By Robert G. Brown, Duke University (elevated from a WUWT comment)
I spent what little of last night that I semi-slept in a learning-dream state chewing over Caballero’s book and radiative transfer, and came to two insights. First, the baseline black-body model (that leads to T_b = 255K) is physically terrible, as a baseline. It treats the planet in question as a nonrotating superconductor of heat with no heat capacity. The reason it is terrible is that it is absolutely incorrect to ascribe 33K as even an estimate for the “greenhouse warming” relative to this baseline, as it is a completely nonphysical baseline; the 33K relative to it is both meaningless and mixes both heating and cooling effects that have absolutely nothing to do with the greenhouse effect. More on that later.
I also understand the greenhouse effect itself much better. I may write this up in my own words, since I don’t like some of Caballero’s notation and think that the presentation can be simplified and made more illustrative. I’m also thinking of using it to make a “build-a-model” kit, sort of like the “build-a-bear” stores in the malls.
Start with a nonrotating superconducting sphere, zero albedo, unit emissivity, perfect blackbody radiation from each point on the sphere. What’s the mean temperature?
Now make the non-rotating sphere perfectly non-conducting, so that every part of the surface has to be in radiative balance. What’s the average temperature now? This is a better model for the moon than the former, surely, although still not good enough. Let’s improve it.
Now make the surface have some thermalized heat capacity — make it heat superconducting, but only in the vertical direction and presume a mass shell of some thickness that has some reasonable specific heat. This changes nothing from the previous result, until we make the sphere rotate. Oooo, yet another average (surface) temperature, this time the spherical average of a distribution that depends on latitude, with the highest temperatures dayside near the equator sometime after “noon” (lagged because now it takes time to raise the temperature of each block as the insolation exceeds blackbody loss, and time for it to cool as the blackbody loss exceeds radiation, and the surface is never at a constant temperature anywhere but at the poles (no axial tilt, of course). This is probably a very decent model for the moon, once one adds back in an albedo (effectively scaling down the fraction of the incoming power that has to be thermally balanced).
One can for each of these changes actually compute the exact parametric temperature distribution as a function of spherical angle and radius, and (by integrating) compute the change in e.g. the average temperature from the superconducting perfect black body assumption. Going from superconducting planet to local detailed balance but otherwise perfectly insulating planet (nonrotating) simply drops the nightside temperature for exactly 1/2 the sphere to your choice of 3K or (easier to idealize) 0K after a very long time. This is bounded from below, independent of solar irradiance or albedo (or for that matter, emissivity). The dayside temperature, on the other hand, has a polar distribution with a pole facing the sun, and varies nonlinearly with irradiance, albedo, and (if you choose to vary it) emissivity.
That pesky T^4 makes everything complicated! I hesitate to even try to assign the sign of the change in average temperature going from the first model to the second! Every time I think that I have a good heuristic argument for saying that it should be lower, a little voice tells me — T^4 — better do the damn integral because the temperature at the separator has to go smoothly to zero from the dayside and there’s a lot of low-irradiance (and hence low temperature) area out there where the sun is at five o’clock, even for zero albedo and unit emissivity! The only easy part is to obtain the spherical average we can just take the dayside average and divide by two…
I’m not even happy with the sign for the rotating sphere, as this depends on the interplay between the time required to heat the thermal ballast given the difference between insolation and outgoing radiation and the rate of rotation. Rotate at infinite speed and you are back at the superconducting sphere. Rotate at zero speed and you’re at the static nonconducting sphere. Rotate in between and — damn — now by varying only the magnitude of the thermal ballast (which determines the thermalization time) you can arrange for even a rapidly rotating sphere to behave like the static nonconducting sphere and a slowly rotating sphere to behave like a superconducting sphere (zero heat capacity and very large heat capacity, respectively). Worse, you’ve changed the geometry of the axial poles (presumed to lie untilted w.r.t. the ecliptic still). Where before the entire day-night terminator was smoothly approaching T = 0 from the day side, now this is true only at the poles! The integral of the polar area (for a given polar angle d\theta) is much smaller than the integral of the equatorial angle, and on top of that one now has a smeared out set of steady state temperatures that are all functions of azimuthal angle \phi and polar angle \theta, one that changes nonlinearly as you crank any of: Insolation, albedo, emissivity, \omega (angular velocity of rotation) and heat capacity of the surface.
