I’m taking a blog holiday this weekend. Right now I’m watching the History channel 2 (H2) while some off the rails eco-scientist explains to us why we are all going to die because of “what might happen if a gigantic methane-gas explosion occurred in the Pacific.” Methane Explosion (2007) watch the video:
I had to laugh at the YouTube description (bold mine):
History Channel “Mega Disasters” series. This explores the controversial paper published by Northwestern University’s Gregory Ryskin. His thesis: the oceans periodically produce massive eruptions of explosive methane gas… enough to cause global catastrophe on a regular basis!
Discuss the methane explosions or whatever you like, within site policy. If you want to submit a guest post, flag a moderator.
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Agile Aspect says:
February 13, 2012 at 11:25 am
Myrrh says:
February 13, 2012 at 5:34 am
This is getting to be really ridiculous.
;——————————————————————–
See “Heat and Thermodynamics” by M. Zemansky and R. Dittmann.
==========
Go outside when the SUN is shining, bask in its warmth – that’s heat and thermodynamics. That’s heat you’re feeling direct, beam, from the Sun, it is HEAT, it is the Sun’s thermal energy on the move, it is heat, it is invisible thermal infrared, it is heat, it is warming you up because that’s what heat does.
It reaches the surface because you can feel it – AGW junk energy budget says it doesn’t reach the surface!
Visible light direct from the Sun can’t warm you up.
Heat, the invisible thermal infrared direct from the Sun is what warms up land and oceans, because it CAN.
Water is transparent to visible light, visible light is transmitted through without being absorbed, visible light cannot heat the oceans. You cannot feel visible light from the Sun, because it isn’t thermal energy on the move from the Sun. You can’t even feel near infrared because it isn’t thermal. Thermal – of Heat.
Visible light is Light.
You’re working to a junk energy budget of fictional fantasy fisics.
And you’ve missed out the Water Cycle completely.
From Doug Cotton on February 13, 2012 at 11:58 am:
Why bother? We’re talking about longwave infrared radiation, which is photons. Thus you’d have to expand over the electromagnetic spectrum, and say that gamma rays (x-rays) from a less-intense emitter wouldn’t be absorbed by a more-intense (with a shorter peak wavelength) gamma ray emitter, same for radio waves, ultraviolet, etc. It’d expand across the usual band groupings, and you’d have to show that radiation from a primarily radio wave emitter would not be absorbed by a primarily shortwave infrared and visible emitter. Best of luck showing the tungsten filament of a glowing light bulb won’t absorb radio waves.
Kadaka:
You are talking about disributions of wavelengths v. temperature. I suggest you look up typical plots of frequency v. temperature as shown under “Wien’s Displacement Law” in Wikipedia for example. No doubt you know that peak frequency is proportional to absolute temperature, but the distribution is strongly attenuated and does in fact have a maximum cut-off frequency that can be accurately determined.
Considering the worldwide average effect, the atmosphere is certainly sufficiently cooler than the surface to ensure no significant overlap of the frequency distributions of the two.
As proven by Claes Johnson (Professor of Applied Mathematics) in his Computational Blackbody Radiation” there can be no conversion of radiated energy to thermal energy in such circumstances. Hence there is no atmospheric greenhouse effect.
Your argument about which molecules might or might not “absorb” radiation says nothing about whether additional thermal energy will be the result, or just immediate re-emission of radiation which thus has no effect on temperature, any more than reflection would have.
As I have explained in earlier posts, net radiative flux in one direction does not mean that net heat transfer has to be in the same direction. Regardless of the direction of net flux, heat will only ever “flow” from warm to cool as per the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Every sunny morning there is net flux into the surface from the Sun. Extra flux from the atmosphere cannot increase the rate of warming. So please now read my “10 steps” post above before responding further. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/11/open-thread-weekend-7/#comment-890609
If cooler bodies could warm warmer ones (as in my example of the “backradiation” from the Earth to the Sun) then energy would be created out of nothing in the process.
If you wish to argue about Johnson’s mathematical computations (with which I find no fault) then I suggest you communicate with him directly. A link to his paper is on the second page of my site http://climate-change-theory.com and you will easily find his blogs.
So, Myrrh, why are they closing down solariums which kill people by burning their skin with ultra-violet light. Does it need any heat to burn something? Have you never heard about UV light causing sunburn. Here in Australia the weather reports tell us the UV index each day in summer so we know on which days we need to keep out of the sunlight because it has dangerous levels of UV light.
