I say my solar panels prove Roy Spencer’s 24 hour a day radiation at an albedo 1/4 of the solar constant is BS – just like his model.” – I actually meant –
I say my solar panels prove Roy Spencer’s 24 hour a day radiation at 1/4 of the solar constant adjusted for albedo is BS – just like his model.
My partner demanded I drive her somewhere as I was trying to post the previous.
Spencer has also said – “well proven physics apparently” – ’cause that is all he ever says (?) –
“Without the greenhouse effect, heat transported upward from the surface would never be lost, the atmosphere would become isothermal,there would be no convection, and there would be no moist adiabatic lapse rate. It’s NOT a pressure effect! This is basic stuff.”
Well I simply ask him how does he explain Jupiter – or the other outlying planets for that matter ???
It is ludicrous enough to try to spin that the “greenhouse effect” on Venus with 132 W/sq metre insolation – reference http://www.atmos.ucla.edu/~liougst/Lecture/Lecture_3.pdf – can heat the surface to a temperature where the radiative flux is 16,101 W/sq metre by the SB equation !!
But surely even he is not going to be stupid enough to try to claim that on Jupiter where 50.5 W/sq metre is the solar radiation and the atmosphere is almost 100 % hydrogen and helium almost completely void of greenhouse gases that it is the “greenhouse effect” responsible for an internal temperature estimated to be in excess of 24000 K – a radiative flux of 18,811,699,200 W/sq metre ???
It also seems Jupiter’s atmosphere is definately NOT isothermal.
Clearly there are so many reputable basic facts that totally disprove this so-called “well proven physics” !! How do they simply deny reality and claim the opposite is true because they are the “Doctor” ???
Where do these guys get this BS from ??
Wish I could spell – definitely !
His insertion of the moist adiabatic lapse rate to that sentence is idiotic…the whole sentence is in fact stupid.
He says that without the GHE the atmosphere wouldn’t be able cool, meaning that the GHE causes the atmosphere to cool, and this is why the GHE causes heat to be trapped? And the moist lapse rate to exist?
Do we all see yet that these people create sophistry either on purpose or simply because they’re complete idiots? These people don’t deserve your respect…they don’t deserve to be listened to by anyone.
It is actually quite difficult to form a single sentence in which you state mutually exclusive phenomena to cause each other.
Spencer: “The GHE causes heat to be lost, and this is what makes heat be trapped.”
It’s just so great…I mean you have to laugh at the end.
That actually qualifies as yet another version of the GHE:
GHE Version N: The greenhouse effect is when how the atmosphere cools down, it heats up. The GHE causes heat to be lost, and this is what makes heat be trapped.
In other words, they’re putting one over on us, and the joke is actually on us, because if we were actually defending truth, we wouldn’t put up with this sort of crap from them. Hence my attitude of late, but really, we need to destroy the tenure concept and strip these people of their careers and their positions. Tenure has rotted the mind of academia and we need to flush it out.
No Joseph,
the atmospheric greenhouse effect causes the ATMOSPHERE to cool to a radiation balance condition at a significant elevation (on average) rather that all of the cooling coming directly from the ground (which would occur if no absorbing atmosphere). The lapse rate times the average elevation where cooling balances solar input is added to the temperature that would occur at that average altitude (based on effective absorbed sunlight), thus increasing the average temperature of the atmosphere and ground. Thus the greenhouse gases and clouds cause the atmosphere and ground to be hotter than otherwise. The way you interpreted this is a common theme to your basic misunderstanding.
[JPReply: Now you’re backsliding and changing the version of the GHE you believe in. This version where the average radiating height is simply set by the outgoing spectral absorption from CO2 has NOTHING to do with backradiation heating and the metal plates analogy. Your credibility now decreases further. And further, in my paper I highlighted the fact that the average surface of 0.3 albedo is not found at the ground surface in any case, but is determined by the average cloud height. The average albedo of 0.3 is determined mainly by clouds and hence is found at the cloud top, and thus, this is what sets the albedo surface and the average radiative balance height. The albedo at the surface itself is much, much smaller on average. So, you’re changing positions, and the one you’re going back to has its own problems anyway.]
If there were no atmospheric cooling at elevation, that the lapse rate would slowly decrease due to conduction, and if there were no other source of continual mixing, conduction would eventually result in an isothermal atmosphere. However, I personally think that day/night variation in surface input, along with latitude variation would mix the atmosphere enough to make the lapse rate never go fully to zero, but it would reduce below the isentropic level. The isothermal condition is implied by the maximum state of entropy, but conduction is many orders of magnitude smaller than even small sources of convection. Roy is correct in principal, but probably not totally in practical terms. I can give you a formal proof of the statement about lapse rate if you desire.
[JPReply: If GHG’s cause cooling, then that’s what they do, is cool. As far as the lapse rate, U = m*(gh + CpT) is so fundamental and works so well for the dry rate, and adding latent heat release perfectly predicts the wet rate, there is no role left for GHG radiation, other than that GHG’s are allowing the column to cool, and thus don’t cause it to heat.]
A point to consider: the ocean, which dominates Earth’s area, only changes about 0.1 degree day to night at the surface (where ALL of the emitted and absorbed long wave radiation occurs), so radiation to space from the average surface is not significantly affected by using local vs global long time average temperatures for Earth. Obviously land temperature changes faster, and latitude variation is not as small, but ocean currents and wind move energy far more than the radiation difference, so global steady average is still a good approximation. Local calculation (time varying) is not useful due to lack of enough detail and not including storage effects to allow any useful improvement. This refutes you initial issue.
[JPReply: More bullshit. Was I talking about how steady the output is when discussing time-dependence? No, we are referring to input. How do you think the ocean water is maintained in the first place? From 161 W/m^2? 161 W/m^2 can not maintain liquid ocean water. Hence, you have to have a real-time model to actually produce water and clouds, and hence, any input-averaged model is wrong. Sorry but this refutes your insistence that we stop doing science. As I said, we’re going to do science, we’re going to model things in real time, and we’re going to continue proving that the averaged-out models are fictions.]
I simply can’t let this one go. Surely among the better ones. I wonder, do these people even listen to what they’re saying? Or read what they’re writing? Before submitting.
This is Christopher Game (on Spencer’s blog) trying to explain how ‘back radiation’ warms the surface without actually warming it (!):
“The ‘back radiation’ is passing energy to the land-sea body, but does not raise its temperature above its value that actually determines the emission, its actual temperature. It “raises its temperature [ordinary language usage of ‘heat’]” only virtually, relative to a hypothetical value that it would have had without the ‘back radiation’; this is not an actual raising of temperature, such as is implied by Kristian’s muddled word usage. Properly speaking, the atmosphere transfers a moiety of energy to the land-sea body, but such a moiety is not a heat transfer in physical terms, because a physical transfer of heat is a net transfer, not just a moiety transfer.”
So they expect us to grant them energy transfer from the atmosphere to the surface and this energy transfer making the surface warmer than it would’ve been without the atmosphere around … but it’s not heat, because it doesn’t actually make it warmer, only relatively warmer.
Logic straight outta la la land.
Kristian says (2013/05/17 at 7:00 AM): “So they expect us to grant them energy transfer from the atmosphere to the surface and this energy transfer making the surface warmer than it would’ve been without the atmosphere around … but it’s not heat, because it doesn’t actually make it warmer, only relatively warmer.”
==============================================================
This has always been their point, as far as I remember.
Of course, relative warming is also warming, according to the common sense, so not calling it heat is indeed ridiculous, but how they call it is a secondary point. The trick helps to fool the readers though.
I believe we should focus on why both absolute and relative warming by back radiation is crap and make it clear to the readers in such terms that any layperson could understand it. The main task is not to convince liars, because they know that they lie, per definition.
Wham, bam, biff, zap….good discussion. I’m still wrestling with Mr. Weinstein’s hot wire in a thermos bottle thought experiment and trying to upgrade it to a real life experience. What happens if your oven is set at 450F and the thermostat breaks and the heating elements stay on? The stove will get hot as hell but the total thermal energy introduced into the system will not exceed what is delivered by the glowing elements. Makes no difference if oven has a vacuum, is lined with mirrors, filled with GHGs, or apple pie. CO2 back-radiation has undergone a malicious exaggeration to satisfy green dogma i.e. principles from an authority that may not be denied or disputed.