And we haven’t even got an atmosphere yet. Or water. But at least up to this point, one can solve for the temperature distribution T(\theta,\phi,\alpha,S,\epsilon,c) exactly, I think.
Furthermore, one can actually model something like water pretty well in this way. In fact, if we imagine covering the planet not with air but with a layer of water with a blackbody on the bottom and a thin layer of perfectly transparent saran wrap on top to prevent pesky old evaporation, the water becomes a contribution to the thermal ballast. It takes a lot longer to raise or lower the temperature of a layer of water a meter deep (given an imbalance between incoming radiation) than it does to raise or lower the temperature of maybe the top centimeter or two of rock or dirt or sand. A lot longer.
Once one has a good feel for this, one could decorate the model with oceans and land bodies (but still prohibit lateral energy transfer and assume immediate vertical equilibration). One could let the water have the right albedo and freeze when it hits the right temperature. Then things get tough.
You have to add an atmosphere. Damn. You also have to let the ocean itself convect, and have density, and variable depth. And all of this on a rotating sphere where things (air masses) moving up deflect antispinward (relative to the surface), things moving down deflect spinward, things moving north deflect spinward (they’re going to fast) in the northern hemisphere, things moving south deflect antispinward, as a function of angle and speed and rotational velocity. Friggin’ coriolis force, deflects naval artillery and so on. And now we’re going to differentially heat the damn thing so that turbulence occurs everywhere on all available length scales, where we don’t even have some simple symmetry to the differential heating any more because we might as well have let a five year old throw paint at the sphere to mark out where the land masses are versus the oceans, and or better yet given him some Tonka trucks and let him play in the spherical sandbox until he had a nice irregular surface and then filled the surface with water until it was 70% submerged or something.
Ow, my aching head. And note well — we still haven’t turned on a Greenhouse Effect! And I now have nothing like a heuristic for radiant emission cooling even in the ideal case, because it is quite literally distilled, fractionated by temperature and height even without CO_2 per se present at all. Clouds. Air with a nontrivial short wavelength scattering cross-section. Energy transfer galore.
And then, before we mess with CO_2, we have to take quantum mechanics and the incident spectrum into account, and start to look at the hitherto ignored details of the ground, air, and water. The air needs a lapse rate, which will vary with humidity and albedo and ground temperature and… The molecules in the air recoil when the scatter incoming photons, and if a collision with another air molecule occurs in the right time interval they will mutually absorb some or all of the energy instead of elastically scattering it, heating the air. It can also absorb one wavelength and emit a cascade of photons at a different wavelength (depending on its spectrum).
Finally, one has to add in the GHGs, notably CO_2 (water is already there). They have the effect increasing the outgoing radiance from the (higher temperature) surface in some bands, and transferring some of it to CO_2 where it is trapped until it diffuses to the top of the CO_2 column, where it is emitted at a cooler temperature. The total power going out is thus split up, with that pesky blackbody spectrum modulated so that different frequencies have different effective temperatures, in a way that is locally modulated by — nearly everything. The lapse rate. Moisture content. Clouds. Bulk transport of heat up or down via convection. Bulk transport of heat up or down via caged radiation in parts of the spectrum. And don’t forget sideways! Everything is now circulating, wind and surface evaporation are coupled, the equilibration time for the ocean has stretched from “commensurate with the rotational period” for shallow seas to a thousand years or more so that the ocean is never at equilibrium, it is always tugging surface temperatures one way or the other with substantial thermal ballast, heat deposited not today but over the last week, month, year, decade, century, millennium.
