Guest Post by Ira Glickstein
The Unified Theory of Climate post is exciting and could shake the world of Climate Science to its roots. I would love it if the conventional understanding of the Atmospheric “Greenhouse” Effect (GHE) presented by the Official Climate Team could be overturned, and that would be the case if the theory of Ned Nikolov and Karl Zeller, both PhDs, turns out to be scientifically correct.
Sadly, it seems to me they have made some basic mistakes that, among other faults, confuse cause and effect. I appreciate that WUWT is open to new ideas, and I support the decision to publish this theory, along with both positive and negative comments by readers.
Correlation does not prove causation. For example, the more policemen directing traffic, the worse the jam is. Yes, when the police and tow trucks first respond to an accident they may slow the traffic down a bit until the disabled automobiles are removed. However, there is no doubt the original cause of the jam was the accident, and the reason police presence is generally proportional to the severity of the jam level is that more or fewer are ordered to respond. Thus, Accident >>CAUSES>> Traffic Jam >>CAUSES>> Police is the correct interpretation.
Al Gore made a similar error when, in his infamous movie An Inconvenient Truth, he made a big deal about the undoubted corrrelation in the Ice Core record between CO2 levels and Temperature without mentioning the equally apparent fact that Temperatures increase and decrease hundreds of years before CO2 levels follow suit.
While it is true that rising CO2 levels do have a positive feedback that contributes to slightly increased Temperatures, the primary direction of causation is Temperature >>CAUSES>> CO2. The proof is in the fact that, in each Glacial cycle, Temperatures begin their rapid decline precisely when CO2 levels are at their highest, and rapid Temperature increase is initiated exactly when CO2 levels are their lowest. Thus, Something Else >>CAUSES>> Temperature>>CAUSES>> CO2. Further proof may be had by placing an open can of carbonated beverage in the refigerator and another on the table, and noting that the “fizz” (CO2) outgasses more rapidly from the can at room temperature.
Moving on to Nikolov, the claim appears to be that the pressure of the Atmosphere is the main cause of temperature changes on Earth. The basic claim is PRESSURE >>CAUSES>>TEMPERATURE.
PV = nRT
Given a gas in a container, the above formula allows us to calculate the effect of changes to the following variables: Pressure (P), Volume (V), Temperature (T, in Kelvins), and Number of molecules (n). (R is a constant.)
The figure shows two cases involving a sealed, non-insulated container, with a Volume, V, of air:
(A) Store that container of air in the ambient cool Temperature Tr of a refrigerator. Then, increase the Number n of molecules in the container by pumping in more air. the Pressure (P) within the container will increase. Due to the work done to compress the air in the fixed volume container, the Temperature within the container will also increase from (Tr) to some higher value. But, please note, when we stop increasing n, both P and T in the container will stabilize. Then, as the container, warmed by the work we did compressing the air, radiates, conducts, and convects that heat to the cool interior of the refrigerator, the Temperature slowly decreases back to the original Tr.
(B) We take a similar container from the cool refrigerator at Temperature Tr and place it on a kitchen chair, where the ambient Temperature Tk is higher. The container is warmed by radiation, conduction and convection and the Temperature rises asymptotically towards Tk. The Pressure P rises slowly and stabilizes at some higher level. Please note the pressure remains high forever so long as the temperature remains elevated.
In case (A) Pressure >>CAUSES A TEMPORARY>> increase in Temperature.
In case (B) Temperature >>CAUSES A PERMANENT>> increase in Pressure.
I do not believe any reader will disagree with this highly simplified thought experiment. Of course, the Nikolov theory is far more complex, but, I believe it amounts to confusing the cause, namely radiation from the Sun and Downwelling Long-Wave Infrared (LW DWIR) from the so-called “Greenhouse” gases (GHG) in the Atmosphere with the effect, Atmospheric pressure.
Some Red Flags in the Unified Theory
1) According to Nikolov, our Atmosphere
“… boosts Earth’s surface temperature not by 18K—33K as currently assumed, but by 133K!”
If, as Nikolov claims, the Atmosphere boosts the surface temperature by 133K, then, absent the Atmosphere the Earth would be 288K – 133K = 155K. This is contradicted by the fact that the Moon, which has no Atmosphere and is at the same distance from the Sun as our Earth, has an average temperature of about 250K. Yes, the albedo of the Moon is 0.12 and that of the Earth is 0.3, but that difference would make the Moon only about 8K cooler than an Atmosphere-free Earth, not 95K cooler! Impossible!
