Replicating Al Gore's Climate 101 video experiment shows that his "high school physics" could never work as advertised

davidmhoffer says:
October 20, 2011 at 8:57 pm
Myrrh;
However…, lasars of visible light can also burn if the intensity is increased. Which is a whole other subject and doesn’t mean that visible light suddenly becomes capable of moving the molecules in the paper. >>>>
1. Yes it does.
2. High intensity burns just like you said, proving that visible light carries energy capable of heating.
3. You demand proof, provide the proof yourself, and then insist that it isn’t proof.
4. This is called being willfuly blind. An apt description in this case since if visible light was incapable of affecting the molecules in the back of your eyeballs, you’d be unable to see. If the intensity gets too high, it will burn the backs of your eyeballs out, and you really will be blind. Which is why you don’t look directly at the sun, even through glass which blocks infrared.
Rubbish, I’ve watched the sun solar eclipses through glasses because they’re designed to block the infrared from burning your eyes. This is what burns the eyes, the lens of the eye acting like a magnifying glass heating the eyeball. You might get temporarily ‘blinded’ by the glare of light and that can happen when any bright light from any source hits the retina, a period of rest in black, cupping one’s hands over the eyes for example, will bring this back to normal. Anyone can look directly at the Sun, it’s only when it is too intense do we automatically turn away from the heat and light it’s producing. Watching too long or exposed too long to strong light and heat is a hazard for welders and any working in high heat furnace type areas – in these situations thermal can cook the eyeballs and UV, much tinier even than visible, is more of a danger too, working on the DNA level.
Heat and Light are two different properties of electromagnetic waves and have different effects.
Here:

http://www.bibalex.org/Eclipse2006/SafeWithFilters.htm
Observing Solar Eclipses with Filters
A solar filter is an optical piece specially designed to reduce the glare of the Sun to a safe level for viewing and to block the harmful solar ultraviolet and infrared radiations.

Why do those pro the science fiction memes always come back with statements like 4. that are such a lie from the way they jumble stuff up? Either because they know the difference and want to deliberately confuse or because they don’t know the difference, and are merely repeating misdirection about this.
I’ve asked for proof that visible light from the Sun heats land and oceans as claimed in the AGWScience Fiction Incs energy budget, KT97 and ilk.
Visible light does not burn. Only by artifically increasing intensity can it do damage and that more often than not in lasers is from the infrared element. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_pointer
You’ve no sense of scale. Or rather, you and your ilk can only provide arguments based on no sense of scale and out of context analogies because you have to deliberately avoid having to deal with the physical fact that visible light energy can be used in different ways, such as chemical, fluorescence, which are not the creation of heat and this destroys the simplistic unscientific claim that visible light from the Sun heats land and oceans.
Prove it, show exactly how visible light from the Sun heats land and oceans or stop trying to confuse the new to the subject. All you’re showing by your avoidance is disingenuity.
Visible light from the Sun doesn’t have the power to move molecules of rocks and water into vibration which is what heats up matter.
It’s heat from the Sun which creates visible light, visible light is a product of heat.
Visible light is so weak that it doesn’t have the energy to make big waves… 🙂
Discuss..
Enough, you can look up for yourself how visible light from the Sun interacts with matter, on an electron scale and as I’ve already described in above posts. These visible light waves are too small and too puny power to move the much bigger molecules of matter into vibration. These waves get bounced around the sky by the electrons of oxygen and nitrogen molecules, scattered when the electrons get pinged and bounce visible out the way it came in.
If ‘visible light heats matter by being absorbed’ then the AGWSF claim is falsified because the atmosphere is not transparent to them, because these electrons absorb visible light before ejecting it, the molecules of oxygen and nitrogen should be hot! Water molecules won’t even let visible light in to play with its electrons. Visible light cannot move the water molecules into vibrational states which is how matter is heated up.
Heat energy from the Sun is powerful enough to move molecules into vibration – this is thermal energy, heat, thermal infrared, the real energy from the Sun capable of heating land and oceans.
This is bog standard basic difference between Light and Heat.
You can continue to claim otherwise, but you can never find anything to prove it because such a proof doesn’t exist and the real mechanisms falsifying your claim are already standard knowledge in real world physics.
So put up or shut up. You cannot keep claiming that visible light is heating up land and oceans when basic physics shows it can’t.
You have to prove basic known physics wrong.