The other day in my job as a two way telecommunications maintenance, troubleshooting-repair-calibration-instrumentation-“please invent us a ______________ so we can _______ or control ____________ by _______________” guy,
I sat down as any mere mortal would, near the door to the climatology department, down at the University.
Since I’m not a – a climatologist, and I know it, I feel inadequate with a mere electronic engineering/troubleshooting-of-all-things-with-a-dial-or-place-to-install-ANYTHING-with-ANY-kinda bell, buzzer, button, or other appliance to help keep the people who use it from hurting/embarrassing themselves/their equipment/humanity@large
background, I’m going to put it into the terms I THINK I heard. You might know more, hence be able to understand it all.
I paraphrase but as nearly as possible, I quote:
“Hay.”
“Wat.”
“Yew think thim Hockie Stik Prognostifukashus iz poW’r’FUL?”
“WaYYYL, YEW bETCHA!!11! Thay’z REEL AS A T.R.E.E.M.O.M.I.T.ER. an YEW NO THAIR AINT NUTHIN KIN MAYZUR uh TREEMOMiTER but tha moST POWWWWER’fUL uv Prognostufukashuns.”
“Yeah. Hay.”
“Wat.”
How Yew no wat tree yews’about’tuh dreel, so yew kin look in yer borehole, an’ tayl wat time it wuz ‘zakly wat temperchur a hunnerd yeerzago?”
“Caws.”
“Caws wat.”
“CAWS THISN’S uh’WUN IMAFIXIN tuh BE BORIN, BOY, NOW GIT BACK!11!! Git BACK!!1”
“wOW.”
“wOW waT.”
“‘eMz sum POW’eR’Ful Prognostifukashuns tuh ‘terpritize thim’AIr CLIMIT tungs.”
“Shore is. Now gimme sum borehole greece, i caint see whut ima doin down heeyur tah muh BOREHOLE.”
Then to my utter surprise, something I felt scantily knowledgeable about-the power of the largest heater ever heard of, cooking the atmosphere by force of one of, a class of gases, the main constituent of which class is of course water – the atmospheric-pressures phase-change REFRIGERANT –
covering in it’s liquid/solid formes some 70+ percent of the earth’s surface – well anyway we all already know about that but the point they discussed you see, was this …magic gas, CO2, which somehow, comprising a T.I.N.Y. FRACTION of all these gases of this one class – the ones which most well accept/re-radiate the spectrum of light in the low-power, infrared class –
this magic gas of course, is going to make all the water evaporate and the sky will, most certainly father Gore, has told us, catch on fire. To put it mildy and assuming, there’s no REAL critical problem like someone’s prius being damaged by falling flaming birds.
Anyhow I digress and these two um, ‘fellERs uv CLIMITAWLUGIE’ were discussing the relative merits, of carbon sin, vs. carbon virtue.
A vision of Al Gore just appeared to me warning me that
(1)I’m not a climatologist
(2)this heeyur aint no peer ruhvew
(3)I caint reed a thermomuhter without sum hayulp
(4)shut up Gaia was having – and I quite – ever more urgent hotness and wetness enough without me makin her feel worse from me makin her ‘time-of-the-month’ worse from self indulgence in USING FIRE, to do things like feed my kids, heat my dog, wife, kids, and friends at night, etc
so I’m not allowed to reveal more about our cherch but lemme tayl yew: thim thair climit prognostifukashuns dun by al thim sintists?
Thays fer reel. And the Sasquatches, and thuh Abominable Snowmen? Thay ar cryin.
And I just felt so overwhelmed right thin in thuh climatologie unaversatee that I ruhpentid an i meen right now. And so shud yew.
Amen
Tuh muhsayulf.
Aynd to thuh sky helpin Gaia wipe yew all out so me and my prius can go to werk and not see no extra peeple.
Oh: also Al Gore told me “THEEZ HEEYUR IS SUM UV tha SMARTIST MINN ON ERTH, FOLKS!1!!”
Now yew caint fake that.
No sir yew caint.
Caws global warmin is reel evun if there aint no tropusferic hotspot and evun if thuh atmosferic downwelling of infrared has DROPPED in the last 15 years.
And even if the instrumental record hasn’t warmed for more than 15 years.
And even if .it aint reel it’s reel so thair i sed it. So i buhleave yew shud to.