2) In the following quote from Nikolov, NTE is “Atmospheric Near-Surface Thermal Enhancement” and SPGB is a “Standard Planetary Gray Body”
NTE should not be confused with an actual energy, however, since it only defines the relative (fractional) increase of a planet’s surface temperature above that of a SPGB. Pressure by itself is not a source of energy! Instead, it enhances (amplifies) the energy supplied by an external source such as the Sun through density-dependent rates of molecular collision. This relative enhancement only manifests as an actual energy in the presence of external heating. [Emphasis added]
This, it seems to me, is an admission that the source of energy for their “Atmospheric Near-Surface Thermal Enhancement” process comes from the Sun, and, therefore, their “Enhancement” is as they admit, not “actual energy”. I would add the energy that would otherwise be lost to space (DW LWIR) to the energy from the Sun, eliminating any need for the “Thermal Enhancement” provided by Atmospheric pressure.
3) As we know when investigating financial misconduct, follow the money. Well, in Climate Science we follow the Energy. We know from actual measurements (see my Visualizing the “Greenhouse” Effect – Emission-Spectra) the radiative energy and spectra of Upwelling Long-Wave Infrared (UW LWIR), from the Surface to the so-called “greenhouse” gases (GHG) in the Atmosphere, and the Downwelling (DW LWIR) from those gases back to the Surface.
The only heed Nikolov seems to give to GHG and those measured radiative energies is that they are insufficient to raise the temperature of the Surface by 133K.
… our atmosphere boosts Earth’s surface temperature not by 18K—33K as currently assumed, but by 133K! This raises the question: Can a handful of trace gases which amount to less than 0.5% of atmospheric mass trap enough radiant heat to cause such a huge thermal enhancement at the surface? Thermodynamics tells us that this not possible.
Of course not! Which is why the conventional explanation of the GHE is that the GHE raises the temperature by only about 33K (or perhaps a bit less -or more- but only a bit and definitely not 100K!).
4) Nikolov notes that, based on “interplanetary data in Table 1” (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Moon, Mars, Europe, Titan, Triton):
… we discovered that NTE was strongly related to total surface pressure through a nearly perfect regression fit…
Of course, one would expect planets and moons in our Solar system to have some similarities.
“… the atmosphere does not act as a ‘blanket’ reducing the surface infrared cooling to space as maintained by the current GH theory, but is in and of itself a source of extra energy through pressure. This makes the GH effect a thermodynamic phenomenon, not a radiative one as presently assumed!
I just cannot square this assertion with the clear measurements of UW and DW LWIR, and the fact that the wavelengths involved are exactly those of water vapor, carbon dioxide, and other GHGs.
Equation (7) allows us to derive a simple yet robust formula for predicting a planet’s mean surface temperature as a function of only two variables – TOA solar irradiance and mean atmospheric surface pressure,…”
Yes, TOA solar irradiance would be expected to be important in predicting mean surface temperature, but mean atmospheric surface pressure, it seems to me, would more likely be a result than a cause of temperature. But, I could be wrong.
Conclusion
I, as much as anyone else here at WUWT, would love to see the Official Climate Team put in its proper place. I think climate (CO2) sensitivity is less than the IPCC 2ºC to 4.5ºC, and most likely below 1ºC. The Nikolov Unified Climate Theory goes in the direction of reducing climate sensitivity, apparently even making it negative, but, much as I would like to accept it, I remain unconvinced. Nevertheless, I congratulate Nikolov and Zeller for having the courage and tenacity to put this theory forward. Perhaps it will trigger some other alternative theory that will be more successful.
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UPDATE: This thread is closed – see the newest one “A matter of some Gravity” where the discussion continues.
“Photons have no mass.”
It isn’t that simple. They have no mass at rest but in fact they are always moving which gives them ‘relativistic mass’.
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/ParticleAndNuclear/photon_mass.html
Whether one calls it mass or not they get absorbed by planets and atmospheres and heat is released in the process of conversion to a different wavelength .
