Monday Mirthiness – spot the troll

Hmm. Perversely, my comment is awaiting moderation.

Troll from Old Danish (OD) “droll”, an elf or jester, alternatively a lurking monster, is powerfully suggestive. In Shakespeare, “troll” represents “a drab, a harlot, strumpet, trollop”– a girl, a lass, a wench.

Oh, on topic:
I understand “Alligators in the sewer”, “monsters under the bed” and how “trolls in the closet” fits, but, really, wouldn’t an outhouse be more appropriate for trolls?

Crispin in Waterloo: “If you have a paper (or article) to present that is up to snuff in terms of content and quality you can offer to host a session and we will examine your argument. It can be very informative.”
That’s probably what Mr. Watts intends, but I can tell you from first-hand experience that “up to snuff in terms of quality” can be so applied as to suppress alternative views.
I have no doubt that Mr. Watts sincerely attempts to maintain open inquiry on his site and to give space to opposing points of view. And by all accounts he succeeds to a much higher degree than alarmist sites such as Skeptical Science. But mechanisms for enforcing a consensus operate on his site, too, as I discovered when I submitted a proposed post questioning what I’ll call the “Brown-Eschenbach Law of Lapse-Rate Conservation” (the “B-E Law”).
Long-time followers of this blog may remember posts by Willis Eschenbach and Robert Brown respectively called “Perpetuum Mobile” and “Refutation of Stable Thermal Equilibrium Lapse Rates.” Those posts’ purpose was to refute Han Jelbring’s erroneous theory that at equilibrium the atmosphere would exhibit its dry adiabatic lapse rate: there would be a substantial vertical temperature gradient even if the atmosphere were not being mixed by the effects of solar radiation, etc. There are indeed legitimate bases for refuting Dr. Jelbring’s theory. Instead of those, however, Mr. Eschenbach and Dr. Brown employed respective versions of the B E Law.
The B-E Law contemplates two thermally isolated systems that are initially at equilibrium and for the sake of argument exhibit different lapse rates in the presence of gravity. Consequently, at least one of them has a non-zero thermal-equilibrium lapse rate. If those erstwhile-isolated systems are then thermally coupled at two different altitudes, the B E Law says that instead of decaying to zero as the now-coupled systems approach a common, composite-system equilibrium lapse rate, net heat flow between them would last forever (or, apparently, at least until their temperatures decay to absolute zero) as the two systems attempt to maintain their pre-coupling lapse rates.
Where did they get such a law? Supposedly, it is dictated by thermodynamics and Fourier’s Law in particular. But how can that be? The bases of thermodynamics are strictly empirical, whereas the situation to which they are applying it is one that according to them could never have been observed. What is their rationale for thus applying thermodynamics beyond its scope? In particular, how can thermodynamics tell us that heat flow would not simply decay to zero as the new, composite system reached its own, common lapse rate?
Dr. Brown’s following derivation of the B E Law supposedly explains it:

Two different columns of gas with different lapse rates. Place them in good thermal contact at the bottom, so that the bottoms remain at the same temperature. They must therefore be at different temperatures at the top. Run a heat engine between the two reservoirs at the top and it will run forever, because as fast as heat is transferred from one column to another, (warming the top) it warms the bottom of that column by an identical amount, causing heat to be transferred at the bottom to both cool the column back to its original temperature profile and re-warm the bottom of the other column. The heat simply circulates indefinitely, doing work as it does, until the gas in both columns approaches absolute zero in temperature, converting all of their mutual heat content into work.