Thank yew I am going to skeptikuhl sints and git me a carbon sin online anxiety jr pastor of apocalypse counseler
sertifuhkit.
So I can cownsul all yew wat wont buhleave.
And my new pastor over at ‘Kooks@Cooks@Kweenslund’
says yew awtuh ruhpent uv yer sin
to.
Thin
ALL thuh THERMOMITERS’LL START WERKIN RIGHT AGIN.
Myrrh and others:
It is important when we argue that there is no greenhouse effect that we get our facts right.
(1) Only about half the radiative flux energy in solar insolation is in the infra-red spectrum.
(2) This does indeed cause about half the warming on the surface, and that is why carbon dioxide has a slight cooling effect when it absorbs some IR from the Sun and sends it back to space. It is a deliberate “oversight” on the part of the IPCC that they do not mention this. The frequency of virtually all IR radiation from the Sun is well above the peak frequency of IR radiation emitted by the Earth’s surface, and so the solar IR radiation can be converted to thermal energy in the surface.
(3) But the other half of the solar insolation (in the visible and UV spectra) does also contain about as much energy and that energy will also be converted to thermal energy when it penetrates the oceans and land surfaces because its frequency is also higher than the peak frequency emitted by the surface. So indeed we do have heat transfer from the Sun to the surface.
(4) But radiation at lower IR frequencies which comes from a cold atmosphere will not normally be converted to thermal energy when it reaches a warmer surface. This is the major error made in the greenhouse conjecture. The Second Law confirms that heat transfer cannot be from cold to hot. Some radiation certainly does go from the atmosphere to the surface, but the energy it contains does not get converted to thermal energy unless it travels at a low angle to the horizon and strikes an area (perhaps in Antarctica) which might be colder than that part of the atmosphere from which it originated – fairly unlikely.
Read my book Greenhouse Land when it is published soon.
How does the Magnesium ion in chlorophyll figure into this? Is a percentage of the light converted into heat? I remember something Willis had done about vegetation affecting heat on a large scale.
Prof Claes Johnson has proved in Computational Blackbody Radiation* that energy in radiation only gets converted to thermal energy if the peak frequency of the radiation from the source is above the peak frequency of the radiation from the target.
This essentially provides a mechanism which explains why the Second Law of Thermodynamics also applies for radiative heat transfer, as it does for heat transferred by conduction.
It is not the net radiative flux (or even its direction) which determines whether (and in which direction) thermal energy is transferred. For example, if the emissivity of two bodies is very different, there can be more radiative flux from the cooler one. But all that flux will be scattered by the warmer one and not converted to thermal energy. Only the flux from the warmer one (no matter how weak) will be converted to thermal energy in the cooler one. This “ensures” that the Second Law is valid in all cases because it depends on peak frequency which is proportional to absolute temperature – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wien's_displacement_law
* http://climate-change-theory.com/RadiationAbsorption.html
Too funny. The realclimate post begins with whining over alleged death threats; way down the comments someone mentions the misbehaviour of that “We know where you live” Greenpeace director, and Gavin replies: “… But mainstream climate science is not the world’s policeman, nor is it responsible for what any individual says….”
You don’t say!
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/02/free-speech-and-academic-freedom/comment-page-2/#comment-227760
Doug Cotton says:
February 13, 2012 at 12:12 pm
Myrrh (and others who don’t understand what physics says “heat” means, should consider the fact that, when EM radiation (UV, visible or IR, for example) goes from Point A to Point B it does not necessarily mean that Point B will experience a rise in temperature.
Well, that’s not really saying anything. For example, water has a really high heat capacity, it can absorb huge amounts of heat, whether that’s transmitted by conduction, convection or radiation, so is slow to raise its temperature all the while taking in large amounts of thermal energy, it is therefore also slow to release heat, this is why it is used in central heating systems, for example. Carbon dioxide which has even less heat capacity than oxygen and nitrogen, can’t ‘trap’ heat, it releases it practically instantaneously. And then there’s visible and UV you mention, these are Light energies, not thermal, not heat. They are not hot and don’t have the power to move molecules and atoms to kinetic energy, and please, don’t go into nit picking ‘it’s not zero’, and ‘it’s maybe somewhere in the shash’, – these are claimed to be THE MAIN SOURCE OF DIRECTLY HEATING LAND AND OCEANS IN YOUR JUNK ENERGY BUDGET. So, where are the figures for each of these and details of their ability to heat land and water? Please fetch. This isn’t a rhetorical question.