You mean all those years I used NaCl blocks to run IR spectra because I thought glass was opaque to IR, I could have used glass? Dadgum, I should have asked Bill Nye the Sinus Guy first. I thought everyone recognized that minor difficulty the Gore experiment and didn’t mention it.

Myrrh,
Some advice. Instead of telling everyone why you understand physics more than they do, go down to your local university, wherever that is, go to the physics or chemistry department, and find a competent spectroscopist. Ask them.
Before you go you may want to look up the Franck-Condon principle.

So we have Herschel discovering invisible infrared coming out of a glass prism that has sunlight directed on it, but time and time again it is stated that glass blocks Infrared. There seems to be a contradiction here. Herschel also discovered that visible light and invisible light below that of red also produces heat when it is directed on the blackened bulb of a thermometer.
I’m finding it a tad hard to find definitive answers on this using Google but am getting the impression that sunlight contains near infrared (according to Wiki on the greenhouse effect) which will pass through glass (TV remotes/ camera active focus as examples). When the sunlight hits the Earth’s surface it heats up the surface and that heat energy produces far Infrared of a much longer wavelength and that will not pass through glass, in fact glass then becomes an insulator as far as Infra red heat transmission is concerned. This then would also make Anthony quite correct with his greenhouse diagram.
Am I on the right track?

According to the Al Gore principle of CO2 warming we’d each save a bundle on winter heating cost by putting a glass bubble around our house and filling it with CO2. Perhaps he should try it first as another experiment and then let us know how it worked out…

zac:
You are wondering if sunlight has near-IR, right? Here are some tables I made month’s ago using Wikipedia’s definition of frequency breaks here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/05/30/skeptic-strategy-for-talking-about-global-warming/#comment-673670 — there’s the nearIR and IR in solar radiation.
Hope that helps. (the discussion was different so not every entry is the same width frequency-wise so careful as you read them)

Cheers Wayne
I ended up reading all of the thread you linked to, I had no idea how political and money making global warming is.

Leif Svalgaard says:
October 21, 2011 at 3:52 am
Myrrh says:
October 21, 2011 at 3:25 am
You cannot keep claiming that visible light is heating up land and oceans when basic physics shows it can’t.
Herschel discovered infrared and showed in the process that visible light heats:
http://coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu/cosmic_classroom/classroom_activities/herschel_experiment.html
see also: http://home.znet.com/schester/calculations/herschel/index.html
Shrug, since visible light isn’t capable of moving molecules into vibrational states, AS WE NOW UNDERSTAND IN REAL PHYSICS, all that was being measured in terms of temperature in the thermometer was from thermal infrared.
http://coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu/cosmic_classroom/classroom_activities/herschel_example.html
Yeah right, put thermometers in an enclosed box to measure thermal infrared heat spread.
Wayne previously suggested a real experiment based on the known-well-to-modern-day physics properties of light and heat to test just how capable visible light was of raising the temp in thermometer. As explained above in real world applications photovoltaic creation of electricity from visible and plate capture of thermal infrared –
we already know the difference between light and heat energies from the Sun,
we already know in great detail how visible light from the Sun light works on electron level,
we already know in great detail how thermal energy from the Sun works on atomic/molecular level,
Visible light works on electron scale in electronic transitions which does not move molecules and not on the thermal infrared atomic/molecular scale of rotational/vibrational which is how matter heats up.
What is so difficult to understand here? You’re supposedly a highly educated scientist and one would assume that gives you practice in rational, logical thinking on a daily basis.
So, beginning from where we have got to now with real world knowledge,
with real physics which knows that thermal infrared heats water and visible light doesn’t,
as seen in the real world around us in countless applications such as photovoltaic cells and plate capture of light and heat, and water curtains to grab the thermal heat energy while allowing visible light to pass through in protecting fireman tackling great conflagrations, and in cooling bulbs in producing blue light for plant growth in greenhouses:
Wayne suggested building a box, covering it with glass lid and circulating water over the top which captures thermal infrared but allows visible light to pass through, because in real world physics we know that water is a transparent medium for visible light.
………………………………………………………
zac says:
October 21, 2011 at 7:09 am
So we have Herschel discovering invisible infrared coming out of a glass prism that has sunlight directed on it, but time and time again it is stated that glass blocks Infrared. There seems to be a contradiction here. Herschel also discovered that visible light and invisible light below that of red also produces heat when it is directed on the blackened bulb of a thermometer.
As above my reply to Leif, all Herschel found was that there was an invisible heat source, and I don’t mean ‘all’ in any put down sense, it was a momentous discovery. But interpretation is only as good as knowledge of the subject allows. In the cold light of the modern day physics knowledge..
I’m finding it a tad hard to find definitive answers on this using Google but am getting the impression that sunlight contains near infrared (according to Wiki on the greenhouse effect) which will pass through glass (TV remotes/ camera active focus as examples). When the sunlight hits the Earth’s surface it heats up the surface and that heat energy produces far Infrared of a much longer wavelength and that will not pass through glass, in fact glass then becomes an insulator as far as Infra red heat transmission is concerned. This then would also make Anthony quite correct with his greenhouse diagram.
That diagram is based on the junk fictional science promoting AGW. Near infrared is not hot – the NASA page on traditional science explained it, ah, I’ve just realised when I went to the post I mentioned this before, that I gave the wrong URL for the post I was directing to, here’s what it should be:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/07/28/spencer-and-braswell-on-slashdot/#comment-711886
from which the link to the NASA still teaching traditional physics page: http://science.hq.nasa.gov/kids/imagers/ems/infrared.html
which says:

“Shorter, near infrared waves are not hot at all – in fact you cannot even feel them. These shorter wavelengths are the ones used by your TV’s remote control.”

Near infrared is akin to visible light and UV, reflective rather than absorptive. It is near infrared used in cameras to capture images on film which works on the same principle as normal visible light cameras, by capturing the infrared light reflecting off the subject. This is different from the thermal infrared cameras which read the amount of heat coming from a subject.
In themselves UV, Visible and Nr IR are not hot, we cannot feel them, they are not the invisible thermal energy we do feel from the Sun. As explained on that NASA page:

“Far infrared waves are thermal. In other words, we experience this type of infrared radiation every day in the form of heat! The heat that we feel from sunlight, a fire, a radiator or a warm sidewalk is infrared.”

The main reason you’re finding it difficult to get definitive answers on google is because the teaching of real physics on this has been taken out of the education system. Which is my point here, and the proper URL linked post show how I found this. And because the science fiction memes promoting AGW which have been put into education don’t have any internal coherence; they simply take ‘sound bites’ from physics, taking laws out of context, claiming something has the property of another thing or that things have properties which they don’t have, and then mixing it all up – that’s why the arguments about this get so convoluted..
What this science fiction has done is simply denied real world known physics so the important thing is to get back to this, to the real basics, which does have internal cohesion, the parts fit. For example, AGW science fiction has no need of such things as convection or the differences between properties in terms of weight and volume, it is one dimensional science produced to sell an idea; another ‘experiment to prove it’ is of opening a bottle of scent in a classroom and as the smell wafts across the room claiming this proves that carbon dioxide thoroughly mixes in the atmosphere. All the complicated real world physics is taken out, but this is complicated to explain because of that as it goes into differences of ideal gas/real gas and weight of molecules, and evaporation of water and alcohol and differences between Brownian motion and convection, and so on and on. (That’s why this experiment of Anthony’s is important, if they had real proof they wouldn’t need to fake experiments).
Same with glass and infrared claims that it doesn’t go through, it obviously does, one can feel it for oneself through a window and instantaneously feel it disappear when a cloud passes, and there’s a whole industry devoted to producing windows for hot countries which keep the thermal out and let in the light. But again this has its complications because of this fictional meme is now so well ingrained, that ‘visible is a thermal energy’, that it takes a lot of effort on the part of someone believing this to get their mind out of this trap and distractions about greenhouses. That this is a fictional claim in the energy budget can be reduced to a simpler parameter, the difference between light and heat, though getting one’s head around it can still present problems… The difference between electronic transitions and atomic/molecular vibrations is standard physics. They only have to prove that visible light can heat water to convince me..
..and it’s here where everyone claiming that energy budget is real physics comes a cropper, because they cannot find anything in real physics which teaches this so there is no mechanism explained for it being able to do so. I suppose some might have to get to that point for themselves before they realise that there isn’t any real physical explanation for the claim. If there was there would be tons of material available proving this and giving real world examples of how it’s used in real life applications. But all you’ll find is how visible light is not a thermal energy, its main branch of science is optics, and all the applications that in real life work know this. As I gave the example between the different methods needing to be used to capture these very different energies through the creation of electricty in photovoltaic cells by using light energies and direct capture of infrared heat by metal plates.
Am I on the right track?
You have to bear in mind that the AGWSF energy budget, which has now been brainwashed into education, includes mid infrared which is a thermal energy. To avoid further distractions by this, and by discussion on how UV works etc., I try to limit this to the difference between visible light and thermal infrared. That covers the principles involved.
The challenge is to provide real physical explanations showing ‘that visible heats water’, as I have shown from real physics in the simple differences of scale and properties on an electon/molecular level that it can’t. So far, as you can see from the examples above, all I get back is bluster and obfuscation and misdirection and straw men arguments, besides the ad homs. My challenge is for them to look for it.
Because there is no proof of their claim in real physics, they can’t find anything.
What they do with that information if and when it finally sinks in, is up to them.