Yessir, a damn hard problem. Anybody who calls this settled science is out of their ever-loving mind. Note well that I still haven’t included solar magnetism or any serious modulation of solar irradiance, or even the axial tilt of the earth, which once again completely changes everything, because now the timescales at the poles become annual, and the north pole and south pole are not at all alike! Consider the enormous difference in their thermal ballast and oceanic heat transport and atmospheric heat transport!
A hard problem. But perhaps I’ll try to tackle it, if I have time, at least through the first few steps outlined above. At the very least I’d like to have a better idea of the direction of some of the first few build-a-bear steps on the average temperature (while the term “average temperature” has some meaning, that is before making the system chaotic).
rgb
Robert Brown says:
January 12, 2012 at 9:00 am
I think it would be very educational to do this and would take the guesswork out of the question “what does water do” or “what does an atmosphere do” to the sphere (relative to superconducting or insulating static sphere).
Why not start from where water has been included?
Earth temperature 15°C
Earth without any atmosphere: -18°C
Earth with atmosphere but without water, therefore no water cycle: 67°C
Therefore, the plus 33°C ‘warming’ from -18°C to 15°C comes via a 52°C cooling through the Water Cycle.
And there’s also that forty years ago NASA had to junk Stefan-Boltzmann to get real moon temps estimated for the landings, somewhere on-line, as they needed three dimensions not the flat earth of SB and they had to include that thermal energy absorbed from the Sun penetrated and was released later.
“I can’t figure this out. Considering how smart I am, it must mean that noone else can, either.”
Willis Eschenbach: First, we have a pretty good handle on how much energy hits the earth system after albedo. It’s on the order of 240 W/m2.
Second, we have a pretty good handle on how much the earth surface is emitting. It’s on the order of 400 W/m2.
I have a feeling that you have left out something important, or I have forgotten something important — I note you wrote “earth system” in the first sentence and “earth surface” in the second. If this were true as written, we would have a pretty good handle on the earth losing 160 W/m^2. What do you mean by “on the order of”? that the error can’t be more than 1%? 10%? 100%? Since electronic communication can sound snarky when not intended so, let me apologize in advance if this sounds snarky.
Francois says:
January 12, 2012 at 8:30 am
“Are you serious? You know there are a few books which might help you understand how the system works”.
I guess, I would have to say are you serious? Have you ever had to model a multidimensional fluid model ( i.e. including Naiver-Stokes )? Not to mention the multiple layers of radiation and convective heat transfer in the atmosphere and ocean.
Even simple models, can take hours on a Cray. We had to run these on the night shift, to keep costs down.
The majority of the heat at the Earth’s surface is due to its radioactive core, especially U-238. Since the half-life of uranium is about 4.5 billion years, that is a factor in changes since the Hadean, or even Cambrian ages, but is effectively a constant for the duration of human existence on the planet.
The majority of the heat flux out is due to U-238? Doing what? As you say, the half-life is 4.5 billion years, meaning that it is really not terribly radioactive. It’s decay channels are also not terribly energetic — this isn’t fission, it is alpha decay, IIRC.
Also, does this make sense? Why is it cold at the poles and hot at the equator, if this is true? Why does it get hot in the day and cold at night? I’m open to there being more geothermal heat (not terribly uniformly distributed) than is currently estimated because there is a lot of unexplored territory out there in the world even today (on the ocean floor, for example). But places where there is an unmistakable surplus of geothermal energy — Iceland, Yellowstone, near active volcanoes — don’t even warm the ground in general enough to prevent winter locally anywhere but right on top of a hot spot.
I think this fails the common sense test, as well as contradicting a whole lot of measurements by hapless geologists who have no dog in the AGW fight, sorry. Although I’d be happy to be convinced otherwise if you can provide me with a quantitative basis for your estimate. Sure, the Earth’s core is very hot, because it is wrapped in a big blanket of insulation — the crust and mantle. What heat is generated in there, stays in there a long, long time, but we live on the outside of the blanket and are heated and chilled with the vagaries of, well, the weather!
rgb
thepompousgit says:
January 12, 2012 at 10:50 am
Since you cannot seem to even comment in complete sentences, I do not think that you calling Harry Huffman’s comment incoherent has any validity whatsoever.
