Cooking the books
By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Mr. John Cook, who runs a website puzzlingly entitled Skeptical Science” (for he is not in the least sceptical of the “official” position) seems annoyed that I won the 2011 televised debate with Dr. Denniss of the Australia Institute, and has published a commentary on what I said. It has been suggested that I should reply to the commentary. So, seriatim, I shall consider the points made. Mr. Cook’s comments are in Roman face: my replies are in bold face. Since Mr. Cook accuses me of lying, I have asked him to be good enough to make sure that this reply to his commentary is posted on his website in the interest of balance.
Chaotic climate
Cook: “Monckton launched his Gish Gallop by arguing that climate cannot be predicted in the long-term because it’s too chaotic because, [Monckton says],
‘the climate is chaotic…it is not predictable in the long-term…they [the IPCC] say that the climate is a coupled, non-linear, chaotic object, and that therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.’
… It’s really quite self-evident that Monckton’s statement here is incorrect.”
Reply: Paragraph 5 section 14.2.2.2 of the IPCC’s 2007 AR4 TAR report says:
“In sum, a strategy must recognise what is possible. In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”
My quotation from the IPCC, given from memory, was in substance accurate. Here and throughout, I shall ignore Mr. Cook’s numerous, disfiguring, ad-hominem comments.
Consensus
Cook: “Monckton proceeds to demonstrate his confusion about the causal relationship between science and consensus: [he says: ‘the idea that you decide any scientific question by mere consensus [is incorrect].’ … He suggests that somehow climate science is done by first creating a consensus when in reality the consensus exists because the scientific evidence supporting the anthropogenic global warming theory is so strong.”
Reply: This seems a quibble. Dr. Denniss had said he was satisfied with the science because there was a consensus. He had appealed repeatedly to consensus. Yet in the Aristotelian canon the argumentum ad populum, or headcount fallacy, is rightly regarded as unacceptable because the consensus view – and whatever “science” the consensus opinion is founded upon – may or may not be correct, and the mere fact that there is a consensus tells us nothing about the correctness of the consensus opinion or of the rationale behind that opinion.
Adding carbon dioxide to an atmosphere will cause warming, but we need not (and should not) plead “consensus” in aid of that notion: for it is a result long proven by experiment, and has no need of “consensus” to sanctify it. However, the real scientific debate is about how much warming extra CO2 in the air will cause. There is no “consensus” on that; and, even if there were, science is not done by consensus.
Mediaeval warm period
Cook: “Every single peer-reviewed millennial temperature reconstruction agrees that current temperatures are hotter than during the peak of the [Mediaeval Warm Period]. …
Reply: At www.co2science.org, Dr. Craig Idso maintains a database of papers by more than 1000 scientists from more than 400 institutions in more than 40 countries providing evidence that the medieval warm period was real, was global, and was generally warmer than the present, sometimes by as much as 3-4 C°. Many of these papers provide millennial reconstructions.
Cook: “The climate scientists involved in creating those first millennial proxy temperature reconstructions are not under criminal investigation.”
Reply: The Attorney-General of the Commonwealth of Virginia, Mr. Cuccinelli, issued a press statement on May 28, 2010, repeating an earlier statement that –
“The revelations of Climategate indicate that some climate data may have been deliberately manipulated to arrive at pre-set conclusions. The use of manipulated data to apply for taxpayer-funded research grants in Virginia is potentially fraud. … This is a fraud investigation.”
Fraud, in the Commonwealth of Virginia as in most jurisdictions, is a criminal offence. The Attorney-General’s investigation is being conducted in terms of the Fraud Against Taxpayers Act 2000.
Is there a human fingerprint?
Cook: “The scientific literature at the time [of the 1995 Second Assessment Report of the IPCC] clearly demonstrated a number of ‘fingerprints’ of human-caused global warming.”
Reply: The scientists’ final draft of the 1995 Report said plainly, on five separate occasions, that no evidence of an anthropogenic influence on global climate was detectable, and that it was not known when such an influence would become evident.
However, a single scientist, Dr. Ben Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, rewrote the draft at the IPCC’s request, deleting all five statements, replacing them with a single statement to the effect that a human influence on global climate was now discernible, and making some 200 consequential amendments.
These changes were considered by a political contact group, but they were not referred back to the vast majority of the authors whose texts Dr. Santer had tampered with, and whose five-times-stated principal conclusion he had single-handedly and unjustifiably negated.
We now have the evidence of Prof. “Phil” Jones of the University of East Anglia, in one of the recently-released Climategate emails, that the warming of the past century falls well within the natural variability of the climate – consistent with the conclusion that Dr. Santer had negated.
The IPCC’s fraudulent statistical technique
Cook: “Monckton proceeds to make another bizarre claim about the IPCC reports which we’ve never heard before: that they use a ‘fraudulent statistical technique’ to inflate global warming’ … As long as the claim sounds like it could be true, the audience likely cannot determine the difference between a fact and a lie.”
Reply: Mr. Cook is here accusing me of lying. Yet my email address is well enough known and Mr. Cook could have asked me for my evidence for the fraudulent statistical technique before he decided to call me a liar. He did not do so. Like the hapless Professor Abraham, he did not bother to check the facts with me before making his malevolent and, as I shall now show, baseless accusation.
The IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, 2007, carries in three places a graph in which the Hadley Center’s global mean surface temperature anomaly dataset from 1850-2005 is displayed with four arbitrarily-chosen trend-lines overlaid upon it. At each place where the altered graph is displayed, the incorrect conclusion is drawn that because trend-lines starting closer to the present have a steeper slope than those starting farther back, the rate of warming is accelerating and that we are to blame.
I wrote both to Railroad Engineer Pachauri (in 2009) and to a lead author of the 2007 report (in 2011), and visited both of them in person, to report this defective graph. They both refused to have it corrected, though neither was able to argue that the technique was appropriate. I have now had the data anonymized and reviewed by a statistician, who has confirmed that the technique is unacceptable. In the circumstances, the refusal of the two senior IPCC figures to correct the error constitutes fraud and, when the statistician has been shown the context of the data that he saw in an anonymized form, the police authorities in the relevant nations will be notified and prosecution sought.
Climate sensitivity
Cook: “Where Monckton gets this claim that the Australian government’s central climate sensitivity estimate to doubled CO2 is 5.1 C° is a complete mystery.
Reply: The “mystery” could and should have been cleared up by Mr. Cook simply asking me. The estimate is that of Professor Ross Garnaut, the Australian Government’s economic adviser on climate questions. It is on that figure that his economic analysis – accepted by the Australian Government – centres.
Cook: “Monckton also repeats a myth … that most climate sensitivity estimates are based on models, and those few which are based on observations arrive at lower estimates. The only study which matches Monckton’s description is the immensely-flawed Lindzen and Choi (2009).”
