Heh. In response to a ridiculous claim making the rounds (I get comment bombed at WUWT daily with that nonsense) which I debunked here: A misinterpreted claim about a NASA press release, CO2, solar flares, and the thermosphere is making the rounds
Dr. Roy Spencer employs some power visual satire, that has truth in it. He writes:
How Can Home Insulation Keep Your House Warmer, When It Cools Your House?!
<sarc> There is an obvious conspiracy from the HVAC and home repair industry, who for years have been telling us to add more insulation to our homes to keep them warmer in winter.
But we all know, from basic thermodynamics, that since insulation conducts heat from the warm interior to the cold outside, it actually COOLS the house.
Go read his entire essay here. <Sarc> on, Roy!
UPDATE: Even Monckton thinks these ideas promoted by slayers/principia/O’Sullivan are ridiculous:
Reply to John O’Sullivan:
One John O’Sullivan has written me a confused and scientifically illiterate “open letter” in which he describes me as a “greenhouse gas promoter”. I do not promote greenhouse gases.
He says I have “carefully styled [my]self ‘science adviser’ to Margaret Thatcher. Others, not I, have used that term. For four years I advised the Prime Minister on various policy matters, including science.
He says I was wrong to say in 1986 that added CO2 in the air would cause some warming. Since 1986 there has been some warming. Some of it may have been caused by CO2.
He says a paper by me admits the “tell-tale greenhouse-effect ‘hot spot’ in the atmosphere isn’t there”. The “hot spot”, which I named, ought to be there whatever the cause of the warming. The IPCC was wrong to assert that it would only arise from greenhouse warming. Its absence indicates either that there has been no warming (confirming the past two decades’ temperature records) or that tropical surface temperatures are inadequately measured.
He misrepresents Professor Richard Lindzen and Dr. Roy Spencer by a series of crude over-simplifications. If he has concerns about their results, he should address his concerns to them, not to me.
He invites me to “throw out” my “shredded blanket effect” of greenhouse gases that “traps” heat. It is Al Gore, not I, who talks of a “blanket” that “traps” heat. Interaction of greenhouse gases with photons at certain absorption wavelengths induces a quantum resonance in the gas molecules, emitting heat directly. It is more like turning on a tiny radiator than trapping heat with a blanket. Therefore, he is wrong to describe CO2 as a “coolant” with respect to global temperature.
He invites me to explain why Al Gore faked a televised experiment. That is a question for Mr. Gore.
He says I am wrong to assert that blackbodies have albedo. Here, he confuses two distinct methods of radiative transfer at a surface: absorption/emission (in which the Earth is a near-blackbody, displacing incoming radiance to the near-infrared in accordance with Wien’s law), and reflection (by which clouds and ice reflect the Sun’s radiance without displacing its incoming wavelengths).
He implicitly attributes Margaret Thatcher’s 1988 speech to the Royal Society about global warming to me. I had ceased to work with her in 1986.
He says that if I checked my history I should discover that it was not until 1981 that scientists were seriously considering CO2’s impact on climate. However, Joseph Fourier had posited the greenhouse effect some 200 years previously; Tyndale had measured the greenhouse effect of various gases at the Royal Institution in London in 1859; Arrhenius had predicted in 1896 that a doubling of CO2 concentration would cause 4-8 K warming, and had revised this estimate to 1.6 K in 1906; Callender had sounded a strong note of alarm in 1938; and numerous scientists, including Manabe&Wetherald (1976) had attempted to determine climate sensitivity before Hansen’s 1981 paper.
He says, with characteristic snide offensiveness, that I “crassly” attribute the “heat-trapping properties of latent heat to a trace gas that is a perfect energy emitter”. On the contrary: in its absorption bands, CO2 absorbs the energy of a photon and emits heat by quantum resonance.
He says the American Meteorological Society found in 1951 that all the long-wave radiation that might otherwise have been absorbed by CO2 was “already absorbed by water vapor”. It is now known that, though that is largely true for the lower troposphere, it is often false for the upper.
The series of elementary errors he here perpetrates, delivered with an unbecoming, cranky arrogance, indicates the need for considerable elementary education on his part. I refer him to Dr. Spencer’s excellent plain-English account of how we know there is a greenhouse effect.
