Guest post by Steve Goreham, Climate Science Coalition of America
In an address to Green Mountain College on May 15, Carol Browner, Director of Energy and Climate Change Policy, stated “The sooner the U.S. puts a cap on our dangerous carbon pollution, the sooner we can create a new generation of clean energy jobs here in America…” In July, 2009, President Obama lauded the “Cash for Clunkers” program, stating that the initiative “gives consumers a break, reduces dangerous carbon pollution, and our dependence on foreign oil…”
Unfortunately, our President is misinformed about carbon pollution.
The phrase “dangerous carbon pollution” has become standard propaganda from environmental groups.
An example is a May, 2010 press release from the World Wildlife Fund that called for “a science-based limit on dangerous carbon pollution that will send a strong signal to the private sector.” Environmentalists have successfully painted a picture of black particle emissions into the atmosphere. This misconception is being used to drive efforts for Cap & Trade legislation, renewable energy, and every sort of restriction on our light bulbs, vehicles, and houses—all in the misguided attempt to stop climate change.
Carbon is integral to our skin, our muscles, our bones, and throughout the body of each person. Carbon forms more than 20% of the human body by weight. We are full of this “dangerous carbon pollution” by natural metabolic processes.
It’s true that incomplete combustion emits carbon particles that can cause smoke and smog. But this particulate carbon pollution is well controlled by the Clean Air Act of 1970 and many other federal and state statutes.
According to Environmental Protection Agency data, U.S. air quality today is significantly better than it was in 1980. Since 1980, airborne concentration of carbon monoxide is down 79%, lead is down 92%, nitrogen dioxide is down 46%, ozone is down 25%, and sulfur dioxide is down 71%. Carbon particulates have been tracked for fewer years, but PM10 particulates are down 31% since 1990 and PM2.5 particulates are down 19% since 2000. Over the same period, electricity consumption from coal-fired power plants rose 72% and vehicle miles driven are up 91%. We do not need Cap & Trade, Renewable Portfolio Standards, or the California Global Warming Solutions Act (AB32), to reduce carbon particulates.
Climatism! Science, Common Sense, and the 21st Century’s Hottest Topic, Figure 78, data from EPA, 2006
The target of “dirty carbon pollution” propaganda is carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is an invisible, odorless, harmless gas. It does not cause smog or smoke. Humans breathe out 100 times the CO2 we breathe in, created as our body uses sugars. But since it’s tough to call an invisible gas “dirty,” Climatists use “carbon” instead. It’s as wrong as calling water “hydrogen” or salt “chlorine.” Compounds have totally different properties than their composing elements.
Not only is carbon dioxide not a pollutant, it’s essential for life. As pointed out by geologist Leighton Steward, carbon dioxide is green! Carbon dioxide is plant food. Increased atmospheric CO2 causes plants and trees to grow faster and larger, increase their root systems, and improve their resistance to drought, as documented by hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific papers. Carbon dioxide is the best compound that mankind could put into the atmosphere to grow the biosphere.
This “carbon pollution” nonsense is driven by Climatism, the belief that man-made greenhouse gases are destroying Earth’s climate. In a debate at the Global Warming Forum at Purdue University on September 27, Dr. Susan Avery, President of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, was asked “What is the strongest empirical evidence that global warming is caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions rather than natural causes?” Neither Dr. Avery nor Dr. Robert Socolow of Princeton, who also presented, could provide an answer, except the ambiguous “There is lots of evidence.” In fact, Climatism is based largely on computer model projections. There is no empirical evidence that man-made greenhouse gases are the primary cause of global warming. According to Dr. Frederick Seitz, past President of the National Academy of Sciences, “Research data on climate change do not show that human use of hydrocarbons is harmful. To the contrary, there is good evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful.”
As Joanne Nova, Australian author, points out: “Everything on your dinner table—the meat, cheese, salad, bread, and soft drink—requires carbon dioxide to be there. For those of you who believe carbon dioxide is a pollutant, we have a special diet: water and salt.” So the next time you drink a beer or eat a meal, beware of that “dangerous carbon pollution.”
Steve Goreham is Executive Director of the Climate Science Coalition of America and author of Climatism! Science, Common Sense, and the 21st Century’s Hottest Topic.
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Oh good, will re-aquaint myself with the discussion and post back Sunday.
And re-acquaint myself with spelling..
That wasn’t Charles Keeling! It was Roger Revelle. Again and again, you show that you are not familiar with the question of global warming or the events surrounding it.