Reply: I am not sure what qualifications Mr. Cook has to find Professor Lindzen’s work “immensely flawed”. However, among the numerous papers that find climate sensitivity low are Douglass et al. (2004, 2007) and Coleman & Thorne (2005), who reported the absence of the projected fingerprint of anthropogenic greenhouse-gas warming in the tropical mid-troposphere; Douglass & Christy (2009), who found the overall feedback gain in the climate system to be somewhat net-negative; Wentz et al. (2007), who found that the rate of evaporation from the Earth’s surface with warming rose thrice as fast as the models predicted, implying climate-sensitivity is overstated threefold in the models; Shaviv (2005, 2011), who found that if the cosmic-ray influence on climate were factored into palaeoclimate reconstructions the climate sensitivities cohered at 1-1.7 C° per CO2 doubling, one-half to one-third of the IPCC’s central estimate; Paltridge et al. (2009), who found that additional water vapor at altitude (caused by warming) tends to subside to lower altitudes, allowing radiation to escape to space much as before and greatly reducing the water vapor feedback implicit in a naïve application of the Clausius-Clapeyron relation; Spencer and Braswell (2010, 2011), who found the cloud feedback as strongly negative as the IPCC finds it positive, explicitly confirming Lindzen & Choi’s estimated climate sensitivity; Loehle & Scafetta (2011), who followed Tsonis et al. (2006) in finding that much of the warming of the period 1976-2001 was caused not by us but by the natural cycles in the climate system, notably the great ocean oscillations; etc., etc.
Cook: “Monckton at various times has claimed that climate sensitivity to doubled CO2 is anywhere between 0.2 and 1.6 C°.”
Reply: I have indeed done climate sensitivity estimates by a variety of methods, and those methods tend to cohere at a low sensitivity. The IPCC at various times has claimed that a central estimate of climate sensitivity is 3.8 C° (1995); 3.5 C° (2001); and 3.26 C° (2007); and its range of estimates of 21st-century warming in the 2007 report is 1.1-6.4 C°. Ranges of estimates are usual where it is not possible to derive an exact value.
Carbon pricing economics
Cook: “Monckton employs the common ‘skeptic’ trick of focusing on the costs of carbon pricing while completely ignoring the benefits.”
Reply: On the contrary: my analysis, presented in detail at the Los Alamos Santa Fe climate conference in 2011, explicitly calculates the costs of taxing, trading, regulating, reducing, or replacing CO2 and sets against the costs the cost of not preventing the quantum of “global warming” that will be reduced this century as a result of the “investment”. Yet again, if Mr. Cook had bothered to check I could have sent him my slides and the underlying paper.
Cook: “Economic studies consistently predict that the benefits [of carbon dioxide control] will outweigh the costs several times over.”
Reply: No, they don’t. True, the Stern and Garnaut reports – neither of them peer-reviewed – came to this conclusion by questionable methods, including the use of an absurdly low inter-temporal discount rate. However, if one were permitted to use the word “consensus”, one would have to point out that the overwhelming majority of economic studies on the subject (which are summarized in my paper) find the cost of climate action greatly exceeds the cost of inaction. Indeed, two review papers – Lomborg (2007) and Tol (2009) – found near-unanimity on this point in the peer-reviewed literature. Cook is here forced back on to the argument from consensus, citing only an opinion survey of “economists with climate expertise”. However, he does not say how many were interviewed, how they were selected, what weightings and other methods were used: and, in any event, the study was not peer-reviewed. Science is not, repeat not, repeat not done by opinion surveys or any form of head-count.
Abrupt warming
Cook: “Monckton proceeds to claim that abrupt climate change simply does not happen:
‘Ask the question how in science there could be any chance that the rate of just roughly 1 C° per century of warming that has been occurring could suddenly become roughly 5 C° per century as it were overnight. There is no physical basis in science for any such sudden lurch in what has proven to be an immensely stable climate.’
The paleoclimate record begs to differ. A stable climate is the exception, not the norm, at least over long timescales.”
Reply: Mr. Cook displays a graph of temperature changes over the past 450,000 years. At the resolution of the graph, and at the resolution of the proxy reconstructions on which it was based, it would be quite impossible to detect or display a 5 C° warming over a period of as little as a century.
Global temperatures have indeed remained stable over the past 100 million years, varying by just 3% either side of the long-term mean. That 3% is around 8 C° up or down compared with today, and it is enough to give us a hothouse Earth at the high end and an ice age at the low end.
However, very extreme temperature change can only happen in a very short time when conditions are very different from what they are today. For instance, at the end of the Younger Dryas cooling event, 11,400 years ago, temperature in Antarctica rose by 5 C° in just three years, according to the ice cores (which, over that recent period, still have sufficient resolution to allow determination of annual temperatures). No such lurch in temperatures has happened since, and none is reasonably foreseeable.
We now have confirmation from the UK Met Office that there has been no “global warming” to speak of for 15 years. That is hardly the profile of an imminent 5 C° increase in global temperature. Bottom line: a stable climate is the rule, not the exception: and nothing that we can do to alter the climate can cause a major change such as that which terminates ice ages. Remember Canute: our power is limited.
Human influence on the climate
Cook: “There has never before been a large human influence on the climate, so why should we expect it to behave exactly as it has in the past when only natural effects were at work?”
Reply: I did not say that the climate will behave “exactly” as it has in the past. We are capable of exerting some influence over it, but not very much. The notion that we can exercise a large influence is based on the mistaken idea that the initial warming from a doubling of CO2 concentration (which might be about 1 K) will be tripled by net-positive temperature feedbacks. This unfortunate assumption is what truly separates the IPCC from scientific reality. The IPCC makes the mistake of assuming that the feedback mathematics that apply to an electronic circuit (Bode, 1945) are also applicable to the climate. In two very important respects that the models are tuned to overlook, this is not so. First, precisely because the climate has proven temperature-stable, we may legitimately infer that major amplifications or attenuations caused by feedbacks have simply not been occurring.
Secondly, the Bode equation for mutual amplification of feedbacks in an electronic circuit has a singularity (just above the maximum temperature predicted by the Stern report, for instance, or by Murphy et al., 2009) at which the very strongly net-positive feedbacks that reinforce warming suddenly become just as strongly net-negative, dampening it. I have not yet heard of a convincing physical explanation for any such proposed behaviour as applied to the climate. But if we must use the Bode equation then it necessarily follows from the climate’s formidable temperature-stability that the feedback loop gain in the climate system is either zero or somewhat net-negative. A climate subject to the very strongly net-positive feedbacks imagined by the IPCC simply would not have remained as stable as it has.
Has Earth warmed as expected?