Any wealthy folks listening? Here’s my proposal. Fund someone like Prof Lindzen to design a research programme including physics and statistics and computing to review fundamental issues relevant to the current controversies around climate variation and its causes. Work such as that outlined by Prof Brown is exactly the kind of thing I have in mind. The aim? To bring more 1st class science and analysis into a field taken over by superficial analyses, tawdry manipulations (just look at the dross in CG1 and CG2 for example), and pandering to destructive political activists.
Ian W says: several things I don’t repeat…
but reply to as “Damn skippy, you are so very right….”
However, Enthalpy, the Earth’s climate viewed as a self-organizing heat engine, and chaotic fluid dynamics of open systems are for later. First I need to take baby steps… even if they follow in the footsteps of others or if future things will confound them.
rgb
And after all that figgerin., you just have weather, not climate.
Robert Brown:
You might be interested in reading my critiques of standard theory here:
http://principia-scientific.org/publications/Copernicus_Meets_the_Greenhouse_Effect.pdf
here:
http://principia-scientific.org/publications/The_Model_Atmosphere.pdf
and here:
http://www.tech-know.eu/uploads/Understanding_the_Atmosphere_Effect.pdf.
As to your post and the questions/analysis you present, I have developed the code and theory for modeling the Earth in real time just as you have described – modelling, that is, the differential equation of heat input and output as a function of time, latitude, eccentricity, local albedo, local extinction, etc. This is the question and task I left posed at the end of my 2nd paper, linked above. My background is astrophysics so I already had on hand the theory of how to do much of this…as it is described in the Astronomical Almanac, but for a different context of course.
It can be simplified for demonstrative purposes to an analytically solvable equation; otherwise, a numerical approach would not be difficult to perform, as all the equations are intrinsically smooth, aside from any perturbations one might eventually want to introduce, for example, a cloud passing over-head.
Such a model gives MUCH greater insight into the real physics of the Earth-Sun interaction. Treating the Earth as flat, being shone with a cold Sun at -18C, just can not be a philosophically valid model or paradigm. For example, if Sunshine is -18C, then why does water exist? Due to the GHE? Of course not. Direct, real-time, non-averaged into night-time sunlight, is more than energetic enough to melt ice into water, and thus dive a climate system. The instantaneous solar input to the Earth actually has a heating potential of anywhere between +30C to +121C. And this DOES lead to an average output from the Earth corresponding to -18C, or 240 W/m2, in accordance with the expected conservation of total energy.
Anyway, if you would like to work on this together, let me know and I will look up your email on your university’s website and contact you. Or you may find and contact me, at the University of Calgary.
Regards
Joe Postma
MSc Astrophysics
As the ‘standard model’, used by warmistas, gives a -18 deg C temperature due to solar irradiation, how on earth did earth ever manage to unfreeze? so-called GHGs would be at very low levels in the atmosphere – being either ice or trapped/dissolved in the ice. Also they mistake conservation of energy – which is real – as conservation of power which is meaningless.
“Myrrh says:
January 12, 2012 at 2:33 pm
And there’s also that forty years ago NASA had to junk Stefan-Boltzmann to get real moon temps estimated for the landings, somewhere on-line, as they needed three dimensions not the flat earth of SB and they had to include that thermal energy absorbed from the Sun penetrated and was released later.”
That’s quite interesting. In the model I have been developing, it seems apparent that such a term needs to be introduced in order to capture all of the physics…you can’t ignore the massive thermal mass and extremely long time-constant of “dirt”. You also therefore question the idea that the ground surface has zero contribution from geothermal energy – if this were true, the ground would go down to zero kelvin at some point. But in fact it never actually gets all that cold beneath the ground surface, in fact it is MUCH higher than 0 Kelvin! You have to include that…and it WILL raise the temperature. The same effect from the atmosphere is known to be much less significant, having a much, MUCH shorter time-constant, and much less thermal energy stored within in.
