A controversial look at Blackbody radiation and Earth minus GHG's

Yes your analysis is correct.
The albedo of the Earth surface is likely to be even less than the 0.12 value for the Moon.
Reason, the 70% of Earth surface covered by water.
Without the greenhouse gases the extra radiation reaching the surface will largely be short wave infra red(slightly longer than visible red down to 5um).
For this EM region the albedo must be getting near zero.

There are strong arguments to suggest that the atmosphere if anything cools us rather than heats us. Certainly, if we did not have an atmosphere day time temperatures would be a lot hotter than we experience. Night time temperatures may be cooler but the extent to which this would be the case depends upon the heat capacity of the liquid storage reservoirs which cover approximately 3/4 of the surface area of the planet..
The average temperatrure of the globe may be out by several degrees, We do not accurately know its albedo nor its emissivity (which are not constants) and the oceans (which themselves are in effect a greenhouse gas albeit in liquid form) is a vast heat storage reservoir. The earth is not a blackbody and I consider that these fundamental problems make the entire BB assessment unreliable.
Further, I consider that it is misconceived to view the earth’s surface temperature as measured today as the base against which the comparison should be made. We are in the midle of an interglacial period and the earth’s surface is untypical warm. The oceans have an average temperature of about 4 degC and this low temperature will come back to bite. Some weighting should be given to take account that over geological time the average surface temperature of the earth is far less than we are privileged to enjoy today.
What if your calculation (or the accepted BB calculation) was performed 20,000 years ago? Many of the fundamentals would be the same and yet in this scenario, the cAGW crowd would have one believe that GHGs were raising the temperature by only about 23K (not 33K).
In posing that question I am aware that ice extent will have changed the albedo, but may be it was less cloudy elsewhere which would tend to offset the change in albedo made by ice.
I would not be surprised if in the real world GHGs add only a few degrees. It is the presence of water and its properties that keep us warm.

OK, that seems like a pretty silly argument. Take a look at Mars. I think Mars would be pretty close to earth without ghgs. No oceans, no vegetation, no ice no animals, just lots of red dirt. But Mars does not have an albedo of 0, it has an albedo of 0.25 – not too disimilar to that of Earth, and certainly a value which will get you closer to 255K than 279K.
As for the assumption of a perfectly thermally conducting Earth, if you abandon this, you will lower the average temperature. Because of the T^4 dependancy of outgoing radiation, having one part of earth at (say) 245 and another of equal area at 265 will result in more outgoing radiation than having it all at 255. Therefore to achieve the same amount of outgoing radiation, the average temperature needs to be lower than 255.
Anyway, well done for writing this, but make a bit more effort to think things through.

Surely if you want to determine the effects of the sun on a body at the distance of the earth with no atmosphere, just look to the moon.

This is painful to read. You seem ignorant of many things. You even start by saying you don’t know what is meant by a characteristic emission temperature. I mean, that’s not particularly clear language but anyone with a basic physics education knows what is meant by that. You wrongly claim that you can’t use an average temperature to calculate radiation losses. And you have used nearly 2000 words simply to say that you don’t agree with the albedo commonly used in this simplified calculation.
The calculation neglects the greenhouse effect; it doesn’t neglect the reflective properties of the atmosphere. This is because we wish to estimate the magnitude of the greenhouse effect, so we only take that out.

Stephen Wilde says:
December 26, 2011 at 4:23 am
//////////////////////////////////////
I am with you on much of what you have said.
On several occassions I have had arguments with Willis regarding the oceans freezing. He considers that without GHGs the oceans would freeze. I say to him, he is basing that claim on average conditions and one needs to look not at the average condition but rather to look at the considtions prevailing over the tropics. In the tropics, there is enough sloar energy to ensure that the oceans do not freeze at the tropics. The heat in the tropical ocean is then circulated poleward. May be the circulation pattern and extent would be different to that observed today but the material point is that the tropical ocean would not freeze and some of its heat would be distributed elsewhere.
The key to Earth’s climate is the oceans, the properties of water and the water cycle.

who is the author of this? the article only says “news staff” and it isn’t signed either?

A thought experiment. If the earth had an albedo of 0 and you could put whatever imaginary layer you wanted around it (with physical properties, i.e. you can’t use one-way glass that doesn’t exist in the real world). What is the maximum temperature?
Could you get the earth to have a higher temperature than a theoretical perfect black-body? If so, does that seem logical?

Not only is the Earth not a black body but since oceans cover about 7/10th of the surface, a much smaller area than half of a sphere centered directly under the sun can even have the effect of absorption of incoming radiation as clearly shown in this simple experiment in relation to the specific critical angle:

I can find no reference of this in “climate science” and would appreciate any links someone might have, where this is taken into account or, whether this is calculated within the albedo ~0.30 figure used within such calculations used in this post.

steveta_uk says:
December 26, 2011 at 4:24 am
Surely if you want to determine the effects of the sun on a body at the distance of the earth with no atmosphere, just look to the moon.
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Two problems. First, the length of the lunar day. Eg., what would be the average temperature of the moon if a lunar day was only one hour rather than about 27;5 days? This becomes very important when considering the second problem. Second, the moon is a rocky world without the heat storage reservoirs found on Earth (ie., it does not have the equivalent thermal ocean reservoirs).
On Earth, the oceans absorb solar irradiance during the day and then slowly release this at night. The Earth’s rotation of 24 hours playing an important role in this. There is long enough daylight for the oceans to respond to the warmth of the sun, but not too much darkness to permit them to fully convcet/conduct and radiate away the heat so absorbed. If the Earth rotated on its axis once every 100 years, the conditions on Earth would be radically different even though we would still be receiving the same amount of solar energy input.
The Earth is a water world and cannot be likened to a rocky world. As far as I understand matters BB calculations do not work properly for the moon nor for any of the planets in the solar system and the Earth (due to its watery nature) is far more complicated.
I consider the entire rational behind the BB calculations for the Earth to be misconceived . .

“If I am correct, then the use of 255 K in the computation of the Earth surface temperature difference with and without greenhouse gases is invalid.”
Yes of course it is. It’s the earth without an atmosphere or ocean and an albedo of zero. The average temperature of the moon is 250K. It has an albedo of 0.15.
Ask the fraudsters sometime to take the ocean out of their climate models and see what happens. The global ocean is where most of the greenhouse effect happens. Water is quite transparent to visible light and quite opaque to infrared. It’s more opaque than water vapor and far more opaque than CO2. Transparency to visible light and opacity to infrared are the properties which distinguish greenhouse gases from non-greenhouse gases. Since gases are technically fluids and liquid water has the requisite properties for greenhouse warming one can then quickly realize that greenhouse heating of the ocean is what does most of the surface warming above blackbody temperature. Sunlight penetrates the ocean to some 100 meters where it absorbed along the way by impurities. All the energy in the sunlight is transferred to the water at the speed of light. However because water is opaque at all far infrared frequencies, unlike CO2 which is opaque only in narrow bands, none of that energy absorbed at depth can escape radiatively – it must be mechanically transported to the surface. That delay in transport, whether it’s water or CO2 doing the delaying, is what causes the so-called greenhouse effect. The ocean, you see, has many times the mass of the atmosphere and thus many times the greenhouse effect. Adding insult to injury the ocean doesn’t absorb any significant energy from downwelling infrared from greenhouse gases because the LWIR energy is completely absorbed in a skin layer just a few micrometers deep which doesn’t mix downwards but rather evaporates and carries the LWIR energy immediately away as latent heat of vaporization.

“the effective Earth absorption albedo of 0.3 used to generate the 255 K temperature is in part (mainly?) due to clouds in the atmosphere, and atmospheric clouds are created from water vapor, which is a greenhouse gas.”
A sticky wicket indeed. The earth and moon are made of the same stuff. The moon has an albedo of ~0.15 which is what the earth would be without an atmosphere. The ocean has an albedo of ~0.00 which makes it a lot darker than the moon. But the ocean can’t exist without an atmosphere to keep it from boiling away. And you can’t have a liquid ocean and an atmosphere without clouds. Clouds have an albedo of ~0.80 and then the combination of all these things gives the planet an albedo in the range of ~0.35 which varies interannually by an unknowm but presumably small amount in the range of +-0.03.
No one knows exactly what the earth’s average albedo really is. Climate models use values which differ by as much as 0.07 from one to another. Speaking in W/m^2 that 0.07 uncertainty is 7% of some 200 Watts per square meter or about 14 W/m2. The net effect of all anthropogenic forcings is claimed to be around 2.5W/m2 so in essence this means that uncertainty in natural albedo forcing is about 6 times greater than anthropogenic forcing. In other words, the models are operating in the dark (so to speak) with uncertainties far greater than the anthropogenic factor they are trying to calculate. Albedo in the climate models is a proverbial fudge factor that is adjusted by the model maker to whatever value gives the best result in conjuction with all the other assumptions and variables. If these models weren’t being considered with more credibility than instruments (if observations disagree with models it is presumed the observations must be wrong!) this would be material for late night talk show comedy skits.