Cook: “Monckton … repeats … that Earth hasn’t warmed as much as expected … [He says} ‘If we go back to 1750 … using the Central England Temperature Record as a proxy for global temperatures … we’ve had 0.9 C° of warming …’. It should go without saying that the temperature record for a single geographic location cannot be an accurate proxy for average global temperature.”
Reply: Central England is at a latitude suitable to take the long-run temperature record as a fair proxy for global temperatures. However, if Mr. Cook were unhappy with that, he could and should have contacted me to ask for an independent verification of the 0.9 C° warming since 1750. Hansen (1984) found 0.5 C° of warming had occurred until that year, and there has been 0.4 C° of warming since, making 0.9 C°. Indeed, in another article on Mr. Cook’s website he himself uses a value of 0.8 C° in the context of a discussion of warming since 1970.
The significance, of course, is that the radiative forcings we have caused since 1750 are equivalent to those from a doubling of CO2 concentration, suggesting that the transient sensitivity to CO2 doubling is around 1 C°.
Cook: “… Human aerosol emissions, which have a cooling effect, have also increased over this period. And while 3 C° is the IPCC’s best estimate for equilibrium climate sensitivity, the climate system is not yet in equilibrium. Neglecting these two factors (aerosols and thermal inertia of the global climate), as Monckton and Lindzen have done, will certainly give you an underestimate of equilibrium sensitivity, by a large margin. This is how Monckton supports his lowball climate sensitivity claim – by neglecting two important climate factors.”
Reply: Once again, Mr. Cook has failed to check his facts with me. Of course my calculations include the effect of aerosols (which, however, is by no means as certain in its magnitude as Mr. Cook seems to think). And of course I have not ignored temperature feedbacks (which Mr. Cook mistakenly confuses with “the thermal inertia of the global climate”: actually, it is I who have been arguing that there is considerable homoeostasis in global temperatures, and he who had earlier been arguing that global climate was not stable). If I am right about temperature feedbacks (see above), then the equilibrium sensitivity will be about the same as the transient sensitivity – around 1 C°. And that, on most analyses, would actually be beneficial.
Cook: “The warming over the past 60 years is consistent with the IPCC climate sensitivity range and inconsistent with Lindzen and Monckton’s lowball climate sensitivity claims. Monckton claims the observational data supports his low sensitivity claims – reality is that observational data contradicts them.”
Reply: Warming from 1950 to date was 0.7 C°. Net forcings since 1950 were 1.8 Watts per square meter, using the functions given in Myhre (1998) for the major greenhouse gases and making due allowance for aerosols and other negative anthropogenic forcings. The transient climate-sensitivity parameter over the period was thus 0.4 Celsius degrees per Watt per square meter, consistent with the 0.5 derivable from Table 10.26 on page 803 of IPCC (2007) on each of the IPCC’s six emissions scenarios. In that event, the transient warming in response to a doubling of CO2 concentration over the present century would be 0.4(5.35 ln 2) = 1 C°, again using a function from Myhre (1998). Interestingly, the IPCC’s implicit central estimate of warming from CO2 this century is only 50% above this estimate, at 1.5 C°.
In short, even if the IPCC is right about the warming this century from CO2, that warming is simply not going to be enough to cause damage.
Lying
Cook: “Monckton spent almost the entire debate misrepresenting the scientific (and economic) literature at best, lying at worst.”
Reply: Now that readers have had a chance to hear both sides, they will be able to form a view on who was lying and who was not.
Gary H says:
“Smokey, since you seem less emotional than some others on this thread, could you be a lamb and address the Mercury-o/Warmio/Cooliet thought experiment described earlier in the thread? Just let us know if you think Warmio would treat the 900nm photons from Mercury-o and Cooliet differently, and if so, why.”
If I knew the answer to that question, I would be a happy camper. I like the thought of an absolute 2nd Law, but it appears that the 2nd may be only statistical. I’m reading The Hidden Reality by Prof Brian Greene, and that seems to be his conclusion. So it seems there are different versions of Laws. The Second isn’t as much a Law as a function of entropy.
Joel Shore says:
February 8, 2012 at 7:43 am
Smokey says:
And explain why that would not violate the 2nd Law.
The 2nd Law applies to macroscopic systems. It is not a statement of how things behave on the microscopic level. In fact, the modern understanding of the 2nd Law is how it elegantly explains the apparent paradox that on the atomic scale, collisions and such are reversible, but somehow when you go to the macroscopic scale, you get irreversibility, e.g., heat only spontaneously going from hot to cold, mechanical energy being converted into thermal energy by friction but never the reverse, etc. The paradox is resolved by considering how astronomically improbable it becomes to see heat flowing from cold to hot once you consider the statistics of the large numbers of atoms and molecules involved.
If you don’t understand this, you don’t understand the 2nd Law, pure and simple. You will instead have what I call a “magical” view of the Second Law which will bear little resemblance to how physicists understand it. Read a textbook and learn how the physical universe actually works.
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And the usual trick of linking to a page which doesn’t have the information on it, and continuing to not show any proof that such an elegant reversibility exists nor show any mechanism for it to suddenly go from reversibility to irreversibility. Joel appears to be one of those most modern scientists who make up scenarios and claim their models prove them, here they call it statistics. Statistics based on no empirical data just as their models are based on no empirical data, just whatever they feel like imagining.
So when Joel says: “The paradox is resolved by considering how astronomically improbable it becomes to see heat flowing from cold to hot once you consider the statistics of the large numbers of atoms and molecules involved.”
One has to ask, but, if there are large numbers of photons being sent from a vast colder body to a much smaller hot body, then surely that means the much small less numerically significant hot body will be overwhelmed and will begin to get even hotter?
Certainly that’s what Spencer claimed in Yes Virginia. And unless Joel can provide the mechanism which stop this then a cup of hot coffee placed on a bath of frozen water will get hotter and hotter with so many photons travelling to it from the larger body of cold.
AGWSF has an active imagination and creates all kinds of things by taking laws and processes out of context from real science. There is of course a real net in heat transfer, as heat flow excites the first molecules of something into vibration making them jiggle faster and faster, kinetic energy, which then spreads to the next molecules and so in the process the first lose heat to the second and so on as the first then gains more and passes it on, the real net here being the actual events of gains and losses in the process of heating up something. And I imagine there is a statistical method in use in applied science which will take into account the materials and conductivity and heat capacity, water for example with its very high heat capacity will take in a load more heat energy than most things and so take longer to raise its temperature, and so take longer to lose it. And I imagine there probably some computer working on such things which will have the ‘stop’ put in that it must obey the always flows from hotter to colder. But, to join these to the quantum world and claim that photons actually are reversible in flowing from cold to hot?? Where is this shown?
Nope, what they have done is even stranger than that, as you see Joel claim it is so elegant…
If you don’t understand this, you don’t understand the 2nd Law, pure and simple. You will instead have what I call a “magical” view of the Second Law which will bear little resemblance to how physicists understand it. Read a textbook and learn how the physical universe actually works.”