The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley (April 18, 2013)
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Here in the UK most houses are built with a double skinned wall with breeze blocks (I think in the USA you call them ash blocks) forming the inner wall, then an air gap, then bricks on the outer wall.
The bricks are porous and absorb water when it rains, which then evaporates when it is windy and dry. This arrangement keeps the inside of the house warm in winter and cooler in summer because of the still air in between the two. This system has worked well for years.
There are companies that will fill the cavity with foam or fibreglass insulation and claim that as a result your house will be warmer. It can also be damper, as the rainwater passes from the outer wall, by capillary action to the breeze blocks and then to the plaster on the inside wall. Mildew then develops and the house is damp, also water vapour from breathing, cooking, showering etc condenses on the coolest parts of the interior of the house, which is usually the parts of the walls that the cavity wall insulation could not get to, causing more mildew and dampness. The house feels cold and damp and is a health hazard to those with asthma.
This is all very expensive to put right and these companies usually go out of business on a regular basis to avoid legal action.
So this article is less sarcastic than Roy thinks!
By the way “insulation conducts heat” is that not an oxymoron or at least a contradiction?
One weakness of sarcasm is that it requires honest comparison between norms and the offered information in order to get it. Thus it frequently leaves the target of the pointed information completely clueless…. but a great fallback is the entertainment value for those that have the ability to make the comparison.
Thank you Dr. Spencer for the analogy… and thank you Anthony for the entertainment.
Cue the Slayers to come in and …explain… this again.
cringe Oh noes, not again!
I’ve quit arguing this point with people. When I get this urge, I remind myself that I’ve found it’s much more productive and fulfilling to beat my head against concrete pylons instead.
I mean, c’mon, duh. A home is a home, not a greenhouse. Got it? The Earth is a greenhouse. That’s the difference. A greenhouse is for growing plants. A home is for growing people. So the Earth is not a home. Uh, wait a minute. Uh, we grow here too. So the Earth is a home, I guess, but, uh, mmm…
Quick, John Holdren, help me out here.
Sarcasm apart. What did the guy wanted to say?
Surely more insulation helps you keeping the house warmer. What was the question?
More clothes you have on, the warmer you feel.
All materials conduct heat. Insulation conducts heat, but the heat transfer is slowed compared to any material which insulates less.
The first commenter touches on the problem that arises when moisture is not managed inside a sealed house. The examples he cites are caused by contractors not understanding the right way of insulating a dwelling. It’s not the insulating material wot dunnit, it was the act of changing only one thing in a system that was more complicated than it looked.
Kind of like “climate” “policy”…
Insulation in your house prevents draft leakage and convective loss to the outside, by trapping material molecules. This simply makes it easier for the furnace to hold temperature. A gas, CO2, doesn’t trap itself. It doesn’t prevent its own convection and drafting etc. And, such insulation doesn’t raise the temperature above the temperature of the input, of the furnace.
So then the analogy is created that trapping photons, via CO2, has s a similar heat trapping effect, even though trapping photons does occur in a real greenhouse but actually has nothing to do with the temperature inside a real greenhouse, because the temperature inside a real greenhouse is caused by preventing convective cooling when the input is sunshine at, say, +80C at noon. The analogy is then further extended to say that trapped photons can cause a -18C input (the incorrect and absurd flat earth assumption for the solar input), to become +15C, even though this doesn’t actually occur inside a real greenhouse nor with the insulation in your home. In fact, trapped radiation inside a cavity simply produces a blackbody spectrum of the temperature of the source, and this is of course the origin of quantum mechanics; trapped radiation doesn’t raise the temperature of its own source in any case. Photons are bosons and can pile on top of each other without noticing, other than equal amounts of constructive and destructive interference which results in no net change. This is markedly different behaviour from molecules which, when packed on top of each other, can not simply pass through but must find smaller and smaller volumes of space in which to situate themselves, thus increasing pressure and temperature. Shine two flashlight directly into each other and seal them perfectly, and they will not explode or even shine any brighter, unlike what would happen if you were compressing more and more gas into the sealed chamber.