Right, that was Revelle, I’ve been thinking it was Keeling for quite a while. It was some time ago that I read that history and associated the story with Keeling. So, my sympathy for Keeling was misplaced.., it was Revelle who tried to reign things in.
I’m familiar enough with quite a few aspects of it.., enough to have decided in my investigation that it was a con built on unproven science. I continue learning.
I don’t understand your calculation. As I’ve said, I don not claim that a cooler body can heat a warmer body, except in the sense of making the warmer body warmer than it would be if the cooler body were not sending back an IR. It adds heat to the warmer body, but it adds less than the warmer body is losing. I thought you’d get that from Spencer’s “Yes, Virginia” article.
Shrug, I’m not sure what anyone can get from this article. He begins by saying,
“Probably as the result of my recent post explaining in simple terms my “skepticism” about global warming being mostly caused by carbon dioxide emissions, I’m getting a lot of e-meail traffic from some nice folks who are trying to convince me that the physics of the so-called Greenhouse Effect are not physically possible.
More specifically, that adding CO2 to the atmosphere is not physically capable of causing warming.
These arguments usually involve claims that “back radiation” can not flow from the cooler upper layers of the atmosphgere to the warmer lower layers. This back radiation is a critical component of the theoretical explanation for the Greenhouse Effect. etc.”
And the rest is garbled. For example, he at one point compares the second plate to cloud cover on a cold night, and attributes this to IR from the second plate delaying the heat loss of the first plate, having already said that he can’t think of anything else it could be which is causing the first plate to heat up. Though having said that the electric source heating continues. In the case of the cloud he says it is because it is sending out IR. And so on along the same lines as what you’ve been saying here about insulation and blanket.
So I’m confused. I really, really, have not the faintest idea of what he is saying.
I’m assuming he’s still attempting, or rather thinks he has, shown that ‘ back radiation from the cooler layers of the upper atmosphere can flow to warmer lower layers’.
Given that he doesn’t dispute the law of heat flows to cooler objects, I can’t see that he has shown this.
In likening the heating of the first plate by the second to cloud cover on a cold night for example, he attributes the warming to IR, that seems to me a totally irrelevant comparison. The earth’s atmosphere is not a vacuum, water has a higher heat capacity than carbon dioxide, that’s why we use water in our radiators, not CO2, and so on. IR is emitted by warm things, how is a cold CO2 molecule in the upper layers of the atmosphere emitting it? What is this second plate really doing? Like the cloud cover, he just assumes that it is IR and leaves it at that. Not only has he failed to prove that colder upper layers of the atmosphere are capable of heating lower warmer layers, he doesn’t actually make anything clear about ‘the Greenhouse Effect’.
We could go through this article in more detail, but since you keep using the idea of this as ‘insulation’ effect as he does, I thought I’d concentrate on that particular aspect. Hence my attempt to work out what this ‘blanket of CO2’ actually looks like, because by using such imagery this insulation conjours up something quite substantial. In the roof space of a house, so also a blanket around a body. The image of the effects of CO2 are utterly at odds with its availability to be such a substantial cause of warming, as you’ve already admitted here. So why keep on using it? Such an insulating blanket of CO2 around your cold but still living body would be utterly useless in raising your temperature. It would be around 1sq inch of the total surface of your body, even if you were lucky enough to have it all congregated in one place rather than thoroughly scattered in the mix of air around your body..
What the skeptics mean by “the greenouse effect” is the same as what the warmists mean by it.”
This is the crux of the problem I have with the AGW arguments for CO2 and the Greenhouse Effect. As I’ve explained re that article, I don’t understand them. If you can explain this better than Spencer who makes no sense at all, then I might be able to compare it with ‘what skeptics mean by it’, whatever that is. (And I don’t actually care what this is in our discussion, I’m really only interested in understanding what AGW’s mean by it.)
If you can explain it better than Spencer, then please do so.
Myrrh:
You ask how “a cold CO2 molecule in the upper layers of the atmosphere” can be emitting IR. Every object whose temperature is above absolute zero emits IR. Secondly, the CO2 that does the back-radiating that we’re concerned with is not in the upper layers of the atmosphere. It’s in the troposphere.
I’m assuming he’s still attempting, or rather thinks he has, shown that ‘ back radiation from the cooler layers of the upper atmosphere can flow to warmer lower layers’. Given that he doesn’t dispute the law of heat flows to cooler objects, I can’t see that he has shown this.
There is no contradiction between back-radiation and the fact that heat flows from warmer objects to cooler objects. The CO2 sends back some percentage of the IR that it receives from the earth’s surface, so the earth’s surface is sending more than it gets back. The situation is as if I were throwing baseballs to you, and you were throwing some of them back to me. The net flow would be from me to you, but it would be slower (in baseballs per unit time) than if you were not throwing any of them back.