What about a “leaking condenser”,where the atmosphere, being the dielectric, short circuits during lightning storms (and also during tornadoes, etc.)?

Don’t we already have a close by object with no atmosphere? What’s the surface temp on the moon? Can that not be used an an example?

Complicating all this even more is rotation rate. The *measured* average temperature of the moon’s surface is 250K. Its albedo is much lower than the earth’s so by that empirical yardstick the earth should be colder than the moon. However, the blackbody calculation for the earth presumes that it is rotating fast enough for day/night temperature difference to be erased. But it does rotate and does have a diurnal temperature difference. Sans atmosphere the difference would be nearly as great as on the moon (which is a couple of hundred degrees K). Because heat is lost faster when temperature is higher this makes the real-life rotating body colder than the blackbody calculation would produce. Thus we have the circumstance where the earth’s moon with an albedo of 0.15 and a 28 day rotation period has a measured average temperature of 250K and a theoretical earth at albedo 0.30 spinning infinitely fast would be 5K warmer even though the theoretical earth absorbs 15% less energy.
There are so many confounding factors that the 33K figure bandied about for an earth without greenhouse gases is completely untrustworthy and without merit. I use that figure solely for the sake of argument because it isn’t necessary to dispute it in order to show the hideous flaws in computer climate models.
But this is still a great OP as it does point out a very flawed assumption bandied about by CAGW fraudsters as some kind of basic fact that is beyond dispute. Little of what they claim is beyond dispute.

Infrared radiation can’t heat gases (atmosphere), so where is warming effect?

Everything concerning the fictitious 33°C greenhouse gases effect has been definitively explained and rebutted by Gerlich & Tscheuschner (2009) in “Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics” (http://arxiv.org/abs/0707.1161)
This value comes from a wrong use of the Stefan-Boltzmann law (flux imposing local temperature, which is wrong) involving an over simplified planet model (no atmosphere, infinite conductivity, no rotation). The real temperature would be -129°C.
Therefore, this -18°C has no meaning at all.
I do not understand why there is still a debate here.

This subject has been pretty well beaten to death by “Science of Doom”. Leonard Weinstein and DeWitt Payne were two of the folks who made the most sense there.

PeterF says:
December 26, 2011 at 5:26 am
“… and the heated atmosphere will also radiate energy to space)”
No, it won’t. When you start with the assumption that there are no greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, then the remaining gases (oxygen and nitrogen in this case) will neither absorb nor radiate in the relevant micrometer range, and hence can’t radiate energy to space.>>>
Yes it will. The absorptive/radiative spectrum for Oxygen and NO2 is right in the graphic in the article. It may not be as pronounced as water vapour and CO2, but it isn’t zero either. Further, the atmosphere contains plenty of dust which will absorb and radiate depending on the composition of the dust, but more than likely in a very broad spectrum.

Richard M says:
December 26, 2011 at 5:52 am
” think were on the right track here. First, we need to consider the Earth with no oceans and an atmosphere just like the current one without GHGs. Then, we need to add back in the oceans but still keep the GHGs out of the atmosphere. Yes, I realize this is unphysical, but I think in doing those calculations we could learn a lot.”
What you get is a snowball earth. We already have something very similar to that condition to look at in the geologic column. The vast majority of the atmospheric greenhouse effect is from water vapor. On a snowball earth most of the water vapor is frozen out of the atmosphere and the ocean is effectively removed from the equation be being covered with permanent sea ice.
The earth with an atmosphere but no ocean would be a frozen wasteland. Without greenhouse gases it would be colder but not much colder so long as a liquid ocean covered most of the surface. Where non-condensing greenhouse gases are very important is in a snowball earth episode. On a snowball earth volcanoes continue to spew CO2 and dark ashes. On a snowball there are no CO2 sinks so CO2 keeps building up in the atmosphere. Ashes also accumulate as some float so when ice surfaces partially melt in the summer it concentrates the ash on the surface making it darker and darker. After millions of years of that a tipping point is reached. So non-condensing greenhouse gases are the kindling which ignites the water cycle. Once the water cycle is ignited it keeps the earth unfrozen (most of the time) and is self-regulating through cloud formation which caps the maximum temperature preventing a runaway greenhouse. It’s quite elegant and works so well that for most of the earth’s history, even though the sun has increased its output 10% over geologic time, the earth stays warm and green from pole to pole. Episodes where there is permanent ice cover at the poles are rare. If anything right now the big climate danger lurking around the corner is the end of the Holocene Interglacial period and unless one finds hunting wooly mammoths over frozen tundra to be a good way to earn a living then we should welcome what little additional warming that anthropogenic greenhouse gases can give us and be concerned about what happens when we no longer have a way of fluffing up the earth’s temperature enough to maybe avoid the return of mile-thick glaciers as far south as New York City.

@Stephen Wilde
I just read your treatise:
http://climaterealists.com/attachments/ftp/TheSettingAndMaintainingOfEarth.pdf
I had no idea you were a member of the Royal Meteorlogical Society!
I swear by all that is Holy and my mother’s eyes too that I hadn’t read your treatise before arriving at the same conclusions.
The only caveat I would add to it is that the earth isn’t entirely covered by ocean so there is still some validity in the atmospheric greenhouse effect particularly at the surface of the rocks where we live and work. On average the ocean is the big kahuna but on average we live in continental interiors far enough removed from the ocean so that we experience some warming due to greenhouse gases. That warming though simply isn’t enough to throw the entire system into a catastrophic tailspin. Perhaps it might be enough, given the greatest effect is in higher latitudes over continental interiors, that it can extend the Holocene Interglacial through the peak of the Milankovitch cycle without glaciation getting the upper hand this time. In point of fact I’m very hard pressed to come up with anything at all in the way of negative consequences from much higher atmospheric CO2 level. The earth is pretty much green from pole to pole when it is far higher and unless one actually likes barren rocks and ice one should ardently adore the prospect of more CO2.

First, I think the entire model is flat wrong. (From American Thinker) Certified Consulting Meteorologist Joseph D’Aleo and computer expert E. Michael Smith appeared together on KUSI TV [Video] to discuss the Climategate — American Style scandal they had discovered. This time out, the alleged perpetrators are the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).
Perhaps the key point discovered by Smith was that by 1990, NOAA had deleted from its datasets
all but 1,500 of the 6,000 thermometers in service around the globe. For example, Canada’s reporting stations dropped from 496 in 1989 to 44 in 1991, with the percentage of stations at lower elevations tripling while the numbers of those at higher elevations dropped to one. That’s right: As Smith wrote in his blog, they left “one thermometer for everything north of LAT 65.” And that one resides in a place called Eureka, which has been described as “The Garden Spot of the Arctic” due to its unusually moderate summers.
Overall, U.S. online stations have dropped from a peak of 1,850 in 1963 to a low of 136 as of 2007. In his blog, Smith wittily observed that “the Thermometer Langoliers have eaten 9/10 of the thermometers in the USA[,] including all the cold ones in California.” But he was deadly serious after comparing current to previous versions of USHCN data and discovering that this “selection bias” creates a +0.6°C warming in U.S. temperature history.
Willis Eschenbach’s WUWT essay, “The smoking gun at Darwin Zero,” and it plots GHCN Raw versus homogeneity-adjusted temperature data at Darwin International Airport in Australia is another excellent article outlining huge problems with “averaging” temperatures with mostly fake data. Furthermore, Smith cited boatloads of problems and errors he found in the Fortran code “adjustments” written to accomplish this task, ranging from hot airport stations being mismarked as “rural” to the “correction” having the wrong sign (+/-) and therefore increasing when it meant to decrease or vice-versa.
The real chicanery begins in the next phase, wherein the planet is flattened and stretched onto an 8,000-box grid, into which the time series are converted to a series of anomalies (degree variances from the baseline). Now, you might wonder just how one manages to fill 8,000 boxes using 1,500 stations.
Here’s NASA’s solution:
For each grid box, the stations within that grid box and also any station within 1200km of the center of that box are combined using the reference station method.
Even on paper, the design flaws inherent in such a process should be glaringly obvious.

