Does the Trenberth et al “Earth’s Energy Budget Diagram” Contain a Paradox?

Unfortunately, an old draft of the article has been posted in errror. I’ve Emailed Anthony, asking for the intended version to be posted. It contains additional information.

If i followed your presentation correctly, then it seems to me that you left out an important fact. The radiation lost “sideways” above one point, should be exactly made up by the radiation “sideways” from some other point on the globe. I’m sure that, if you consider the earth as a sphere, these effects all average out and your concern is misplaced. I think that, to the extent that the earth is not a sphere, more surface radiation is absorbed in the atmosphere than in the spherical case.
Billy

An interesting observation about R. Gates. Has anyone else noticed that he pops up almost immediately in any thread where Trenberth’s work is being scrutinized? On other threads he is noticeably absent, but pick a hole in Trenberth’s work and POOF! there’s R. Gates defending it with one argument or another, usualy a tengential one intended to hijack the thread.
BTW R. Gates, you welched on your bet with me.
And I repeat my question from another thread…Do you have on official relationship with Trenberth, and if so, what is it?
Excellent article Bob Fernley-Jones.

I must say I don’t get any of this really, but what I have always found odd about this line of thinking is, what about kinetic and potential energy transfer of the heat. It would seem to me, that the sun shining and warmth associated converts into water moisture, which rises, forms clouds and falls. It creates wind from pressure variances. So when they start accumulating forcings and adding it all up, in fact that little extra just becomes one days little bit extra rain, just a little bit extra wind. It doesnt add up over the years, it just turns out to be a little more movement day to day.
When someone says climate engine, or weather engine, this is what I think of.

“…temperature change in matter can only take place when there is a HEAT transfer..”
Sorry , but no. Temperature is directly affected by absorption of radiation – so how and why are you distinguishing HEAT (in capitals!) from EMR.

Tim Folkerts says:
October 26, 2011 at 6:21 pm
“The length of each vector is proportional to the power of the ray, in that direction, such that A + B = C.”
Energy is not a vector! You cannot take components of energy. […]
Energy transfer is a vector and you must take it’s dimensional components when analyzing it in a real world. First study some real three dimensional physics.

One would assume that there would be some work term. The conversion of saline into airborne fresh water, then its transport onto land would be included, but no.
There is really no point in attempting to use such diagrams as this to calculate anything. The average temperature and average emission(s0 of a rotating planet that orbits a star every 365.25 days is a nonsense.
The difference between total radiative influx between the summer and winter solstices is 3.5%. If global is global then 3.5% of 341, 12 W/m2 should drive the difference between the global temperature around June 22nd and December 22nd. Sadly, this gives 12W/m2 = -0.17 degrees.
The problem is the heterogeneous distribution of different types of water and of land.
Trenberth ignores this complexity and presents box diagrams that were abandoned by everyone else some decades ago.
The Earths average temperature, see the BEST June+July vs Dec+Jan, is lower when it is closer to the sun than when it is further away.

Mr. Fernley-Jones;
With respect, I do understand that this particular post is an “initial draft” and perhaps additional details are forthcoming. I await these with interest.
In the meantime I would just like to point out a few observations relative to your (or more accurately NASA’s) Figure 2;
All of the following energy flows are travelling at the speed of light; “incoming solar energy = 100%”, “reflected by atmosphere = 6%”, “reflected by clouds = 20%”, “reflected by Earth’s surface = 4%”.
The following energy flows that are travelling at “close” to the speed of light after a slight delay (caused by absorptions and remissions by gases with thermal capacities) include; “absorbed by atmosphere = 16%”, “absorbed by clouds = 3%”.
Some of the remaining energy flows are made up of various flows that travel through the system at a combination of speeds; “radiated to space from clouds and atmosphere = 64%” which travels in part at close to the speed of light after absorptions and emissions but also contains energy flows that are “absorbed by land and Ocean’s = 51%” and “carried to clouds and atmosphere by latent heat in water vapor = 23%” which travel through the system at a close to the speed of heat.
One interesting thing to note is the ABSENCE of any text that indentifies the source / destination / and magnitude of the lower rightmost red arrow which starts as “absorbed by land and Oceans = 51%” (after removing 23% + 7% (or 30%) this would equal 21% and seems to leave the Earth as “radiated to space directly from Earth = 6%”. Somehow this 21% gets 15% “deleted” from to it and it becomes 6%. Seems to make sense, HOWEVER upon careful observation the arrow labeled “absorbed by atmosphere = 16%” MAGICALLY becomes “radiation absorbed by atmosphere = 15%” after passing behind the BIG 64% red arrow. Perhaps a typo, perhaps an accounting error?
In summary, while these nice little graphics do a reasonably good job of describing the first “order” understanding of the energy flows through the Sun / Atmosphere / Earth / Atmosphere / Universe system they have MANY faults. The largest of which is totally discarding any consideration of the speed at which each of these energy flows travel through the system.
In electrical engineering this is considered as a “DC” (direct current) analysis. Once the “speed” / “lag time” / “response time” / “delay time” is incorporated into the analysis a totally different prediction of the systems response usually results.
Hey, a percent here and a percent there, it probably cancels out and we are STILL WARMING FROM THE “GREENHOUSE” EFFECT RIGHT ???
Cheers, Kevin.

What about evaporation, condensation and changes of state? Are those really equal in time and balancing each other?

Mr. Watts,
The earth is a globe. Horizontal radiation will leave the atmosphere at an angle if it makes it that far. Shallower angles would leave at angles approaching vertical. Of course, with so much more atmosphere to traverse the likelihood of it leaving on that path is much smaller than straight up, the shortest path!!! As the emission point rises the angle that can irradiate the earth is increasingly small and the radiation has a larger area that points to space through increasing amounts of atmosphere (your cone).
The IR from the surface is most likely going to be absorbed by GHG’s close to the surface anyway. At the pressures and density there I am told collisions will transfer much of that energy to oxygen or nitrogen and be convected away as collisions happen oftener than the emission of IR.
As we go up in the atmosphere that gradually changes until the Strat. where the density apparently favors emission.
GHG’s therefore speed the heating and cooling of the bulk of the atmosphere which has a magnitudes lower absorption and emission rate in the far IR. This also brings into question just how much IR there is to actually get back to the surface if the energy is being preferentially transferred though collisions in the far IR opaque lower trop.
Another interesting bit is that GHG’s absorb in slightly wider frequencies near the ground due to the line broadening. It would seem if they emit at the same frequency the IR going up would have a better chance of escaping as the pressure/temp decreases narrowing the bands and not absorbing as much as the lower.
This would all seem to be especially apropros as to why Venus does NOT have a huge Greenhouse. The effect drops off so quickly only near the surface is it possible to be so massive, yet, the collisional transfer even though it is from CO2 to CO2 must be almost total under such temp/pressure/density!! It would almost seem to be more like water, conducting instead of radiating internally.
I must be wrong, but I don’t know enough to see why.

jimmi_the_dalek,
“The horizontal fluxes will cancel. ”
The surface is a sphere. The adjoining points would NOT cancel. Surface irregularities will confuse this so that the surface is irradiating itself just as the surface of the water does. One of the requirements for S-B to apply is that the surface geometry does NOT allow it to irradiate itself. OOOPS!!!!

I’m not sure I understand this article but just to clear a few things up, radiation is not heat. Heat is the result of the absorption of radiation by a surface or molecule. 2nd Law of Thermodynamics does state that heat (without work) will only travel from higher to lower temperature, that is correct, however, radiation is not heat. Radiation can travel in any direction and because of this radiation reflected or re-emitted can also travel in any direction, up, down, sideways. Is the question here how much of the radiation is actually absorbed by the system, surface and atmosphere, and how much is lost (unused) out to space, leaves the system without being absorbed? I just don’t know how any of these figures are even calculated. If the earth reflects 4% that presumes that every day, the same amount of energy and direction of radiation and absorbing surfaces never change. This presumption is preposterous. Climate scientists and Physicists cannot do their calculations until they have an average figure but the real world is an every changing system that doesn’t know what an average is. I’m still trying to work out how long wave radiation can produce more heat than short wave radiation thereby causing global warming. I suspect it just ain’t so.

Myself i am a layman, but i know that the sun is a flaming band and it ebbs and flows. So my question is who came up with the figure on the amount of radiation coming in and is that always constant. Can anyone tellme how it is measured and is it the same amount in the UK as in the USA or Australia, or is it what is measured at the Eqautor and considered the measurement for all of Earth? I have been told by warmist that a specific radiation amount sqaured is constant, on paper yes, but IMHO, the real world, i do not see it.

jimmi_the_dalek @ 6:49 pm
Jimmi, you are describing ONE of the ways of transporting HEAT. In the case of radiation this ONLY happens when there is a potential difference between two sources of radiation.
Check – out Wikipedia on heat transfer, for a start;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_transfer

I would love to see this in a 3d ray traced model animation. With the multiple freq bands it would have to be broken up into several animations to visualize it. I really enjoy these type threads even though I only understand about 2/6th of the content! Thanks for the puzzle.