OK, you speak about “GHGs share their energy promptly with the non GHG molecules around them by collision and conduction” [my bold] Good, we are on the same page, talking about ENERGY. (As I said a couple times, in financial malfeasance, FOLLOW THE MONEY. With Climate Science theories, FOLLOW THE ENERGY.)
In my posting I pointed out how, absent GHGs some radiative ENERGY gets a free pass from the Surface out to Space and is never heard from again. Given radiation, some GHGs get absorbed and re-emitted, and some of that ENERGY comes back to the Surface. FOLLOW THE ENERGY and show me how that balances differently in the non-GHG case.
Example: Say my wife gives me X coins every morning. I have a hole in my pocket, so some coins leak out and are picked up by a dishonest guy. I come home at night with only Y coins because some of the coins she gave me are gone forever. OK, you happen to be a relatively honest chap and you happen to follow me. You pick up the coins I drop and give half of them back to me. When I get home that night, I have more than Y coins. Right?
A non-GHG atmosphere is like that dishonest guy. Energy radiated from the Surface is gone forever. A GHG-atmosphere is like that relatively honest chap, about half the energy is returned to the Surface.
Willis Eschenbach says:
January 4, 2012 at 11:41 am
“We are discussing a thought experiment using idealized gases and surfaces. How is this not the “idealized circumstances for which the equation is formulated”?”
The interface. You’re an EE. Surely you’ve done impedance matching?
The point is, you’re aiming for a knock out blow, and it isn’t happening. Your opponent is already staggering on the ropes, and I’m calling a TKO. Isn’t that enough?
“A GHG-atmosphere is like that relatively honest chap, about half the energy is returned to the Surface.”
A non GHG atmosphere is like a completely honest guy returning ALL the energy to the surface because it can’t get out any other way.
Which should be warmer ?
“A non GHG atmosphere is like a completely honest guy returning ALL the energy to the surface because it can’t get out any other way. Which should be warmer ?”
Errmm! With respect, NO! The NON GHG atmospherereturns none of the energy to the surface. It doesn’t, by definition, absorb, so it cannot radiate. It just lets the radiation through without any taxes or other hindrances, so it goes, never to return.
Willis Eschenbach says:
January 4, 2012 at 11:41 am
“Energy retained has increased … but we added atmosphere, so we added mass. As a result, no net surface temperature change.”
Depends on the relative heat capacity. But, you see, here you want it both ways. You say only the surface of the planet matters in S-B, yet there is additional mass retaining energy above the surface. And, the only difference between that mass and the mass below it is proximity of neighboring constituents.
Stephen Wilde flails:
But, we’ve already talked about that. We have ~240 W/m^2 of power coming in from the sun’s photons and ~390 W/m^2 of power going out from the longwave radiation. What is supplying the missing ~150 W/m^2?
Richard S Courtney says:
Let me try to explain it differently than I did in the other thread because I now think I understand your confusion: You are correct that the some of the 133 K deficit that Nikolov et al identified in Section 2.1A) of their paper is fictional in that you can get a higher surface temperature simply by moving heat around so that the surface temperature is more uniform. However, the highest temperature that can be obtained by doing this is 255 K, which is the temperature at which a spherical surface with a uniform surface temperature would be emitting ~240 W/m^2.
Hence, that still doesn’t explain the 288 K average surface temperature that we have, and in fact it provides a good argument as to why everybody else in the world except for Nikolov talks about the temperature deficit that needs to be explained as being 33 K (=288 K – 255 K) rather than using the unrealistic temperature distribution that he does and saying that the deficit that needs to be explained is 133 K!
“C’mon, guys, this should not be hard. Imagine a planet with no atmosphere. At equilibrium, it emits exactly the radiation it receives from its sun, whatever that might be.
Then a perfectly transparent atmosphere, no GHGs, is added to that planet. You guys claim the surface will warm. I say no.”
Your planet with no atmosphere reaches some equilibrium temperature. Call it T1. Fine.
Now to keep it simple just add some nitrogen; enough to make 1 cm of atmosphere with negligible surface pressure and mass change. At time zero all the incoming radiation is matched by outgoing radiation. Soon though, the nitrogen equilibrates to T1 strictly by conduction with the surface.