🙂
Joseph,
i am always consistent in my explanations. You continually misunderstand. The lamps, candles metal plates, vacuum bottles are all efforts to make you understand the effect of back-radiation. Since you do not understand my detailed comments of the actual physics, I and Roy made efforts to give simpler cases to explain back-radiation where you could understand it but we both failed. Be clear, the failure is yours, not ours. I get a better and more scientific reception on the sites of some of the supporters of AGW than I did here, even when they disagree with some of what I say. SOD and J Curry are the best examples.
[JPReply: Sorry Leonard, but your description of the GHE was not consistent and you jumped to a different explanation as it suited you. You’re gonna get a hell of a lot more rational analysis here than you get at SOD or J Curry…J Curry also has a problem of not understanding what a physical unit is and when it is and isn’t OK to average them. In any case, in my paper I’ve presented a better way forward using better physics and better types of data for understanding the actual, not fictionally modeled, system. The GHE has no foundation in an actual real-time system, it simply isn’t required. There is no reason but very bad ones for other scientists to not support the work.]
relative warming is also warming – Greg
Yes but no, not as greenhousers want you to think of it! A heated body in the open air is constantly being cooled by that air. Seal it off, then, deprive it from communicating with its surroundings, and it will naturally get warmer. By the same token (greenhousers want you to believe), a heated body in a vacuum is constantly being cooled by its radiation. Seal it off, then, prevent it from radiating to space, and it will also get warmer. Not so, however. What a body radiates in a vacuum is a function of its temperature and its emissivity. So confining that radiation will not make it radiate more vigorously or increase its emissivity. In short, radiation is the RESULT of a body’s temperature, and will only increase the temperature of a body that is radiating LESS.
You know, Roy loves to bring up the canard of “but I measure IR from the atmosphere, and IR warms the sensor in my bolometer, so that is evidence of radiation from a colder source warming a hotter body” doesn’t he?
Curious how this will go over.
They just make up BS as they go along…and then rehash the same old BS that has been debunked over and over again. It is their strategy you see…that’s what they got. Endless repetition of BS.
How can they spin the fact that there is absolute proof that the solar radiation alone is capable of heating a planetary surface to temperatures approaching 390 K ?
I have copied a post I made about a year ago in response to one of his blog posts – Slaying the slayers with the Alabama Two Step.
He failed to actually rebut any point I made – note I was actually asking for info as to why my thoughts were wrong.
I was labelled someone who pollutes minds with pseudoscinece – yet he did not provide with any reason why my thoughts were actually incorrect.
I’m not claiming any sort of expertise simply asking why my thoughts are incorrect when the reality I observe support my thoughts.
Given his track record with unsubstantiated claims about cold heating warm, no comments on steel greenhouses etc etc I have lost any faith in his credibility.
This is the interaction –
“Can someone please explain to me why the same solar radiation can heat the Moon’s surface to over 109 degrees C whilst only achieving about half on Earth ?
Moreover, why can this obviously powerful radiation only heat the Earth to minus 18 degrees C ?
Surely this proves that the atmosphere and oceans actually act to reduce the heating effect of the solar radiation ?
I appreciate the long lunar day allows more time for the radiant heating –
BUT, I also note the Moon starts from an extremely cold surface temperature approaching minus 173 degrees C – and this is again some evidence to suggest radiative cooling of a planet to the vacuum of space is a slow process.
If the Earth had no atmosphere wouldn’t the 24 hour period dictate that :-
1. Although in the first 12 hours the surface temperature would not reach the theoretical “blackbody” temperature for the solar constant it would rapidly heat more than if an atmosphere were present – reduced albedo, no clouds or “extinction” and,
2. Because radiation from a relatively cool body in the vacuum of space would not cool the Earth down to anything like the Moon does (in ~29 days) in 12 hours the next dawn would be warmer than the previous until the average rapidly approached the maximum ?
So the solar radiation alone raises the Moon’s surface temperature over 300 K – from information I have seen this is achieved fairly rapidly.
From evidence I have seen on Earth the Solar radiation can heat surfaces very quickly – eg asphalt can increase from cool to blisteringly hot in a few hours from dawn – at least here in south east Queensland Australia.
Doesn’t this suggest the atmosphere and oceans act to reduce the surface heating power of the same solar radiation which is clearly capable of heating the Moon by over 300 K ?
As I said, I would really like someone to clearly demonstrate why this isn’t significant – for example is there evidence that shows it takes almost all the lunar day to heat the surface from minus ~173 to ~123 degrees C ?
This to me is the biggest paradox of all this theoretical postulating – why is it reasonable to say the Earth would be minus 18 degrees C without greenhouse gases when the solar radiation can clearly heat the Moon’s surface to what the Stefan-Boltzmann equation predicts for the solar constant and accepted albedo ?
I remain unconvinced that convective transport of air and water vapour heated by contact with the heated surfaces of the Earth are not the major methods of energy transport in an atmosphere and I am unconvinced that this does not actually reduce the temperatures on Earth rather than trace gas radiation increasing the heating.
Again – Moon ~123 – Earth less than half – similar solar radiation except Earth’s atmosphere is responsible for the higher albedo.
o Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D. says:
March 15, 2012 at 6:06 AM
This post is a good example of how some people have polluted the minds of others with
pseudo-science.
Radiative calculations alone can indeed explain the temperatures on the moon (taking into
account the heat capacity of the surface as well).
Yes, convection does indeed cool the Earth’s surface well below what radiative effects
alone would dictate…I alluded to this in my blog post.
Your comments are (as I predicted) full of strawmen, and imply I have claimed things which
I have not claimed.”
As you see – no evidence – none at all !!
Roy Spencer completely discounts the period as having any relevance and resorts to simplistic radiative blackbody calculations which are clearly meaningless – how the hell does something the size of a planet instantaneously spread energy around so that it exhibits blackbody behaviour ?
There is clear evidence it simply does not occur in the temperature profiles measured.
There is clear irrefutable evidence that it takes time to heat up something exposed to a radiative flux and it takes time to cool.
There is clear irrefutable evidence that the solar radiation is far more powerful than any radiation produced by the Earth and therefore its heating capacity MUST be far greater.
How can people be so stupid as to deny this simple reality ?
[JPReply: I think we really need to realize that we’re not dealing with honest people…it has become so obvious now. They are either lying on purpose or they’re transfixed by a stupid belief system – either way it doesn’t matter, they are an enemy of reason and we need to treat them as such.]
No comment so far from Roy.
I initially thought that the Willis GHE dumbass shell model could not be topped as far as stupidity is concerned. Then I viewed the link to the ScienceofDumb(Doom) article that Weinstein provided. Not satisfied with one or two shells, Weinstein calculates the backradiation effect for 100 shells surrounding a blackbody radiating at a constant input. Not satisfied with 100 shells? He supplies an equation, T’/To = (N+1)^0.25 where one can input 1000 shells or more, if so desired.
Dr. Weinstein. For 100 shells, you indicate the temperature of the blackbody will increase by a factor of 3.16. Since the input energy is not changing, where does this magical energy come from that that raises the blackbody temperature by over a factor of 3? Secondly, why have you not patented this device where output energy exceeds input? I could use such a device to heat my house.
Max™ says (2013/05/17 at 3:15 PM): “You’ve stated repeatedly that a microbolometer is warmed by IR from colder objects, this is utterly false, it is not detecting temperature changes of the sensor, only voltage changes.”
==================================================
This thing about IR thermometers is not quite clear to me. As far as I understand, IR from large areas goes through a lens there and is focused on a very small area of the sensor. Is it possible that this optic makes it possible for the IR from colder objects to overcome the natural barriers and cause some warming on this part of the sensor?
Just saying “only voltage changes” is not enough, I am afraid.
Like any lens, it only makes the image brighter, as if the target is closer. Think of what a magnifying glass does to sunlight. What an IR thermometer’s circuits respond to is essentially an intensity of light. Little light drives the meter one way, lots of light drive it the other. It’s still the Seebeck Effect at root, however. That’s my perspective.
Rosco says (2013/05/17 at 5:38 PM): “Moreover, why can this obviously powerful radiation only heat the Earth to minus 18 degrees C ? … why is it reasonable to say the Earth would be minus 18 degrees C without greenhouse gases when the solar radiation can clearly heat the Moon’s surface to what the Stefan-Boltzmann equation predicts for the solar constant and accepted albedo ? …
…There is clear irrefutable evidence that the solar radiation is far more powerful than any radiation produced by the Earth and therefore its heating capacity MUST be far greater.”
