Refutation of Stable Thermal Equilibrium Lapse Rates

Thermal infrared from the Sun is the Sun’s thermal energy on the move, it is invisible; that is what we feel as heat direct from the Sun, as we feel from a fire, or a stove not glowing with any visible light. We cannot feel near infrared or visible light, they are not hot, they are not heat, they are light.. When we step into the shade on a hot, sunny day, we no longer feel the direct heat from the Sun, we can feel the warmth of the air heated by the Sun, but not the thermal infrared direct from it. This is bog standard physics of light and heat.
“Water absorbs the incoming solar Infrared Radiation because the frequency of the internal vibration of the water molecules is the same frequency of the waves of the solar Infrared Radiation. This form of Radiative Heat transfer is known as Resonance Absorption.
We humans feel the heat radiated by the Sun and other systems with a higher temperature because our bodies contain 55-75% of water. The radiative energy inciding on our skin is absorbed by the molecules of water in our bodies by Resonance Absorption. Just then, the Infrared Radiation absorbed by our bodies leads to a more intense internal vibration of the water molecules in our bodies and our bodies get warmer. However, in general, living beings possess thermoregulatory systems that permit us to eliminate the excess of heat from our bodies, maintaining a quasi-stable internal temperature (it is one of the homeostatic processes of biosystems).”
http://www.biocab.org/Heat_Transfer.html
We can sweat it out.
A scientist is a person “who cares deeply and passionately for truth and clarification, for the liberating experience of finding order and beauty in a chaotic jumble of natural events.” (Leon M. Lederman, 2001).

Yes it is. It was in your example for goodness sakes. Geez. This was in response to your statement at 2/5 10:25: “So if we move heat from the bottom to the top,” as faithfully copied. LOL. Heat doesn’t exist independent of the molecules, at least not since the caloric theory bit the dust not much more than a century ago.
Heat can be transported without bulk transport of molecules. This has been known since the caloric theory bit the dust not much more than a century ago. That is why technically I am correct and you are incorrect in the idealized discussion, as Velasco states. If you take a gas that cannot conduct heat or share heat through radiation — note well the conditional — then there are many — not just one, many — stable horizontally stratified hydrostatic profiles of an ideal gas. In fact, all of them with a monotonically decreasing concentration (density) and pressure profile. In all of these cases there is no convective instability. The gas does not conduct, which means that it does not diffuse either, because physical diffusion of the gas molecules implies heat conduction unless you insert a Demon that only lets the “right” molecules through from one layer to the next. There is no bulk transport of molecules because the gas is hydrodynamically stable by construction so no parcel of air experiences a net upward or downward force, begins at rest, and according to Our Friend Newton, remains at rest.
Turn on any diffusion (not that you could ever really turn it off), turn on any sort of heat conduction without bulk transport (not that you could ever really turn it off — you can compute what the conductivity is for an ideal gas and it is strictly non-zero, just like the dynamic viscosity:

In this is the gas concentration (molecules per unit volume, molecular density). is the mean speed of the molecules, related to their temperature but not the same way for monatomic and diatomic ideal gases and hence expressed as a parameter by itself. is the mean free path. is the molar heat capacity. is Avogadro’s number — you could use the molecular heat capacity and insert the number of degrees of freedom of the gas and write this whole thing in a different form with the temperature explicitly inserted, but it is not zero. So when one talks about an adiabatic ideal gas — one where no internal heat transfer occurs via conduction — one is already talking bullshit, or rather, restricting your attentions to short enough times that thermal equilibrium hasn’t been established. Note that as far as scaling goes, and countervary — when is high, is low, and vice versa. The conductivity is independent of the pressure in an ideal gas, note well.
Since you are doing this for the same reason I am — to learn a lot more about atmospheric thermodynamics (and thermodynamics in general) beyond what I/we learned in school, you might want to look at this site:
http://zeolites.cqe.northwestern.edu/Module/heattrans.html
it has a nice summary of heat transport in fluids, including a discussion of the ideal gas conductivity (where they write it in one of the slightly different forms equivalent to that which I inserted above) and include a table that shows the measured, non-zero thermal conductivity of many gases.