Bob Fernley-Jones says:
October 26, 2011 at 6:12 pm
R. Gates @ 5:46 pm,
Yes, you are correct, that work can result in heating, or cooling. An oversight on my part, where I was trying to show the difference between heat and EMR.
____
Thanks for your reply. I assumed it was an oversight on your part. But to be clear, in a pure sense, heat is a measurement of energy in transit, and should not be taken to be a measurement of the average translational kinetic energy (normally called temperature) nor the total internal energy of the object. Again, heat is a energy in transit flowing between objects. An excellent resource on this can be found at:
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/hframe.html
and on the whole issue of heat and thermodynamics, see:
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/hframe.html
To your point about the difference between heat and EMR, They are completely different things,as one is the measurement of the flow energy, and one is a form of energy.

Well I have always been critical of the Trenberth “cartoon” earth energy budget, or whatever they currently call it in your new posting. And I should add, that I do not use the word”cartoon” in any derogatory sense; simply a descriptive label for a diagram that is not very scientific.
So tell me; why would anyone (including me) take any notice of anything written by a “scientist” apparently with a Doctorate Degree (Dr Laura has a PhD, and she doesn’t know beans about climate either) who uses “Watts” or “Watts per metre squared” as units of ENERGY.
When I went to school and studied Physics, Watts, was a unit of POWER, and “Watts per metre squared” would be a unit of AREAL POWER DENSITY.
And at the position of earth’s orbit (average) the arriving power density is 1362 Watts per metre squared; it certainly is NOT 341 W/m^2.
The response of real materials to an incident power density of 1362 W/m^2 (irradiance) will be quite different to the response to 341 W/m^2. For example the former might melt or vaporize a material whereas the latter may not. Such a change might be irreversible, in that the altered material may then become widely dispersed.
An example would be, a somewhat attenuated proportion of each of those purported radiances being incident on the surface of say an Arctic (of Greenland) ice mass.
The former larger radiance might result in warming the ice surface sufficiently for it to melt, whereas the latter could do no such thing.
Remember that WATTS is a rate of supply (or loss) of energy, and if the supply rate does not exceed the loss rate from other processes, such as simple thermal radiation; or conduction, then melting will NEVER occur, no matter how long that condition is maintained.
And since the earth rotates, under that incident power density (radiance) of 1362 W/m^2, if melting does not occur, during the irradiation portion of the daily cycle it never will melt, and it certainly won’t melt under 341 W/m^2 irradiance.
So Trenberth’s cartoon is unscientific gobbledegook.

I have just published a little monograph on this subject titled ‘The Dynamic Greenhouse Effect and the Climate Averaging Paradox’ . The links are:
Paperback:
http://www.amazon.com/Dynamic-Greenhouse-Climate-Averaging-Paradox/dp/1466359188/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1319675042&sr=1-2
Kindle:
http://www.amazon.com/Dynamic-Greenhouse-Climate-Averaging-ebook/dp/B005WLEN8W/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1319675042&sr=1-1
I put my dynamic or time dependent version of the K-T diagram on the front cover. Just copy it from Amazon. This may be challenge to Trenberth that you are looking for. Journals like Nature and Science wouldn’t dare touch this one. Once the dynamics are understood then the whole global warming problem disappears into the noise of the daily surface energy transfer. The ‘average’ solar heating and convective cycle is 12 hours not 24.
The funamental issue is that there is no such thing as a climate equilibrium state. The whole radiative forcing approach is just plain wrong. There are no ‘forcings’ or ‘feedbacks’. The climate models have been wrong at least since 1967 when Manabe and Wetherald started down the wrong path.
There is more info on my little web site at http://www.Venturaphotonics.com for those who are interested.

There is a lot more examples of contention even in the second NASA version. While it is headed ENERGY budget, it diesn’t give units so that is ok.
BUT !! just let’s start with the INPUT at the left edge in yellow. Starting at 100%, 20% is reflected by clouds. Well average global cloud cover is supposed to be in excess of 60%, so if only 20% is reflected from 60% coverage, then the cloud reflectance must only be 33%. And the reflectance of clouds over the solar spectrum is well known to be much higher than 33%, so that 20% number doesn’t fly.
Now look there at the cloud ABSORPTION; only 3%
Now if the clouds REFLECT 20% and ABSORB 3%, what does that say about how much of the solar energy the clouds TRANSMIT ?
Well anyway, that is just an aside; the real point is that in CLEAR AIR there are NO clouds; so the clear air losses of solar energy are then 6% REFLECTED by the atmosphere; 16% ABSORBED by the atmosphere and 4% REFLECTED by the surface (oceans plus land). So assuming that is all true, then the ground level solar insolation (clear air) is 26% less than the TSI or 74% of 1362 which comes out to 1007 W/m^2, and that seems like a believable number since 1,000 W/m^2 is the usually accepted maximum power density for solar energy availability.
The 6% reflectance of the atmosphere is news to me; I’ve never been aware of it. Is it possible that they are using the term REFLECTANCE to describe processes like Raleigh scattering, that produces the blue sky color, and results in a like amount of solar energy being scattered to space.
The incoming solar rays are certainly not obeying the reflection laws of geometrical optics, so it is incorrect to describe Raleigh or Mie scattering as REFLECTANCE.
As to the 4% reflected from oceans and land, about 75% of the earth surface in the major solar input latitudes, is ocean, and the normal relfectance is 2%. That leaves another 2% to be reflected from the land, which comprises only 25% of that surface area. a simple calculation then shows that the land reflectance must only be 10%; and that would be a maximum, because, while 2% is the normal incidence reflection coefficient of water, over all angles, the total reflectance is more like 3%, since the 2% number holds relatively constant up to teh Brewster angle (57 deg incidence), but then increases rapidly beyond that.
So in that case, the land must only contribute 1% to the total reflectance and that reduces the land reflection coefficient down to 7%.
Whether 7% or 10%, both numbers are way too low for the reflectance of land areas.
But at least it looks as if they may be closer than Trenberth, and they avoid the incorrect units problem, and its consequences

I know this is going to sound really dumb to a lot of you out there,
but I’m just a humble individual whose job it is to control, temperature and humidity…so could someone explain to me please exactly how or more precisely where heat would accumulate in the Warmist model.
Given that the air temp at 300kPa is minus 30 degrees C over the equator and minus 50 over the poles…(and we all know from traveling in planes that air reguarly rises to this height then cools and falls) I’ve just never understood WHERE the warming is meant to BE and when it is there what stops it from rising up to the frigid void at the top of our atmosphere?
Be gentle with me!

For me, thermals seemed always greatly underestimated.
Second, all atmospheric molecules radiate IR, not only so called “greenhouse gases”. Those fantasy diagrams being obsessed with wrong greenhouse analogy ignore 99% of the atmosphere and things like simple heat retention.

kuhnkat says:
October 26, 2011 at 8:21 pm

GHG’s therefore speed the heating and cooling of the bulk of the atmosphere which has a magnitudes lower absorption and emission rate in the far IR.

Sorry, but it seems to me that that assertion was refuted by the replication of Al Gore’s high-school science experiment. CO2, at least, is a green-house gas that actually retards the speed of heat transfer through the atmosphere.

Walter H. Schneider….. During the ATTEMPTED replication of Al Gore’s high-school science experiment….. AKA, Science 101…..;-)
Anthony Watts showed quite clearly that Al’s experiment was busted….. But did prove to be informative of the fact that pure, or high concentrations of CO2 have a different thermal conductivity than that of air….

I think everyone is making this way too complicated. Physics is all about symmetries. For the purpose of explaining Figure 1 (which, after all, is a cartoon) imagine the processes shown are equal across the sphere of the Earth. Since there is no preferred direction in that case, there can be no net radiative or convective transport, except in the direction normal (up or down) to the surface. There is no net horizontal energy flow.
Obviously the real Earth breaks this symmetry and has a preferred direction – namely the axis of rotation. That is why calculations are done for energy transfer as a function of latitude. When you do that you get Hadley cell circulation north and south, which then produce the trade winds, etc., by the Coriolis effect.
Suffice it to say that Trenberth understands this, and that Figure 1 is a very useful and informative graphic.