============================================================
First, they do not say “to minus 18 degrees C”, the say “on average”, therefore maximum 120C and on average -18C is not a contradiction. Of course, those -18C is a total crap, but you need to refine your argumentation.
Second, your “must be be far greater” implies that back radiation does have some heating effect on the source of IR. Let me remind you again that this is absurd and physically impossible, see my explanation above.
http://www.explainthatstuff.com/how-pyrometers-work.html
“The detector chip can’t measure absolute amounts of radiation, only differences, so it works by comparing the radiation from the two sources. By subtracting the measurements it makes of its own, known heat source from the alternating measurements it makes of the unknown heat source, it can very accurately figure out the temperature of the object you’re trying to measure. “
Oops, delete the post above this one, left out a / in the blockquote close tag.
>.>
Is this a new ghe version? I replied that the change is energy gain or loss, as he said himself, which sort of undermines his whole “Yes, Virginia” argument, doesn’t it?
_______________________
Greg, lenses can only do so much, raising the temperature of a target above that of the source is not something optics alone can achieve.
An IR thermometer has a calibration range where the typical operating temperature is set as 0 voltage change and positive or negative changes are assigned positive or negative temperatures relative to the sensor.
If Roy was correct then any bolometer could detect any IR and determine the temperature of any target, because any IR would cause a positive change, so no calibration would be needed, no cooling would be necessary, and the sunshield on the JWST is a huge waste of time.
They just make up any BS they want, Max. They purposefully obfuscate and create distractions.
Allen Eltor says (2013/05/18 at 11:39 AM): “http://www.explainthatstuff.com/how-pyrometers-work.html
“The detector chip can’t measure absolute amounts of radiation, only differences, so it works by comparing the radiation from the two sources. By subtracting the measurements it makes of its own, known heat source from the alternating measurements it makes of the unknown heat source, it can very accurately figure out the temperature of the object you’re trying to measure. “”
=======================================================
Alan, a lay person would conclude from this explanation that colder objects are “heat source” for the warmer detector, too.
Anyway, It is not quite clear to me, how exactly IR thermometers work with colder targets. Amplifying by lenses would be one possible explanation. Another one I found on the Spencer’s blog yesterday, unfortunately I can not find it now, maybe it was deleted. In short, it goes like that: by colder objects the receiving part of the sensor is not getting warmer, it is getting colder because it is designed to not get warmed by anything except the target, so it cools to the temperature of the target. In my understanding, this to be true requires the receiving part of the sensor to be isolated from the surrounding air in a sort of vacuum chamber.
Another possibility is that the receiving part of the sensor is artificially cooled to the temperature lower than the lowest temperature it is designed to measure. Then the receiving part of the sensor would be indeed warmed by a warmer target.
Anyway, we need to find a correct convincing explanation.
Cooled bolometers and microbolometers (or pyrometers, or pyrgeometers) are indeed brought down to as low a temperature as is reasonable.
Uncooled microbolometers detect the change in voltage when pointed at different targets, and reference that against the internal temperature to determine whether it is gaining or losing energy to the target, and a calculation is then performed to determine what temperature a target with known emissivity would have to be in order to produce the observed voltage changes.
Saying ‘subtraction’ isn’t saying ‘addition.’
There’s a lens. There’s an amount of energy per interval.
The sensor is alternately charged with an internal energy generator: a heater –
and the incident radiation from the lens.
Since the timings are known, the differences in voltaic generation are known.
Hotter lends more,
Cooler lends less.
It’s a comparator.
6 lines up from the spoon-feed: “These days, it’s more common for scientists to use entirely automatic, digital pyrometers.
They measure heat (infrared) radiation from hot objects using semiconductor-based, light-sensitive photocells (similar to tiny solar cells, but designed to respond to both visible and infrared radiation)…”
Hey Max, give me some time but I’m going to write an article on your model going into detail on the calculations etc. Haven’t and won’t be forgetting about it!
Rock it man, pretty cheery about getting a couple of projects I’ve had hanging over my head completed myself.
Dear Mr. Postma
I have learned a lot from your real sun-atmosphere-round-rotating-earth model as opposed to the flat-earth-cold-sun model 🙂
I had a rather upleasant experience of being blocked at Spencer recently, trying to issue the comment below on his blog. I would appreciate your view on my comment, and Spencer’s responce when i mailed him, see below.
Best regards Petter Tuvnes
——————-
Dear Dr. Spencer, I agree with you to a certain point that “backradiation” indirectly will reduce the rate of cooling of a warmer object, and thus the temperature will increase if you in addition have a constant heat source heating the warmer object. In that way “backradiation” act in much the same way as the insulation of a house, or a blanket over your body. However, you can regulate the heat sources in a house, and the body will self-regulate, but we cannot regulate the sun. As far as I understand professor Claes Johnson also agrees to this.
Considering the system sun – earth – atmosphere it is obvious that it is possible to measure temperature of the constituents of the atmosphere, like clouds and gases, by pyrometers etc. Since the constituents of the atmosphere have a temperature they will also radiate electromagnetic waves in all directions, – also toward the earth, but this does not mean that all radiation will cause heating.
The radiation from the sun has a higher frequency distribution compared to that from the earth. The earth acts as a blackbody frequency filter, absorbing high frequency radiation which is converted to heat and radiating low frequency radiation corresponding to the temperature of the earth. The same takes place in the atmosphere. The radiation from the colder atmosphere that hits the earth cannot by itself increase the temperature of the earth, but will reduce the cooling rate of the earth, and since insolation is constant this will theoretically give a slightly higher temperature of the earth. This effect of “backradiation” reducing cooling rate, and thus indirectly increasing the temperature of a body that is constantly heated by a constant heating source, like the sun, is possible only if there are no other temperature influencing mechanisms, – but in the earth – atmosphere system there are numerous feedback mechanisms (more than 100 some claim) that mainly acts to level out temperature differences towards equilibrium.
The reason why electromagnetic radiation from a colder object cannot directly warm a warmer to a higher temperature lies in the physics of blackbody radiation. This is well described by professor Claes Johnson in his work on “Computational Blackbody Radiation” http://www.csc.kth.se/~cgjoh/ambsblack.pdf.
I will try to summarize why radiation from a cold body cannot warm a warmer:
The reason is because the radiation from a cold body has a lower “cut-off” frequency than a warm body. The “cut-off” frequency is the frequency at the maximum energy level of the Planck specter of the radiation from a body at a certain temperature. Only radiation with a higher cut-off frequency compared to the target has enough energy to increase the frequency and hence temperature of another body (the target). Frequencies below the target’s cut-off frequency will resonate with the original frequencies (same temperature) and be re-radiated in all directions (not reflected). The resonating lower (cold) frequency radiation will contribute to the radiation from the warmer target object, and hence contribute to a reduced consumption of the warmer object’s own radiation in such a way that the rate of heat loss by radiation is reduced. When the rate of heat loss is reduced and there is in addition a constant heat source (like the sun) then the temperature will increase. In that way back radiation will act in much the same way as the insulation of a house, or a blanket over a body.
The contribution from the “greenhouse” gases in the atmosphere is, however, so small that the effect is not measureable, – confirmed by you Dr. Spencer and documented in your book “The great global warming blunder”. And besides, the round earth is revolving, there is day and night, and over 100 other factors influencing temperature and climate. Among the important factors determining the temperature of the atmosphere are the gravity effect, latent heat and convection.
In all respect, Dr. Spencer, I find the analysis of Joseph Postma more convincing than the flat earth and cold sun energy budget of Kiehl and Trenberth. The Slayers have put up here http://principia-scientific.org/supportnews/latest-news/196-roy-spencer-tells-slayers-put-up-or-shut-up.html
—————
After that I had a private email conversation with Dr. Spencer and asked why I was blocked, and he replied that it was because he blocks comments which include certain names or IP addresses related to the same Slayers arguments which have been going on for years, and which he was no longer allowing to clutter up the comments section. In this case, it was either mention of “Joe Postma” or links to the Slayer’s website. Besides the comments perpetuate a variety of incorrect assumptions, and Postma’s views violate basic thermodynamics.
Hi Petter,
Your discussion and questions are good and insightful. Of course, Spencer has embarrassed himself badly with the “put up” challenge and it is now known by people who actually read things (which is few, unfortunately) that Spencer is a fraud and that him and others gate-keep the discussion. So, all they have now is to create a front where they try to ignore us.