[Language .. Robt]
As I was quoting Mr Springer, and you allowed his language through in the first place, I saw no reason to edit the foul language. However, upon reflection, Mr Springer’s foul mouth should be no excuse for my own, even in the circumstance where I am quoting him. My apologies, and I shall endeavour to be more circumspect in the future.

enneagram says:
December 26, 2011 at 4:52 am
“Remember: How soon atmosphere cools down during an eclipse.”
—————
Or after dark in a desert.

Let’s call it planet Earth, forget the water, the atmosphere, the animals -us- , I still do not understand how the whole systeme works according to your calculations. If you think we should not be here, please tell us, somehow, we’ll manage.

Richard Verney and Steven Wilde, some questions for you. I think the earth conducts a yearly experiment, which, if looked closely at, can provide some underdstanding of the different effects a world with more water has verses a world with less.
This is seen on a hemispheric bases bi-annually, as the earth’s seasonal energy pulse can reveal on a hemispheric scale some of what happens with the ocean / atmosphere on a monthly daily and hourly basis. Sunlight, falling on the Earth when it’s about 3,000,000 miles closer to the sun in January, is about 7% more intense than in July. This is close to 90 W/M2 more TSI. Because the Northern Hemisphere has more land which heats easier then water most people state that the Earth’s average temperature is about 4 degrees F higher in July than January, when in fact they should be stating that the stating that the ATMOSPHERE is 4 degrees higher in July. In January this extra SW energy is being pumped into the oceans where the “residence time” within the Earth’s ocean land and atmosphere is the longest. There are also other factors, such as the Northern hemispheres winter increase in albedo exceeds the southern hemisphere’s winter albedo due to the far larger northern hemisphere land mass.
Please consider answering my three questions in the following paragraph.
So at perihelion we have a permanent loss to space of ? W/2m SWR, due to increased NH albedo, and, in the SH a temporary loss of SWR to the atmosphere, as at perihelion the SWR is falling on far more ocean, where it is absorbed into the oceans for far longer then if that SWR fell on land. Do these balance (unlikely) or is the earth gaining or losing energy during perihelion???
The TOA seasonal flux should tell us and climate models should accurately predict the observation. Does anyone know if the climate models accurately predict what happens seasonaly on earth?

Richard M says:
December 26, 2011 at 8:07 am
Why do you only consider radiation? The GHG-less atmosphere will receive energy by conduction. Since the atmosphere has low emissivity that heat will not be radiated away quickly as it can be with GHGs. However, once it gets warm enough it will start conducting heat back to the surface. Where is this equilibrium point? Is it 255 K and if so, why?
I’ll admit I don’t have any training in this area so maybe there is a simple explanation. I’ve never seen it though and can’t help feeling this could a positive feedback situation where the Earth would heat up.
The conductivity of air is 0.024 W/mK. That means that a cube of air with a side of length 1metre and a temperature difference of 1 degree C from top to bottom would dissipate 0.024 watts. Now the adiabatic lapse rate is 6C per kilometre so the actual temperature difference across a cube of air at the earth’s surface would be only 6 thousandths of a degree. So the actual loss by conduction is only about 120 microwatts. This is miniscule compared with radiation. Convection and evaporation are the next largest with even these being many thousand times more important than conduction. In addition you mke the statement “when it gets warm enough”. However there is no mechanism whereby the air temperature could exceed the surface temperature and so “start conducting back to the surface”

Jim D says:
December 26, 2011 at 8:36 am
“son of mulder, there was a Schmidt et al. paper (the control knob paper) that did this (removed CO2 starting with the current atmosphere) and found that the temperature dropped about 30 degrees, and not all the water vapor goes, but most does, while the albedo goes up due to the extra sea ice that covers a large area when you cool it that much, and this helps with the positive cooling feedback too.”
I have no argument with that. The earth is in an ice age right now and it evidently requires nothing more than a slight cyclical shift in orbital alignment which makes northern hemisphere winters warmer and summers cooler to kick off a process at the end of which London and New York are beneath mile of ice.
The thing of it is though that CO2’s greenhouse effect is logarithymic in nature and the first 100ppm does most of the heavy lifting thus an increase from 280ppm to 400ppm will have only a very modest effect and due to other factors at work in heat distribution the effect is felt mostly on land and mostly at higher latitudes. Given that we’re in an ice age right the f now and given that anthropogenic emission helps warm up the joint mostly where the glaciers have their footholds and not where it’s already comfortably warm all year round it’s difficult to escape the conclusion that rising atmospheric CO2 is a good thing.

Dave Springer;
The emissivity of water is dependent on temperature and can be overwhelmed by the coefficient of evaporation.>>>
In physics, particularly as it applies to undestanding climate processes, we are not as concerned about what “can” happen as we are about what does happen in general over a period of time. The following image from ERBE is instructive:
http://eos.atmos.washington.edu/cgi-bin/erbe/disp.pl?olr.ann.d
As can be seen in this image, the outgoing LW radiation from the ocean surfaces over a period of one year in general exceeds that of the land masses by a considerable amount. I will leave it to you to determine if you are wrong due to the reasons I stated, or if you are wrong due to other reasons. Data trumps theory however, and your theory appears to be incorrect.
Dave Springer;
Aside from those facts of physics which you and Monckton are evidently unaware of is the fact that water is totally opaque to long wave infrared and its emissivity is limited to a surface layer just a few microns deep. The solar heated water below that depth must first be somehow transported to the surface before it can emit any radiation. Then when it reaches the surface it must compete with the evaporation coefficient.>>>
As I explained earlier, still water is opaque to IR, turbulent water is not. As for mechanisms to promote mixing, please note that rain is pretty much a daily occurance over the open ocean and the rain is in general not only a source of turbulence, but also causes mixing because it is cooler than the ocean itself. As for the warmer water below, you are neglecting conduction. If the radiance emitted was overwhelmed by evaporation, then the ERBE data would not show such high amounts of outbound LW.
Dave Springer;
The net result is reflected in many ocean heat budget studies. Approximately 70% of ocean heat loss is evaporative, 25% emissive, and 5% conductive. These are the facts. You may deny them but you cannot change them and neither can Lord Monckton.>>>
I do not deny those facts. Your contention was that escape of LW to space is negligible from the ocean surface. I’ve demonstrated that this is incorrect.
Dave Springer;
With all due respect to your expertise as an IT salesman>>>
A rather snide remark coming from someone who spent most of his career working in the computer industry designing hardware for gaming consoles and desk top computers. BTW, you may want to consider that what I did in my career for one period of time does not apply to my entire work experience, nor is it indicative of my educational background.

to springer, wilde and the author – in this vast psychodrama that was never about science, you guys have found some. and to think the entire circus could have been avoided if you’d had a say about it…lol
i think you have the correct view on how the planet is heated and refrigerated.
arthur clarke once wondered why it was called ‘earth’ when it was mostly water…
i like the meme ‘hot water bottle effect’. it might be supplemented with the ‘sauna effect’.
the greenhouse meme is precisely as useful as the notion of phlogiston – it is a useful indicator of how well a person’s mind is navigating the catastrophist diorama.

Dave Springer notes: “Sunlight penetrates the ocean to some 100 meters where it is absorbed along the way by impurities.”
Why can you see the mid-ocean ridges thousands of feet below the surface as viewed from space?

Dave Springer says:
December 26, 2011 at 7:45 am
“What you get is a snowball earth.”
Only in a flat world with 1/4 of solar radiation.
I would be very interested to see calculation that leads to snowball earth in a rotating sphere-world with 1365 W/m2 not a 1/4 of it, including day & night. This would not let water freeze in the tropics – no way, sorry.
With ocean circulation this expands north and south so snowball earth needs additional conditions to happen, cannot be caused by missing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
R. Gates says:
December 26, 2011 at 9:03 am
“one side of the planet would be boiling hot and one side freezing cold, as there’d be no greenhouse gases or oceans to modulate that “average””
The earth is a sphere that is spinning no way to have one side boiling hot and one side freezing cold – what you say does not make sense R. Gates, sorry.