DocMartyn says:
October 26, 2011 at 7:19 pm
“Trenberth ignores this complexity and presents box diagrams that were abandoned by everyone else some decades ago.
The Earths average temperature, see the BEST June+July vs Dec+Jan, is lower when it is closer to the sun than when it is further away.”
Sunlight, falling on the Earth when it’s about 3,000,000 miles closer to the sun in January, is about 7% more intense than in July. Because the Northern Hemisphere has more land which heats easier then water most people state that the Earth’s average temperature is about 4 degrees F higher in July than January, when in fact they should be stating that the ATMOSPHERE is 4 degrees higher in July. In January this extra SW energy is being pumped into the oceans where the “residence time” within the Earth’s ocean land and atmosphere is the longest. There are also other factors, such as the Northern hemispheres winter increase in albedo exceeds the southern hemisphere’s winter albedo due to the far larger northern hemisphere land mass. So at perihelion we have a permanent loss to space of ? W/2m SWR due to increased albedo and a loss of SWR to the atmosphere as at perihelion the SWR is falling on far more ocean, where it is absorbed into the oceans for far longer then if that SWR fell on land. Do these balance (unlikely) or is the earth gaining or losing energy during perihelion??? The TOA flux should tell us and climate models should accurately predict the observation.

Gail @ 12:47
You are getting at the basics of how radiation interacts with matter, which makes it a little easier to understand Trenberth’s graph and its refutation in this article. Adding to your list of potential radiation interactions: for incoming cosmic radiation, which may be >10E6 eV/photon, there is enough energy in the photon to disrupt the nucleus of an atom. This is how we get C-14 from nitrogen in our atmosphere as one example. Just looking at the atomic level, energy distribution from radiative forces in our atmsophere is clearly complex.
One thing I have not seen is how all the different forms of electromagnetic energies are measured for determining the relative amounts of energy transfer to earth and space (once measured and summed, conversion to potential energy such as watts/meter square is relatively easy). I know we have instruments that measure incoming radiation for a lot of spectrums (maybe the entire spectrum), but do we have instruments measuring outgoing radiation? Is outgoing measured or just calculated? I’d love to see some references that talk to how they measure outgoing radiation if someone has this handy.

This is really disappointing – both the article and the meandering, and largely confused, blog responses about 3-D geometry. It casts no light at all for me on the important central questions:
1. Does back radiation to the Earth’s surface occur at all or is it “unphysical”?
2. If it does, what proportion of that back radiation is due to CO2?
3. What proportion of the back radiation due to CO2 is due to man-made CO2?
Any answers to the above questions should then be tested for credibility against the real-world data which indicates that near-surface average temperatures between 1850 and 2010 increased at the decidedly unalarming long-term trend rate of about 0.4degC per century. (See: http://www.thetruthaboutclimatechange.org/tempsworld.html.)
Cmon guys – please let’s get focussed!

Trenberth’s ‘Back Radiation’ is the biggest scientific cock-up in History. He has confused it with ‘Prevost Exchange Energy’, exactly offset by IR from the ground plus a bit from lower, hotter gas. A Dutch PhD student recently shinned up an 800 foot radio mast and showed that the [up-down] signal decayed exponentially to zero, Beer’s Law.
Because the modellers include this imaginary energy in their CO2-AGW myth, they have to hide it by cloud cooling. The first thing they do is to overestimate low level cloud albedo by >2. The second is to claim the 1st AIE applies to thicker clouds. It doesn’t, so the sign is wrong.and it’s the real AGW which heated the World as Asian industrialisation spewed out aerosols which switched off a direct backscattering mechanism. It’s why Asian low level clouds look dull from the top compared with 30 years’ ago; they transmit more energy. It’s self-limiting hence the oceans stopped warming in 2003, and Trenberth’s ‘missing heat’.
Because they also overestimate present greenhouse warming by a factor >3, the IPCC ‘consensus’ CO2 climate sensitivity is a factor of at least 9 too high.
So long as Trenberth continues his elementary mistake [he clearly wasn’t taught the correct physics] , he is condemning himself to be considered by history as a failure. As for Hansen with his recent claim of over double 1st AIE to keep his 4.2K climate sensitivity despite no warming, he is an expert on aerosol optical physics so has no excuse for what is almost certainly fraud, the claim by NASA from 2004 of imaginary ‘surface reflection’ purporting that clouds with small droplets have high albedo,.
Look at any rain cloud – it’s dark underneath because albedo is high, and it’s a complex large droplet phenomenon. Yet workers in climate science believe the surface reflection myth.

According to Trenberth’s figure the downward radiation from the GH gasses in the atmosphere. is 333 W/m2. But there must be an equal amount upward. Does’nt the atmosphere radiate infrared in all directions. If 333 W/m2 were radiated from the atmosphere to space we would have far more energy leaving the Earth then received! Surely this backradiation figure is a nonsense.
Can some one answer another question. All up 239 units of IR radiation are emitted to space, 40 directly from the Earths surface, 199 from the atmosphere (including clouds). How is this 199 units radiated to space? – It has to be by Greenhouse Gases in the atmosphere. If these gases were not present this energy could not be emitted. By increasing GH gas concentrations the ability for the atmosphere to radiate energy to space is increased. Where does warming come from?

MODTRAN looking down will almost always be different than satellite measurements because a significant amount of the available heat is moved from the equator toward the poles via the wind. Thus, at the equator a satellite measures less heat than computed, and at the winter poles, much more.
Because the energy coming from clouds is sometimes much more than predicted by Stefan’s equation, it makes more sense to treat them as mirrors than as blackbody emitters. Yes, I have measured the energy using an IR thermometer. Very interesting.

Fred Berple raises the old ‘ice cube and hot object fallacy’. He says at 9:38 PM,
“A large block of ice and a small candle flame both emit the same amount of EMR. However, only one is capable of warming a human being.”
Normally we think of an ice cube as being cold, because most things around us are normally warmer than that. Thus the analogy seems reasonable at first sight. How could an ice cube warm us? We all make the implicit assumption that if the ice cube wasn’t there, there would be something else, warmer, in its place – this is our normal experience.
But lets say you are in the cold vacuum of space, close to absolute zero. Now the ice cube is relatively warm, and you will receive much more radiation from it than you were previously receiving from ‘nothing’. If the energy received from it is the same as from the candle flame (which was the predicate) then It will provide the same heating effect as the candle flame. A black body absorbs all the radiation falling on it, whether from an ice cube or a candle.
.

For one heart-stopping moment I thought someone had really got what was wrong with ” EMR is a form of energy that is sometimes confused with HEAT.”
Ask why is it so? says:
October 26, 2011 at 9:06 pm
I’m not sure I understand this article but just to clear a few things up, radiation is not heat. Heat is the result of the absorption of radiation by a surface or molecule. 2nd Law of Thermodynamics does state that heat (without work) will only travel from higher to lower temperature, that is correct, however, radiation is not heat.
Thermal radiation, thermal infrared, is heat. It is the thermal energy of the Sun. It is heat on the move. Not all electromagnetic radiation is heat.
What is wrong with this energy budget is that LIGHT from the Sun, shortwave, non-thermal, has been given the properties of HEAT from the Sun, which is thermal energy on the move, thermal infrared from the Sun direct to us, thermal radiation.
For example, visible LIGHT cannot heat water because it doesn’t have the mechanism to do so, water is a transparent medium for visible LIGHT and so visible light is transmitted through without being absorbed, visible light cannot move the molecules of water into the vibrational state which is heat.
HEAT on the other hand, does have the mechanism to heat water, and does. This is the real energy which is heating the land and oceans directly from the Sun.
Not only has the KT taken out the world’s real energy budget the energy direct from the Sun to the surface which is the real source of heating the Earth, the Sun’s thermal energy, thermal infrared – it has given the properties of thermal infrared to visible, it has swapped HEAT to LIGHT around. It is saying that shortwave is thermal energy.
Not so much a paradox, more junk science fiction produced by the AGWSF department to sell its wares.
I have just had a long discussion on this and do not have the time to go through it all again here, but for any interested in telling the difference between this junk energy budget in order to understand what is really going on in our world, this has to begin with disentangling the science fiction memes about heat and light from the real physical properties of energy and matter.
You can start here with the difference between Heat and Light:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/18/replicating-al-gores-climate-101-video-experiment-shows-that-his-high-school-physics-could-never-work-as-advertised/#comment-778960
=======================
Bob Fernley-Jones – your link to HEAT takes to a page of junk physics.
Here’s real world physics on HEAT.