See http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/11/open-thread-weekend-7/#comment-891159
You mean this?: You have a lot to learn about physics. You say “The heat that we feel from sunlight … is infrared.” Well, I tend to get sunburnt from the UV part of solar insolation more than the IR.
You can’t feel UV, it isn’t hot. It does not warm you up as thermal infrared does – thermal infrared warms you up inside, because it has this thing going with water molecules, they resonate together….
Look, for goodness sake, it won’t take you long to actually look at UV and find how it gives you a tan, you get a tan because the melanin in your body acts to try and stop it burning your skin by damaging your DNA. YOU CAN’T FEEL IT BURNING YOU. Because its not heating up your skin. UV is TINY! It may well be highly energetic, even more so than Visible light, but the scale it works on is TINY. Sorry, I’ve had a long day… But it is so frustrating that none of you has any sense of scale.
UV doesn’t even get through the first of the three layers of our skin – highly energetic?? Put on a shirt and you STOP IT. That’s how not powerful it is. It is tiny, it works on the DNA level. It’s energy is used to create Vitamin D. It is not a thermal energy, it does not heat, doesn’t move the molecules of matter. Rub your hands together, that’s mechanical energy creating heat, moving the molecules in your skin into vibration, kinetic energy, that’s what thermal infrared does – especially to the water in you because it penetrates the body and has a special affinity with water – this is the real source of heating the oceans by the Sun.
The claim of your energy budget is that it is the shortwave, Solar, which is Visible and the two shortwaves either side or UV and Nr IR, which directly heat ALL the land and oceans.
So, where are the figures for these individually? Where is the mechanism by which these heat water and land, rocks, soil? Come on now – step up to the plate all of you who claim this, produce the evidence.
Water is a transparent medium for Visible, this means that the energy isn’t absorbed, it is transmitted through, but, Visible is absorbed by the electrons of the molecules of nitrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere…
Here, the basic difference between HEAT and LIGHT:
======================
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparency_and_translucency
Electronic: Transitions in electron energy levels within the atom (e.g., pigments). These transitions are typically in the ultraviolet (UV) and/or visible portions of the spectrum.
Vibrational: Resonance in atomic/molecular vibrational modes. These transitions are typically in the infrared portion of the spectrum.
UV-Vis: Electronic transitions In electronic absorption, the frequency of the incoming light wave is at or near the energy levels of the electrons within the atoms which compose the substance. In this case, the electrons will absorb the energy of the light wave and increase their energy state, often moving outward from the nucleus of the atom into an outer shell or orbital.
The atoms that bind together to make the molecules of any particular substance contain a number of electrons (given by the atomic number Z in the periodic chart). Recall that all light waves are electromagnetic in origin. Thus they are affected strongly when coming into contact with negatively charged electrons in matter. When photons (individual packets of light energy) come in contact with the valence electrons of atom, one of several things can and will occur:
*An electron absorbs all of the energy of the photon and re-emits it with different color. This gives rise to luminescence, fluorescence and phosphorescence.
*An electron absorbs the energy of the photon and sends it back out the way it came in. This results in reflection or scattering.
*An electron cannot absorb the energy of the photon and the photon continues on its path. This results in transmission (provided no other absorption mechanisms are active).
*An electron selectively absorbs a portion of the photon, and the remaining frequencies are transmitted in the form of spectral color.
Infrared: Bond stretching
etc.
===============
That’s what Visible light from the Sun does, it’s tiny, highly energetic may well be, but look at the second of those, this is what visible does in the atmosphere – it gets bounced around by the electrons of the molecules of nitrogen and oxygen – like trying to get through a pin ball machine – they’re reflected/scattered, all over the sky – blue visible, more highly energetic, gets bounced around even more as the electrons spit it back out again, hence our lovely blue sky.
Yes, really powerful peak energy visible! OK, so this is absorbed by the electrons of the molecules in the atmosphere – your junk energy budget say the atmosphere is transparent to it, fibs again, now tell us how much Blue Visible is heating the Sky since y’all claim that absorption means heating?
Now look at the third one. That’s what happens when visible meets water, it is transmitted through, it is not absorbed, not even by the electrons of the water molecules, because water is a transparent medium for visible, (and not, look in the next section for infrared vibrational, it is not big enough to move the whole molecules of water into vibration).