“zac says:
October 21, 2011 at 3:23 pm
Cheers Wayne
I ended up reading all of the thread you linked to, I had no idea how political and money making global warming is.”
Interesting series of threads. Wish I could have found a penny inside :). Those some 10,000 comments in Ira Glickstein’s series of articles this spring was the culmination of my trek finding out what the heck has gone so very wrong with science behind this CAGW propaganda I hear daily. That’s when I finally found what exactly Trenberth had done in his cute and insidious graphics in the LWIR side. One sixth of his huge red arrow is real and could be termed (though I hate the term) back radiation but the rest is a pure figment. If you exchange and reworking the numbers all the energy flow properly gel. That is what I carried away from that set of articles.
You know it is funny, Trenberth has admitted to the 65-66 W/m2 being real and correct, I read that month’s ago, not the 390-396 W/m2 claimed in his graphics huge red arrow but he refused to come clean and loudly publically. If he did everyone would have a clearer understanding of Earth’s energy flows. To me that’s very telltale of the money you are speaking of (can’t remember his corporation’s name).
All of that is buried somewhere in those 10,000 comments across about 10 articles.

jimmi_the_dalek says:
October 21, 2011 at 7:52 pm
Unfortunately Myrrh, this statement
“The challenge is to provide real physical explanations showing ‘that visible heats water’, as I have shown from real physics in the simple differences of scale and properties on an electon/molecular level that it can’t”
is incorrect. It is in fact impossible to have an electronic transition (a.k.a. absorbing visible light) in a molecule, without an accompanying vibrational transition. Go and ask a spectroscopist. Since you are building your whole case on statements like this, then the argument collapses.
Unfortunately you read into it what you want, I have spent rather a lot of effort of making the distinction between electronic transitions by invisible light, on an electron scale, and, atomic/molecular rotational/vibrational by thermal infrared. Visible light can move an electron (not always).
Electronic transitions by visible light show first of all that the atmosphere isn’t transparent to this wavelength as claimed in AGWScience Fiction, the electron absorbs the energy and spits the light back out. That’s why we have a blue sky. Because visible light is bounced around the sky by the electrons of the molecules, that’s how puny visible light is. Visible light doesn’t even get to play with the electrons of the molecules of water, which in real life is a transparent medium for visible light, it get transmitted through without moving any of the electrons. It takes real power to move whole molecules of water and heat matter up, this is done by the invisible THERMAL INFRARED DIRECT FROM THE SUN.
So, “The challenge is to provide real physical explanations showing ‘that visible heats water’, as I have shown from real physics in the simple differences of scale and properties on an electon/molecular level that it can’t”
Now do you see what I was referring to? Good. Now take up the challenge. Prove that Visible Light heats land and oceans as per the junk energy budget claim. I have explained why it can’t on an electron/molecular level and why thermal infrared, which as NASA used to teach, is the heat we feel from the Sun can, because it moves the whole molecule. Show me the physics on an electron/molecular level which says Visible light heats water, or stop repeating this stupid fantasy claim.
Leif Svalgaard says:
October 21, 2011 at 10:13 pm
Myrrh says:
October 21, 2011 at 4:19 pm
“Herschel discovered infrared and showed in the process that visible light heats”
Shrug, since visible light isn’t capable of moving molecules into vibrational states,
What Herschel found was that all thermometers showed an increase, including the ones only subjected to visible light.
? Yeah, so? We know that visible light isn’t capable of doing this. So what’s really happening? What he found when moving away from the visible light bits is the temp went very much higher, that’s when he discovered that there is an INVISIBLE ray from the Sun which is capable of heating up matter considerably better than what he ASSUMED did visible light. He couldn’t have been measuring such a thing, on that scale he perhaps should have thought it through a bit better, but understandably, the discovery of invisible infrared must have overwhelmed further thinking about this. At the time is was ASSUMED that visible light from the Sun delivered the heat we feel, we now know better, at least, in world of real physics we do. What he was measuring was leakage of the thermal infrared, the heat energy direct from the Sun. Which this nonsense energy budget EXCLUDES.