At this point we both acknowledge that the entropy of the isothermal gas column is greater than the entropy of the isentropic gas column. You assert that — under nonphysical (or at least, inconsistent) conditions, that is, zero conductivity — an arbitrarily prepared gas column will relax to one with the DALR. I assert that — under the physical/consistent condition of an ideal gas with the ideal gas conductivity — it will relax to isothermal, the true thermodynamic equilibrium state. Velasco unambiguously agrees with me — I mean really, there is no doubt that a physically consistent ideal gas will relax to isothermal unless you make it physically inconsistent and choose to ignore internal conductivity or insist in looking at small enough time scales and initial conditions such that convective equilibrium is reached but thermal relaxation has not yet occurred.
Since Jelbring explicitly states that he is waiting a very long time for relaxation to occur and did not inconsistently qualify his use of an ideal gas by asserting that it is non-conductive (and because there is no substantive difference between my vertically confined gas column and his vertically confined gas column, at this point we all agree that my arguments against EEJ are valid and the stated conclusion of his thought experiment is incorrect. An ideal gas in true static thermodynamic equilibrium does not have an thermal lapse, it is isothermal.
Whether or not you have a dog in the fight, Jelbring definitely did and still does, and his paper is used by many people in the skeptical camp to defend the absurd statement that gravity alone will create a stable temperature gradient in a gas, even if the gas is e.g. prepared in an isothermal state originally. I think, if I read your remarks above correctly, that you even agree with this at this point.
This leaves us in our discussion with only one last thing to talk about. That is broken ergodicity and hydrodynamics. I am fortunate in that my teacher in stat mech in graduate school was one of the original researchers that studied systems that exhibit formally broken ergodicity, so I got exposed to the idea a lot and actually know a lot about it, and the problem of widely split relaxation rates, from my own research. So let’s talk about the gas — and let’s make it a consistent gas, please, as the idea of an ideal gas without thermal conductivity makes as much real sense as talking about an ideal gas that doesn’t satisfy the relation , right? — a consistent gas with thermal relaxation rates that are slow compared to hydrodynamic viscous relaxation rates (that work to slow dynamical shear whenever it occurs within the gas, gas parcels moving in opposite relative directions) and convective relaxation rates. Slow enough that we can ignore it at least to the extent that we can ask what state we are likely to find a gas initially prepared in an arbitrary initial condition — after waiting just long enough for hydrostatic equilibrium to be established but not long enough for thermal equilibrium (which is isothermal and strict maximum entropy) to be reached via internal conduction. We will similarly ignore radiative relaxation as being slower than hydrodynamic relaxation, although for gases like CO_2 or H_2O this is almost certainly untrue in the temperature ranges of 100K-500K that are relevant to the earth and other planets.
I think that it is your belief that the gas will relax to a state with the DALR from all, or nearly all, initial conditions. I say nearly all, as we seem to be in agreement that if it is started with isothermal, it will stay there. Permit me to very quickly convince you that this is not true, that in fact nearly all initial conditions will cause the gas to relax to a state that is not one with a DALR. In fact, a gas with a DALR is a fairly special case of the many “equilibria” one can reach in the specific limit of hydrodynamic relaxation (only) to a state of hydrostatic balance neglecting the much slower thermal relaxation that eventually makes the gas isothermal.
First, let me appeal to your intuition. If we prepare the gas in any of the infinity of hydrodynamically stable states with a vertically increasing temperature gradient, the cold dense gas is on the bottom, the warm less dense gas is on the top. We ignore conduction, as noted, so the heat cannot conduct from top to bottom. The gas is convectively stable. It is hydrodynamically stable. You could go away and come back years later — any period that is short relative to the thermal relaxation rate — and the gas would still be cold on the bottom and hot on top. Furthermore, if you turn on thermal relaxation, isothermal equilibrium lies between it and a gas with a DALR, and we agree that if the gas is ever isothermal it will stay isothermal.