“A transparent material is one in which the charged particles
can’t permanently absorb any photons of visible light. While these
charged particles all try to absorb the visible light photons, they
find that there are no permanent quantum states available to them when
they do. Instead, they play with the photons briefly and then let them
continue on their way. This playing process slows the light down.” http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/may98/893732585.Ph.r.html
In photosynthesis, the energy of Visible light is used for a chemical energy process, creating sugars, it does not create heat. Carbon dioxide plus water plus visible light makes sugar. Green visible isn’t used, is reflected back out. Check out an optics page or two, we see the world and colour because visible is reflected differently from objects around us, and that comes into our eyes and registers.
Doug Cotton says:
February 13, 2012 at 12:28 pm
Myrrh.
You have a lot to learn about physics. You say “The heat that we feel from sunlight … is infrared.” Well, I tend to get sunburnt from the UV part of solar insolation more than the IR.
You haven’t even begun to learn anything about physics, you, and you generic, don’t even know what the different wavelengths do – to you they’re all the same and all magically creating heat. Learn the difference between heat and light.
UV is not a thermal energy, it does not move your molecules into vibration, you might get enough Vitamin D out of it if you get enough sunlight – there’s been a spate of rickets among children here, Britain and Ireland, because parents have been frightened by the cancer scares about being out in the sun and by the ads for sun creams which urge using higher and higher blocking power against UV..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_tanning
http://www.mcgill.ca/reporter/33/17/white/
UV is not a thermal energy, its energy is used in chemical processes, working on the small DNA level. It’s also very good for sterilising water, by wrecking the DNA of the microbes. Highly energetic, certainly, but on a tiny scale of matter.
But it is true that about half of the solar spectrum is indeed in the IR spectrum, which a lot of climatologists don’t seem to realise, because they never mention the fact that carbon dioxide absorbs some of this incoming solar insolation and thus has a cooling effect. It is a small effect, however, because there is more energy in UV and visible light photons than in IR photons due to the higher frequencies. Physics tells us that photon energy increases with frequency – which is why UV causes sunburn much more than IR.
You can’t even feel yourself getting sunburnt, it is not hot, and it isn’t heating you up, ‘increased energy with frequency’ is giving you the wrong impression. In overdose more than your personal levels of melanin can cope with, your skin will fry, just as it would with gamma rays. Gamma rays are thousands of times as energetic as Visible – and still they won’t heat you up! They’ll destroy your DNA. Enough of it in huge amounts and it will vaporise you completely, that’s why they called the point of impact in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ground zero – because there was nothing left.
http://www.ehow.com/about_5554168_gamma-radiation-health-effects.html
The IR radiation coming from a cooler atmosphere is incapable of transferring thermal energy to a warmer surface – meaning that there is no atmospheric greenhouse effect.
Something we agree on.
I really think this has to be taken back to the real differences between light and heat. I can only suggest that you re-read what I posted above about heat, and compare that with what you now know about UV.
Heat direct from the Sun is the Sun’s thermal energy on the move.
Thermal Energy Explained
http://thermalenergy.org/
http://thermalenergy.org/heattransfer.php
Thermal energy and heat are often confused. Rightly so because they are physically the same thing.
Myrrh: You exhibit a complete lack of understanding of physics when you say “And then there’s visible and UV you mention, these are Light energies, not thermal, not heat. They are not hot and don’t have the power to move molecules and atoms to kinetic energy”
Perhaps if and when you have 50 years of studying physics behind you, as I have, you may have learnt that UV light can burn your skin and give you skin cancer. I hope you don’t have such cancer by then because you didn’t believe me. Please keep out of those UV solariums!
I could read no further into your post as you are obviously not interested in learning, but you may do well to remember that IR radiation does not penetrate 100 metres into the depths of the oceans, like UV and visible light does. Have you never seen sunshine lighting up the floor of a river or lake?
PS Myrrh
The amount of warmth you feel depends on the intensity of the radiation as well as the frequency . You don’t feel much from the IR backradiation at night, or even the upward IR radiation at night. You won’t however get sunburnt standing in front of an electric radiator, but you will under a UV light.
What do you suppose happens to the energy in UV and visible light when it penetrates and eventually gets absorbed in the oceans? You can’t destroy energy.