You’re being lied to by these sophists. Either you understand it or you don’t. That being said, it is quite difficult to understand, but within that difficulty is where the sophists create their garbage. 50% (and more) increase of CO2 over the last few decades and no increase in temperature above 1930′s values, or above the warm periods before that, or above the first entire half (or more) of this whole interglacial; ice core records which show that the Earth enters an ice-age when CO2 level is high(!). You’re being lied to by sophists.
Close!
But the real cause of warming in the house is the insulation traps the CO2’s and that leads to ‘Housing Warming.’
What this infra-red thermography shows is convective heat stratification within the home and the thermal exit paths. The higher section of the windows and roof are heated more than the lower section. Home insulation provides a physical barrier to convective flow. The home repair industry does not add ‘radiative barriers’ of Carbon Dioxide to the hot spots to ‘redirect’ the radiative flow. Since the premise is meaningless, there can be no ‘satire’. Roy would benefit from reviewing a sample of satire. I recommend, “Amazing! New! Wrongco Proxy Crock” posted at Canada Free Press.
If things behaved this way, if trapping heat could raise the temperature above the temperature creating the heat, then ALL of thermodynamic research in the 1800’s would have revolved around exploiting this and today we would have devices which could create an internal extremely high temperature (to use for doing useful work with) with only a minuscule, tiny input; say, a AAA battery and tiny resistor could be used to generate 5000K inside a shell, and then you could smelt some steel or something with a AAA battery. Instead they created steam engines powered by coal and developed things like the Carnot Cycle. They never ever developed anything about trapping heat to create higher temperature than the input. What they found when they tried to do so, was what was eventually codified into the Laws of Thermodynamics.
One can hope that folks will follow anthony’s and roy’s lead here by calling out skydragon nonsense for what it is. The real debate is over how much warming GHGs will cause.
That is the debate. That science is not settled. Skeptics with smart arguments will get published, see Nic lewis and Troy masters. Its the central debate..
Yeah, this sarcasm just went over my head. The argument was very funny, but I really don’t know what the hell was that about.
The difference between a greenhouse and the Earth is convection. A greenhouse sitting in the sunlight gets hotter because it has no convection – the hot air gets trapped beneath the cover provided by whatever media is used to put a lid on everything.
But is CO2 an insulator ?
It is supposed to block outward longwave from the surface but in doing so increases convection, evaporation and radiation to space (by providing a radiative window not supplied by non GHGs).
Evaporation has a net cooling effect of 5 to 1 (enthalpy of vaporisation) and so is a hugely powerful negative system response.
I am not yet convinced that CO2 has any net insulating effect at all once the negative system responses have been accounted for.
Note that I do not deny the thermal characterisatics of GHGs, merely do I question the sign and power of the system response.
The insulated house analogy is entirely inappropriate because one is simply interposing a less effective conductor between the air inside the house and the air outside the house.
Kind of like the “thermos Joke”:
http://www.funniestcleanjokes.com/joke/funny-thermos-joke
I can actually work that one out from first principles. Having studied a great deal of thermodynamics, I am equipped to tell you that Roy’s statement is 100% true.
The angels are in the details.
If you have an electric water heater, how thick do you make the insulation jacket?
As Roy points out, making the insulation thicker does not mean that you will reduce the total heat loss.
Heat loss happens by conduction, convection and radiation. The models for heat loss for an electric water heater are very well known and accurate and reliable. As you increase the diameter of the heater you increase the surface area, thereby increasing the conduction, the convection and the radiation even though you’ve increased the resistance of heat flow from the tank. Insulation is a conductor… in fact.
I recall it was a question on one of my Thermo II course exams.
Common sense does not prevail. Understanding the underlying models and experimental results wins. Real science is great!
🙂
It is a problem of diminishing return. At what point does the cost of insulation yield a saving that is less than the cost of insulation. It depends on the cost of heat and the cost of insulation.
Let’s say you have a pot of water that is being boiled (~373 K) and a block of ice (~273 K) radiating towards each other.
Correct: P = εσA(Th⁴ – Tc⁴)
Incorrect: P = εσATh⁴ – P = εσATc⁴
Doing it the right way gives 782.63~ W/m^2 from the pot to the ice block.