What they’ve done here? They’ve obviously cherry picked, why isn’t friction time reversible? It’s only another example of bouncing off a wall. And they’ve decided that all fundamental laws are time reversible, and the only reason it doesn’t reverse is because they say that it would take too many coincidences to make it reverse!! So, they claim from this amazing powers of reasoning that the 2nd Law is only a statistical law. Missing the point of the real 2nd Law as I gave in an above post.
Now, don’t get me wrong here, I’m not saying that the basic laws aren’t time reversible.. But, I think using ‘too many coincidences’ as justification for it not happening very sloppy thinking indeed, there’s nothing elegant in that at all, that’s no explanation at all of why it isn’t reversible on a macro level, nor any proof that on a macro level it isn’t reversible..
And to use that justification to then claim the 2nd Law is only ‘statisical’ is just too absurd. All they have done is add the world “net” into the 2nd Law and claimed it is so because of this ‘reasoning’, calling it ‘modern statitistical science’ and based on ‘there would be far to many coincidences necessary for it to be otherwise’ How the feck is that a LAW?. It is irrelevant to the 2nd Law.
And, what is worse here, is that they pretend this so-called reasoning is oh so vastly superior to anything from ‘old’ physics and we’re just too stupid to understand it…
So, Joel, as I’ve said to you before, I do understand what you’re saying and what I’m saying still stands, unless you can provide proof that any photon of heat flows from colder to hotter in heat transfer, then you are breaking the real 2nd Law and you cannot use your imaginary ‘net’ addition to the the 2nd Law to claim ‘backradiation’ to Earth of heat from the colder atmosphere to the hotter surface.
And moreover, again, if you still claim this is what is actually happening without giving any proof that photons behave in this way on the physical real level you still have to provide a mechanism which takes it from reversibility to irreversibillity – otherwise there is no stopping it in greater numbers. And a someone said, when we want to warm ourselves up all we have to do is step into our fridge… 🙂
Myrrh, what do you say to Latour’s example of the visibility of ice? (photon traveling from cold ice to warm eyeball) –AGF
Smokey says:
February 8, 2012 at 2:11 pm
Gary H says:
“Smokey, since you seem less emotional than some others on this thread, could you be a lamb and address the Mercury-o/Warmio/Cooliet thought experiment described earlier in the thread? Just let us know if you think Warmio would treat the 900nm photons from Mercury-o and Cooliet differently, and if so, why.”
If I knew the answer to that question, I would be a happy camper. I like the thought of an absolute 2nd Law, but it appears that the 2nd may be only statistical. I’m reading The Hidden Reality by Prof Brian Greene, and that seems to be his conclusion. So it seems there are different versions of Laws. The Second isn’t as much a Law as a function of entropy.
Smokey – I’m going to give a comparison here sparked by your post.
First a bit more from the page I gave earlier about the 2nd Law, from an engineer:
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http://www.ftexploring.com/energy/2nd_Law.html
The Second Law of Thermodynamics
Or Energy is Forever, but Not Exactly
“How Everything Happens
Energy makes everything happen, and every time something happens, there is an energy change. There are two important natural “laws of energy” that describe what happens to the energy involved in every change. We call them “laws” because countless observations and thousands of experiments have shown them to always predict what will happen.
Ponder that for a moment – how everything happens. It means we don’t understand much, if we don’t understand both the first and second laws of Energy.
These next few pages will give you an overview of the famous, but often misunderstood, 2nd Law.
Beyond the First Law
The First Law of Thermodynamics tells us energy is conserved. The total amount never changes. But something does change. I will call it “re-usability”, for now. It’s not an official text book word, but pretty good for communicating the basic idea.
Remember that there has to be an energy transfer for something to happen; energy changes form or moves from place to place (heat flow, for example). As energy moves and changes, the total amount of energy stays the same, constant forever as far as we know.
That sounds good doesn’t it?
Energy is forever.
But wait! If it’s forever, why are all these do-gooders telling us we need to conserve energy by using less? Can’t we just keep using it over and over? Why shouldn’t everyone drive to work alone in a 300 horsepower car?
The Rest of the Story…
Alas, my friends, there is always a rub, and when it comes to energy, the rub is described by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The first law would be quite happy to let us re-use energy over and over. The first law is happy as long as energy is conserved. It’s the happy law.
The second law may seem a little less happy to some. It describes the aftermath of every energy change that makes something happen. The second law says that each time energy gets transferred or transformed, some of it, and eventually all of it, gets less useful. That’s the truth. It gets less useful, until finally, it becomes mostly useless (at least as far as its ability to make things happen is concerned).
All of the energy we use ends up, sooner or later, as what we engineers like to call “low-grade” energy. This low-grade energy is only good for warming the air around us a little bit. We can’t use it to do things we consider useful, like generate electricity or make a car go. Inevitably, most of it gets radiated out into the vast cold universe, lost to us forever.
To understand this, it is helpful to start with another aspect of the Second Law. Let’s call it “the direction energy moves” aspect.
The Direction Energy Always Goes
The second law tells us which way energy naturally flows when not blocked or “pushed” by other mechanisms. It says energy has an absolute unfailing tendency to go from “more concentrated” to “less concentrated”. It sort of “spreads out” and gets “diluted”. That’s a good way for beginners to think about it.
Energy flows from a higher temperature to a lower temperature (heat flow).
Energy flows from a higher pressure to a lower pressure (expansion). etc.
……
Read the following at least 3 times:
It is only about energy.
It is only about energy changes.
It is only about the condition of the energy before and after the change.
To be sure, there are interesting concepts about organizational disorder, probability, complexity, and things getting messy (and the propagation of misinformation about thermodynamic entropy). But it is incorrect to create metaphors and analogies from thermodynamic entropy to explain those concepts, and it only misleads beginners. Relax, you don’t need them to explain this concept to students.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics absolutely does NOT say everything tends toward disorder (or decay)!
It is not a universal law of messiness. It is only about energy changes. Isn’t that nice? We can all relax. My messy desk and your wrinkled shirt are not predicted or measured by entropy formulas and the 2nd Law of thermodynamics. ”
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My bold. Taking Laws out of context, creating all kinds of scenarios out of what one imagines entropy to mean can be fun, but when this imagined ‘far superior mathematics’ as it thinks itself takes the 2nd law out of context and then says the 2nd Law is proved to be wrong because of it… You are not dealing with any kind of scientific logic.
I don’t know what Prof Green has to say about entropy, I began looking for it and the first thing I found was the following, and I thought It a good example of fun thinking and then spotted something which shows how easily the change from fun thinking to ‘this is a fact’ happens, practically seamlessly..