Now the nitrogen is producing back radiation isn’t it? It’s at T1 so it will radiate (UV ???) isotropically. Won’t that mean the surface still has the incoming solar radiation plus the back radiation? Won’t that raise the temperature of the surface? Sounds like a runaway greenhouse effect, eh?
How is the backwards radiation from the nitrogen that has been heated by contact with the surface any different than backwards radiation due to infrared absorption by a GHG?
Radiation balance is maintained. The outgoing IR spectrum would change but the outgoing IR would still equal the incoming solar radiation where the reduction in surface IR is exactly replaced with nitrogen IR.
“Now the nitrogen is producing back radiation isn’t it?”
Sadly, I have to tell you that you are mistaken. Nitrogen don’t produce no radiation, none, nadda. Therein lies the rub (Will Shake).
as we are talking about a hypothetical planet then I am sure I can use my hypothetical elementary particle physics knowledge here .Perhaps pressure broadening of spectral lines could lead to nitrogen and oxygen acting in some way as greenhouse gasses ,someone told me that this is possible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_line
Spectral lines are produced by high energy interactions that can raise electrons to excited states. We are talking low energy photons which cannot do that.
there is a co2 molecule (500 ppm) wants to hit me where the good lord split me but it just can’t because there are a thousand water molecules (1%) ahead of it blocking the way.
and all of them are just jostling each other in a crowd of 100,000 pickpockets.
but hey- co2 is wearing makeup, so she’s askin for it. lock her up.
ok, on the bare rock planet, it radiates only. it has a specific ‘temperature’.
now, if we put a conductive fluid in contact with it – a heat sink on it – it gets warmer?
orly? srsly? cuz a conductive evaporative radiative bigger radius, more surface area fluid is an insulator?
and the denser material i make my heat sink out of, the better insulator it is?
“Where is your hypothetical additional energy coming from?”
Where does it come from under the exact same scenario with GHG. The GHG increases surface temp therefore the planet has more energy, therefore energy has been created by CO2 magic gas hasn’t it?
Seriously though this is a problem. If surface temp goes up then a first cut says you’ve increased the energy of the planet. The only explanation I have (again a first cut) is that in my 1 cm atmosphere at time t+1, the planet’s energy has been robbed of exactly the amount that the nitrogen took away by conduction. This would imply that the surface temp should actually go down. This occurs with either N or CO2 magic gas doesn’t it?
I think what a lot of us are doing is confusing equilibrium, equilibration, and steady state energy flow. Since the entire system is dynamic, with energy essentially flowing through it all the time, it never really equilibrates does it? You can reach a steady state without equilibrating. If I heat a steel rod with a blow torch on one end it will reach a steady state where its temp profile reaches a constant state but it will certainly not equilibrate until I take the torch away.
As long as I pour solar energy into the little atmosphere I can’t expect some part of it down inside to behave like a black body anymore.
Paul Bahlin says:
It is different in that the former is fictional and the latter is real: Kirchkoff’s Rule of Radiation says that at each wavelength emissivity = absorptivity, If a substance is not a greenhouse gas, it will not absorb radiation but it also will not emit radiation. (In reality, because of collisional effects, nitrogen will absorb and emit tiny amounts of radiation…i.e., it is a very, very weak greenhouse gas at terrestrial pressures, but so weak that it will only be able to raise the surface temperature by a tiny amount.)
No…It is not magic. It is physics. The problem that Willis speaks of only occurs if we assume that all of the radiation emitted by the surface escapes into space. If some of it is absorbed by the atmosphere, i.e., the atmosphere contains greenhouse gases, then there is no longer a problem with conservation of energy.
(And, yes, the atmosphere will also emit radiation, but it turns out that some of the emitted radiation goes back to the surface rather than out into space. This both decreases the emission back out into space AND increases the amount that the surface receives and thus the amount that it can emit and still have radiative balance at the surface.)
Bart said:
“Absent absorption in the atmosphere, they (photons) speed up, their paths get bent, and they get redshifted to balance everything out”
Redshifting means that they lose energy so that the wavelength increases and the light emitted shifts towards the red end of the spectrum.
They. Lose. Energy. Which part of that do you, Willis Joel, Ira et al have a problem with ?
In the process of the interaction with any gravitational field photons slow down, lose energy and release heat. Unless they get accelerated into a black hole. If out in space the heat release is dissipated in space.