Petter Tuvnes says (2013/05/22 at 2:57 AM): “…“backradiation” indirectly will reduce the rate of cooling of a warmer object, and thus the temperature will increase if you in addition have a constant heat source heating the warmer object.
…The radiation from the colder atmosphere that hits the earth cannot by itself increase the temperature of the earth, but will reduce the cooling rate of the earth,
…The reason why electromagnetic radiation from a colder object cannot directly warm a warmer to a higher temperature lies in the physics of blackbody radiation.”
==============================================================
I am sorry, Petter, but this is crap, because you contradict yourself. Two contradictions, assuming you know about the Sun being a heat source.
Greg, are you agreeing with “back radiation slows cooling…”? I am not understanding this particular concept. I don’t see how back radiation could slow cooling. Would not this slowed cooling ultimately need to result in the cooler object having the ability to also warm a warmer object? If the ground was 35C and the air above it was 25C, will the ground cool to 30C more slowly than if the air was 20C? or 10C? I can see where the ground could not cool to a temperature lower than the air temperature, but I don’t see how it would slow the rate of cooling to have a cooler air.
It is easy enough to get around filters like Roy has: http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/05/time-for-the-slayers-to-put-up-or-shut-up/#comment-80841
http://tinyurl.com/p2cr6ox
Petter Tuvnes says (2013/05/22 at 2:57 AM): “…“backradiation” indirectly will reduce the rate of cooling of a warmer object, and thus the temperature will increase if you in addition have a constant heat source heating the warmer object.
Petter, so much confusion arises in climate discussions because the context and conditions are unstated or assumed. What you are describing above is a radiative flux between a continuously heated warm object and a cooler object. As the cooler object warms, approaching the temperature of the warm object, less heat flows from the warmer to the cooler. In an enclosed system (context), with no means for heat to escape, both objects will heat to the maximum potential of the heat source.
However, the earth and atmosphere exist as an open, not closed system. That is, the atmosphere is continually releasing heat upwards toward space. In that context, heat continues to flow, and since the solar heat stops overnight, cooling is accelerated, not delayed. Considering that radiative transfers occur at the speed of light, any delay by CO2 can only be a few milliseconds, compared to the hours of nightime.
squid2112 says: “Greg, are you agreeing with “back radiation slows cooling…”?”
=================
😯 No, I am not.
squid2112 says: “I don’t see how back radiation could slow cooling. Would not this slowed cooling ultimately need to result in the cooler object having the ability to also warm a warmer object?”
=================
Yes, it would. https://climateofsophistry.com/2013/05/13/slayers-putting-up-not-shutting-up/#comment-2029
OMG….. We’re living in a thermos!!! Thanks for clearing that up Mr. Weinstein. Oh, excuse me, …………..Dr. Weinstein.
God help us all if this is how our Phds explain things to everyone!
Joe, keep up the good work and keep explaining things in a manner I would expect from a true Scientist and a Doctor! Spencer and Weinsein can keep their thermos and home insulation research going until they figure things out. Sadly, I have little hope for them. I fully expect them to go to their graves trying to prove that a thermos actually makes your coffee hotter than when you first pour it in there!!
Too far gone!!!!
Bart says (2013/05/23 at 2:41 PM): “…Spencer and Weinsein can keep their thermos and home insulation research going until they figure things out. Sadly, I have little hope for them. I fully expect them to go to their graves trying to prove that a thermos actually makes your coffee hotter than when you first pour it in there!!”
=============================================================
I do not think they have ever said that.
They might have expressed the idea that the reflective coating makes coffee cool at a lower rate thanks to back radiation, which is equally absurd to me. But not to you, right?
@Greg, whew…. you had me worried there .. 😉
Ron C: I think you have interpreted my comment correct. I was thinking of a theroretically closed system with a constant heat source where we only need to consider radiation, but in reality the sun-atmosphere-earth+ocean system is open and influenced by more than a hundred temperature and climate influencing mechanisms. The theoretical “backradiation” cooling rate reduction will of cource vanish when the sun goes down, because then there will be no heat source at the night side. The theoretical “backradiation” effect on the earth temperature is probably so small that it is probably impossible to measure. At least Dr. Spencer has not been able to yet.
Greg House: Regarding your crap comment, I will refer to Douglas Cotton here:
Click to access psi_radiated_energy.pdf
Radiated Energy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics
5. The concept of resonant scattering
“In fairness, there would be a slight slowing of the rate of cooling when the temperatures
approach each other, because of the way in which the area between the Planck curves reduces.”
Come to think of it, the Stefan-Boltzmann law itself refutes the idea of ‘back radiation’, doesn’t it?
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/05/a-simple-experiment-to-show-how-cool-objects-can-keep-warm-objects-warmer-still/#comment-80999
There is no heating caused by backradiation. You’ve described it so eloquently Kristian, that backradiation can not be a heat source for the source.
Kristian, I read through all of the comments on that post last night (I cannot post, I have been (proudly) labeled a “Slayer” and thus blocked from commenting at Roy’s or WUWT sites, for simply asking questions). To you I give applause.
What I found particularly remarkable was the fact that you were repeatedly accused of changing the argument. I see absolutely none of that. It was Roy and his cohorts that continually danced around the age old topic of “can a cooler object heat a warmer object”. This simple question you stated and re-stated, ad-nauseum, to no avail. You stuck to your guns with intelligent argument and repeated restatement of the facts and question at hand. I am astounded by the treatment you received from Roy and Joel in particular. The utter stupidity that they display, I find breathtaking.
Well that’s what they do. THEY lie and create sophistry and then accuse others of doing it. It’s just that simple. You have to ask if Roy Spencer is actually defending climate alarm or if he’s an actual scientist? Obviously, he’s defending climate alarm. Just look at what this post is about. He’s been outed as a fraud. Roy Spencer is a fraud, and that is now an established fact with a public paper trail. Roy and Joel may not even be real people, but simply personas created to manufacture a position. Or, they are real people but they’re paid by the Donor’s Trust to defend what they’re told to defend, because they’re sell-outs. Either way you cut it, they’re frauds, intellectual frauds at the minimum. What kind of actual scientist, real person, denies that time-dependence exists and is a real thing, and that real sunshine does everything by itself that the GHE models can’t, etc.
Joe, I guess you overlooked one comment of mine, it is still “awaiting moderation”…
Petter Tuvnes says (2013/05/24 at 4:15 AM): “Greg House: Regarding your crap comment, I will refer to Douglas Cotton here:”
=================================================
Well, it must be right, because Douglas Cotton said it was right, thank you, I am trying to stop thinking now, it is not necessary any longer, I only need to ask Douglas Cotton, he can not be wrong.
Wait, there still can be a problem. What if Couglas Dotton disagrees with Douglas Cotton? Who should I believe then? Don’t know…
Oh sorry Greg, right. Yes, I know that fellow, he doesn’t want to get in an argument with anyone…just was dropping by to make a general statement and lend support.
Kristian says (2013/05/24 at 5:28 AM): “Come to think of it, the Stefan-Boltzmann law itself refutes the idea of ‘back radiation’, doesn’t it?
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/05/a-simple-experiment-to-show-how-cool-objects-can-keep-warm-objects-warmer-still/#comment-80999“
=====================================================
Kristian, this is a really good one. There is only one little problem: a lay person would not understand it. Maybe you could put it in a more understandable way. It dies not need to be very precise either. From my experience, lay persons have some difficulties with special terms and numbers. If you say in your explanation “200+400=600”, they understand it, but “5.75+3.74=9.49” causes a sort of traffic jam in their minds. Terms like “emissivity” make it even harder. Please, keep in mind that you can not convince a liar, he knows. You need to convince journalists, politicians and general public who come to those blogs for information.
I brought up this argument elsewhere a while back and I recall lots of dismissive gestures, but never saw a good reason why it doesn’t apply.
The black body curves for the Sun and Earth are often presented like this:
Or this:
Which gives the impression that the often used “the atmosphere is selectively opaque at the wavelengths where the Earth emits more than the Sun does” is not nonsense.
There are no wavelengths where the Earth emits more than the Sun does, how could there possibly be?
Intrinsically the Earth does not emit at greater spectral intensity than the Sun. However, we do need to scale the Solar intensity down by the inverse square law (solar radius divided by solar distance, squared) in order to get an in-situ comparison of the spectral fluxes at the position of the Earth. In this case, at very long wavelength, starting at about 5500 microns, the Earth does emit more flux than it receives from the Sun – in terms of flux and only at that wavelength and beyond.