This is what has so infiltrated the education system that you get tons of these ridiculous pages incapable of teaching real physics, presenting instead garbled nonsense and faked experiments or experiments with nonsense fiction physics descriptions of what is going on – designed to confuse, from which no child can get a proper grasp of the physical world around us and these fictional science memes are now ubiquitous, even science experts in other fields take these for granted, why would they not? You may not find this appalling, I do. Until I found that AGW was a fictional physics I considered myself very lucky to be born at this time, the last century advances in our knowledge of the physical world around us is phenomenal. And NASA used to be a shining light of exploration, but now it teaches this fictional physics, teaches that infrared doesn’t even get to the surface of the Earth. Have you read the link I posted to my post where I compare before and now of NASA’s teaching? The quotes I gave a couple of posts back?
Now to something astonishing. Background to is another AGWSF meme, about carbon dioxide, that it mixes thoroughly in the atmosphere and can’t be unmixed and that it stays up in the atmosphere accumulating for hundreds and even thousands of years, their ‘blanket’ trapping heat. I’ve had rather a lot of discussions on this, trying to explain that carbon dioxide is heavier than air and therefore will naturally always sink in the atmosphere unless work is being done to move it, and the carbon cycle in general. But this heavier than air thing is so contrary to what they are brainwashed by that they generally come up with such things as ‘then it would separate out in a layer at the bottom and we’d all be dead’, type of reasoning, you have to remember that their gases have no volume, no weight, their atmosphere is empty space, so, they can’t get their heads around heavier than air molecules. They think carbon dioxide is an ideal gas which diffuses at great speed through empty space.
Last night I taped Stephen Fry’s QI (quite interesting) and when I played it back, after posting here, I watched it. He demonstrated that carbon dioxide was heavier than air in a very simple experiment which is still taught by traditional physics teachers, he poured the invisible carbon dioxide onto lit candles and put them out. Carbon dioxide being heavier than air displaces it, it displaced the oxygen required to keep the flames going.
Some knew that it was carbon dioxide, there was surprise that it could be poured like a liquid. Gases are not called fluids in traditional physics for nothing.. The whole atmosphere around us is an ocean of fluid gas, and very heavy, pressing down a ton/sq foot, we’re all carrying that on our shoulders.. (scent wafting through a room has to move through that, not empty space).
He really demonstated it very well, and an experiment that every child can do from ingredients and equipment from his own kitchen!

I don’t know if you’re able to access it, but the QI programme is online here: http://tvwatch-stream.com/qi-season-9-episode-7-s09e07-21-october-2011-bbc-one-uk/

Myrrh
I am finding this a tough one to find a black and white statement that visible light creates heat when it is ansorbed by a body. Getting back to Herschel, other than the link given earlier all the other references I come across merely say he discovered IR by accident as his control thermometer placed below the red beam heated up.
From Wiki Main interactions with matter by electromagnetic radiation.
Visible: Molecular electron excitation (including pigment molecules found in the human retina), plasma oscillations (in metals only).
Near infrared: Molecular vibration, plasma oscillation (in metals only).
Far Infrared: Plasma oscillation, molecular rotation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_spectrum
But the Solar adiation and Climate Experiment (SORCE) states:
Radiation at the longer visible and infrared wavelengths penetrates into the lower atmosphere, where the portion not reflected is partitioned between the troposphere and the Earth’s surface, and becomes a dominant term in the global energy
http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/science/introduction.htm
But a lot of the material at SORCE seems to be aimed at school children and that could just be a generalisation.
Obviously visible light does have energy as that is what SORCE is measuring and the LASP Interactive Solar Irradiance Data Center (LISIRD) publishes the irradience data.
http://lasp.colorado.edu/lisird/#
But nowhere that I can find boldly states with no ambiguity, that visible light from the sun produces heat and how great that heat is when compared to near IR. Which I find strange given how topical global warming is at the moment. Sorry if this looks a bit messy, how are quotes, italics and such put into a post?