http://thermalenergy.org/
“What is thermal energy ?
Thermal Energy: A specialized term that refers to the part of the internal energy of a system which is the total present kinetic energy resulting from the random movements of atoms and molecules.
The ultimate source of thermal energy available to mankind is the sun, the huge thermo-nuclear furnace that supplies the earth with the heat and light that are essential to life. The nuclear fusion in the sun increases the sun’s thermal energy. Once the thermal energy leaves the sun (in the form of radiation) it is called heat.
Heat is thermal energy in transfer. Thermal energy is part of the overall internal energy of a system.
At a more basic level, thermal energy comes from the movement of atoms and molecules in matter. It is a form of kinetic energy produced from the random movements of those molecules. Thermal energy of a system can be increased or decreased.
When you put your hand over a hot stove you can feel the heat. You are feeling thermal energy in transfer. The atoms and molecules in the metal of the burner are moving very rapidly because the electrical energy from the wall outlet has increased the thermal energy in the burner. We all know what happens when we rub our hands together. Our mechanical energy increases the thermal energy content of the atoms in our hands and skin. We then feel the consequence of this – heat. Laws of Thermodynamics [link]”
[And]: http://thermalenergy.org/heattransfer.php
“Thermal energy and heat are often confused. Rightly so because they are physically the same thing. Heat is always the thermal energy of some system. Using the word heat helps physicists to make a distinction relative to the system they are talking about.”</blockquote

jason says:
October 27, 2011 at 12:24 am
Very interesting discussion, which demonstrates clearly that the view that sceptics are politically rather than scientifically motivated is false.
Good to see R Gates removing more of his mask. He starts off posting in the arctic threads arguing with steve m, then reveals he is a buddy of Trenberth, and now demonstrates in this thread that his understanding of the subject goes way above a layman. R Gates is I believe someone far closer to the heart of the debate than he has let on until now. Genuinely sceptical mind turned, or trojan horse?
_____
Really, aspersions as to my intentions, relationships, etc. are quite unecessary and, more importantly, completely inaccurate. I comment here when I see something that sparks my interest, I have no relationship to Dr. Trenberth other than the fact that we live in the same state, and I think for many of those frequenting WUWT our knowledge of the subject at hand go well beyond the “layman”.
In terms of my own position of AGW. I remain more convinced than not that it is happening (I put the percentage at 75% just to show it is more than 51/50, but not 99%). Finally, I am currently not a believer in catastrophic AGW.

R. Gates;
Really, aspersions as to my intentions, relationships, etc. are quite unecessary and, more importantly, completely inaccurate.>>>
REPLY: If you would provide straight forward answers to questions that wouldn’t be the case. But you don’t.
R. Gates;
I comment here when I see something that sparks my interest, I have no relationship to Dr. Trenberth other than the fact that we live in the same state,>>>
REPLY: You proudly proclaimed yourself as the “go between” who arranged for an invitation for 20 people from WUWT to meet with Kevin Trenberth. You accomplished this merely by living in the same state as Trenberth? I call BS.
R. Gates;
and I think for many of those frequenting WUWT our knowledge of the subject at hand go well beyond the “layman”.>>>
REPLY: Putting aside the royal “our”, excuse me, but you barely qualify as a layman. Consider the bet with me which you jumped into and then welched on. You agreed to wager that Al Gore’s experiment, if conducted as illustrated, would show the results as illustrated. You failed to notice that Al Gore’s experiment as illustrated made use of infrared heating lamps, making it IMPOSSIBLE for the experiment to demonstrate the greenhouse effect in the first place. Then, to compound your so called “well beyond” the knowledge of a layman, you suggested taking the globes OUT of the jars as they were superflous to the experiment. Really? Tell me please, with nothing in the jar to absorb SW and re-radiate it as LW, exactly how could the “greenhouse effect” be demonstrated? That thread alone demonstrated how limited your understanding of the physics is, and I could draw many more examples from many more threads. You constantly parrot the words of others, and when people with knowledge start asking pointed questions, you get backed into a corner and simply stop responding. Or welch on the bet. Whatever.
R. Gates;
In terms of my own position of AGW. I remain more convinced than not that it is happening (I put the percentage at 75% just to show it is more than 51/50, but not 99%). Finally, I am currently not a believer in catastrophic AGW.>>>
REPLY: Really? Can you point to a single skeptic comment about any part of the CAGW debate anywhere in the WUWT forum? Ever? Just one? As for not believing in “C”AGW, shall I cut and paste from all those comments of yours about chaos theory and sand piles collapsing under the weight of a single grain of sand?

Richard Keen says:
October 26, 2011 at 6:52 pm
Along with the paradox, the Trenberth et al. diagram also contains a statistical fantasy, which is the obscenely precise value of 0.9 W/m2 for the net absorbed.
http://icecap.us/index.php/go/icing-the-hype/the_flat_earth
Thanks. I’ve always had a hard time even looking at Trenberth’s representation, because it’s really too much like a Cartoon out of some pre-Kindergarten book.

You might like more writing on the paradox summarized quite nicely here:
http://www.tech-know.eu/uploads/Copernicus_Meets_the_Greenhouse_Effect.pdf
and a more lengthy version here:
http://www.tech-know.eu/uploads/The_Model_Atmosphere.pdf

Leif, a second reference for you…
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=bad%20light%20zone&source=web&cd=10&ved=0CHUQFjAJ&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.scienceclarified.com%2FMu-Oi%2FOcean-Zones.html&ei=CIepTrzlLsHnsQKqy52vDw&usg=AFQjCNHtNuybbpchX9S35Pp8IywjkMq8hQ
From 660 to 3,000 feet (200 to 900 meters), only about 1 percent of sunlight penetrates. This layer is known as the dysphotic zone (meaning “bad light”). Below this layer, down to the deepest parts of the ocean, it is perpetual night. This last layer is called the aphotic zone (meaning “without light”). At one time, scientists thought that very little life existed within the aphotic zone. However, they now know that a variety of interesting organisms can be found living on the deepest parts of the ocean floor.
Read more: Ocean Zones – body, used, water, process, Earth, life, plants, chemical, form, energy, animals, carbon, oxygen, parts, primary, plant, surface http://www.scienceclarified.com/Mu-Oi/Ocean-Zones.html#ixzz1c06eJJzu

The Sun does not surround the Earth, illuminating and heating it from the vertical all day long at all points on the surface. The Sun illuminates/heats the dayside of the Earth as if it were 1/2 a circle the size of the Earth….from the vertical. So, the Earth’s dayside gets, at most, 1/2 of the 1366 W/m^2. 1366/2 = 683.

Anyway, shouldn’t it be A^2 + B^2 = C^2 for that little vector diagram, not A + B = C?

Man Bearpigg says:
October 26, 2011 at 11:54 pm
.. and they call us skeptics ‘Flat Earthers’ when their calculations are based exactly on that notion.
A blast from the past:
“NASA covered up for forty years proof that the greenhouse gas theory was bogus. But even worse, did the U.S. space agency fudge its numbers on Earth’s energy budget to cover up the facts?”
http://sppiblog.org/tag/stefan-boltzmann-equations
“What ignited this latest Climategate-linked rumpus is a sensational new research paper, ‘A Greenhouse Effect on the Moon?’ otherwise called the ‘Moon Paper.’
Researchers for the paper scientifically proved that since at least 1997 climate scientists knew that guesswork was underpinning the whole greenhouse gas theory. In fact, so flaky are these numbers that they can be rendered to show a GHG effect on Earth’s moon, where no greenhouse gases exist! Thus, skeptics argue, the burning embers of political heat generated by the discredited theory should now finally and unequivocally be extinguished.
But more sinisterly, it turns out that NASA climate scientists, with access to better climate equations used for the Apollo Moon mission, forsook those in favor of dodgy Dr. Schmidt’s ‘back of an envelope’ numbers.”
http://usactionnews.com/2010/06/nasa-charged-in-new-climate-fakery-greenhouse-gas-data-bogus/
NASA knew how to calculate it properly, it had to junk Stefan-Bolzmann to get accurate figures for the moon landing.

climatereason says:
October 27, 2011 at 9:15 am
R Gates
I have asked you this many times and perhaps you have answered but it got lost within the deluge of comments.
When do you believe the globe started warming? (we shall leave aside the one third of stations that are cooling that we pointed out in our article ‘in search of cooling trends’
I believe it started warming from 1607/8 albeit it has been in fits and starts with numerous serious reversals and astonishing advances (such as around 1700.)
Berkely appear to partially support my view with a rise from their start date of 1800.
Supplementary question; Who do you believe, Michael Mann or the Berkely study?
tonyb
_____
Tony, by your question, I take it you mean when did human activity (specifically the burning of fossil fuels) begin to warm the climate? I think the issue would be one of measureability of the signal through any natural background fluctuations. Certainly, IMO, most of the decadal, century scale, and even 1500 year cycles in climate (i.e. non-Milankovitch) can be traced back to the sun. They may be reflected in ocean cycles, but the oceans themselves are not the cause of the cycles, but only a resultant effect. Then there are the shorter term cycles in climate linked to events like ENSO, volcanoes, etc. So in trying to find an anthropogenic signal amongst all this other natural background climate noise is a difficult proposition. For example, there can be times when the natural cycle is toward cooling (i.e. a Maunder or Dalton Minimum), but there could be human influences which make the cooling less severe or deep than it might have been. Identifying that type of effect (a less intense cooling) as in indication of warming is certainly quite a challenge. However, not to dodge your question, in my opinion the first really visible signs of human warming of the planet would be early in the 20th century, with the signal growing progressively stronger throughout (even though there were periods of natural cooling). I think for certain by the early 1980’s we could see temperatures begin to deviate from the natural solar influenced cycle, meaning that the influence of human GH forcing became greater than the solar influence. As to who I believe, Mann or Berkeley, I find that an odd choice. For example, I think the MWP was probably a bit warmer and bit more global than Mann might like to posit, but I also think that in general, the trend of global temperatures increases over the past century as reflected by Berkeley et. al, are pretty much on target, give or take some inconsequential adjustments. Based on natural cycles plus human forcings, we are due for continued warming (despite the AGW skeptics excitement over the flattening of the upward trend over the past decade). So we are due for warmer, not cooler times ahead…and the next glacial period by Milankovitch cycles is not due for more than 10,000 years.
One final note, of course human influences on the climate go both ways , with some leading to cooling and some leading to warming. So even these can be competing signals against the background of natural forcings.