Hopefully this is something that Robert and I could work on together…
“You have to add an atmosphere. Damn. You also have to let the ocean itself convect, and have density, and variable depth. And all of this on a rotating sphere where things (air masses) moving up deflect antispinward (relative to the surface), things moving down deflect spinward, things moving north deflect spinward (they’re going to fast) in the northern hemisphere, things moving south deflect antispinward, as a function of angle and speed and rotational velocity. Friggin’ coriolis force, deflects naval artillery and so on”
The problem I have always had with all these efforts to reduce the Earth to a simplistic radiative energy model is that there are very significant energetics continually ongoing on the planet that are not captured in the calculation. Every time a molecule moves from coordinate abc to coordinate xyz there is energy involved. Most of everything in the atmosphere, the oceans, lakes rivers, even the solid earth is in constant motion. Admittedly some, maybe most, of that motion is driven by gravity and the rotation of the planet, but some of it is driven by the conversion of the radiative input of insolation from the Sun into kinetic energy. Is anyone willing to suggest we know enough about what that number is to conclude that it is insignificant, particularly given the almost infinitesimal marginal changes we are trying to estimate in the climate?
Then there is the real difference that differentiates the Earth, from simple S/B models or from any other planetary body or satellite we are aware of. The Earth is covered not only by a large atmosphere and massive oceans, it is covered by LIFE. Almost everything that lives, grows, reproduces, and moves by swimming, slithering, crawling, hopping, walking, flying or any other mode of motivation, ultimately draws the energy to do so from the energy falling on the planet from the Sun and most of it is accomplished without any accompanying radiative signature. Again I would ask is anyone willing to suggest that we can create even a ballpark estimate of the energy use of life on this planet? Given all we don’t know about that life, I would suggest that even our best efforts couldn’t come within 1000 Superdomes of an accurate estimate.
John West says:
January 12, 2012 at 11:55 am
What is the rational behind the statement: “where it is emitted at a cooler temperature”? I’m not convinced that the Stefan-Boltzmann Law applies to GHG’s any more than it does fluorescent or neon lights. It seems to me that a CO2 (or H2O) molecule can emit IR at a rate not proportion to it’s temperature as long as the temperature is above the “freezing” point of it’s vibration modes (degrees of freedom), such that temperature is merely a threshold variable to IR emissions from GHG’s.
Consider the following:
1) The temperature of a gas is a measure of the kinetic energy of translation not vibration. “Fundamentals of Modern Physics”
2) The specific heat of a gas increases proportionally to degrees of freedom availability. More energy is required to increase the temperature of a gas as degrees of freedom other than translation are “unfrozen” suggesting energy stored in non-translational modes do not effect temperature directly.
http://theory.phy.umist.ac.uk/~judith/stat_therm/node81.html
3) Even though equipartition of energy occurs within a mass of gas, the likelihood for a collision capable of imparting a translational motion from a vibration motion is the same as the likelihood for a collision capable of imparting a vibration motion from a translational motion for a given set of circumstances. Whether the atmosphere would be heated or cooled is dependant on the probability of a collision capable of transferring motion to/from translation to/from vibration encountering the opposite condition; or to put another way, the proportion of GHG to IR input. Consider the atmosphere if the Earth did not radiate IR; any collisions resulting in vibration motion could be emitted as IR, reducing the overall translational motion of the atmosphere, thus cooling it. Considering the other extreme where the Earth radiated so much IR that all available vibration modes were always immediately exited by IR input; then equipartion of energy would be “averaging” energy from vibration induced by IR input into translational movement through collisions thus heating the atmosphere. Obviously, the actual atmosphere is somewhere in between these two extremes. Whether GHG’s heat or cool the atmosphere depends on the amount of GHG’s (increases may result in less direct heating), the amount of IR input, and the availability of vibration modes. Only the availability of vibration modes is dependant upon temperature and then only as a threshold.