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http://www.npr.org/2011/03/04/134265287/brian-greene-on-em-the-hidden-reality-em
FLATOW: Mm-hmm. Tell us about this – one of the kinds of universes that you have in there is the holographic universe – hard to imagine, for many of us.
Prof. GREENE: Yes. That is, in many ways, the strangest proposal of all, but it is one that may have the chance of being tested in the next few years. In fact, we’re doing tests right now at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. Experiments there are actually probing this idea.
And the idea is this: All that we know about in this three-dimensional world around us, this proposal suggests, may actually be a holographic-like projection of laws of physics that exist on a thin-bounding surface that surrounds us. Just like an ordinary hologram, that’s a piece of thin plastic. You illuminate it the right way, it creates a realistic, three-dimensional image.
The math of string theory and the math of black hole physics suggest that everything we know about may be a similar holographic projection of fundamental information that exists on a large surface that surrounds us. Now, you may wonder: Where does this crazy idea come from?
(Soundbite of laughter)
FLATOW: You noticed the silence.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Prof. GREENE: It comes from an interesting puzzle, which comes from black holes. When you throw something into a black hole, we know it disappears. But the puzzle has been: What happens to the information that the object may contain? Let’s say you throw your laptop or your iPad, whatever, you throw it into a black hole. Where does the information that that object contains go? Now, one suggestion from Stephen Hawking a long time ago is it simply disappears. The problem is, that conflicts with quantum mechanics. It creates tension with quantum mechanics.
So people like Leonard Susskind and Gerard ‘t Hooft, you know, they study this for a long time. And they concluded that what actually happens to the information is it gets smeared out on the surface of the black hole.
FLATOW: Mm-hmm.
Prof. GREENE: So your iPad, whatever, it goes into the black hole, but a copy of the information is smeared on the surface. That means that information on a bounding surface can describe a three-dimensional object that lives inside. And we believe what’s true for black holes may be true for space more generally. We may be three-dimensional objects described, just like your iPad, that go into a black hole by information on a big, two-dimensional surface that surrounds us.
FLATOW: Do you think we’ll ever know the real answer to any of this?
Prof. GREENE: Well, this particular proposal allows us to perform certain calculations that are otherwise completely impenetrable, to do with what will happen when gold nuclei slam into each other at very high speeds – which is what happens at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider out there in Long Island. The calculations are too hard to do in the traditional rote. But if you use this holographic version to translate the calculations into this bounding surface on the interior of this framework, you can do the math.
———————
Greene goes from “they concluded that what actually happens to the information is it gets smeared out on the surface of the black hole.” To ” And we believe what’s true for black holes may be true for space more generally. We may be three-dimensional objects described, just like your iPad, that go into a black hole by information on a big, two-dimensional surface that surrounds us.” Without stopping to question whether ‘the information from an ipad gets smeared onto two dimensional surfaces around us’, it’s become true because someone spent a ‘long time thinking about it” – therefore it must be true and now they can do the maths..
Anyway, what I’ve discovered in these AGW arguments, is stuff is always being taken out of context, and lot’s of fun thinking should have stayed fun thinking, but instead became the new ‘true’ because someone thunk it, and now putting them all together one gets an Alice through the looking glass of impossible physics defended as if actual reality such as carbon dioxide turned into a super molecule able to defy gravity and demonised as toxic, without most of those promoting it knowing why they’re spouting junk physics, as Latour called it.
agfosterjr says:
February 8, 2012 at 3:38 pm
Myrrh, what do you say to Latour’s example of the visibility of ice? (photon traveling from cold ice to warm eyeball) –AGF
Is it a photon of heat? No distinction made in AGWScience Fiction between heat and light because if it were then properties and processes from the real world would have to be brought in. They’ve reduced everything to ‘all energy is the same’, ‘all photons create heat’ and all reduced to ‘radiation’, and like taking out the Water Cycle from their AGW energy budget, it’s all done to reduce the ‘science’ to sound bite propaganda. It is remarkably cleverly done, those bits I’ve spotted where they’ve taken laws out of context and attributed properties of one thing to another – visible light now heats the land and oceans, and thermal infrared, the direct heat we actually feel from the Sun, doesn’t even reach us..
Latour made the point that ‘climate scientists’ think they know better than the engineers and so on, the applied scientists, but it’s even more confusing than that because these fictional fisics ideas have been deliberately introduced into the education system for the last decades, so even scientists who are good at what they do in a different field will have picked up some of this nonsense and simply think it real because it’s become ‘well-known’, so when an applied scientist from the field concerned tries to put them right they think he’s making up a new physics! Really, it’s an enormous mess.
I think that’s why so many are ‘anti’ CAGW, but not AGW itself, because they believe such things without investigating properly. And, that’s not unexpected, we, humans, have ‘always’ appreciated that we have diverse gifts, we take delegating stuff to those who are interested for granted. That’s how AGW propaganda has been so successfully spread, the biggest meme was that there was scientific consensus, so people didn’t question it, why should they? We have an inbuilt quality of co-operation (even to the point of self-sacrifice, the dying for a cause) which has enabled us to survive, and creatively, this is also our greatest weakness as our history shows over and over again, because the unscrupulous can exploit this.
Joel Shore @ur momisugly February 8, 8:01 am
Thanks Joel for your THIRD lecture about various topics, however, I’d much prefer that you address the questions that I repeatedly asked. Last time I expanded it a bit for you, perhaps too much for you, so I’ll try a short version with units of W/m^2 :
According to the Trenberth cartoon, the portion of heat that leaves the surface via radiation, and which is absorbed by the atmosphere and clouds, is 23. The other important portion of heat loss which has radiative consequences in the atmosphere, and associations with the concept of feedbacks and climate sensitivity is (Thermals + Evapotranspiration) amounting to 97.
Why do you infer that a small change in CO2 results in a bigger change in feedbacks in the 23 than it would with the 97, that being a much greater pool of energy? (when BTW, there seems to be little research into the latter)
Also, in your go-nowhere-waffle on possible cloud cover and water vapour level changes, yes, most of us know that there are uncertainties, and I pointed out the conflicts between Dessler and Spencer as an example.
Perhaps you should go back to my previous post for more information:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/03/monckton-responds-to-skeptical-science/#comment-887133
Oh and I also wonder if you are afraid of upsetting Trenberth by contradicting his data:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/03/monckton-responds-to-skeptical-science/#comment-887185
Myrrh says (February 8, 2012 at 12:43 pm): “I’ll ask again, what is the mechanism which puts a stop to the colder warming the hotter to get this ‘modern science’s imaginary 2nd law “net”‘?
Not sure if I understand the question, but I think Myrrh is asking why a warm body, if it does receive “back radiation” from a nearby cooler body, doesn’t increase its temperature indefinitely. As countless others have tried to explain, as the warmer body’s temp increases, its radiative output increases until it matches the inputs. Then the system is in thermal equilibrium.