So the only initial preparations that can achieve the DALR are ones that already are warmer on the bottom than on the top. Here’s the interesting bit.
If the gas is prepared in a hydrodynamically stable state with a vertical temperature lapse in between the DALR and isothermal, I would argue that it, just like any arrangement with monotonically increasing temperatures, is still stable absent conduction. This is because it is still stable against convection — the gas has a bulk density that is monotonically decreasing with height so you don’t end up with parcels of gas that are more dense sitting above parcels that are less dense. This, and only this, drives the thermal mixing through vertical convective transport of parcels of gas that leads the gas to become approximately isoentropic. That’s why all of the books on physical climatology derive the DALR by discussing uplifting and downfalling “parcels” — the parcels are too big to thermalize via conduction during the transport process and are being uplifted by buoyancy forces that are greater than the opposing forces of dynamic viscosity!
So what is the class of initial states that could relax to a gas with the DALR? Ones that are hydrodynamically unstable initially, with a pronounced thermal gradient from bottom to top where the gas at the bottom is much warmer than the gas at the top, with a gradient that is larger than the DALR. A gas that is precisely prepared in a vertically stratified state might still be hydrostatically balanced, but the equilibrium is no unstable, as you have more dense gas above and less dense gas below. Any perturbation and the gas will convectively mix, with convective buoyant forces that exceed the “restraining” forces of static and dynamic viscosity. As it mixes, parcels will uplift and cool as they expand and warm the cooler gas they expand into as they compress it while those other parcels fall.
At this point there will be a very interesting competition. The DALR is one of an infinity (as I hope we now agree) hydrostatically and hydrodynamically stable states the gas can reach in the absence of conduction. Basically the entire range of vertical profiles that are convectively stable are possible final states. Depending on the details of the initial condition of the gas, it might relax to a vertical thermal profile almost anywhere between the DALR negative gradient and the infinity of zero to positive thermal gradient profiles that are all hydrostatically stable (bulk hydrostatic balance of buoyancy and gravity) and convectively stable (both static and dynamic viscosity that resist and damp out bulk motion perturbations so that they cannot grow).
Now, as you might agree, we can gain some actual insight into the real atmosphere. If the atmosphere were differentially heated from the top down, and weren’t subjected to forces that drive vertical thermal mixing, it would be hot from the top down. Indeed, the part of the atmosphere that is heated from the top down by direct absorption (which exponentially attenuates as one penetrates the absorber) has a stable postive thermal gradient from the bottom (top of the stratosphere) to the top.
The troposphere, on the other hand, is differentially heated from the bottom and cooled at the top. The ground and the oceans absorb the bulk of the solar energy that is not reflected (albedo) without transferring heat into the system, and they are both located at the bottom of the atmosphere. They warm the lower atmosphere by direct conduction (as well as by radiative transfer mediated by the GHGs, which in the case of the real atmosphere can most definitely not be neglected, because the at the very least a major chunk of the cooling of the surface is from radiation). Heat picked up at the surface is thus rapidly vertically mixed and transported by all three mechanisms — conduction, convection and radiation — acting at different length scales and with considerable and non-ignorable chaotic and self-organized emergent mesoscale structure — to produce an atmosphere that, as you note, ends up somewhere between the DALR and isothermal most of the time, although inversions (warmer on top) or with a gradient even larger than the DALR happen all the time, and are unstable or transiently metastable states with some lifetime and break apart and perhaps reform somewhere else as the conditions that favor them recur.
What makes the DALR a “pole” in this process? The fact that not only is the gas actively heated at the bottom but that it is actively cooled at the top of the troposphere. There is a continuous transport of heat from the bottom to the top, and heat transport via convective mixing is much faster than conduction and at least competes with radiation in the bulk of the troposphere. Still air with either little vertical shear and relatively weak warming of the ground or with so much vertical shear that turbulence occurs and irreversibly physically mixes the air parcels faster than “reversible” adiabatic expansion can keep up favors the “isothermal” pole, although this too is almost never precisely observed. Warm ground (strong heating of the ground) and non-turbulent vertical flow due to convective shear forces slow enough to allow approximately adiabatic expansion and compression to occur in the overturning convective air parcels favors the DALR.