Now, if the photon hits a planetary surface or enters an atmosphere it gets stopped in its tracks and ALL its energy is converted to kinetic energy in the molecules of the surface or the atmosphere. All the momentum is converted to kinetic energy and and in due course radiated back out as longwave.
THAT is where your ‘extra’ energy is coming from.
The issue then is as to how long it is before on average the energy is radiated out again. The longer it takes for the energy to depart the higher the energy content of the system will get.
As it happens under current atmospheric pressure the energy builds up to about 150 W/m2 if one goes by Joels figures and that balances the budget at equilibrium.
Atmospheric pressure results from the strength of the planet’s gravitational field and that is mass dependent.
The more powerful the gravitational field the greater the surface pressure and the more dense the atmosphere relative to volume.
The more dense the atmosphere the more collisions there will be, the longer it takes energy to escape and the higher the temperature will get.
The source of the energy retained by the atmosphere is the ‘waste’ heat from the solar irradiation that has been downpowered from shortwave to longwave. ALL the molecules in the atmosphere are affected whether GHGs or not.
It is nothing to do with radiative downwelling from atmosphere to surface.
The presence of GHGs actually increases the upward flow and makes the system less hot than it would be if reliant only on non GHGs acting via conduction alone.
The opposite to the standard theory.
“Joel Shore says:
January 4, 2012 at 6:06 am
”
What one gets is the temperature calculation based upon the W/m^2 of blocking. What is not present is the feedback of any change. The effects are present for the initial condition of being 33 deg C above the 255 K. Like the definition of sensitivity being defined as the temperature rise due to one doubling of CO2 from dawn of the industrial era, breaking down forcing effects into forcings and feedbacks is beyond idiotic. A proper definition of sensitivity should have been simply the rise in temperature due to a 1 W/m^2 increase (or actually increase or decrease). As the ipcc has claimed, they assume a W/m^2 is a W/m^2 regardless of how it comes about.
If you get down to it, there is no such thing as a forcing that isn’t also a feedback. Raise the T due to co2 and you’ll get more co2 as it comes out of solution in the ocean. Also, all so called feedbacks have to be functions of temperature.
The best way to deal with this is to checkout the ipcc’s proclaimed major feedback – h2o vapor. Using the common assumption of relative humidity staying the same for temperature changes, one sees that there is more actual h2o vapor present in warmer conditions. The actual IR effects are dependent upon absolute humidity and they are a log just like co2. A doubling of h2o vapor at constant RH has an absorption effect of about 2 to 3 times that of a co2 doubling. A 5 deg. C rise in T amounts to something like a 30% increase in h2o vapor present at constant RH. A two degree C rise is closer to 13% (as I recall from the absolute charts that can be found easily on the web). At a sensitivity of 0.218 deg C per W/m^2, one finds that increased h2o vapor amounting to a 30% increase is just under the same W/m^2 value as a co2 doubling. That leaves the ‘forcing’ plus the primary feedback to contribute 1.6 deg. C rise – but we’re still missing 3.4 deg C ( 15.5 W/m^2 of required power increase) in order to generate the 5 deg C rise. do it for a 2 deg C rise and the h2o vapor increase is closer to 13% increase – a long way from a doubling. One has 0.8 deg C rise for the co2 but now the h2o vapor is providing closer to 1 W/m^2 than 3 or 4 W/m^2 and so now we’re around 1 or 1.2 deg C for a forcing and primary feedback of h2o vapor that can be brought about by a 2 deg C increase in T. But now we’re only shy around 0.8 to 1.0 deg C of required W/m^2, roughly an additional 4.7 W/m^2, which is about the amount of forcing + feedback we start with.
The ipcc may or may not be right about h2o vapor being the primary feedback. They are totally whacked out about sensitivity.
Note that the numbers I use don’t care about where in the atmosphere things happen or how much is actually blocked versus blocked and reradiated or for that matter, how much is due to clouds or gh gases. It is quite insensitive to minor errors.
If you want to get to the nitty gritty, it’s burried in earlier hansen’s and lacis’ papers where they admit to making assumptions about the reduction of cloud cover. They also use 1-d modeling to get their results as it is far too complex to run such calculations in a gcm even on a supercomputer.