Harry Dale Huffman says:
December 26, 2011 at 9:16 am
Harry, the problem I have with your work is that you base the whole thing on the pressure related (adiabatic) lapse rate which is of course the same for any planet such that all other things being equal the ‘temperature’ (I prefer energy content) of the planet will be related directly to atmospheric pressure at the surface and distance from the sun.
The trouble is that the actual (so called ‘environmental’) lapse rate is very different from planet to planet so Venus CANNOT be directly compared to Earth.
On Earth we have a fully functioning and highly effective water cycle which Venus does not have so the outturn on each planet is NOT comparable.
Earth has a powerful Hot Water Bottle Effect and a very weak Greenhouse Effect. Venus has a very powerful Greenhouse Effect and NO Hot Water Bottle Efffect.
Chalk and cheese come to mind.

@ wilde:
good job. now if you only had willis’ awesome jimmy.buffetness… nah- you’ll do without… lol

Thierry says:
December 26, 2011 at 7:22 am
“Everything concerning the fictitious 33°C greenhouse gases effect has been definitively explained and rebutted by Gerlich & Tscheuschner (2009) in “Falsi fication Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse E ffects Within The Frame Of Physics” (http://arxiv.org/abs/0707.1161)
This value comes from a wrong use of the Stefan-Boltzmann law (flux imposing local temperature, which is wrong) involving an over simplified planet model (no atmosphere, infinite conductivity, no rotation). The real temperature would be -129°C.
Therefore, this -18°C has no meaning at all.”
On must explain why temperature probes buried a meter or more deep in lunar regolith at 45 degrees latitude record a year-round constant temperature of -23C while the same probe buried a meter deep at the latitude on the earth records a year-round temperature of 11C.
Something is making the earth ~33C warmer than the moon. This is not only a theoretical calculation but an observation as well since the early 1970’s when two separate Apollo missions buried temperature probes in lunar regolith from surface to 3 meters deep that radioed the temperatures back to NASA for the next several years. Gerlich et al are certainly entitled to an opinion on why the earth is so much warmer than the moon but they aren’t entitled to their own facts where their “fact” is that the earth isn’t really warmer than an approximate black body lacking a dynamic ocean/atmosphere at the same distance from the sun.

SLAY THE SKY DRAGON——END OF ARGUMENT!!!

Alan Stratham,
you said: “You wrongly claim that you can’t use an average temperature to calculate radiation losses.”
I must disagree. Whenever you have a non linear relationship between two variables, you have to be very careful about averaging the independent variables.
Suppose for sake of argument, you have half the surface area with temperature T1, and half with temperature T2. What would be the radiative flux from each area? Ignoring Stefan-Boltzmann’s constant, you would have F1 = T1^4 and F2 = T2^4.
Total flux would be Area1 x T1^4 plus Area2 x T2^4. Since each area is half of the total area A, total radiative flux = 1/2A(T1^4 + T2^4).
Now let’s find the average temperature Tav. Tav = 1/2(T1 + T2).
Flux density = (Tav)^4 = 1/16(T1 + T2)^4.
Multiplying this by the total area A, total radiative flux = 1/16A(T1 + T2)^4.
You can expand that if you like, but I think you’ll find it is not equal to 1/2A(T1^4 + T2^4).
Based on the mathematics, I suggest that the author is correct in claiming that you can’t use average temperature to calculate radiation loss.

R. Gates says:
December 26, 2011 at 9:54 am
“To those discussing how the earth may have broke out of the snowball epoch, this fairly current research is most germain, and not at all irrelevant to the topic of greenhouse gases and earth’s average temperature:”
http://www.springerlink.com/content/6262k8x02pvkm772/
Thanks Gates. You did good. That research confirms my own conclusion which I arrived at all by my lonesome, about the effect of volcanic ash on deglaciation.
I would also remind you that James Hansen himself, earlier in his career, pointed out that accumulation of black soot from dirty smokestacks and unfiltered old diesel engines travels up to a few thousand kilometers from its source then comes to rest on NH permanent snow cover accelerating the melt of sea ice and glaciers as it gets darker and darker every single year. In fact back when he wasn’t so afraid of the facts getting in the way of his agenda he assigned black soot up to half the blame for global warming.
This was, of course, before it was determined that the United States needed to be the scapegoat for global warming because, you see, since the Clean Air Act of 1964 the U.S. has not been emitting much black soot. But Europe with its abiding love for antique diesels in its transportation fleet (ya gotta love how those old diesel engines just keep going and going and going like the energizer bunny) and poor countries who cling to slash & burn agriculture and cook with anything combustable, continue to emit copious amounts of black soot which then goes on to melt things like the Himlayan Glacier. But we can’t go blaming Europe and poor undeveloped countries for these things… that’s just not politically correct. So the CO2 bogeyman and attendant water vapor amplification were invented so the US could be made to appear to be the bad guy.
Isn’t that just precious?

Lars P., thoroughly enjoyed reading you recent comment in tips&notes. You should re-post it here, not link, for general consideration by the many who are digging to bury the pseudo-science surrounding this very subject. I found yours very relevant.

More on a greenhouse gassless atmosphere. I’m reiterating what other’s have pointed out earlier:
The atmosphere would pick up heat by conduction with the earth’s surface.
The heat would drop off the higher you get in the atmosphere due to conservation of energy.
When the planet reached equilibrium, the energy lost by conduction from earth’s surface to the atmosphere would equal the net energy picked up by conduction from earth’s atmosphere.
Net radiation from the sun to earth’s surface would equal net radiation from earth’s surface back to space.
In the real universe there’s no such thing as a completely non-greenhouse atmosphere- all gases radiate in SOME frequencies. Depending on the densities of the different gases making up an atmosphere, these different gases would have different “effective radiation heights”, in the atmosphere, giving differernt greenhouse effects.
In the real universe there’s no such thing as a perfect black body.. All surface temperatures are
hotter than a black body giving off the same amount of radiation.
In the real universe, there’d be no free oxygen in an atmosphere without life, There’d be no life on a planet without water, so the argument about the effective temperature without greenhouse gases would be moot..

There are two things wrong with the normal formula used. 1. The idea of an average temperature using the 255 W/m^2. It can be shown that much of the NH up To 45N in the summer gets near 700 W/m^2. The troplcs near 1000 all year. 2. IR in the range CO2 emits (15 micro) back to the earth has no ability to do work so cannot heat anything.
Further there are no examples of gases doing anything other than dissipating heat. Our lives depend on this fact.
Sent from my new Christmas gift tablet. Please forgive spelling errors etc. as I get used to it.

R. Gates says:
December 26, 2011 at 10:27 am
I guess then that the moon, which is also a spinning sphere, would not have a boiling side and freezing side? But it does.
_______________________
What?

ferd berple says:
December 26, 2011 at 10:13 am
“Doesn’t the EPA and IPCC claim that atmospheric CO2 warms due to the exact same effect that warms real greenhouses?”
No. Nobody is claiming that there’s a sheet of glass blocking convection of heat away from the surface.

Actually, Dave , I should have said ‘solar influence’ rather than ‘solar activity’ which would have brought in astronomical changes such as the Milankovitch cycles.
I think we are all guessing at vague somethings at this distance in time. The snowball Earth idea is a concept rather than a fact.
The continents were in very different positions back then so that there are many bits of continental land mass bearing signs of glaciation that are now near the equator.

R. Gates says:
December 26, 2011 at 10:27 am
I guess then that the moon, which is also a spinning sphere, would not have a boiling side and freezing side?
>>>
The moon… spinning huh, like Venus you must mean, right? R. Gates , that sure is a cheap shot to Lars P. Or, I guess using your logic, that even with a greenhouse gas-less Earth spinning at 1 RPM, it would have the sun lit side boiling hot and the dark side freezing cold. Why don’t you stop quoting from your AGW manual every now and then and just think of what you are saying. Any intelligent person could understand Lars point.

Short of slight variations in mineral content affecting actual albedo, using the moon’s temperature on the sunlit and then the dark side should give you a pretty good idea of what the “average” temperature would be on earth. The daytime side of earth would be approximately 120C and the nighttime side would fall to a frosty -230C (but of course no frost would form as there would be no water vapor). The moons albedo is about .12, and you could make a reasonable assumption that the earth’s would be somewhere in the region without atmosphere, oceans, or clouds. But of course the earth has a different mineral mix than the moon, perhaps making a bit darker, so a slightly lower albedo is probably in order. But as the above extreme dirurnal temperature extremes the earth would experience indicate– the notion of an average temperature in a world devoid of ocean and atmosphere becomes meaningless.