Even with inverse square distance scaling applied to the flux (maybe it could be done via the emissivity parameter in that snapshot?), it is interesting to plot the intensities on a linear scale rather than a log scale, because it shows just how feeble the terrestrial output is compared to the solar input.
I scaled the curves for TOA and Surface:
And yeah, 5500 microns is a good ways into the microwave bands isn’t it?
Data from here btw: http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/spectra/am1.5/ASTMG173/ASTMG173.html
I am finding it interesting that every couple of weeks WUWT (and a couple others) release posts on new papers that “show a lower climate sensitivity”, ie: “the GHE is less than we thought”. But these same people can’t grasp the fact that the GHE doesn’t exist at all. They just continue to hang on to the fallacy of the GHE and insist it exists while adjusting their sensitivity hypothesis’ lower and lower. So, when they finally get down to a sensitivity of zero, are they still going to hold on to the GHE hypothesis?
Joe,
Could somebody clarify a slight confusion in my mind about the subject of ‘backradiation’ please?
I am not a scientist, but can cope with most basic scientific principles.
To me, the presence of ‘backradiation’ is only relevant if the energy provided by the backradiation is absorbed for net energy gain by the source. If a warmer source emits radiation to a cooler object, the cooler object warms because its energy level is increased by the warmer body’s radiation. I hope I have that sorted.
But when a cooler body emits radiation (because it is above absolute zero) toward a warmer body, the warmer body can either:
1. Absorb the radiation for net energy gain.
2. Absorb the energy but not for net gain.
3. Not absorb the energy at all (maybe deflected?)
I suspect answer 2. is correct.
If answer 1. is correct, then the following analogy would be logical:
I place a one-bar electric fire in a room and switch it on. The room warms and reaches equilibrium. The energy output of the fire is fixed.
I then place a second, exactly similar, electric fire in the room close to the first fire but I do not switch it on.
According to the AGW backradiation theory, the first (hot) fire should get warmer because it is absorbing energy from the second (cool) fire.
The logical extension of this argument is that, if I then place several more identical electric fires around the first one, the first fire will gain even more energy and heat up even more.
Is this really what they mean?
“Slowing cooling by backradiation” would seem to imply that the equilibrium temperature of the room is greater when the first fire is surrounded by several switched-off fires than it is when there was just the first fire.
Is this correct?
Finally, am I on the right track with the ‘absorbing for net energy gain’ argument?
Regards,
Arfur Bryant
Well we know that cool things don’t heat up hot things (can you believe this is what these frauds have reduced physics to, to having to state these things?…) and that cold things don’t help (in any/some way) heat up hot things. If a hot things heats a cool thing, this doesn’t mean that the hotter thing now has to get hotter also, as is argued by GHE supporters who don’t understand physics or the math of heat flow.
So indeed, if a hot thing heats a cool thing, the presence of the warmer cool thing doesn’t mean that the hot source has to become hotter still. This is a convoluted abuse of mathematics and physics that has been created by fraud and frauds.
Also remember, that photon impingement is not like absorbing a particle of matter. Photons can do something which in general matter can not – which is resonate. What is becoming clear is that there is a big hole in the general understanding of thermodynamics in regards to radiant energy; it is within this gap of general knowledge that sophists create their garbage.
So to clarify reality: when a hot object warms up a cooler object, this does not mean or require or imply that the hot object now has to heat up also, due to backradiation from the cooler object or whatever. This is simply saying that a source can not be a double-source to itself. Nothing can create higher temperature with its own heat.
However, the same conditions apply for a cooler object heated with its own source and with a hotter object nearby: nature does not have have a conscious way of tracking who has a source and who doesn’t, who should be doing what because of that, etc., and then differentiating the outcome of such conditions. The only conditions which exist on the outside are hotter vs. cooler objects and their interaction; there is no tracking of who has a source and who doesn’t. So, the same reality applies whether the colder object has its own source or if it is heated by the warmer source. Indeed, the colder object with its own source will be heated by the warmer object in any case, and again, a hot object warming a cooler target does not ever mean that the hotter source has to heat itself up in order to warm up something cooler, whether or not the cooler object has an independent source of energy.
So, Claes Johnson has done a lot of work on the physics of thermal absorption of radiation, and his answer would be somewhere between your 2 & 3. 1 is not correct: a cold object does not cause a hotter source to become hotter still. We all know this doesn’t happen with conduction: it doesn’t occur with radiation either.
When you ask “is this really what they mean?”, yes, it is what they mean. Essentially, if you put more and more ice-cubes around your body, they think it would heat you up.
Arfur Bryant – like Arthur Bryant, after the BBQ shop? Cute alias.
squid2112 says (2013/05/25 at 12:41 AM): “I am finding it interesting that every couple of weeks WUWT (and a couple others) release posts on new papers that “show a lower climate sensitivity”, ie: “the GHE is less than we thought”. But these same people can’t grasp the fact that the GHE doesn’t exist at all.”
========================================================
Why do you think they can not grasp it? There is no presumption of honesty.
One possible explanation is this. Saying “Shut up, “greenhouse effect” and “global warming” exist, you are banned” is bad propaganda. Instead, saying “one paper says it is not that high, and it will be not so warm” is good propaganda.
Joe,
Thank you for taking the time to respond to my post. Sounds like I’m not too far off. Much obliged!
As for this:
[“Arfur Bryant – like Arthur Bryant, after the BBQ shop? Cute alias.”]
Not an alias! I didn’t realise I made BBQ sauce. Must order some online and see what the fuss is all about!
Arfur
@Greg,
I don’t know what their reasons, but I find their path disturbing. I guess I feel this way because I have spent a lot of years following and participating in debates (supportive) on the WUWT site and with a lot of folks that frequent there. Now I find they are just exactly like the alarmists. They are FOS in my opinion. They believe they are riding a big white horse and that they, and they alone have the answers and wish not to hear from the little people (such as me). I am very saddened by the fact that I can no-longer support a group I once thought to be open and honest with integrity. My eyes are open, and I have learned they are posers, spewing forth the same propagandized bullshit as the alarmists, with just a slightly different flavor.
Thankfully we still have folks like Joe and PSI (and fine folks such as yourself)… please keep the truth going .. I am really getting sick and tired of lies, and I for one am not going to take it anymore. I am not going to let anyone get away with sophist crap without calling them out.
Now, back to the yard work .. at least nature is honest 🙂 .. cheers, and have a great weekend!
Joseph E Postma says:
2013/05/25 at 10:00 AM
So indeed, if a hot thing heats a cool thing, the presence of the warmer cool thing doesn’t mean that the hot source has to become hotter still. This is a convoluted abuse of mathematics and physics that has been created by fraud and frauds.
———-
I have experimentally demonstrated a cool object warming a hot object how do you explain this?
———
JP
When you ask “is this really what they mean?”, yes, it is what they mean. Essentially, if you put more and more ice-cubes around your body, they think it would heat you up.
————–
No – what is said is if you are surrounded by absolute zero and you put ice cubes around you then you will warm up. There is no cold radiation from absolute zero. There is no cold radiation from ice. There is only different levels of radiation
1. You’re confusing insulation and/or reduction of convection with the GHE. 2. The icecubes get heated by you…they don’t heat you up and you don’t have to warm up in order to heat them up – it wouldn’t happen by conduction, and it doesn’t happen by radiation. Touching icecubes all over your body doesn’t heat you up. Not touching them near your body doesn’t heat you up either.
Joseph E Postma says: 2013/05/25 at 9:18 PM
1. You’re confusing insulation and/or reduction of convection with the GHE. 2. The icecubes get heated by you…they don’t heat you up and you don’t have to warm up in order to heat them up – it wouldn’t happen by conduction, and it doesn’t happen by radiation. Touching icecubes all over your body doesn’t heat you up. Not touching them near your body doesn’t heat you up either.
—————
If a human body was in space between galaxies with a bottle of oxygen for breathing.
Are you saying it would make no difference if you were in an ice sphere (painted inside to give BB i.e. no reflection of body radiation) at -10°C or if you were floating unprotected.
i.e.
No air = no conduction or convection in both cases.
Body is warmer than ice so no radiation absorbed
Body is warmer than space so no radiation absorbed.
Body therefore cools at same rate in both cases????
Your body produces its own heat. If in empty space, the radiant energy goes out to infinity; if surrounded by ice, you heat the ice with your radiant energy until it equilibrates to the temperature you provide.