Myrrh, does a hypothetical spherical black body with a temperature of 900 degrees K radiate energy in all directions?
Smokey says (February 8, 2012 at 2:11 pm): “If I knew the answer to that question, I would be a happy camper.”
Fair enough. Bear in mind, though, that if you think a black body can distinguish between two otherwise identical photons emitted from sources with different temperatures, you’re postulating a so far unknown ‘temp of origin’ property of the photon. Proof of such a property would be worth at least a Nobel Prize, which is why I’m shocked that Latour and Johnson haven’t physically performed Dr. Spencer’s “Yes, Virginia” thought experiment and claimed their prize.
agfosterjr says (February 8, 2012 at 3:38 pm): “Myrrh, what do you say to Latour’s example of the visibility of ice? (photon traveling from cold ice to warm eyeball) –AGF”
Just a nitpick, but the full path is from (say) warm light bulb to cold ice to warm eyeball. Our eyes see ice by reflected, not emitted light.
A properly calibrated infrared camera, on the other hand…
agfosterjr @ur momisugly February 8, at 3:38 pm
AND
Gary Hladik @ur momisugly February 8, 7:37 pm
That is by no means a nitpick!!!! Another way of expressing it is that emitted light from ice is in the far infrared, which cannot be seen by the unaided eye.
But then, maybe agfosterjr was just teasing Myrrh?
I suspect so.
Bob Fernley-Jones says (February 8, 2012 at 11:00 pm): “But then, maybe agfosterjr was just teasing Myrrh? I suspect so.”
And he got a rambling three paragraph response. I was kind of hoping for the “elevator speech” version of the new physics. 🙂
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/13/a-matter-of-some-gravity/
Gary Hladik says:
February 8, 2012 at 7:17 pm
Myrrh says (February 8, 2012 at 12:43 pm): “I’ll ask again, what is the mechanism which puts a stop to the colder warming the hotter to get this ‘modern science’s imaginary 2nd law “net”‘?
Not sure if I understand the question, but I think Myrrh is asking why a warm body, if it does receive “back radiation” from a nearby cooler body, doesn’t increase its temperature indefinitely. As countless others have tried to explain, as the warmer body’s temp increases, its radiative output increases until it matches the inputs. Then the system is in thermal equilibrium.
No, I’m asking how does that not make the net from cooler to hotter – because that makes the net flow from cooler to hotter.
Myrrh, does a hypothetical spherical black body with a temperature of 900 degrees K radiate energy in all directions?
Well, since it’s come up in another form, I’ll stop avoiding getting involved in your thought experiment. Radiating what?
Bob Fernley-Jones says:
February 8, 2012 at 11:00 pm
agfosterjr @ur momisugly February 8, at 3:38 pm
Myrrh, what do you say to Latour’s example of the visibility of ice? (photon traveling from cold ice to warm eyeball) –AGF
AND
Gary Hladik @ur momisugly February 8, 7:37 pm
Just a nitpick, but the full path is from (say) warm light bulb to cold ice to warm eyeball. Our eyes see ice by reflected, not emitted light.
That is by no means a nitpick!!!! Another way of expressing it is that emitted light from ice is in the far infrared, which cannot be seen by the unaided eye.
But then, maybe agfosterjr was just teasing Myrrh?
I suspect so.
I was going to ask what Latour had actually said, but then decided just to take it as a springboard to bring up the fact that they can’t ‘see’ any difference between heat and light photons, which as you can see from Gary’s response, they can’t.
I suspect that Gary is of the school of fisics as the reply I got some time ago about this aspect:
————————————————————————————————————————
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/02/28/visualizing-the-greenhouse-effect-atmospheric-windows/#comment-610576
Ira Glickstein, PhD says:
March 1, 2011 at 6:11 am
Myrrh says:
February 28, 2011 at 4:31 pm
I’m really at a loss to understand any of this. How on earth does Visible light and near short wave heat the Earth?
Myrrh, you really need to get outside more and sit in the Sunshine and feel the warmth! That is how visible and near-visible (“shortwave”) light warms he Earth.
If you don’t or cannot get outside, turn on an old-fashioned incandescent light bulb and hold yourhand near it (not too close, you will get burned). Feel the heat? That is shortwave light because the filament is heated to temperatures similar to the Sun’ surface. You can tell it is shortwave because you can see the light.”
————————————————————————————————————————
Compare with reality – that thermal infrared, heat, is invisible and, that an incandescent lightbulb emits around 95% heat, thermal infrared, invisible, to 5% visible light.
When you turn off the lightbulb, the visible light disappears, the thermal infrared keeps going, we can still feel the heat transferred by radiation. That’s the same as the heat we feel from the Sun, which is actually capable of heating oceans as it heats us. Water is transparent to visible..
What AGWScience Fiction has done is turned the world into a imaginary fantasy world with its own fisics of impossible properties – the problem is that those like Gary arguing for it don’t understand this, they think they’re describing real properties and processes.
If you’ve any interest in this aspect, I found a little while back that NASA’s education pages have been corrupted to this fictional world – someone tried to get rid of the kid’s page on infrared which taught we couldn’t see thermal, longwave, but could feel it as heat from the Sun and that near infrared wasn’t hot, we couldn’t feel it – the page disappeared for a while, but someone’s got it back so it’s still a reference for us in the change in education about this.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/07/28/spencer-and-braswell-on-slashdot/#comment-711614
In reading this discussion I assume a clearer picture of the warring sides firmly entrenched in unnecessary dug trenches. And why do they use trenches when they were fighting maneuver and not live ammunition.
Is it possible to stop this “war”, inadequately disposed arms, prepared to make arguments regarding the legality of the relevant natural phenomena around us, what are the consequences of mutual effects of celestial bodies (the Sun and planets).
Let us first of gravity and its impact on the creation of intermediate electro field around the planet.
How now proton nuclei produce magnetic fields?
What happens now, the interaction between electro-magnetic fields and how they affect the proton nuclei in motion?
Whether as a result of the interactions between them can occur thermal energy with their changing cycles?
The influence of sunlight and the composition of our atmosphere is irrelevant factor in climate change.
Is not this more natural than to use some models based on assumptions and some nebulous facts?
Disclaimer: I don’t know squat about thermodynamics. Continue reading at your own risk.
Certainly like all good science, it should remain descriptive. When I first heard about deep space radiation I thought it was ridiculous. After buying a thermometer gun and studying frost formation I got a kindergarten education. I can confirm what all meteorologists know: frost forms on clear nights, not cloudy nights. I have even see frost form on one side of cars and not the other–the sky was half clear and half cloudy.