Needless to say, the actual cooling at the top of the troposphere is due to the GHGs, which actually lose heat energy up there via radiation. If they didn’t, the bulk transport of heat upward would gradually warm the upper atmosphere, and as I note above, a warm, less dense, upper atmosphere is utterly stable without conductivity or radiation.
Anyway, I really appreciate your efforts to communicate more normally and talk to me in first person — it also makes it easier for me to address your points, and I hope, for you to read and understand what I say (if you indeed have no dog in the fight, then most of this should make sense). Bear in mind that IMO it is borderline silly to do stat mech on an atmosphere in the first place — it is only useful to answer “formal” questions like those addressed in Velasco like “what is true thermal equilibrium given thus and such conditions” and even there the computations are enormously difficult and require a variety of basically inconsistent or non-ergodic assumptions to be made. The right way to treat an atmosphere is almost certainly with bulk hydrodynamics — Navier-Stokes. That is, of course, insanely difficult, but show me a stat mech computation of a N ideal gas molecules in a box heated on one side and cooled on the other, with gravity, that spontaneously predicts e.g. the appearance of convective rolls. Not happening…
So we begin any real study of a real gas, or for that matter an ideal gas, with hydrodynamics and thermodynamics, not stat mech. Thermodynamics alone does just as good a job of telling us the true thermodynamic equilibrium of the gas as Velasco’s complicated stat mech computation, and allows us to determine maximum entropy and so on perfectly well. To talk about the DALR, one has to use hydrodynamics with bulk transport, for bulk transport to occur that produces sufficient vertical adiabatic mixing one requires differential heating or just the right sort of very slow transport driven by other means.
On a slightly different subject:
>Of the solar radiation reaching the surface of water some 50% is in the IR.
…
OK. I agree now.
This is irrelevant. What matters is how much or the total irradiance penetrates liquid water to a depth of at least centimeters, nothing more. The figure in:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_absorption_by_water
shows both the intensities at the surface and the skin depth (exponential penetration length). Wavelengths between 200 nm and around 1 um have a skin depth of at least 10 cm and don’t just warm “a few millimeters on the surface”. That is easily 2/3 of the total power that makes it to the surface itself — basically “all” solar UV and visible, with the latter absorbed at depths up to a 100 meters, and a good start on the IR.
This isn’t to argue the point that most of the IR — around a third of the incoming power — is absorbed at the surface and largely goes into latent heat of evaporation rather than actual heating of the water. Heat is heat, of course — it still has to be gotten rid of to keep temperatures in balance, and the only way out of the Earth is through radiation — but it does make the flow of energy on its way out a lot more interesting, not to mention provides enough water vapor in the atmosphere to produce rain and so on.
The point is that you can’t pretend that the sun doesn’t warm oceans with visible light — that is absurd and wrong. Most of the actual warming of oceanic water comes from its absorption of visible light and UV and short wavelength IR at depth. Ocean temperatures vary with the season because the amount of energy they receive from the sun is modulated by axial tilt, just like everything else the Sun warms on Earth.
