In the last few weeks I have been arguing with both actual flat Earthers and climate radiative greenhouse alarmists at the same time, on different threads on X; they argue the exact same way! Their argumentative strategies are identical: deflect, change topics, change boundary conditions, ignore the answers you gave, ask the same questions as if you never answered, demand proof of basic well-accepted things, redefine terms, straw men, red herrings, etc. One would almost think that they are the same people. And the funny thing is – THEY ARE! It’s incredible, truly. You have actual flat Earthers who you know are going to argue in bad faith, and then you have climate alarmists who you think should act like scientists but because their entire position is based on flat Earth without them ever admitting it, they likewise have to argue just like open flat Earthers have to, in bad faith. It’s amazing. Even if we consider that the climate alarmists are good-faith scientists, they end up having to argue like actual flat Earthers in order to defend…flat Earth theory! Can you believe that this is happening? I mean it’s so funny and absurd! Pick up the Great Noetic Filter if you haven’t yet.
I just want to emphasize how utterly ridiculous this all is. Look at the below diagram. This is the stating point for the greenhouse effect. Forget about it being a flat Earth diagram, the reverse heat flow or slowed cooling or whatever you want to call it, even forget about emission height, even forget about the phrase ‘greenhouse effect’ – What does this diagram claim? What does this diagram demand that the arrows and the radiation has to be responsible for?
What does the diagram do? It makes the surface hotter, and it has some altitude which is cooler. That is therefore a change in temperature, over a change in altitude: ΔT/Δh. This diagram, its “greenhouse effect”, therefore claims responsibility for the lapse rate. It never presents any other possible contribution or cause of the lapse, and so it therefore fully claims responsibility for the existence of the lapse. It’s causative – it causes the lapse rate. It causes the lapse rate because of backradiation, or slowed cooling, or whatever you want to call it.
The ΔT we know from observation and it is 33 K – the difference between the surface temperature (15 °C) and the effective spectral radiative temperature (-18 °C) as seen from space and approximated as a Planckian. This is always compared against a Δh of 5 km, the distance between the surface and the altitude in the atmosphere at which we assume the effective temperature to be a physical temperature – not that the effective temperature is an actual physical temperature, but we make this assumption anyway, without real justification.
But this is how it’s done and everyone knows that everyone does it this way.
The radiative greenhouse effect claims the lapse rate, but does it derive it? Do you see what just happened there? All that was done was that a reference to a physical phenomenon was made – the temperature lapse – and then some arrows and math was drawn which claimed it. Think on that – the lapse was simply claimed, but it was not derived.
Well that’s not how physics works! In physics we derive things. We start with first principles which must be governing the phenomenon in question, principles like energy conservation or thermal equilibrium or ideal gas laws or central forces or forces and accelerations, and then we derive the phenomenon we’re interested in through algebraic manipulations to isolate the terms we need, and then we see if that mathematical physics solution agrees with the observation. If it doesn’t, then we need to either check our work, or reconsider the first principles we’ve applied, or check the observation, or all of this. When we do get a good match between the mathematical physics derivation and observation, then we consider it a success, and we then should be able to comprehend the physical principles involved which have the effects that they require in order to produce the observed phenomenon.
None of that was done with the radiative greenhouse claiming the lapse, and that scheme also left out a veritable swath of first principles such as the ideal gas law, hydrostatic equilibrium, the definition of heat, the definition of the First Law of Thermodynamics, the existence of gravity, the thermal capacity of the air, etc.
Of course, anyone familiar with this debate knows that the true cause of the lapse is the adiabatic effect which is borne out of the first principles of hydrostatic equilibrium, the ideal gas laws, the laws of thermodynamics, the thermal capacity of the air and strength of gravity, and that when you solve the relevant equations, you perfectly derive and physically explain why there is a temperature lapse with altitude as a causative effect of the first principles involved. See the following primers:
Thus, the initial claim of the radiative greenhouse diagram for the temperature lapse was never scientific mathematical physics in the first place.
And then something truly or additionally non-scientific happens, when you show the thermodynamic adiabatic derivation mid-debate: the radiative greenhouse suddenly claims something else. And it does this again. The first time is a relocation of the claim of effect to “setting the height of -18 °C”. That one is refuted on two counts because firstly the adiabatic lapse implies that its own average must be at its average location, and doing so determines the surface temperature, and secondly because raising an emission shell at -18C violates conservation of energy with a fixed input. The second time is a relocation to a slogan of “slowed cooling”, however, this is refuted by night-time observations where cooling is enhanced at the surface rather than slowed.
This behaviour is all clearly outside of the process of normal scientific inquiry. You’re dealing with something which acts like a religion, a sort-of “God of the gaps” strategy to place the radiative greenhouse effect somewhere such that CO2 can still be blamed for something we’re told to not like about the climate. It is all quite pre-meditated and intentional.
Pick up Planet Wars too if you haven’t yet.