You have not explained the calculation I said I didn’t understand.
You ask how “a cold CO2 molecule in the upper layers of the atmosphere” can be emitting IR. Every object whose temperature is above absolute zero emits IR.
Oh, please, we’re talking here about major heat transfer, the scenario we’re presented with is bloody great billions and billions and billions and billions of tons arctic and antarctic ice and Himalayan glaciers melting, scenes of New York and London flooded to practical obliteration!
IR is heat transfer. Heat being the optimum word here. IR is given out by warm or hot bodies. A cold CO2 molecule has no heat, no IR to emit. A hot CO2 molecule cannot keep its heat, it emits practically instantly, so a hot CO2 will practically instantly pass on that heat to whatever is colder around it, like water vapour, or the heat will disappear into space, because heat rises, and this will be practically instantly out of the whole atmosphere because light travels etc.
Secondly, the CO2 that does the back-radiating that we’re concerned with is not in the upper layers of the atmopshere. It’s in the troposphere.
I used his description, I thought that he meant the upper layers of the troposphere, but in the example it’s actually about the upper layers of the the whole atmosphere since he compares his vacuum to the vacuum of space. As I said, he isn’t making sense to me, another example of why not. Either way, a cold CO2 isn’t emitting IR, not that CO2 is likely in the upper layers of the whole atmosphere.
There is no contradiction between back-radiation and the fact that heat flows from warmer objects to cooler objects. The CO2 sends back some percentage of the IR that it recieves from the earth’s surface, so the earth’s surface is sending more than it gets back. The situation is as if I were throwing baseballs to you, and you were throwing some of them back to me. The net flow would be from me to you, but it would be slower (in baseballs per unit time) than if you were not throwing any of them back.
? So what’s the mechanism that’s throwing the CO2 back to earth, if the earth is warmer?
You have not explained the calculation I said I didn’t understand.
I thought I’d explained it, I took the the surface of skin area on a human body (a figure around 1.85 square metres), to see what proportion 400ppm would be.
I didn’t have time to work out what this square inch (around 7square centimetres), would look like spread ‘well-mixed’, in terms of something that one could visualise, fraction of hair, cobweb?, but it’s insignificant. That’s why CO2 is called a trace gas, it’s insignificant as a proportion of our atmosphere. (Atmosphere here the troposphere, this is, I’ve noted, generally used as a term to describe just our troposphere, our immediate atmosphere subject to gravity, pressure etc.)
Sorry, that should be, what’s the mechanism for throwing IR from CO2 back to a warmer earth?
Myrrh:
IR is heat transfer. Heat being the optimum word here. IR is given out by warm or hot bodies. A cold CO2 molecule has no heat, no IR to emit. A hot CO2 molecule cannot keep its heat, it emits practically instantly, so a hot CO2 will practically instantly pass on that heat to whatever is colder around it, like water vapour, or the heat will disappear into space, because heat rises, and this will be practically instantly out of the whole atmosphere because light travels etc.
IR is emitted by every object with temperature above absolute zero. This does not depend on coldness of surrounding objects. Indeed, the warmer the surrounding objects, the more IR the object emits, because it receives more. Heat “flows” from the warmer to the colder in part because the warmer emits more IR than the colder. The colder object does not have any magical power to decide whether to emit.
Heat rises because of convection.
I used his description, I thought that he meant the upper layers of the troposphere, but in the example it’s actually about the upper layers of the the whole atmosphere since he compares his vacuum to the vacuum of space. As I said, he isn’t making sense to me, another example of why not. Either way, a cold CO2 isn’t emitting IR, not that CO2 is likely in the upper layers of the whole atmosphere.
The cold CO2 does emit IR. There is some CO2 in the upper atmosphere, but it’s not the CO2 we’re concerned with in talking about back-radiation warming the surface.
? So what’s the mechanism that’s throwing the CO2 back to earth, if the earth is warmer?
As I said, any object above absolute zero emits IR. You are implying that whether an object emits IR depends on the temperature of its surroundings. That’s not true.
I thought I’d explained it, I took the the surface of skin area on a human body (a figure around 1.85 square metres), to see what proportion 400ppm would be. I didn’t have time to work out what this square inch (around 7square centimetres), would look like spread ‘well-mixed’, in terms of something that one could visualise, fraction of hair, cobweb?, but it’s insignificant. That’s why CO2 is called a trace gas, it’s insignificant as a proportion of our atmosphere. (Atmosphere here the troposphere, this is, I’ve noted, generally used as a term to describe just our troposphere, our immediate atmosphere subject to gravity, pressure etc.)