The real primary feedback – neither based on reality or on gcm modeling is the assumption that cloud cover reduces as average temperature goes up. In their discussions in the papers they also admit it is not the only legimate assumption possible. Since lower temperatures result in less h2o vapor in the atmosphere and less energy to go into the water vapor cycle, one sees that the cloud cover must decline as it gets colder. If Hansen and Lacis were somehow correct, slight increases in average temperature would mean that cloud cover decreases as well and that makes our roughly 62% current cloud cover the maximum it can possible be. That means we could never have 75% or 100% cloud cover.
“Errmm! With respect, NO! The NON GHG atmospherereturns none of the energy to the surface. It doesn’t, by definition, absorb, so it cannot radiate. It just lets the radiation through without any taxes or other hindrances, so it goes, never to return.”
It receives energy from the surface by conduction until it returns it by conduction as fast as it receives it.
Radiation not necessary. Non GHGs return everything they receive back to the surface before it can be radiated out by the surface.
All around the Earth the Oxygen and Nitrogen is at the same temperature as the GHGS mixed up with it.
cba: It sounds like you at least implicitly admit now that your calculation based on the 151 W/m^2 producing a 33 K temperature rise basically assumed that all feedbacks are absent (as feedbacks) except for the negative lapse rate feedback. Hence, your calculation of a low sensitivity was a completely circular argument.
You are now trying to go on to explain why you don’t believe the feedbacks are what they are. Fine, but that is getting us too far afield as this is already a hijack of the subject of this thread.
I just wanted to make it clear that your calculation of the sensitivity based on the total radiative effect of greenhouse gases and the 33 K rise it produces was a completely bogus way to derive a climate sensitivity relevant to the current “experiment” of increasing CO2 levels and other greenhouse gas levels. I think that you have at least implicitly admitted that now…or, at least, you are no longer contesting it.
Joel shore
Who made the assumption that the atmosphere was at earth pressure?Why can’t we use real planets that you can’t tinker with the assumptions to get the results you want.
“The iceman cometh says:
January 4, 2012 at 1:28 pm
Spectral lines are produced by high energy interactions that can raise electrons to excited states. We are talking low energy photons which cannot do that.
”
I’m not sure what your conversation is about but your statement is totally wrong. Spectral lines can be produced by changes in vibrational and rotational states of molecules in addition to electron states.
BTW, just because a diatomic molecule like n2 or o2 isn’t a strong absorber / radiator in the IR doesn’t mean it doesn’t have any emission / absorption lines in the IR all the way down to the microwave region.
Also, when dealing with molecules bouncing around banging into each other, a collision can result in raising the energy state to a higher level which can then radiate or another collision can deactivate the state and bring it down to ground state or to a different energy state higher or lower than what it was in. Also, a molecule that absorbs a photon can be raised to a higher state and then re-radiative that photon, a combination of lower energy photons, possibly a higher energy photon if it was not in the ground state at the time it absorbed the photon, or a collision can sap out the energy deposited by the photo either completely or partially. Pressure helps determine the average time between collisions and quantum mechanics determines the time a molecule might remain in a higher energy state before radiating a photon but these too are averages that only suggest how many molecules might deactivate by collision rather than by photon emission.
Willis Eschenbach says:
January 3, 2012 at 3:57 pm
“Couldn’t disagree more. First I need a crystal clear explanation of what you call “the mechanism”. Only then can I design an experiment to determine if said mechanism works”
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>600 comments on this thread alone and the issue is still unresolved. This is why empirical experiments are required. Forget “crystal clear explanations”, it clearly time to get some IR transparent pressure vessels, sunlight, thermometers and a compressed air source and start testing.
I say that my initial tests indicate that Nikolov and Zeller may be correct. For those saying they are incorrect my simple question is –
“What empirical experiments have you conducted?”
“Now, if the photon hits a planetary surface or enters an atmosphere it gets stopped in its tracks and ALL its energy is converted to kinetic energy in the molecules of the surface or the atmosphere. All the momentum is converted to kinetic energy and and in due course radiated back out as longwave.”
A photon which hits the energy surface might convert into kinetic energy- most photon that hit the earth do NOT don’t get converted into KE.
If all photons did this, no human could see anything. And earth would not appear as blue marble in space but instead it would appear as black emptiness.
Someone should figure out how energy efficient LED lights would be required to make earth night side as bright as daylight. Or say you lit a 1 sq km area at night so it was as bright as daylight.