People with 50 years experience in Physics like myself, who have done university degrees majoring in physics like myself and who have tutored university students and marked university assignments like myself do know that most energy in UV and light gets converted to thermal energy when it strikes a surface or penetrates an ocean. What other type of energy do you suppose it ends up as? Even the potential energy in your car rolling down a hill gets converted to thermal energy when you apply the brakes – the same stuff the radiative flux energy in all that IR radiation gets converted to when it strikes your skin.
Myrrh:
Less than 5 minutes on Google and I found this NASA site which might help you understand how light etc. can be converted to thermal energy. http://coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu/cosmic_classroom/light_lessons/thermal/heat.html
Please do your own research and be prepared to learn from accepted physics because I don’t like to see people like yourself trying to argue the same point of view as myself – that AGW does not exist – but stating such incorrect “physics” that it reflects on all of us and all “skeptics” get a bad name for pseudo-physics such as you conjecture.
Do spend some time learning what physics really says before writing more garbage.
From Doug Cotton on February 13, 2012 at 3:33 pm:
There you go again. That Wikipedia entry shows a graph just like the ones I linked to, which tells me you didn’t even bother to look. You’re arguing the wrong end, talking about maximum frequency (highest frequency, shortest wavelength) when I’m discussing minimum frequencies (longer wavelengths). As I mentioned, those long tails into the longer wavelengths are still there. You’re still wrong.
So not only is your understanding of physics still whack, you’ve shown you can’t be bothered to read a reply well enough to intelligently respond, resorting instead to dismissal with an amount of extraneous verbiage representative of the burgeoning size of your ego as you pedantically attempt educating the ignorant unwashed masses without seriously considering the arguments presented.
Thanks for notifying us about your eventually-to-be-published book, so we know it’s not worth buying and we should look for real science elsewhere.
Myrrh: (and others)
I don’t want to give the impression I disagree with many of the processes you describe, about why the sky is blue etc.
The most relevant point you obviously have copied from somewhere is “An electron absorbs the energy of the photon and sends it back out the way it came in. This results in reflection or scattering
The “scattering” in this process is what Science of Doom did not acknowledge when I argued on the Backradiation threads on that site until they could no longer answer me and thus banned me – several times in fact.
This scattering (rejection in effect) leaves no energy behind. Thus none of the scattered radiated energy is converted to thermal energy and so no heat is transferred. This is why and how the Second Law of Thermodynamics operates for radiation. Warmer bodies scatter radiation from cooler bodies (if not already reflected) and so cooler bodies don’t warm warmer ones. So heat only “flows” from hot to cold, regardless of how much radiation is going backwards and forwards or in any direction around the place. Heat transfer is always betwwen two points, as is light transfer. You only “see” the effect of light when it strikes something.
So this is why the IPCC is wrong. They assume that, even when an area of the surface is warming up on a sunny morning that they can just send more IR radiation from the cold atmosphere and increase the rate of warming of the surface. They are wrong because, as you have seen in the above quote, there is another alternative to warming, namely scattering.
Finally, please remember that you do not “feel” much IR warmth from the Sun when you dive deep underwater, but even UV and visible light do not penetrate to the very bottom of the deep oceans. They get absorbed little by little and converted into thermal energy as they go deeper. In other words, they warm the oceans. Theyalso warm the soil, the rocks and sand on the beach (about as much as the IR component), and all that energy flows back out at night in the form of IR radiation.
Kadaka – yes, sorry, Wikipedia does only show a wavelength plot and comments underneath that it does not show Wien’s Displacement Law like a frequency plot does. A bit sloppy of them – it was a while since I’d read their page and probably forgot that the best plot actually showing how peak frequency is proportional to absolute temperature is the left hand one on this site: http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/WiensDisplacementLaw.html
However, I take it that you accept that Wien’s Displacement Law is valid.
All your “tails” don’t have a significant impact in the mean observed results in the real macro world. Otherwise the Second Law of Thermodynamics (which with very low probability may be slightly out due to the tails) would not be generally observed to apply. But it does, so no significant warming can happen, especially when the atmosphere is generally at least several degrees cooler than the surface. There can be nothing like the 100% warming effect that IPCC conjectures for “backradiation.” The very vast majority (say, >98%) of backradiation is merely scattered. I don’t think we need worry about any temporary warming from the rest.
I realise this is new ground-breaking computational physics as derived by Prof Claes Johnson, so if you wish to argue with him go to his blog.
It is however the only plausible explanation for the observed Second Law of Thermodynamics for radiation.