Where did Dr. Brown get that “as fast as heat is transferred from one column to another, (warming the top) it warms the bottom of that column by an identical amount, causing heat to be transferred at the bottom to both cool the column back to its original temperature profile and re-warm the bottom of the other column”? In particular, how does he know that “it warms the bottom of that column by an identical amount”?
At least to this layman, that result seems remarkable. Thermally coupling the previously isolated systems gives the (now-constituent) systems access to a broader range of energies than they previously had, so their phase spaces and thus their statistics change. Yet Mr. Eschenbach and Dr. Brown seem to argue that the constituent systems would seek the same equilibrium configurations they previously had. I could detect no logical basis for so astonishing a result.
So I submitted comments questioning their logic and instead suggesting the conclusion of a paper by Velasco et al. To my way of thinking, that paper not only provided the real basis for refuting Dr. Jelbring’s theory but also showed that the B E Law is invalid. But I’m afraid that what ensued was not edifying.
Why, the response was, should anyone give any credence to some “random guy” on the Internet? My acceptance of Velasco et al. and my refusal to avert my eyes from the yawning chasm in the logic behind the B E Law was taken to evidence of “amazing ignorance of thermodynamics.” No one attempted to explain why coupled systems would not simply assume a new, different-lapse-rate equilibrium state. No one attempted to identify any false step in Velasco et al.’s derivation. In other words, the thread trailed off into irrelevancies.
And that’s the way things stood for a couple of years, until comments submitted by Dr. Brown in the winter of 2014 again addressed equilibrium isothermality. Ordinarily I just let errors go after I’ve made a few attempts to dispel them—my batting average is only about .300—but I had been so taken aback by such unscientific arguments from scientists that I again urged Dr. Brown to aattempt a more-creditable defense of his theory.

My reading of Velasco et al. is that it is a demonstration, based on no assumptions other than the basic axioms of statistical mechanics, that at equilibrium there is in fact a non-zero (albeit, for any significant quantity of gas, quite small) translational-kinetic-energy gradient in the presence of a gravitational field. If you haven’t disproved that through statistical mechanics, your “refutation” is illusory.

Again, though, he merely acted as though the B E Law had the status of F = ma:

Well, illusory except for the implicit violation of the second law. Because if a gas has a lapse rate and metal has a different one then you have perpetual motion. The only way to avoid a violation of the second law is for all material objects to come to the same thermal gradient in a gravitational field. I’m hoping you can see why this is not ever going to be the case.

Thereby convinced that we would never get more than a superficial dismissal of Velasco et al. from the scientists, I decided to dig into it myself and report the results. I wrote up an equation-by-equation description of how Velasco et al. arrived at their conclusion so that anyone who could identify an error would be more likely to do so, , and I submitted it to Mr. Watts as a proposed post.
And that’s where I witnessed this site’s consensus-enforcement mechanism first-hand. In response to my submission, Mr. Watts spiked my piece, dismissing Velasco et al.’s paper as “junk” without identifying any incorrect step in their reasoning. So I wrote another piece, this time without the Velasco et al. equations. The second piece was a more-qualitative demonstration of why the gradient would be zero only in the infinite-number-of-molecules limit. Mr. Watts would not post that piece, either.
Now, both submissions included some statistical mechanics, and at least as to the second one Mr. Watts ultimately admitted that he didn’t understand its substance. In truth, that’s partly my fault; after the effort that went into typing all those complicated equations into the first submission I didn’t put as much effort as I might have into making the second’s statistical mechanics accessible. But I don’t think the subject matter’s difficulty was the sole reason for his spiking my submission; his blog runs plenty of posts that not everyone can follow. I think the ultimate reason for spiking my pieces was that Mr. Watts thought they contained a crackpot theory.
That’s understandable, of course. There’s a “random guy on the Internet” up against two of Mr. Watts’ more-influential contributors. Although Mr. Watts no doubt does want to expose his readers to alternate points of view, he doesn’t want the site to be seen as the place where every weird theory finds a home.
At the end of the day, though, what he did was this. Despite the lack of scientific support for the, well, novel B E Law, he hosted two posts based on it, thus establishing it as this site’s de facto standard proof of equilibrium isothermality. And when he was offered a post that—with complete mathematical support—questioned this standard, he spiked it. Regardless of the intent, the effect was to enforce the local orthodoxy and suppress an alternative view.