4) Absorption and emission of specific bands of IR by GHG’s corresponding and limited to vibration modes also suggests that IR absorption and emission by GHG’s are not black body emissions but instead exhibit this characteristic of “cold radiators”.
5) Earth’s atmosphere temperature profile does not correlate with GHG concentration appreciably warming the atmosphere.
http://regentsearth.com/Illustrated%20ESRT/Page%2014%20(Properties%20of%20Atm.)/ESRT10-Properties%20of%20Atmosphere.jpg
6) Anecdotal evidence: IR heaters and lamps do not heat the air in a room directly but heat the IR absorbing surfaces exposed to its output.
I conclude from the above that IR emissions from the atmosphere are not directly proportional to its temperature and therefore cannot be black/grey body emissions or Stefan-Boltzmann Law would be violated. Therefore, a temperature increase is not required for an increase in atmospheric IR emissions (atmospheric radiance is not proportional to temperature). How can an increase in GHG mass in the atmosphere cause an increase in GHE (back radiation) prior to any significant atmospheric temperature increase if a temperature decrease (emitting from higher, colder position) reduces the radiance of the atmosphere? Until I see some evidence to the contrary, I maintain that no temperature increase is required in order to emit an additional amount radiation from GHG’s both down and up.
Reference your points. We actually have geostationary satellites watching the IR output from the Earth and available to anyone to look at.
See:
GOES East Water vapor imagery – this shows where there are front’s and other upwelling moist convection
http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/goes/east/natl/flash-wv.html
GOES East Rainbow IR imagery – this shows where there is IR being emitted to space and seen by the satellite.
http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/goes/east/natl/flash-rb.html
Note how the dry areas in the water vapor map do not show emission of IR in the IR imagery.
Note how the upwelling moist air is emitting IR at high ‘cool’ levels – this is presumably heat being emitted as water changes state condensing then freezing. This energy output is NOT shown by Stefan Boltzmann maths nor is it linked to ‘temperature’.
NASA/NOAA state that this convective transport to the tropopause is far greater than radiation from the surface. Looking at the surface and trying to use SB would appear to be incorrect it is looking inside the hohlraum.
@ur momisugly Robert G. Brown, Duke University
==============
Good stuff, keep it coming.
You’ve got a great writing style, and I look forward to any future contributions.
I can almost understand some of it 🙂
Thanks, Matthew. Not sure what the point is here. The earth doesn’t lose 160 w/m2 because of absorption in the atmosphere.
What that means is that I’m tired of giving the best estimate and having someone bust me saying something like “it’s not 240 W/m2, you idiot, it’s 239, how could you make such an egregious error, or are you just lying on principle?” or the like..
Errors in both of those figures are likely within 10% of the true value, but as far as I know, we have no hard data on the error figures. I am merely trying to give a rough idea of the size of the hill that alternative theories have to climb. The exact numbers are not important for my discussion.
w.
“”””” Thermodynamic professor, power plant manager says:
January 12, 2012 at 1:19 pm
George E. Smith; says:
January 12, 2012 at 11:11 am
So Thermodynamic Professor, whether or not one believes that the ordinary atmospheric mono or homo-diatomic gases: Argon, Nitrogen, Oxygen (maybe …..
Sorry but we have never managed to warm up anything with colder objects or gases, the nonsense you are talking about. This is based purely for Thermodynamic laws. It would of course be very nice if such unphysical [snip] happens, our power plant production costs would be much lower;) “””””
Well Prof Thermo, absolutely nowhere in my post did I state either specifically, or by inference, that “we managed to warm up anything with colder objects or gases.” If that is nonsense, you are the one who said it, not me.