It’s trivial to calculate the temperature of the Earth without the conjecture of the “greenhouse effect” using Stefan-Boltzmann Law and the equation of state of gases in the atmosphere.
Simply calculate the temperature using the Sun’s flux, locate the altitude of the temperature playing with the albedo, then use the equation of state of the atmosphere to reach the surface.
The temperature will be to high since the calculation assumes a static atmosphere, i.e., no rotation, no slipping at the boundary and no wind.
The Stefan-Boltzmann Law can not be applied to gases since they do not have a continuous frequency distribution.
In short, your calculation is nonsense since you ignored gravity and what you refer to as the “greenhouse” effect is nothing more than the heat capacity of gases.

Next problem of the Kindergarten-Model:
The “surface temperature” of 288K which is measured in a Stevenson screen in ABSENCE of radiation and in 2m height is a “convective” air temperature.
Thus one can not compare an air temperature of 2 m height in absence of radiation with a radiation temperature in 0 m height.

richard verney says:
December 26, 2011 at 3:48 am
…
. Some weighting should be given to take account that over geological time the average surface temperature of the earth is far less than we are privileged to enjoy today.
…

Only if you don’t count the temps in deep geological time, which were much longer at much higher temps, ~24°C. The “Hot House” state is more common than the “Ice Box”.

Dave Springer says:
December 26, 2011 at 6:48 am
“The ocean has an albedo of effectively 0 and it covers 70% of the surface.”
True but in a very limited set of circumstances that are not part of the real world: Yes, at very low degrees incidence angle with no waves, hardly the case all over the Earth at any one time. Water is mostly a mirror. Albedo equations are not proper for water, Fresnel equations are. Nevertheless, water is considered to have a very low albedo, I believe that to be wrong.
Best,
J.

gas laws-
http://physics.about.com/od/glossary/g/temperature.htm
kinetic energy transfer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avogadro's_law
same pressure = same temperature
not radiation physics

Pat Frank says that by experimental evidence and calculation the Earth with an albedo of 0.3
results in;
” Earth radiates as though it is at equilibrium with an energy source equivalent to a radiant temperature of 254 K.”
Nobody disputes these points.
What is in dispute is the claim that if the so called greenhouse gases did not emit/absorb in the IR the Earths albedo would stay fixed at 0.3.
It should be fairly obvious that much more radiation(particularly in the IR) would reach the surface.
The surface has an albedo of 0.15 for the existing solar radiation.
With a large increase of IR radiation the surface albedo is bound to fall much further.
It is an abuse of any kind of logic to use an albedo of 0.3 for a calculation of a mythical greenhouse effect of 33K.
Any theory to be taken seriously must be internally consistent.
By using IPCC accepted values the claimed 33K turns out to be nearer 16K.
The greenhouse theory as presented in popular expositions is internally inconsistent.

wayne says:
December 26, 2011 at 11:10 am
R. Gates says:
December 26, 2011 at 10:27 am
I guess then that the moon, which is also a spinning sphere, would not have a boiling side and freezing side?
>>>
The moon… spinning huh, like Venus you must mean, right? R. Gates , that sure is a cheap shot to Lars P. Or, I guess using your logic, that even with a greenhouse gas-less Earth spinning at 1 RPM, it would have the sun lit side boiling hot and the dark side freezing cold.
——
Why would it be any different? It would not. Just as we get large diurnal temperature swings in the desert areas of earth because there is less water vapor in the atmosphere above the desert, if you took away all greenhouse gases planet wide you would get a diurnal temperature swing that would be even more extreme. It might not be as dramatic as that of the moon (-230C at night to 120C during the day) because of some heat coming from earth’s interior, but it would still be extreme enough to make Earth a very inhospitable place.

To Donald L. Klipstein
I hope I can interest you further to consider this comparison.
A black body is often approximated by a spherical cavity with a small hole in it. The energy gets in at one angle, but bounces around ‘trapped’ at many other angles with a small percentage chance of finding the hole again.
I believe that band-pass, or high-pass filters are just another type of ‘hole’. The energy gets in at one frequency and is converted (through absorption and emission) to different frequencies with a small percentage chance of hitting the escape frequency again.
I like to think of things in terms of energy densities. It helps get rid of the confusion of temperature which is material dependent and adds complexity.
Whether we are talking about angles or frequencies, the end result remains the same (I believe) and you can not create an average energy density inside the spherical cavity that is higher than the energy density outside the cavity. [Of course if our energy source is coherent (i.e. radiation in a single direction, or at a single frequency) then we can be focus the energy to obtain extremely high energy densities, however the average energy density will remain the same.] Average energy density conservation is basically just a different way of looking at second law of thermodynamics and how you can not transfer heat from a cold object to a hot object and special filters of any kind we can imagine are not a form of Maxwell’s demon.

Does anyone have access to this paper? http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2011/2010JD015343.shtml
A precis of results would be appreciated..

I see that some people think N2 and O2 are incapable of emitting radiation. If that is a fact, wouldn’t that make them into very powerful GHGs?

Myrrh says:
December 26, 2011 at 5:50 pm

Does anyone have access to this paper? http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2011/2010JD015343.shtml
A precis of results would be appreciated..

Will this do?
http://www.gewex.org/BSRN/BSRN-11_presentations/Tues-wacker.pdf

Hmmm…
Is Dr Nikolov’s paper above agreement with Harry Huffman’s claims/
http://www.wcrp-climate.org/conference2011/posters/C7/C7_Nikolov_M15A.pdf
http://theendofthemystery.blogspot.com/2010/11/venus-no-greenhouse-effect.html

Dave Springer says………..
…No one knows exactly what the earth’s average albedo really is. Climate models use values which differ by as much as 0.07 from one to another. Speaking in W/m^2 that 0.07 uncertainty is 7% of some 200 Watts per square meter or about 14 W/m2. The net effect of all anthropogenic forcings is claimed to be around 2.5W/m2 so in essence this means that uncertainty in natural albedo forcing is about 6 times greater than anthropogenic forcing. In other words, the models are operating in the dark (so to speak) with uncertainties far greater than the anthropogenic factor they are trying to calculate…
—————————————————————————————————————————
…. Yep, that has been my opinion for this whole debate on AGW and the purported catastrophic effects to the Earths climate. Like Dave I consider that the noise of natural climate variation to be wholly overwhelming of any anthropogenic effect on the climate system, and real observations seem to bear this out…… It is only within the unnatural computer models of the Earths climate system that the AGW hypothesis continues to exist.
The confounding effects of the natural world defeat any simplistic climate model or math equations