Joseph E Postma says: 2013/05/26 at 8:14 PM
Your body produces its own heat. If in empty space, the radiant energy goes out to infinity; if surrounded by ice, you heat the ice with your radiant energy until it equilibrates to the temperature you provide.
—–
You did not answer:
[does the] Body therefore cools at same rate in both cases????
[JPReply: That was the answer. The body wasn’t cooling originally, it is a heat source with constant heat generation. If in empty space, the radiant energy goes out to infinity; if surrounded by ice, you heat the ice with your radiant energy until it equilibrates to the temperature you provide.]
I think an easier way to explain the difference between the positions being discussed here is simply what state they tend towards.
Joe, myself, all of modern physics, and I imagine others think that a warm body surrounded by a colder body will tend towards a state where entropy is maximized. That would be when both bodies approach the same temperature, and no more work could be extracted from the system.
For some reason those who hold that this is the correct description of events have a problem with being told that the system would tend towards a state where some sort of gradient is maintained as an end state.
Indeed, this end state being posited is one where the warm body undergoes an actual temperature increase as it raises the temperature of the colder body, and then some handwavy nonsense about “but it’s warmer in comparison to an absolute zero background, so it’s ok to say it is actually geting warmer because yadda yadda yadda” which just looks like an effort to tiptoe around the flaws in the way the system is initially described by trying to force the argument to remain within the aforementioned flawed paradigm.
Hmm, seems WUWT has done experiment attempting to demonstrate the light bulb hypothesis. Looks interesting. I haven’t thoroughly mulled it over yet, but it will be interesting to read comments.
@Max; Yep.
While at first glance WUWT’s experiment looks impressive, I am still left with the question, if what Anthony is portraying is true, why hasn’t someone invented an extremely efficient energy producing machine? My thoughts run back to first principals, and thus, there has to be something wrong with this experiment. You cannot get energy from nothing!
PSI folks, please tear this one apart. I know this cannot be possible, and hence, there has to be a flaw in the experiment itself.
Never mind … duh, I already see the flaw in this experiment. He is talking about the “surface” of the light bulb gaining heat, but the “surface” (hence, the out side glass) is what he is measuring, he is NOT measuring the source of the heat (the fulfillment), and thus, is NOT measuring an increase in temperature of the heat source itself.
You know, this is like being at the carnival, and trying to discover the tricks of the midway hawkers. There’s always a catch.
The problem is amateurs running websites that give them far too large of egos, supported by people with PhD’s who don’t even know basic math concepts. Yes I see what is wrong with the experiment immediately.
Joe, would it be possible for you and your PSI folks to tear this apart in extreme detail? I know this requires work and effort, but I would love to understand exactly why this is flawed. Every time we dance around this mulberry bush, I learn a lot more, and I am sure others do too. I wish I knew enough physics to be helpful as I would gladly volunteer to assist, but alas, I am but a commoner.
Yes I will write an article for response.
Good grief… Once again, I have read some of the most absurd comments on this experiment. I am left wondering, how can a simpleton such as myself understand the vast majority of this topic, and yet there are so many people commenting on there that have absolutely no clue as to what is going on. I am amazed beyond words. I totally get the fundamental principals of this whole thing, yet the stupid stuff I am reading is leaving me breathless.
Yes, indeed, Jeff, indeed! That is precisely it. People just don’t know what they hell they’re even saying and they’re just making it all up as they go along, making sense nowhere. As you may know from my writing I am always at odds in deciding if it is stupidity or knowledgeable malice which is at work here. Both perhaps. But the stupidity sure looks like malice, and the malice sure looks like stupidity.
BTW just wait till you read the analysis of WUWT’s “experiment”. After Spencer’s face plant, Watts takes the cake.
I’ll just leave this here:
Max™ says:
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
May 27, 2013 at 1:27 pm
Uh, a couple questions.
1. Is the glass of the bulb itself the source of the light or is it the filament?
2. Is the filament temperature being monitored?
3. Why is this an attempt to refute a claim which isn’t made? I thought the slayers were saying the bulb won’t become brighter, not that it wouldn’t be warmer if you collected the light it emits and redirect it back onto the bulb?
I’m just not sure how measuring the temperature of the glass on a light bulb when you reflect the light back onto it is supposed to be proof or disproof of any of the points they make.
Wow I can barely read this thread because it gives me a headache.
What I would like to know why stars can’t be made brighter in a telescope even under increased magnification off several mirrors parallel with each other……, he he he……..
Have you looked through a cassegrain or schmidt-cassegrain telescope where the incoming light reflected off the main mirror then concentrated to a smaller area of the secondary then made yet smaller again for it to go through the CENTER of the main mirror.But the total brightness of the incoming light never increased the entire time and actually loss some of it on the way into the ocular or CCD unit.The reflective coatings on the mirrors are often rated for 97-99% light transmission for high end telecsopes and 90-95% for most telescoped above walmart grade telescopes.
I bring it up because when I used to have a few telescopes with the biggest being the Obsession 25″ F 5 Telescope in possesion,I would read in astronomy books about how magnification changes does not change the TOTAL brightness level of the image just changes the size of the image to a larger size when magnified thus speading out the light to a larger area but the total amount of incoming light is the same despite that It may APPEAR dimmer to the eye.
The light bulb radiates at a set temperature and luminosity as designed and will not get hotter because the source filament is already several hundred degrees and the surrounding air is around room temperature thus making it impossible for “backradiation” at ROOM TEMPERATURE to add to the bulbs internal temperature that is at least 100 degrees hotter than the surrounding air right outside the bulb.
When will this madness end?
@Max…yep basically. I have it written up more verbosely and am waiting on other PSI people to approve and post it there, then will post here as I did with Spencer.
Nice, Tommy.
Hi Joe,
I see that you twigged, or is that cottoned on, to the fact that Anthony and Roy are both making the same mistake, they measured the temperature of the outer casing/cover, of the heat source, and not the source itself. In the case of Roy he measured the temperature rise of the glass shroud/cover of the heating element and measured how placing a metal object close to it increased the temperature of the glass cover. Anthony mentions that he could not use an ordinary lamp because of all the various temperature ranges. Tell him to use a clear glass lamp and record the temperature of the filament.
The only household utensil that can be used for this experiment is a plain old toaster with open wire elements. Put a slice of bread to be toasted in the toaster and measure how the slice of bread cools down the heating element. Ha-Ha, you’ll come out as toast!
Ooh that’s a good idea…maybe I’ll use it in my response article, Loodt.
Oh, I didn’t notice David Siddons actually made the “gets warmer” claim in a comment, though it seems like Watts is attributing that to you, Joe.
Sorry what is being said exactly, where?
Squid astutely writes:
“Never mind … duh, I already see the flaw in this experiment. He is talking about the “surface” of the light bulb gaining heat, but the “surface” (hence, the out side glass) is what he is measuring, he is NOT measuring the source of the heat (the fulfillment), and thus, is NOT measuring an increase in temperature of the heat source itself.”
Bingo!
We are both commoners and yet see the obvious flaw from the start.
The bulb is shedding many,many thousands of photons at high speed and energy level against a few hundred backscattered photons of high speed and much lower energy level.There is no detection device sensitive enough to find the warming effect of the “backradiation” onto the bulb filament since the postulated effect is lost in the one sided energy flow and to consider when the energy level is so one sided (Top of the Hill) that it is not credible to claim it is warming up a FIXED energy source on the inside of the glass surface from a backscatter because it is already much cooler thus no energy can be given back to it.
One way flow from the top of the energy hill (Filament) going down the slope (outside the bulb into the room that is at least 200 degrees cooler) cooling as it goes spreading the energy flow throughout the room that becomes diffused by area.This is obvious when you stand close to a lighted bulb and walk backwards looking at it for a couple seconds.The heat and luminosity quickly drops right in front of you.It is so freaking obvious and yet so many fail to get it……….
It’s cut up a bit and hard to tell what exactly is written by whom.
Yes Anthony is misinterpreting the “does not heat up” phrase and running with it; meanwhile, his own video shows that the lamp doesn’t get brighter…lol. He just doesn’t know what the heck he’s doing.
Oh, sunsettommy, tungsten filament temperatures range from 1000 to 2000 K warmer than the room.
sunsettommy says:2013/05/27 at 2:50 PM
What I would like to know why stars can’t be made brighter in a telescope even under increased magnification off several mirrors parallel with each other……, he he he……..