I simply enquired how a surface can possibly tell the Temperature of an object or gas that is emitting Electromagnetic Radiation, since such radiation carries NO Temperature information whatsoever. Nor can the source determine the Temperature of some remote surface, to decide whether it is legal for it (the object or gas) to emit EM radiation or not. Since the emission of EM thermal radiation from a body or gas is of necessity isotropic, that would imply that such a body or gas can either emit EM radiation towards ANY other surface or object in any direction, at any surface Temperature at all, or else it must omit nothing, if by your assertion, a warmer surface in some direction prohibits the emission of such radiation. Or alternatively, if such a warmer surface does not prohibit isotropic emission from some remote colder source ( could be light years distant), what is the mechanism by which it prevents such radiation from landing; and if it doesn’t land; where does it go.
Is it possible to examine the spectrum of EM radiation emitting or reflecting from some surface; say the earth, and sort out which is emission and which is “reflected” rogue radiation that tried to land from some rejected colder source (which also might be light years away. ??
So why don’t you let us all in on what academic institution you Profess Thermodynamics instruction at; so we can all enroll in your classes.
The 33K “difference” obviously isn’t right. If you take away the GHG water vapor, they’ll be no more clouds (or snow/ice). Also no more latent heat available to cool the ocean surface & increase convection. Water (as liquid/solid or vapor) serves a dual purpose — both warming & cooling.
I’m not sure what it is, but it isn’t just the simple difference between the surface temp & the temp at the average radiating “surface” in the troposphere/tropopause — 288K-255K.
Mike M says:
January 12, 2012 at 8:30 am
But but.. the ‘settled science’ is so settled that we’re already spending over $2.5 billion per year to ‘combat climate change’. Ain’t no physics in the universe gonna slow down a gravy train with that much inertia.
——————————————————————————————
One Super volcano would do the trick…..
🙂
Joel Shore says:
January 12, 2012 at 9:23 am
“….Because we know that the Earth + atmosphere are absorbing ~240 W/m^2 from the sun and that the Earth’s surface is emitting ~390 W/m^2 or so….”
Joel
Please will you provide details of the latitude and longitude of where on planet Earth, the Earth is absorbing 240W per sq.m and the date and time when that occurs.
Please will you provide details of the latitude and longitude of where on planet Earth, the Earth/s surface is emitting 390W per sq.m and the date and time when that occurs.
Earth is 259 trillion cubic miles of mostly MOLTEN rock with a temperature above 2500F. Uranium-235 is approximately 4 PPM, or 700,000 cubic miles; Thorium app 1.2 million cubic miles. These fissionable materials are NOT limited to standard half-life decay and are in fact variable in time and location. Estimates of this force had a magnitude increase from ~6 terawatts to 66 TW with the KamLAND experiment, see “First Measurements of Earth’s Core Radioactivity”, New Scientist, July 27, 2005. Fission decay can involve up to a dozen unstable daughter atoms which also release heat, see “Potassium-40 Heats Earth’s Core”, Physics World, May 07, 2003. Massive amounts of geothermal energy are released, but hidden in plain sight. Some geothermal energy is disgused at ocean floor vents, per “Earth’s Missing Geothermal Flux”. Additional fission energy is converted to hydrocarbon molecular energy as described in “Fossil Fuel is Nuclear Waste” and “Earth’s Elemental Petrol Production”.
We live on a far more complicated and interesting planet that we are FORCED to believe. Please find and share Truth.
Joseph A Olson, PE
Individual molecules can’t be said to have any temperature; they move at a huge range of speeds, depending on the net ‘vector’ after their latest collision, from nearly dead stop to kps. It’s the gas-mass that has a characteristic number and violence of collisions which can be said to have a temperature.
So there’s no problem in any CO2 molecule, at any speed, absorbing radiation from the surface (or other CO2 molecules, or anywhere) and gaining vibrational energy. But the lag before it gets hit by another molecule (O2, N2 probably) and exchanging thermal energy with it is far shorter than the probable time to re-emit. So, as Cao Jinan points out, most of the radiation from CO2 results from energy acquisition from a recent collision, not from absorbed radiation, which has long since been thermally passed on: the odds are many orders of magnitude greater, actually. Net-net, CO2 thermalizes incoming radiation, and occasionally radiates acquired thermal radiation. Since O2 and N2 don’t do the latter, CO2 constitutes a “hole in the bucket” at higher altitudes, radiating (leaking) thermal energy to space that would otherwise hang around longer (raising local/average temperatures).