No, you didn’t explain it, and you haven’t explained it now. The 400 ppm is 400 ppm of the atmosphere. Did you multiply the mass of the atmosphere by 0.0004, divide the result by the human population, and somehow (how!?) come up with your 0.0009 square meters from that? Or did you pile all the CO2 onto one person and somehow (how!?) come up with your 0.00009 square meters from that? Or what? I have no idea of what you did.
Bill
IR is emitted by every object with temperature above absolute zero.
I’m not disagreeing with you, but then that also includes all the nitrogen and oxygen in our atmosphere.
This does not depend on coldness of surrounding objects. Indeed, the warmer the surrounding objects, the more IR the object emits, because it receives more. Heat “flows” from the warmer to the colder in part because the warmer emits more IR than the colder. The colder object does not have any magical power to decide whether to emit.
Nor does it have any magical power to emit against the law that heat flows from the hotter to the colder, and not the other way round.
heat rises because of convection.
And radiation.
The cold CO2 does emit IR. There is some CO2 in the upper atmosphere, but it’s not the CO2 we’re concerned with in talking about back-radiation warming the surface.
There’s IR and IR, far IR is thermal, and is, as I’m using it here, the common understanding of IR, thermal energy. How does CO2 in this ‘back-radiation’ transfer thermal energy back to the hotter earth’s surface which emitted it when the law clearly states it can’t?
As I said, any object above absolute zero emits IR. You are implying that whether an object emits IR depends on the temperature of its surroundings. That’s not true.
No, as above, I’m saying that heat transfer cannot be from colder to hotter, and, heat rises. The atmosphere, troposphere, is cooler the higher it is from earth, the heat transfer from the earth will therefore always be in the direction away from the earth’s surface. Cloud cover particularly, but water vapour generally in the atmosphere has a real ability to delay this, but still, the direction of heat transfer still remains from the earth upwards. CO2’s heat capacity is less than 1, it can’t hold onto to heat, it passes it on practically instantaneously. And so that will be in the direction away from earth’s surface still emitting the hotter IR, to the colder around it. (The actual light aspect of this takes a very small fraction of a second to leave the earth’s whole atmosphere, it doesn’t hang around!) Anyway, the colder-than-earth emitting IR CO2, cannot then back-heat the earth’s surface heating it up. If it could we would have perpetual motion effect, the earth getting hotter releasing more heat and CO2 back-radiating it making it even hotter and the much hotter earth emitting even more heat and the CO2 back-radiating it making the earth even hotter, ad infinitum. It doesn’t happen.
My fuel bills would go in inverse ratio if you can let me know what to tell my plumber in setting up these second plates..
We also know it doesn’t happen quite obviously because the clouds and water vapour in the atmosphere which have a greater capacity to hold thermal energy, and significantly more abundant in the atmosphere than CO2, have never had such an effect as back-radiating the IR and heating the earth’s surface making it hotter as per AGW description of CO2. (At any given day the amount of rain fall is around 3% of the total water content of our atmosphere.) That’s an awful lot of IR not back-radiating to heat the earth’s suface. What we find instead is that just as land nearer the sea is cooler, because water evaporates from the earth’s surface when heated by the sun, as it rises it takes away heat from the earth. Because of its exceptional capacity to hold heat, water has a two-fold effect on our atmosphere, it both delays the loss of heat after the sun has warmed it, (noticeably so as in Spencer’s description of cloud cover), and cools the atmosphere when the sun is warming it.
In other words, water vapour is our greenhouse gas of choice, real greenhouse not AGW, regulating the temperature of the earth by regulating the extremes of temperature we would have without it as in a desert, giving us life.
No, you didn’t explain it, and you haven’t explained it now. The 400 ppm is 400 ppm of the atmosphere. Did you multiply the mass of the atmosphere by 0.0004, divide the result by the human population, etc.
Grin. No I did not. First a reminder of why I did it. Because I’m really really fed up of these images of ‘blanket’ and ‘insulation’ in AGW descriptions of CO2 in our atmosphere, conjouring up something so substantial relative to the earth’s surface that it ‘will cause all the ice on earth to melt and millions will die’.. The 400ppm is a proportion, so, I wondered just what this meant if it was a blanket around a human body. For human body I took the area which is skin, around 1.85 square metres, divided it by a million and multiplied that by 400, I got a very tiny blanket. And not much use in insulation as in a house if I put that very tiny blanket on top of my head. But, since AGW claim is that CO2 is thoroughly mixed and so evenly distributed, that tiny blanket would then have to be shared equally by my body’s area of skin. Which is such an insignificant amount I can’t readily find something to use as an analogy. Suffice to say that it is practically invisible?