—————————
wiki
Multiple Mirror Telescope (1979-1998)
The MMT operated between 1979 and 1998 with 6 mirrors, each with a diameter of 1.8 meters, providing the equivalent gathering area of a 4.5-meter telescope, making it the third largest optical telescope in the world at the time of its dedication.
—————————
@jp
thefordprefect says:2013/05/26 at 9:44 PM
[JPReply: That was the answer. The body wasn’t cooling originally, it is a heat source with constant heat generation. If in empty space, the radiant energy goes out to infinity; if surrounded by ice, you heat the ice with your radiant energy until it equilibrates to the temperature you provide.]
This is badly worded response but from this I assume you are saying that the body will go into hypothermia at exactly the same rate if surrounded by, but not touching, Ice at 0°C or -100°C or background radiation at 3K? Please will you confirm.
Your question doesn’t make sense because a body produces its own heat and so won’t be going into hypothermia. The body isn’t cooling, it is a heat source with constant heat generation. If in empty space, the radiant energy goes out to infinity; if surrounded by ice, you heat the ice with your radiant energy until it equilibrates to the temperature you provide. If the ice was touching you, then you would get hypothermia.
If an object with a temperature but no internal heat source is introduced, and no other body around, then this object will cool to the ambient energy field, either 3K if empty space (CMB energy), or whatever the temperature the ice is.
Anthony has just prepared a very good video to show how lack of ventilation around a lamp can cause fires. His local fire department can put this video to good use in training fire fighters.
Has he never heard of all the stage fires, and how these days stage lighting is very specialized trade? What he demonstrated is that the electric current that heats up the element to about 1400 degrees Celsius, so that it can emit light, keeps running and unless you make sure the lamp can cool down, sooner or later, it will heat up the surrounds and either cause a fire, or hopefully fuse, before a fire starts. Only a small part of the electric power is emitted as light, the rest is light. That is why they – the Green Jihadist – banned the use of the old-fashioned incandescent light bulbs.
Seeing that Anthony lives in America, on the east coast, surely someone from the stage and sound guild can explain to him that what he is doing is dangerous, and he should not use a light bulb unless he follows the manufacturers instructions and guidelines.
Max,I looked it up and see that the common bulb is indeed super hot!
Temperature of an Incandescent Light Bulb
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/1999/AlexanderEng.shtml
Standardize temperature range of the bulb filaments are between 2,800 K to 3,700 K
Quoting from the link:
“Incandescent lamps are the most common sources of electric lighting. The mostcommon incandescent lamp is the conventional household bulb. Incandescent lampsare based on the principle of incandescence, which states that solids and gasesemit visible light when heated to a high enough temperature. The bulb consistsof a filament positioned inside a glass bulb filled surrounded by an inert gas.This gas is usually composed of a combination of argon and nitrogen, which doesnot react with the tungsten or the bulb. The gas also acts to extend the lifeof the filament. The filament is a piece of thin coiled wire and is part of thelight bulb that produces the light and is usually made out of tungsten — a materialthat can withstand incredibly high temperatures without melting. Despite its minisculeappearance, the filament is about one meter in length wound into a spiral whichis then wound again into wider spiral. This spiral design increases the efficiencyof the bulb. Electric current flows through the filament when the lamp is turnedon. The electrons, which make up the electric current carry energy and collidewith the tungsten atoms which then gain kinetic energy. This increases the temperatureof the filament to about 2500 °C. As a result the filament glows.”
Thus making their “backradiation” claims more incredible because of the vast temperature difference between the filament and the room temperature level.
thefordprefect
“Multiple Mirror Telescope (1979-1998)
The MMT operated between 1979 and 1998 with 6 mirrors, each with a diameter of 1.8 meters, providing the equivalent gathering area of a 4.5-meter telescope, making it the third largest optical telescope in the world at the time of its dedication.”
You seem confused here because what you post does not contradict what I wrote:
“What I would like to know why stars can’t be made brighter in a telescope even under increased magnification off several mirrors parallel with each other……, he he he……..”
I was talking about magnifying the light INSIDE of a cassegrain telescope while you are writing about light gathering capability of a Richey-Chretain Telescope which are two different things.
The amount of incoming light will not be increased by several reflections of smaller parallel mirrors inside of a telescope without additional enhancement (which are available) of the light.Thus no increase of light will happen as per my own experience using many telescopes and even with the Observatory grade 31″ F 18 Cassegrain Telescope at 3,100 Feet elevation.Incoming image of a star does not get brighter and brighter in the ocular and you know it if you ever viewed one at night.
The MMT is a specially designed multiple mirror plan to reduce the weight of the scope and increase the resolving power over a sincle concave mirror of comparable surface area.That is why they made it that way.
Joseph E Postma says: 2013/05/27 at 3:41 PM
If an object with a temperature but no internal heat source is introduced, and no other body around, then this object will cool to the ambient energy field, either 3K if empty space (CMB energy), or whatever the temperature the ice is.
————-
Why not just please tell me the answer to this question which I thought I had asked above
—- Is the rate of heat loss the same in both cases – Ice or 3K?
I have answered the question. For a body with constant heat generation/temperature, which was the original question, it will send the energy out to space, or heat up the ice if that’s what is there. Neither case require the source body to heat itself up beyond what it already intrinsically is; it just gives its energy to its surroundings, whatever that may be. It is a heat transfer question, not a heat “loss” question, and so the question is poorly formed. There is no real heat transfer to empty space since space itself doesn’t hold heat or a temperature, other than considering your radiant emission to be transfer out to infinity. With ice around though, then there is proper heat transfer to material, and the rate of heat transfer as we know is a function of the temperature differential between the source body and the ice. When the ice comes to the same temperature as the source, then there is no more heat transfer, although there is still energy transfer through the ice to the outside of the ice, and then emission from there to infinity again. Nowhere in this process does the source heat itself up with its own energy in any way and violate the laws of thermodynamics.
Ignition Temperature of Paper is 230 degrees celsius
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2003/LewisChung.shtml
WOOD BURNING COMBUSTION starts burning between 212 and 450 Degrees F (100-232 degrees C) but when it reaches 540 degrees F (282 degrees C) the moisture and basic gases are consumed or driven out.Then secondary combustion stage commences that raises the heat to around 900-1100 degrees F (482-593 degrees C) if sufficient oxygen is available.
http://www.heartheat.com/flameworksOLD/index_WoodComb.htm
Stage lights can burn the place down rather easily without adequate ventilation.I have seen and read actors stating that it can be hot on the stage.”Backradiation” is not sufficient to boil water or start fires because it is diffuse energy thus can’t warm up something that can be hundreds of C higher.
IR is much lower on the energy totem pole than Visible light as well known by being outside on a warm sunny day.
My humble evaluation of the Anthony Watts experiment: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/27/new-wuwt-tv-segment-slaying-the-slayers-with-watts/#comment-1318459.
Of course, others have already said that on that thread, more or less.
Max™ says:
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
May 28, 2013 at 3:28 am
How to control for convective changes is simple enough. Just run the experiment three times with the following modifications:
1. A sheet of glass which remains in place near the light bulb.
2. Get three sheets of material to place against the glass, on the other side from the bulb: another sheet of glass, a sheet of black glass, and a mirror all with the same mass and density, differing only in their transmittance, reflectance, and absorptivity.
3. Run the experiment as you did, placing the clear/black/mirrored material after temperatures stabilized, leave it until temperatures stabilize again, then for a final bit of interesting data, turn off the bulb and plot the rate at which it cools.
___________________________________
I would expect the glass/glass run will remain unchanged (for the most part) as the only radiation passing through towards the bulb would be from the wall or experimenter. When you add the black or mirrored material, you’re reducing the ability of the glass bulb to shed heat, and note for all past and future posts I make, the following statement holds under all conditions and in any context: radiation is not heat, heat is the transfer of energy from a warm body to a cold one, which includes thermal emission of radiation.
The real question I have is if you have some plan to test for whether the bulb became brighter, rather than the glass becoming hotter, as you did originally, Anthony.
not sure why this hasn’t come up before in the thread, but hey.
Exactly, Max.
They don’t know what they’re doing.
Max™ says:
May 28, 2013 at 3:16 pm
Soooo, the bulb does not become brighter after all?
Hmmm…
It is unfortunate that the graphic had the bit about “the bulb heats up”, as I said, I never noticed that as you correctly state it won’t become brighter, this experiment confirmed that, yet it is now a rousing disproof of everything? >.<
Note that they’re both using frosted bulbs, which, like their opacity, hides the truth.