@Leif Svalgaard says:
October 27, 2011 at 8:24 am
Just to be clear, are you talking about pure water, or the soup that is sea water?

Tim Folkerts says:
October 26, 2011 at 7:49 pm
“If 10^19 photons of energy 10^-19 J pass thru a 1 m^2 surface oriented perpendicular to the earth’s surface, then 1 J passes thru the surface independent of the direction that the photons are moving.”
Unh-uh. If that were true, we would not need to steer solar arrays to point at the sun to get maximum power. You have to integrate over the projected area, which is proportional to the cosine of the angle between the (-) surface normal and the direction of propagation.

MostlyHarmless @ October 27, at 3:18 am
You seem to have misunderstood the article in two ways:
1) The problem is expressed in the absorptive spectra, which is why I wrote: (ignoring some [radiation] escaping directly to space)
2) The problem is concerning the S-B isotropic radiation when affected by an absorptive atmosphere. It is not chrystal clear to me what they did with their initial S-B calculation in 2009, but it doesn’t matter how the final number of 396 was derived, and the same argument would apply if they stayed with their 390 number of 1997. That is why I wrote: they give that the 396 W/m2 of EMR emitted from the surface in Fig.1 is calculated primarily by using the Stefan–Boltzmann law, and global year average conditions. And why I also put a question mark against the temperature in the tables

Michel @ October 27, at 2:58 am
What I wrote in full was: The initial isotropic S-B surface emission, (Trenberth’s global 396 W/m2), would largely be absorbed by the greenhouse gases instantaneously near the surface. (ignoring some escaping directly to space through the so-called “atmospheric window”).
The reason I claim this is that most of the radiation is in lateral directions, and even if the photon free path lengths are long, their initial absorption would be near the surface. Of course those streams of a more vertical aspect would mostly go much higher.

Well, It can be put this way:
According to Trenberth heat transfer by thermal radiation from surface to atmosphere is 23 W/m², while thermals + latent heat (related to phase transitions of water) carry off 97 W/m². As 40 W/m² is supposed to escape directly from surface to space through the atmospheric window by thermal radiation, it is only 14.4% of the entire heat flux leaving the surface that can be connected to the greenhouse effect.
More importantly in Table 2a of their paper they say global land area has an overall 15.6 W/m² heat flux deficit, that is, it radiates 5.57 PW more to space than it receives from the sun. This figure matches exactly the latent heat carried by the amount of water vapor carried by winds over land that is seen again as global river runoff to the ocean, glacier discharge added (slightly more than a million cubic meter per second).
Their value of 80 W/m² for the latent heat of evaporation also matches global average precipitation closely (as it should). However, water, once up in the atmosphere in the form of vapor, seldom returns to the surface upon first condensation. Most droplets and ice crystals, up to 90% of them evaporate again as they descend to lower layers, well before reaching the surface. That vapor is then raised again until it re-condenses, and so forth.
That is, even that 14% of heat flux that left the surface as thermal radiation and was re-absorbed by the atmosphere at some (pretty low) level, does not have to proceed painfully upwards as radiation, but is aided in its progress by the water cycle, until it makes up to a level where the air is clear & dry & cold enough to let radiation escape to space.
This level is at the cloud top, of course, and most of the radiation there comes from ice crystals. Emissivity of ice (and liquid water) in the thermal infrared is very close to one, that is, it behaves like a black body. This broad band radiation can hardly be intercepted any more by narrow absorption lines of dilute greenhouse gases at low pressure, which are not even subject to pressure broadening up there.
If the atmosphere gets a bit more opaque in the thermal infrared (due to GHGs), this intermediate water cycle simply gets more vigorous, making the overall average upward heat flux nearly constant.
Anyway, radiative transfer can’t give a serious contribution to heat flux between atmospheric layers as long as various forms of water are not involved, otherwise thermal conductivity of carbon dioxide could not be smaller than that of dry air (which, unlike carbon dioxide, neither emits nor absorbs em radiation in the thermal infrared band).

“”””” Kelvin Vaughan says:
October 27, 2011 at 1:16 am
Just a thought! anti phase sine waves of the same frequency cancel out. Does this happen at infra red wavelengths? “””””
Kevin, the question EXACTLY as you have phrased it has a very simple answer; YES.; well actually with one little detail you left out; those sine waves also have to be of the exact same amplitude, to completely cancel. And I bet you knew that too, if you had just thought about it.
So let’s just say that your sine waves are coming from some electronic oscillator circuit. You can of course switch the power to that circuit off and on; whenever you like.
Just what do you suppose is the likelihood, that if you switched the power off, and then on again, that the oscillator will come up in EXACTLY the same phase, that it might have had if you DIDN’T switch the power off; well not bloody likely as they say.
So ingeneral any oscillator goes on and off from time to time, either deliberately or accidently, so it may not remain PHASE CONTINUOUS all the time.
Well most light sources, and most Infra-red sources, are like that off and on sort of sources. They don’t remain phase continuous FOR VERY LONG; ACTUALLY THEY REMAIN CONTINUOUS FOR A VERY DAMN SHORT TIME.
The infra red radiation, may only travel two inches, and suddenly the phase jumps discontinuously to some other place in the cycle. We call it the COHERENCE LENGTH.
Ordinary light sources or IR sources, don’t normally cancel out, because they never remain exactly out of phase, because of theat coherence length.
The most obvious exception is the LASER. A laser, is not unlike an ordinary oscillator, with its phase remaining coherent for quite alarge distance (or time if you will).
As anybody knows, if you shine one of those little red laser pointers at a wall or something, you see this bright SPECKLE PATTERN apparently dancing in front of the wall, and as you move your eye the speckle patter seems to follow you around.
That speckle pattern is nothing more that the laser beam travelling towards the wall, INTERFERING with the beam reflected off the wall, in the space above the wall, where they overlap, and the speckle is a pattern of dark spots, where the two beams cancel, and the bright spots are where they add together to make an even brighter spot.
So the short answer to you r question is yes they can cancel, but only for the time duration when they really are out of phase.
Non laser ordinary light or infrared sources, usually do not cancel each other because the coherence length is too short..
Now Michelson, measured the length of the standard Metre bar against some lines in the spectrum of Cadmium, which happen to be very narrow bandwidth atomic spectral lines, and in that case they have a much longer coherence length than other sources. The Cadmium Red line as measured by Michelson came out at 6438.4696 Angstrom units, or aqbout 643.84696 nano metres. He had to have his coherence length at least 10 cm long to do that measurment, otherwise he would have seen no interference fringes.
There is a green line in the Mercury 198 spectrum, which is even sharper, than the Cadmium Red line, and makes even nicer interference patterns. Trouble is Mercury 198 is not a natural isotope, or is extrremely rare; so you have to make it in a nuclear reactor out of gold; so 198Hg is far more valuable than gold. There are some even better ones, before you have to go to lasers.
Ordinary sources; specially thermal ones, are very noisy so have low coherence lengths, maybe not even mm in extent.

davidmhoffer says:
October 27, 2011 at 1:26 pm
Tonyb;
Congrats on getting a response from R. Gates… well, sort of.
Me he continues to ignore entirely because the only answer he has left is to admit that he was totaly wrong and welched on his bet with me.
_____
Tony simply is far more polite than you and seems to have a better grasp of the the issues.

In my previous post I neglected to mention the reflective property of water to light photons, which is relatively high compared to other matter. This is the result of partial interaction of the incoming photon without much energy deposition and is related to the unique structure of the water molecule, the frequency/wavelength of the incoming photon, and the incidence angle. Someone with a better theoretical physics background than I may be able to explain this phenomenon in laymen terms better than I. Obviously with reflected light photons, which do not enter into the water mass, this energy does not get adsorbed by the water. However, most of this light energy will be adsorbed by other matter, though a very small portion may escape into space.