Which, a, put’s the description “CO2 is a trace gas in the atmosphere” and so insignificant for AGW purposes, into a more manageable picture, and b, makes me glad that CO2 is heavier than air and will always sink through air back to the earth’s surface where plants, and we, need it to survive and so, doesn’t ‘stay hundreds and even thousands of years out of reach well mixed through the atmosphere’, starving us to death at the surface and back-radiating us into toast.
SF: IR is emitted by every object with temperature above absolute zero.
M: I’m not disagreeing with you, but then that also includes all the nitrogen and oxygen in our atmosphere.
Oxygen and nitrogen are transparent to IR. CO2 is not. However, your remark is relevant in that CO2 molecules collide with oxygen and nitrogen molecules.
SF: This does not depend on coldness of surrounding objects. Indeed, the warmer the surrounding objects, the more IR the object emits, because it receives more. Heat “flows” from the warmer to the colder in part because the warmer emits more IR than the colder. The colder object does not have any magical power to decide whether to emit.
M: Nor does it have any magical power to emit against the law that heat flows from the hotter to the colder, and not the other way round.
It doesn’t emit against the law. It emits “against” the more rapid loss of heat that would occur if it were not there, just as, in my baseballs analogy, you emit against the more rapid loss of baseballs that I would suffer if you were not throwing some of them back to me. Whoever it is that writes scienceofdoom.com has identified 6 engineering textbooks that confirm this. He provides photos of the textbook pages:
Amazing Things we Find in Textbooks – The Real Second Law of Thermodynamics
SF: heat rises because of convection.
M: And radiation.
Yes, but the radiation does not have a preferred direction. The CO2 emits IR in all directions.
SF: The cold CO2 does emit IR. There is some CO2 in the upper atmosphere, but it’s not the CO2 we’re concerned with in talking about back-radiation warming the surface.
M: There’s IR and IR, far IR is thermal, and is, as I’m using it here, the common understanding of IR, thermal energy. How does CO2 in this ‘back-radiation’ transfer thermal energy back to the hotter earth’s surface which emitted it when the law clearly states it can’t?
The law does not state that it can’t. The law is about the net effect. It has nothing to say about whether a colder body emits IR in the direction of a warmer body.
SF: As I said, any object above absolute zero emits IR. You are implying that whether an object emits IR depends on the temperature of its surroundings. That’s not true.
M: No, as above, I’m saying that heat transfer cannot be from colder to hotter, and, heat rises. The atmosphere, troposphere, is cooler the higher it is from earth, the heat transfer from the earth will therefore always be in the direction away from the earth’s surface.
Heat transfer is the net effect. Think about the baseballs. There’s “net baseball transfer” from me to you, but this does not preclude your throwing some of them back to me as part of this process.
M: Cloud cover particularly, but water vapour generally in the atmosphere has a real ability to delay this, but still, the direction of heat transfer still remains from the earth upwards. CO2′s heat capacity is less than 1, it can’t hold onto to heat, it passes it on practically instantaneously. And so that will be in the direction away from earth’s surface still emitting the hotter IR, to the colder around it. (The actual light aspect of this takes a very small fraction of a second to leave the earth’s whole atmosphere, it doesn’t hang around!) Anyway, the colder-than-earth emitting IR CO2, cannot then back-heat the earth’s surface heating it up. If it could we would have perpetual motion effect, the earth getting hotter releasing more heat and CO2 back-radiating it making it even hotter and the much hotter earth emitting even more heat and the CO2 back-radiating it making the earth even hotter, ad infinitum. It doesn’t happen.
There’s no perpetual motion effect. I am not claiming that the CO2 and water vapor back-radiate all of the IR that they receive from the earth’s surface. Beyond that, let me say, you raise too many issues simultaneously. I don’t have the time or the inclination to disentangle them with long explanations, and I don’t think it would do any good, considering the difficulty you’re having. Besides, I’m not a physics teacher or anything like that, so I would have to think very hard about how to state things.
More later – maybe.
Myrrh, I forgot, one other thing re your phrase “greenhouse gas of choice,” referring to water vapor If that means that water vapor is responsible for most of the greenhouse effect, the warmists agree with you. The trouble is, it’s not an independent variable; the amount of water vapor that the atmosphere can hold depends on the temperature. If you raise the temperature by adding CO2 to the atmosphere, this enables it to hold more water vapor.