The question of where the O2-N2 mix gets most of its thermal energy is thus key. Since H2O is so much more common in the atmosphere, and picks up far wider up-welling and downwelling frequency bands, it’s the obvious suspect, aside from its potent role in using its huge latent heat phase changes to cool the surface and heat (at cloud level) the atmosphere.
As a heating tool, CO2 is very small — micro-small — potatoes.
Edit: “radiating (leaking) thermal energy to space that would otherwise hang around longer.”
@Lucy Skywalker says: January 12, 2012 at 1:39 pm
“….CO2 in the stratosphere emits radiation toward the surface. ….”
Quick question – perhaps a dumb one (I have checked you link but am none the wiser) – does the CO2 in the troposphere really only emit radiation towards the surface, heating the CO2 below and thence H20 in the tropospause, so the H20 then can emit it to space? I’d expect the majority of it was being emitted (to space) via CO2 in the stratosphere?
Or does this just refer to a trapping mechanism for that portion of the radiation going downwards?
Joe Postma says:
January 12, 2012 at 3:19 pm
“Myrrh says:
January 12, 2012 at 2:33 pm
And there’s also that forty years ago NASA had to junk Stefan-Boltzmann to get real moon temps estimated for the landings, somewhere on-line, as they needed three dimensions not the flat earth of SB and they had to include that thermal energy absorbed from the Sun penetrated and was released later.”
That’s quite interesting. In the model I have been developing, it seems apparent that such a term needs to be introduced in order to capture all of the physics…you can’t ignore the massive thermal mass and extremely long time-constant of “dirt”. You also therefore question the idea that the ground surface has zero contribution from geothermal energy – if this were true, the ground would go down to zero kelvin at some point. But in fact it never actually gets all that cold beneath the ground surface, in fact it is MUCH higher than 0 Kelvin! You have to include that…and it WILL raise the temperature. The same effect from the atmosphere is known to be much less significant, having a much, MUCH shorter time-constant, and much less thermal energy stored within in.
Hopefully this is something that Robert and I could work on together…
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I really would like to see a proper basic model, desperately needed to have something to pin all the variables on.., I hope this collaboration or one like it takes off.
Also to bear in mind that water wasn’t a problem for NASA’s rejigging to get Moon temps, and the Earth’s great ocean with its high heat capacity has the ability to store the heat energy it gets direct from the Sun without ostensibly showing any great difference in temperature and regardless the atmospheric temp changes going on surrounding it – it takes longer to heat up and so correspondingly longer to cool down, higher heat capacity than dirt.
And, I’m very much in agreement with http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/12/earths-baseline-black-body-model-a-damn-hard-problem/#comment-862218
Especially re his LIFE, which other planets don’t have and didn’t have to be considered in the moon landings. Adding to Dave Wendt – there are two distinct categories of energies reaching Earth, Heat and Light. Heat, the direct thermal energy of the Sun on the move, transfer, via radiation is that which directly heats land and oceans, and us as water is the great absorber of thermal energy and we’re mostly water, so to some extent all Life absorbs direct thermal energy from the Sun, but, we also manufacture our own via the energy we get from food in burning it for work and this food chain has plant life at its base which manufactures food direct from Light, sugar from visible, and in burning this for work releases heat into the atmosphere via transpiration. Photosynthesis isn’t limited to the land, some 90% of the oxygen in the atmosphere is said to be produced by photosynthesis in the ocean.
As if all that isn’t complicated enough addition, it’s the variables created by all the heat exchanges through convection in the heavy fluid gaseous atmosphere around us, which gives us our weather and great wind systems around the globe, which makes me get out the popcorn..
Good luck.. 🙂