Give me an alternative explanation, considering two bodies with very different emissivity. You can’t, can you?
The frequency distribution for a cooler emitter (the atmosphere) is fully contained within the frequency distribution of an emitter at a higher temperature (the surface), and it is shifted towards lower frequencies because the peak frequency is proportional to the (absolute) temperature.
Hence any radiation from the cooler emitter can potentially resonate with the warmer emitter and be re-emitted immediately without any conversion to thermal energy. This is what Prof Claes Johnson has proved does happen and it is the only plausible explanation for the veracity of the Second Law of Thermodynamics applying to radiation.
In contrast, the frequency distribution of the warmer emitter does extend into higher frequencies than that of the cooler emitter. The area between the curves in this region gives a measure of the probability of conversion of such radiation to thermal energy. Thus this probability is nil when there is no temperature difference, and then increases as the temperature difference increases.
We see that virtually all solar radiation reaching the surface (UV, visible and IR) will be converted to thermal energy because there is virtually no overlap between the spectra of incident solar radiation and that of emitted radiation from the surface.
Hence the surface absorbs solar radiation, converting it to thermal energy which can subsequently exit the surface layer (usually at night, but even months later in local winter) by diffusion, conduction, evaporation, radiation and chemical processes, followed by convection once the energy is into the air. There is subsequently negligible probability of any of that energy returning to the surface or remaining in the surface layer of the atmosphere for longer than it would otherwise have done just because of carbon dioxide, methane or similar trace gases.
I think the lesson here is “Better drill it out and use it.” Seriously, I don’t see anything wrong with the theory. The term “Regularly,” could mean merely periodically. Life has been around a long time. I like this guy’s idea, though I wouldn’t waste trillions on stopping it. I suppose that’s the point.
Furthermore, the emissivity of the atmosphere is only about 20% and the radiation towards Earth is half that. Then the temperature of the atmosphere is colder, so even less radiation.
So “backradiation” can only be less than ~10% of upwelling radiation from the surface.
Nothing at all like those energy diagrams which fly in the face of SBL.
Elementary calculations you cannot fault, now can you?
Not even. Quietly, 1934 (or so) has been re-instated. IAC, 1998 was a one-off super-El Nino “anomaly”. Ignore it.
Same problem as with the homeopathists: the successive dilutions operate on a power law basis, and you quickly get down to less than a molecule — individual photon in this case — making the cut. At which point there’s nothing but a tiny percentage of bupkis left for the next cycle. End of positive feedback cycle, with little or nothing to show for it.
Doug Cotton says:
February 13, 2012 at 12:40 pm
Agile Aspect:
Did I ever say there was no energy in radiative flux?
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Flux is the result of a measurement with an associated uncertainty, requires a well defined surface, and the measurement occurs after the radiation has arrived at the surface.
Your statement “electromagnetic radiation transmits radiative flux energy” violates causality and has units of Watts/m^*Joules.
If you drop the word “flux”, then it would read “electromagnetic radiation transmits radiative energy” which makes sense and has units of Joules.
February 13, 2012 at 12:40 pm
Your statement “electromagnetic radiation transmits radiative flux energy” violates causality and has units of Watts/m^*Joules.
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Opps – ignore the causality part of that statement (I was carrying on two conversations at once.)
IMHO, it’s ambiguous but this post has degenerated into nitpicking.
How about addressing these issues ..
(1) The direction of net radiative energy flow can be the opposite of the direction of heat transfer. if you have a warmer object (say 310 K) with low emissivity (say 0.2) and a cooler object (say 300 K) with much higher emissivity (say 0.9) then net radiative energy flow is from the cooler to the warmer object. Yet the Second Law says heat transfer is from hot to cold.
(2) Any warming of a warmer surface by radiation from a cooler atmosphere violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Consider the situation when the surface is being warmed by the Sun at 11am somewhere. Its temperature is rising and net radiative energy flow is into the surface. How could additional thermal energy transfer from the cooler atmosphere to make the surface warm at a faster rate?
Clearly radiation from a cooler atmosphere cannot add thermal energy to a warmer surface. The surface molecules scatter radiation which has a peak frequency lower than the peak frequency of their own emission, and so no radiative energy from that radiation is converted to thermal energy. (This was proved in Johnson’s <Computational Blackbody Radiation.), So the atmospheric radiative greenhouse effect is a physical impossibility.