Oxygen and nitrogen are transparent to IR. CO2 is not.
Well, first of all that oxygen and nitrogen are transparent to IR is a claim that is not proved, or rather I have never seen it explained, shown, as proved, instead all I see is references to Tyndall, (who said that water was the primary warmer of the earth’s atmosphere by IR and the rest insignificant).
Actually, cannot be proved if they are shown to not be transparent to IR.
So, where is the tested proof that they are transparent?
Here is a claimed proof that both oxygen and nitrogen are not transparent to IR, (which I’m still thinking about):
http://www.spinonthat.com/CO2.html
Here spectrum data:
http://www.coe.ou.edu/sserg/web/Results/Spectrum/o2.pdf
which made my eyes glaze over, however, I have now found this page:
http://freshgasflow.com/physics/respi_gases/oxygen/pulse_oximeter.html
which is written and presented in language I can understand. Oxygenated blood absorbs more infrared light than red light, de-oxygenated blood absorbs more red light than infrared light.
This is a machine built to measure something important to know accurately in the medical sciences, if oxygen was known to be transparent to IR would anyone have thought to devise such an instrument?
However, your remark is relevant in that CO2 molecules collide with oxygen and nitrogen molecules.
As do oxygen with nitrogen and nitrogen with nitrogen and oxygen with oxygen. And there are more of these to collide with each other than there are carbon dioxide molecules.
It doesn’t emit against the law. It emits “against” the more rapid loss of heat that would occur if it were not there, just as, in my baseballs analogy, you emit against the more rapid loss of baseballs that I would suffer if you were not throwing some of them back to me.
It’s against the Law. This Law states quite clearly and unambiguously that heat does not flow from a colder to a hotter object. Generations of practical scientists, I include here all the engineers who work with this Law, have not found it possible to violate it. If they had, things created in the real world by real science engineers in all fields where this is applicable would be creating things which wouldn’t work, and they would long ago have told us that. It would no longer be a Law but a falsified hypothesis.
Your baseball analogy, to remind us, as you posted earlier.
The situation is as if I were throwing baseballs to you, and you were throwing some of them back to me. The net flow would be from me to you, but it would be slower (in baseballs per unit time) than if you were not throwing any of them back.
I can understand the picture. I can understand how it works with baseballs. I can’t understand how it works in heat transfer when the Law states that the direction of flow of heat cannot be from colder to hotter. It either can or it can’t. We have a tried and tested Law which says it can’t. So what’s going on here?
I missed it the first time around, but your addition of the page below goes to explain it what I think is awry with your baseball analogy, why it isn’t applicable re heat transfer as I understand it.
Whoever it is that writes scienceofdoom.com has identified 6 engineering textbooks that confirm this. He provides photos of the textbook pages:
http://scienceofdoom.com/2010/10/07/amazing-things-we-find-in-textbooks-the-real-second-law-of-thermodynamics/
I find such a page very difficult to read, but, I have spotted something I saw an engineer reply to which relates to your baseball analogy, so I’ll paraphrase his answer as best I can.
ScienceofDoom says the Law of Thermodynamics is imaginary and he proposes that there is a ‘real’ version which contradicts it and shows that textbooks say so. As above, I cannot for one moment understand why generations of scientists have practically used this Law and not found it violated without telling us.
The first thing he mentions in his ‘real’ law is: 1a Net heat flows from the hotter to the colder. This is your baseball analogy.
A reply I read somewhere, was that this was like saying that gravity is a net effect. He posted to a link, which I didn’t follow up so can’t reference now, which stated that law is without the ‘net’, i.e. that the classic law is that ‘heat flows from the hotter to the colder’, not, ‘net heat flows from the hotter to the colder’. He gave gravity as an example.
If it were ‘net gravity’ the baseballs you were throwing to me would sometimes be arriving in the direction I would expect and sometimes not, some would be flying out of our gravitational field and into space, but, the ‘net’ effect statistically would be that most would arrive in the trajectory I would expect them to arrive according to classical measurement of gravity.
Clearly, this doesn’t make any sense in the Law of Gravity as we know it, all of us know it practically, so why should such an addition of ‘net’ to the law of heat transfer make any more sense, even if it’s not so obvious?
Also, this ‘net gravity’ would have the same probability of you accurately receiving the balls I was throwing back as it did when you threw them to me.
So, I’m not sure about this ‘net’ thing re heat and your baseball analogy.
But also, re this page from ScienceofDoom, are you sure he is accurately reading the textbooks?