I think there are a few essential elements missing in this generation of the null hypothesis,
1: The standard no-atmosphere “black body” model uses temperature of the surface, whereas the global temperature is the atmospheric temperature at 1.5 meters above the surface. Think about that
2: Non radiating gasses cannot lose their heat by radiation, only conduction and convection and there is only the earth surface to conduct heat to. Nothing can be emitted to the atmosphere.
3: There is no negative convection.
This is how I wrapped the null hypothesis up in UKww:
“The null hypothesis is usually describing the situation which would it make different from the actual -or alternative- hypothesis. It’s used mostly in statistics, I think, but why not try and see what happens if we apply it to the GHG hypothesis.
We read all over internet that the black body temperature of the Earth would have been -18C, but the actual average temperature is +15C; consequently this 33 degrees difference is supposed to be the greenhouse effect. But is this true?
Is the blackbody situation the “null hypothesis”? I don’t think so. The black body calculation assumes a sphere with a constant flux of light energy, uniformely distributed over the surface, using the Stefan Boltzman equation to derive it’s temperature like this.
But the earth is nowhere near a blackbody and if we want to really look at the null hypothesis, we would have to look at an earth without greenhouse effect, but still with an (inert) atmosphere and still rotating in 24 hrs, with seasons and all.
Now instead of using an average steady state solar radiation, we need to realize that we have the diurnal cycle with max insolation radiation at noon and no radiation incoming when the sun is below the horizon. So during daytime the earth surface warms up and much more than the according the average radiation. Equilibrium temperature at the equator in a steady state with the sun in zenith, using the full incoming 1365 w/m2 (albedo 30%) would be 360K or 87C. This follows from applying the Stephan Boltzman equation for the spot directly under the sun, instead of a uniformely distributed radiation.
So this much higher temperature of the earth surface is transmitted via conduction to the lowermost boundary layer of the atmosphere. This heated air gets is less dense, and it becomes buoyant so it rises up; Convection, the very basics of meteorology. So at daytime the atmosphere receives thermal energy of the earth. How can it lose this energy again? Remember we are in the null hypothesis, no radiation, no greenhouse effect, so the inert atmosphere cannot lose the energy by radiation.
Now, at night time the Earth does not receive radiation energy from the sun but it radiates energy out and cools quickly, obviously much more quickly in the null hypothesis even than with the greenhouse effect, which would have directed (“reflects”) some radiation back to earth. Now the cooler earth also cools the boundary layer of the atmosphere by conduction again, however there is no negative convection as the cool air gets more dense and tends to stay put; the inversion; also very basic meteorology. So despite the cooling of the earth, the missing radiation from the atmosphere prevents it from cooling at night and the next day more conducted energy is convected into the atmosphere, that stays there again.
Obviously we have an unbalance. And equilibrium can only be reached, maybe after thousands of years, when the convection at daytime has reduced so much to balance heat loss at night time via conduction back to the surface. For that the lower level atmosphere needs to be at the same temperature / density than the boundary layer would reach due to the conduction of heat from the surface.
Conclusion, in the null hypothesis, without greenhouse effect, the average temperature of the lower atmosphere would be considerably higher than the black body temperature of the surface. How much I don’t know. But the main point is that a certain portian of the temperature difference between black body and actual atmospheric temperature is not due to greenhouse effect but to the inability of the inert atmosphere to cool down by radiation. “

I think there is at least one (potentially major) error in this whole atmospheric transmission mess-up. There not TWO (Transmission vs. “Absorption AND Scattering”) but THREE (wavelength dependent) components for each atmospheric component:
1. Transmission
2. Absorption (and Re-Emission!)
3. Reflectance (“Scattering”)
I think Climate Science has an oversimplified model of this mess-up by putting Absorption and Scattering together.

I am sorry to disagree with the famous Lord but the theory of GHG’s violates the laws of thermodynamics.
The BB radiated temperature calculated is incorrect because the earth is not a black body. the nobel Lord has completely forgotten the small fact that the atmosphere generates heat through adiabatic compression, rather like a diesel engine increases its cylinder temperature to the diesel oil combustion temperature of 250C by compressing the internal gasses. Refrigerators work by the same process. Using the combined gas laws will produce the required temperature at the earth’s surface. Venus, with a surface pressure of 90 atmospheres generates 480C or 750K by the same process and the high surface pressure is due to the heave CO2 atmosphere. It is interesting to note that in the Jovian atmosphere, without any greenhouse gasses present, generates a similar temperature to earth at the 1000mb level.
The GHG theory relies on these gasses to be IR reactive. But are they? The rerun of Gore’s experiment by Anthony Watts in which two identical containers with air in one and a CO2 rich mixture in the second were heated by light. Anthony got no temperature rise in his CO2 enriched container above that of the air filled container. Both remained at similar temperatures. He repeated this experiment several times without any greenhouse effect. The rigerous way Anthony carried out this experiment should have got people thinking harder about this discredited GHG theory.
A moments thought will show that if a molecule of CO2 is preferentially heated it will immediately share this heat with its surroundings. It cannot do anything else. It cannot ‘store it’ because the 2nd law must hold true. Any heated volume of gas in the atmosphere will convect due to density changes and convecting air in the atmosphere must expand and loose heat due to adiabatic expansion. The gas will very soon be cooler than the surface so cannot re-radiate heat to the surface, heat can only flow by whatever means from hot to cold as the laws of thermodynamics dictate. Also as confirmation the so called heat anomaly in the mid troposphere as predicted by the theory of GHG’s cannot be found. Why? because the theory is WRONG.

For interest:

“NASA Abandoned Flawed Climate Calculations in 1960’s
Siddons, Hertzberg and Schreuder were astonished to find that “the principal method for predicting a planet’s temperature is surprisingly arbitrary and simplistic.” That was, they believe, why NASA needed to set aside the blackbody equations when doing their own calculations for the Moon landings.
To climate sceptic scientists it seems self-evident that the Earth’s surface should not be treated like a flat, two-dimensional blackbody. It is more properly a complex spinning sphere with large variability in reflectivity and absorption of the Sun’s light and energy. But, despite the U.S. government knowing since the 1960’s that the blackbody equations were of no use to real-world science, these facts don’t appear to have been passed on to climatologists.
Lunar Temperatures Cast Doubt on Climate Theory
NASA had found that daytime temperatures on the lunar surface were lower than expected because planetary bodies also conduct heat to their inside rather than radiating it all into space – an empirical fact that challenges the GHG theory. Computer models supporting GHG theory had predicted that such heat energy would be ‘blanketed’ above a planet’s surface.
In fact, the Apollo data proves the Moon’s surface temperatures throughout its two-week night were higher than predicted by the blackbody equations because the moon “feeds on” the heat it had previously absorbed.
Thus the success of NASA’s moon landings becomes evidence against the unreliability of the Stefan- Boltzmann equations in real world science.”
http://www.suite101.com/content/apollo-mission-a-giant-leap-to-discredit-greenhouse-gas-theory-a241363

I don’t know why you are arguing about this. I have it on good authority that the science is settled.
http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=c47c1209-233b-412c-b6d1-5c755457a8af
/sarc

Richard Verney wrote: “Two problems. First, the length of the lunar day. Eg., what would be the average temperature of the moon if a lunar day was only one hour rather than about 27;5 days? ”
A while back, I wrote a simulation model of what the Earth surface temperature would look like if it had no atmosphere, and spun on its axis once an hour. The mean temperature is the same as with a 24 hour rotation period, but there’s less variation around it.

Re: surface moisture effects:
“Soil Moisture–Atmosphere Interactions during the 2003 European Summer Heat Wave”
http://www.iac.ethz.ch/people/fischeer/docs/fischer_et_al_2007c.pdf
(etc):
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2011JCLI3523.1
http://www.lmd.ens.fr/dandrea/i1520-0442-22-18-4747.pdf
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v3/n10/full/ngeo950.html

The 33C temperature difference with/without greenhouse gases is simply a Gedankenexperiment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_experiment), exploring the potential consequences of a change, what happens if a single variable is modified – and in this case _with all other things held to be unchanging_.
Now, if we could experimentally remove all greenhouse gases, the end resulting temperature of the Earth would not be 33C colder, because that would kick in all kinds of other changes: missing clouds reducing albedo, glaciers increasing albedo, vegetation changes, changes in the lapse rate due to modified atmospheric energy, etc. Some of these changes would make the Earth warmer, some would make it colder.
But – the greenhouse gas contribution to current temperatures is 33C. That’s just spectroscopy, shown both by computations from numerically integrating over the depth of the atmosphere and measurements of the outgoing IR spectrum. The IR emissivity of ground and water is ~0.98 (98% as efficient as a pure blackbody), while the IR emissivity of the Earth to space through our greenhouse-gas containing atmosphere is ~0.612. An IR emissivity of 0.98 would allow the Earth radiate energy equal to incoming sunlight at ~-18C, while the emissivity of 0.612 means a temperature of ~15C is required.
And again, that’s just spectroscopy.
Secondary changes which would occur in a “real-world” removal of greenhouse gases, positive or negative, don’t change the GHG contribution to current temperatures – because those secondary changes are additional contributions +/-.

Bomber_the_Cat says:
December 27, 2011 at 8:35 am:
“For instance, the car in my garage has pressurised tyres. Do you think the tyres are hotter than the rest of the car?”..
How about the charge temp in the cylinder at the top of the compression stroke as JM indicated?
Not sure what your argument is, but if it is re: compression and atmospheric temps check this:
http://pds-atmospheres.nmsu.edu/education_and_outreach/encyclopedia/adiabatic_lapse_rate.htm

I think the number being referenced may have been made by making a few very simple assumptions that avoid all complex details about the surface of the Earth.
1. The Earth is characterized by a single temperature.
2. The total black body energy radiated at that temperature over the entire spherical surface of the earth is equal to the energy received from the sun on its disk shaped cross-section.