People get so angry when they discuss incoming spectrum, and seem so eager to claim that there is no such thing as a GHE involving CO_2 at all, and they seem so reluctant to address the outgoing top-of-atmosphere spectrum that clearly shows the involvement and importance of CO_2 in the outgoing radiation budget. Seeing is believing. Everything else is squabbling about the details of internal transport, and honestly doesn’t matter so much. What does matter is the precise response of the top 1-2 km of the troposphere and and bottom 1-2 km of the stratosphere to increased CO_2 and the general solar-driven modulation of H_2O. I don’t think we understand either one particularly well, but all of the rest of the stuff supposedly happening down below the top of troposphere isn’t really relevant to the actual energy balance and hence mean temperature. What matters is the (temperature of) the radiators of outgoing power in the emission bands of the sources of the outgoing radiation. Nothing more. At that point it is all detailed balance. The egregious and misleading stuff from the warmists IMO consists of a) overstating the quality of the physics in their models and the confidence we should have that they are correct; b) treating the ad hoc parameter of “feedback” or “sensitivity” as something they can set on heuristic grounds, and then optimizing the other parameters of their models around it. As I believe Willis pointed out on a different thread, give me five or six adjustable parameters in a fit and I’ll both fit an elephant and make him lift up his trunk to salute the queen. I build high quality neural networks to use as predictive models, and I can cite chapter and verse and write holy canons myself on the dangers of too many adjustable parameters. It is trivial to build a NN that fits almost any nonlinear data set quite nicely. The problem comes when you try to make the fit predict new data. The better the fit of the training data (after a fairly rapidly reached point) the worse the actual predictivity of the model, as you’ve basically taught it to “recognize” the noise of the training data instead of abstract the much weaker predictive signal buried in the noise.
You’ve made an idiot-savant net, one that memorizes perfectly and understands nothing. I suspect that many, although perhaps not all, of the climate models are idiot-savant models, tuned to fit a hypothesized pattern that tells a particular story on past data, but rather lacking predictive skill. Usually this is a sign that one needs to build models with much less detail and better attention paid to gross effects, not that one should add still more parameters and detail, but who asked me?
A final observation. I’ve been working on a matlab/octave ODE program that directly compares the thermodynamics of an isothermal gas column and a DALR gas column. The latter is a bit odd, of course — it reaches T = 0, P = 0 at around 18 km, sharp as a knife, which all by itself tells you that it is wrong as it is absurd to think that molecular collisions won’t populate the volume above the supposed T = 0 level (and of course Earth’s real atmosphere extents out an order of magnitude further. The density is not exponential — I got that wrong — because it does go to zero at a specific altitude. It is even more nonphysical than I thought, in other words.
I’m really busy, so I haven’t had time to finish it (in particular renormalizing the DALR, which has to be evaluated numerically from and set so that it has the same integrated number of molecules and surface pressure and temperature as the isotropic case to get the right boundary conditions for both, but I should finish that in a few days. I’ll post the results of this computation. They promise to be quite interesting.
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[Long reply, thank you. Robt]

Robert Brown says
“The point is that you can’t pretend that the sun doesn’t warm oceans with visible light — that is absurd and wrong.”
The point was made to counter the claim by many in Climate Science that light is INSTANTLY transformed into thermal energy.
Light initiates many photochemical reactions.
Often the energy ‘fix’ lasts for thousands of years.
Promoters of climate alarm find it convenient to ignore the natural energy storage systems within our climate.
All credit is reserved for the 33K co2 driven greenhouse theory.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthesis

Wayne, yet another post I screwed up, the first para is mine, the bulk Robert’s which finishes at demons out, and then comes my commment.(I think I missed an opening italics to Robert’s but this has become so unwieldy now that I have difficulty posting). So I think you’re responding to what Robert said.
My point, as before in this, is that the AGWSF energy budget is fiction – it claims that shortwave heats oceans and land which then emits thermal infrared once so heated. This is so obviously junk it’s not even funny. The propose this as the main heating source of all of Earth’s land and water!! Water, regardless of how esoteric some want to get about it, IS TRANSPARENT tO VISIBLE LIGHT.
Water transmits visible light without absorbing it. That’s what transparent means! However, when they claim that the atmosphere is transparent to visible light this is not true! Visible light gets absorbed by the electrons of the molecules of nitrogen and oxygen, and reflected/scattered by this.
If water absorbed visible light there would be no life in the ocean. The reason you can see underwater is because light isn’t absorbed. How attentuation, not absorption, happens in the ocean is not the point here. The point is that they have excluded the real heating source of the oceans, thermal infrared, heat direct from the Sun, which is physically capable of heating water!