If you look at the posts exchanged between SofD and John Millet beginning 10ct 10, 8:43 and in particular to John Millett’s reply Oct 11 9:25 to SofD’s post above it, Oct 10 4:17 – then, I’m reluctant to believe that the classic Law of Thermodynamics is imaginary as ScienceofDoom says it is.
I really don’t understand the mathematics of it to accurately judge this exchange, if you can provide me, I’ll continue looking too, with a workable example such as the simpler page I posted on oxygen absorbing IR, something that works in the real world, I might be able to get my head around it better.
The page you posted earlier on the Spencer example doesn’t do this for me either, as I said. But then, neither does it really for him, because he says that, I paraphrase, ‘if the original hot plate isn’t gaining heat by absorbing IR from the colder one, then I don’t know why it gets hotter’. This isn’t proof that it is caused by back-radiated IR, and is an example of why AGW ‘proofs’ irritate me, because they argue from non-proof (‘we can’t find anything else to explain it therefore it must be CO2’).
I don’t think I’m being unreasonable in asking for real proof. I’m not a scientist or a mathematician so have to struggle through such discussions as best I can. What I have found in reading many of them now, is that ‘engineers’, those with practical science qualifications in their fields who do have the maths, always argue that the law applies on both macro and micro level.
I have to go with the John Millet’s in such discussions, his view is summed up in his post Oct 11, 9:25
“You can make up whatever ideas you like to support your belief in the imaginary second law of thermodynamics. I invite new readers to read what the textbooks writers actually say.”
Yes, but radiation does not have a preferred direction. The CO2 emits IR in all directions.
Again, this is a statement I see but I have not seen anything to prove this is so, and as with the example I posted re oxygen and IR, perhaps there is a practical application in the real world showing this, proving or disproving it. If you can provide such a thing please do.
For the moment, assuming that is correct. The figure I’ve seen about this, is that 50% will get emitted away from the earth and 50% towards the earth, so not all is radiated back.
Until I see a proof that the Law of heat flow isn’t a Law, I’ll stick with it. Of that 50% directed to the earth, how much is actually reaching the earth if the earth is still radiating out greater heat and the flow therefore is 50% up into the atmosphere? Wouldn’t any radiation from the atmosphere to the earth simply be swept up in the heat radiating from the earth?
The law does not state that it can’t. The law is about the net effect. It has nothing to say about whether a colder body emits IR in the direction of a warmer body.
Yes, it’s this that’s confusing me, as I said above. I’ve seen a post from practical scientists which says the Law was not stated as ‘net’, and, I’ve just gone back to SofD page and (if I’d read all the replies first …), and another Millet post explains why it doesn’t when the colder comes into the environment of the hotter. Oct14 11:59 in a reply to Warmcast:
“If the less bright body of your question is less energetic (colder) than the medium it would cease emitting into the medium (incidentally, towards the other body). It would instead absorb from the medium (incidentally, from the other body).”
Which is what I meant by “swept up in the heat radiating from the earth”.
See Bryan Oct 19 2:10 re the books SofD quotes from. Now, we do have lots of examples of AGW proponents cherry picking data to prove something to support their arguments, if this post accurately conveys the problem here, that this is cherry picking from badly written descriptions and doesn’t even include physics text books, then this explanation of ‘back-radiation’ is just another example. I’ll stick with the practical scientists’ assessments.
Interesting page for the discussion. Just noticed something else. Bryan Oct 19 5:16pm
refers to a physics text book which states:
“..it is impossible to transfer heat continuously from a cold body to a hot body without the imput of work”
Which is why I asked ‘what mechanism is sending the baseball back’? If the hotter body is you throwing baseballs to me and the colder me is absorbing these it takes work for me to send them back to a warmer body which you still are.
There’s no perpetual motion effect. I am not claiming that the CO2 and water vapor back-radiate all of the IR that they receive from the earth’s surface.
That’s not what I meant. As in the Spencer example is what I mean by ‘perpetual motion effect’. If the second plate is causing the first plate to become hotter, it is then itself emitting more heat and would be causing the second plate to become hotter and this in turn would cause the first plate to become hotter etc., ad infinitum. We then have perpetual energy cycle, which would lower my fuel bills dramatically, so I’d like it to be true!
Beyond that, let me say, you raise too many issues simultaneiously. I don’t have the time or the inclination to disentangle them with long explanations, and I don’t think it would do any good, considering the difficulty you’re having. Besides, I’m not a physics teacher or anything like that, so I would have to think very hard about to state things.
More later – maybe.