Hmm.
“Full, unobstructed sunlight has an intensity of approximately 10,000 fc”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot-candle
“Let me try to illustrate how light diffuses with an example. Let’s assume we build a pyramid whose base is 8 feet by 8 feet and it’s height is 8 feet. The construction is such that no light escapes from the inside and no light penetrates from the outside.
At the inside top of this pyramid there is a 1,000 watts light bulb emitting approximately 9,230 fcs of light (now remember that’s the measure of light on a one square foot area at a distance of one foot from the light source). ”
http://orchidsusa.com/3Lightlevels.htm
So would need one 1000 watt light bulb per sq foot.
With LED I would get more efficient light- it will not require 9 1000 watts per square meter. Or 9 times more energy per sq meter as compare to sunlight.
“This produced a commercially packaged white light giving 65 lm/W at 20 mA, becoming the brightest white LED commercially available at the time, and more than four times as efficient as standard incandescents. In 2006, they demonstrated a prototype with a record white LED luminous efficacy of 131 lm/W at 20 mA. Nichia Corporation has developed a white LED with luminous efficacy of 150 lm/W at a forward current of 20 mA.[38] Cree’s XLamp XM-L LEDs, commercially available in 2011, produce 100 lumens per watt at their full power of 10 watts, and up to 160 lumens/watt at around 2 watts input power. ”
So it could possible to light area for about the same power as sunlight. And so a square km could be lit as bright as sunlight if used about 1000 watts per square meter using lastest in LED technology, so 1 Megawatt of electrical power is needed for a square km.
“Now, if the photon hits a planetary surface or enters an atmosphere it gets stopped in its tracks and ALL its energy is converted to kinetic energy in the molecules of the surface or the atmosphere. All the momentum is converted to kinetic energy and and in due course radiated back out as longwave.”
I agree in part, some of that is poorly worded.
In particular there is a lot of bouncing of photons and molecules around and partial conversion that I didn’t make clear.
Nonetheless the general process is correct.
The iceman cometh says:
January 4, 2012 at 1:06 pm
“I agree with you. What happens when you add the gas (a non GHG gas) is that you disturb the equilibrium; the new atmosphere picks up heat by conduction and convection from the planet and so the planet cools. Then the system moves to equilibrium as the planet picks up heat from the “sun” (the irradiating source of first instance) which it will do because it is slightly cooler than before, and you will end up with the planet at the same temperature as before and a warm atmosphere. Is that the answer you sought?”
Hi iceman,
I can only see three ways that the surface can warm and the planet still emit the same amount of radiation. It seems to me that any other way of warming the surface will cause the Earth to emit more radiation.
#1. you can (like Richard S. Courtney suggests) increase temperature uniformity at the surface (unfortunately this would not get us to the magnitude of the observed 33K difference)
#2. you can reduce the lapse rate
#3. You can increase the effective height that radiation is emitted from the Earth.
Which option(s) do you favor? Or is there a fourth option?
Cheers, 🙂
Shawnet said”I can only see three ways that the surface can warm and the planet still emit the same amount of radiation. —. #1. you can (like Richard S. Courtney suggests) increase temperature uniformity at the surface (unfortunately this would not get us to the magnitude of the observed 33K difference) #2. you can reduce the lapse rate #3. You can increase the effective height that radiation is emitted from the Earth. Which option(s) do you favor? Or is there a fourth option?” But I said if you carried out the requested experiment, and introduced some nitrogen as an atmosphere to a planet that previously had none, the planet would first cool because energy was transferred to the gas, and only then would it warm because it would revert to radiative equilibrium. Lapse rate and the effective height have nothing to do with it because our hypothetical atmosphere is not radiative at the wavelengths we are talking about. At first, therefore, the planet would emit less radiation than before it gained an atmosphere, because it was cooled, and then it would warm until it emitted just the same as before. The warm atmosphere would be the result of conduction and convection.
don penman says:
Well…That’s the whole point, don. Nikolov claims to have a theory that works for any planet. So, we are considering the case that illustrates a case where his theory and the conventional theory would predict different results. And, what we are finding is that his theory seems to be predicting something that violates conservation of energy.
A theory that predicts violations of conservation of energy on ANY planet is not a good theory.