This is junk science at its finest, nit-picking to avoid confronting the reality that this energy budget is totally junk.
What’s worse, is that it has now become ingrained in the education system, the last couple of hundred years of science progress has been replaced by gibberish. To the point where Ira teaches that the heat we feel from the Sun and incandescent lightbulbs is from the visible! WE CAN’T BLOODY FEEL ANYTHING FROM VISIBLE LIGHT! If it can’t heat us up it sure as hell isn’t heating the oceans. Do you think I haven’t investigated this?
And Tim knows that full well… He continues to run away whenever actual experiments are asked for, as above he claimed there were loads.., or as here, does an ad hom in the best of Beria tradition..
All I’m asking for is proof that blue visible light as from the Sun heats water. Why is this always avoided? If visible light was really capable of heating water there would be tons of stuff on it proving their energy budget. Until they can show that any further distractions and deflections are a waste of time for me. The only reason I ask is because there isn’t any such proof! I just hope in investigating it for themselves they come to realise that..

“The point is that you can’t pretend that the sun doesn’t warm oceans with visible light — that is absurd and wrong.”
The point was made to counter the claim by many in Climate Science that light is INSTANTLY transformed into thermal energy. Light initiates many photochemical reactions. Often the energy ‘fix’ lasts for thousands of years. Promoters of climate alarm find it convenient to ignore the natural energy storage systems within our climate. All credit is reserved for the 33K co2 driven greenhouse theory.
But this doesn’t counter that claim at all. If you want to counter a claim, do so with something that actually respects the laws of physics and experimentally observed percentages. I am quite certain that some 98% or 99% of the energy in the electromagnetic energy that penetrates further than the first few millimeters of the ocean’s surface is more or less instantly converted into heat. Photosynthesis just isn’t all that efficient. Wikipedia has a whole page devoted to photosynthesis effciency, and typical plant conversion efficiencies are indeed 1-2%, although some plants e.g. sugarcane can get up over 5% (and possibly some of the new gene-tailored algae as well). In the biosphere, most of the energy thus stored is in rough balance — it’s getting eaten as fast as it’s being produced. We’re hardly pressing oil out of sunflower seeds and pumping it into the ground.
You also need to think carefully about “energy storage systems” in our climate. The ocean is the big kahuna, and the entire discussion concerning the oceans was Myrrh’s claim that the ocean doesn’t absorb energy from visible light because it is “transparent”. This is wrong — the ocean takes up a huge amount of heat in the tropics and does indeed store it and transport it (e.g. to the north in the Gulf Stream) where it contributes mightily to the moderation of the climate of Europe, for example. The atmosphere itself no doubt stores and transports energy.
But what else does? If you consider the amount of solar energy entering the Earth every day, it is a truly awesome number. Even if you ignore the fact that nearly any subsystem you look at but the ocean is always near dynamic equilibrium, you have to find a sink that on average removes heat so it does not eventually have to radiate away to materially affect the energy budget. Bear in mind that you could provide 100% of the per capita energy consumed by people in the US to every human on the planet from the solar energy that falls in a remarkably tiny fraction of the total surface area, even allowing for insolation, night time, conversion efficiency, and so on. See e.g. —
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Solar_land_area.png
This is, in the end, why CAGW isn’t going to happen even if the CAGW enthusiasts are right about the evils of CO_2! Most of the places that would make the best solar producers aren’t good for much of anything else — too hot and dry to be good farmland or good places for humans to live. At $1/watt for solar cell capacity, $1 buys at least 2-3 kW-H per year. That amortizes the cost of the cell over 5-6 years. All that we are lacking before this becomes the only way to make electrical power at a (substantial!) profit are good ways to store the power and to transport it longish distances compared to what we do now with our existing network of power plants. Even doubling the price (allowing for storage with current technology) still leaves one with decent amortization schedules.