Tim Folkerts says:
October 27, 2011 at 3:22 pm
“Whatever angle a photon hits a solar array, if that photon gets absorbed, it deposits all of its energy. “
Nobody is interested in individual photons. The question is, what percentage of photons in an incident plane wave are being absorbed. That is very much dependent on the angle of incidence.

R. Gates;
Tony simply is far more polite than you and seems to have a better grasp of the the issues.>>>
Then by all means, answer his follow up question, it was politely worded, was it not?
As for the notion that you don’t answer me because I’m not polite…in one of my comments I suggested you were a girl and you instantly jumped all over me. Seems to me when I’m totaly rude you respond right away. But to factual questions you either go silent or, as in your response above, come up with some inane excuse that is patently and obviously not true.
I’ve asked if you had some sort of relationship with Trenberth on many occassions. You finaly answered by claiming you had no relationship other than you lived in the same state. I repeat my follow up question:
Did you or did you not arrange for Anthony Watts and 20 guests from the WUWT forum to meet with Kevin Trenberth? You claimed very proudly in another thread that you did. How did you accomplish this without having any contact with Kevin Trenberth other than living in the same state as him?
As for our bet, you welched. You can fail to respond to me, or come up with excuses, but the record is there for all to see. You accepted the wager, and asked me how much I would like to bet. Then you tried to redefine the experiment. Then you tried to claim that Anthony’s results showed only that Anchor Hawking glass absorbs IR. That wasn’t the bet. The bet was that if the experiment were done as illustrated, it would not show the results illustrated. You said they would, and they didn’t.
Of course when it became totaly obvious that you’d lost the bet, you turned from defending Al Gore’s “illustration” to throwing the guy under the bus as if we’d forget what you said in his defense only a few weeks before.
Frankly R. Gates, I’m being perfectly factual, and while you might accuse me of being blunt, there is nothing impolite about anything I said or the questions I asked. If you are uncomfortable with answering the questions, might I suggest that your discomfort originates from another cause?
Ooops. I just did. How impolite of me.

Modtran results looking up from the surface in the tropics (looking at the back-radiation, the red line) when it is Clear.
http://img171.imageshack.us/img171/4308/rad12081141.gif
Modtran results looking up from the surface in the tropics when there is low cloud cover. A perfect black-body radiating at 20C (and it is cloudy 65% of the time).
http://img171.imageshack.us/img171/7268/tropicalsurfacelookingu.gif
Where is this described in Trenberth’s diagram?
It is an illustration which gives everyone a false impression of how the real atmosphere works, and how it really works over a 24 hour period.
Another good example, in the middle of the day in clear conditions, the solar irradiance coming in can be as high as 1200.000 joules/m2/second. But the surface energy level in the same conditions is only increasing by 0.008 joules/m2/second. It is flying out as fast as it is coming in. Where is that shown is Trenberth’s diagram?

George E. Smith; says:
October 26, 2011 at 11:11 pm
“”””” CRISP says:
You CANNOT transfer heat from a colder body (the upper atmosphere) to a hotter body (the lower atmosphere and Earth surface) without doing work. The 2nd Law of Thermodymanics avbsolutely forbids it. “””””
EM radiation knows absolutely nothing about either “heat” or “Temperature.”, and it can go wherever it darn well pleases .
—————————————————–
George I hope you don’t want to imply that the 2nd Law doesn’t hold for radiation, Planck and Einstein surely build on it when they dug into the BB-radiation problem.
Anyways, I notice that many people think the entropy in k*ln*W has to do with the probability of jiggling atoms. It does not. It has to do with possible energy microstates, entropy is about the dispersal of energy itself. W stands for “Ways of energy distribution”, so in the case of atoms the energy distribution among all possible translation, rotation and vibrational states.
Why doesn’t the earth surface heat up infinitely by radiation? Because after absorption from a SWR photon the energy can leave dispersed as 20 diffuse LWR photons.
Backradiation may be real but it is clear that it cannot warm up the surface further because it can’t be dispersed any further than it was when it left the surface in the first place, it can only do this if it would be radiated away at an even LOWER surface temperature.
The ‘heat from hot to cold’ phrase that is often used, should be: Energy tends to flow from being concentrated in one place to becoming diffused and spread out and therefore less concentrated. This more concrete formulation with respect to the 2nd Law is well known in chemistry.
So EM radiation cannot transfer (heat)energy from a colder to a hotter body because the photon energy cannot be dispersed by the hotter body. Energy is still more concentrated here.
For an excellent website about the 2nd Law look here.

Hans;
George I hope you don’t want to imply that the 2nd Law doesn’t hold for radiation, Planck and Einstein surely build on it when they dug into the BB-radiation problem.>>>
That’s not what George said. He said that all bodies radiate energy as per Stefan-Boltzmann and they do so in a spectrum as defined by Planck. The photons emitted by a body at any temperature don’t care WHAT the temperature of what they are aimed at is. They either get absorbed or they don’t depending on the properties of whatever they run into. SB, Planck and Einstein all require this to be the case. The 2nd Law holds up just fine if you define the NET exchange of radiation. So, a cold body does in fact send energy to a warm body, but not as much as it GETS from the warm body. That said, if you insert a cold body in between a warm body and a SUPER cold body (outer space for example) the warm body still cools, just not as fast as it would without the cold body in between.

Again, again, again, only crickets when the facts appear. Nobody wants to address the real issues. Just argue about photons…
The Atmospheric GHG theory has been proven to be toast in several ways, yet that is ignored and the silly debates about radiation go on, as if there were no elephant in the room at all.
Rather deserving of a comical play, no?
Very worrisome, I think.
But, even of more concern, the same problem applies to many other totally irrational things going on now, because of a stupid, lazy, uneducated, rich society. Like substituting bumper sticker slogans for policy. “Hope and Change,” as a “policy,” e.g. Like calling a war a “kinetic military action” and Muslim terrorism “man-caused disasters.” Like the climate scientists and Obamabots saying that “our ideas are really right, we just need to communicate them better, and the (stupid fools) will learn to appreciate us. Like the absolute stupidity of the concepts of “green energy,” “renewable energy, and “sustainability.”
1984 is coming true in 2011, unless more people wake up!

Tim Folkerts @ October 27, at 6:37 pm
My comment related to Bart’s comment pertaining to the surface alignment of solar panels relative to sunlight. They are fairly devoid of specular reflection or if you like are close to Lambertian reflectors/emitters. It is a tad off topic, but had relevance particularly with it giving another demonstration of vector analysis.
We could also get into semantics again, in that there are different terminologies again between optics, and your view of physics/elementary quantum theory.

davidmhoffer says: (to R. Gates)
October 27, 2011 at 5:19 pm
“Did you or did you not arrange for Anthony Watts and 20 guests from the WUWT forum to meet with Kevin Trenberth? You claimed very proudly in another thread that you did. How did you accomplish this without having any contact with Kevin Trenberth other than living in the same state as him?
___
100% true. I emailed him, and told him what we wanted to do…including who it was that would like to do it (i.e. a small group that I would bring and Anthony Watts and a group he would invite). He politely emailed me back his schedule of when he’d be in Boulder, and told me his assistant would be in contact. Within a day or so she contacted me and we saw that Nov. 10th was open. I then communicated directly with Anthony to set up the details. Very simple, very straight forward. Though I have been to NCAR several times, I’ve never met Dr.Trenberth in person, and have only exchanged a few emails (no more than 2 or 3) over the past few years. He’s always been quite generous and responded within a few days.

Smokey says:
October 27, 2011 at 9:06 pm
So Gates is part of the conspiracy to backstab Anthony.
Figures.
_____
Smokey, I would expect an apology from a reasonable person, but that might be asking too much from you. I would also like to see Anthony make some remark here, as he knows the full truth of the situation, and there was never any attempt to back-stab Anthony or anyone else. Though Anthony might have become more hesitant to go to NCAR after the BEST issue happened, the two were never connected in any manner, and based on things I heard, I think Dr. Trenberth and Anthony probably would have found some common ground in being critical of the way the BEST results were handled. it was a missed opportunity, but I respect Anthony’s decision not to go, but to insinuate that their was a “conspiracy to backstab Anthony” is…well, beyond the normal level of paranoia even for you.