When I first heard the claim that leaves can act as heat sinks, radiatiing energy to space, I thought it was ridiculous. Now I suppose it’s true. We all know that the Apollo 13 spacecraft, in spite of receiving more radiation on its surface than any desert ever collected, left its occupants in danger of freezing.
Water is about 99% transparent to light–it makes it down hundreds of feet, but it’s dark deep down. The only way the sun can heat water at depth is by light. After all, eyes evolved in the depths to help critters play hide and seek, making use of what little radiation was available. Of course any thermodynamic argument against evolution is nonsense at the outset, having no chance of being descriptive.
I don’t know how to distinguish between emitted and reflected light. The GW claim is that CO2 absorbs and re-emits IR. How does re-emission differ from reflection?
My tentative understanding of this stuff is that nature tends toward equilibrium at any given wavelength, and T can only be defined by wavelength. Feel free to educate me. –AGF
Nikola Milovic says:
February 9, 2012 at 5:37 am
In reading this discussion I assume a clearer picture of the warring sides firmly entrenched in unnecessary dug trenches. And why do they use trenches when they were fighting maneuver and not live ammunition.
Nikola – my arguments are against both sides.. Because they use the same fictional fisics to describe our world, and, this has become norm in the education system over the last decades. So we have impossible physics claims of carbon dioxide accumulating in the atmosphere for hundreds and even thousands of years, but in the real world carbon dioxide is heavier than air and displaces air continually, when it’s not coming down in the water cycle – which this ridiculous fisics has taken out of the energy budget (Kiehl/Trenberth 97 and variations on an Alice through the looking glass world). This who thinkg began as a scam, but, I think the physics of these claims important, I’m really saddened to think the advances we’ve made in science has been denied this generation. As far as ‘climate change’ is concerned, we’re in the end of our interglacial, and we have a very good idea from geology just what that means to us…
So, “The influence of sunlight and the composition of our atmosphere is irrelevant factor in climate change.”
I’ve read your previous posts, but don’t understand what you mean (I’m not a scientist so please don’t use mathematics to reply to me…), can you explain it more simply for me?
agfosterjr says:
February 9, 2012 at 9:42 am
Certainly like all good science, it should remain descriptive.
There i agree with you… 🙂
When I first heard about deep space radiation I thought it was ridiculous. After buying a thermometer gun and studying frost formation I got a kindergarten education. I can confirm what all meteorologists know: frost forms on clear nights, not cloudy nights. I have even see frost form on one side of cars and not the other–the sky was half clear and half cloudy.
What everyone who grows stuff knows, not just meteorolgists. On clear frosty nights where is this ‘insultating blanket of carbon dioxide’ when we need it for our plants??
When I first heard the claim that leaves can act as heat sinks, radiatiing energy to space, I thought it was ridiculous. Now I suppose it’s true.
Not sure what you mean here, plants transpire, sweat.., releasing heat in doing so, this is part of the photosynthesis cycle.
We all know that the Apollo 13 spacecraft, in spite of receiving more radiation on its surface than any desert ever collected, left its occupants in danger of freezing.
Only when their electrics broke down – their spacecraft was well protected from taking in the great heat of the Sun they were exposed to, so that wasn’t available to them as a heat source as they kept losing heat.
Water is about 99% transparent to light–it makes it down hundreds of feet, but it’s dark deep down. The only way the sun can heat water at depth is by light.
Visible light can’t heat water, because water doesn’t absorb visible light, that’s what transparent to visible means, that it doesn’t absorb the energy and since it doesn’t it can’t be heated by it. Heat heats water, and that’s the invisible thermal infrared from the Sun. The ‘energy budget’ that most both pro and con AGW use is the same junk science for teaching that short wave the main heat for land and oceans. It’s simply ludicrous.
After all, eyes evolved in the depths to help critters play hide and seek, making use of what little radiation was available. Of course any thermodynamic argument against evolution is nonsense at the outset, having no chance of being descriptive.
Without visible light being available in the ocean we wouldn’t have life develop as we know it. The primitive bacteria which first used visible light for photsynthesis, for chemical energy not heat energy, evolved to be the plant life we have now. Some 90% of the oxygen is still produced by photosynthesis in the oceans. Visible light isn’t a heat energy, thermal infrared direct from the Sun is, this is what we feel as heat from the Sun and it warms us up because we are mostly water – and water is the great absorber of heat energy. It’s thermal infrared direct from the Sun which heats up oceans and land, it’s invisible, we feel it as heat because it is heat. It’s the Sun’s massive thermal energy on the move from the hotter Sun to the colder us.
I don’t know how to distinguish between emitted and reflected light. The GW claim is that CO2 absorbs and re-emits IR. How does re-emission differ from reflection?
I await their answer..
My tentative understanding of this stuff is that nature tends toward equilibrium at any given wavelength, and T can only be defined by wavelength. Feel free to educate me. –AGF
Temperature relates to the kinetic energy of a body, water has a very high heat capacity, it takes in a lot of heat energy before we can see a change in temperature, so a good holder of heat energy, and loses it more slowly. Carbon dioxide has zilch ability to hold onto heat energy, it releases it practically instantly – more nonsense claimed for it by AGWSF fisics saying it ‘traps’ heat.
All their claims about the basics are really junk science, not just messing with laws but changing properties and giving the properties of one thing to another – they, for the most part, don’t know what nonsense they’re spouting because the education system has been corrupted by the green agenda for some decades now.
————————
A p.s. to Smokey – besides all the messing with the 2nd Law, there’s also another phenomenon at play in ‘modern’ science, maybe you already know it, but if not, it’s a fascinating look at the absurdities people go to in their supposed scientific reasoning, postmodernism takes subjectivity as its base science premise so the variations can be very entertaining. 🙂 A good place to start is with the man who posted a spoof by using its ‘language’ – which spawned a huge backlash and endless discussions since: http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/index.html
Here’s one which sets the scene: http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/lingua_franca_v4/lingua_franca_v4.html
We do see this in the CAGW campaign, that the facts of real science don’t matter because the ’cause’ takes precedence, its view of the science is what science should be because their subjective reality creates it. There’s a look here at one such postmodernist bemoaning having to deal with old school scientists sceptics – Michael Duffy looks at Clive hamilton not believing that sceptics care about the graphs, but are just anti-environmentalists: http://themichaelduffyfiles.blogspot.com/2009/05/clive-hamilton-ian-plimer-climate.html
Myrrh says (February 9, 2012 at 2:21 am): “Not sure if I understand the question, but I think Myrrh is asking why a warm body, if it does receive ‘back radiation’ from a nearby cooler body, doesn’t increase its temperature indefinitely. As countless others have tried to explain, as the warmer body’s temp increases, its radiative output increases until it matches the inputs. Then the system is in thermal equilibrium.