In less than ten years the cost per watt will halve. In less than ten years solutions for the storage problem will emerge — WUWT published a nice article on Zinc-Oxide batteries that might have the capacity and lack of “memory” to make a good base for large scale storage of daytime power and/or electric car batteries (where currently no battery approaches the energy content of gasoline). Sometime in the next ten years, if we “do” nothing at all, one of the simplest ways in the world to make money will be to buy square kilometers of Arizona and New Mexico and West Texas, cover them with solar energy cells hooked into matteries, and linked by ultra-high-voltage transmission lines to cities in cooler, water rich places where people want to live. Ditto North Africa, India, Australia, and so on. 200% to 500% ROI over the 30 year lifetime of the plants, guaranteed.
We’re almost at break-even on this even now, in some parts of the world. In thirty years nobody will be burning coal for electrical energy, not because they want to be green but for the same reason we don’t burn wood for electrical energy now — it costs too much to harvest it and transport it and deal with the fact that you always have to find new sources as old ones mine out.
Then there is nuclear, both fission and (speculative) fusion. We could go green as all hell almost overnight if we just started building fission plants, ideally thorium-salt plants that can’t melt down or be used to build bombs. Sometime in the next 10 to 50 years we’ll probably master fusion as well. Once that happens we will (shortly thereafter) have achieved a type 1 civilization on the Kardashev scale and energy scarcity will never again by a constraint on human civilization on a mundane scale. Energy costs will fall to “almost free” by current standards, even as energy becomes the universal currency base.
I therefore predict, quite confidently, that the Earth will never get more than slightly over halfway to the doom-and-gloom prediction of carbon dioxide doubling before it comes down on its own because burning fuel for power or heat becomes as passe as TV antennas on rooftops — reaching for a signal that is no longer there…
Gasoline used in motor vehicles may last a lot longer — even indefinitely. I’m still not seeing anything remotely capable of storing 37 kW-Hours in the volume of one US gallon on the techno-horizon. But we may find electricity so cheap that we just synthesize gasoline straight up, recycling the CO_2 that’s already there.
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How attentuation, not absorption, happens in the ocean is not the point here.
It’s only not the point to you because the way the light is attenuated is by being absorbed. If you would deign to look at the exponential decay constant for water in inverse centimeters, in the Wikipedia article I linked above, you will note that the length scale, the exponential “penetration depth” for light in the visible band is nowhere greater than around 100 meters. That means that well over half of the energy in the visible light that makes it through the partially reflective surface of the sun is absorbed by the water within the first 100 meters, photosynthesis is only possible in the top 200 meters (the Epipelagic zone) and virtually none of the energy penetrates past a kilometer in depth. The 800 meters of water under the layer warmed by visible sunlight is called the Mesopelagic, and the temperature at the bottom of it is a constant 4K because that is precisely the point where there is almost no solar energy left to directly warm it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesopelagic
Paradoxically, the precise place you think warm enters the water is where it does not. The penetration depth of most of the IR, in particular, is order of a millimeter or less — mostly less. Lots of the energy is absorbed in a layer 1-10 micrometers in thickness — 1000-10000 molecules thick — at the very surface, where it causes the water to evaporate rather than heating the bulk. The energy mostly goes into the latent heat of vaporization of water (which is very substantial); relatively little is leftover as “warm water” and that which there is is largely stuck at the top, because water has a relatively high thermal expansion coefficient and the warmer water is considerably more buoyant and stays on top except where mixed by the action of wind or wave or sustained current.
Again, you seem to want to think that all climate science is bullshit and all climate scientists are idiots, to the point where you are inventing new physics for them to be wrong about. I’d suggest that both are almost certainly untrue in general, even though there may well be some climate science that is bullshit and some climate scientists that are idiots, and in any event, getting the basic physics you’re trying to call them on wrong simply destroys your own credibility as a reasoning participant in the debate.
To summarize — the (dry) atmosphere isn’t perfectly transparent to visible light, but one can look down from orbit and photograph a newspaper in high enough resolution and with more than enough light to read the headlines. A photograph from space clearly shows us the continents and oceans by day everywhere that isn’t obscured by clouds, and at night even the relatively dim lights of human activity (dim compared to sunlight) can easily be seen from orbit or a plane flying 10 km above the surface.