REPLY: You wanted a response, OK here it is. I made the decision not to go, because every time I’ve ever tried to outreach to climate science by invitation, I end up getting burned. It happened with NCDC after my visit in 2008, and it happened with BEST in the spring of this year. On both occasions, people that I confided in then went to great lengths to put me and the work I’ve done down in public and in very unprofessional ways. Karl et al used preliminary data against my objections, data that was put up briefly for the benefit of survey volunteers, and never part of the final product, and then Dr. Thomas Peterson had the gall to write a ghost authored “talking points memo” about it. He circulated it to every NOAA climate division and middle manager, naming me and my work and telling everyone how it was flawed, but didn’t have the integrity to put his own name to the internal paper. Then later, Karl, Menne, and Vose offer me an option to put my name on their upcoming paper…a week before it gets submitted, but I’m not allowed to offer any criticisms, revisions, or changes to it. Name only. I ask them for a letter of invitation, they refuse to even put it in writing. The idea was to get me to endorse their paper by putting my name on it. Sheesh.
I don’t know that Dr. Trenberth had any designs, he probably didn’t, but I do know this: I asked him personally not to address people as “deniers” at the AMS conference and he declined, only rewriting his speech to change the inaccuracies we called him out on. He didn’t even have the courtesy to respond. After my two previous experiences with “professional” climate scientists and the resulting outcome, I couldn’t see spending my own money, effort, and time to stand next to a man who has so little respect for me and others that he could not refrain from calling people like myself who question the issues on a scientific basis “deniers”.
That, and none of the other 8 scientists I invited wanted to attend. It seems they couldn’t justify making the effort for visiting Dr. Trenberth. So all in all it became simply R. Gates was the only one who really wanted this to happen. In better times, perhaps it would have worked out. But Dr. Muller has put the kiss of death on any further cooperation with his media blitzkrieg. And even now, he’s complaining that “I broke the embargo” because I published my essay on the BEST paper an hour before they got their website up…he seems to think that the Economist publishing a story hours before doesn’t count, and that I was bound by an embargo that somehow wasn’t broken by the Economist, but I did. I found myself being deluged with emails and requests for interviews even before BEST got their stuff out. Judith Curry published 30 minutes before BEST got their stuff on their website, but I’m the bad guy.
There’s no scruples it seems in climate science where the treatment of skeptics is involved. And after what I’ve been through, I won’t trust any of these people again.
Leaning from that, Dr. Trenberth can go fly a kite. – Anthony

wayne says:
October 26, 2011 at 6:44 pm
Tim Folkerts says:
October 26, 2011 at 6:07 pm
Well, in a word: YES!
In a transparent atmosphere and ignoring the curvature of the earth, the average 396 W/m^2 would be constant all the way up. […]
Wrong.
It decrease with temperature with an increase in altitude.

Speaking as a former meteorologist who observed and reported innumerable surface and air temperatures with surface observations and rawindsonde probes during routine and special operations, Increasing altitude certainly does not result in a decrease in air temperature in all atmospheric layers or in all geographic locations and their time intervals. It is quite common for air temperatures to increase with increases in altitude in some atmospheric layers, in many geographic areas, at certain times, and in many common atmospheric conditions. There are a multitude of ways in which inversion layers develop as warm air masses become positioned above cooler air masses. The adiabatic lapse rates which assume decreasing temperatures with increasing altitude are based upon Tropospheric conditions and ideal assumptions about dry air conditions adjusted for dew point measurements in the upper air soundings. Variations in atmospheric temperature and density at different altitudes also change the quantities of electromagnetic energy being modulated by the air volumes. The presence of water vapor, water, and water ice changes the electromagnetic environment and thermal environment in complex ways. Models which fail to accurately account for these widespread and common exceptions are inherently lacking in reality.

Since no one has really picked up on how wrong the K&T cartoon is, think about this. If CO2 doubled and that caused water vapor forcing to double twice the CO2, there would be a total of 3 times 3.7 or 11.1 Wm-2 increase in that 333Wm-2 down welling radiation. 11.1/333 = 0.033 or 3 percent increase in forcing. If that 333 is related to all of the 33C greenhouse effect, a 3 percent increase would be 1.1 degrees of warming due to a doubling of CO2 forcing and water vapor forcing. Not just a no feed back forcing, the whole enchilata. That is what Richard Lindzen has said, K. Kimoto has said, and Monckton has said. They are right, if you use that cartoon.
Isn’t it ironic how some people defend the indefensable even when it is shooting themselves in the Foot? 🙂
Unfortunately, it is not as simple as discrediting another flawed icon of global warming past. The reality is a little more complicated.

Bob Fernley-Jones @ October 27, 2011 at 3:13 pm
My understanding of the 396 W m-2 is that it is an averaged net upwards oriented energy flux resulting from all phenomena taking place on a non-even emitting surface. The Trenberth and the NASA diagrams are just energy balance MODELS, not a fundamental explanation of all the physics going on on a lukewarm plate.
Even for lateral going radiation, a high enough concentration of IR absorbing gases (so called GHG) would be needed to absorb this energy. CO2 at 391 ppm and H2O at 0 – 40000 ppm cannot play that role on a very short distance (may be some methane at high concentration in cows’ flatulence could do the job). The major air components O2, N2, and Ar don’t absorb in the IR range.
To debate if [or not] a 15°C surface emits [or not] energy in its perpendicular [or not] direction is a “Nebenkriegschauplatz”, a battle not worth conducting.
What is more important is the unbalance shown in Trenberth, 333 W m-2 going only downward, and to understand what is wrong there (or if it’s right, to expain it).
And even more important is to know if a 3.7 W m-2 effect (GHG forcing for doubling CO2) can bring to a tipping point a system with huge shock absorbers like water evaporation and cloud albedo.

BTW everyone, may I suggest that regardless of what his relationship with Trenberth might be we should listen to R. Gates, because it seems to me that he does produce some arguments that we should consider as worthwhile thinking-on.

Leif Svalgaard says:
October 27, 2011 at 8:24 am
Myrrh says:
October 27, 2011 at 5:15 am
For example, visible LIGHT cannot heat water because it doesn’t have the mechanism to do so, water is a transparent medium for visible LIGHT and so visible light is transmitted through without being absorbed, visible light cannot move the molecules of water into the vibrational state which is heat.
Yet it does.
No it bloody well doesn’t. Shine blue light on water and let me know when it’s hot enough for you to make a cup of coffee..

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/chemical/watabs.html
“Transparency of Water in the Visible Range
“It doesn’t absorb in the wavelength range of visible light, roughly 400-700 nm, because there is no physical mechanism which produces transitions in that region – it is too energetic for the vibrations of the water molecule and below the energies needed to cause electronic transitions.”
If there is some other factor at play to alter that at some visible wavelengths it is still so insignificant that for all practical purposes it is zero. Get a grip on scale.
This Visible light direct from the Sun to Earth is what is being touted as the PRIMARY heating mechanism of the whole Earth! Claiming it is directly heating land and oceans. This is pure, unadulterated, unscientific, uneducated, stupidity. It’s high time this was acknowledged by everyone discussing this fictional AGW KT energy budget.
100 meters of water absorbs all the visible light falling on it, so heats it.
No it doesn’t. Water is a transparent medium for visible light. What is the problem here? How can you not know what transparent means? You’re happy enough to use transparent when talking about visible light passing through it to reach the surface, to heat the surface.
Transparent is used in error in the ‘AGW greenhouse scenario’ when it claims that the atmosphere is transparent to visible light. It isn’t, reflection and scattering, blue sky, are the result of ABSORPTION in the TECHNICAL physical sense, of being actually absorbed by whole or part of the molecule.
How hot is the sky from this? Why isn’t the figure in the KT?
Not all absorption creates heat, photosynthesis is chemical energy not heat energy, the creation of sugars, for example. This one dimension fictional science thinking that equates ‘all absorption of energy creates heat’, is quite frankly, pathetic coming from ‘educated scientists’. However, Water really is tranparent to visible light. “Absorption” here can not refer to the technical physical sense of the molecule or part thereof physically absorbing its energy. See Georgia link above.
Visible light does not affect the molecule of water, not on an electron scale nor on the atom/molecule scale, it cannot move the molecule into vibration, it can’t because it doesn’t have the mechanism to do this.
Visible light move water molecules into overtones of symmetric and anti-symmetric vibrations.
Codswallop, utterly stupid science fiction. ..I think you may have misread this, this is a description of how a molecule of water moves, but to get that moving into vibrational heat energy production takes thermal infrared, heat, visible isn’t capable of it.
Visible is transmitted through without being absorbed. Visible isn’t capable of moving the whole molecule into vibration.
Therefore, whatever reason visible travels through water to greater or lesser depths depending on its wavelength, colour, it isn’t because it is being absorbed by the molecules of water. The use here of “absorbed” can only mean in the general sense, that it disappears..
Visible is transmitted through without being absorbed. Visible isn’t capable of moving the whole molecule into vibration.
Water is a transparent medium for visible light, this means that it doesn’t even get in to play with the electrons. Visible light does not have the means to moves molecules of water, its effect on matter is on the electronic transition level, electron level.
In the atmosphere, visible light is absorbed by the electrons of the whole molecules of oxygen and nitrogen. What happens then? The electron briefly becomes a bit more agitated and then comes back to norm spitting the blue light out again, called reflection/scattering. Number two on this list of what electronic transitions can do in the post I set out the differences, here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/18/replicating-al-gores-climate-101-video-experiment-shows-that-his-high-school-physics-could-never-work-as-advertised/#comment-778960
First: There is a real physical difference in the way Light and Heat energies from the Sun work:
“Mechanisms of selective light wave absorption include:
Electronic: Transitions in electron energy levels within the atom (e.g., pigments). These transitions are typically in the ultraviolet (UV) and/or visible portions of the spectrum.
Vibrational: Resonance in atomic/molecular vibrational modes. These transitions are typically in the infrared portion of the spectrum.”
Got that?
Now, in the list of what is possible that UV/Visible can and will do:

“UV-Vis: Electronic transitions
In electronic absorption, the frequency of the incoming light wave is at or near the energy levels of the electrons within the atoms which compose the substance. In this case, the electrons will absorb the energy of the light wave and increase their energy state, often moving outward from the nucleus of the atom into an outer shell or orbital.
The atoms that bind together to make the molecules of any particular substance contain a number of electrons (given by the atomic number Z in the periodic chart). Recall that all light waves are electromagnetic in origin. Thus they are affected strongly when coming into contact with negatively charged electrons in matter. When photons (individual packets of light energy) come in contact with the valence electrons of atom, one of several things can and will occur:
*An electron absorbs all of the energy of the photon and re-emits it with different color. This gives rise to luminescence, fluorescence and phosphorescence.
*An electron absorbs the energy of the photon and sends it back out the way it came in. This results in reflection or scattering.
*An electron cannot absorb the energy of the photon and the photon continues on its path. This results in transmission (provided no other absorption mechanisms are active).
*An electron selectively absorbs a portion of the photon, and the remaining frequencies are transmitted in the form of spectral color.”

The second is what happens to visible light in the atmosphere – it is being absorbed by the electrons of the molecules of oxygen and nitrogen and reflected/scattered back out.
The third is what happens to visible in water – it is transmitted through without being absorbed because water is a transparent medium for visible light.
VISIBLE LIGHT IS NOT ABSORBED BY WATER. THEREFORE, IT CANNOT HEAT WATER.
The AGW energy budget cartoon is just that, a cartoon. How anyone here can be discussing it as if it is serious physics is getting to be a bad joke, you’re wasting your time, better spent deconstructing it its core premises, which are here seen to be fictional memes. That visible light isn’t capable of heating land and oceans is basic, bog standard traditional physics, which knows the difference between Heat and Light. And it doesn’t need to be more complicated than these well understood category differences.

Michel says:
October 28, 2011 at 1:08 am
The major air components O2, N2, and Ar don’t absorb in the IR range.
———————–
Sure they do.
About 0.00000000015 seconds after a CO2, H2O, or CH4 molecule absorbs a photon in the IR range.

Myrrh, thank you for your reply however I think you seem confused. I was talking about radiation not whether it is visible or invisible. The 2nd law of thermodynamics is often brought up to prove that CO2 cannot cause warming because heat does not travel from cold to hot, and the surface of the earth being hotter would not receive the heat CO2 apparently sends back to the surface to cause global warming. If it were heat, this would be true, however, radiation unlike heat can travel in any direction including back down to the surface. I believe it is important for it to be understood that heat is controlled by the Laws of Thermodynamics, radiation isn’t. I’m sorry if my explanation was too simple. I often get lectured about that but I believe the KISS theory much more effective than the complicated gobbledygook scientists use.
I’m still trying to work out how long wave radiation can produce a higher temperature than short wave radiation.

Bob FJ
“Yes, indeed, and I was wondering at one stage if I should include an observation in the article that if the TOA could be treated as a surface, (which is a tad conceptual), then the idea of surface integration at “that level” might be applied.”
To quote the silly movie, Night Shift, “I am a Big Picture, kinda guy.”
I don’t do complicated though, so I keep it as simple as possible, which is a challenge in atmospheric physics.
This article, http://redneckphysics.blogspot.com/2011/10/330-watt-weirdness.html could use a little better grasp of the Queen’s English. You may find it humorous and enlightening once you go back to the basics then work toward the true relationships. Besides the dig that Lindzen and K.Kimoto seems to be playing on K&T, the Arrhenius relationship based on perfect blackbody is illuminating.
Feel free to edit as you wish.
I am working on some Tropopause posts that explain the impact of the inversion more clearly. Fun stuff.

On SW absorption in water. With a ;long enough path, it is absorbed. The more interesting part is suspended particulates at varing depths greatly impact the depth and degree of absorption. Woods Hole has quite a few interesting links. As a fisherman, this is something nice to know, in case you wonder why fish stocks and climate seem to correlate.

Tim Folkerts:
“So enlighten us, JAE.
What do you consider to be “the Atmospheric GHG theory” and in what specific ways is it “proven to be toast” ?”
Multiple lines of evidence. I’ve linked to this twice in this thread alone:
http://theendofthemystery.blogspot.com/2010/11/venus-no-greenhouse-effect.html
If it’s wrong, why do you keep ignoring it?

Ask why is it so? asks:
October 28, 2011 at 8:05 am
I’m still trying to work out how long wave radiation can produce a higher temperature than short wave radiation.
Try this – the long wave energy is absorbed in a few millimeters of water, but the short wave energy is absorbed over 100 meters. Assuming that each group of frequencies carries the same amount of energy, the energy absorbed in the smaller volume will produce the greater temperature rise. If this case several million to one.
In the case of a solid surface – the absorptivity is frequency based. As a result, many more long wave photons are absorbed than shortwave. This is one of the main failings of the KT diagram – it does not indicate that the reflected radiation has a different spectrum than the absorbed radiation.

I’m not a scientist, just an old Air Force photo interpreter with 20+ years’ experience. I’ve worked with about every kind of photography imaginable, from B&W, Color, false-color IR, regular IR, Radar, and a few others I can’t talk about. I’ve physically SEEN that the atmosphere isn’t equally transparent to all wavelengths of EMR. LOTS of different things can degrade reflectivity (photography being the recording of reflected energy, regardless of the type). You can sometimes see quite well through very thin clouds, other times those same types of clouds are virtually opaque. The resolution of IR imagery is directly affected by the ambient-environment temperature in which it’s being recorded – the greater the difference in temperature, the better the resolution. RADAR has no-return zones, either caused by blocking the radar energy from a given area (building “shadow”, etc.), or in the case of relatively calm water, the majority of the reflected energy isn’t returned to the recording site (the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection. Visible light has a greater variety of angles of incidence than other types of imagery). Dust and smog can also affect any imagery negatively.
The atmosphere works the same way for solar radiation. Some of the radiation is allowed through, some of it’s blocked, some of it is absorbed or reflected away in odd angles. Since the atmosphere is a constantly-changing soup of elements, chemicals, and aerosols, some of which exist in more than one phase, I can see no way to develop a direct measurement of its’ overall transparency for any given location, much less for the earth as a whole. The best we can do is come up with what we in the business call a SWAG – a ‘Scientific’ Wild-A$$ Guess”. Even that would require taking a constant, highly-accurate, 24/7/365 measurement of the transparency (both ways – receiving and emitting) from multiple points on the earth to develop that. Until then, all of this is just an exercise in futility, proving nothing.

Smokey says:
October 28, 2011 at 12:26 pm
Gates,
I stand by what I wrote. No one else but you tried to push Anthony and his supporters into a meeting controlled by Trenberth, with no agenda or rules.
_____
Smokey, read Anthony’s last reply when I said you’d make a good fiction writer. You are off base on this in a serious way, so let it go. It was a meeting that was completely above board and it simply didn’t work out. No one tried to push anyone into anything, and the Dr. Trenberth was willing to talk about any climate issue we wanted him to, and answer Q & A. After BEST, Anthony (understandably) became a bit gun-shy. Can’t blame him, but that’s all there was to it. End of story.

Tim Folkerts.
“And following up on that point, the calculations you have are all for clear skies. If you model a cumulus cloud base, the numbers are much higher. For example, the first line for looking up from 10 m in a clear tropical sky was 348 W/m^2 in your table, but 418 W/m^2 when cloudy. Arctic winter goes from 163 W/m^2 to 243 W/m^2.”
As most IR from the ground is absorbed within the first 10m, I would also think that any IR from above, if emitted from over 10m up would have little chance of getting to the ground!!! As this area is where much of the thermalization of the IR occurs I keep wondering what the real numbers are at sea level and the surface of the ocean. At higher altitudes we are cooler as there is more radiation directly to space due to less atmosphere.
Anyone got some actual ground measurements? The gradient at the surface is apparently a lot higher due to the density of the atmosphere and humidity!!!