Frank Davis says:
December 27, 2011 at 6:29 am
//////////////////////////////
Frank
Thanks for the link. I have not yet read your paper but will definitely do so. I am not surprised by your summary. The position with respect to the Earth would be different if the speed of rotation was very much slower, may be measured in decades rather than in a day. The thermal capacity of the oceans stores the energy received during the day and releases it during the night. It smoothes the energy budget. However, for the thermal reservoirs to work, obviously they must not freeze (since in that condition they reflect most of the incoming solar energy) and this requires that solar inpout is regularly received (as in the case of the Earth every 12 hours).
The point with the moon is that it has no such thermal reservoirs. If it did, the diurnal differences would not be as stark. Since the moon does not have these thermal reservoirs, there is little to smooth the diurnal range since the rocky surface does not get heated to a significant depth. Lacking the thermal reservoirs the only other way to obtain diurnal smoothing would be a fast rotation. In my post, I suggested a rotation of once an hour, I have not done the calculations and it may be that the day would need to be even shorter than that!

@Bomber_the_Cat says:
December 27, 2011 at 8:35 am
///////////////////////////////////////////////////
Bomber the Cat
I have had this argument for years with car tyres.
When you inflate the tyres, the air inside heats in relation to the pressure. After inflation, the air in the tyres is hot. However, although the rubber is a fairly good insulator eventually, the heat from the air inside the tyre is lost by conduction and radiation.
In a static condition there is nothing replenishing the heat so eventually the air inside the tyres cools to ambient garage temperature. If on the other hand, immediately following inflating the tyres whilst the air temperature inside the tyres was still hot from the pressure brought about by the inflation, you were to drive on the tyres, the very slight flexing of the side walls would be sufficient to maintain the heat inside the tyres. The flexing of the side walls does not create very much pressure but the work being done is sufficient to maintain the temperature of the air inside the tyres. If you could drive indefinitely you would maintain the temperature indefinitely,
The point is that you need some external input of energy to maintain the temperature.
Reverting to the Earth. The Earth has two such external sources of energy that maintain the temperature caused by the pressure of the Earth’s atmosphere. First, there is the sun. Some of the solar energy is absorbed by the atmosphere. Second, the atmosphere flexes just like the side walls of the tyre (when you are driving on the tyre). As you are no doubt aware there is an atmospheric/diurnal bulge which is constantly fluctuating. These inputs taken together are sufficient to maintain the temperature caused by the pressure of the atmosphere.

@richard M says:
December 27, 2011 at 7:41 am
////////////////
The temperature in the first instance is created by the gravitaional pressure. Thereafter, there is heat loss from the system. You need some external input which need not be sufficient to create the remperature brought baout by the gravitional process (in our case circa 288K) but rather that which is sufficient to cover/make good the heat loss from the system.
Obviously, the sun is one such source. A second source is work done in the atmoshere itself. The atmosphere is dynamic and in constant flux. Work is being done and a by product of this is to heat the atmosphere at any rate to the extent necessary to cover/replenish the heat loss.
I would not definitely rule out some heat trapping effect caused by GHGs but there is in practice no need to resort to such a theory to explain the temperature of the Earth. Gas pressure alone is quite capable of explaining why the Earth is sufficiently warm for life to flourish.

First, I want to thank Anthony for “Guest Posting” my thoughts.
Second, I want to thank all commenters–both pro and con. Many valid points have been raised. Some commenters have asked: What’s the issue? The answer is clear and it is “X”. The problem is, the commenters don’t agree on “X”. We each have our own personal experiences, educational backgrounds, and biases. What is “correct” to one person is an absolute “falsehood” to someone else. We (and I am especially including myself) should realize that nature (which includes mankind) will behave according to a set of laws that we may or may not understand. Those laws, not opinion pieces, will determine what happens. This is not to say we shouldn’t try to understand those laws and base our actions on our understanding of their implications. It does, however, say that our “understanding of their implications” may be incorrect, and hence our actions may worsen not help the situation. As Humphrey Bogart said in the movie The African Queen: “You pays your money and takes your chances.”
Third, it was never my intent to quantify the temperature effects of greenhouse gases on the Earth’s temperature (surface, subsurface, water, land, atmosphere at any altitude, etc.). Nor was it my intent to discuss the “Greenhouse EFFECT”, whatever that means. My intents were to (a) describe the algorithm I believed is widely used to claim a 33 K “Earth temperature difference with and without greenhouse GASES”, and (b) describe why I believed that algorithm’s treatment of greenhouse gases is internally inconsistent–specifically the algorithm computes two temperatures each of which is a function of and requires the presence of greenhouse gases, and thus to claim the difference of those two temperatures represents the temperature difference with and without greenhouse gases is internally inconsistent and hence illogical.
Thank you all.
Reed Coray

@jim Masterson says:
December 27, 2011 at 7:03 am
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Jim
Others have hinted at the point that you so clearly have made and you are right to point this out. Regrettably, seeking to compare apples and pears is a common meme in the world of climate science.
The majority of the data is significantly flawed and not fit for purpose. It should have huge error bars and yet proponents of AGW would have one believe that the position is certain and measurements can be made to one hundredth of a degree!
They always use averages despite the fact that in the real world, the average condition is rarely encountered and tells us little about what is in reality going on. If a process is unknown or complex, it is either ignored or some fudge factor applied.
The Earth is nothing like a Blackbody so why would one expect a BB calculation to be accurate? Indeed, one point often overlooked is that we have no idea as to the area of the Earth. We look at it as if it were a uniformly smooth sphere of constant radius when we know that is not the case! What is the surface area of the Earth with all its valleys and peaks? I do not know but to give insight, the coastal distance of Norway is approximately the same as the circumference of the Earth, (ie., approximately 25,000 miles). Norway is just a small country and occupies only a small part of the circumference of the Earth and yet its coast line is equal in distance to the circumference!
The point I make is that the surface area of the Earth is nothing like that calculated from a uniformly smooth sphere (it is far larger) and each point has differences in emissivity, absorption etc such that the Earth is nothing like a Blackbody.
There are fundamental issues with the entire concepts behind the GHG theory. Now that observational data and models have ‘decoupled’, there are reasons to suspect that these fundamental issues are material and that the GHG theory is unsound. Whether this unsoundness is merely a matter of degree or more significant will no doubt become apparent the longer the ‘divergence’ continues between observational data and model projections. The heat is on to find the ‘missing heat’ or perhaps it is merely an apparition and is not missing because it was never there.

Anthony, your credibility and that of your site remain unchanged. Sincerely. Keep up the good work.

Let’s forget those rotating plates, black bodies and insulation integrals from north to south.
Why is our day colder than Moon’s day? Simply because
– air cools the surface and goes up, allowing cold air to sink and cool the surface
– water (condensed “greenhouse gas”) cools the surface by evaporation
– clouds (condensed “greenhouse gas”) shield the surface against the sunlight
– ice/snow (solidified “greenhouse gas”) reflects almost all sunlight, so the iced surface does not warm the atmosphere.
Result: our day is COLDER than Moon or black body thanks to presence of bulk atmosphere and water with its hydrological cycle and three states. So the “+33K” difference, even much more because our day is colder, must occur during the night.
Why is our night much warmer than Moon’s night?
If I go outside during the night, I am warmed by direct contact between my skin and warm bulk atmosphere. Bulk atmosphere holds the daily heat. Bulk atmosphere is nitrogen and oxygen, which got warmed during the day by conduction and convection. If they radiate IR (they should, since every object with >0 K temperature radiates something), they warm us, and there are 999,900 N2 and O2 radiating molecules per 100 anthropogenic CO2 molecules. If they do not radiate (as some of you claim), then they just hold the daily heat, effectively warming the night to much higher temperature as without their presence. Simple as that.
“Greenhouse gas” does nothing, if there is not a bulk atmosphere. NOTHING. Mars blackbody and practical temperature is the same 210K, despite its thin atmosphere contains 95% CO2, or 6,000 ppm. The point is, it does not have the bulk atmosphere.
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/marsfact.html