No, I’m asking how does that not make the net from cooler to hotter – because that makes the net flow from cooler to hotter.”
Even though the radiative flow is bidirectional, more energy flows from the hotter body toward the cooler body than vice versa. Myrrh, do you understand the difference between “net” and “gross”, as for example applied to business income?
“Myrrh, does a hypothetical spherical black body with a temperature of 900 degrees K radiate energy in all directions?
Well, since it’s come up in another form, I’ll stop avoiding getting involved in your thought experiment. Radiating what?”
Electromagnetic radiation, as illustrated by the default diagram at the top of this page, showing the emission spectra of several black bodies at various temperatures:
http://www.phy.ntnu.edu.tw/ntnujava/index.php?topic=427.0
Myrrh, I have to ask: what do you think it’s radiating, if anything?
Myrrh, if light can’t heat water, what happens to its energy? It just disappears? Don’t you believe in conservation of matter and energy? –AGF
Test question for anyone: how efficient is an electric heater? (there is only one answer) –AGF
agfosterjr says:
February 9, 2012 at 3:24 pm
Test question for anyone: how efficient is an electric heater? (there is only one answer) –AGF
No – there are tens of millions of electric heaters in the world today, and for each there is a different efficient. And a different effectiveness.
For the woman I spoke with the other night who was buying one at the hardware store at 10:00 pm when her furnace failed, I’d give her effectiveness – and efficiency – at 100%. It kept her children safe that night until the gas furnace repaired.
For the steelmaker who has to use electric furnaces to melt alloys i a vacuum to preserve their chemical ratios and maintain precise heat treatment temperatures for hours as the molten metals cooldown after fabrication and welding … I’d say their effectiveness – and their efficiency – is 100%. Nothing else can do that job.
For those users who leave doors open and who try to heat their homes from an electric stove? Not quite as efficient. Not quite as effective either. For those who use electric heaters and an air conditioner to reduce humidity in controlled areas? Not 100% efficient. But very effective.
Not bad. Anyone else? –AGF
Gary Hladik says:
February 9, 2012 at 2:11 pm
Myrrh says (February 9, 2012 at 2:21 am): “Not sure if I understand the question, but I think Myrrh is asking why a warm body, if it does receive ‘back radiation’ from a nearby cooler body, doesn’t increase its temperature indefinitely. As countless others have tried to explain, as the warmer body’s temp increases, its radiative output increases until it matches the inputs. Then the system is in thermal equilibrium.
No, I’m asking how does that not make the net from cooler to hotter – because that makes the net flow from cooler to hotter.”
Even though the radiative flow is bidirectional, more energy flows from the hotter body toward the cooler body than vice versa. Myrrh, do you understand the difference between “net” and “gross”, as for example applied to business income?
Let me repeat my argument. There are two problems here, a) the first is critical to your claim, you haven’t shown that heat flows from colder to hotter. And, b) even if you are able to show that this can happen, you haven’t provided a mechanism which stops the process to bring it to the claimed ‘net’ of flowing from hotter to colder which you say in claiming that your scenario doesn’t violate the 2nd Law.
All you keep repeating is that ‘photons flow in all directions’, so bloody what?! That’s irrelevant here, it’s irrelevant because you haven’t shown that this is what is actually happening in heat flow.
Unless you can show that this is actually what is happening, your ‘net’ has no basis. All you are basing your ‘net’ on is some airy fairy idea that has come out of someone’s imagination without any proof that such a thing is actually happening.
And, if and when you can show that this is what is happening, you then have to provide some mechanism for it to become a net from hotter to colder to comply with the 2nd Law. Because until you do, a cup of hot coffee in antarctica will keep getting hotter and hotter.
In other words, you have no basis for making such a claim in the first place.
“Myrrh, does a hypothetical spherical black body with a temperature of 900 degrees K radiate energy in all directions?”
Well, since it’s come up in another form, I’ll stop avoiding getting involved in your thought experiment. Radiating what?”
Electromagnetic radiation, as illustrated by the default diagram at the top of this page, showing the emission spectra of several black bodies at various temperatures:
http://www.phy.ntnu.edu.tw/ntnujava/index.php?topic=427.0
Spell it out, describe it in words, I want to know exactly what you’re saying before we go any further.
We so far have Warmio and Cooliette radiating at different temperature, what are they radiating? Please translate it into Centrigrade, I have zilch familiarity with K.
Myrrh, I have to ask: what do you think it’s radiating, if anything?
I’m waiting for you to tell me since a black body doesn’t exist in nature…
Myrrh says (February 9, 2012 at 12:54 pm): “Visible light can’t heat water, because water doesn’t absorb visible light, that’s what transparent to visible means, that it doesn’t absorb the energy and since it doesn’t it can’t be heated by it.”
Pure water isn’t 100% transparent to visible light:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Water_absorption_spectrum.png
Of course oceans, lakes, and rivers are far from pure water, and full of things that absorb visible light. If Myrrh were correct that the ocean absorbs no energy from the sun at “visible” wavelengths, we could see the bottom of the Challenger Deep from the surface.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenger_Deep
“Visible light isn’t a heat energy, thermal infrared direct from the Sun is…”
They both are. Otherwise a visible-light laser (e.g. green), which doesn’t emit in the infrared, couldn’t light a match or burn through a target:
Check out some of the other laser videos on YouTube, using blue, green, red, and infrared lasers.
I think I’m beginning to understand Myrrh’s confusion. The electromagnetic spectrum is huge, mostly invisible to the naked eye, and has apparently diverse effects on matter. However, all these effects involve the same process, i.e. transfer of energy via electromagnetic radiation. Hopefully the simplified example of the laser will dispel some of Myrrh’s misconceptions.
I had a 500 mw green laser that would easily pop balloons, burn cardboard, etc. [It burned out after about an hour’s total use; made in China.]
Here is a 1,100 milliwatt purple laser. And for those so inclined, a death ray.
Myrrh says (February 9, 2012 at 4:32 pm): “Please translate it into Centrigrade, I have zilch familiarity with K.”
That explains a lot.
“Myrrh, I have to ask: what do you think it’s radiating, if anything?
I’m waiting for you to tell me since a black body doesn’t exist in nature…”
Well, I did tell you, and even linked to a web page. But hey, let’s try again with a real-life example that acts much like a (non-existent) black body:
1. Our sun, acting approximately as a black body at 5,800 degrees K (5,527 degrees C), radiates electromagnetic energy in all directions. Agree or disagree?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight
2. If the sun isn’t radiating electromagnetic energy as described above, what do you think it’s radiating, if anything?
We’ll stop there for now, but for those of you still reading (yes, both of you), I intend to repeat my three body thought experiment with our sun as Warmio, Sirius A (9,940 degrees K) as Mercury-o, and Proxima Centauri (3,042 degrees K) as Cooliet.