Doing it the wrong way gives 1097.59 W/m^2 from the pot to the ice, and 314.96 W/m^2 from the ice to the pot, so now the pot is receiving input+314.96 W/m^2, and we then equate the output to the input to say the pot is receiving 1097.59+314.96=1412.55 W/m^2!
So now we claim it has to emit 1412.55 W/m^2 which equates to a temperature of 397.28 K!
So just by putting a block of ice next to a pot of boiling water we raised the temperature of the boiling water by 24 K!
It is the difference between this:
P = εσA(Th⁴ – Tc⁴)
and this:
P = εσA(Th⁴ + Tc⁴)
If your home is heated from the outside by a big lamp, adding insulation will make it cooler.
Joseph E Postma says:
”if trapping heat could raise the temperature above the temperature creating the heat”
I don’t recall that ever being said:
http://www.asterism.org/tutorials/tut37%20Radiative%20Cooling.pdf
Let’s say I turn the heat on to some body for 12 hours out of every 24, obviously, if I add insulation the body will cool slower during the off heat 12 hours and could be warmer at the initiation of heat for the next heat on 12 hours; in this manner of reducing heat loss the body gets warmer not that the insulation directly heats the body.
crosspatch says:
April 24, 2013 at 11:47 am
If your home is heated from the outside by a big lamp, adding insulation will make it cooler.
That is precisely what I asked Roy Spencer, his response was
The house would be slower to heat if that heat was applied to its outside, it would warm quicker if it the source of heat was inside. In the case of the climate system, most sunlight is absorbed at the surface, so it is “heated from within”.”
So CO2 does not act as an Insulator at all because if it did it would prevent the Radiation from heating surface in the first place.
So we are back to the Back Radiation issue.
The House is a crap analogy and he knows it, I am glad Anthony finds it funny, but for all the wrong reasons.
Joe Postma, yes you probably CAN design a system for generating 5,000K temperatures using just a AAA battery. All you need to do is resistance heat a very small object with little heat capacity, and insulate it very well. The problem would be the insulation, because it, too,would heat up. Remember, 10,000,000 K temperatures are created at the core of the Sun with heating rates less than what the human body produces (per unit mass).
Roy,
Many thanks for coming out all guns blazing on this. It should be greatly entertaining as well as informative to all who follow this issue. What PSI finds amusing is how you have tripped yourself up by your blatant contradictions. e.g. You say:
“One of the first things you discover when putting numbers to the problem is the overriding importance of infrared radiative absorption and emission to explaining the atmospheric temperature profile. These IR flows would not occur without the presence of “greenhouse gases”, which simply means gases which absorb and emit IR radiation. Without those gases, there would be no way for the atmosphere to cool to outer space in the presence of continuous convective heat transport from the surface.
Indeed, it is the “greenhouse effect” which destabilizes the atmosphere, leading to convective overturning. Without it, there would not be weather as we know it. The net effect of greenhouse gases is to warm the lowest layers, and to cool the upper layers.
The greenhouse effect thus continuously “tries” to produce a lapse rate much steeper than the adiabatic lapse rate, but convective overturning occurs before that can happen, cooling the lower troposphere and warming the upper troposphere through a net convective transport of heat from lower layers to upper layers.”
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2011/12/why-atmospheric-pressure-cannot-explain-the-elevated-surface-temperature-of-the-earth/
So, Roy, what you’re claiming is that the enormous heat from GHGs leads to convective heat-mixing, which makes the lapse rate shallow. But the RADIATIVE GHE would make the lapse very steep.
Good lord. That’s just awful. You are saying that without GHG’s, the atmosphere wouldn’t be able to cool???!!!! Don’t you mean it would be HOTTER without GHG’s??
Convection occurs automatically because warm air is less dense…duh! It gets heated and then rises. GHG’s don’t cause convection…how could 0.04% force the rest? So backwards.
And then why is the lapse rate for dry air SIMPLY what it is if you calculate it using U = gh + CpT. Where’s the GHG effect? How come when you factor in condensation heat release to the equation, then you just get exactly the wet rate? You are referring to an effect on the lapse rate that is non-existent.
Roy Spencer says: “yes you probably CAN design a system for generating 5,000K temperatures using just a AAA battery”
Wow. That is of course ridiculous. Actually let me rephrase that.
Please make it so and prove it. 🙂