Juraj V. said:
Why is our night much warmer than Moon’s night?
If I go outside during the night, I am warmed by direct contact between my skin and warm bulk atmosphere. Bulk atmosphere holds the daily heat. Bulk atmosphere is nitrogen and oxygen, which got warmed during the day by conduction and convection. If they radiate IR (they should, since every object with >0 K temperature radiates something), they warm us, and there are 999,900 N2 and O2 radiating molecules per 100 anthropogenic CO2 molecules. If they do not radiate (as some of you claim), then they just hold the daily heat, effectively warming the night to much higher temperature as without their presence. Simple as that.
“Greenhouse gas” does nothing, if there is not a bulk atmosphere. NOTHING. Mars blackbody and practical temperature is the same 210K, despite its thin atmosphere contains 95% CO2, or 6,000 ppm. The point is, it does not have the bulk atmosphere.
_____
N2 and O2 have no absorption or emission in the IR range at all. It is the greenhouse properties of water vapor, CO2, and to a lessor extent, N2O and methane that hold all the IR, or as you call it, the “daily heat” in and keep it warmer at night. Considering what a small fraction all these are of the bulk atmosphere, their effect is remarkable. If you’ve ever spent any time in the desert at night, you can appreciate the potency of water vapor as a greenhouse gas, for even though the bulk atmosphere over a desert is not significantly different (certainly N2 and O2 are the same) than over a more moist region, the little bit of extra water vapor in the air makes a huge difference. The diurnal temperature change in deserts is far more extreme than in more moist regions because of the water vapor. Take it to an extreme, and keep the N2 and O2, (the majority of the bulk atmosphere) but take away all the greenhouse gases and the diunral temperature change gets even more extreme. Greenhouse gases do the heavy lifiting in moderating the diurnal temperture changes.

“In Earth’s atmosphere the restriction to convection is provided by the inertia of millions of tonnes of air.”
Not so.
The restriction to convection is provided by the temperature inversion at the tropopause which is a consequence of solar heating of ozone in the stratosphere.
In my view the height of the tropopause especially the slope of that height between pole and equator is critical because that dictates the entire surface air pressure distribution, the positions, sizes and intensities of the permanent climate zones and thus the rate of energy flow from surface to stratosphere.
There we have the key to cloudiness and global albedo changes with an effect on the quantity of solar energy able to get into the oceans to fuel the climate system.
Solar activity levels appear to have the ability to raise and lower the height of the tropopause especially at the poles.
The likely cause is variations in the mix of particles and wavelengths from the sun differentially affecting ozone quantities at different levels.

@R. Gates says:
December 27, 2011 at 2:40 pm
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Mr Gates
You are right to point out the effectiveness of water vapour. In pointing this out, one can see how little warming/heat retention CO2 plays. However, the position is very complicated and we do not know precisely how everything interplays.
Let us assume the following: (i) that N2 and O2 cannot radiate heat and therefore can only give up heat by way of convection or conduction; (ii) that there is no CO2 nor water vapour in the atmosphere and the atmosphere consists only of N2 and O2; (iii) at the end of the day the N2 and O2 molecules are at a temperature of about 40degC (this being the air temperature measured in the shade in the usual way say 1.5m above the ground); (iv) it is a windless night; and (v) there is very thick cloud cover at say 50ft extending miles high which has a temperature of say 39 deg C on the desert side and below freezing on the space side (an unlikely scenario over a desert but since we are looking at theoretical compositions of the atmosphere a legitimate exercise).
In this scenario, the night air temperature cannot quickly cool since the thick cloud cover acts like a lid and hinders convection. The warm air (consisting of only N2 and O2) is trapped between the desert surface and low lying cloud (likewise the low lying cloud acts as a barrier to the coldness of space). The N2 and O2 unable to radiate away heat such that the air remains warm all night long.
Now what happens if we add CO2 to the mix?
Is the night air cooled by the addition of CO2 in this scenario since the N2 and O2 molecules whether by collision, conduction or what have you can transfer/give up their heat to a CO2 molecule which can then radiate away the heat (some going up, some going side ways and some going down – materially some going up and through the cloud thereby escaping out to space)?
What happens as we add more and more CO2? Obviously the greater concentration of CO2 the easier it will be for the N2 and O2 molecules to impart their energy onto the CO2 molecules and the more CO2 molecules the more radiators that are present to dissipate the heat.
I welcome your views.

Mr Gates
Further to my last post in which I agreed with you that water vapour makes a significant difference, perhaps I should have observed that whether this is due to the greenhouse properties of water vapour, or whether it is due to the fact that in moist air there is much more latent heat such that it obviously takes longer to cool since there is much more energy to give up/dissipate, or whether dry air convects quicker than moist air, or whether it is combination of more than one or all of these factors is a moot point.
In my view, the moderating of the diurnal range is primarily brought about by the oceans and not by GHGs. Far away from the oceans such as in deserts, the middle of Antarctica large diurnal ranges are experienced. To a lesser extent it is moderated by cloud cover which hinders convection (clouds in turn being a factor of the oceans).

shouldn’t it be fairlyeasy to create a model that also reflects the earths distance from teh sun and it’s rotation on it’s axis (and wobble) and breaks the surface down into 10k x 10k chunks. We would see that using a general number for the total surface is way out when we start looking at the actual energy loss/gain on each sector throughout not just a 24 hour day but a 365 day year and longer.

” It is the greenhouse properties of water vapor, CO2, and to a lessor extent, N2O and methane that hold all the IR, or as you call it, the “daily heat” in and keep it warmer at night. ”
BEEP! wrong!
jeez louise – this is not about radiation physics.
water vapor holds 50,000 times more HEAT than the CO2 on a parcel of atmosphere and it is perfectly capable of conduction without condensation. steam is used to cook things NONRADIATIVELY. it can also condense without radiating – dew you know?
nitrogen, oxygen, friday’s beans – all gasses of every description conduct heat.
you’re not heated by radiation when you swim in a sea of gasses and the fan on my heat sink isn’t moving IR rays, mmk?
and also, ffs – TEMPERATURE is not heat. it is also not a property of radiation physics.
temperature is kinetic energy. nitrogen and oxygen don’t need permission from radiation freaks to be hot or not. dip something in some lox and guess what happens. explain that with radiation – go ahead and make my day… lol

slow to follow says:
December 27, 2011 at 4:25
Try this:
“if the
temperature differential between the surface and the stratosphere increases the
tropopause must rise. If the differential decreases then the tropopause must fall.
“Suppose, for example, that the surface temperature and the tropospheric
temperature gradient are given and that the temperature of the stratosphere
varies. Then, a cold stratosphere will be associated with a high tropopause (low
tropopause pressure), and a warm stratosphere will correspond to a low
tropopause (high tropopause pressure).”
from here page 14:
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-
0442(2001)014%3C3117%3ATTITPR%3E2.0.CO%3B2pm
So if solar variability alters ozone quantities above the tropopause to warm or cool the stratosphere then the tropopause height will change accordingly.
In another thread it has been confirmed that (unexpectedly) an active sun cools the mesosphere by destroying ozone above 40/45km. It has been observed that the stratosphere also cooled when the sun was more active. I think the stratospheric temperature trend follows the mesosphere trend DESPITE an active sun creating MORE ozone below that height.
That makes my hypothesis set out here:
http://climaterealists.com/attachments/ftp/How%20The%20Sun%20Could%20Control%20Earths%20Temperature.pdf
likely to be correct and the only current climate description that fits the observations.

****
slow to follow says:
December 27, 2011 at 9:14 am
Think of getting in a submarine and descending in the sea – does the hull experience a change in pressure loading?…
****
Certainly. Just like the change in pressure loading that happens when it ascends, except the opposite. 🙂

R. Gates says:
December 27, 2011 at 2:40 pm
“It is the greenhouse properties of water vapor, CO2, and to a lessor extent, N2O and methane that hold all the IR, or as you call it, the “daily heat” in and keep it warmer at night.”
If so, why diurnal temp difference in Mars is so big despite having about 9 times more CO2 in much smaller surface area in its atmosphere?

As has been known since 1966,[58] Jupiter radiates much more heat than it receives from the Sun. It is estimated that the ratio between the power emitted by the planet and that absorbed from the Sun is 1.67 ± 0.09. The internal heat flux from Jupiter is 5.44 ± 0.43 W/m2, whereas the total emitted power is 335 ± 26 petawatts. The latter value is approximately equal to one billionth of the total power radiated by the Sun. This excess heat is mainly the primordial heat from the early phases of Jupiter’s formation, but may result in part from the precipitation of helium into the core.[59]

SGW says:
December 28, 2011 at 12:58 am
///////////////////
The argument that the AGW proponents raise is that the atmosphere is so thin. Obviously, it is true that the Marsian atmosphere is thin, but whether this is the reason why the GHE cannot be seen on Mars is moot.