OK, neither am I, so do understand how hard going this can be.. I’ve enjoyed your discussion for the opportunity it’s given me to think about it. I’m still finding myself wondering what caused the first plate to reach equilibrium… (have reduced this to a picture of the two plates trapped in the vacuum of a vacuum flask.. grin).
Myrrh, I forgot, one other thing re your phrase “greenhouse gas of choice,” referring to water vapor. If that means that water vapor is responsible for most of the greenhouse effect, the warminsts agree with you. The trouble is, it’s not an independent variable; the amount of water vapor that the atmosphere can hold depends on the temperature. If you raise the temperature by adding CO2 to the atmosphere, this enables it to hold more water vapor.
I think of water vapour as the greenhouse gas of choice because for me the greenhouse is all the atmosphere around the earth, in its totality it prevents the conditions on earth we see on the moon which doesn’t have an atmosphere. It’s the water cycle within that which regulates the temperature we have on earth from extreme highs and lows and which makes the abundance of life possible. Locally its absence produces desert conditions, daytime temperatures soar and inhibit life. If this were happening globally we would be desert all over. So water the greenhouse house of choice within our greenhouse atmosphere.
And so, naturally from my logic, CO2 merely joins that cycle, which is cooling the earth by taking up excess heat.
Thank you for your thoughts here, bye for now.
A p.s. on your ScienceofDoom link above. It concerned me that the Spencer experiment was in a vacuum, because this isn’t our atmosphere, but I wasn’t quite sure what difference it made. I think John Millet has solved this in his post Oct 21 10:41 am.
“I think this is the source of Sod’s misunderstanding, doing in one step what the entropy law requires to be done in two steps, between each body and the surrounding medium. …Sod’s result (I typed law!) comes from assuming the absence of a medium.”
And the discussion then looks at this lack of medium, i.e. calculations are done in a vacuum.
This is similar to something I found earlier when discussing the movement of CO2 molecules, and couldn’t understand why the concept of CO2 being heavier than air was alien to AGW, all insisting that CO2 mixed thoroughly in the atmosphere and wouldn’t separate out – until I decided to investigate it via a discussion with an AGW (a PhD in physics), who insisted that CO2 moved rapidly in the atmosphere mixing thoroughly without work. This was in reply to me saying that CO2 being 1.5 times heavier than air, always sank to the earth unless work was done to move it (wind, ventilation).
Our scenario was a room in which a large quantity of CO2 sank to the floor and pooled, as happens in mines, breweries, volcanic eruptions, vents and so on. I said because CO2 was heavier than air, it would stay on the floor where it had pooled if nothing changed to alter the conditions in which it had pooled. So, opening a window, putting on a fan could move it, work. He said, that even if conditions remained the same the CO2 would mix thoroughly in the atmosphere without any work being done because it travels at great speed colliding with other molecules in the atmosphere and so would mix into the atmosphere even though it was heavier than air.
On further exploration of why he could think this I discovered that he was quoting ideal gas laws for the movement of CO2. The ideal gas is ‘imaginary’, it is not the way a real gas is but useful in calculations (a bit like the imaginary ‘average’); it does not have volume, is not subject to gravity, does not interact with other molecules, but bounces off them, and so on, contra to real properties of molecules. There are various ideal gas laws, none can accurately describe real gases in real life physics and various tweakings have to be done to bring these to describe how a real gas will react in any given situation. These are two distinct terms in this physics, real and ideal gases, and “imaginary” to describe ideal gas is also standard, that it doesn’t actually exist.
But, so convinced is he that this is how CO2 works in the real world, that it is an ideal gas, that he utterly dismissed any thought that its known physical property being heavier than air could alter this, and so came up with this really strange picture of CO2 pooling and then getting up on its own without work to mix back into the air it was too heavy for.
That’s the problem with the vacuum calculations, like ideal gas to describe real CO2, these can’t accurately describe real behaviour in the real world. Rather than accept that the Laws of Thermodynamics are actually laws, as CO2 is actually heavier than air, these laws are claimed to be wrong because the AGW hypothesis requires them to be wrong.
This is the science taught to children at school, AGWScience. Certainly when some of those go on into practical science disciplines, like engineering, gas, energy disciplines etc, they will be corrected because their skills requires it, but look how difficult it is for such to argue with AGW’s who think they understand the science! Most of us will take this ‘consensus’ view because that’s what scientists are for, to come up with understanding of how reality works..
Anyway, even in a vacuum I still don’t understand why Spencer says an equilibrium is reached, I’ll see if he’s got a discussion about it.
Thanks again.