My humble evaluation of the second experiment: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/28/slaying-the-slayers-with-watts-part-2/#comment-1319878. Seems to be a fake.
Note the strategy is to ignore our actual answer to Spencer’s challenge and create a sideshow instead on something that is rife for obfuscation and misinterpretation. Changing goal posts as fast as they can!
Greg,your humble evaluation was too much for Anthony since it was snipped out completely.
Gee this guy Anthony really contributes to science debate doesn’t he…
Greg House says (2013/05/28 at 7:21 PM): “My humble evaluation of the second experiment: … Seems to be a fake.”
============================================================
😯 It is not there any longer: DELETED! My comment, of course, not the fake “experiment”.
I have made a screenshot precautionary: http://i44.tinypic.com/2upvn6p.jpg. Here is the text of my comment:
“My opinion on the report presented above.
Compared to the experiment presented yesterday, the results contradict each other. Both can not be true, so at least one report is not correct. I think that the one presented yesterday by Antony was genuine. Hence the one presented above is not. I do not buy it, sorry. Another point is that the Antony’s one has not proven what it was intended to prove, but let us put it aside.
In the Antony’s experiment the convection cooling of the bulb was reduced by the mirror and it caused (let us say for the debate’s sake, together with the back radiation from the mirror) 10C increase in temperature. In the report presented above much more reduced convection (enclosure!) and much more back radiation from the glass (that is very much opaque to IR) allegedly caused the same 10C increase in temperature. This can not be true. Therefore the central comparison to the effect of the foil can not be true either.
So, Antony made a mistake by misinterpreting the opponent’s point and the “greenhouse effect” as presented by the IPCC and as a result conducted an experiment that was unrelated to the actual point. This is something I can understand. The thing presented above seems to be of quite a different nature to me. But OK, maybe the thermometer was broken, no problem.
P.S. Antony, I misspelled your name to avoid a delay mentioning your name causes, sorry.”
Watts at his quote of the week “high school climate science” thread, tried to claim “the only people who don’t believe in GHGE are the few “dragon slayers” so I chewed his stupid pseudoscience ass out.
Three posts in quick succession which will probably vanish:
Richard Vada says:
August 5, 2013 at 11:56 am
Whenever you get that “heating component” figured out for the refrigerant class of gases in the atmosphere – it’s a frigid nitrogen oxygen bath refrigerated by the phase change refrigerant water – to move an instrument, or when you find the text with the heating component shown for a refrigerant, you let us all know.
The only people on this earth to be laughed at to their face by so many people they’re afraid to go off their own reservation is climatologists who believe in that magic gas story.
Show us some magic gas believers being right about which way an instrument is going to point.
Show us some magic gas believers being right about anything at all.
People laugh at those who believe in the “heating component of refrigerants” with the offhand disdain one reserves for a child who thinks movies are real.
======
Richard Vada says:
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
August 5, 2013 at 12:13 pm
I never read the Dragon Slayer book but I did check the loon-tunes crowd who’s trying to bark magic gas is real.
Magical back and forth-isms un-countable by mathematics of any kind, and undetectable by instruments of any kind swarming between objects two ways, when every instrument and mathematic ever devised shows clearly heat transfer is from more concentrated to less;
the fantasy belief that the lack of any warming for nearly 20 years doesn’t dent their procession of ludicrous and insultingly ill-conceived claims,
the fantasy that lack of a developing tropospheric hotspot isn’t instant death to their bullshoot.
Then there’s the fact that they’re the only bunch of goobers on earth to claim their bullshoot’s “too big to check with an experiment” while “maybe being” in the next hype story, “so small as to be barely measurable” while being “too obvious not to believe in.”
The things you magic gassers say are far and away the most ridiculed statements in modern technological dismissal of luddites who can’t read an instrument or predict which way one’s going to point.
========
Richard Vada says:
August 5, 2013 at 12:28 pm
If magic gas has any traction in reality based science there will be found to be a textbook describing how to project the warming done by the refrigerant in a phase-change refrigeration system.
If it has any reality based values, the infrared astronomy field would have no problem revealing and describing in full, the giant infrared light you’re constantly claiming is in the sky, “too big to not believe in, too small for any instrument to actually measure.”
The insanity of people whose theory can’t even predict the direction a thermometer is going to move, and who systematically preach against entropic thermodynamical motion by charge carriers
claiming people in real sciences believe that crap,
is the mark of just how bad it’s gotten in the world of “opinion based” pseudoscience.
You people have actually tried to redefine science so that something that can’t be tested at all goes beyond hypothesis to be ‘theory’
and where you claim you have a “scientific theory”
that’s not falsifiable.
Your peoples’ claims have included everything from hockey stick generators looking into bore holes to turn trees into magical treemomiturs that are 1/10th degree thermometers,
to the lack of a tropospheric hotspot not proving it wrong,
to the fact there’s a giant gas mirror receiving 168 watts from the earth emitting 324 back down to it, and 324 out toward the sky.
That’s your official scientific earth energy budget. 168 watts from earth gets 324 back. And 324 out the top.
To you that’s science.
To the rest of the world that’s a laughingstock.
It’s not really worth checking up on, but since I put it up there, and it seems to have not been pulled by now, however long afterward this post is – here’s the link to where I ran across the thread, and chewed him out.
“Magical backerds & forth-isms caint no math cownt, ‘an caint no insturmint, mayzhur.
Boy howdie thim thair’s
sum reel,
* * *REEL,* * *
deap thawts.
‘Area 51,
Bigfoot,
and
Magic Gais, Ya’W!’
d.e.g.e.n.e.r.a.t.e.s.
Pingback: Burning Watts with Watts | Climate of Sophistry
” It turns out it isn’t a genius conspiracy or plot to gate-keep such simple questions from being asked; the gatekeepers really are just scientifically illiterate.”
I don’t know about anyone else but that is precisely my definition of gatekeeping.
A conspiracy is simply more than one person committing a crime. In this case we are looking at a conspiracy to commit AGW fraud.
There is no doubt that AGW is a fraud and that many thousands have conspired to perpetrate this fraud. The blogosphere is a digital record of the conspiracy to commit AGW fraud. There is no way to deny AGW fraud is a conspiracy. It is a matter of record.
“the near-zero emissivity of O2 and N2 means that 99% of the atmosphere can hold a higher temperature for a given radiative output than it would otherwise,”
So O2 and N2 radiate but they don’t radiate, right?
All substances radiate/emit, as in emissivity, according to their temperature. O2 and N2 are no exception to that rule.
You cannot claim to be arbiters of truth when you adopt the exact same pseudoscience arguments as those you oppose.
You either come clean and play it 100% straight or you just become another layer in the onion of AGW fraud. Another layer of gatekeepers, another layer of clima-clowns.
All gases are poor radiators, that is why trapped air is such a good insulator. It is at their respective phase change temperatures that they become most powerful radiators. This is the case for ALL gases.
CO2 strongly absorbs and emits IR at around 15µm. This has a corresponding temperature of -80º C, it is no coincidence that this is the phase change temperature of CO2 in our atmosphere.
The Hitran database is not a complete record of the absorption and emission properties of every gas at every temperature. Not by a long way.
A light moment :-
The vacuum flask is the most brilliant invention ever , you put hot soup in it , it stays hot , you put cold tea in it , it stays cold,,,,,,,,How does it know?
Sorry to interrupt the scientific flow.
Hey folks, I am a layman and my battle is the food supply, but I have so much appreciation for Joe and those of you who are truth tellers about this insane “global warming”, which now, of course, has been repackaged into “climate change.” It’s amazing, but not surprising that the same GHE and Climate change garbage has slipped into one of the reasons why round up and 2 4 D has to be “genetically engineered ” into the food. The madness of destroying the food supply to “help dissipate “global warming” means that I have to be engaged in this arena as well. Like I said, I’m no scientist, nor mathematical scholar, but I am a truth seeker and this whole arena is all about control of the climate, the gene, the carbon, the seed, and eventually our souls.
So, please keep up the good work for folks like me.
Hey Samm,
Try these two reads, to learn who is controlling what, and what the options are:
Old World Order
New World Order
Pingback: Willis Eschenbach’s Greenhouse Shell Game | Climate of Sophistry
Pingback: Anthony Watts: Loser | Climate of Sophistry
Pingback: How Anthony Watts and Chrisopher Monckton Helped Prove Slayer Rationalism | Climate of Sophistry
Reblogged this on Climate- Science.