Those same pictures do not show the bottom of the sea. Riding on a boat even over very clear, very clean water, one cannot see a kilometer down. One cannot see 100 meters down. In world war II, submarine hunters couldn’t see submarines a mere 20 meters down as a general rule, with a few exceptions where the water was particularly clear. By no stretch of the imagination is water as transparent as air, even to visible light. If it were, our satellites could photograph the bottoms of oceanic trenches, and they can’t. The top kilometer of water is almost completely opaque, because all of the visible light that does make it in at the top is absorbed there, warming the water.
The word “transparent”, when applied to air and water, is an approximate concept. Air scatters blue light quite strongly, but is much more transparent to red light. Scattering isn’t the same thing as absorption. If you want to understand what water does, don’t appeal to an English word such as transparent as if it, used as an adjective applied to a material, is a scientifically precise descriptor. What is scientifically precise is the absorption cross-section or penetration depth, which tells you just how much water visible (or any other frequency) of light can traverse before it is 10%, 50%, 90% absorbed.
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When we step into the shade on a hot, sunny day, we no longer feel the direct heat from the Sun, we can feel the warmth of the air heated by the Sun, but not the thermal infrared direct from it. This is bog standard physics of light and heat.
Good lord! You must be joking. I’ve never heard anything so silly from somebody presumably out of high school.
Look, go find yourself a blue-ray disc player. Take it apart, carefully, until you expose the 1 watt blue laser. Point it at your skin. Power on. After your finger heals from the hole you drilled through your skin, come back and tell me that visible light doesn’t carry heat.
Or you can watch any of the umpty youtube videos that show people using e.g. 250 mW laser pointers to start fires (red, green, blue, who cares what color!). For example, here is one:

out of about a million — kids LIKE to start fires with lasers. Lasers are good counterexamples because they are monochromatic, so you can’t pretend that your burned finger came from “secret” infrared added to the beam by your invisible fairies.
Here’s a very simple exam question. Blue light with an intensity of one watt per square centimeter illuminates a thermal sensor coated with lampblack, and the temperature increase is plotted as a function of time. After the sensor returns to its original temperature it is illuminated with red light at the same intensity. You expect the temperature of the sensor to:
a) Remain constant in both cases because visible light doesn’t heat anything (Myrrh’s bog-standard physics answer — I must find a copy of his new book, “Bog Standard Physics” as I somehow don’t have it on my shelves).
b) Warms faster for the red light because it is closer to infrared and everybody knows only infrared light can actually heat anything.
c) Warms just about exactly at the same nonzero rate for both.
If you get this one right we can try you on which one weighs more, a pound of feathers or a pound of lead.
What matters in energy transfer via light is two things: The intensity of the light, that is, the power per square centimeter (more properly the Poynting vector of the light as the power incident on any surface is the flux of the Poynting vector through the surface, correcting for surface geometry and the direction of the light); the absorptivity of the material in the wavelength chosen.
The latter is basically never “perfectly zero” for anything but a vacuum, although it can be quite small. Things that are opaque tend to reflect white light in the colors that they don’t absorb and absorb the light in the colors that they don’t reflect. Hence when you light up a red piece of paper with red light, you don’t warm it much, but if you use blue light you warm it a lot. Black is the universal absorber color, white (or metallic/shiny) the universal reflector, although that’s really only for the visible spectrum because whether something is “black” (a good absorber) to UV or IR may not be connected to its color in the visible spectrum. “Transparent” materials are more complicated, and conductors are treated somewhat differently than insulators.
You can’t just make sweeping statements about this — you have to learn the actual physics and learn the actual relevant physical properties of the particular kinds of stuff you want to apply the physics to. Visible light will heat you up just fine, as has been shown in countless elementary school science fair projects. Or you can do the “experiment” itself with a high-power laser pointer or blue laser from a CD burner, if you’re stupid enough to actually try it.
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